Dr. Matt Walker

It was deep non-REM sleep.

What we've come to realize is that deep non-REM sleep in part seems to be

almost shifting you from that sympathetic state over to the parasympathetic state.

It seems to engage that nice rest and digest.

It seems to reduce your heart rate.

It seems to drop levels of cortisol.

And we think that perhaps is a resetting brain body, literally an embodied mechanism by way of deep non-REM sleep, helping you just relieve that anxiety pressure.

So it does come back to your question, which is yes, quantity if I manipulated, quality if I manipulated, regularity or timing, manipulate any one of those, I can change your anxiety.

But the story coming through here, if anything, was that it wasn't quantity, it was quality.

I told you that from one night to the next to the next, the quality of your sleep that we are measuring

was predictive of your anxiety.

And then when we bring you into the laboratory and we look at the electrical activity of your brain.

I also mentioned in that episode on the first episode, another way we measure quality is not just subjectively what's going on or objectively, what is the efficiency of your sleep?

Is it filled with lots of awakenings, which was the measure that we used in the day-to-day study and night-to-night study.

But we looked at the electrical quality of your sleep.

Once again, it was quality that was predicting it.

It's something about getting good continuous sleep that is replete with this deep non-REM electrical brain activity that provides an anxiolytic benefit to your brain the next day.

And I think it's strategic because so many of us deal with anxiety.

and some of us would prefer not to necessarily be on medication or even look to that well here again is a strategic tool think about your sleep it really does seem to be a buffer for anxiety along those lines maybe you can just recap a few of the things covered in previous episodes that are known to improve the quality and quantity of deep non-rem sleep um

I think there are.