Dr. Matt Walker

So it's not as though net net overall, there is a higher level of cortisol in people with insomnia.

It seems to be right at those trigger zones that map very nicely to sleep onset problems, sleep maintenance problems.

Yeah, I often think that sleep maintenance insomnia that you've just described is the revenge of daytime emotions unresolved.

That's a great way to put it, yeah.

So that would be, so we've spoken about regularity, we've spoken about darkness, and we've spoken about the inverse of that in the morning, which is light, a little bit of cortisol.

So the third out of the five is going to be temperature.

And the advice here is keep it cool.

As we mentioned a little bit in the first episode, and we will go into great detail when we speak not just about these conventional and unconventional tips, but we're also going to go into the future of science and where sleep science is taking us to, in fact, optimize and even enhance our sleep.

We will speak a lot about temperature.

Suffice to say that you need to drop your core body temperature and your brain temperature by a little less than one degree Celsius, two to three degrees Fahrenheit, to get to sleep and stay asleep.

The general target that we have in sleep science, if you look across the literature, is somewhere around about the 67 degree Fahrenheit, or I'm trying to do the calculation, maybe 18.5-ish degrees Celsius.

Now I know that that sounds cold, and cold it is, but you can also wear thick socks to bed.

You can have a hot water bottle at the end of the bed.

That's great too, but the ambient must be cold.

the fourth piece of advice is walk it out and here what i mean is do not stay in bed for long periods of time awake and i think we mentioned this perhaps in the first episode too when you are awake in your bed for long stretches of time because your brain is an incredibly associative device

it will quickly learn that this thing called my bed is the place where I'm awake and not asleep.

And what you need to do is break that association.

If you've learned that time and time again because you've stayed in bed and the rule of thumb, and it's just a rule,

a rule of thumb about 20 25 minutes if you can't fall back asleep or you can't fall asleep it's okay just say tonight is not my night it's not a problem it's tomorrow is not completely shot it's fine

i'm just going to get up get out of bed if you can if you're lucky enough try to go to a different room and in dim light read a book listen to a podcast whatever it is that relaxes you just do that don't check email don't eat because if you start eating that again trains your brain to start waking up and feeding at that time