Dr. Matt Walker

And let's test that hypothesis because you go to sleep quite early.

You are an early bird, maybe bordering on an extreme early bird.

And we'll speak about or we have spoken about those different flavors of chronotype sleep.

I would prefer you not to be having that caffeine in the afternoon based on how early you go to sleep.

And I mentioned that preference because of what you described regarding your sleep maintenance insomnia.

One of the issues with caffeine is that not only can it make it more difficult for you to fall asleep, which you don't have in part because if you're waking up quite frequently throughout the night and struggling to get back to sleep, you're going to be carrying a sleep debt into every night.

And that debt continues to grow.

And it's almost like compounding interest on a loan.

So you will not have a problem falling asleep.

In fact...

Sometimes the speed with which people fall asleep and some of these sleep trackers will almost penalize you for falling asleep too quickly is because in sleep science and clinical sleep medicine, it should take you somewhere, you know, healthy sleep onset, you know, 5 to 15, 20 minutes.

But if you put your head on the pillow and you turn off the light and within a minute or so you're dead to the world and you're gone, I'm worried that you're A, carrying a sleep debt, not necessarily, but I would like to explore it with you.

And then I would say, even if you can fall asleep fine,

this factor of waking up in the middle of the night is also related to caffeine.

Why?

Because caffeine not only can make it harder to fall asleep, not your problem, but it keeps you out of that deep, deep sleep.

And it puts you into a more shallow state of non-rapid eye movement sleep.

And when you are in the shallow state, it's A, easier for you to be woken up.

But B, and I think more of the problem, it's harder for you to fall back asleep because your brain doesn't necessarily want to go back down into that deep sleep and nor has it come up out of that deep sleep.

So you're not in that wonderful, glorious, thick, treacly sort of sleepy state when you wake up, you go to the restroom, you come back and you just know, oh, this is gonna be great.