Dr. Matt Walker

The next day you come back and you do a little bit more and you get booted again.

After about five or six days, you've built up such a strong desire and hunger to get your workout in.

You walk in, you put your phone on silent, you put it over in the corner and you just get to it.

And that's the same thing that we're trying to do with sleep restriction therapy.

So you have to be a little bit careful, do it under supervision, especially if you're driving or you're operating heavy machinery.

We just want to keep an eye.

It's not necessarily a big concern, but we would say, okay, Andrew, you're currently spending almost total about, you know, eight-ish or seven and a half hours in bed.

Tonight, I'm going to restrict you down to five hours a night.

And we're going to do this for the next week.

And the way that we normally do it is I don't change your wake-up time.

I change your to bedtime.

Why?

It's easier to stay awake longer than it is to wake up earlier.

So I put it on the front end of the compromise.

And at first, things don't change.

But after maybe about four or five days of going through this, I build up enough of a short-term debt in your system that

that your system all of a sudden thinks, gosh, I just cannot be as lazy anymore.

I can't do this thing of waking up in the middle of the night and spending an hour and a half awake.

I don't have the choice anymore.

There's so much physiological buildup and pressure to do this.