Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Welcome to the Huberman Lab guest series, where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today marks the second episode in our six-episode series all about sleep with our expert guest, Dr. Matthew Walker.
During today's episode, we discuss the do's and the do-nots of sleep. Focusing, for instance, on how to use light and absence of light, as well as temperature, both of your sleep environment specifically, the room you're in, your body temperature, and much more in order to regulate the timing and quality of your sleep.
And we discuss how things like alcohol, caffeine, and cannabis impact sleep and the various stages of sleep. And we discuss the various tools that exist now and that are rapidly becoming available to improve your sleep. This episode is essential for anyone trying to optimize their sleep.
And when I say optimize your sleep, I mean trying to optimize the formula that was addressed in the first episode of the series, which is the QQRT formula, the quality, quantity, regularity, and timing of your sleep.
Four variables that combine to determine whether or not your sleep is optimized for you and thereby providing the most restoration and improvement to your mental health, physical health, and performance. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs.
It's abundantly clear that sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. When we're getting enough quality sleep, everything in life goes so much better. And when we are not getting enough quality sleep, everything in life is that much more challenging. And one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to have the appropriate mattress.
Everyone, however, has slightly different needs in terms of what would be the optimal mattress for them. Helix understands that people have unique sleep needs, and they've designed a brief two-minute quiz that asks you questions like, Do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Or maybe you don't know the answers to those questions.
If you go to the Helix site and take that brief quiz, they'll match you to a mattress that's optimal for you. For me, it turned out to be the Dusk, D-U-S-K mattress. It's not too hard, not too soft, and I sleep so much better on my Helix mattress than on any other type of mattress I've used before.
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Chapter 2: What are the key principles of sleep hygiene?
Great question. So in terms of the mechanism, it seems actually not to be the alcohol, but some of the metabolic byproducts of alcohol. We think that perhaps the main culprit may be some of the aldehydes that are the metabolic separate consequences of alcohol metabolism.
You make a good point though, in terms of the dose response timing curve, how late or how early do I have to cut myself off from alcohol? People have done those studies and they have found that even an afternoon single glass of wine, if you measure sleep in the way that we measure it at Bicenter with high fidelity, you can see compromises and impairments. I wish I could tell you otherwise.
I would say that based on that data, the principal protocol advice I would have for you is go to the pub in the morning. That way, by the time you're about to sleep, the alcohol is out your system. No, no, I would never. As a public scientist, I would never advocate necessarily for morning. I'm just kidding you. But that's sort of one of the unfortunate consequences.
Yeah.
there does seem to be an impact to say that there isn't is just me not being truthful about the data but again if you think about the trade-off here if you're going out or you're having friends over and you're going to make an incredible evening of memories and you're going to open a favorite bottle of wine and have a couple of glasses of wine is your sleep going to be compromised yes it is
But maybe that's worth the trade-off for that specific night. I would just not wish you to, and you've spoken a lot, and so has our dear friend Peter Atiyah and others. There just doesn't seem to be any safe amount of alcohol. But I would say think about that trade-off simply, however, don't make it a habit that you're doing it, you know, multiple nights a week or more.
That would probably be the advice. Great.
What about food and sleep? How close to sleep? Is it okay to have a meal if you want to optimize your sleep? I like to eat my final meal somewhere around 6.30 p.m. And I go to sleep somewhere around 8.30, 9 p.m. In an ideal world. Sometimes I go to sleep a bit later. Sometimes I eat a little bit later. There's some variability with these.
But put differently, what is the relationship between food intake and sleep quality in terms of timing of food intake? And then perhaps we can talk a little bit about food macronutrients.
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Chapter 3: What is sleep restriction therapy and how does it work?
It's called sleep restriction therapy. And you say, no, no, no, you didn't understand. I'm not getting enough sleep, but it's not quite that. Here's how it works. If you are spending so much time in bed, too much time in bed, you are not forcing your brain to be efficient. And by way of constraining your sleep window, even to, let's say, five hours a night to begin with,
I brute force ruthless efficiency from your sleeping brain after several days. So another analogy would be, let's say you're trying to make a nice thin crust of pizza base and you put the dough on the table and you start rolling it out. If you roll it too thin, it starts to get gaps and holes in it. Why? Because you've spread it out too far, and you've started to create these absences.
That's the same thing that happens, and it's very natural. As an insomnia patient, you would say, I'm just not getting enough sleep, so I'm going to start spending more time in bed. It's the very worst idea.
Another way would be to say, look, I go to the gym, and I spend about an hour and a half working out, but if I were to videotape you, a lot of people are doing the, I think I've coined it as your phrase, but the 11th rep, where people do the 10 reps and then all of a sudden there's the selfie or there's the social media.
Oh yeah, the texting, they finished the last rep, put it down and then immediately to their phone.
And if you look, they're only working out for about, let's say, 45 minutes and the other is wasted. So what if the next day you came to the gym and I said, look, I'm sorry, and there's some big bouncer guys at the door, you are only allowed to work out for 40 minutes and then we're going to eject you. And the first day you go back and you do the same thing.
And then you've only got through 30% of your workout. So you get booted. 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.
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Chapter 4: What strategies can help improve sleep confidence?
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.
Chapter 5: How can temperature manipulation enhance sleep quality?
There's so much physiological buildup and pressure to do this. And gradually what happens is that you sleep longer. You don't wake up as much. And after maybe about two weeks of doing this, all of a sudden you go to bed at this later time. So for you, let's say you normally go to bed at 8. I'm going to have you go to bed at maybe 10, 30, 11.
But we're still going to have you wake up at that sort of 4.30 a.m. mark that you would normally wake up. And all of a sudden, you go to bed at 10.30, 11. You're out like a light. And then again, the next thing you remember is your alarm going off saying, I'm sorry, you've got to wake up.
And what happens by way of that reset is gradually we will then, once you're stable, we will start to back it off. We'll start to have you go to bed at 10. And if it stays stable, then 9.45, then 9.30, and titrate you back to where you were. And if there's any sign that you're starting to not sleep well, we zip it back up again.
The goal here is in some ways almost like hitting the reset button on your wifi router. I'm trying to retrain your brain to better sleep. Because when you are not sleeping well, you've lost your confidence in your ability to sleep. And when I do this technique with you, gradually your system and you cognitively relearn that you are a good sleeper and you can trust in sleep.
And now your sleep does not control you.
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Chapter 6: What are the advanced techniques for optimizing REM sleep?
You control your sleep. The hard part, however, is that it's not easy to go through. And we have to be, we have to usually ask two questions with individuals. Firstly, what is your motivation for better sleep? We need to know that you really are motivated.
And then second, you just stay with a high touch white glove frequency, checking in on individuals and motivating them to keep going because it's very easy to fall off the wagon. So that's the next suggestion, sleep restriction therapy or bedtime rescheduling, as we would call it.
You said it's difficult for people to go through. You know, it takes a little bit of rigor, a little bit of attention, means in some cases getting less sleep than one would like.
But as compared to something that, you know, sadly, I've experienced a lot in my life of having challenges with sleep and trying to get things back in order and looking at the bed and just going, oh, yeah, the battlegrounds. I think it makes a lot of sense. And I love the analogy to the gym.
Somehow, if there's a restriction to one hour in and out the door, or maybe 70 minutes in and out the door because you need to put your stuff in a locker or something like that, it always, at least for me, gets done best when you just have those constraints. I think there's something about the human brain that we don't do well in.
in unrestrained systems that I really think guardrails are fantastic. I love deadlines, for instance. Yeah, discipline is essentially the- Hard deadlines, or as they say in academia, because we write grants all the time, drop deadlines, which who made up that term? But if you don't make it, that's it. It's like there isn't a, hey, I'll send this in tomorrow. 5 p.m.
Pacific time, that website closes.
And you better have... And boy, do you get things done all of a sudden. It's surprising how much distraction you can, you know, pull out the noise and focus on the signal. It's great signal to noise ratio.
Yeah. And I love the idea that one can control their sleep as opposed to sleep controlling them. I think that that's... And this notion of sleep confidence, one's confidence in their ability to sleep. These are important terms and they're more than just terms because I think that A field and an area of health practice and, gosh, what's more important than sleep?
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