Welcome to this curated educational transcript of the Joe Rogan Experience. In this session, we provide a deep-dive examination of the critical perspectives and historical dialogues presented in Episode #1109. Our mission is to offer a high-fidelity, searchable research resource for students of cultural history, emerging technology, and global discourse. This transcript has been specifically optimized for academic reference, linguistic study, and archival preservation regarding Sleep Science, Neuroscience, and Brain Health Optimization And we're live. What's going on? Did you sleep
well last night? I did. I didn't sleep too badly.
I mean, hotels are a tough thing. And we actually
know the science that one half of your brain
will actually not sleep as deeply than the other
when you're sleeping in an unusual room like
a hotel room. Really? That's what fucks me up.
Because when I'm on the road, you know, I'll
do. three different hotels in a week because
I'll do like a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, like
with gigs. And then by the time Sunday rolls
around, I'm a mess. In rough shape. Yeah. Is
that what it is? Yeah. And it's a threat detection
thing. I mean, if you look at other species,
they can do this much more impressively than
we can. So dolphins or any sort of sea dwelling
mammal can actually sleep with half a brain.
So one half of their brain goes into deep sleep.
The other half is wide awake. That's how people
at the DMV do it. Those people that work at the
Department of Motor Vehicles, they work half
asleep. You ever meet them? I haven't, no. Just
teasing you. It's your DMV listening, going,
fuck you, man. Next time you come in, get your
license renewed. There's my next NIH grant, I
think, looking at the DMV and sleep. TSA workers,
same thing. Same type of human. That I've come
across. Yeah. Them too. I'm just kidding, fuckers.
Relax. So when you're in a hotel room, what is
happening that half your brain is not really
sleeping? Yeah, so there's different stages of
sleep. There are two principal types. One is
non -rapid eye movement sleep or non -REM sleep.
The other is REM sleep, which is also known as
dream sleep. Right. And non -rapid eye movement
sleep is further divided into four separate stages.
which are unimaginatively called stages one through
four. We're a creative bunch. It is true, but
I think it's also our low IQ. But it's the deep
stages of sleep, three and four of that non -rapid
eye movement. That's where a lot of sort of body
replenishment takes place, great for the cardiovascular
system, metabolism, all of those good things.
But that's the deep sleep that one half of your
brain will resist going into when you're sleeping
in a foreign environment. It stays in this kind
of lighter stage, almost like a threat detection
system. And you can imagine why, you know, it's
an unusual context. Evolutionarily, it would
make a lot of sense to just have that sort of
on guard one half of the brain. That makes so
much sense. And that really, for me, it fills
in the blanks of like why, even if I get, you
know, seven, eight hours sleep on the road, I'm
still kind of. just out of it yeah and that's
in fact probably one of the i think the most
impressive parts of new research on sleep it's
not just about quantity it's also about quality
and quality can be as detrimental if you don't
get it as a reduction in total quality i mean
both are essential right but i think it speaks
exactly to your point you just don't feel like
it's a refreshing sort of deep sleep um yeah
it feels totally different um it just it feels
like I guess I would say it feels like half asleep.
I mean, it's really kind of how it does feel.
One of the things that I noticed, I did this
thing with my friends called Sober October where
we didn't smoke any pot or do any, no drinking
at all, nothing for a month. And when I did it,
one of the things I found was that after about,
I don't know how many days, but it was noticeable.
that I would have these incredibly vivid dreams.
And then I had read that marijuana does something
to suppress heavy REM sleep. Like what is happening
there? Yeah, so both of those chemicals, both
of which are used as a sleep aid, alcohol and
marijuana, are actually very good at blocking
your dream sleep, your rapid eye movement sleep.
And so what happens is that the brain is quite
clever in this regard. It builds up a clock counter
of how much dream sleep you should have had.
but have not been getting. And it starts to develop
this increasing appetite and hunger for dream
sleep so that finally when the alcohol actually
gets out of your system, sober October, love
the name, that's all of a sudden where you get
what's called a REM sleep rebound effect where
you not only get the normal amount of REM sleep
that you would normally have, you get that plus
the brain tries to get back some of that dream
sleep that it's been losing over the past maybe
11 months. Try 20 years. Yeah, I didn't want
to make any assumptions. So you get this REM
sleep rebounded effect, and that's where you
have these really intense dream sleep situations.
It's the same reason that people, they'll say,
like, I had a bit too much to drink last night.
Maybe it was a Friday or Saturday. They sleep
in late. They say, I just had these crazy dreams.
What happens there is a kind of an acute version
where the alcohol is swilling around in your
system. And after about six hours, your liver
and your kidneys have finally excreted all of
the alcohol. And your brain has been deprived
of dream sleep for that first six hours. So then
it feasts in the last couple of hours. And that's
why you have these really bizarre dreams after
you've been drinking a little bit too much. Oh,
wow. So what is happening with marijuana, though,
specifically? Do you know? Yeah. So marijuana,
it does help people. Well, help it. It puts people
to sleep quicker. Although I think the question
is whether it's really naturalistic sleep or
not that they go into. Certainly with alcohol,
it's not. That nightcap idea is a misnomer. Alcohol
will actually, well, it's a form of drugs that
we call the sedatives. And sedation is not sleep.
It's very different. But we often mistake one
for the other. Marijuana seems to act in a physiologically
very different way. It doesn't target the same
receptors in the brain. So it's unclear whether
the speed with which you fall asleep after having
a session with marijuana is actually natural
sleep. Let's assume it is. The problem, however,
is that it then will start to disrupt REM sleep.
It will start to block the process. We think
perhaps at the level of the brainstem, which
is where these two types of sleep, non -REM and
REM sleep, will actually get sort of worked out.
That's where marijuana may actually impact dream
sleep and shut it down and block it. Have there
been any studies on chronic marijuana smokers,
like those dawn -to -dust type characters? That
just are constantly high? Like, and what happens
to their brain? Because they must never hit REM
sleep. Yeah, so people haven't looked at marijuana.
They have looked at alcohol, though. Exactly
that. So what happens is if you look at alcoholics,
they will have something often when they come
off alcohol, something called delirium tremens,
which is where sort of DT. There what happens
is that the alcohol has been blocking dream sleep
for so long and the pressure for dream sleep
is built up so powerfully in the brain, it actually
just spills over into wakefulness. And so the
brain just says, look, okay, if I'm not going
to get this dream sleep whilst you're asleep,
I'm just going to take it whilst you're awake.
And so you start to essentially dream while you're
awake. It's this sort of collision of two states
of consciousness. So you get delirium. Wow. I
always thought the DTs were detoxing. When someone
says someone's going through the DTs. Okay, yeah.
So it's delirium tremor. Yeah, delirium tremors.
So what is going on with them when this is happening?
So if they are going through this delirium during
the day while they're conscious, what's physiologically
happening? So it's almost as though the veil
of REM sleep gets pulled over the waking brain,
as it were. So you have this mixed state of consciousness
that you can pick up with brainwave recordings.
Wow. And it just tells me, I mean, in some ways,
how... necessary sleep must be if that's the
lengths that the brain will go to to get that
which it's been missing yeah just shows you why
you know it took mother nature 3 .6 million years
to put this thing called an eight hour sleep
necessity in place and we've come along and within
the space of 100 years we've lopped off almost
20 percent of that if you look at the data wow
really yeah And so many people take pride in
that, too. I don't need eight hours sleep. I
got three. I'm good, ready to go, kick ass and
dominate the world. Yeah. It's the sort of like
sleep machismo sort of attitude. There is a lot
of that, right? Yeah. Not me, baby. I like sleep.
Well, I mean, you'd be glad to know that then,
you know, men who sleep five to six hours a night
will have a level of testosterone, which is that
of someone 10 years their senior. So a lack of
sleep will age you by a decade in terms of that
critical aspect of wellness, virility, muscle
strength. Ten years. That's incredible. Wow.
We had a woman on the podcast. Her name is Courtney
DeWalter, and she's a ultra marathon runner.
And she ran. She's a real freak. I mean, like
an incredible athlete. She ran this thing called
the Moab 240. It's 238 miles through the Moab
Mountains. And she did it 22 miles faster than
the second place man. So she won it by like a
whopping, I think it was 10 hours, 10 hours ahead
of the second place winner. And she slept one
minute, one minute the entire time. She tried
to lie. This is over three days. I think it took
her less than three days. I think it took her
like two days. She slept. For one minute during
the entire time. She tried to lie down. She said
she laid down for a few minutes, but she couldn't
fall asleep. And then she wound up actually just
taking one minute and going to sleep. And she
said that one minute was like one of the most
intense, restful minutes. After that minute is
over, she was woken up because she told her partner,
her running partner, to wake her up at a minute.
And she's like, how long did you let me sleep?
And he was like, one minute. She's like, wow,
I feel great. Let's go. But she was saying that
she hallucinates and that she starts seeing like
rabbits are talking to her and she sees things
that aren't there and like mystical beings and
stuff. She said it's really freaky, but she knows
that she's hallucinating because she's done this.
She's done a bunch of ultra marathons. So she
just keeps going. She just keeps going. She's
like saying hi to rabbits. They're talking to
her and stuff. Yeah. I mean, and you see these
reports. too. I mean, there's a race, a cycling
race, I think it's bike across America. You've
just got to go from East Coast to West Coast
in as short a time as possible. And that's exactly
what they do too. It's all about managing how
little sleep that you get. And they will explain
these wild hallucinogenic experiences on the
bike. If you look at world records for people
who have tried to sort of go without sleep, one
of the most famous examples is a radio disc jockey
called Peter Tripp. back in the um it was back
in the sort of 60s 50s 60s and he tried to break
the world record he went eight days straight
um and yeah With no sleep? Yeah, he was broadcasting
from Times Square. He would do a show there.
And, you know, the scientist, the psychiatrist
said, look, this is a very bad idea based on
what we know. Please don't do it. And he said,
I'm going to do it anyway. And then the scientist
being the good scientist, they said, great. Do
you mind if we study you? Because it'd be a great
paper to sort of, you know, to write up. And
they tracked him. And by day three, he was having
florid. delusions and hallucinations. He was
seeing spiders in his shoes. He became desperately
paranoid. He started to think that people were
trying to poison him in his food. One point,
it was the middle of winter. Some guys came in
with sort of these, it was New York winter time,
came in with these big jackets. He thought it
was the Secret Service coming to get him and
he ran out into the road. You know, these are
strange things. But so we know that that same
profile of just starting to become, you know,
psychotic, which is, Essentially what happens
naturally when you dream that you are, I mean,
all of us here, you know, as long as we slept
last night, became flagrantly psychotic when
we went into dream sleep because you start to
see things which are not there. So you hallucinate.
You believe things that couldn't possibly be
true. So you're delusional. You get confused
about time, place and person. So you're suffering
from disorientation. You have wildly fluctuating
emotions, something that psychiatrists call being
sort of affectively labile. And then how wonderful.
We both woke up this morning and we forgot most,
if not all of that dream experience. So we're
suffering from amnesia. What is happening when
you're having these? hallucinogenic experiences?
Like what are the chemicals that are causing
it? Do we know? We do. Yeah. And so we've done
some of these studies where we put people into
brain scanners, we let them fall asleep, and
then we see what happens within the brain, which
parts of the brain are switching on, which parts
of the brain are switching off. When you go into
REM sleep, firstly, some parts of your brain
become 30 % more active than when you're awake.
So, you know, we think of sleep as this sort
of, you know, static passive state where everything
just kind of drops down in terms of activity.
It's quite the contrary. But what's also interesting
is that not all parts of the brain ramp up when
you go into REM sleep. Visual parts of the brain
increase, motor parts of the brain increase,
emotional centers and memory centers, they all
increase. But the part of the brain that bucks
the trend and goes in the opposite direction
is the part of the brain that we call the prefrontal
cortex, this sort of CEO of the brain that's
very good at rational, logical thinking. That
part of the brain gets shut off. So it's almost
as though the prison guards are gone and everyone
runs amok because there's no controller in place.
And so we know sort of from the patterns of brain
activity why… You become sort of so visual. You
see things, why you have motor kinesthetic activity,
why things feel so emotional, but also why things
seem utterly illogical and irrational. Because
your frontal brain, the thing that makes us most
human, you can say goodbye to that for the rest
of dream sleep. So there's no driver. So there's
no driver. Yeah. Now, why do we forget? Why do
we forget those dreams? Because I wake up and
I am sure that I'm going to remember these dreams.
And sometimes I do. Sometimes I remember, and
I don't think I really remember them. I think
what it is is very much like, you ever hear someone
talk about a memory from a long time ago? I used
to think that people actually remembered things
from a long time ago. But now what I think is
they remember remembering it. I think they remember
talking about it. They remember how they described
it. And then they sort of remember that and repeat
it and in their mind convince themselves that
that's what happened. Because I've heard people
tell stories about the past and they vary wildly
from what is absolutely true. like factual you
could check it you could research it you know
what the facts are but in their mind it's very
different and I think that it's entirely possible
that what people are doing is remembering the
recollection of these memories and how they told
them and then also sort of people elaborate things
and make themselves look better or make the situation
look more dramatic but with dreams That doesn't
make any sense. So I'm always trying to figure
out what is it about a dream where sometimes
I can remember the dream. And sometimes it's
so vivid when I wake up. I'm like, holy shit,
that was crazy. What a dream. And then I forget
it 20 minutes later. Right. What is that? So
firstly, I mean, one theory of dreaming is that
it's just simply a reconstruction when you wake
up. So you have these fragments of activity.
And what your cortex does when it wakes up is
what your cortex is designed to do when you're
awake normally, which is try to package everything
and make a good story, make logical fit out of
the world. That's one theory. I don't believe
that, though. Your point is a really interesting
one. Do I remember my dreams? that doesn't necessarily
mean I forget my dreams. And what I mean by that
is... accessibility versus availability. So if
you haven't had that experience where you've
woken up, you thought, I was definitely dreaming.
I can't quite grab it, you know, it just, and
it's gone. And then two days later, you're in
the shower, you sort of washing yourself, you
see a bottle of shampoo, you see the label, and
it just triggers the unlocking of that dream
memory. And it sort of comes flooding back or
someone says something to you and you think,
oh, that was the dream. What that tells me as
a brain scientist is that the memory is there.
It's preserved. It's available. But what happens
most of the time when we wake up is that we lose
the IP address to the memory. So it's present,
but it's not consciously accessible. Available,
not accessible. If that's true, what it means
is that this type of information we know can
have non -conscious impacts on our behavior all
the time. It's great. brain science about this
non -conscious memory processing. It's possible
that we store every one of our dreams. We just
don't consciously have accessibility to it. But
nevertheless, it's changing how we behave, how
we feel each and every day. No evidence for it.
It's a theory I'm still wanting to test, but
that's possible too. And it's only that anecdote
where I can think, I just don't remember the
dream. I've forgotten it. I don't think that
may be true. It may still be there. I just need
to find the keys to sort of access that memory.
What's stunning to me is how quickly the dream
evaporates, the memory of the dream, in relation
to an actual experience. Like if we went outside
and we saw some lady walk up to some guy and
kick him in the balls, we'd be like, whoa! We
would remember that. And you'd be able to tell
your friends, like, yeah, some lady just randomly
walked up to some guy and kicked him in the balls.
Like, we would remember that. And you would remember
it 10 minutes later. You'd remember it an hour.
You'd remember it next day. You'd be telling
your friends, yeah, she just walked right up
to him. I remember it like it was yesterday.
Because it was, right? Yeah. But a dream can
be 10 minutes ago. And you wake up and dude,
it was King Kong and he was swinging from my
ceiling and somehow or another he fit in the
room but the room got bigger and you have these
crazy dreams and then 20 minutes later you forget
all of it. Like what is happening there? So one...
One current explanation is that the chemistry
of the brain when you go into dream sleep is
radically different. So one of the chemicals
called noradrenaline in the brain, which downstairs
in the body, its sister chemical is called adrenaline.
Noradrenaline actually plummets to the lowest
levels. It's actually a stress chemical in the
brain or to one of them that gets shut off during
dream sleep, which is even if you're panicking.
Like what if you fall off a building? Well, what's
interesting is that. That chemical is low whilst
you're having that dream. But when you wake up
from those, and some people often wake up, that's
when you have the spike of noradrenaline. So
it's still low when you're in dream sleep. But
there's another chemical that goes in the opposite
direction. It's called acetylcholine. It's the
chemical that is actually altered in Alzheimer's
disease. And these two chemicals will change
essentially the input -output direction of information
flow into the memory centers of the brain. That
makes sense because people take that as a nootropic.
They do. Yeah, that's actually an alpha brain.
When you take that, it's been clinically proven
to enhance memory, especially verbal memory and
recollection of words and things like that. That's
right. So that's happening while you're sleeping.
Whilst you're in REM sleep, yeah. But what may
be happening, our current models, if you sort
of build these neural models to sort of mimic
dreaming, it may be that during dreaming, it's
principally about the outflow of information
to generate dreams. And in fact, the chemical
profile is oppositional to input, which is about
saving. So it's about sort of pumping out information
rather than committing information. And so when
you come out of a dream sleep, you still get
this sort of lingering after sort of taste of.
chemistry, as it were, in the brain, that means
that the dreaming brain is more programmed to
be outputting a narrative and an experience rather
than actually committing it to memory, which
is the opposite direction, if that makes sense.
It does make sense. How aware are you of dimethyltryptamine?
I'm somewhat aware of it scientifically, not
personally. Experientially? Yeah. One of the
things about psychedelic experiences with dimethyltryptamine,
first of all, it's endogenous. Your brain produces
it, your lungs, your liver produce it. But when
you have a DMT experience, after it's over, the
memory fades very rapidly. And it seems just
like a dream. in that regard, where while you're
having it, what's bizarre is that you're having
it while you're awake. And then after you have
it, within 10, 20 minutes, it is just like a
dream that you can't remember. I remember little
flashes of experiences that I've had. And there's
been a lot of speculation that that's one of
the things that you're experiencing while you're
in heavy REM sleep, and that could be responsible
for the crazy visuals that you have that seem
so vivid. I mean, there's been times where I've
had... had dreams where I was a hundred percent
convinced that I was awake. Yeah. And then something
happened. Like, uh, I, I do this thing sometimes
where I'll, and if I do it consciously a lot,
I think I saw in one of those wacky movies, like,
uh, what the bleep do me know? I think I saw
it in that where you walk up to a door as you're
walking through the door, you knock on the side
of the door and go, am I awake? Nope, not awake.
Or am I asleep rather? Yeah. No, I'm not asleep
because I'm knocking on the door. Well, I did
that and my hand was just like going right through
the wall. And I went, oh, I'm sleeping. And then
I woke up and I was like, but. The feeling that
I had while I was in that dream, it was so vivid.
I mean, everything seems so real. Like, what
could possibly be causing me to construct this
artificial reality in my mind that, at the moment
at least, was indistinguishable? from the reality
that I experience right now. And I'm assuming
because I just knocked on this table that I'm
awake. Yeah, I really hope I'm not just a fictive
character in your dreamscape. Maybe we're sharing
a dream. Yeah, very Inception -like. Is that
possible? Not based on the science so far. But
I think, you know, what you're speaking about
there really is almost why would Mother Nature
create this thing? called the dream experience.
What would be the function of essentially every
night going into what sums up to be about two
total hours of virtual reality experience and
testing? One possibility, which is deeply unsatisfying,
is that it's just a byproduct. It's just epiphenomenal
that when your brain goes into this thing called
REM sleep and all of the different patterns of
brain activity that we described. An offshoot
is this thing that we call dreaming. In the same
way that a light bulb, the reason that we construct
the apparatus that's a light bulb is to produce
light. But when you produce light in that way,
you also produce heat. It was never the function
of the light bulb. It's just what happens when
you produce light in that way. Maybe dreaming
is just sort of the heat of REM sleep. And REM
sleep serves lots of other functions. But that
doesn't feel to me right though. Why? Well, firstly,
I think it's probably additionally metabolically
demanding to have dreams in addition to this
thing called REM sleep. And whenever Mother Nature
burns calories, it's usually for a reason because
they're so precious. That's a good point. That
makes sense, too. Yeah. I read some article about
the lack of REM sleep with marijuana users, and
it was trying to say, and it made me super skeptical,
even as a pot smoker. It was trying to say that
it's not bad for you because what it's essentially
doing is bypassing the REM sleep and going directly
into the deep sleep. And that it's helping you
in that regard. Does that make sense to you?
Doesn't make sense. As a neuroscientist, he says,
nay, you fucking stoners. I'm so deeply unpopular.
I'm telling people, don't smoke pot. Stay away
from alcohol. Apart from a general personality,
which is dislikable, this doesn't help me. You're
definitely not dislikable. But I don't think
you're saying anything wrong. I think marijuana,
like... most things is best used in moderation.
And one thing that I got out of the Sober October
thing wasn't just that it's fascinating to see
the dreams like just ramp up and get crazy, but
also that when you take a few days off and then
smoke a little pot, the pot actually has more
of an impact. In fact, one of my favorite psychedelic
authors and lecturers, the late great Terence
McKenna, his advice was, to not do marijuana
for long periods of time and then do as much
as you could stand and he was a you know a real
psychedelic adventure and his thought was to
really get the benefit out of marijuana it's
not something that should be used daily and recreationally
it should be used as a psychedelic sacrament
Not should be because he actually did smoke pot
pretty regularly. But his thought was if you
really want to get the full impact of it, you
shouldn't be accustomed to it. And when you're
accustomed to it, you build up a tolerance to
it and it doesn't have the same impact. It's
that thing, I don't know if you've ever been
around pot smokers, but when someone doesn't
smoke pot and then they get talked into smoking
pot with some pot smokers, it's always a terrible
idea. Because you've got a bunch of people with
super high tolerances and some poor person that
doesn't have any tolerance and they just get
taken down a tornado rabbit hole journey into
their childhood. It's like zero to 60 in like
1 .2 seconds. They're just so paranoid and thinking
about everything and freaking out and all these
sensations that they've just never experienced
before. But the idea that you could bypass REM
sleep and go straight into the deep sleep, that
doesn't make any sense to you. No, it doesn't.
And what we've learned over the past sort of
30 or 40 years is. All stages of sleep are important.
When you think about sleep as a state, it makes
no sense. Firstly, you're vulnerable to predation.
You're not finding food. You're not finding a
mate. You're not reproducing. You're not caring
for your young. On any one of those grounds,
sleep should be strongly selected against as
a collective. I mean, it's almost idiotic. If
sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function,
it is the biggest mistake that the evolutionary
process ever made. And that counts for all of
the stages of sleep too. Again, Mother Nature
wouldn't waste time putting you into a state
that wasn't necessary. And what we've discovered
is that all of those different stages of sleep
that we spoke about all have unique and separate
functions. So you can't shortchange any one of
them. You don't need to bias towards one and
try and sort of, you know, placate the other.
You know, evolution has taken a long time to
get the blueprint accurately correct for each
physiological individual. I wouldn't. play around
with it and think that you're smarter than that
process right i when i read it i felt like it
was a justification for smoking a lot of pot
like man you're just getting deeper sleep man
you don't need that REM sleep you're passing
it up man you just go right into the deep heavy
necessary sleep au contraire au contraire potheads
um so what is happening to the body during REM
sleep that's so critical that one particular
aspect of sleep so firstly In the body, your
cardiovascular system seems to do something quite
strange. It goes through periods of dramatic
acceleration and then dramatic deceleration.
During REM sleep. Yeah, during REM sleep. Quite
unpredictable, too. We also know that during
REM sleep, your brain paralyzes your body so
that your mind can dream safely. Wow. I mean,
and that makes a lot of sense if you're thinking
that you're, you know, this. world champion mixed
martial arts person, and it's in the middle of
the night. It's dark. You can't see. You're not
perceiving your outside world. You're going to
get popped out of the gene pool very quickly
if you start acting out that experience. So there
is a barrier in place that Mother Nature locks
you down in incarceration, muscle incarceration.
That's crazy that you say that because when I
was fighting when I was young, I would wake up
throwing kicks. I would kick in the middle of
the night. I would do it all the time. I'd be
sleeping and I would move and throw a kick in
the middle of the night. And I remember it waking
me up like, what the fuck is wrong with me? And
then I'd try to go back to sleep again. But I
was obviously dreaming. about competing. Do you
actually remember this? So when you woke up,
did you remember dreaming at that point? Or did
you just have no recollection of anything going
on at that point? I believe I had a recollection.
It's been a long time, but I believe I had a
recollection. Like I would be like in bed with
my girlfriend, I'd wake her up to, you know,
just don't like I wouldn't throw a full kick,
but my body would move like I was going to, you
know, like I would turn my hips and my leg would
extend it was my body was I attribute it to the
idea that it's so extreme, like the activity
of fighting is so extreme that my brain had kind
of like hypercharged itself to compete at this
very high level, you know, and that this was
like so unusual. That it was almost at red alert
all the time and maybe even trying to work out
patterns while I was sleeping. That's exactly
the evidence that we have now. So for things
like motor skills or even rats running around
a maze where they will learn specific sort of
navigational pathways and even skilled motor
movements. What you can do is you can place these
electrodes into centers of the brain. My sleep
center works on humans. Other people have done
these studies in rats. And you implant electrodes
and you measure the brain cells firing as the
rat is running around the maze. And let's say
that you can sort of play little tones for each
brain cell. So they're running around the maze
and you can listen to the brain cells learning
the signature of that maze. So it goes... What
was amazing is that when you let those rats sleep
but you keep listening to the brain, what you
hear is... As if the brain is actually, and in
fact it is, it's replaying the exact same sequence,
the memory sequence that it was learning whilst
it was awake. It's replaying, but at a speed
that is 20 times faster. So, you know, now we
start to get into this inception world, and I
don't mean to because the scientific data, we're
not sort of in that territory. You know, that
notion of time compression and time dilation
that Christopher Nolan played so well with in
that movie, we can see that at the level of brain
cell firing in rats as they're learning these
mazes. And it comes back to what you're saying,
which is that. The better that they rehearse
those skilled memories, when you wake them up
and test them the next day, that predicts how
much better they are in terms of their performance.
So it's not just that you learn, you go to sleep
and you replay and you hit the save button on
these new memories. You actually sculpt out those
memories and you improve them. And we've done
studies with motor skill learning, critical for
athletic performance. And practice does not make
perfect. Practice with a night of sleep is what
makes perfect because you come back the next
day and you're 20 to 30 percent better in terms
of your skilled performance than where you were
at the end of your practice session the day before.
Wow. Wow. I mean, sleep is the greatest legal
performance enhancing drug that most people are
probably neglecting in sport. Wow. And not just
for your physical performance, but actually skill
learning. That's right. Skill learning, memory,
and then also downstairs in the body, all of
the recuperative benefits. And you can flip the
coin, by the way. If you're getting six hours
of sleep or less, your time to physical exhaustion
drops by up to 30%. So you could spend all of
your time training for a 10 -round fight. Perfect
condition, but then I put you on six hours of
sleep the night before. You're now going to be
physically exhausted by round seven rather than
round ten. Wow. But, well, that's a really hard
thing for fighters because they have a very difficult
time sleeping the night before a big fight. Yeah.
It's very, very difficult because there's anxiety.
And I would imagine it's got to be, I mean, it's
probably going to take a huge toll. I mean, it's
probably a huge benefit if they can somehow or
another. bypass all that and just relax and learn
how to relax and learn how to actually sleep
I mean it's I think you know it's one of We're
constantly trying to hack the physiological system,
especially in elite sports these days, because,
you know, small fractions of a percent of gain
can make a huge difference. Well, that sounds
like 30%. That's a monster. Huge. Yeah. I mean,
your time to sort of not just physical exhaustion,
but, you know, the lactic acid builds up quicker,
the less and less that you sleep. Your ability
of the lungs to actually expire carbon dioxide
and inhale oxygen decreases the less sleep that
you have. That makes so much sense. Well, because
when I was doing, I was doing Fear Factor and
I was doing stand -up comedy and then I was also
doing another television show and I was doing
jujitsu. I never got eight hours sleep. I mostly
got four. Usually I got four. And my cardio always
sucked. Yeah. It was always terrible. And I'd
be like, why does my cardio suck? I work out
so much. Like, that was probably what it was.
Yeah. It's a huge part of that. Wow. Now, how
many hours of sleep should you get? Somewhere
between. excuse me, somewhere between seven to
nine hours. Once you get below seven hours of
sleep, we can measure objective impairments in
your brain and your body. I can show that in
the last two days. And I can show it because
I basically did the same workout two days in
a row. The day before, I had flown back from
Boston, very tired. Hanging out with my kids
all day. Went to get some sleep. But then I had
to do some stuff at like 2 o 'clock in the morning.
And I just never really got good sleep. And then
my youngest daughter got up at 5. She was crying.
And then eventually my alarm went off at 8. So
my sleep was like three, four hours. It was all
screwy. And the night before it was even less
because I had flown and I had to get up early
for the flight and I tried to sleep on the plane
and I went running and I felt like dog shit.
And then during the day I felt like dog shit.
I just didn't have, like as I was running, I
just didn't have any extra gear. I was like,
ugh. I did it. I pushed through it. But then
it was over. I was like, ugh. Well, last night,
last night I slept seven and a half hours. Woke
up today, lifted weights, ran, ran. I felt great.
I feel great now. Like two days in difference.
I mean, that's the difference. The difference
is one day I got real sleep. One day I didn't.
I did the exact same thing even more today. I
lifted weights today as well, and I just feel
great. So I could see it physiologically in the
difference in my performance in 24 hours. Yeah,
and that's noticeable. I mean, we see that too.
peak muscle strength, your physical vertical
jump height, and your peak running speed, all
of those things correlate with sleep. The less
that you have, the worse those outcomes are.
Probably one of the most surprising factors there
was injury risk when they've looked at athletes
across a season and they've just plotted, you
know, how frequently will they get injured? And
then they surveyed them, you know, how much sleep
were you getting? And they bucketed them into
sort of people who are getting nine hours, seven
hours, six, five, four. And it's a perfect linear
relationship. The less sleep that you have, higher
your injury risk. So people getting nine hours
versus five hours, there was almost a 60 % increase
in probability of injury risk during a season.
Do you attribute that to exhaustion or do you
attribute that to a lack of recovery from the
previous night's workout? Is it a combination
of those things? Is it exhaustion causing you
to misstep perhaps and like twist an ankle or
turn a knee? Yeah, it's all of those things.
Even if you look at microbalance, if you look
at sort of these stability muscles versus, you
know, major muscles, those stability muscles
also fail when you're not getting sufficient
sleep. And I think we often underestimate how
critical they are in sport performance, particularly
in terms of combating and placating injury risk
too. So if you just get someone on a stability
ball, you know. sort of just dose them down with
sleep eight hours five hours you know three hours
and just notice how those stability muscles help
you balance just the basic act of balance that
deteriorates dramatically no wonder you're getting
more injury risk totally makes sense now As a
neuroscientist, what do you attribute when people
talk about visualization? And visualization is
a huge factor in improving technical skills,
specifically martial arts, which I'm a big fan
of, obviously. Martial arts, when you visualize,
people who visualize. who sit down and go over
their body, going through the motions and doing
things, those people perform better. They perform
better. They learn quicker. What do you attribute
that to? Do you think it's the same thing as
what's happening when you're sleeping, just maybe
to a lesser extent? It's about 50 % as effective
as physically performing it, too. And it's 50
% as effective, what I mean there is, in changing
the plastic connections within the brain. So
even just visualization, you know, passive play,
as it were, still can actually cause a rewiring
of the brain beneficially. Wow. You know, learning
techniques, specifically martial arts techniques,
my good friend Eddie Bravo. world -famous jiu
-jitsu instructor, he's always comparing it to
tying your shoe. And he said, do you know how
like when you were a little kid and you're trying
to figure out how to tie your shoe, it's an extremely
difficult thing to do. You're like, how do I
do this? And you put that down and you do loops.
Like I'm watching my seven -year -old daughter
go through that right now. But now, as a grown
man, when I tie my shoe, I could just be talking,
you know, what? Oh, yeah, we're going to go tomorrow.
And I'll do it. I don't even know what I did.
If you tried to ask me to explain how I tie my
shoe, I'd be like, how do I tie my shoe? Like,
I don't even know how I do it because it just
I have it in there. It's just and the idea with
martial arts is you've got to be. All of your
techniques have to be automatic. Someone extends
the arm, you instantly hook it and go into the
arm bar. You have to have these paths so drilled
in that you don't even know you're doing them
until it's over. Yeah. So automaticity is one
of the things that sleep actually accomplishes.
I was talking about those 20 to 30 percent benefits
in motor skill performance. So we did some additional
studies to actually say, well, how does sleep
do that? You know, where in your skill performance
does sleep give you the benefit? So you're right.
Tying a shoelace, you know, even driving a car
with stick, you know, at first it's just overwhelming.
It's so difficult. It's clutch. It's gas pedal.
You know, it's gear. And now it's just second
nature. You know, it's shifted from conscious
to automatic, from conscious to non -conscious.
If you look at performance that is conscious
and not automatic, it's usually very staccato.
It's this, then it's that, then it's that. It's
not fluid. If you heard someone trying to sort
of play piano to begin with, it doesn't sound
very fluid. As someone who is a maestro, it just
flows out of them. So we looked at this with
motor skill performance, again, sort of like
keyboard playing, musicianship. And you learn
and you learn and you get better. And let's say
that you type a sequence. Let's say 4 -1 -3 -2
-4. And people learn it, but they have these
problem points throughout the sequence. They
go 4 -1 -3 -2 -4, 4 -1 -3 -2 -4, as if it's a
sticking point. It's the same thing with any
skilled performance in athletics. And it's the
brain chunking things up. A very long motor sequence
gets chunked up into small sort of digestible
bites. It's a good way to begin learning, but
it's not a way to create automaticity. At some
point, what you have to do is stitch all of those
things together and it just flows. Like a sentence.
Like a sentence. Yeah. Like a piano piece. Like,
you know, a sequence of movements. If you've
got, you know, in martial arts, you've got, you
know. What we found was that before sleep, you've
got these big problem points, these gaps in your
motor skill learning. Sleep does not necessarily
improve the places where you're already good.
Sleep is intelligent. It goes in, finds that
problem point, that friction point in your motor
skill. sort of deficit and it smooths it out
so you come back the next day and now it's just
four one three two four four one three two four
four it's automaticity and it's exactly what
you're describing you know speak to musicians
they'll say i was playing i just couldn't get
that piece the night before and then i came back
the next day and i sat down and i could just
play sleep's doing its work i've heard that too
with problems and that's why people say sleep
on it yeah Yeah, you've never been told to stay
awake on a problem. Yeah, it's true, right? I
mean, sometimes when you're about to go to bed,
it's almost overwhelming. You just can't concentrate
on anything else but this problem, whatever it
is. And then you go to sleep and you wake up
in the morning like, eh, it's all right. Yeah.
It's going to be fine. Yeah. I got it. I know
what to do. And there's lots of anecdotal evidence
of sleep inspired creativity. And now this shifts
to one of the benefits of dreaming. In fact,
it's during dream sleep when we take all of the
information that we've previously learned and
we start to collide it with all of the new information
that we've learned. I mean, it's a little bit
like group therapy for memories. Everyone gets
a name badge and you all get to speak to each
other. And the brain starts to seek out and test
novel connections and new associations. So it's
almost like informational alchemy. And you wake
up the next morning with a revised mind -wide
web that is now capable of divining incredible
solutions to previously impenetrable problems.
Lots of anecdotes, you know, Dmitry Mendeleev
came up with a periodic table of elements by
way of dream -inspired insight. You know, talk
about a Herculean task, take all of the elements
in the known universe and figure out a structure
as to how they all fit together. Off you go.
His waking brain could not do it. His sleeping
brain solved the problem. I mean, Einstein, by
the way, this is great. Einstein was suggested
to be a short sleeper. And we don't know if that's
true. But even if he was, he was a habitual napper
during the day. I've got some great pictures
of him on his workbench. And he used sleep ruthlessly
as a tool for creativity. And he would sit at
his desk and he would have a sort of pad of paper
and a pencil. He had a chair with armrests and
he would pick up two steel ball bearings and
take a metal saucepan and turn it upside down,
place it underneath the arm of the chair. put
the two steel ball bearings in his hand, then
he would rest back and he would start to fall
asleep. And so he didn't fall too far into sleep.
What would happen is at some point, his muscle
tone would relax. They would release the steel
ball bearings. They would crash on the saucepan,
wake him up. And then he would write down all
of the creative ideas that he was having. Isn't
that brilliant? So no wonder you're never told
to sort of stay awake on a problem. And in every
language that I've inquired about today, French,
Swahili, that phrase, sleep. Sleeping on a problem
seems to exist, which must mean that this benefit
of dream sleep transcends cultural boundaries.
I should note, I think it's important that the
French translation is much closer to you sleep
with a problem. We, the British, you say you
sleep on a problem. The French, you say you sleep
with a problem. I think it says so much about
the romantic difference between the... The British
and the French, you know? Yeah, the French are
trying to fuck everything. They're trying to
fuck their problems. I'll lose my British passport
for saying that, but that's okay. He won't. I
will. But I won't either. It's just a joke. That's
fascinating that Einstein figured that out too,
that he literally had like a whole routine and
that he would drop this ball and hit it, bang,
and wake up and start writing. Self -medicating.
I would love to be in the room watching Einstein
do that. It must have been fascinating. Oh, sorry.
I said Einstein. It's Edison. My goodness. I'm
an idiot. Edison. Sorry. That changes everything.
Wasn't Edison a thief, though? Didn't he steal
everything from Tesla? I think there's an argument
to be made. But, I mean, he has a lot to answer
for, by the way, in terms of the way that we're
sleeping. You know, he was the first person to
electrify society. Not necessarily create the
light bulb, but he really, you know, gave, shifted
us from a... point where now we controlled the
night in terms of illumination and like we are
a dark deprived society in this modern era and
that's one of the things that is keeping us awake
at night a lack of darkness yeah not just that
but also our inability to see the stars anymore
the the light pollution that we have at night
i think it's i think it's a giant shift in perspective
like uh have you ever been to a planetarium or
um an observatory like one of those uh at night
um there's a Keck Observatory in Hawaii is a
place I try to go to every year. Really stunning
because it's very high up. I think the observatory
is somewhere more than 9 ,000 feet above sea
level, and then I think you go even further,
and then they have the telescopes. But you go
to Visitor Center, and you go to the Visitor
Center, and they have some telescopes set up.
But you actually drive through the clouds. So
as you're driving up this mountain, we were bummed
out. We're like, oh, it's cloudy. We might not
be able to see anything. And then you drive through
the clouds. And then when you get through the
clouds, you're like, oh. Holy shit. And you feel
like you're on a spaceship flying through space.
And this is what our ancestors saw every night
when they went to sleep with a clear sky. They
saw all the stars. They saw the full Milky Way
like this. And the way the Big Island has set
up, they use diffused lighting all over the island.
Because of the Keck Observatory. So you don't
have the same level of light pollution that you
have when you're in a normal city like Los Angeles,
which is terrible. I mean, L .A., if you look
up, you see like one or two stars because everything's
lit up. It's crazy bright. I think that perspective,
that's a giant factor in the way human beings
look at their relationship with the universe.
But I think that also just the light everywhere,
constant light everywhere. That's got to be a
big factor in why people sleep so little, right?
Yeah, we know it is now. I mean, these studies
have been done. You know, the first part is the
external light, which is, you know, street lighting.
You know, even if you've got curtains that can
still bleed through. But then when you come into
the home, you know, the invasion of light into
the home by way of technology has been a big
problem. People looking at their phones before
they go to bed. Well, firstly, yeah. I mean,
the incandescent light bulb. sort of was the
start of it. And light bulbs can suppress a hormone
that's called melatonin. It's the hormone of
darkness and it tells your brain when it's dark
and when it's time to sleep. But then you add
into that screen usage and they've done studies
where, for example, you know, one hour of iPad
reading versus just one hour of reading on a
book, you know, in dim light. That one hour of
iPad reading firstly delayed the release of this
critical darkness hormone called melatonin by
about three hours. So if you read on your iPad
for an hour here in California, your melatonin
peak is not going to arrive. I mean, somewhere
in Hawaii time, in fact, it's three hours delayed.
It's 50 % less in terms of its peak. And furthermore,
you don't get the same amount of REM sleep. And
when you wake up the next morning, you don't
feel as refreshed or restored by your sleep.
Those studies have been done too. Wow. What should
someone do if they have a hard time sleeping?
Like say if you're a person who has insomnia,
you have a hard time getting to bed, you have
a hard time staying asleep. When you wake up,
you can't go back to bed. Are there strategies?
There are. I mean, I think for most people, there
are five things that you can do just out the
gate to get better sleep. Regularity is probably
the most important thing I can tell you. Go to
bed at the same time. Wake up at the same time.
No matter whether it's the weekend, weekday,
regularity is key. We've spoken about light.
For example, when you, in the last hour before
bed, try to stay away from screens, but also
just switch off half the lights in the house.
You'd be surprised at how soporific that is.
It really starts to sort of make you feel a bit
more drowsy. They've done some great studies
where they would take people out, you know, into
the Rockies. No electric light, no electricity
whatsoever. And they started to go to bed two
hours earlier than their acclaimed natural bedtime.
It wasn't just because they didn't have anything
necessarily to do. It was that their melatonin
was rising two hours earlier. So keep it dark.
The third is probably keep it cool. Your brain
actually needs to drop its temperature by about
two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep.
And that's the reason that you will always find
it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too
cold than too hot. I've seen people use cold
pads. Have you seen those? You sleep on these
cold pads? What do you think of those? Yeah.
I mean, the evidence is pretty good that cooling
the body actually works. In the book, I write
about a series of studies where they had people
in, it's almost like a wetsuit, but it has all
of these veins running through it. And they could
actually perfuse warm or cold water into any
part of the body, hands, core of the body, feet.
And so that you could exquisitely manipulate
the temperature of any part of the body. And
what they found is that they could effectively
cool the body down and it instantaneously made
people fall asleep faster. And it gave them deeper,
deep non -REM sleep, that sort of restorative
sleep for the body. And you can even look at
studies where people sleep semi -naked, and that
also seems to improve their sleep, and they get
a little bit more deep sleep too. So cold is
better. Paradox here, though, is that you need
to warm your feet and your hands to kind of charm
the blood away from your core out to the surface
and radiate that heat. Really? So you should
go to sleep with socks and gloves on? Yeah. Or
better still, have a hot bath. Evidence here,
too, that I discussed where people say, you know,
I get out of a hot bath, I feel nice and toasty
and relaxed, and that's why I fall asleep. It's
the opposite. When you get into a bath, you get
vasodilation. You sort of get rosy cheeks, red
skin. All of the blood rushes to the surface.
You get out of the bath and you have this massive
thermal dump of heat that just evacuates from
the body. Your core body temperature plummets
and that's why you sleep better. So you can hack
the system very easily. Wow. So your core body
temperature plummets and that's what makes you
sleep easier. Yeah. That sounds so counterintuitive.
Yeah. But it makes sense. And it makes sense
because that's how we were designed. If you look
at hunter -gatherer tribes whose way of life
has not changed for thousands of years and you
ask how do they sleep, one of the things that
seems to dictate... take their sleep is the rise
and fall of temperature. Temperature is at its
lowest in the nadir of the night, three or four
in the morning. And as that temperature, that
climate temperature starts to drop, that's when
they start to get drowsy. As if temperature is
just sort of signaling to the brain, now it's
time to sleep. So light as well as temperature
are two key triggers to help you get better sleep.
If you look at... Those tribes, by the way, and
when they go to sleep and they wake up, you know,
they go to sleep probably at two hours after
dusk, sort of eight to nine in the evening, wake
up about half an hour, even an hour before dawn.
It's the rise in temperature rather than light
that triggers their awakening. But there's a
reason, you know, have you ever thought about
what the term midnight actually means? Middle
of the night. And that's what it should be for
all of us. But in modernity, we've been dislocated
from our natural rhythms. And now midnight has
become the time when we think I should check
Facebook last time. You know, I should send my
last email. That wasn't that is not how we were
designed to sleep. And in fact, we may also be
designed to sleep by physically, too. If you
look at those hunter gatherers, they don't sleep
one long bout of eight hours at night. Yeah,
I've heard this recently that people that you
should have two sleeps. The idea of two sleeps.
Yeah, it's actually a little different than the
idea of two sleeps. So there was a time in sort
of the Dickensian era where people would sleep
for the first half of the night, maybe sort of
four hours or so. Then they would wake up. They
would socialize. They would eat. They would make
love. And then they would go back and have a
second sleep. If you look at... Natural biological
rhythms in the brain and the body, that doesn't
really seem to be how we were designed. It certainly
seems to be something that we did in society,
but I think it's more of a societal trend than
it was a biological edict. However, we do seem
to have two sleep periods the way that we were
designed. Those tribes will often sleep about
six and a half hours, seven hours of sleep at
night. And then especially in the summer, they'll
have that siesta -like behavior in the afternoon.
And all of us have that sort of this what's called
the postprandial dip in alertness just means
after lunch. And if I measure your brainwave
activity with electrodes, I can see a drop in
your physiological alertness somewhere between
2 to 4 p .m. in the afternoon. But is that dependent
on diet? It's not. People think it is, you know,
especially after they've had a heavy lunch. Yeah.
You can actually just have people fast and sort
of, well. Fasting for long periods of time actually
makes your sleep much worse. But you can have
people abstain from lunch and you still get that
drop. So it's independent of food. It's a genetically
hardwired pre -programmed drop that suggests
we should be sleeping biphasically. But is that
dependent upon their standard diet? Because if
someone is on a carbohydrate -rich diet, a lot
of times you do get that spike and then you crash.
But when people are on low -carb and high -fat
diets, they don't get that. they tend to be more
even with their energy through the day? Yeah.
So yeah, that sort of more constant release of
energy can actually help you sort of almost combat
that lull. But that lull exists no matter what.
Exactly. So even if you don't think it exists,
it's there. It's still present. Interesting.
So why did they do that in the Dickens era? Why
did they, what, is there a root cause of their
double sleep thing? We don't know. I mean, it's
hard to sort of really go back. Fascinating.
Yeah, it's incredible. That was a trend. Yeah,
that it was a movement. That they would just
wake up and do things and. Yeah. Maybe it's because
they didn't have TV. They didn't know what to
do with themselves. Yeah. Sounds like they did
some pretty interesting things, which were nice.
Yeah. Well, they created a lot of art then too,
right? A lot of writing and a lot of fascinating
stuff came out of that time. Now, when you're
measuring people's health and when you're measuring
people's health in regard to how much sleep they
have, how do you do that? talk to people? Do
you do surveys? How do you get a detailed analysis
of people's patterns? So you can do it at many
different levels. I mean, we can start at the
sort of gross high level, which is epidemiological
studies across millions of people, where you
do surveys, you ask them about their sleep, and
then you look at health outcomes. The first thing
from that data that's clear is an unfortunate
truth. The shorter your sleep, the shorter your
life. Whoa. Short sleep predicts all -cause mortality.
Which is really ironic because people that want
to sleep less are like, you know, I don't have
a whole lot of time. You know, this life is short.
Well, it's fucking shorter if you sleep less.
Yeah, that old maxim, you know, you can sleep
when you're dead. Well, it's mortally unwise
advice because we know from the data you will
be both dead sooner and the quality of that now
shorter life will be significantly worse. Yeah,
that's counterintuitive to people. The idea that
you need this. It's not just like you're making
best use of time by sleeping less. You're not.
You would make best use of time by being awake
less. Exactly. Which is crazy. I mean, wakefulness,
firstly, from a brain perspective is low level
brain damage. We know that. Wakefulnesses? Yeah.
Like right now, you and I are getting low -level
brain damage. Yeah, that's right. And it's sleep
that offers a reparatory function. Wow. And I'll
give you one example, which is your risk for
Alzheimer's disease. Insufficient sleep across
the lifespan now seems to be one of the most
significant lifestyle factors determining whether
or not you'll develop Alzheimer's. What studies,
if any, have been done on people that work the
third shift? So people have looked at shift work
in general. They haven't necessarily split it
down. to that granular point. But what we see
is that shift workers have higher rates of obesity,
higher rates of diabetes, but perhaps most frighteningly,
cancer. And in fact, we now know the link between
a lack of sleep and cancer is quite strong. Insufficient
sleep is linked to cancer of the bowel, cancer
of the prostate, cancer of the breast. And the
association has become so powerful that recently
the World Health Organization decided to classify
any form of nighttime shift work as a probable
carcinogen. Whoa! Yeah, so jobs that may induce
cancer because of a disruption of your sleep
-wake rhythms. Are there other correlating factors?
Like, don't people that sleep less or work into
the night, don't they eat more and eat more shitty
food? They do, both of those things. Yeah. And
we know exactly the pathways. So there are two
hormones that control your appetite and your
weight. One is called leptin. The other is called
ghrelin. They sound like hobbits, but they're
not. They're real chemicals. They do sound like
hobbits. It's bizarre. So leptin is the chemical
that tells your brain you're full, you're satiated,
you don't want to eat anymore. ghrelin does the
opposite it's the hunger hormone it says you
want to eat more you're not satisfied with your
food If I take people, and these studies have
been done, we've done some of these studies too,
and you just put you a group of healthy people
on four or five hours of sleep for, let's say,
one week, and you look at those two hormones,
they go in unfortunately opposite directions.
So leptin, that says you're full, stop eating,
that gets suppressed by a lack of sleep. Ghrelin,
the hunger hormone, that gets ramped up. So firstly,
people who are sleeping just five to six hours
a night will on average eat somewhere between
200 to 300 extra calories each day because of
the underslept state. Add that up, it's about
70 ,000 extra calories a year. It's about 10
to 15 pounds of obese mass each year, which for
me is starting to sound familiar. But what we
also know is that it's not just that when you're
underslept, you eat more. you eat more of the
wrong things. So if, and these, the great scientific
work, if you give people this sort of finger
buffet and they can eat whatever they want and
it contains all of the different food groups
and you sleep deprive them or you give them a
full eight hours of sleep. Yes, they start to
overeat by somewhere around about 450 calories
with total sleep deprivation. But what they go
after is heavy hitting carbohydrates and simple
sugars processed food. And they stay away from
the healthy sort of leafy greens, nuts, proteins,
etc. So you're not just eating more, you're eating
more of the wrong things. And that's why a lack
of sleep has such a strong obesogenic profile
to it. And you can take a step back too and you
say, well, if you look at the rise of obesity
over the past 70 years, it's just this. upward
exponential increase. And if you plot on the
same graph, the amount of sleep that society
is getting, it goes in the opposite direction.
As sleep time has declined, obesity rates have
increased. I'm not going to sit here and tell
you that the obesity epidemic is simply a sleep
problem. It's not. It's a problem of us being
sedentary, processed foods, larger food serving
sizes. If you take those factors though, by themselves,
they cannot explain the increase in obesity.
Other things are at play. Is sleep one of them?
Now we know it is. It's a critical factor in
the obesogenic epidemic. I know from personal
experience, when I'm tired, I always gravitate
towards the worst choices. For me, it's late
night cheeseburgers. Wendy's at two o 'clock
in the morning or whatever. What happens if you
get naps? Say if you only have five hours of
sleep, but you take a two hour nap during the
day, does everything make up? Yes and no. So
what you're talking about there is what we call
prophylactic napping, which is sort of strategically
trying to help combat your deficiency of sleep.
Naps can actually give you benefits. We've done
some of these studies where they improve your
learning, your memory, your alertness, your concentration,
especially your emotional regulation too. Sleep
is critical for emotional first aid and mental
health. However, you can't keep using naps to
self -medicate sort of short sleep of four or
five hours each night. We know that the system
itself, your brain, has no capacity to regain
all of the sleep that it's lost. It will try
to sleep back some of that debt. But what we've
discovered, let's say I take you tonight, I deprive
you of sleep. eight hours lost, then I give you
all of the recovery sleep that you want on a
second, third or fourth night. You will sleep
longer, but you will only get back maybe just
three or four hours of that lost total eight.
So sleep is not like the bank. You can't accumulate
a debt and then hope to pay it off at the weekend.
And so there is no credit system. within the
brain for sleep. You can't bank it, which is
odd, by the way. I would love that system. Yeah,
then you would know what you owed. You would
know what you owed. But I could also just know
when I'm going into a state of, you know, sleep
debt, and I could build up some credit. And there's
precedent for this, by the way. There is a system
like that in the brain. It's called the fat cell,
because there were times during our evolutionary
past where we faced famine and we faced feast.
And so the body learned to adapt to that and
said, when you have feast, store it up as caloric
energy in these things called adipose cells,
fat cells. And then when you go into famine,
you can spend that caloric credit. Where is that
in the brain? Why don't we have that? The reason
is very simple. Human beings are the only species
that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep
for no apparent reason. Mother Nature has never
faced the challenge of coming up with a safety
net for lack of sleep. We've never been forced
to come up with that solution. That's why we
get such demonstrable disease, sickness and impairment
when you undergo a lack of sleep. So this is
a recent occurrence in human beings. Is that
what you're saying? Yeah. I mean, the only time
we see it in nature is when you go into. conditions
of starvation, the only way that you can get
a species to sleep less, and it's very, very
difficult to do because sleep is just so essential,
is when you put them under conditions of extreme
starvation. There they will forego some sleep
to stay awake so that they forage in a larger
sort of circumference area to try and find more
food. It's probably the reason that when people
go into fasting, their sleep... is so terrible
because the brain is receiving this ancient trigger
that you're going without food you're in a state
of starvation you need to stay awake and hunt
for food that's why your sleep gets so much worse
when you're when you're undergoing fasting that's
fascinating i did not know that so fasting is
when you're talking about multiple day fasting
and not intermittent fasting um we don't know
the evidence for intermittent fasting so you
know if you're some people are doing sort of
12 hours 14 hours 16 hours That doesn't seem
to be extreme enough to trigger a change in sleep.
But if you fast for these long periods, two days,
three days, four days, you can really see some
quite marked sleep fragmentation. Ask any of
those people. They'll tell you. That's fascinating
because people always cite the health benefits
of multiple -day fasts. Do you think that that's
just like a placebo effect? I mean, certainly
we know that there are chemical pathways that
when you go into fasting are activated that seem
to be beneficial for health outcomes. And there's
a big literature on sort of fasting and aging
with the mTOR pathway, for example. We also know
that as a species, we were not designed to have
such terrible fragmented sleep. And we spoke
about how sleep regulates your appetite. If you're
trying not to eat food and sort of control and
manage your weight, the last thing that you probably
want to do is be shortchanging yourself on sleep
because it's only going to make you even more
hungry and reach for sort of worse food. So I
still think there's room for fasting in the equation,
but I think those extreme fasts, you know. and
the havoc that it plays on sleep, it's still
yet to be understood. You've got to be very careful
with playing around with anything going beyond
sensible behavior. So what does it? Say if you're
going to fast for two days, what switches on
that forces your body into this haphazard sleep
program? So that's where that hormone ghrelin
just kicks into high gear, that hormone that
is just saying, It's a starvation hormone at
that point. It's not just a hunger hormone. You've
gone over into starvation, and that will promote
alertness. It promotes chemicals that try to
keep you awake, chemicals like dopamine to sort
of force you wide awake. So it's forcing you
to go hunt or gather. That's right, yeah. And
this is even if your body goes into a state of
ketosis? That we don't know. People have not
tried to correlate sort of, you know, the...
profile change in ketosis versus alterations
in sleep. I actually think it would be fascinating.
Maybe there's a peak where it's bad, and then
you crest it, and then things get better. Does
the body acclimate to that? I don't know. We've
never seen the body being able to sort of...
re -engage with, you know, cognitive function
with a dose of sleep deprivation that keeps going.
So if I, and these studies have been done, take
people and give them two weeks of seven hours
of sleep, five hours of sleep, three hours of
sleep, or no sleep, you know, even by sort of
seven days or even 14 days of six hours of sleep,
your cognitive performance just nosedives like
a dart into the ground. And it doesn't show any
signs of leveling off. As if there is no asymptote
that it could keep going. And by the way, people
should know that after 20 hours of being awake,
you are as impaired cognitively as you would
be if you were legally drunk. Wow. What about
physical movement? Same thing. Yeah. In terms
of your alertness and reaction time. But it's
worse. And this is where, you know, drowsy driving
comes in. For every 30 seconds that we've been
speaking, there has been a car accident linked
to sleeplessness. Drowsy driving, it seems, kills
more people on the roads than either alcohol
or drugs combined. Whoa. Why are drowsy driving
accidents so deathly? Now, I'm not endorsing
those other things. Of course not. But let's
just think about why that's the case. When you're
underslept, you start to have what are called
micro -sleeps. Sometimes your eyelid does not
close all the way. It just partially closes.
But the brain essentially goes to sleep for just
a very brief period of time. You can even see
individual brain cells. It looks like they go
to sleep during these micro -sleeps. At that
moment, if you're traveling in a vehicle on the
freeway, you've got a one -ton missile traveling
at 65 miles an hour and no one is in control.
One ton if you're lucky. Yeah, exactly. When
was the last time you saw a 2 ,000 -pound car
unless you have a Miata? Yeah, or a McLaren P1.
Even those are heavier than that. Are they really?
Yeah. Shows my lack of knowledge despite loving
them. And what happens here is that with drugs
and alcohol, it's often the case of a problem
of later reaction. With a lack of sleep, it's
a problem of no reaction at all. So you're out
of it. So you're out of it. So rather than breaking
too late, there's just no breaking whatsoever.
I have a tip for people, too. If you find yourself
tired and driving and you have to stay awake,
take either ice. or ice -cold water and put it
in a washcloth and then rub your face with it.
It keeps you awake. Works? Yeah, it works. I
mean, if you're forced to drive for whatever
reason, you have 20 minutes to go and you're
really exhausted, do that. Ice is the best. Take
a wet cloth, put ice inside of it, and just rub
your face. It just wakes you right up for whatever
reason. I mean, the statistics around drowsy
driving, though, are frightening. It's a weird
thing when you're on the road. There's something
about those white lines that just want to put
you to sleep. There's no other time where I feel
more compelled to just conk out while I'm awake.
Yeah, it's probably one of the greatest sedatives
known to man. It's strange. It's that monotonous
behavior. And the longer you go with that monotonous
behavior, The worst things get, you know. And
if you look at, you know, teenagers, that's where
we see some of the greatest impact of drowsy
driving. You know, it's the leading cause of
death in most first world nations. Suicide is
second. Wow, that is crazy. And it speaks to
this model of later school start times. They've
done these studies. There was a great one that
was done, I think, in Teton County in Wyoming.
They shifted their school start times from 7
.35 in the morning to 8 .55 in the morning, much
more biologically reasonable for teenagers. The
only thing more impressive than the extra hour
of sleep that those teenagers reported getting
was the drop in vehicle accidents. There was
a 70 % reduction in car crashes the following
year when they made that time to 7 -0. Holy shit.
So the advent of ABS technology, for example,
anti -lock braking systems, that dropped accident
rates by 20 to 25%. Some deemed it to be a revolution.
Here's a simple biological factor, sleep, that
will drop accident rates by 70%. Wow. So I think
if our goal as educators truly is to educate,
and we've spoken about learning in memory, and
not risk lives in the process, then we are failing
our children in the most spectacular manner with
this incessant model of early school start times.
Why do we do that? And not just early school
times, but early work times too. I was driving
to the airport the other day at 6 a .m. 6 a .m.,
bumper -to -bumper traffic on the 405. I was
like, this is insane. Look at these poor fucks.
What are we doing? And if you're in the car at
6 a .m. there, it means that you probably woke
up. Four? Yeah, four. 4 .30? Average school start
times in the U .S., some of them 7, 7 .25. Buses
for a school start time of 7 .25 will begin leaving
at 5 .30 in the morning. That means that some
kids are having to wake up at 5 .15, 5 o 'clock,
maybe even earlier. It's just lunacy. It is lunacy.
Now, why do they do that? I mean, it's just a
pattern that they've always done. They never
corrected it? Yeah. It's a pattern that actually
has changed over the past 30 or 40 years. I mean
American schools used to go to – used to start
around 9 o 'clock and it started to shift ever
and ever earlier. Why? Part of it is because
of work times that parents had to get to work
at ever earlier start times. So they dropped
the kids off before work. Yeah. And then bus
unions and bus schools, they comply to that same
timeframe as well and it becomes very difficult.
I don't mean to chastise school systems or the
bus unions. You know, it's an incredibly difficult
logistics problem. But I have to think that,
you know, what is our goal here? If our goal
is to keep our kids safe and to get them well
-educated and get information into the brain
and nurture them and, you know, create them to
be the next generation, early school start times,
you know, are not the thing to do. There's a
lot of lazy kids out there that are going, yes,
preach on, doctor, preach. I mean, the data,
you know, they looked at these academic things
too. You know, one of these, another example
comes from Adina in Minnesota, and they shifted
school start times from, I think it was 725 to
830 in the morning. And they looked at SAT scores.
And in the year before they made the time change,
the top 10 % performing students got an average
SAT score of 1 ,288. which is a great score.
The following year, when they were going to school
now at 8 .30 rather than 7 .25, the average SAT
score was 1 ,500. That's a 212 point increase,
which is non -trivial. Wow, that's gigantic.
Yeah, I think it's the school time in correlation
with the work time. It's very difficult to get
people off of that. Yeah, and that's part of
what modernity has done. We're working longer
hours and also we're commuting for longer durations
of time. So therefore people are having to wake
up earlier. They come home later. And the one
thing that gets squeezed sort of like vice grips
is this thing called sleep. And the decimation
of sleep throughout industrialized nations as
a consequence is having a catastrophic impact
on our health and our wellness and the safety
and the education of our children. Silent sleep
loss epidemic. Wow. Now, other than making the
room cold and warming up your hands and your
feet and things along those lines, what about
diet or even time that you eat? Is there a specific
time before you go to bed that you should eat?
How much time should you give yourself to digest
your food? So the general advice right now is
don't go to bed too full and don't go to bed
too hungry. Again, if you're going to bed too
hungry, you can get that sort of that signal
of I'm starting to go into low level sort of
starvation and that can keep people awake at
night. The evidence in terms of diet composition
and sleep is quite unclear. It's not particularly
well researched area right now. What we do know
is that diets that are high in sugar. and um
sort of heavier stodgy carbohydrates and low
in fiber those diets tend not to be good for
sleep you tend to have less deep sleep and your
sleep is also more fragmented throughout the
night so that's sort of right now the best advice
so you should eat several hours before you go
to bed but not five hours that's right yeah like
two hours maybe and it's different for different
people and you will know it you know if you're
sort of starting to wake up with really severe
hunger pangs then what about supplements like
melatonin supplements or things on those lines
melatonin um is efficacious it's useful when
you're traveling between time zones so at that
point your body clock your internal clock is
out of sync with the actual real time in the
new time zone and let's say i fly from los angeles
over to london back home um you know my melatonin
spike is going to be eight hours in the past
you know it sort of back in time. It's not going
to arrive with me for eight hours. So I can take
some melatonin. I can fool my brain into thinking,
oh my goodness, it's actually dark when despite
in California, it's still daylight once I've
arrived at Heathrow Airport. So you can use melatonin
strategically for jet lag. Once people, however,
are stable in a new time zone, melatonin does
not seem to be efficacious for helping sleep.
That said, though, if people out there are taking
melatonin and they think it helps, I would tell
them to keep taking it because the placebo effect
is the most reliable effect in all of pharmacology.
So if it works for you, no harm, no foul. Keep
taking it. Interesting. So the people that take
melatonin nightly. They're like, this is what
gets me to go to bed. Really, they're just playing
a trick on their mind. Yeah, unless you're an
older individual where your sort of 24 -hour
rhythm, it's called your circadian rhythm, starts
to get blunted and it's not as strong anymore.
That's where nightly use of melatonin actually
has been demonstrated to be efficacious. But
if you're young, healthy, and you're taking melatonin,
it's unlikely that it's actually helping your
sleep. That's probably the placebo. So it really
should just be just for traveling. Yeah. Or weird
situations where your sleep is interrupted. That's
right. And you need to kick it into gear. Bring
it back online, yeah. So it's almost like a hack.
Yeah, it's definitely, you know, that's one way
that you can hack jet lag. I mean, there's no
cure for jet lag, but there's actually lots of
ways that you can hack jet lag. Are there any
other vitamins or nutrients or particular foods
that enhance the sleepy effect? I mean, there
was always the thing about tryptophan. Everybody
thought that tryptophan was in Turkey. But what
I read was that was bullshit. And what was really
going on was that you just ate a gigantic meal
and it's filled with stuffing and mashed potatoes
and all those carbohydrates cause you to just
crash. And it's usually it's the time that everyone
goes back through into sort of the living room.
You lie down. Most people are chronically sleep
deprived. And finally, you get the opportunity
to sort of just rest and no one's doing anything
because there's no plans. What do you think the
numbers are of sleep deprived people in this
country? So we know those numbers, actually.
Almost one out of every two adults in America
are not getting the recommended eight hours of
sleep. Almost one out of every three people that
you pass on the street are trying to survive
on six hours or less of sleep. Back in 1942,
Gallup did a poll. And what they found was that
the average American adult was sleeping 7 .9
hours of sleep. a night now that number most
recently is down to six hours and 31 minutes
for the average adult during the week in america
that's the average by the way that means that
there's a huge swath of people well below that
average and what about the people that say that
they sleep they go to bed they they sleep five
hours they wake up and they feel great yeah is
that bullshit um we have The number of people
who can survive on six hours of sleep or less
without showing any impairment rounded to a whole
number and expressed as a percent of the population
is zero. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Zero. And one of the
big problems with a lack of sleep, by the way,
is that you don't know you're sleep deprived
when you're sleep deprived. So your subjective
sense of how well you're doing with a lack of
sleep is a miserable predictor of objectively
how you're doing. So it's like a drunk driver.
Especially with men, right? Yeah. Right. Especially.
Yeah. Perfect example. You know, you're at the
bar. You've had six or seven shots. I'm fine.
I can drive home. I'm fine. And your response
is, I know that you think you're fine to drive
subjectively. Objectively, trust me, you're not.
It's the same way with sleep deprivation. That's
fascinating. But you're not drunk. So even though
you're impaired, you don't feel like you're impaired.
And you probably have a couple of espressos or
one of these caveman coffees. You feel fine.
You get juiced up. You're ready to go. And you're
trying to accomplish things. You're trying to
succeed. You're trying to get ahead in this life.
I don't need to sleep. And that's completely
counterintuitive based on the data. We know that
people are more productive. And we've done some
of these studies in the workplace where you look
at, firstly, underslept employees will take on
fewer work challenges overall. They end up taking
the simpler ones like listening to voice messages
rather than actually digging into deep project
work. They produce fewer creative solutions to
challenges that you give them. They also slack
off. When they're working in groups, it's called
social loafing, where they just ride the coattails
of other people's hard work. The less sleep that
you have, the more willing that you just sort
of don't pull your weight. Furthermore, it goes
all the way up to the top. So the more or less
sleep that a business leader has had from one
night to the next, the more or less charismatic
their employees will rate that business leader,
despite them knowing nothing about the sleep
of that CEO. It's evident in their behavior.
Well, because they're short. You know, they're
short with their temper. They're quicker to get
upset about things. They're less charismatic
and social with their conversations. They're
just more, okay, I got it, I got it, I got it.
Go to work. Work for it, yeah. So less sleep
does not equal more productivity. And it's always
struck me as strange. You know, why do we sort
of overvalue employees that undervalue sleep?
And if you look at your workforce, you know,
Trust me, everyone's going to be looking busy,
but it's like stationary bikes. Everyone's looking
like they're working hard, but there's no forward
progress. The scenery never changes. That's what
an underslept workforce will be for you. Now,
what about the amount of time that people spend
at work? I mean, I know this is not related to
sleep, but I've always felt like people work
too much. I feel like you probably get more done
with less time there. Yeah. So efficiency is
what we're talking about. And that's another
one of those things with sleep deprivation. I
think many people, when they haven't had a good
night of sleep, that, you know, they're looking
at this report and they realized, I've just read
this paragraph a third time and I still can't
quite get it. Because your head scrambled. Yeah.
Efficiency, you know, productivity. But I would
feel like when people are working eight hours
a day. I don't think that you could work at peak
capacity for eight hours. At least I don't think
the average person can. No, you can't sustain
that. So you're kind of bleeding these people.
You're getting blood out of a rock in the last
couple hours. And it's, yeah, it's not, you know,
either a creative way to work. And creativity,
you know, is supposed to be the engine of, you
know, business and ingenuity. But why would you,
you know, take... Twice the amount of time to
boil a pot of water on half heat when you could
do it in half the time if you just put it on
high. Well, that's sleep. You know what's interesting,
though? There are certain writers who use sleep
deprivation as a strategy for creativity. They
literally don't start. Like the writers for the
sitcom I was on, News Radio, they wouldn't start
writing until like 2, 3 in the morning. They
would just play video games and fuck around.
And then late at night, they would really start
writing and they would write till like seven
in the morning. They would be, they would stumble
into the set like barefoot, delirious, hair all
fucked up with hilarious scripts. And it's like
they had used being silly and overtired as a
strategy, almost like they were doing drugs,
but they weren't doing any drugs. I mean, it
comes back to it. Well, we don't know in that
scenario. But what we have found, at least in
our scientific studies, is that that prefrontal
cortex region that we spoke about before, that
sort of rational, logical part of the brain,
that's one of the first things to go when you're
sleep deprived. So that area of the brain just
gets sort of switched off the more that you are
sort of lacking in your sleep. And emotional,
deep emotional centers of the brain, which are
normally controlled and kept in check by that
prefrontal cortex, they just erupt in terms of
their activity. So you're all emotional gas pedal
and too little regulatory control break, which
for the most part, very bad. But, you know, one
possibility is that if you want to try and get
a little bit sort of. you know. crazy, loosey
-goosey, maybe that's not bad for that type of
sort of comedic writing that you become a bit
more childlike. And I say that affectionately
because the last part of the brain to mature
in development is the prefrontal cortex. So you
revert back to almost a more childlike state.
But I honestly would not condone that sort of
undergoing sleep just based on the mortality
and risk of Alzheimer's and cancer by itself.
You just don't want to undersleep. short doses
like you have a couple days a week like here's
the if sleep is not a renewable resource like
what is the effect of say if you have three nights
a week where you sleep eight hours and then the
next night two hours and then the next night
eight hours how much of a bump or how much of
a dip does that two hours give you in your overall
health it's bad It's bad. So I'll give you two
examples. There was a study where they just took
individuals and they just gave them four hours
of sleep for one night. And what they saw was
a 70 % reduction in critical anti -cancer fighting
immune cells called natural killer cells. These
are wonderful immune assassins that target malignant
cells. Today, both you and I have produced cancer
cells in our body. What prevents those cancer
cells from becoming the disease that we call
cancer is in part these natural killer cells.
And after one night of four hours of sleep, that
is a remarkable state of immune deficiency. And
that's one of the reasons why insufficient sleep
predicts cancer. I could also speak about your
cardiovascular system, though, and all it takes
is one hour. Because there is a global experiment
that's performed on 1 .6 billion people across
70 countries twice a year, and it's called Daylight
Savings Time. Now, in the spring, when we lose
an hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 24 % increase
in heart attacks. What? In the fall, in the autumn,
when we gain an hour of sleep, there's a 21 %
decrease in heart attacks. So it's bidirectional.
That's how fragile and vulnerable your body is
to even just the smallest perturbation of sleep.
One hour. One hour is all it takes. Yeah. Wow.
That is, you're blowing my fucking mind. It's
frightening. I mean, you can go even further,
by the way. Wow. Insufficient sleep will even
erode the very fabric of biological life itself,
your DNA code. So in one study, they took a group
of healthy adults. And they limited them to six
hours of sleep for one week. And they compared
the profile of gene activity relative to when
those same people were getting eight hours of
sleep. And there were two critical results. The
first was that a sizable 711 genes were distorted
in their activity caused by one week of six hours
of sleep, which is highly relevant, by the way,
because we know that many people are trying to
survive on six hours of sleep during the week.
Wow. The second, sorry, I was going to say the
second sort of perhaps more interesting result
was that about half of those genes were actually
increased in their activity. The other half were
actually suppressed. Those genes that were switched
off by six hours of sleep for one week were genes
related to your immune response, many of them.
So you become immune deficient. Those genes that
were increased, or what we call overexpressed,
were genes that were related to the promotion
of tumors, genes that were related to long -term
chronic inflammation within the body, and genes
that were associated with stress and, as a consequence,
cardiovascular disease. This is unbelievable.
You know what's really disturbing to me? In my
youth, from age probably, I guess I was probably
18 when I started, I delivered newspapers. I
used to drive around and throw newspapers out
of my car, and I did it for years. And I would
have to be up at 5 o 'clock every morning. And
I never, never went to bed early. Yeah. Ever.
And I worked 365 days a year. How old were you,
by the way? I think I started when I was 18.
I might have been 17 whenever I started driving.
Well, I drove at 16, but I don't think I started
right away delivering newspapers, but I was trying
to find a good part -time job. I think I was
like either in my senior year of high school
or after, I think right after my senior year
of high school. So I was probably 18. Okay. And
the reason I asked, by the way, is because...
as you go through into those sort of later stages
of adolescence and sort of early adulthood your
biological rhythm moves forward in time so you
want to go to bed later and wake up later so
even if you went to bed sort of conscientiously
at that time let's say like 10 o 'clock or 9
o 'clock you wouldn't be able to sleep Because
it's biologically impossible. Yeah. No, I didn't
sleep. And then on Saturday, even worse, one
day a week, Saturday night, I'd have to get up
at three or four in the morning because I had
to deliver Sunday papers. And the Sunday papers
were enormous. And so I had to pack a van filled
with 350 people that I would deliver papers to.
So I'd have to do multiple trips. So I'd start
work at. I'd start delivering somewhere around
435, depending on when the papers got in, and
I was done by like 9, you know, 930, and then
I'd try to crash, but I was a wreck. Yeah. I
mean, and it fucked me up for years. For years
I did that. And I stop and think about that now,
listening to you, listening to this conversation,
like what kind of fucking damage did I do to
myself over those years? Yeah, I won't tell you
about the stuff with Alzheimer's then and amyloid
protein. Well, I feel okay now. It's been several
decades. Did I mention that your subjective sense
of how well you're doing with insufficient sleep?
Wow, I'm sure you did. And I'm sure that there's
a factor there. What's stunning to me is that
six hours is so detrimental. I would have thought
that would have been fine. The six hours is good.
Like you get six hours, that's good. That's normal
for me. Yeah. Like six hours is normal. Like
literally the minimum is seven. Yeah. Seven to
nine hours of sleep. Seven you need. Yeah. Anything
under seven is bullshit. Yeah. For the average
adult. You really should get eight. There is
a small fraction of 1 % of the population that
has a special gene that allows them to survive
on about five hours of sleep. And most people,
when I tell them this, they say, ah. I must have
that. I'm one of those people. The chances of
you being, you know, you're much more likely,
for example, to be struck by lightning in your
lifetime, the odds of which are, I think, about
one in 12 ,500, than you are to have this incredibly
rare gene that means you can survive on something
around five hours of sleep. Really? Yeah. And
what is the gene? Well, it's a gene that seems
to promote sort of, again, wakefulness. chemistry
within the brain that allows you to sort of maintain
wakefulness in a more sustained way and so we're
only trying to understand right now what the
actual biochemical mechanisms are of in terms
of the consequence of that gene that gene mutation
But certainly it seems to exist that there are
some of those quote unquote short sleepers. By
the way, you know, we hear of these business
leaders and even actually heads of state. I'm
not going to name any names, but I'll give you
right now. But I'll give you two examples of
the past. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
both were vociferous in their statement and their
declaration of how little sleep that they would
get. Both of them said four or five hours a night.
And I think in part it was to. paint this heroic
ironclad status. And many people would say to
me, you know, Margaret Thatcher, lifetime. Well,
sadly and tragically, Thatcher and Reagan both
ended up getting Alzheimer's disease. And we
now know because of it's during deep sleep at
night that there is a sewage system in the brain
that kicks into high gear and it cleanses the
brain of all of the metabolic toxins that have
been built up throughout the day, this low -level
brain damage. One of those toxic sticky proteins
that builds up whilst we're awake is called beta
amyloid. Beta amyloid is one of the leading causes.
of underlying the mechanism of Alzheimer's disease.
So the less sleep that you're having across the
lifespan, the more of that toxic amyloid is building
up night after night, year after year. And I
don't think it's coincidental that both of them
ended up progressing tragically into a state
of Alzheimer's disease. So it's good night's
sleep clean in that way in terms of deep sleep.
That's critical. That is stunning. Are there
anything – is there anything you can do in terms
of how you eat or supplements you can take that
could potentially at least somewhat mitigate
the effects of having no sleep? We haven't found
any good countermeasures. Have you tried diet
pills? So people have tried things like ephedrine.
Amphetamines. Amphetamines. I mean caffeine has
been used strategically by the military for years
and caffeine can – help you get over the basic
reduction in your alertness. So basic response
times. You can dose with caffeine and still maintain
some degree of a fast response under conditions
of sleep deprivation. What about provigil or
nuvigil? Have you studied those at all? Yeah,
so modafinil is sort of the underlying chemical
there. And it's debated who actually came up
with it. It may have been the French military
who actually ended up being the generators of
that. That seems to work through a pathway, at
least right now as we understand it, for a chemical
called dopamine. And dopamine is principally
known as a pleasure drug. It's the chemical that
a lot of drugs of abuse will target to sort of
ramp up. But it also is a basic alertness drug
that when you get an increase in dopamine, you
tend to actually get an increase in your alertness
and your wakefulness. Don't you get an increase
in happiness as well? You can too, although modafinil
tends to come with the alertness component of
that equation. So with the euphoria, that's why
it has a lower prevalence of sort of addiction
and abuse. Boy, I know a lot of people who I
wouldn't say they abuse it, but they say they
have to use it like all the doctor says. Doctor
says I got to use it. And I'm always suspicious
because they seem pretty normal other than the
fact that they they're exhausted if they don't
take this. What's essentially a stimulant? I've
taken it a few times. I've taken it when I have
to drive long periods of time. Like I'm driving
from San Diego to California or to Los Angeles
and maybe I have a gig. My gig's done at like
11 .30. I know I'm going to be on the road late
at night. I might take one. And it's fine, but
it gives you this weird feeling. It's a weird
state. And I know a lot of tech people, a lot
of Silicon Valley is on this stuff and they pop
it like candy. So much so that Tim Ferriss, when
he was writing his book, The 4 -Hour Body, he
didn't want to include it. He didn't want to
include this particular drug because he felt
like people were just going to eat it all the
time. I mean, and it's right throughout student
populations, study drug as well. As is Adderall.
Yeah. And Adderall, you know, one of the interesting
things is that if you look at the profile of
what sleep deprivation is cognitively, you know,
reduced alertness, impulsivity, lack of ability
to concentrate, difficulties with learning and
memory, difficulties with behavioral problems.
If I were to describe those features to a pediatrician
and say, what disorder is this? Probably say
it's... It's ADHD. Yes. But what we now know
is that there is some portion of children out
there who are diagnosed with ADHD who either
one are just underslept or two actually have
sleep disordered breathing because of perhaps
tonsil problems where they're not getting sufficient
sleep. And when you treat the sleep disorder,
when you do a sort of, you know, remove the tonsils,
they start sleeping normally. And the ADHD. disappears
wow so there is an issue here i think within
that sort of the explosion of adhd not all people
are you know sort of privy to this sort of sleep
problem simply masquerading as adhd some people
are one of the other problems too though is that
adhd kids tend not to sleep very well and What
we end up giving them is a drug that is a stimulant,
which will combat sleep and fight back against
sleep. So I think we need to have a bit more
of a strategic approach as to when we think about
at least the dose of that medication in terms
of when sleep should be sort of expected during
the day. Because, you know, taking it in the
middle of the day, in the evening, if it's a
stimulant, it's a weight -promoting drug. You
need to be very careful. Sleep is part of that.
Well, that's terrifying because I don't know
if the people that are prescribing these things
have the sort of deep education in sleep and
the necessity of it that you do. They don't.
And, you know, it's not their fault either. In
fact, I've started to try and lobby doctors to
start prescribing sleep. And don't make the mistake
that that's me suggesting, you know, prescribing
sleeping pills. That's a separate story. Sleeping
pills are associated with significantly higher
risk of death and cancer. And I'm happy to speak
about that, too. The one chapter in the book
that I think the legal team of my publisher took
a very long, long look at. But I think doctors,
to come back to your point, they on average only
have about two hours of sleep education in the
medical curriculum. So one third of hours, two
hours, one third of that. This podcast has been
two hours. Yeah, that's fucking crazy. Isn't
that frightening? That's terrifying. And I bet
you probably have laid things out better in this
podcast than you would get in those two hours
of education. I don't know about that, but I'll
give you that credit. If they could increase
that, you know, I'm desperately appealing for
this. You know, it's a third of their patient's
life, but they only get two hours of education.
But the other problem is the medical industry
itself, by the way. You know, their residents,
that data, you know. Residents working a 30 -hour
shift are 460 % more likely to make diagnostic
errors in the intensive care unit relative to
when they're working 16 hours. If you have elective
surgery, you should ask your surgeon how much
sleep they've had in the past 24 hours. If they've
had six hours of sleep or less, you have a 170
% increased risk of a major surgical error, such
as... sort of organ damage or hemorrhaging relative
to that same surgeon if they had been well -rested.
And then the irony here, by the way, is that
when a resident finishes a 30 -hour shift, gets
back into their car to drive home, there is a
168 % increased risk that they will get into
a car accident because of their underslept state,
ending up back in the same emergency room where
they... Just came from, but now as a patient
from a car crash. You know, we need to radically
rethink the importance of sleep in education,
in business, in the workplace, and in medicine
too. Why do they do that to residents? It's a
fascinating story. So there's a chapter here
in the book on this too. It's a guy called William
Halstead. And he set up the first resident surgical
program in the United States at Johns Hopkins
University. And he was known for being able to
stay awake for these heroic lengths of time,
days on end. It was incredible, like superhuman
strength. Turns out that in later years after
he died, there was a dirty secret that he was
actually a cocaine addict. That son of a bitch.
And here's what happened. It wasn't his fault.
Early in his career, he was examining the anesthetic
capacities of cocaine. So, you know, if well,
I'm not going to say, you know, you may have
heard from perhaps colleagues that when you snort
cocaine, you get a numb face. The reason is because
it blocks nerves. I like how you said it from
colleagues. My colleagues have told me. I've
actually never done cocaine, but I know quite
a few people who have. And they will, you know,
they'll have this sort of numbness. The reason
is because cocaine is also a nerve blocking agent.
Yeah, like lidocaine. Lidocaine, exactly. We
talked about this yesterday, ironically, on the
podcast and about doctors becoming drug addicts.
The initial doctors that started doing lidocaine.
Halstead was one of them. And so he became an
accidental cocaine addict. Wow. And then he was
up for days. And he structured a program where
he expected his residents to match him, to go
toe to toe with him. Oh, my God. It sounds like
what a coke head would do. Come on, man, stay
awake. Unbelievable. And I think the story was
that he actually knew that it was a problem.
He went to rehabilitation, checked in under a
different surname. And one part of the regiment
for him coming off cocaine was to prescribe morphine.
And at the end of the rehabilitation program,
he came out with both a cocaine addiction and
a heroin addiction. Oh, my God. And so now there's
rumors, you know, that he would get his shirts
laundered in Paris, you know, in France. And,
you know, they would come back. And it wasn't
just the white starch, you know, shirts that
were in the box. There were other white substances,
too. But that's, you know, you ask a great question.
Where's that history? The legacy seems to date
back to William Halstead, who was an accidental
cocaine addict. And there we have then maintained
that inhumane practice in medicine. Which is
like so critical to be awake and aware and to
be sharp. You're cutting people open. You're
operating on people. And think back to what we
said about being awake. You would never accept
treatment from a doctor who started looking at
your child who's sick with an appendicitis at
3 a .m. in the morning, who then swigs some whiskey
and says, yeah, I'm going to do the operation.
It's fine. You would go ballistic. Why do we
accept treatment? You know, after 20 hours of
being awake, you're as impaired as you would
be if you were legally drunk. So unfortunately,
we placed young residents in this position of,
you know, acting and operating and decision making
under conditions of insufficient sleep. One in
five medical residents will make a serious medical
error due to insufficient sleep. One in 20 medical
residents will kill a patient because of a fatigue
related error. One in 20. That's crazy. And right
now, you know, there are well over 20 ,000 medical
residents. So if you have 100 of them, five are
going to kill people. Accidental deaths. Think
about that number. That's insane. If we were
to solve the sleep loss epidemic in medicine,
you know, we could start saving lives. And I
don't know what it is. Is it just a, you know,
an old boys network where we said, well, we went
through it. Yes. So you've got to go through
it. You know, and the data now is so. prolific.
You know, I write all about that and try to make
a build an evidence based, you know, emotionless
cold case for sleep in medicine, a sleep prescription
for medicine, as it were. Well, most people don't
realize the requirements that residents have.
No. And they are they are literally. you know,
beyond human capacity. Thinking that, you know,
hubris and some degree of hours on the job is
going to be able to allow you to sort of, you
know, cut short what took three and a half million
years to sort of, you know, get in place, which
is an eight hour night of sleep. That's just
thick headed. You know, it's, and I think the
medical profession may be at the stage where
it's, my mind is made up. Don't confuse me with
the facts. Wow. This is blowing me away. I just
don't understand how the very people that are
working on the health of patients and fixing
them and repairing injuries and taking care of
diseases, those are the people that are ignoring
one of the primary factors of disease and errors
and cognitive function. It's impairment. It's
a travesty. I have a friend who's an ophthalmologist
and he tells a story about during his residency.
He was back in the 80s and he had a pager. He
was on the toilet with a tray of food on his
lap because he didn't have time to eat and go
to the bathroom. So he's eating food and he fell
asleep. And then his pager went off. He's like,
fuck my life. I mean, how many warning bells
do you need to tell you that you're in a deleterious
state? If you're falling asleep with your trousers
around your ankles, with food all over your face,
and yet you're in the deepest stages of non -REM
sleep. And he's the guy who's working on people's
eyes. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. And it's, you know,
sleep is equally absent for the patient in the
hospital, you know, setting. ICU alarms are either
unnecessary or ignorable. And the one place where
you desperately need the Swiss army knife of
health that is a good night of sleep is the one
place where you get at least, which is on a hospital
ward. We could exit people out of hospital beds
earlier. The data is already there for the neonatal
intensive care unit. They used to leave bright
lights on 24 -7. And that would prevent sort
of the signaling for sleep and wake and sleep
and wake. And that cycle is critical. If you
regularize sleep, sorry, if you regularize light
in the neonatal intensive care unit, those infants
ended up having higher levels of oxygen saturation
because they were sleeping better. Their weight
gain was dramatically increased and they ended
up exiting the neonatal intensive care unit five
weeks earlier. Whoa. Simple things. You know,
why don't we do something like this in medicine?
When you come in onto a hospital ward, you get
this on an international flight travel for free.
Earplugs, face mask. Even just that by itself
could help people to start get better sleep.
Next, on the hospital admission form, tell me
when you normally go to sleep and when you normally
wake up. And to the best of our ability, we as
doctors will try to sort of. you know, manage
your health care around your natural sleep tendencies.
If we could do that, you know, sleep is the elixir
of life. It is the most widely available, democratic
and powerful health care system I could ever
possibly imagine. Why aren't we leveraging that
and taking it? That's one of the greatest hacks
that medicine could actually, you know, inflect.
That is stunning. How is this being received
by doctors? Are they reluctant to listen to you?
I mean, what is happening with all this data
and your passionate cry for extra sleep or more
sleep or the proper sleep, I should say? It's
starting to happen. I mean, when the book came
out, which was sort of the hardback came back
out back in October. Some people started to give
pushbacks sort of in the medicine realm. You
know, there was some concerns about continuity
of care, that if you keep switching residents
out every 16 hours, that you wouldn't have continuous
patient care. And that was a problem. Well, there
are other medical training systems, for example,
France, Sweden, New Zealand. They do this all
the time. do not allow their residents to undergo
anything longer than either a 14 or a 16 -hour
shift. They train their residents in the same
amount of time or less. And if you look at the
rankings of their medical health systems around
the world, they rank far higher than the United
States. So you can't tell me that longer work
hours for residents, for example, are necessary
to train good doctors. The evidence just isn't
supportive. So I've had some pushback there.
But for the most part, I think people are receptive
once they know the information. And I think I'm
the I've been the someone who's been to blame
here. I've known this evidence for, you know,
I've been doing sleep research now for 20 or
so years. We are with sleep where we were with
smoking 50 years ago. We had all of the evidence
about the deathly carcinogenic cardiovascular
disease issues. But the public had not been.
No one had adequately communicated the science
of, you know, smoking to the public. The same,
I think, is true for sleep right now. That's
part of the motivation for why I wrote the book,
why I've been doing or trying to do a lot of
publicity. I'm a very shy person. I don't like
being in the spotlight. I feel as though there
is a mission that whose voice has not been actually
gifted yet. And I wanted to try and help and
be a sort of a sleep diplomat. I mean, that's
why I chose the handle on social media, trying
to be there as an ambassador for sleep. And now
once people start to understand the sciences
we've spoken about for two hours, then people
start to actually realize it's not the third
pillar of good health alongside diet and exercise.
It's the foundation on which those two other
things sit. You know, for example, if you're
dieting. But you're not getting sufficient sleep.
70 % of all the weight that you lose will come
from lean body mass, muscle, and not fat. Your
body becomes stingy in giving up its fat when
it's underslept. So once you get this information
out there, things are starting to change. I've
started to have some discussions with the World
Health Organization. They seem to be very interested
now in getting to grips with sleep. I'd love
to speak to first world governments, though.
When was the last time you saw any first world
nation have a government supported public health
campaign around sleep? I don't know any. We've
had them for, you know, drink driving, for risky
behaviors, you know, for drugs, for alcohol,
for healthy eating. Sleep should be a part of
that equation. You know, I want to lobby governments
to start to instigate this, and it will save
them millions of dollars. The Rand Corporation
did an independent survey two years ago on the
demonstrable cost of a lack of sleep to global
economies. What they found was that a lack of
sleep costs most nations about 2 % of their GDP,
their gross domestic product. Here in America,
that number was $411 billion caused by insufficient
sleep. Solve the sleepless epidemic. You could
almost double the budget for education and you
could almost halve the deficit for health care.
Wow. What studies, if any, have been done on
people who live in the northern hemisphere where
they experience these long days like Alaska and
Siberia, places like that? It's really tough
for the regulation of the circadian rhythm. A
lot of people, they're not all, but a lot of
people will suffer from what's called seasonal
affective disorder, which is the winter blues.
And it's an unfortunate acronym, you know, SAD.
Your doctor comes along, you say, look, I'm not
feeling good. It's the wintertime. Well, you're
sad. No, I'm sorry. It's a medical term. It's
called SAD. It's called seasonal affective disorder.
And that data is quite powerful too. And you
end up having to use melatonin strategically
to help you fall asleep, to sort of signal darkness
in the summertime when it's really light, almost
all day. And then in the wintertime, you reverse.
engineer the trick and in the morning you sit
and you have your breakfast or you're working
at your terminal and you have one of these big
light boxes that sits next to you strong lux
power light to try and sort of fool your brain
into thinking that you're getting a lot of daylight
when it's you know it's not going to be light
for the next four hours so they have to undergo
treatment do they have to do vitamin d supplementation
as well some of that too yeah because of lack
of exposure for the skin to uv light Listen,
man, I think you just opened up a lot of people's
minds. You certainly did mine. I mean, this podcast
blew me away. I thought I knew a little bit about
sleep. I knew nothing. Thank you so much. You're
so very welcome. Tell people how they could read
your book. Where can they get it? What's your
website? Yes, so I'm all over the social media
and the web pages by sleepdiplomat .com. And
the book is called Why We Sleep. And it is out
now on Amazon and all major booksellers. And
that's probably the best way that they can learn
all about sleep and frightening the living daylights
out of them. Thank you so much, Matt. I really,
really appreciate it. You're very welcome, Joe.
Sleep well. Thank you. You too. Thanks.