AMA #2: Improve Sleep, Reduce Sugar Cravings, Optimal Protein Intake, Stretching Frequency & More
Watch on YouTubeVideo summary
In this Ask Me Anything episode, Andrew Huberman addresses a specific question regarding how to increase deep sleep, also known as slow-wave sleep (SWS). He explains that SWS primarily occurs in the first half of the night and is critical for bodily tissue repair through growth hormone secretion, protein synthesis, and muscle recovery. While rapid eye movement (REM) sleep handles emotional processing via intense dreaming, an imbalance where REM dominates over deep sleep can indicate disrupted sleep architecture. Huberman notes that while commercial trackers like Whoop or Oura provide estimates based on heart rate variability rather than direct brain wave measurement, the goal should be to balance these two stages as closely as possible without obsessing over exact percentages. To improve slow-wave sleep, Huberman outlines several "don'ts" and behavioral protocols. He strongly advises avoiding alcohol within eight hours of bedtime, noting that while it may help one fall asleep initially, it significantly disrupts SWS architecture. Similarly, caffeine should be avoided for at least 8 to 12 hours before sleep, as well as cannabis or CBD use during the same window. Additionally, he recommends finishing meals two hours prior to bed; however, this is not absolute if going hungry prevents falling asleep entirely. The ideal scenario involves abstaining from food three to four hours before sleep to maximize growth hormone output while ensuring one does not suffer from excessive hunger that disrupts sleep onset. For active interventions, Huberman highlights a study showing that 60 minutes of moderate-to-intense cardiovascular exercise performed at least six hours before bedtime can enhance the stability and power of slow-wave sleep without disrupting REM sleep if done too late in the evening. He also introduces specific supplements he personally uses to improve sleep depth: magnesium threonate or bisglycinate, L-theanine, and apigenin taken 30 to 60 minutes prior to bed. For individuals following a low-carbohydrate diet who struggle with hunger-induced wakefulness at night, he suggests adding myo-inositol (900 mg) to this stack. This combination has been shown in studies involving pregnant women to improve sleep quality and architecture by reducing anxiety-related arousal during the night. Huberman concludes that while a slight imbalance between deep and REM sleep is not necessarily pathological given the body's resilience, striving for balance ensures optimal recovery from exercise and injury. He emphasizes that total sleep duration varies by individual stress levels but generally recommends aiming for at least 6 to 8 hours per night; sleeping less than this makes it difficult to achieve a balanced architecture of SWS and REM. Ultimately, he encourages listeners to avoid alcohol and caffeine close to bedtime as the most effective first steps before layering in exercise or supplementation strategies like his sleep stack or myo-inositol protocol.
Read the full video transcript
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast,
where we discuss science and
science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor
of neurobiology and ophthalmology at
Stanford School of Medicine. Today is an
ask me anything or AMA episode, which is
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Without further ado, let's get to
answering your questions and as always I
will strive to be as accurate as
possible, as thorough as possible, and
yet as concise as possible. The first
question is about how to improve sleep
in particular how to improve deep sleep
that is sometimes called slow-wave
sleep. This was a question that was
asked by Jack Pritchard and it got a lot
of upvotes. Now, we've done multiple
full-length episodes of the Huberman Lab
podcast on sleep and tools to improve
sleep, including the master your sleep
episode and perfect your sleep episode,
as well as a toolkit that is available
completely zero cost at hubermanlab.com.
It's a downloadable PDF that lists out
the behavioral tools and other tools
that you can implement to improve your
sleep. Now, Jack's question is
specifically about how to improve deep
sleep. He asks, "I have a sleep analyzer
and I typically observe that I get a lot
of REM sleep, that is rapid eye movement
sleep. For him, he says it's 30% of his
total sleep is rapid eye movement
sleep."
But he asks,
"My deep sleep is often low, around 10%,
and I would like to know if there are
any science-backed protocols I can use
to specifically increase my deep sleep."
Okay, so for those of you that may not
know, what is deep sleep? Now, deep
sleep is sometimes referred to as slow
wave sleep, that is slow wave sleep and
deep sleep are sometimes used
interchangeably to describe the same
thing. They aren't necessarily the same
thing, but they fall under the same
mechanistic umbrella. What is that
mechanistic umbrella? Well, when you go
to sleep at night,
you cycle through a number of different
stages of sleep. And in the early part
of the night, I would say in the first
half of your night or so, most of your
sleep is going to be slow wave deep
sleep. But then as you transition into
the second half of your night, more of
your sleep will be rapid eye movement
sleep. Now, that's the typical pattern
that is observed when you're not
disrupting your sleep architecture with
things like caffeine and alcohol. We'll
talk about caffeine and alcohol in a few
minutes.
Deep sleep, aka slow wave sleep, at
least for the sake of this conversation,
is vitally important in particular for
repair of bodily tissues. During deep
sleep, you secrete growth hormone, and
in fact you secrete growth hormone every
night when you go to sleep, but most of
that growth hormone release is
restricted to the first half of your
sleep night. The other feature of deep
sleep is that the dreams that occur
during deep sleep tend to be of a less
emotional nature than the sorts of
dreams that one experiences in rapid eye
movement sleep. So, just to give a broad
top contour of what deep sleep, aka
slow-wave sleep, is really about. It
tends to occur in the first half of the
night. It also occurs in the second half
of the night, but in the first half of
the night, most of your sleep is going
to be occupied by deep sleep, aka
slow-wave sleep. It is the time when
your bodily tissues are repaired in part
by release of growth hormone, which is
involved in metabolism, but also protein
synthesis, muscle repair,
repair of all cell types and tissues.
And during deep sleep, your dreams tend
to be somewhat mundane, sometimes a
little bizarre, but typically not very
emotionally loaded. That can change if
you're dealing with a lot of emotionally
laden circumstances in your waking life,
but in general, the sleep and dreams
that occur in the first part of the
night
is deep, and it's not terribly
emotionally ridden.
Your body also goes through specific
patterns of metabolism. This relates to
recent findings, just this last year, in
which researchers monitored the output
of people's breath and the various
metabolic factors present in the breath,
as well as through blood draws. So,
basically, doing all this while people
are asleep in a laboratory. And they
observed that during the first half of
the night, while people are in deep
sleep, their body is actually
metabolizing energy very differently
than it does in the second half of the
night. I'll come back to this in a
little while, but this turns out to be
very important for establishing your
metabolism and the way you regulate
insulin and blood glucose during the
daytime. So, all of this is to say that
getting sufficient deep sleep, slow-wave
sleep, is vitally important. And Jack's
asking how he can increase the amount of
deep sleep that he's getting because by
his sleep tracking method, he's
observing far less deep sleep than rapid
eye movement sleep.
Now, that raises the question of how
much deep sleep one should be getting
overall. In general, the goal should be
to balance the total amount of slow-wave
sleep and rapid eye movement sleep
across the night. However, I would not
want people to obsess over getting
exactly 30% rapid eye movement sleep and
exactly 30% slow wave sleep. Your body
is much more resilient than that, but
the closer those two numbers are to one
another,
the better overall architecture of your
sleep. And he doesn't list out exactly
how he's measuring his sleep, so I do
want to put an asterisk on both the
question and the answer I provide by
stating that a lot of sleep trackers,
whether or not they are Whoop trackers
or Oura's, or whether or not you're
using a mattress-based or mattress
cover-based sleep tracker like Eight
Sleep or other,
is using heart rate and heart rate
variability and body movement
to estimate or to
kind of predict whether or not you're in
slow wave sleep or rapid eye movement
sleep. And that's because during rapid
eye movement sleep, you tend to be in
what's called atonia. You tend to be
paralyzed. You can't move.
And during slow wave sleep, that's not
the case.
But no matter what the sleep tracking
method it is if it's a standard
commercial sleep tracking method,
Whoop, Oura, Eight Sleep, et cetera, it
is an estimate or a best guess at what
stage of sleep you're in.
Whereas, when you go into a sleep
laboratory like the sleep laboratory at
Stanford, at University of Pennsylvania,
or others of the great sleep
laboratories that are out there, they're
going to use other methods including EEG
and EMG. These are just acronyms that
refer to ways to record brain waves.
They actually are going to try and
observe for rapid eye movements beneath
the eyelids, et cetera.
So, sleep trackers give you a best guess
as to what stage of sleep you're in.
They are not perfectly accurate. At
least, none of the commercially
available sleep trackers are perfectly
accurate. So, we do want to highlight
that. Okay. So, now let's answer Jack's
question directly, which is how to
increase the total amount of slow wave
sleep. Well, there are a couple of ways.
First of all, are the don'ts, and then
we'll talk about the do's.
Two things that you can do to really
disrupt your slow wave sleep
are to drink alcohol within 8 hours
prior to bedtime or even at all. Some
people will find that even if they have
a glass of wine or a beer with lunch
that the amount of slow wave sleep and
sometimes even the rapid eye movement
sleep that they get at night is reduced
and that their overall sleep
architecture is disrupted. This has been
shown again and again. Likewise,
avoiding caffeine
within 8 and ideally within 12 hours of
bedtime
would be
preferable.
And if you're not a caffeine drinker,
obviously you don't have to worry about
this at all, but avoiding caffeine
intake within that 8 to 12 hours of
bedtime will greatly assist in you
getting more slow wave sleep and higher
quality rapid eye movement sleep. This
has been shown again and again. And as
well, avoiding cannabis use and maybe
even CBD use within 8 to 12 hours of
sleep can be very beneficial if your
goal is to improve the quality of your
sleep. Now, I know a lot of people rely
on alcohol, cannabis, and CBD in order
to get into sleep. However, it's been
shown many times in human studies and
this was discussed in the podcast
episode that we did with the great Matt
Walker, who's a professor of
neuroscience and psychology at
University of California, Berkeley and a
world expert in sleep and sleep science.
Matt and I discussed the research
showing that even though alcohol helps
you fall asleep, even though cannabis
can help you fall asleep, and even
though CBD can help people fall asleep,
that it does disrupt and in many ways
reduce the quality of sleep that one
gets. So, that's disappointing news I
know for a number of the people that
rely on cannabis, CBD, or alcohol to
fall asleep, but I would encourage you
to check out the episodes of the
Huberman Lab podcast that we did about
alcohol
and about cannabis, including some of
the health benefits of cannabis in
certain situations, but also some of the
detrimental effects of both alcohol and
cannabis in other situations, in
particular for improving slow wave
sleep. So, that's actually three major
don'ts. Avoid caffeine, alcohol, and
cannabis. And let's put under the
umbrella of cannabis
THC and CBD
in the 8
and ideally within the 12 hours prior to
sleep.
If your goal is to improve the total
amount of slow wave sleep that you're
getting and your overall sleep
architecture.
In addition,
it's well-known that avoiding food
intake in the 2 hours prior to sleep is
going to greatly assist in the amount of
growth hormone output that you achieve
during the early stages of the night and
the depth and duration of slow wave
sleep.
Now, I want to place an asterisk on that
statement by saying, if you go to sleep
too hungry,
it can also disrupt your sleep. So,
you're going to have to arrange your
eating schedule and your sleeping
schedule such that you're not eating too
close to bedtime, but you're also not
going to bed so hungry that you can't
fall asleep or that you don't get into
deep sleep and stay asleep. I can
personally attest to the fact that if
I'm too hungry, I can't fall asleep.
Now, for me most nights, I'm going to
eat dinner sometime between 6:00 p.m.
and 8:00 p.m. depending on time of year,
schedules, what's going on, traffic,
etc. And I tend to go to sleep somewhere
between 10:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. plus
or minus an hour. Again, depending on
time of year and what else is going on
in life. So, I normally have that buffer
of 2 hours or so before going to sleep.
However, there are some nights where
even if I eat dinner around 7:00 p.m.,
I'm quite hungry at 9:00 p.m. and I want
to go to sleep. In that case, eating a
small amount of food
ought not to disrupt your slow wave
sleep too much, but you do want to avoid
eating large meals right before going to
sleep. Unless, okay, unless
completely fasting and not eating
something late at night will prevent you
from getting into any sleep at all. In
other words, it's better to make sure
that you're getting to sleep than it is
to avoid food just so that you get
increased growth hormone output and into
slow wave sleep. I hope that's clear.
You know, I have had times in my life
where I'm working very, very hard and I
miss dinner or something comes up and I
know some people can fall asleep quite
easily on an empty stomach. I've been
able to do that and in particular if I'm
very exhausted. I also rely on a handful
of supplements to fall asleep each
night. Um although I'm not dependent on
them. There've been times when I haven't
been able to access those supplements
and I can still fall asleep. But the
point is that you don't want to be so
hungry that you can't fall asleep. And
yet in an ideal circumstance, especially
if you're trying to increase the amount
of slow wave sleep, you would avoid food
in the 2 hours or so before going to
sleep. If you can avoid food for the 3
or 4 hours prior to sleep and still fall
and stay asleep easily, that's even
better for sake of increasing slow wave
sleep and growth hormone output. Now,
there are some additional tools for
improving slow wave sleep in particular,
the transitions between slow wave sleep
and the other sleep stages. Because even
though, as I mentioned earlier, the
early part of your night is occupied
primarily by slow wave sleep, all night
long you're transitioning from slow wave
sleep
into an intermediate stage of sleep and
then into rapid eye movement sleep and
then back again. It's just that in the
early part of the night more of that
time is going to be occupied by slow
wave sleep.
The two ways to improve slow wave sleep
that are well documented in the
literature and here we can point to some
really nice papers that I'll reference
in case you want to read further is the
first one is entitled "Exercise Improves
the Quality of Slow Wave Sleep by
Increasing Slow Wave Stability." Slow
wave stability has to do with as
researchers call it the amount of power
present in the different aspects of slow
wave sleep. So this gets a little bit
technical, but this is an instance in
which they brought subjects into the
laboratory, they measured brain waves by
EEG, they had some other measurements as
well including subjective measures of
sleep, and they looked at whether or not
people were doing exercise or not prior
to sleep. Now, when I say prior to
sleep, I mean not within 6 hours prior
to bedtime. In fact, exercising
intensely
in the 6 hours prior to bedtime for many
people, not all, but for many people can
disrupt the total amount of slow wave
sleep that they get, and can also
disrupt rapid eye movement sleep. So,
the conditions of the study were pretty
straightforward. It was a
randomized crossover trial. Basically,
they had people either sleeping and
monitoring their sleep, or they had
people doing an hour of exercise at 60%
of their so-called VO2 max. You can look
this up
for 60 minutes. Okay, 60% of their VO2
max, that was the intensity. It's
breathing pretty hard, but not extremely
hard. If we were going to map that to
the so-called zone, zone two cardio
being the kind of cardio you can do
steady state while holding a
conversation, this would be somewhere in
the probably zone three or zone four.
Although, that's not exactly what 60% of
VO2 max is going to map to every time,
think about relatively challenging
cardiovascular output
for 60 minutes, and they had them do
that at least 6 hours prior to bedtime,
and this is an important end, they did
have the subjects in this study in all
conditions abstain from caffeine and
alcohol. So, that's very important. And
what they observed was an enhancement of
slow wave sleep. So, exercise of this
sort turns out to be a very potent form
of improving slow wave sleep. Now, I do
not know, because the study as far as I
know has not been done, whether or not
doing resistance training or some other
type of exercise would have led to the
same effect. Although, I have to imagine
that if it's moderately intense to
intense resistance training,
provided it's done
far enough away from going to sleep,
right, prior to 6 hours before sleep,
that one ought to see the same effects,
although that that was not a condition
in this study. But, it's a very nice
study. They looked at everything from
changes in core body temperature to
caloric expenditure. They didn't see
huge changes in uh core body temperature
changes, so that couldn't explain the
effect. It really appears that the major
effect of improving slow wave sleep was
due to something in changing the fine
structure of the brain waves that occur
during slow wave sleep. In fact, and
this is an important point, the subjects
in this study did not report
subjectively feeling that much better
from their sleep. So, you might say,
"Well, then why would I even want to
bother?" However,
it's well-known that getting sufficient
slow wave sleep is important not just
for repair Excuse me, for repair of
bodily tissues, but also for repair of
brain tissues and repair and wash out
of debris in the brain, and that debris
is known to lead to things like
dementia. So, getting the best quality
slow wave sleep is extremely important
for body and for brain, and getting an
hour of exercise that's moderately
intense, and making sure that you're not
doing that exercise within the 6 hours
prior to bedtime.
And
avoiding caffeine and alcohol, certainly
within the 6 hours prior to bedtime, but
I would say
in the 8 to 12 hours prior to bedtime
would be even better, or not drinking
alcohol at all, or I know there are
people out there that don't drink
caffeine at all. I'm not one of those
people, but restricting that caffeine
intake to the very early part of the
day. That has been shown to improve the
quality and the overall architecture of
sleep and slow wave sleep in particular.
That's really what this study points to.
There's another tool that can improve
the amount and quality of slow wave
sleep that you achieve at night. There's
actually a tool that I've started using
over the last 6 to 8 months or so.
As many of you know, I believe in
getting behaviors right before embracing
changes in supplementation or
prescription drugs.
Behavioral tools consist of do's and
don'ts, and the do's and don'ts for
sleep are well documented in the Master
Your Sleep episode and the Perfect Your
Sleep episode in the Toolkit for Sleep.
They include getting morning sunlight in
your eyes or bright light of other
kinds, avoiding
bright light from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00
a.m., etc., etc. All that information is
in the Toolkit for Sleep and those other
full-length episodes of the Huberman Lab
Podcast.
Now, there are supplements that can
greatly improve the
depth of your sleep
and that can shorten the latency to fall
asleep.
And here I'm not referring to melatonin,
as many of you, perhaps already know,
I'm not a fan of melatonin for a variety
of reasons, mainly the fact that most
melatonin supplements out there don't
actually contain the exact amount of
melatonin that's listed on the bottle.
They contain either
much, much more or much, much less, and
that melatonin is a potent hormone that
has impacts on not just sleep, but on
other hormone systems as well.
The supplements that I've suggested
and that I personally take in order to
improve my sleep are magnesium
threonate, spelled t h r e o n a t e,
and interchangeably with that, one could
use magnesium bisglycinate. I do
consider those interchangeable because
both cross into cells and across the
blood-brain barrier in much the same
way. That makes them better candidates
for improving sleep than some of the
other forms of magnesium. So, magnesium
threonate, theanine, t h e a n i n e,
theanine, and something called apigenin,
which is essentially what you find in
chamomile that
is the reason why chamomile can make you
sleepy. a p i g e n i n, apigenin. The
dosages for those, etc., are described
in the Toolkit for Sleep and why some
people might want to avoid theanine.
I'll just tell you, for those of you
that have very intense dreams or that
might sleepwalk, or have night terrors,
you might want to avoid theanine because
it can enhance the
kind of emotional and elaborate nature
of of dreams. Other people like that.
So, I'll take magnesium 3 and 8,
theanine, and apigenin as a so-called
sleep stack about 30 to 60 minutes prior
to sleep.
I do not take them during the day.
There is, however, another supplement
that used in combination with the sleep
stack that I just described, or alone,
can greatly enhance the quality of your
sleep.
And in particular, people who are
following a low-carbohydrate diet, who
have trouble falling and staying asleep,
seem to benefit from it. And that is
so-called inositol. Now, inositol comes
in different forms, but the form that
I'm referring to here in terms of
enhancing slow-wave sleep is
myo-inositol.
There are an enormous number of studies
on inositol
for sake of mental health, and for sake
of enhancing various aspects of cellular
function, and
for sake of improving sleep.
I'd like to just highlight one paper.
The title of this paper will make it
clear what it's about. The title of the
paper is the impact of myo-inositol
supplementation on sleep quality in
pregnant women, a randomized
double-blind placebo-controlled study.
Now, as I just told you, the study was
carried out on pregnant women, but there
have been other studies of inositol on
other populations, and the major
takeaway from these studies is that
inositol can improve the quality of
sleep, and can adjust the architecture
of sleep in ways that make it a great
candidate for improving the structure,
and maybe also the duration of slow-wave
sleep in particular. I find that if I'm
following a lower-carbohydrate diet,
which I do from time to time,
I sometimes have trouble falling asleep,
or if I eat 4 to 6 hours prior to
bedtime, then I tend to be pretty hungry
around bedtime. And sometimes, if I'm
exercising very hard or if I'm working a
lot, even if I eat dinner around 7:00
and I go to sleep around 10:00 p.m., I
might be a little bit hungry still at
10:00 p.m.
In that case, I find that taking 900 mg
of myoinositol in addition to the other
sleep stack that I just described,
greatly enhances my ability to fall
asleep and to get terrific quality
sleep. I do monitor my sleep. I do that
two ways. I do that these days with my
Eight Sleep sleep tracker and I use a
Whoop sleep tracker when I sleep. The
combination of those two taps into
different aspects of sleep tracking,
heart rate variability, movement, etc.
In a future episode, we'll talk about
what are the best devices for monitoring
sleep, which have certain advantages and
others have disadvantages, but I
certainly see it in the objective data,
that is from the sleep tracking data,
and I also observe subjectively that
taking 900 mg of inositol prior to
sleep, again, 30 to 60 minutes prior to
sleep, can greatly enhance the ability
to fall asleep and for me to stay asleep
throughout the night. I also noticed
another effect, which is that if I wake
up in the middle of the night to use the
restroom, which I often do, I find it
much easier to fall back asleep. I don't
tend to get into kind of looping thought
and things of that sort in the middle of
the night. And that may relate to the
fact that myoinositol has been studied
in many cases for its role in
controlling anxiety, that is for
reducing anxiety. And that's one of the
reasons, in fact, one of many reasons
why people take myoinositol during the
daytime. There's uses of myoinositol for
dealing with anxiety, for sleep as we're
discussing now, and even for improving
fertility and things of that sort, in
particular in women. So again, 900 mg of
inositol can be a useful tool. 60
minutes of exercise as described
previously can be a tool, and certainly
avoiding caffeine and alcohol is is
excellent tool for enhancing the total
amount of slow wave sleep. Jack had a
second part to his question. He asked,
"Is having a high level of rapid eye
movement sleep and a lower level of deep
sleep likely to cause any health
issues?" And to be honest,
it's not really clear that it would
cause any specific health issues.
Although, if we think about what the
specific roles of slow wave sleep versus
rapid eye movement sleep are,
again, rapid eye movement sleep
being
laden with highly emotional dreams, it's
thought to act as a sort of trauma
release where people are paralyzed in
body, and that's a healthy paralysis,
the so-called sleep atonia,
but
undergoing some pretty emotional stuff
within their dreams,
and there is a lack of ability for the
body to secrete adrenaline during rapid
eye movement sleep. That's thought to be
important for emotional repair, if you
will,
um, during the night. Uh, certainly,
studies where people have been deprived
of rapid eye movement sleep have shown
that their ability to manage emotionally
during the daytime is reduced. So,
certainly, if you have reduced rapid eye
movement sleep for multiple nights,
that's going to be the case.
The only caveat to that is that there
are certain forms of treating depression
that involve specifically depriving
people of rapid eye movement sleep.
That's an a whole other story,
um, that was covered in the podcast
episode with Dr. Nolan Williams. So, if
you want to learn more as to why that's
the case, check out that episode. But,
because slow wave sleep, which occurs,
again, during the early part of the
night is when growth hormone is
released, and when there's this periodic
washout
of debris within the brain and to some
extent within certain tissues of the
body, you could imagine that reduced
slow wave sleep would lead to reduced
ability to recover from exercise, from
injury, maybe even relate to the immune
system. However, I am personally not
aware of any studies that specifically
looked at the ratio of slow wave sleep
to rapid eye movement sleep, and that
focused, in particular, on reduced slow
wave sleep for bodily repair. Those
studies might be out there. I was not
able to find them. If you are able to
find them, please put them in the
comment section, and I would love to
check out those studies.
So, I don't think that one needs to be
overly concerned if you're not getting
a balance of slow-wave sleep to rapid
eye movement sleep that's perfect.
However,
and as I mentioned earlier,
it would be good to strive to try and
balance the amount of slow-wave sleep
and rapid eye movement sleep
across the entire night. If you think
about it, that will also tell you
whether or not you're getting sufficient
total sleep. And I don't want to open up
another set of questions here as I'm
about to close out an answer to this
question, but I do often get asked the
question whether or not 4 hours is
enough or 6 hours is enough or 8 hours
is enough. Well, it's impossible to know
exactly how much sleep each individual
person needs, and of course, each
individual person will need a different
amount of total sleep depending on the
amount of stress and physical strain and
various other things they're dealing
with in their daily waking life.
However,
it's generally the case that kids and
people that are undergoing puberty and
certainly in early infancy need more
sleep than adults do. So, as you age,
you do in fact need less sleep.
One good metric of whether or not you
are getting enough sleep is whether or
not you're sleepy during the daytime or
not. If you're falling asleep a lot
during the daytime, you're probably not
getting enough sleep at night. That's
sort of a duh, but it's an important duh
to pay attention to. And for those of us
like myself that need a 20- or 30-minute
nap in the afternoon, great. That
doesn't necessarily mean you're not
getting enough sleep at night. Okay? So,
if you get sleepy enough to want a nap
in the afternoon,
that's not an indication necessarily
that you are not getting enough sleep at
night. However, if you're only sleeping
4 or 5 hours per night, it's very hard
to imagine that you're getting a balance
of slow-wave sleep and rapid eye
movement sleep. Once you get into the
range of sleeping 6 to 8 hours and
certainly 8 to 10 hours per night, the
probability that you're getting a
balance of slow-wave sleep and rapid eye
movement sleep greatly increases. So, if
I were to
throw out a number, I would say for most
people, that is for 95% of people out
there, getting at least 6 hours of sleep
per night,
at least, and ideally more like 7 or 8,
is going to be the goal. However, I've
noticed, for instance, for myself,
unless I'm exercising extremely
intensely or I'm going through a lot of
emotional or physical stress in my daily
life, getting 6 and 1/2 to 7 hours of
sleep per night allows me to feel really
good and refreshed throughout the day.
And that's especially the case if I get
that 20- or 30-minute nap in the
afternoon or use NSDR, non-sleep deep
rest. So, I hope that answers your
question, Jack, and uh there, of course,
I'm extending the answer to
all others who uh upvoted that question
or who might be interested in improving
their slow-wave sleep. There are some
do's, there are some don'ts that I just
described.
I suggest trying various things one by
one to see what works best for you. So,
you don't necessarily need to leap to
uh doing the 60 minutes of exercise plus
the inositol, et cetera. However, I do
encourage everyone to avoid alcohol and
caffeine within the 8 to 12 hours prior
to sleep. And again, if you're not using
either of those, that would be even
better, at least in terms of sleep
architecture. Thank you for joining for
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