Scientist Reveals The Best Sleeping Positions For Your Health - Dr Matthew Walker

one question I had do sleeping positions matter why why why do people have habits when it comes to their sleeping positions it's really interesting that people say I'm a back sleeper I'm a side sleeper that's not really true you will typically sleep in almost all of those positions throughout the night it's just what is the dominant position and when people say I am a x sleeper or Y sleeper you're just talking about what you typically do more often relative to the other positions more people people are side sleepers than front sleepers or back sleepers about 60% of people are most often side sleeping position doesn't matter with probably two exceptions although one of them has an asteris which is I don't want a scir Monga the first is definitive if you are snoring if you have sleep apnea or undi if you know anyone who's snoring and they have not been tested for sleep apnea go and get them tested or if you are go and get tested it's real easy to figure out if you're a snorer or not download an app I have no association with them it's called snor lab snore lab Android Apple you open it up you hit record you place the phone down by your bedside it listens to your snoring and then at the end of the night you can see the amount of snoring and it grades it from quiet moderate loud and Epic and you see these RoR shocks throughout the night the worse still you can then go and tap at any moment in your night and you can listen to yourself gasping for breath and snoring because snoring what happens when you snore is that the airway starts to partially collapse and when it starts to partially collapse like a straw that gets bent sort of you start to get these fluctuations these edies in the airway and that's the sound of that's the partial collapsing of the airway when the airway collapses completely the straw goes flat effectively that's when you stop breathing entirely and you can be there for 15 20 seconds and and your blood oxygen saturation just starts to plummet and at some point your brain stem which picks up the ratio of the gases in your bloodstream between carbon dioxide and oxygen says break glass in case of emergency wake him up we we've got to wake him up and that's the moment where you hear and you gasp and you back up again as a consequence you're never going into deep sleep you stay in those shallows of sleep now mild sleep apnea if you have these what we call apnea events and apnea is a word it's beautiful um pinea is breath the from a Latin derivative anything in medicine that has the word a before it is usually the absence of it you know arhythmia um the absence of a normal rhythmic heart apnea is the absence of breath and Mild sleep apnea is you having maybe 5 to 15 of the events per hour that's how we grade it for each hour of sleep how many of these events you're having mild sleep apnea let's just call it 10 events and you're asleep for 8 hours imagine if I were to come in and say tonight Chris I'm going to come into your room and for the entire night maybe 80 times throughout the night I'm going to come in and I'm going to throttle you around your throat to the point where your oxygen saturation drops below 80% do you think you're going to feel good by tomorrow morning the answer is no but so many people are living with undiagnosed sleep apnea we think at least 80% of people who have sleep apnea are undiagnosed right now and that will put you in an early grave it's snoring the same as sleep apnea no it's not you can have snoring and it will not classify as sleep apnea you still want to understand why you're snoring but nevertheless you can just get a very simple home test in fact you can look at your risk for sleep apnea already go online and type in the uh the search term stop Dash bang questioner stop bang questioner and again it takes probably two minutes to fill out and it will give you a risk Hazard ratio of How likely is it that you have sleep apnea and it correlates very well with an atome sleep apnea test so it's a good quick proxy I love snor laab though that's another great way to frighten yourself into understanding what's exactly happening um so all of which to say I think I I'm forgetting how we got here but nevertheless sleeping positions sleeping position is one of those situations where when you are lying on your back you are allowing your arway the direct access to this thing called gravity and when gravity is present with back sleeping it's far easier to pull that straw flat shut so that's why we typically don't like people with sleep apnea sleeping on their back the old school approach gsh when I was coming up to sort of start to treat was or to at least get you away from a back sleeping position was you would ask the gentleman usually the more heavy set you would ask them find a t-shirt from your wife usually smaller and get that t-shirt that has a pocket on the breast and then I want you to wear that tight t-shirt back to front and then I want your wife to take a tennis ball before you sleep and put it in the pocket every time you roll over it's so uncomfortable that you train yourself out of back sleeping wow and so that's the way that's the old is that um so why do we have preferences for sleeping position is this chronotype is this just habitual can we train ourselves out to being usually based on your skeletal ergonomics and how you want to sleep it's also in part driven absent of your body based on your mattress mhm and so that's why you know having a mattress that's at least supportive enough where you don't get that banana Boe because if you are a front sleeper and you're sleeping on a poor mattress then all of a sudden you just get this every night this bending of the spinal cord and you're lying there might just say okay today for8 hours I'm going to have you compressed into this banana shape lying on your front and then at the end of that eight hours get up and you know do 10 Jumping Jacks and feel great not so much so you've got to be mindful of the position so I would say sleeping on your back if you're a snorer not so great there is some evidence that sleeping and I'm going to forget which side it is now I'm trying to think of my anatomy but sleeping I think it's on your left side based on how your gastrointestinal system is working leads to a greater degree of gird which is gastric reflux in other words getting heartburn just get reflux interesting so that's the the second one though reallyy that I was going to mention is um sleeping on your front or on your back may not necessarily be ideal because what they found is that during sleep and this quick tangent I'll come back to it but another one of the new functions of sleep is brain cleansing that when we go into sleep your brain essentially has this sewage system that kicks into high gear and it washes away all of the metabolic detrius that's been building up across wakefulness because from a biochemical perspective wakefulness is low-level brain damage sleep is your s planetary salvation and two of the pieces of metabolic detrius that that sleep system will cleanse your brain of or beta ameloid and Tow protein which are the two culprits that underly we believe the Alzheimer's disease Cascade and what's interesting is that when you are sleeping on your side these are animal studies they found that that cleansing system is more efficient than when you're sleeping on your back or your front and what they did was they they showed their in rats and in mice and then I was watching this I was at a conference they started to show you pictures in the wild of every single animal sleeping what was common across all of them no matter how they contorted their body the common ingredient was that their head was always on one side or the other as if that was the natural sort of tendency the predeliction of how sleep was optimally designed and they argue that the reason for that is because that's when you get greatest optimality of flow of this what we call the glymphatic cleansing system now I would say that I haven't seen strong replication of that nor have I seen any evidence that that's true in human beings human beings are very odd species our head is tilted 90° relative to many others think about a giraffe a donkey think about a dog a cat their head is lifted up in line with their spinal cord when we went from being quad Reds to bipeds one of the things that had to happen because we were walking on all fours with our head out like a dog if you then stood up on your back legs but kept the head in that same position all you're doing is looking getting very deep interestes in clouds so our head tilted down 90° and so that means that our ERG ergonomics of the head and the cranium may be very different to animals so I think the jewelry is out and I don't think that's any good reason for you to start worrying about my goodness I've got to get my head to the side and if I'm not if it's down on the pillow or I'm on my back don't worry about that is there anything else to say on snoring people that snore why we snore and then sort of progressing through that to treat sleep apnea I would simply say that coming back to being insufficiently slept and that mood disregulation and you not knowing what you the true self actually was is ever more true in untreated sleep apnea patients and I remember we were doing a study with one group and we started to treat these individuals now there are numerous new treatments out there if you have mild sleep apnea you may not need one of these masks these nasal pillows which are called CPAP machines CPAP and it stands for continuous positive airway pressure this little nasal pillow pushes and pressured air up your nose and it acts like a an airway splint to keep the airway open so it doesn't collapse now if you have severe sleep apnea I know that these machines can be invasive although people like ResMed are have really great machines now the old school kind of mask fighter pilot Tom crw those were tough to live with now they're much better nevertheless I would say even if you feel as though you're not you're struggling to sleep because of this kind of pipe that's coming off you that's still far better than you sleeping without it and having the horrific oxygen desaturation and minimal Sleep Quality that you get otherwise so nevertheless if you have mild sleep apnea you now have these um mandibular augmenting devices so it looks like a sports gum guard top and bottom but it's hinged and what it tries to do is move the lower jaw forward by just a couple of millimeters and what's fun is that you can do this test at home lie on your back and just sort of lie there and start making the snoring noise so I can make the snoring noise and then then just try to move your jaw forward it's actually much harder to snore wow and it's a tiny change anatomically in the jaw but it can make a vast difference so now these new mandibular devices are out there there's all sorts of new ways there are also some people obviously rightly don't wish for this there are more invasive surgeries where you'll put a neuros stimulator that stimulates the airway and forces it open and that saves you from having the CPAP machine and some people end up permanent CPAP machine yeah it's a permanent CPAP machine so there are lots of great ways to treat it what about snoring what about reducing snoring something that's presumably more common than sleep apnea yeah so there I would probably go to a mandibular device speak to a dentist if they don't know about it go find a dentist who does they can make up these devices and most of them are covered by Insurance you can buy them on Amazon make sure that you just look at the star ratings and make sure it's rated by at least a couple of 500 600 people and then believe the rating and you've got to get a bit used to it and you know I've I actually about three or four years ago um because I would track ruthlessly every night my snor lab I could start to see a little bit of snoring coming on now that's just my age as we age you know just like the rest of your body it becomes a bit saggy my muscle tone isn't what it used to be and so I started to see signs of very mild sleep apnea now I wasn't in anywhere close to the region of needing to be treated but because I know so much about sleep I don't want to live a shorter life nor do I want to live a life with disease so I just bought myself one of these devices I ended up then um having a a great dentist friend who specializes and we actually got the the proper device custom device and yeah but you can buy them on Amazon you put them in hot water you buy down gum guard and they're actually not too bad as if you can tolerate them for smaller people who don't have Jaws like my jaw and certainly your jaw you know it's going to be a bit you know tougher you know my wife very slim refined woman you know she's probably not going to be able to tolerate it because the jaw mass is just not sufficient so you've got to be a I'm not trying to say it's a one- siiz fit all for everyone but for those who can if you have some mild snoring it will clean it right up it's very impressive in other news Shopify Powers 10% of all Ecommerce companies in the United States they are the driving force behind gym shark and skims and aloe and new tonic that is why I partnered with them look you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do backend Inventory management Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do which is designing and selling an awesome product best of all their award-winning support is there to help you every step of the way so you can upgrade your business and get the same checkout we use at nutonic with Shopify right now you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com /od wisdom or lowercase that's shopify.com wisdom to upgrade your selling today thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that clip you will love the ful length nearly three-hour long conversation with Dr Walker right here go on watch it