The Common SLEEP MISTAKES You Make That DESTROY Your Health! | Matthew Walker

From an evolutionary perspective, sleep is the most idiotic of all behaviors. You know, when you think about it, because firstly, when you're asleep, you're not finding a mate, you're not reproducing, you're not caring for your young, you're not foraging for food, and worse still, you're vulnerable to predation. Now, on any one of those single grounds, but especially all of them as a collective, sleep should have been strongly selected against. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Health Theory. I am here with somebody that's going to blow your mind. His name is Matthew Walker. Matthew, welcome to the show. It's a delight to be here, Tom. Thank you for having me. Dude, super excited. I was telling you before we started recording that you wrote a book called Why We Sleep, and I'm always worried when I'm bringing somebody on that's covering a subject that I've talked about before, if they're going to hit it in a new way. And I loved your book. You come at it from a totally different angle. I wore my brain shirt out of acknowledgement of how much you talk about sleep and the neurological impact. And so, I want to start with two things from the book that really blew my mind. And the first is that sleep is so important that the Guinness Book of World Records will not let people try to set records for sleep deprivation. Walk us through why not. I think this is a great entry to your world. Yes, so what we know is that a lack of sleep will impact just about every major physiological system in your body and almost every operation of your mind. For example, if I were to take you and limit you to just 4 hours of sleep for one single night, there is almost a 70% drop in what we call natural killer cell activity, which are critical anti-cancer fighting immune cells. That's after one night of 4 hours of sleep. That's crazy. Secondly, if I were to short sleep you for just 1 week, your levels of testosterone would be that of someone 10 years your senior. Define short sleep. What How many hours are we talking So, here we could be talking about 4 to 5 hours a night for 4 or 5 nights in a row, which if you look at the data on the survey, that's not unusual for perhaps even 20 to 30% of the population. Certainly during the week. Um we also know from daylight savings time that it doesn't take very much. Because there is a global experiment that's performed on about 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year, and it's called daylight savings time. Now, in the spring when we lose 1 hour of sleep, we see a 24% increase in heart attacks the following day. Yet in the autumn in the fall, we see a 21% decrease in heart attacks. Now, you collide all of that information together as well as the impact on the brain, the mental health issues regarding anxiety, suicidality, depression, as well as increased risk for Alzheimer's disease, and we've been seeing that as well. Um all of these things created this perfect storm for Guinness to take a step back. They used to recognize world record breaking attempts. And to put this in context, you know, several years ago, a remarkable individual, I think his name was Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian, um with Red Bull, he went up in a space capsule. He went to the outer edges of our atmosphere, of our planet. He opened the door, and then in a space suit, he jumped out. He hurtled back down to Earth at over 1,000 km per hour. He broke the sound barrier with his body. And Guinness says, "That's just fine. However, sleep deprivation attempts no longer because they are that much more concerning to your mental, your physical, and your cognitive health. That is the perfect explanation. Like that dichotomy of Felix Baumgartner versus just not getting enough sleep. And I don't think it's a mistake that the Navy SEALs use it just catastrophic sleep deprivation as a part of their Hell Week to really find out like who's got the mental resilience to make it on the other side. Because when you're talking to cuz I if I remember right, they get like 3 hours of sleep over 5 days or just something stupid like that. It's remarkably minimal. And they start hallucinating. You know, I had a friend who was um who was in the British version of that. Um and they were saying, you know, they were running around on these hills during sort of these combat training events. And they were just seeing sort of gravestones popping up in front of them. They were just delusional and hallucinating. What's going on? Like what is it that causes us to hallucinate? Do we know the mechanism, whatever breakdown there is between the conscious and subconscious? I'm not even sure what's happening. Yeah, what we think is happening is that after some degree of sleep deprivation, you build up this pressure for the different stages of sleep. And one of the two main stages of sleep of human sleep at least is something called rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep, which is the stage that is principally associated with dreaming. And what we've learned is that once you start to go through sleep deprivation and including REM sleep deprivation, the brain gets so starved of this thing called dream sleep that it just simply says, "Look, at some point I've got to get this thing called REM sleep. And if you're going to stay awake, I don't really care. I'm just going to produce this state of REM sleep." And so it's almost as though you're awake, but the veil of REM sleep dreaming comes over the brain. And therefore, you're essentially dreaming while you're awake, and that's why you start seeing these hallucinations and delusions. That's our our current understanding. All right. Now, that's really interesting. So, one one of the questions I was most excited to ask you about is the nature of dreaming. So, if the brain is saying, "Hey, look, I'm going to do this whether you're awake or asleep, why is it so contextual? Like, there's no question there were times where the dream is so bizarre, like I can't anchor it to my life, but a lot of times I can, where I'm like, "I know exactly why I started dreaming about that thing." Do we have a sense of what the brain is trying to do with dreams? We do, and dreaming seems to offer at least two different benefits for the brain. The first is creativity. The second is essentially emotional first aid. It's overnight therapy. So, point number one, creativity. One of the things that REM sleep actually does is it takes all of the information that you've been learning, and I should take a step back. It's during deep sleep, which actually happens more in the first half of the night, that those memories, those freshly minted memories that you've recently learned and laid down in the brain, deep sleep will hit the save button on those new memories so that you don't forget. So, so deep sleep strengthens and solidifies those individual memories. But, sleep, we've learned, is much more intelligent than we ever imagined. Because thereafter, it's dream sleep, it's REM sleep, that takes all of those individual memories, and it starts to intelligently collide them and interconnect them. Essentially, it's informational alchemy. Um you could almost think of it like um group therapy for memories, that you know, everyone gets a name badge and REM sleep gathers in all of these pieces. And it forces you to go and speak to the people not at the front of the room that you think you've got the most obvious connection with, but to the people at the back of the room that you think you've got no connection with at all, but it turns out that you do. It's a non-obvious one. But it's a potentially powerful one nonetheless. And so after dream sleep, you wake up with essentially a revised mind-wide web of associations every single day. And as a consequence, you are able to divine solutions to previously impenetrable problems. And it's the very reason that no one has ever told you to stay awake on a problem. And that's one of the benefits of dream sleep, of REM sleep. The second, however, is something that we've more recently discovered and we've done a lot of work in this area regarding mental health, is that REM sleep provides this emotional first aid. And what seems to happen is that sleep will take in these difficult, often concerning, even painful traumatic emotional experiences. And dream sleep acts like this beautiful nocturnal soothing balm. And it just takes the sharp edges off those painful difficult experiences, so that you come back the next day and they don't feel as difficult anymore. So in other words, it's not time that heals all wounds. But it's time during sleep that provides that emotional convalescence, as it were. So why does this relate to your question, which is there are times when it seems strange and there are times when I can definitely pick it up. What we know de facto, definitively, is that dreaming is not simply you rewinding the videotape of the day and then playing it back over again. In fact, only about 5% of your dreaming life is a veridical replay of anything you experience during the day. However, what is dominant, if there is a if there's a red thread narrative that runs through from your waking life into your dreaming life, it is emotional themes and concerns. That's the sort of mental health benefit. That's the mental first aid, the emotional first aid. So, the emotional first aid was the second thing that I wanted to talk about. That was one of the the most striking things about your book. And I want to go a little bit deeper. Um So much around dreaming and I don't I don't want to stray too far from that cuz there's so many more questions I have about dreaming. But talk to me about some of the research with um noradrenaline and PTSD and the work there because this was where I was like, "Whoa, there is a layer to sleep that I've never heard anybody talk about the way that you're talking about it." This is really fascinating. Yeah, so several years ago um I developed a theory as to exactly how this emotional first aid would actually work. Where it it's what's remarkable about dreaming, it's the only time during the 24-hour period where your brain shuts off the stress-related neurochemical called noradrenaline. We never see it at any other time, any other stage of sleep, or any time when you're awake. And the sister chemical everyone will know about in the body, which is called adrenaline. But upstairs in the brain, it's noradrenaline. And I propose that what happens during dream sleep, which is remarkable, is that firstly we know from brain imaging studies that we've done where we put people inside of a scanner and we watch their brain as it lights up as it goes into dream sleep. Emotional centers of the brain and memory centers of the of the brain are reactivated during dream sleep. So, firstly, we know that the brain is capable and is probably reactivating these emotional experiences. But, secondly, unlike when you're awake, it's reactivating and re- sort of um uh playing those memories in a brain state that is devoid of any of the stress-related neurochemical. And so, in other words, dream sleep, we sort of put forward as a theory, allows the brain to take this sort of highly charged emotional memory and strip away the bitter emotional rind from the informational orange. So, that you come back the next day and it's peeled away. And as a consequence, dream sleep has divorced the emotion from the memory because of this neurochemical state, this kind of mollifying, soothing neurochemical bath. Are you familiar with what they're studying with MDMA? Cuz it feels to me like the same idea, right? So, hey, I've got this guy that has PTSD. I'm going to make him relive it, but I'm going to hit him with MDMA, which neurochemically is going to move him into a radically different state. They now revisit the same emotion cuz for And look, you know so much more about this than I do, but I find this so interesting. You will correct me where I go wrong, but we're not we're not faithful to the truth of what has happened in our past. We pull a memory forward. As we're sort of holding it in working memory, it becomes manipulable. And then when we restore it, it's restored with whatever new context we give it. So, if you revisit, you can make it worse or you can make it better. And that feels like it's an echo of this mechanism that you're talking about in dreams. It's exactly that. And you know, and what we know is that when I was describing that deep sleep hits the save button on those new memories, that's what we call consolidation. But, there's also a process of reconsolidation. You're absolutely right. And a great analogy here is a word document. You know, you would never open up a word document and then create a new set of sort of text, which is the memory, then hit the save button, and then double-click it the next day, open it back up, and you can't do anything with it. It's you can't change it, you can't edit it. That's a ridiculous system of storage, of information storage. And the brain works just like that. When you recall a memory, a memory once you've hit the save button is not simply permanent and immutable. It's modifiable, and you can change it and modify it, and then you can reconsolidate it, you can resave it. Now it's edited, and that's what therapy does. That's what we think happens with MDMA. That's what we think is partly happening with dream sleep, but dream sleep is quite different there. It's this neurochemical strange state that allows you to sort of soothe that memory as well. And as I said, sort of strip away, it's almost like detoxifying the memory of the emotion. So that you come back the next day, and you have a memory of an emotional event, but it's no longer emotional itself. And so I had a theory that was in search of data, and I went to a conference in Seattle, and I presented the theory, and then the next person up was a psychiatrist called Murray Raskin, and he was working in the VA system with veterans who had terrible PTSD, and he was treating them with a blood pressure medication that was generic, cuz it's the VA system. And that blood pressure medication was called prazosin. Now, prazosin will actually cross the blood-brain barrier. It will not only affect the body, it'll go up into the brain, and one of the things that it shuts off is noradrenaline. And what we knew before is that in PTSD, those patients have too high levels of noradrenaline. And what he was finding and scratching his head over was to say, "Look, I've been treating these patients with this blood pressure medication, and they're coming back to me because one of, By the way, one of the diagnostic features of PTSD is repetitive nightmares. In fact, you can't get a diagnosis of PTSD without having repetitive nightmares. And so, he was coming um these patients were coming back to him and saying, "Look, doc, I I don't know if my blood pressure is any better, but my trauma dreams are starting to go away, and I don't know why." And he was publishing this data. So crazy. So, I had a And that's exactly what the model would predict, that in PTSD, levels of noradrenaline are too high, so the brain is unable to do this elegant trick of stripping the emotion from the memory. So, the next night, when they come back to dream, the brain comes back and sleep to sleep and says, "Look, I've still got this highly charged trauma memory. Please do your trick of separating emotion from memory." It fails again. It's a broken record. It is the repetitive nightmares of PTSD. And I said, "Look, I I've got to speak with you. Um I flew him down to Berkeley um a few weeks later. We had spent the whole day together. We went out to dinner. We just jammed on this. He started doing these remarkable studies with prazosin, looking at REM sleep, looking at dreaming. And um several years later, it became the um one of the only approved medications for um repetitive nightmares uh in PTSD. Wow. Dude, that that to me is like just when it feels like, "Man, we really know a lot about something," and then a breakthrough like that will occur. This whole field of beginning to really understand cuz when the the title of the book, Why Do We Sleep? is no one's been able to give a satisfying answer to that. Like, you get a lot of these hypotheses, but this is really starting to feel like we're at the beginning of beginning to understand some of the stuff. So, give us the explanation in in sort of an evolutionary context of why we know sleeping just absolutely has to be crushingly important. Yeah, and I'll just touch on your first point, which is to say you're right. So, you know, the book was um called Why We Sleep because we do have now a pretty good understanding. 50 years ago, you know, we used to ask the question, "Why do we sleep?" And the the crass and unhelpful answer was at the time was that we sleep to cure sleepiness. Which is the the factious equivalent of saying, and you would know this better than anyone, you know, I eat to cure hunger. Well, that tells you nothing about the nutritional dynamics of food. But it was the best that we had at the time. Now, 50 years later with over over 10,000 empirical research studies, we've actually had to upend the question. We've actually now had to ask, "Is there anything within the body, any major physiological system in the body, or any sort of major function of the mind that isn't wonderfully enhanced by sleep when we get it, or demonstrably impaired when we don't get enough?" And so far, the answer seems to be no for the most part. So, sort of to come back to your sort of the the the second part of the question, you know, from an evolutionary perspective, sleep is the most idiotic of all behaviors. You know, when you think about it, because firstly, when you're asleep, you're not finding a mate, you're not reproducing, you're you're not caring for your young, you're not foraging for food, and worse still, you're vulnerable to predation. Now, on any one of those single grounds, but especially all of them as a collective, sleep should have been strongly selected against in the course of evolution. But what we know is that sleep, if you look from an evolutionary perspective, sleep appears to have evolved with life itself on this planet. And then it has fought its way through heroically every step along the evolutionary pathway. And it's long been said that as a consequence, if sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital set of functions, then it is the biggest mistake that the evolutionary process has ever made. And what we're now learning from the science is that Mother Nature did not make a spectacular blunder in creating this beautiful thing called a full night of sleep. Yeah, it's really interesting to think through. And one of the things that m- gave me the first hook into why sleep might be ridiculously important is the fact that when you're sleeping, the brain actually shrinks and allows you to clear out amyloid plaques and like basically you're brainwashing yourself, literally washing your brain. Yeah. Um at night, the glymphatic system and and then I was like, okay, that's interesting that you would need to go into sort of this altered state to clear this stuff out. Um that to me gets interesting. What have you found there in the literature that um shows that it needs to specifically be an altered state? Yeah, we never thought that the brain had its own cleansing mechanism. Um and we all know that the body has that mechanism. It's called the lymphatic system. But it was only um probably six or seven years ago that a remarkable scientist, Maiken Nedergaard at the University of Rochester, made a stunning set of discoveries in mice. What she found was that the brain actually does have its own cleansing system. It's called the glymphatic system, named after the glial cells in the brain that make it up. Now, if that wasn't remarkable enough, she went on to find two additional discoveries. The first is that um that sewage system is not always switched on in high flow volume across the 24-hour period. It's specifically during deep sleep when that um that cleansing mechanism kicks into high gear. And as you said, these brain cells will actually shrink and allowing the cerebrospinal fluid to wash away all of the metabolic detritus that's been building up whilst we're awake. Because make no mistake about it, from a biochemical perspective, wakefulness is low-level brain damage and sleep is sanitary salvation. Um and the third thing that she discovered, which is something you mentioned there, one of the pieces of toxic metabolic protein uh product that that cleansing system was washing away was something called beta amyloid, which is what we know is a protein culprit in the cascade of Alzheimer's disease. And we've now done a lot of work, and others have done this work, showing that insufficient sleep may be one of the most significant lifestyle factors determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer's disease in later life. And it it seems to be that it's this particular state of deep sleep and these pulsing these slow pulsing electrical big powerful brain waves that happen during deep sleep that may be driving the pulsing of this cerebrospinal fluid. And this is wonderful work by Laura Lewis at Boston University most recently in humans that are coupled to the brain waves that you have. So, the reason that it's this specific state, which was your question, why deep sleep in particular, because it's only that time period where we get these huge powerful deep brain waves and we get the shrinking of the cells and we get therefore the flow of this pulsing glymphatic system. So, in other words, it's it's almost like a power cleanse for your brain. You know, it's it's good night sleep clean, as it were, in that regard. So complex. It's crazy. This is exactly why I don't like to take supplements. It's like, man, there there are levels of complexity that I assure you we have not discovered yet and you never know, like the heart medication that's also, oh, this one's bypassing the brain and dealing with noradrenaline. And it has this huge impact. Now, that one happens to be positive, but there are some in certain cases. But there are some that very much are not. And speaking of are not positive, so if sleep is so good for me and dreams are amazing and they help with creativity and they they take the sharp edges off my emotions. Why the hell do I have nightmares? Yeah, so what we know is that nightmares aren't necessarily um and we we know that in some conditions and PTSD is a is a very good example of this that they can sort of step over that threshold from being normative to non-normative. I mean, they can be very concerning and and and disruptive to people and it's also very traumatic too to relive those and and wake up from them. We do think it's part of the same process of sort of emotional regulation that it's the brain trying to understand and better comprehend what this thing called waking life and all of its emotional peaks and troughs are all about. So the bottom line here is that as long as they're not causing you distress and harm then you don't have to worry about them. If they are doing that though, there are new clinical therapies um what we call nightmare um disorders. And it involves usually just what you were describing before which is speaking with a therapist, writing down the nightmare and then replaying it while you are awake sort of you know, speaking about it, writing it back down, working with the therapist and essentially trying to sort of just say, look, okay, in that context it's safe. Let's better understand that. And re- repeatedly doing that type of work where you're sort of reactivating the nightmare and then trying to change the context to something that's safe or that's less fearful or that's less negative, gradually over time that type of work can dissipate the frequency and the severity of those nightmares. So, nightmares by themselves not necessarily a bad thing. If they are causing you problems, you can go and speak to your doctor and there are some for that that you can sort of just Google around nightmare therapy etc. and those will help. Yeah, and that like the way in which your brain chooses to interpret it's sort of dream reassessment of the real world will have huge implications in your life. It could be PTSD, it could be a bazillion things. I have a feeling, I have never had this thought before, but I have a feeling that the more we learn about how individual brains recontextualize things and how much the conscious mind and subconscious mind sort of come into cahoots to decide how they're going to align things up because when I was in my early 20s and I was convinced I was stupid, I was interpreting the world one way that was just had me paralyzed by fear and then as I began to realize sort of the nature of the brain and oh just cuz I'm stupid now doesn't mean I can't learn about this, you know, that Carol Dweck's notion of yet, right? I'm not good yet. And so that since then consciously I have changed the way that I frame things, but I would bet a bazillion dollars that I'm also doing that subconsciously as my brain sort of processes the day. I think that's what, you know, dreaming if if it's one of its functions is that recontextualizing of those experiences. You know, dreaming I think is a is a way for us to understand the world in which we live. And we can do it whilst we're awake. You know, I'm not suggesting that we don't form connections and we don't see links between different pieces of information. But, the way that we do it in dreaming is very different. You know, I often liken it to when we're awake, you're sort of inputting this information into the brain, and it's almost like a Google search page one. Where you insert your search term, you hit return, and you get the most obvious immediate hits, the direct connections. That's what waking is all about. Dreaming is you inserting the search term, hitting the return button, and being taken straight to page 20. You know, and you inserted, you know, impact theory university, and all of a sudden, on page 20, it's about a field hockey game in Utah, and you think, "Hang on a second, what on earth is But, then you read it, and you think, "Ah, I can It's a distant wacky connection." And it's not obvious to me that I would have made that, but it's a potentially powerful one. Because when you start to fuse things together that shouldn't normally go together, but they cause these marked advances in evolutionary fitness, it sounds like the biological basis of creativity. And that's one of the things that we're learning about with dream sleep as well. Contextualization, emotional resolution, creativity. Yeah, so, you know, as we start talking about dreaming and nightmares and all of the different ways that the brain is sort of interacting, uh, trying to make sense of the conscious world. One thing I heard you talk about is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which I found very interesting, and I know so little about it, but knowing what I know about cognitive behavioral therapy in terms of pattern interrupting and things like that. Are you Is this like us sending a sort of subconscious signal to our brain? Like, how does that work? Not quite. So, uh, what we know, obviously, has been the rise of sleep difficulties in society and that has been matched by unfortunately a rise in pharmacology and particularly sleeping pills. And I say unfortunately not because I'm anti-medication and I know a lot of people who work at these pharmaceutical companies and they're good people, great scientists wanting to good do good things. But unfortunately sleeping pills are largely blunt instruments and they don't produce naturalistic sleep. Um they're in a class of drugs that we call the sedative hypnotics. And when we take sleeping pills, we mistake sedation for sleep, but it's not natural sleep. And in fact, um sleeping pills have been associated with a significantly higher risk of death as well as cancer. So much so that in 2016, the American College of Physicians made a landmark recommended um intervention. They said that sleeping pills must no longer be the first-line treatment for uh insomnia. Instead, the American College of Physicians said it has to be cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia that must be the first-line recommended treatment for those sleep problems. And so cognitive behavioral therapy in general really tries to target two things, cognitive and behavioral. And so the cognitive aspects for insomnia are aspects where we try to correct your beliefs or your misbeliefs around sleep and some of your ideas around sleep. Some of those things that can be either uh inappropriate, incorrect, or just triggering anxiety or worry. So we try to modify those cognitions, those beliefs, but then we also look at what you're doing in your life, the different behaviors that you're doing or things that you're not doing and try to correct the behaviors as well. For example, how's your caffeine intake? How's your alcohol intake? Uh what time are you going to bed? What time are you waking up? What's your chronotype? Are you a morning type, evening type? Are you sleeping in harmony with your chronotype or against your chronotype? Um, are you getting daylight in the morning? Are you getting too much daylight at light at night, artificial light at night? Do you exercise? And so, we change behaviors and we change thought patterns and together, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term, but what's great is that when you stop working with that clinician or your online program and I should say that I I'm work with a a company I'm an advisor to a company called Shuni. It's s h u n i .io if people want to go and explore it and you can get cognitive behavioral therapy online there. But you work with your therapist and after about five or six sessions, you can continue that benefit of improved sleep for up to five years, the studies have demonstrated now. Whereas with sleeping pills, when you stop their use, then not only do you go back to the bad sleep that you you were having, you typically go back to even worse sleep. It's called rebound insomnia and now you have to go back onto the use. So you become dependent. There is an addiction dependency cycle. So that's really what CBTI is and that's really the best approach for sleeping problems right now. All right. So I have two sleeping problems. One is that there are times where I will get either really stressed or I'll get really excited and I have a very easy time falling asleep, but then I'll wake up after three or four hours and I find it very difficult to fall back asleep. And then the second part just so I don't forget is sleep inertia in the morning. But what can I do to um optimize for staying asleep? Yes, so there it's a case of trying to deal with that sort of downgrade the activation of the nervous system. The reason that people typically wake up uh in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep, not always, but often, is because they have this sort of stress related carrying this anxiety. And anxiety biologically is the principal mechanism that we think underlies most insomnia. And what happens in part is that the fight or flight branch of the nervous system becomes overactive. And that's exactly the opposite down? Like I find it so easy to fall asleep, but I can tell on the nights where I'm going to wake up. It just seems weird that it builds, but then my subconscious mind kicks it back alive. Yeah, why why would it be that way? And the reason is because after about 16 hours of wakefulness, you've built up a lot of that healthy sleepiness, what we call sleep pressure. And the longer that you're awake, the more of that sleep pressure builds up. And it's a chemical that builds up in the brain called adenosine. And then when we go into sleep, it's the time when the brain can actually start to clear out that adenosine. And it's so it starts to lower the sleep pressure. And after about 8 hours of sleep, you've cleared away 16 hours of that adenosine, of that sleepiness. And so you wake up naturally and you feel refreshed and restored. But what will happen is that you can be stressed and sort of or excited, but the sleepiness, the weight of sleepiness pulling you down is so heavy at that point that you can get to sleep. But then three or four hours later, you've jettisoned maybe 50% of all of that adenosine, maybe even more cuz it principally happens during deep sleep. And so now your brain is much more vulnerable to those awakenings because it doesn't have the weight of that sleepiness. If does that make some sense? It makes total sense and makes me want to punch myself back to sleep. It's so obnoxious. Well, because the the benefits or or I should say the the damage that you do by not getting sleep is so terrifying that I'm every time I wake up I'm like come on. Like you know how much better you will perform if you just sleep and I am not one of those guys that's like hey I you got to grind and 4 hours sleep. I'm like if I need 9 hours of sleep I want to get 9 hours of sleep every single night forever until the end of time. So it's just always super obnoxious. If you're hoisting that flag I will salute it and I definitely you know, not everyone but certainly in the type A sort of particularly business culture maybe there is this sort of sleep machismo attitude where people wear their lack of sleep like a badge of honor. Um, but you're right it's it's foolhardy for a number of reasons. But let me come back to that issue of of you know, beating ourselves up because we need to have some degree of self-compassion when it comes to sleep. You know, I am not invulnerable to sleep problems myself. I've had bouts of insomnia throughout my life to be completely transparent and open with you. Um, and everyone every one of us is going to have a bad night of sleep. It's not unusual. Don't worry. Don't stress. You know, back when I was starting to write the book it took me about 4 years to write it in 2014. You know, sleep was sort of the neglected step sister in the health conversation of that time. And I was so saddened by the sickness and the disease and the suffering that was happening because of a lack of sleep. You know, I came out, you know, all guns blazing. And I think that that was important but for those people who were struggling with sleep, those people who had sleep problems with insomnia, you know, the book kind of felt almost as though it was, you know, sleep or else, dot dot dot. Um and I didn't mean it to be that way. So, I want to say right now, because I've I've learned to soften and become a a much better appreciator of these conditions, just like you described. If you wake up and you can't get back to sleep, don't worry. Just realize tonight is not my night. It's not the end of the world. I'm still going to be able to function somewhat tomorrow. Don't stay in bed awake for too long, though. That's the important message here, because very tricky. I'm super curious to see what you think about this, because I know where you're going, right? Yeah, you're training yourself that being in bed is is being awake is okay while you're in bed. So, I used to get up and whether I slept for 2 hours, 3 hours, whatever, if I couldn't fall back asleep in like 15 minutes, I'd get out of bed. And I would go to work and start doing my thing, and then I would go lay back down and sleep, and sometimes I'd fall asleep for, you know, 2 or 3 more hours. But the number of times I would wake up with a headache after that was just too much. So, I was way frustrated and I'm like, all right, there's got to be something else. So, what I found is if I put an audio book on, dude, I will be back asleep in like 10 or 15 minutes. It's crazy. And the only thing that wakes me up is the fact that I have headphones in my ears, or if they start yelling in the book or something like that, which always pisses me off. Uh but it puts me back to sleep so reliably, it's crazy. That's great. That's exactly what we recommend. So, don't go to work, don't start checking emails, don't eat, because it trains the brain to expect food. But instead, in a dim room, somewhere different, so you change the context, so you're changing the learned association. Just read a book, listen to an audio book, um meditate in dim light. All of these things are great. Find out whatever works for you. And then, only when you're sleepy, do you return to bed, and there's no time limit for that. And that way you train the brain back out of a bad association that it's learned, which is my bed is this place of being awake, which if you repeat that over time, you become trained to be awake in the bed. And then you will relearn the association that your bed is the place where you're asleep. So, you're 100% right. That's exactly what we recommend. Um to your second question, which is sleep inertia, it's a real thing. Sleep inertia is typically where we wake up and your brain requires some time to kind of warm up to operating temperature. Like an old vintage car, you know, you can't just turn the engine on and start, you know, flooring it and going up to redline. You need to sort of circulate the fluids and warm the oil up and get the engine warm and then you can really start to push it. It's the same way with our brain in some ways. Now, um different people have different severities of sleep inertia. I might actually, like you, I suffer from quite bad sleep inertia. You know, for the first hour, you know, my partner, she when I come through in the morning, she wakes up a little bit earlier than me, you know, she kind of knows that I can say, "Look, honey, I am not the best version of myself in the first hour. I I know that I may have done something bad yesterday and we should talk about it and I I want to resolve that, but can we not do it in the first hour because I'm not the best version?" So, firstly, accepting that it's normal and it's real. The second thing though, however, is you can sleep inertia typically happens in very severe amounts if you're mismatched between your sleep schedule and your chronotype and some schedule. And so, you can go on um and you can go online and type Google um morningness eveningness questionnaire. And it's a questionnaire that you fill out and it figures out what your chronotype is. Are you um a morning type, somewhere in between, or you an evening type? And what we find is that morning types, when they wake up in the morning at their normal time, which is very early or early, they don't have sleep inertia. They're good to go. They can jump into the gym and they're like Energizer bunnies and they're all happy and, you know, joyful and to me I'm just like, "Ah." You know, whereas evening types waking up at the time that morning types have to wake up, which is in some ways the way society is designed. Society is desperately biased against evening types. And wrongfully so, because it's not your fault. It's genetically determined. There are about six or seven genes that we know right now that dictate what your chronotype is. It's not your fault. Gifted to you at birth. Um you don't get to choose. Now, if you are suffering from sleep inertia, what we find is that if you can sleep a little bit later into the morning, go to bed a little maybe a little bit later, sleep later, play around with that and see if the speed with which you wake up is better, that your sleep inertia is less. That's one way. It may not always work. Another way is temperature. Now, it turns out that when people have a cup of coffee, they say, "Look, I just need like 5 minutes." And I swig a couple of, you know, mouthfuls of coffee and now I'm alert. That's nonsense. Caffeine doesn't actually get into your system until about 12 to 15 minutes. So, if you're feeling any effects of caffeine before that, it's not the caffeine. It turns out that when we go to sleep, we drop our core body temperature. We get very cold. We become almost hypothermic. Now, to wake up, we have to warm up. So, to to get to sleep, we need to get cold. To stay asleep, we need to stay cold. And to wake up, we need to warm up. And so, one way that you can artificially accelerate or try accelerating your inertia in a quicker dissipating manner is to try to warm up more quickly. So, get a hot drink in the morning. Doesn't have to be caffeine if that's not your thing. I don't drink caffeine, but I'm not against it. Caffeine is an issue It's not the really the dose that makes the poison, it's the timing that makes the poison when it comes to sleep and caffeine, which we can come on to, but drink a hot drink, get your body temperature up. If you like, if you've got a smart thermostat, program it to start to rise temperature in your bedroom or in the house in the last hour before your alarm. And you can it can really start to help you wake up. And then play around with these smart lights. I have one where it sort of starts to bring me out of sleep about 5 minutes before my alarm. That can help, but the data is not good on that. The data on temperature, much better. That's interesting. Yeah, Tom. It does, but I'm surprised that you say to get warm because Have you done cold showers before? Yeah, cold showers are sort of more of a noradrenaline thing. Well, they they wake you up real fast. They do. Now, that's not necessarily a normative thing, you know, that's you you know, shocking your fight or flight branch of the nervous system to go from a temperature that it's become accustomed to and it's acclimated to to then all of a sudden being dumped in ice water, as it were, and it doesn't know it's a threat mechanism. It thinks you're under attack, and so of course you're going to wake up. Now, that comes with an adrenergic spike in the body. It comes with an accelerated heart rate. It could come with a cortisol spike. So, I'm not against that, but we don't have to go to those extremes. You can do it in these more subtle manners, which are are the more natural ways. Mhm, fair enough. Um I have a question going back to waking up in the middle of the night. One thing that is super weird is things that during the day are not in any way, shape, or form intimidating or daunting when I'm supposed to be sleeping. So, if I wake up in the middle of the night, I'll start stressing about something, and I'll I'm literally like, once I get out of bed, this is not going to stress me out. So, why is it stressing me out at night? Is there a part of my brain that shuts off? Is there a part of my brain that becomes active? Like, why are things at night do they seem so big and dramatic? Whereas in the day, it's like, man, it's not a big deal. Yeah, I we actually don't really fully understand it in truth, but part of this is to do with context. That it's dark. Um you don't have full awareness. You don't have full functioning of the brain because when we wake up, that sleep inertia, by the way, in part is because your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that makes us most human, it's like the CEO of the brain. It's very good at understanding high-level concepts, putting things into contextually appropriate boxes, making top-down control decisions. It regulates our emotions. That part of the brain is the last thing to come back online as we wake up, and that's why we're not very, you know, brilliant if we have sleep inertia. But when we're waking up out of sleep in the middle of the night, we also have some of that. So, we don't have the rational, logical part of our brain fully engaged. Plus, the context is one that's dark. And so, we don't have sort of the daylight sort of giving us this sort of normative, safe feeling. And so, what happens is that the brain starts to default to rumination and catastrophization. You know, it's almost like this Rolodex of anxiety that then starts to unfold. And that one memory that, you know, you bring back into mind um at that moment of waking up is the finger that flicks the domino on that cascade of of, you know, rumination. So, again, just realize I've done this before. I've experienced this before. I know that tomorrow by, you know, 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon, I think about this and I think, "That was ridiculous to be worrying about. It's it's okay." Try to remind yourself of that. No question. Dude, thank you so much for joining me today. The way that you look at sleep, your insights, they are absolutely magically delicious. Where can people uh keep up with you? Where can they get the book? Uh what's the best way? Oh gosh, after listening so long to this, they shouldn't listen to any more of me, but um if you want to find more of me, uh you can find me at um sleep diplomat. That's my handle. sleepdiplomat.com. Um you can buy the book. The book is called Why We Sleep. It's now out in a second edition following some uh needed corrections. Um you My publisher would say, "You know, you don't have to read the book. You just have to buy it." But I would say, um go and find a second-hand used copy of the book. Um I'm uninterested in any of the money. Just as long as you read the book, I I'm happy. So, um yeah. Awesome. Thank you again so much for what you're putting out in the world and for coming on to the show. It was really, really wonderful. Speaking of things that are really wonderful, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.