Sleep Scientist: This Is What Poor Sleep Really Does to Your Body and Brain w/ Matt Walker | EP #167

Sleep aids, Ambien, Lunesta, Good, bad. Tell me about what your thoughts are on those.

Sedation is not sleep rhythm routine and the right wind down.

Matt Walker.

Matt Walker. Matt Walker breaks down the science of truly restorative rest.

You spend a third of your life sleeping. You should care about that. As you say, it's the foundation upon which all the other longevity therapeutics are based.

Sleep is not like a light switch, and it shouldn't be like that. It's much more like landing a plane. What is pre your best nights of sleep and what's predicting your worst nights of sleep? And what's stunning is that it's different for different people.

I gave you access to all of my aura data.

Here's how Peter's doing.

Now that's a moonshot. Ladies and gentlemen. I have a problem. Matt, my problem is I don't know how to have a short conversation with you.

You just. Thanks, Matt. Take a.

No, no. You're so. You're so brilliant. Have so much wisdom to share.

And let's not rush to judgment on that quite yet. But I will try my best.

I mean, when we're at Platinum together, you know, our conversations go for an hour and a half, two hours, which we unfortunately can't do here. So I'm going to jump into some zingers and in some areas of clear focus, I want to start with a question a lot of folks have, which is sleep aids, Ambien, Lunesta, good, bad. Tell me about what your thoughts are on those.

Yeah, I've on public record, I've not been the biggest advocate of those. That class of drugs.

You be clear about this.

Yeah. So essentially there are. We're now in Web 3.0 in terms of sleep medications. Web 1.0, those were the benzodiazepines, Temazepam, Valium, and then came the second generation, which were Lunestas. The Ambien drugs.

Yeah.

Both of those work by essentially tickling an inhibitory receptor in the cortex called the GABA system. It's lights out, red light, stop traffic. So what those drugs would do, they are called sedative hypnotics. And sedation is not sleep. Now, when you take an Ambien, I'm not going to argue that you're awake, you're clearly not awake. But to argue that you're in naturalistic sleep, If I were to show you the electrical signature is not the same.

Yeah.

So we conflate sedation with sleep on those drugs. Now, there is a new class of medications and it's the first class of medications that in truth I've actually been publicly advocating for. They're called the Dora's drugs. D O R A small S and we'll speak a little bit about that when we actually look at some of your wonderful data. But these drugs, do they work in a very different way? Instead of going up to your cortex and baseball bat like just knocking it out, these Dora's drugs and there are three FDA approved things like Belsomra Davigo, they act like a set of elegant chemical fingers. They go down towards the brainstem and they just dial down the volume button on wakefulness and then they step back and they allow the antithesis of wakefulness to, to come in its place, which is this thing called naturalistic sleep.

Now people, I've tried it. They're not cheap.

They're not cheap. Currently they are not particularly well covered by insurance. It could be upwards of 3, $350 if you don't get insured per month for that medication. That said though, for some of the chronic insomnia patients that we work with, at the end of a month of horrific sleep, if I were to go see them on that sort of night 30 and say I could wave a magic wand right now, if you gave me $350 and I can go back to the start of the month and you would have far better sleep. Do you want to take the deal? The pain of sleep is such that it actually ends up with a yes answer.

Yeah.

So I think the medication now by the way, you could say, well yes, those medications increase the total amount of sleep. They're also quite good at increasing the amount of REM sleep without disrupting deep sleep. You could argue, well yes. And so what? Just because you increase sleep, it doesn't mean that that sleep is beneficial or functional. Isn't it just like potentially junk DNA? It's just junk sleep. Show me that it makes you a better individual. That's my question as a scientist. And now there were some great studies. When we sleep, we wash the brain clear of all of these metabolic toxins that we build up during the day. Two of which are tau protein and beta amyloid associated with Alzheimer's. And they did a great study. Late life adults 65 and older gave them one of these DORA drugs, Balsamra suvaroxin and they measured the amount of Alzheimer's protein in their blood the night before and then the next morning with and without the drug placebo versus control crossover the next morning. Not only did they sleep longer with these New class of medications. The amount of amyloid and tau protein that had been cleared away from the brain by way of sleep, which was better having taken these medications. Whereas with Ambien, a study just came out three weeks ago and it reduced it by 40%.

Wow.

So in other words, it's not just that you add sleep, it's functional sleep, it's not epiphenomenal sleep.

Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rock star group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, focused on the vision and future for AGI humanoid robotics, longevity blockchain. Basically, the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren't at the Abundance Summit, it's not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit online by going to Exponential mastery dot com. That's exponential mastery dot com. All right, so a piece of wisdom there. Next question. You wake up at 3am, your bladder's full or whatever is a sound. You wake up sometimes I'll get up at 3 or 4. What do you do?

Yeah. So when you try to get back to sleep at that point, the reason that sleep is a problem or is a struggle for many of us, myself included, is that the Rolodex of anxiety begins once that starts turning, you start to ruminate. When you ruminate, you catastrophize. And when you catastrophize, you dead in the water for the next two hours. Because I think in truth, everything is twice as bad in the dark of night than it is in the light of day. So your job at that moment, if you choose not to go down a medication pathway, which I would fully understand, you've got to try to distract your mind. How do you do that? You can try any one of the following five. Firstly, meditation. It's well proven. It is a clinically sort of, I think, evidential improvement in insomnia patients for those middle of the night awakenings. The next is some kind of breath work. You can do box breathing. Pick your numbers. You can do that. The third is a body scan. Start at the top of the head. Close your eyes, just work through and ask yourself, where is the tension? Where am I feeling it? Am I. Is my forehead wrinkled? Should I relax it? The fourth is trying to actually take yourself on a mental walk. This is a really interesting one. We did some work at UC Berkeley. Counting sheet, by the way. It does the opposite. It actually makes it harder to fall back asleep because you're thinking about. This should be helping me Fall asleep. So take yourself on a mental walk in hyper detail. So for me, I'm going to walk the dog. I open the drawer. Is it the blue leash, the red leash? I'll take the red leash, clip them in with the right hand, open the door with my left. It's that level of detail. What's common across all of these techniques is that they get your mind off itself. Sleep at 3am is a little bit like trying to remember someone's name. The harder you try, the further you push it away. As soon as you stop trying, usually the next thing you remember is your alarm going off in the morning. Why? Because you got your mind off itself.

Amazing. I love the way this man communicates. He's extraordinary, isn't he? Yeah, yeah. With such clarity and veracity. So we're going to look at my data in a minute, but let's talk about five actionable steps that folks should jot down, should know inherently. I wrote a chapter in my last book on sleep interviewing you of course as a great resource there. But what are the five most important actionable steps to get the best night's sleep you can?

Yeah, I would say sort of maybe do standard five and then a couple of unconventional. The first is regularity. If you're going to just do one thing, go to bed and wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend, regularity is king because it anchors your circadian rhythm and as a consequence you improve the quantity and the quality quality of your sleep.

One of my most important things. What time do I go to sleep, guys? Anybody know? 9:30? Yeah, I mean I broadcast that. So if somebody catches me after 9:30, it's like I better have been sleep.

And you will see some of Peter's data in a second. When we looked at his data, I was stunned by how metronome like methodical. You're regular, your, your deviation around particularly bedtime was, I mean we wanted to double check the data because yeah, my.

Family goes much later.

So regularity. Second, darkness. We are a dark deprived society in this modern era and we need darkness at night. So I think not just darkness in terms of blackout curtains, eye mask, whatever it was, take all the electronics out. What I'm talking about is in the last hour before bed, set a to bed alarm and when that alarm goes off one hour before bed, I want you to turn down half of the lights in your house.

Yes.

Do this for the next seven days and do the experiment. And if it doesn't work, if you don't feel it's surprising to me how soporific that darkness encourages a sort of a sense of it's time to disengage. I start my wind down routine. So I think in the modern era we get what I would call junk light at night and then we don't get enough resolute light during the day. In this constant sort of low level of chronic anxiety light where it's not light enough during the day and it's not dark enough during the night, should be a beautiful sinusoidal.

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So next one is darkness, but let.

Me just hit on that. What about blue light blocking glasses, like true dark that Dave has and also sleep masks? I use a manta sleep mask, which I love.

Yeah, I love the manta sleep mask too. No relationship with them. I think it's incredibly comfortable. I now have to, you know, it's part of my.

I have three of them and I've.

Got one in both suitcases and one at home and it's non negotiable. The blue light glasses I think are interesting. The blue light hypothesis in terms of impacting sleep. The data has been a little bit more mixed recently. It's not to say that those glasses don't work. What I think those glasses are doing, however, is. Is essentially taking out some of the high fidelity, true technical richness of devices. It's not that devices don't impact, it's.

Like turning down the lights, if you will.

Correct. Yeah, they do impact your sleep. It's just not through necessarily the blue light. It's that these are attention capture devices. They are designed to fleece you of your attention economy and they do it ruthlessly well by activating your brain. When you use the devices, it hits the mute button on your sleepiness so you don't think you're sleepy. Rule of thumb, if you want an unconventional tip, no matter how much I tell you about sleep, you're still going to take Your phone into the bedroom. Not that I would wish that, but that's okay. Here's the rule of thumb. If you do that, you can only use your phone standing up.

Great, great.

And then after about seven or eight minutes in your bedroom, you're using it. You think, I'm just going to have a sit down at that point. I'm sorry. The phone is put away. So light blue, light. I think that helps you disengage. There's a feature on the iPhone that you can turn it. You can desaturate the screen. You can go black or white. You can go largely red. I do the largely red. Final two things. Be mindful of alcohol and caffeine. I've changed my tune on caffeine. I say drink coffee. Health benefits are astronomical dose and the timing make the poison. After three cups of coffee, the health benefits go in the opposite direction. Try to cut yourself off at least 12 hours before bed. 10 hours if you must.

How many folks here know whether they're a slow or a fast caffeine metabolizer? Do you know? Right, so you can find out it's just your genetic screen and that will affect you. Right. So I'm a slow afternoon. After 12, I'm. I'm done.

Yeah. And it's the gene to look out for. It's called the CYP1A2 gene.

If that's off the tongue onto the.

Floor, I've always thought it'd be a great name for like a punk rock band. CYP1A2. Come on now.

Last one. You said food and alcohol.

Yeah. Alcohol is just not your friend. I would love to say, you know, you can get away with it. There is a dose response and we have done some studies where sort of in the late morning, early afternoon, the blast radius of alcohol is far less than late afternoon, early evening. So my advice would be that I would never offer publicly go to the pub in the morning. That way the alcohol is out your system. No harm, no foul. I should also note, by the way, that I'm being puritanical in all of these things. I'm talking about the ideal world. None of us live in that world. We live in the real world and life is to be lived. I don't want to be the healthiest person in the graveyard necessarily, so joie de vivre to some degree. But nevertheless, at least try to, you know, accommodate your knowledge so that you are making informed choices about your health.

Being married to a sommelier makes it difficult for me to, like, not taste the wine on occasion. But I have cut out 95% of all alcohol.

Impressive. Very impressive.

Anything last on the, on the list where we covered those five?

I think the final thing is you've got to have a wind down routine. No matter what it is, whether it's stretching, listening to a podcast, whether it's listening to a sleep story, meditation. We, any young parent, once you've got the, the sort of sleep routine in place, you know that if you deviate from it, it's a disaster. We forget that as adults we are, we are bound to the same edict of a wind down routine. Sleep is not like a light switch and it shouldn't be like that. It's much more like landing a plane. You should take time to come down onto the terra firmament. Whatever it is for you, find out what it is and stick to it religiously.

I use, I use an audible, you know, I use, I listen to a book on tape.

Yep.

And I set it for a 15 or 10 minute, you know, timer to go off and typically I'm asleep before it ends.

It's, it's fantastic. I mean that's why, you know, a bedtime story. Yeah, bedtime story. Calm as a meditation company was struggling a little bit. What they stumbled upon was the fact that the usage statistics on the date 24 hour clock was spiking in the evening. People were self medicating the state of insomnia. Then they realized children like to be read stories. Well, it turns out so do we adults. And next thing you know, Matthew McConaughey, Harry Styles and a bad sleep scientist with an even worse British accent will read you a sleep story.

Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on and you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today. And we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body mri, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. You might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com Peter when Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is for me, one of the most important things I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. All right, I'm going to hand this over to you. Let's talk about Nightfall IQ Analytics. I gave you access to all of my aura data.

Yeah.

And you have a company that you've created which generated a beautiful report. I'm just open sourcing my data here for you. Talk about the company, talk about my data, and talk about how the community can use it.

Yeah. So I think what I've realized in working with concierge clients in my own sleep practice is these sort of wearables. They do a great job at sensing your data and then giving you the data in a ux. I think what my clients were saying is I don't really understand what it means and I don't understand what to do about it. So we ended up creating a new company out of necessity called Nightfall iq and it's a deep sleep analytics company. We'll inhale device agnostic. If you scan the QR code, you will get taken to a special abundance page. We are currently oversubscribed in terms of waitlist but you will get priority access if you just sign up to that and you'll get 20% off. We have a couple of packages but what we do is we ingest all of your data and firstly we will give you a.

And can we circulate this, this QR code through the app and we'll put it up when later on we break for lunch so you can make sure to get the image.

Yeah, we will circle around. So in fact I'll show you. We ran Peter's data. Now Peter, I know for a fact because I've seen lots of his aura ring data on the screen you he is a stellar sleeper. This period of time actually spanned the LA fires. So obviously this is not representative.

Just keep in mind we were out of the home, in hotels, hotel, hotel and out of my normal.

I mean how the data is this good, it's surprising. But firstly we start off with just a dashboard, a basic set of sleep metrics. We'll tell you how you're doing here. Peter, obviously because of that situation was a little down in terms of total sleep. Then we actually give you your different sleep scores in terms of the component constituents of sleep. He's doing an incredible job in terms of his deep sleep. Even now he's always been an exception to the rule and I'll tell you why in just a second. His REM sleep numbers there were down a little bit and we'll come back to that. This is great, but it doesn't really tell you. Well, I got a 60 out of 100 for my REM sleep. Is that good? Is that bad for my age or sex? And because we've got millions of hours of sleep data at my center, we now have a referential range. So next we do how you stack up to your age and sex match norms. And here's how Peter's doing. He's right around the average for total amount of sleep his deep sleep he has. We tried to do a chronological assessment. He's probably about 16 to 17 years in terms of his deep sleep, younger than his chronological age. I am desperately jealous and deeply envious. If he wasn't so nice, I would dislike him immensely. That said though, when it came to REM sleep, we did see this deficiency. Now, REM sleep, when you are under conditions of stress, that is the first thing to go. And we could see it in his data here relative to age and sex match norms, his sleep latency, perfect. We don't like to see you fall asleep too quickly or take too long in terms of the amount of wake after sleep onset, what we call way. So this was higher. No wonder it was during that time period. Finally, his sleep efficiency is fantastic. As long as you're above 85% or higher. We like to see that. The next thing that we have is because Peter has now got so much data, we can actually look iteratively time after time, unique date, timestamp, and we can ask, okay, based on the data, what are the trends that we're seeing here? Firstly, we saw because of that situation that he was facing a huge amount of fluctuation that we wanted to bend those sinusoidal waves of high fluctuations down flat some areas. He was doing great. How his heart rate stayed this stable across that time period, I do not know. But you need to interview him and ask whatever he's doing to keep his stress under conditions that's impressive. What's more interesting is that in the analytics report that you get now we ask something very interesting. We can ask what are the trends that we're seeing over the past year? We saw something interesting in Peter's data. We saw that over really about the past sort of six or eight, nine months. There was an increase in its heart rate variability. This is a very beneficial sign. It, it's up a little bit over 27%. We'll speak offline at some point in terms of finding out what the inflection moment was. But this is the power of Mona.

And Helen telling me to do high interval training and take my zoom calls on my bike.

Isn't that impressive? Where finally, because you don't get to see that with your wearable classically, but here is the data that now remotivates a commitment to that change that you made. The next thing that we really ask is fascinating because we've got high fidelity data. We can now cluster it with our AI analyses and say what is predicting your best nights of sleep and what's predicting your worst nights of sleep? And what's stunning is that it's different for different people. And what we found is that when Peter had a lower heart rate and higher heart rate variability in the last few hours before bed, when he was well, de stressed, as it were, he had significantly more REM and significantly more deep sleep. We also found that when he had early and consistent bedtimes, he fell asleep faster and he slept for significantly longer amounts of time. The next thing we looked at, and.

By the way, you know, it's interesting when I, in coming into this, into this summit, there were a number of times Where I literally was going to sleep at 8:30 so I could wake up before the family and get work done at like 4:30 or 5. Those were my best sleep scores.

Yeah, earlier. Because of that. Earlier. And what it's telling us is that you are sleeping more in harmony with what we call your chronotype, which is morning type, evening type or somewhere in between. We also looked at worst nights of sleep when all of a sudden things get irregular. He had worse quality of sleep and we saw circadian rhythm abnormalities in things like his temperature. You don't want circadian rhythm abnormalities. Your body needs that 24 hour clock time for almost every enzymatic reaction. Later. Bedtimes just destroyed his deep sleep. It cut into that early night phase where we get most of our deep sleep. So what this teaches us is what we need to create as a prescription for Peter. Where to lean into and where to stay away from. We also finally looked, by the way, we reversed an analysis. Not just what predicts your best and worst nights of sleep, but after your best and worst nights of sleep, what are the consequences to you the next day? Best nights of sleep, he was about eight to nine more minutes involved in high intensity physical activity. And he had markedly lower biomarkers of stress. He had about 30 minutes less physiologically distressed biology during the following day. After his worst nights of sleep, he was largely immobile. He was much like an amoeba in terms of his activity. I'm just kidding you. And he also had a lower overall readiness. In other words, he was more fatigued. We offered, and I'll speed through these, lots of recommendations. We were really interested in focusing on his REM sleep, trying to improve that, to boost.

And I have increased it since this report I'm now getting.

So I will show you the data. And we offered some recommendations. But there was a bonus. I told you that those Dora's drugs, the sort of Web 3.0, they're not just good to improve your total amount of sleep. They're also quite clever at increasing your REM sleep without decreasing your deep sleep. This was Peter's data I showed you before we'd run or sorry when we'd first run his report. We then worked with Peter. We actually recommended one of these Doors strokes. He started the Doors data, sorry, the Dora's drug. And now we increased his total sleep time from about seven hours up to almost nine hours. But the amazing part was what he was able to accomplish with his REM sleep. You can see here that his REM sleep score shot up to 25% from 13.9%. So he was super proud of that. So I think a round of applause for this gentleman. I think that's immensely impressive.

By the way. Let me hit on something that's important that you taught me, which is if you look at your sleep over the course of the night, typically your deep sleep comes first and your REM sleep comes in the second half or the last third. So if you cut off your sleep right, if you get woken up at 4 o' clock and you stay awake, you've killed your REM.

Yeah. And that's exactly what the first recommendation was for Peter's REM sleep, where we were saying, try to sleep 20 minutes later into the morning. That's the REM rich phase. And remember when we said he was going to bed late at night, it decimated his deep sleep because deep sleep comes in the first half of the night. So if you shortchange in the first half of the night, you go to bed late, you're taking away from the finger buffet of feasting on deep sleep. Whereas if you sleep longer the next morning you're going further into the REM sleep rich phase. So you get more time at the REM sleep serving dish. Terrible analogy.

I love this and found it extraordinarily useful. I need to talk to my team at Fountain. We should make this part of our baseline. What's the cost per person for this service?

Yeah. So right now, our cost dynamics, we have two services. One is an elite package where you get the full 25 page report and that's coming in at around $4,000 non trivial. I know. The next level is the executive package. That's really where I work with white glove concierge clients. At that point you come into our program, it's a whole year that you will get. We actually repeat the important part of this service is not really the cross sectional baseline. We then repeat it quarterly. So we give you a time lapse photography of what's going on with your sleep for two reasons. First, based on what we said, you need to lean into, have you done it and has it made a difference? The next is we want to nip in the bud any declines. If we've seen over the last two quarters a progressive decline in your deep sleep and you're in your late 60s. We're worried about Alzheimer's disease risk and brain cleansing. We need to change and bend the arrow of that deep sleep back up. So that actually is closer to a $15,000 proposition. Right now we are going to be offering a 20% discount for all Abundance members.

Give it up to Matt for that.

Thank you.

So I want to wrap this part and bring Ariana back out, but just a thought here. You spend a third of your life sleeping, you should care about that. As you say, it's the foundation upon which all the other longevity therapeutics are based. Guys, let's give it up for Dr. Matt Walker.

Thank you so much.

Come on, give it up for Matt. If you enjoyed this episode, I'm going to be releasing all of the talks, all the keynotes from the Abundance Summit exclusively on exponential mastery.com you can get on demand access there. Go to exponential mastery.com.

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