A Q&A on managing sleep deprivation and jet lag. The speakers cover how to prepare your body for staying up all night, recovery strategies afterward, and when to use caffeine or Modafinil. Includes dietary recommendations for handling extended wakefulness.
All right, let's get into our questions. We already burned up, like, half our show. Having fun?
Okay, so this question comes from Greg. He travels a lot. Driving, flying. Sometimes it's impossible to get the sleep I need. What is the best way to prepare my body to stay up all night without dying the next day? What's the best way to recover the next day? So it's all really about kind of jet lag. How do we manage jet lag?
There are so many things you can do for sleep hacking. One of the most unacknowledged problems with lack of sleep is actually fear of lack of sleep. And we get stuck in this cycle where your body is used to sleeping. And I say your body, it has its own consciousness. It has automated systems that are there to keep you running even if you didn't even have a human brain. So if you were a dog or a deer or a lizard, there are things that would run the same way without you having to be aware of them. And one of those is sleep sleep. And we know that things like lack of a night's sleep can result in a 40% impairment of your ability to regulate your blood sugar. So you can basically be pre diabetic after missing a night's sleep. So maybe eating less sugar would be a good idea, except that doesn't really work. I recommend that you eat less sugar, but you actually eat more carbs in the form of safe, clean, low glycemic starches. When you're going to miss a night's sleep because your body is going to be stressed, it is going to rely on glucose. You want to up your iodine intake, you want to take adrenal glandulars, which allow you to make more adrenaline. And if you have access to it, even small doses of physiologically identical cortisol can do magic. If you're going to go hardcore, you're going to have to go to your doctor and say, you know, when I'm really going to miss a night's sleep, I'm going to support my adrenal glands instead of beating the crap out of them. Yeah, I do that specifically for jet lag. But the other things that you can do is, is you can get really comfortable with the idea that you are going to miss a night's sleep, but you're going to be fine. Most of the time, your body gets so wound up around this idea, oh, my God, I'm going to die because I didn't sleep, that the stress about being tired is worse than being tired. And the single best thing that I know of to help you deal with that feeling of being tired is coffee. The second best thing is Modafinil, which is a prescription drug. It's not for everyone. It doesn't work for some people. But for the people for whom it works, which is most of them, it is a profoundly amazing thing to take 100 milligrams, which is the lowest dose. You can even do 50 milligrams and take it, and all of a sudden you just feel like yourself again. And the stress burden of the fear of being tired, the subconscious fear of that, it just goes away because you're actually feeling not tired.
