Sleep is the Boss of You – Matthew Walker, Ph D

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that depriving yourself of sleep probably makes you older. It turns out that one night of partial sleep deprivation activates genes that that are related to biological aging in older adults, according to research from ucla. And the researchers said participants blood showed signs of deterioration in the cell's growth and division cycle after just one night of crappy partial sleep. And this is cool. A lot of the science that they talk about, especially in the US Government's garbage nutritional recommendations are basically correlations. We notice when people do this. But this research is different because it was causal. And the researchers the findings link sleep deprivation to the molecular processes associated with biological aging. And they use the word cause in that instead of correlate. And they're saying insufficient sleep can increase risk of chronic disease by basically making you old. That said, sufficient sleep and sleep deprivation are very much out there as what does that actually mean? If you get awesome sleep for seven hours, is it better than crappy sleep for nine hours? The jury's out. Although clearly if you've been listening for a while, you know my perspective on that stuff. Today's show is going to be pretty incredible because as you probably guessed by now, we're going to be talking about sleep. And this is an area of huge passion for me. If you read Headstrong, if you are about to read my new book Superhuman, that you can pre order now on Amazon if you want to do that, you'll learn about sleep and aging and how I've gone from hating sleep and restricting myself to four or five hours a night for a while when I was starting Bulletproof just because it was in the way, to now happily getting six hours but getting as much deep in REM sleep as a 20 year old, you'll know that this is one of the areas of hacking. My wife puts up with me sleeping with EEG headbands on just to see what's going on in there. But we're going to go deep with a guy who calls himself the Sleep Diplomat and a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, director of the center for Human Sleep Science and the lead sleep scientist at Google. Guy's been on 60 Minutes, National Geographic, Nova, NPR, BBC, and author of the international best selling book why We Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, which has sold a million copies worldwide in 34 different languages. In other words, that book kicked the Bulletproof Diet's ass, which is about half as many languages and half as many copies. So welcome to the show. Matt Walker.

Dave, It's a pleasure to be here and thank you so much for having me.

I wanted to have you on because you said something that was sort of in your face. You said, we're in the midst of a catastrophic sleep loss epidemic. What does that mean?

There is a global sleep loss epidemic underway. What we know is that within the space of probably less than 100 years, which is obviously a blink of an evol eyelid, we've lopped off somewhere between 15 to 20% of our sleep amount. So if you look at surveys back in the 1940s, the average American adult at least was sleeping 7.9 hours a night. Now that number is closer to an average of six and a half hours a night. And that's the average, which means that there's a large part of the distribution that's actually well below that average. And so if you were to think about saying, you know, in the past 20 years, by way of a restricting device around your neck, you've reduced your blood oxygen saturation by 20%, you're down to 80%, you know, that would be astonishing. But that's exactly what has happened with sleep. And we see that same profile in most developed nations. You know, my home country, the United Kingdom, is not much better. 6 hours and 49 minutes. Japan is worst, it's 6 hours and 22 minutes now. So that's a decimation of sleep that's happened throughout the industrial world within less than 100 years.

Well, we're going to have to get right into an area where we might disagree and not really sure yet. How do you know that that isn't enough sleep? I mean, there is that big study of 1.2 million people showing that people who sleep eight hours a night die more of all causes than people who sleep six and a half hours a night.

So what we find is that the less and less that you sleep, the higher and higher your mortality risk and the higher your risk for most of the diseases that are killing us in the developed world. There is actually though, a very interesting curve to that mortality risk. And you're right that once you get actually above nine hours of sleep, your mortality risk then increases significantly. So it's not a U shaped function, it's more like. It's more like a J shape function, kind of a J turned backwards, as it were. So in other words, mortality risk on the vertical and less and less sleep, as you go to the left, the higher and higher Your likelihood of dying is. But once you get past about eight and a half to nine hours, there is a hockup in the mortality risk. And at first it seems like perhaps that's telling us if you sleep too much, you're going to die at a younger age. However, I think the media has been misinformed. If you actually look at those studies, what seems to be happening is that that hook is caused by people who are very sick. And what we know. So these are people with usually infectious diseases or cancer. And what was happening there is that sleep is the best sort of health insurance policy and it's the best immune and healing process that we know of. And when you are sick, I think everyone knows, you just want to curl up, get into bed and sleep it off, essentially. And sleep, we know, actually responds to infection. It's a very well replicated finding. What was happening here, we now believe, is that those people were so sick and their bodies and brains were calling up more sleep to help the fight against the disease, but the disease was just too much for sleep. So it artificially looks like sleeping more is bad for you, but that does not seem to be the case.

All right, I love that answer. To put it in one sentence, basically, sick people need more sleep.

That's right. Sick people sleep more and they need more sleep. But I do want to actually almost come over to your side and this may be strange coming from a sleep scientist. Let's just go a little bit further with the thought experiment though. Could there be a thing as too much sleep? I actually think yes, there could be. And the reason I believe that is because it's no different for any of the other three critical ingredients of life. Food, water and oxygen. So can you overeat? Yes, you can. Can you actually get too much oxygen? Yes, it's called hyperoxemia and it will cause free radical damage to brain cells. Can you over hydrate? It happened in the 1990s with the ecstasy craze where governments were saying, when you go to the dance clubs, please drink water. People drank too much, their blood pressure went up and they had cardiovascular events. So in all of these things there is a sweet spot. And getting too little and too much seems to be a problem. Are most people in danger of getting too much sleep? Au contra would be my, my response.

Okay, full agreement with you there. I knew we were going to find some common ground here, but there's kind of the opposite side of the coin here. If sick people need more sleep, wouldn't it follow that exceptionally healthy people need Less sleep.

If sleep was only there to actually, for example, support your immune system, you could imagine that would be the case. But it's not. There is no single major system within the body. Reproductive system, cardiovascular, thermoregulatory, metabolic, or upstairs in the brain in terms of a neural process. There is no single system of the body or the brain that isn't optimally enhanced by sleep when you get it, or detrimentally impaired when you don't get enough. So sleep actually services every one of the biological operations that we know of in the brain and the body. And so therefore, just because your sort of, let's say your immune health is good doesn't mean that your cardiovascular system doesn't also need sufficient sleep or your reproductive system doesn't need sleep, or your brain and your neural processes, particularly in fighting things like Alzheimer's disease, doesn't need sleep. So that's why, just because you're healthy, you don't necessarily need less sleep. In fact, it's a very quick and easy way to get unhealthy.

Okay, I totally buy that. Now, if someone were to sleep six hours, say in an airport versus six hours in a cave, what's the difference between those two nights?

It's more than likely that there will be a difference in what we call sleep quality. So what you've done there elegantly is lock in quantity, which is where we're saying, look, clocked time is the same between those two conditions. When you're sleeping in a noisy environment, sleep is, is your sleep broken up by brief awakenings throughout the night?

Sleep versus deep sleep.

So typically what we see in the healthiest people, and I guess that that's the best barometer, you would probably want to be seeing somewhere between 25 to 30% of deep non REM sleep for REM sleep, somewhere between 20 to 25%. And I'm giving ranges here, so the numbers may not all add up, but it's an estimate. And then you. About 45 to 50% of lighter non REM sleep, which is what we call stage two non REM sleep. And I should note that that other type of non REM sleep is actually critical. It's the most prolific stage of sleep that all of us experience, like non REM sleep. And you could well imagine thinking, well, that's just the stage that you have to go through to get down into deep non REM or to go through to get up into REM sleep. So it's kind of just junk sleep. It's quite the opposite. We're now finding that that type of sleep is packed full of things that we call sleep spindles, which are these short bursts of electrical activity that happen for about a second or a second and a half. And, for example, those sleep spindles are essential for learning and memory functions. So, you know, it doesn't surprise me when I take a step back and we were to ask, well, which stage of sleep is more important? And the answer is, they're all important because sleep is the most idiotic of all evolutionary behaviors for lots of reasons. And if Mother Nature could have excised any one of them because it was functionless, I, well, imagine she would have done that, you know, thousands, if not millions of years ago. But the fact that all of these sleep stages have fought their way heroically through every step along the evolutionary path must mean that all of them have a unique and important contribution to make. And that's exactly what we're discovering.

There's also the argument that Mother Nature didn't really evolve us to live in the world where we got all the food we need and tigers aren't really going to kill us. So some of those sleep things that evolved over all this time for the world we lived in might not be as relevant for where we are today. Do you think there's a possibility that in a world with just a different level and type of stress and a different amount of environmental control, nutrient availability, that sleep itself will change, maybe evolutionarily or maybe even consciously?

Yeah, it's a fascinating question, actually. Well, I'll come back to one thought about that. But I think sleep will evolve. Certainly what we know, if you look back across the millennia, we obviously emerged from apes, and there was something fundamental about the transition from tree to ground that happened. That when we as hominids essentially came out of the trees and onto the ground, the amount of REM sleep that we had shot up dramatically. And in fact, we are unique in the entire animal kingdom, or at least the mammalian kingdom. We have twice the amount of rapid eye movement sleep than any other species that we've measured. And so I make that point because it tells us that there were critical inflection moments during evolution where sleep changed for reasons that we still don't yet understand. There's some theories as to why. Will it change again? Undoubtedly. So will it be, you know, what is the time frame of that? I don't think we know. But what we do know right now is that from populations that we take in this present moment, in the current evolutionary state of our electrified society, when you take someone below seven hours of sleep. We can measure objective impairments in their brain and their body.

If you had to stack rank this sleep, let's say you're only going to get six hours of sleep because you're going to catch a flight tomorrow or because you have screaming children, or all the reasons that people cite for not getting the amazing perfect eight hours of sleep even though they're all important. Is it rem then deep, then stage 2 non rem? Is that the order of prioritization?

The inherent danger with that question is you have to ask what are you trying to optimize for? Because each one of those different stages supports unique and different functions. So let's say that you want to sort of optimize your glucose regulation. Well, there the argument would be you should focus on deep slow wave sleep because that's been demonstrated causally to regulate blood sugar equilibrium. If you're trying to optimize for your learning and memory, then you may want to focus on lighter stage 2 non REM sleep as well as deep sleep because they have a combinatorial benefit. If you want to focus on your, for example, your emotional health and your mental state, then you may want to optimize for rapid eye movement sleep. So it really depends on exactly what your target is. And unfortunately, as human beings, you know, you don't want to shortchange on any one of those and you will pay the price no matter what.

I suppose the thing is, you'll pay the price. But the average listener, and there's hundreds of thousands of people listening right now, if they even track their sleep. And I've done a bunch of episodes on sleep tracking and I was just looking at my numbers for last night. I got an hour and 25 minutes of REM, an hour and 32 minutes of deep sleep in around 7 hours and 20 minutes. So not a great night's sleep for me just because the numbers are low and the amount of sleep I slept is high. Normally I'm six and a half, but I should be getting about two hours of each. I'm listening to you about this non REM thing, but I'm going to be pragmatic. I'm looking at the ROI on sleep. What's the return on investment? Yeah, I could get two more hours of light sleep. Is it going to make me live 20% longer? Is it going to make me smarter tomorrow? Is it going to make me a better parent? What's it actually going to do for me versus where I could put that other two hours of time?

So actually all Three of those examples sleep will support that you described even the parental one, we know that and your relationship. In fact, sleep is predictive of marital difficulties, marital arguments, and the quality of marriage too. So you can go from inside of the cell and we could speak about the DNA all the way up to high complex socio emotional functions, interpersonal relationships, and you can see that damage. So I think it really comes down to the question of, you know, what do you want out of life? Would you like to, you know, invite disease and sickness early into your life when you could be living a longer life? Or are you happy to actually pay that cost towards the end of life and during your life increase your risk of a significant morbidity, for example, like a heart attack, that you survive, but now you are compromised in terms of your heart function. So we know that there's probably, you know, if you were to try and ask me, stack diet, exercise and sleep, because they're the other sort of two things that people try to optimize. You know, where does sleep sit in that? And we can play that game at a number of different levels. But let me just go to one extreme. Let's say I take you, Dave, and I deprive you of food for 24 hours, I deprive you of exercise for 24 hours, or I deprive you of sleep for one night and then I assay your body and your brain across all of the different dimensions that are important for health. And yeah, and sleep just decimates those other two. I mean, it's not even close. Now, I'm not trying to belittle diet and exercise. They are fundamental and it's all interacting. Of course, none of these sit in isolation, but if you want a sort of a realization of what you're doing by under sleeping, I think that that's one good metric to keep in mind.

Okay, that is a beautiful example and I'm glad you brought that up because that really paints it in a great context. And just for full disclosure, I started out 20 years ago pretty much hating sleep because it got in the way of all the cool stuff I wanted to do. Right now I'm very conscious about using sleep as a tool. And I do things an hour or two before I go to bed that increase the quality of my sleep. And I generally wake up feeling really good. And my numbers make me happy to the point where I don't know that I would want to invest more of my life in sleep. But I also am doing stuff that is related to the Russians and I want to Ask you if you've ever looked at this, and if you haven't, we can just kind of move on. But back in the the 60s and 70s, in the unique way that Russian scientists thought back then, they said, well, it's very expensive to send astronauts to space, and they spend a third of their time asleep. So let's just invent a technology so astronauts can sleep a lot less, and therefore we can spend less rocket fuel and build smaller rockets and send less astronauts to space. Right. Brilliant thinking. So they invented cerebral electrical stimulation. They ran a very small current back and forth between the ears at the same frequency as deep sleep, or REM sleep, to put the brain in that state and probably do some weird electrical stuff, and found that they could function adequately, probably not perfectly, on two or three hours of sleep. And have you experimented with or seen the results of any kind of technology that purports to increase the effectiveness or efficiency of sleep?

There are a number of them. And by the way, those studies, they don't really assess the true whole organism. They're usually assessing cognitive functions. So I think it's to be mindful of.

But you have tumors, but your brain works.

That's right, yeah.

They're not going to measure that.

Your systolic blood pressure just went from 120 to 165 within the space of eight hours. But don't worry, you're fine. So there are several things that people could do to try to augment their sleep and get better sleep in the mold that you're talking about. One is actually temperature. So it's mostly effective for deep sleep right now. But what we know is that your body needs to drop its core temperature by about 2, 2 and a half degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep and then to stay asleep. And it's the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot, because too cold is taking you in that right temperature direction for good sleep. And there were some studies done, and we've played around with this too, where you kind of essentially strap someone in what looks like a wetsuit that has all of these veins running all over it, these capillaries. And then you, as the experimenter, control the water flow in those capillaries. And you can warm the water up or you can cool it down, and you can do that to any part of the body discreetly. And what they were able to do is that by essentially warming the surface of the hands and the feet, they were able to charm the blood out of the core of the body, and therefore your core body temperature plummeted as a result. And that increased deep sleep in young adults, but it even more dramatically increased deep sleep in older adults and those with insomnia. So temperature seems to be one of the ways that we can manipulate at least deep quality of sleep. If people are struggling with sleep. There's another technique called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or cbti, and that has really proven markedly efficacious. It's now no longer the question is, does CBT help improve the quantity and quality of your sleep? The questions now in the research field that we're doing is that sleep improvement actually improving other downstream sort of consequences? And there are now some great studies showing that it markedly improves your mental health. It decreases your paranoia, decreases anxiety, it decreases rates of depression. So there are a couple of methods that you can sort of, you know, some clinical, therapeutic, others environmental that you can play around with too. Light is another one of those things that we could speak about if you wanted to.

But yeah, Sachin Panda came on and talked a lot about light and biology. And one of my portfolio companies actually makes glasses that block all frequencies of light that affect the scn. And I think listeners could benefit from hearing you talk for just a brief period about how important light is for sleep. But I would just say go deep in the podcast with Satchin Panda or check out the TrueDark website for a bunch of research on that stuff. Just talk about light and what you've seen light does that's good or bad for sleep and just reiterate that for people who still turn their bright bathroom lights on at night.

So, yeah, Sachin is fantastic. We know each other very well, but we are a dark deprived society in this modern era. And it's not just about the devices, although I'll speak just very briefly about those that are harmful. It's also just that we bathe ourselves in electrical light throughout the evening. And the reason you need darkness at night is to release a hormone called melatonin. And melatonin helps the timing of your sleep and the healthy timing of your sleep. But technology is perhaps fast becoming one of the greatest sort of assaulting things in terms of our sleep. One study looked at the impact of one hour of iPad reading before bed versus just one hour of reading a normal book in dim light. And what they found is that the one hour of iPad reading actually blunted the amount of melatonin that was released by 50% 5, 0. Furthermore, it delayed the peak of that melatonin which normally should peak, you know, a few hours before bed and then rise nicely in the first couple of hours, it delayed that peak by three hours. So myself here in California right now, I would be much closer to Hawaii time if I read an hour on an iPad before bed. In terms of my melatonin, two other things that they found with that study. One is that it also decreased the amount of rapid eye movement sleep that people were having. And then finally, even when they stopped reading the iPad in the days afterwards, there was a blast radius impact of that reading, that the effect of on that sleep disruption didn't go away until two or three days later. Wow. So it's almost like sort of washing yourself out with a drug that, you know, just that one hour, you didn't shake it off for a couple of days. So light is something that I don't think we think enough about. And if you want a quick. I don't really like to call them hacks, but you know, when you, you know, blue light blocking glasses. There was one study that demonstrated some efficacy there for melatonin. The other way that you can do it is just turn down half of the lights in your house before you go to bed. You would be surprised at how soporific that that feels. And it really does make you sleepy. And then eye masks and sort of block out curtains throughout the night, if that's your thing.

It's ridiculous how much just dimmer switches can change your life. And you go to my house, there's dimmer switches on everything. We don't use white LED light bulbs. We use halogen bulbs because they dim better and they have a more natural spectrum that's less blue. And at night we have red night lights or even red full on a few lamps. And all of my exterior lighting is red. So the difference in the quality of my sleeping, if I look at screens or whatever, I wear the glasses. And the glasses from my company are red and they block violet and green and blue and other things for the melatonin effect. But I double my deep sleep on my sleep ring if I do that versus walk around the way I used to. So I found that between temperature, which I recommend, and light, as well as just not eating too close to bedtime. And then a couple supplements. The supplements for me help the rem, but for my deep sleep, it was all about just turning down the lights. But your studies show that it's actually affecting REM sleep, not deep sleep. What is the hack that raises REM sleep the most?

Other than lights, there's actually very few hacks for REM sleep. It turns out one of them may actually be that we're just exploring right now and we don't have enough data, is reverse engineering the deep sleep hack, which is if you look at the circadian profile throughout the night and circadian just means your 24 hour biological rhythm, your core body temperature starts to go down before bed. It hits its rock bottom core temperature around 3 or 4 in the morning, stays there for about another hour and then it will start to ris back up in the late morning. Why is that important for rem? Well, your deep sleep and your REM sleep are not evenly distributed throughout the night. You have most of your deep sleep in the first half of the night and you have most of your REM sleep in the second half of the night. Especially in fact in the last quarter of the night, which parenthetically by the way, should give people pause. Because if you were to say, look, I normally get eight hours of sleep and I only got six hours last night, so I lost 25% of my normal sleep. I lost, lost two hours from eight hours. 25%. That's true, but it's not quite true because yes, you lost 25% of your total sleep, but you may have lost 80 to 90% of your REM sleep. So there is a nasty twist in that tale of how sleep is distributed. And if you're short changing your brain by waking up early because you think you want to get a jump start on the day or get to the gym, you should be mindful of that science. And by the way, I may be sounding like I'm trying to tell people how to live. I'm not, I'm not here to tell anyone how to live. All I want to do is empower you with the science of sleep and then everyone can make their own informed choice. I'm not trying to suggest how to live here.

You're not coming across as that. But if you do this, then this will happen. That's sort of precious knowledge and that's the stuff that I'm working to tease out on every episode of the show. So I don't think that our audience is going to be offended at all by this.

I hope not.

I'm intrigued though, because the idea that wake up at 5:30 every morning to become a better human being, you're saying that that could kill your dreams and.

Probably yourself a little bit quicker, or rather a lot quicker.

Elrod's going to be so mad at you all.

I'm speaking are the scientific truths.

I did wake up at 5am every morning for two years because I decided this is going way back. But I said, all right, this is what the strong people do, so I'm just going to make myself do it. And I found after two years I could do it. And I'm normally a very late. I stay up very late naturally, but after two years I said my creativity is down. I just don't feel as good. I can do it, but I don't like it. I just quit and just said, I'm going to sleep, my body wants to sleep and I've been happy ever since. That said, if. Hal, if you're listening, I totally support your miracle morning thing. I just think morning, the definition of morning might be different for some people than for others. Right?

It really is. And I think that's important to understand that there are evening types and there are morning types. You're an evening type and you don't get a choice. You don't get to decide. It's genetically determined. We know the genes. You are given that edict at birth and it's very difficult to change it. And when you fight against that, you normally are sort of returned by way of disease and illness. So it's morning types. It's great to be waking up at 5 if you're going to bed at, you know, 8:39 at evening types, it's great to be going to bed at 1 if you're, you know, waking up at 9 or 10 in the, in the morning. There is, I'm not trying to shame anyone in terms of an evening or morning type. What I am saying is, though, it is important to do two things. Firstly, get the necessary amount of sleep that we know from science and we can sort of, you know, arbitrate on that amount. The other is, and I think this is going to be the next sort of public health front on sleep is sleeping at the right time for you. And one way this comes across, when I will speak to sort of patients or people when I do public speaking, they'll come up and say, look, I've got terrible insomnia. I get into bed and I can't fall asleep for the first hour or hour and a half. And then I ask them, I say, you know, if you had a completely free day with no commitments, desert island, no one to wake up for, what time would you go to bed normally and wake up, do you think? And they would say, well, probably go to bed at maybe like more midnight or 1. And then I would probably wake up at like 8 or 9. And then I say, well, what time are you going to bed now? And they say, well, I go to bed at 10 because I want to wake up at 6 to sort of get my day started. So what's happening there is that they've placed their sleep eight hour window in a way that is mismatched against their biological, what we call chronotype, morning type or evening type. So they don't have insomnia, they're just trying to fall asleep at 10pm when the brain is not ready to fall asleep, it's only going to be ready to invite sleep at midnight. And so no wonder it's masquerading as what we call sleep onset insomnia. And when you shift, you start to sleep just fine.

I absolutely love hearing that. And it, it makes sense. Go to sleep when you're tired and you wake up when you're not tired. One of the reasons that I pulled my kids out of school just very recently, we're going to try homeschooling for a year is because the school makes them wake up in the middle of the night. From a kid perspective anyway. So I'm dealing with chronically tired kids who are kind of miserable in the morning and super tired. And no matter how early I put them to sleep, they're just waking up too early because school is prioritized around work. And I think the value of letting the kids sleep when teenagers or preteens in my case want to sleep, it's just worth it for a growing brain that I'm willing to deal with the extra work involved in homeschooling. Is there hope to fix the start time of school to be biologically compatible with our children?

There is a movement that's underway right now and I'm actually here in California. We had it on the bill, it got passed through the legislature last time around to delay school start times here in California, but it was not signed by the governor in the end, we're now going back and I think we have a chance at doing it this time around. We will look back with shame and sadness at how we were trying to educate our children amnesic by starting them at School at 7:30 or 8:00 clock in the morning. We know from the data, and there is wonderfully powerful data that is I cover it all in the book is firstly when children start school later, and we're talking about 9 o' clock here, the academic grades increase, behavioral problems decrease, truancy rates decrease, and psychological and psychiatric referrals also decrease. But one of the most surprising findings is that the life expectancy of kids actually increased. And you may be thinking, well, how on earth do you determine that the leading cause of death in late stage adolescents in most developed nations is actually not suicide, it's road traffic accidents. And that is where sleep matters enormously. And I'll give you one example from Teton county in Wyoming. They shifted their school start times from 7:35 in the morning to 8:55. And those kids firstly reported getting a whole hour of extra sleep. But when they looked at that subsequent year, what you saw was a 70% drop in car crashes in that narrow age range of 16 to 18. Now to put that in context, the advent of ABS technology in cars, which is sort of like that anti lock brake system that prevents your wheels from locking up, that dropped accident rates by 20 to 25%, I think, and it was deemed a revolution. Well, here is the simple biological factor. Getting enough sleep that will drop accident rates by, you know, up to 70%. So, you know, I think if our goal as educators truly is to educate and not risk lives in the process, then I fear that we are failing our children in a quite spectacular manner with this incessant model of early school start times.

Oh man, it makes me so happy to hear you say that. I am going to take that audio snippet and put it all over Instagram, because you're right about that. I, I remember just the torture of school. When I was young. I never made it through school without falling asleep in at least half my classes every single day. And they'd always yell at me. I'm like, how am I supposed to stay awake in here? What you're teaching is boring and I'm tired. And I still actually was a good student because honestly, it wasn't that hard. You could read everything that they said in 20 minutes. But I just, I feel you look at what we're doing to tens of millions of kids and it's, it's just not okay on basic human levels. So to hear someone from a big school and with your credentials say that. Thank you. Keep saying that. It's really important.

Well, I think it is. The way that I've been approaching this now with the California legislature is sleep is actually a right of all human beings and it is a civil right. So this delayed school start times mission, it should be part of a civil rights movement. It is the civil right of our children and our teenagers to be given the chance to get the sleep that their brains need. Because when sleep is abundant Minds flourish. And when it's not, they don't.

Well, I just had the hack for that come to mind. It just so happens that I am an ordained minister. I got one of those online ones so I could marry a friend one time. So I hereby now create the Church of Sleep. And if you're a member of the Church of Sleep, you can have a religious exemption for showing up for the first part of school. Because the leader of your new religion around sleep has just ordained that if your kids start school before nine, you are going to hell. There, Problem solved. What do you think?

I think it's an unorthodox but elegant solution.

Only one way to deal with bureaucrats. More bureaucracy. I love it. All right, back to REM sleep. There's a guy who's been on bulletproof radio. His name's Dan Gartenberg, and he started a company called Sonic Sleep with an NIH grant, like a million grant, looking at ways to enhance deep and REM sleep using soundscapes. And the app is Sonic Sleep, and we talked about some of the results there. I've seen differences in my sleep score from using the app. Have you seen efficacy around white noise, around playing certain binaural beats, or any other sound technology for improving sleep quality other than just masking background noise?

So there's some scientific studies actually done on that, and I would only really trust the scientific studies. And it's not to say that companies can't do scientific studies. I just haven't seen data from such companies providing good science. What I will say is that those experiments have been done in scientific laboratories, and there are several things that we know. There is some evidence from Northwestern University that pink noise may potentially be able to help improve deep quality sleep, although I think the consistency and reliability has been difficult to. To. To look at or at least replicate. There is another technique where you actually are measuring the brainwaves online. And when you go into this deep sleep, you get these beautiful deep sleep brainwaves that go up and down maybe just once or twice a second, which for the brain is very slow. Normally the brain is going up and down 40 to 80 times per second. And as you're measuring it, what they tried to do, and this was a group in Germany, they essentially started to play tones just at the strike of midnight of each one of those peaks of the deep, slow brainwaves of deep sleep. In other words, they were almost acting like an auditory metronome to try and help amplify those deep sleep brainwaves. And they were able to increase the size of those deep sleep brainwaves. And they also showed some memory improvement. But here's the problem. If you actually, again, read into that paper, if you keep stimulating for more than a few seconds, the brain shuts down the benefit, because what happens is that the excitation in the brain gets too much, and if it continues unchecked, you would essentially go into an epileptic seizure. And the brain has lots of wonderful feedback loops that will prevent anything like that from happening within a biological realm. So in terms of its real benefit, efficaciously throughout the night, that looks like it's really unproven and unlikely to be the best route for improvement of deep sleep. So right now, I think the sound data is unclear. I should also note, by the way, just as a counterpoint, one of the best ways that we have to selectively remove your deep sleep is to play auditory tones to you. And this is a very elegant method where I can have you sleep for eight hours constantly. I never wake you up, But I can selectively remove almost all of your deep sleep by playing these auditory tones at a level that is a sub awakening threshold. So as soon as you look like you're going down into deep sleep, I start playing these tones, and your brain sort of starts to rise back up in its alertness and goes back into light sleep. And I can prevent it from going down into the deep depths by way of playing these tones. So I think you have to be very careful with the sound quality and exactly what you're doing with the brain. You actually may not even be increasing the deep sleep brain waves. You could actually be impairing them or blocking them.

Yeah, I definitely monitor mine to make sure that that isn't happening when I use stuff like that. And it's interesting, there's another study with babies and white noise. In fact, this was in my very first book called the Better baby book, about how do you have healthier kids with hopefully bigger brains. And it turns out that white noise for very young infants causes all sorts of bad things in their brains when they're sleeping. Not good things. So you have a lot of parents kind of reflexively playing it to make babies sleep, but it had something to do with a lack of synaptic pruning, if I remember right. Like, yikes. So, yeah, sound is an unexpected. Well, we're just beginning to explore what sound does. And there are definitely some scientific things out there that they're making progress. And I think with good science. But it's early days there. I feel like 20 years from now we'll probably know something way more than we know now. You agree with that?

I agree, and I think yeah, I very much. We're actually exploring some ways to do that with both electricity and also sound as well. But I think sound to me is one of those things to just take a step back and ask, think about the way in which we sleep as a species. And most species, they typically retreat to a place where there is usually low amounts of sound. And in fact, the brain actively shuts off its sensory gate deep inside the brain. It's called the thalamus, and it actively inhibits and prevents sound from coming up into the brain and being processed. So, you know, all of these things, when I think about it from the most fundamental scientific perspective, tells me that the invasion of sound into the brain during sleep is one that evolution has taught us is usually not desirable. It doesn't mean that it couldn't be a pathway to a hack, but I think right now it doesn't seem to be the logical path for me at least.

Got it. So be cautious there.

Yeah.

In terms of supplementation, I've written extensively about various things that are out there, L Theanine and GABA and things like that, but I've never had a supplement that quantifiably raised my REM sleep.

So all of these things, when I think about it from the most fundamental scientific perspective, tells me that the invasion of sound into the brain during sleep is one that evolution has taught us is usually not desirable. It doesn't mean that it couldn't be a pathway to a hack, but I think it's right.

Specifically, without just improving overall sleep quality, Bulletproof makes a sleep supplement. Full disclosure here. I'm not talking about sleep mode. I'm talking about lion's mane mushroom extract from a company called Lifecycle. They were just on the show and the guys there said, dave, try the dual extract form. And I said, all right, I'm going to try this. And they said, try it for dreaming. And I've always been around 25, 30 minutes of REM sleep, no matter how many hours I sleep and no matter what I do, it's been like that for as long as I've monitored my sleep for 15 years. I started doing that stuff and I mentioned I got an hour and a half of REM sleep. I take seven dropper fulls of lion's mane mushroom extract that raises least enzymes.

Now, it doesn't seem to be the logical path for me, at least.

Got it. So be cautious there yeah, in terms of supplementation, I've written extensively about various things that are out there, L, Theanine and GABA and things like that. But I've never had a supplement that quantifiably raised my REM sleep studies, nerve growth factor and, and BDNF and things like that. And all of a sudden I'm getting, at least from my perspective, baller levels of REM sleep. Have you heard of mushrooms doing that? Or psychedelic mushrooms or chicken? I don't know. What are things that are going to raise REM sleep for everyone listening?

Yeah, there's no evidence right now that lion's mane actually helps improve REM sleep. None that we can see in broad populations or in humans, Neither animals, normal or even small experimental laboratory studies. And there is some evidence that it may actually help improve some aspects of sleep, but certainly not REM sleep specifically.

Without just improving overall sleep quality. Like Bulletproof makes a sleep supplement. Full disclosure here. I'm not talking about sleep mode. I'm talking about a lion's mane mushroom extract from a company called Lifecycle. They were just on the show and the guys there said, dave, try the dual extract form. And I said, all right, I'm going to try this. And they said, try it for dreaming.

And there's no evidence for that. Now to be clear, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So it's still possible that it may be. All I'm simply saying is that there's no scientific data to do that. What about Your N of 1? I think that that's interesting. I would imagine that you're someone who may not be prey to the placebo effect, but what I would also say is that the placebo effect is the most reliable effect in pharmacology. And so, you know, I think it's, I would love to see studies that actually do, you know, a proper crossover placebo controlled double arm study to see if it's, it's causal.

I'm encouraging those guys. I've always been around 25, 30 minutes of REM sleep no matter how many hours I sleep and no matter what I do. It's been like that for as long as I've monitored my sleep for 15 years. And I started doing that stuff and I mentioned I got an hour and a half of REM sleep. I take seven dropperfuls of lion's mane mushroom extract. That raises least to do exactly that. The supposition I have no evidence of this is that the dual extract, most of the time people just eat the mushrooms or make A tea, there's an alcohol base of extracts and there's a water base of extracts and maybe the psychoactives are in one versus the other. I don't think anybody knows, but it's the only thing I found that worked for me. So I'm definitely a fan. But like you said, early days, no double blind trials. So I'm going to tell Lifecycle to do a trial and see if I can get them to. And if so, I'll send you the data if it's properly double blinded, etcetera, etcetera. Etc. And if it's good, then you can try it.

Yeah, I'd love to see those data.

Okay, that's cool. All right. If we have. Yeah, we have time. Let's talk about Ambien, tranquilizers, Thorazine. I have no idea if you use that for sleep. Ketamine, all the other things that are heavy duty sleep drugs. Is there a role for these in society?

I think it's fading and it's fading very quickly. And part of the reason. Let's just speak about typical prescription sleep aids. These are what we call the sedative hypnotic drugs. And you've just, you know, most people would know the classic sleeping pills that you could take by brand and I won't call any one of them out, but the studies are now quite clear that using those medications markedly increases your risk for mortality, for death. Those sleeping pills have also been significantly associated with the risk of development of cancer. All forms, in fact, so much so.

Studies nerve growth factor and BDNF and things like that. And all of a sudden I'm getting, at least from my perspective, baller levels of REM sleep. Have you heard of mushrooms doing that or psychedelic mushrooms or chicken? I don't know. What are things that are going to raise REM sleep for everyone listening?

Yeah. There's no evidence right now that Lion's Main that in 2016 the American College of Physicians actually made a landmark recommendation on the basis of the fact that those sleeping pills very rarely actually helps improve REM sleep. None that we can see in broad public studies or in humans. Neither animals nor human. Yeah. Nor broad population or even small actually give you much of a benefit above and beyond placebo and the deathly and carcinogenic associations that had been found. They recommended that sleeping pills must no longer be experimental laboratory studies. And there is some evidence that it may actually be the first line recommendation for insomnia. It has to be cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which is a psychological therapy technique. And then I believe I see help improve some aspects of sleep, but certainly not REM sleep. I think it was maybe just 20. What data. We know something like 26, 27 days ago the FDA actually upped the safety warning on sleeping pills because of the dangers that were associated with them. It raised the risk category of them. So I think the time is now. There's no evidence for that now to be clear. You know, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So it's still possible that it may be. All I'm simply saying is that there's no scientific data to do that. You know, what about Your N of 1? I think that that's interesting I would imagine to come and I should note by the way, this is not an attack on those pharmacological, those pharmaceutical companies nor the scientists who develop those drugs. I know some of those scientists and they are desperately trying to produce medicines that help humanity.

They're all trying to help.

Yeah but it's just the fact that those medications that you're someone who's. Who may not be prey to the placebo effect. But what I would also say is that the place ations unfortunately don't help and they do not produce naturalistic sleep. And you also when you come off them have a horrific, what's called a sleep rebound effect where you go back not only to the bad sleep that you were having, but it's even worse as a consequence. So those drugs I think are to be stayed away from. There's also effect is the most reliable effect in pharmacology. And so. So I think it's. I would love to see studies that actually do a proper crossover placebo controlled double arm study to see if it's causal.

I'm encouraging those guys also some evidence.

Not quite as compelling for the use of things to do exactly that.

The supposition I have no evidence of.

This is that it's like antihistamines which some people may be using in the evening. Benadryl, like Benadryl. So I think that the data is less certain there but it doesn't look great. And again I think you can look for alternatives.

I'm really concerned about people using Benadryl for sleep. And there's no doubt the dual extract most of the time people just eat the mushrooms or make a tea. There's an alcohol base of extracts and there's a water base of extracts and. And maybe the psychoactives are in one versus the other. I don't think anybody knows. But it's the only thing I Found that worked for me. It does work. Especially if you have, you know, you ate some old fish that night and you have histamine response, which is stimulating. I'll take a quarter of Benadryl, but if you take a whole one, there's really good data that Benadryl inhibits your ability to what, Move memories from short term to long term. So you'll have a fuzzy memory if you sleep on that.

Same with the prescription sleep medication.

So I'm definitely a fan. But like you said, early days, no double blind trial patients. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Ambien or. Okay, I'm sorry, I won't call them out by name. The thing that rhymes with Rambian.

And I think it's important to ask.

And others. Yeah.

What do we mean by it helps me. Because what people mistake is that those drugs are a class of drugs, as I said, that are called the sedative hypnotics. And sedation is not sleep. But most people mistake the former with the latter when they take them. And I'm not going to argue when you take those drugs that you are awake during the night. You're clearly not. But to suggest that you are in naturalistic sleep is an equal falsehood.

Okay. That is profound and awesome. I'm just loving our conversation so far. So I'm going to tell Lifecycle to do a trial and see if I can get them to. And if so, I'll send you the data if it's properly double blinded, et cetera, et cetera. And if it's good, then you can try it.

Yeah, I'd love to see those data. Okay, I'm glad.

All right, I want to go way back in your career, because when you worked on your PhD in neurophysiology, you study the brainwave patterns of people with different forms of dementia who. Who were awake. That's cool. All right. If we have. Yeah, we have time. Let's talk about Ambien. What did that teach you?

It taught me for two years, absolutely nothing because I failed to get any meaningful results. I was trying to differentially diagnose people very early on as to which type of dementia they had. Was it, you know, Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease or what we call frontotemporal dementia? And I was sticking electrodes on the head, and I was measuring their brainwave patterns, and I couldn't find any tranquilizers.

Thorazine, I have no idea if you use that for sleep. Ketamine, all the other things that are heavy duty sleep Drugs. Is there a role for these good.

Results to separate them at all? And at weekends, I used to go home with this sort of stack of journals and I'd have a little igloo of journals in my doctor's residence and I'd sit there and read at the weekends. And one of those after two years journals helped me understand. I think it's fading and it's fading very quickly. And part of the reason. Let's just speak about typical prescription sleep aids. These are what we call the stand. My mistake. Some parts of the brain in some of those dementias were sort of eating or being eaten away. And those parts of the brains were sleep centers, whereas for other dementias, the brain regions that controlled sleep were unaffected. And I realized at that moment I was measuring the brainwave activity of my patients. Sedative hypnotic drugs. And you've just, you know, most people would know the classic sleeping pills that you could take by brand, and I won't call any one of them out. But the studies are now quite clear at the wrong moment in time. I was measuring them when they were awake and I should be measuring them when they were asleep. That using those medications markedly increases your risk for mortality, for death. Those sleeping pills have also been significantly associated with the risk. And so I started doing that and got wonderful results that led me to the question, well, if sleep is so disordered in these patients, is it not just a symptom of Alzheimer's disease, but perhaps it is a causal trigger? And at that point I asked the question, well, then, why do we sleep? And at that point, 20 years ago, no one could answer that question. The best response we had was, you sleep to cure sleepiness, which isn't very helpful. Now, 20 years on, we've had to actually upend the question. We've actually had to ask, is there anything of development of cancer? All forms, in fact, so much so that in 2016, the American College of Physicians actually made a landmark recommendation on the basis of the fact that those sleeping pills very rarely give you much of a benefit above and beyond placebo and the deathly and carcinogenic in the brain or the body that isn't beneficially improved when you get sleep. And the answer seems to be no, there's nothing we can find. So that set me on a journey to discover why we sleep. And it created a love affair that lasts with me to this day. I am still deeply enamored with sleep. And I thought I was going to solve that question within just two or three years as to why we Slept and then go back to my work with Alzheimer's disease. And I didn't realize that some of the most brilliant minds had tried to answer that question and failed. And you know, hard questions will meter out their lessons no matter who is asking them. And I got schooled and 20 years on I'm still in part associations that have been found. They recommended that sleeping pills must no longer be the first line recommendation for insomnia. It has to be cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which is a psychological therapy technique. And then I believe, I think it was maybe just 20. What data are we now? Something like 26, 27 days ago asking that question. But I've finally been able to come back full circle and we now do a lot of work with the causal relationship between a lack of sleep and Alzheimer's disease. Not just the associational one anymore.

I have a weird data set in that one of the companies that I started does high end neurofeedback training, five days intensive stuff. And there's some portion of people who come through there who have way more alpha brainwaves with their eyes open than normal people. And I'm not one of those, but I am a person who until I really got on top of this as a young man, I used to have intrusive theta brainwaves. This is a dream stage just during the day. So as I'm in high school, sleep deprived, trying to pay attention.

Now I know the FDA actually upped the safety warning on because of all.

The EEG work I've just done on myself. There are states of just out of control theta that I was going into. What happens or what are the reasons that, that people get the states associated.

With sleep during the day, principally sleep deprivation. And the reason. So when you look at rapid eye movement sleep, the brain waves are actually going up and down maybe four to eight times per second, which is what you describe as theta activity. When you go into deep sleep, it now slows down much, much more. It's down to, as I said, sort of one to two cycles per second, which is what we call called delta activity. So what you're describing there is having sleeping pills because of the dangers that were associated with them. It raised the risk category of them. So I think the time is now starting to come. And I should note, by the way, this is not an attack on those pharmacological, those pharmaceutical companies. Theta bursts of activity. And one of the things that we've learned from alcohol or alcoholism and patients who are alcoholics. Alcohol is one of the Best ways that we know of to block your dream sleep, nor the scientists who develop those drugs. I know some of those scientists and they are desperately trying to produce medicines that help humanity.

They're all trying to help.

Yeah, but it's just the fact that those medications unfortunately don't help and they do not produce naturalistic sleep to excise and selectively deprive your brain of rapid eye movement sleep. Now, if you keep doing that time and time and time again, the brain builds up what's called a REM sleep pressure. In other words, it starts to have this increasing hunger for REM sleep. So much so that at some point, REM sleep being so essential, REM sleep. And you also, when you come off them, have a horrific, what's called a sleep rebound effect, where you go back, not sleep just bursts onto the scene when you're awake because the brain is saying, look, if you're not giving me the chance to donate to the bad sleep that you are having, but it's even worse as a consequence to get REM sleep even when you're asleep, then I'm just going to take it whenever I can. And you get these intrusions of REM sleep during wakefulness and that. So those drugs, I think are to be stayed away from. There's also some evidence not quite as compelling for the use of, you know, is the state that we call delirium trems, when alcoholics actually have these delusional psychotic episodes. It seems to be that what they're having is a bleed over of rapid eye movement sleep into the waking state. In other words, they're dreaming while they're awake because the brain is so hungry for REM sleep, it has to start taking its fill.

That is fascinating. Okay. There's two times in my life where I've had periods of intense, just like.

Antihistamines, which some people may be using in the evening.

Benadryl.

Like Benadryl. So I think that the data is less certain there, but it doesn't look great. And again, I think you can look for alternatives.

I'm really concerned about people using Benadryl for sleep. And there's no doubt nightmares. And one of them is when I was in a house that had toxic mold. And it turns out I did a whole documentary on toxic mold. And this is a common symptom of people who are in houses with high levels of stachybotrys and things like that. The other time was a couple years ago I had a relatively dangerous intestinal parasite. And the day I got it, I Started well, I'm just going to say Disaster pants became my friend. And I had it for four months and I saw three different out. It does work, especially if you have. You ate some old fish that night and you have histamine response. So I got rid of it. But every night for those four months I had just something's trying to kill me. Dreams. I don't have nightmares. I haven't had nightmares in 25 years. They just aren't a part of my life. But I was having which is stimulating. I'll take a quarter of Benadryl. But if you take a whole one, there's really good data that Benadryl and inhibits your ability to move memories from short term to long term. So you'll have a fuzzy memory if you sleep on that.

Same with the prescription sleep medication.

And the second I started taking the medication that killed the stuff in my gut, the dreams went away. So is that common that when people get sick they have vivid nightmares or when there's something in their environment, pollution, noise, whatever. Tell me a little bit about those. Those unusual, intense vivid nightmares.

So we actually don't have too much data regarding serious infection and the association with nightmares rather than just standard dreaming. What we do know is that when you raise sort of body temperature, which normally happens when you have an infection, fever is often associated with a delirious state. You can say, you know, they were delirious with fever and patients.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Ambien or okay, I'm sorry, I won't call them out by name. The thing that rhymes with Rambian.

And I think it's important to ask and others.

Yeah.

What do we mean by it helps me. Because what people mistake is that those drugs are. So one current way of thinking about that is that your core body temperature actually increases and so much so which it normally does with REM sleep. And by the way, that comes back to our earlier class of drugs as I said that to are going called the sedative hypnotics and sedation is not sleep but most conversation. One way that you may be able to increase REM sleep is actually by warming the body back up. That's what I failed to complete my story with in terms of reverse engineering the drop in core body temperature with deep sleep. So you need to cool down to get deep sleep and perhaps you need to warm up to get more REM sleep. Although we're still looking at that. We don't know. But that's one possibility. You are having essentially this sort of morphed this alternate version of REM sleep because of an increase in your body temperature. And it doesn't have to be market. We're talking just 0.5 of Fahrenheit in terms of a degree change could trigger that. But in truth, we just don't know. I don't know of a single study that's demonstrated that people mistake the former with the latter when they take them. And I'm not going to argue when you take those drugs that you are awake during the night. You're clearly not. But to suggest that you are in naturalistic sleep is an equal falsehood.

Okay, that is profound and awesome. I'm just loving our conversation so far right now.

Again, it doesn't mean it isn't plausible. You speak about ways that you can actually, though, suffer nightmares. And one of the things that we know tragically and reliably is trauma. And the quintessential demonstration of this is ptsd, or post traumatic stress disorder. We've done a lot of work on sleep and mental health. I should note, by the way, that in the past 20 years of our work, I've not been able to discover a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. So I think sleep has a profound story to tell in our understanding and our treatment, and I hope, ultimately our prevention of grave mental illness. But in terms of ptsd, in fact, I'm glad.

All right, I want to go way back in your career, because when you worked on your PhD in neurophysiology, you studied the brainwave patterns of people with different forms of dementia who were awake. What did that teach you?

It taught me for two years, absolutely nothing. It's impossible to receive a diagnosis, a clinical diagnosis of PTSD if you don't have sleep disruption, including flashback, trauma, nightmares. That's how core they are. They are to the disorder. That's how fundamental they are. And we know more about what's going on there. I created a theory of REM sleep which was called REM Sleepers Overnight Therapy, essentially. And we know that it is during REM sleep in healthy people were a center in the brain that releases a chemical called norepinephrine or noradrenaline, is shut down. So because I failed to get any meaningful results, I was trying to differentially diagnose people very early on as to which type of dementia they had. Was it, you know, Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease or what we call frontotemporal dementia? And I was sticking electrodes on the head and I was measuring their brainwave Patterns and I couldn't find any. Everyone is probably familiar with the sister chemical in the body which is called adrenaline. But there is a version of that upstairs in your brain called noradrenaline and it's associated with, you know, stress and alertness. And REM sleep is the only time during the 24 hour period where your brain completely shuts off the release of that stress related neurochemicals. And I propose that REM sleep is the optimal environment in which all of the emotional and memory centers of your brain come back online, which they do, they erupt in their activity so you can start processing emotional memories. But beautifully you're doing it in the good results to separate them at all. And at weekends I used to go home with this sort of stack of journals and I'd have a little igloo of journals in my doctor's residence and I this quote unquote safe neurochemical environment where you can strip away the pain, sit there and read at the weekends. And one of those after two years journals helped me understand my mistake. Some parts of the brain in some of those dementias were full stinging edges of those emotional experiences. So that you wake up the next morning feeling better and you've resolved that emotional conflict. So it's not time that heals all wounds, but it's time in REM sleep that provides that emotional convalescence. What we found in people with PTSD is that they don't have normal REM sort of eating or being eaten away. And those parts of the brains were sleep centers. Whereas for other dementias the brain regions that control REM sleep, they have fragmented REM sleep and they don't have enough REM sleep. And if you measure the levels of noradrenaline in the central nervous system, and we don't do that by sticking a, a needle in their brain and sampling it. We do a puncture of the lumbar spinal fluid and so we can measure the csf, the cerebrospinal fluid and estimate what's going on in the brain. They have very high levels of noradrenaline, too high. And the model that I proposed suggested that in ptsd, because they have this stress related chemical switch back on during REM sleep, they can't reprocess those trauma experiences. So night after night they keep replaying them, hoping for that overnight sleep therapy and they don't get it. And then we started working with a psychiatrist in Seattle called Murray Ruskind who does some great work. He did this work before I actually, he didn't know of my theory and my theory didn't know of his data, but he'd been giving a drug called prazosin to his PTSD war veterans that he was treating. And that was given for their blood pressure because it helps lower blood pressure. And it's, you know, it's a generic drug, so it turns out that it crosses the blood brain barrier and also impacts the brain. And they were coming back and they were looking and they said, you know, your blood pressure's better. And the patients were saying, but I'm no longer having those trauma dreams. And what was happening is that that drug Prasad sleep were unaffected. And I realized at that moment I was measuring the brainwave activity of my patients at the wrong moment in time. I was measuring them when they were awake and I should be measuring them when they were asleep. And so I started doing that and got wonderful results that led me to the question, well, if sleep is so disordered in these patients, is it not just a symptom of Alzheimer's disease, but perhaps it is a causal trigger? And at that point I asked the question, well, then why do we sleep? Sin actually decreases the amount of this stress chemical. And what we believe then was happening is that finally they decrease the amount of that stress related chemical in the brain during REM sleep. It allowed them to process those memories normally and naturally so that they could start to resolve the trauma. And after, gosh, many years of work, it was some. And at that point 20 years ago, no one could answer that question. You know, the best response we had was you sleep to cure sleepiness, which isn't very helpful. Now, 20 years on, we know we've had to actually upend the question. We've actually had to ask, is there anything subsequently now become one of the only medications that's approved for prescription of PTSD nightmares in the veteran community.

God, you're blowing my mind here. One I haven't ever come across that before. I definitely had PTSD. It was something I worked through largely 20 years ago. And I did have crappy REM sleep, which we already talked about in the.

Brain or the body that isn't beneficially improved when you get sleep. And the answer seems to be no, there's nothing we can find. So that set me on a journey to discover why we sleep. And it created a love affair that lasts with me to this day.

But Unlike most people 20 years ago, I have my numbers for my epinephrine to norepinephrine ratio. And if I'm remembering this right, they said you were dealing with burnout. If you were above 8 and my number was 45, it might have been my norepi to epi ratio but I was completely beyond blown out and I dealt with the ptsd.

I am still deeply enamored with sleep and I thought I was going to solve that question within just two or three years as to why we slept and then go back to my work.

With Alzheimer's and resolve that and now my levels are much more normal. Normal. But I did not know about that drug. I think a lot of people and we have a lot of vets who listen to the show, a lot of people with TBI interests because I've covered that a lot. I think that's going to add to the body of knowledge. Thank you for bringing that up. And I'm gonna have to check that out more myself. I have one more question for you.

Disease. And I didn't realize that some of the most brilliant minds had tried to answer that question and failed. And hard questions will meter out their lessons no matter who is asking them. And I got schooled and 20 years on I'm still in part at this.

Has been such a fascinating show. I feel like I could interview for another couple hours. But the final question has something to do with sleep but it has more to do with aging. I just wrote my new book on anti aging and what I think the future is going to look like. But I want to ask you this. How long do you think it's possible for you to live given what you know, access to the resources you have and what's coming in the world of medicine and everything else?

What's your number right now I'd probably say I'll live to over 100. I think if we're to sort of just do an under over and you know, in part that's just because you know asking that question. But I've finally been able to come back full circle and we now do a lot of work with the causal relationship between a lack of sleep and Alzheimer's disease. Not just the associational one any anymore.

I have a weird data set in that one of the companies that I started.

I'm embedded in the entirety of health and wellness and science and so I try to do as many of the things right as I can. I would say though that I'm often asked how much sleep I get and I give myself a non negotiable sleep opportunity of 8 hours every night and I do that. Not to be a poster child for.

This high end neurofeedback training, you know, five days intensive stuff that I'm on.

And I am on a mission. I want to desperately reunite humanity with the sleep that it is, that is bereft of. But it's not, it's actually selfish because if you knew all that I know about sleep, you would actually choose to do nothing other than give yourself, you know, eight hours a night. My family on my father's side has a very strong history of cardiovascular disease and we know that deep sleep is one of the very best forms of blood pressure medication that you could ever wish for. So I think I invest in the cheapest, most painless health insurance policy I know of, which is called an eight hour night of sleep. And it's largely democratic. It's freely available to most people if you're a healthy sleeper. And I'm not trying to belittle people who struggle with sleep and then diet and exercise. The fourth thing that I've really put on my roadmap though recently, recently probably the last five years is mental health. And I think mental health, dealing with, you know, stress and anxiety. We know that even just being social and having a good social life is critical. For example, we did a study on sleep loss and loneliness a couple of years ago and I won't bore you with the details there, but we read a lot about loneliness and it was striking to me that loneliness is more deathly than being obese.

And there's some portion of people who come through there who have which just blew me away.

And you can see the impact of loneliness all the way down to the expression of genes. It turns out the science is very good. So I think in terms of my, my own health sort of pillars and bastions, I place sleep as the foundation. And then I placed diet, exercise and good mental health and good way more.

Alpha brainwaves with their eyes open than normal people. And I'm not one of those, but I am a person who until I really got on top of this as a young man, I used to have intrusive theta brainwaves. This is a dream stage. This is during the day. So as I'm in high school, sleep deprived, trying to pay attention, now I.

Know social health on top of that and I would very much hope that I live to see 100.

I love that answer. Thank you for sharing it and thank you because of all the EEG work I've just done on myself. There are states of just like out for writing why we Sleep. It's one of the books that has me thinking about my sleep Focusing on quality and maybe I'll get up to, you know, seven hours. But I don't know if you're ever going to control theta that I was going into what happens or what are the reasons that people get the states associated with convinced me to do eight, but you have convinced me to shift it. And your book why We Sleep is one of the many reasons I decided that I would pull my kids out of school and let them sleep. Because that's probably more important important for their brains and whatever the heck they're going to do in that first hour of early morning torture that they call first period in school with sleep during the day.

Principally sleep deprivation. And the reason. So when you look at rapid eye movement sleep the brain waves are actually going up and down. Maybe I'm delighted the book had that impact. That alone in terms of ensuring your genetic legacy but also gifting your children with the very best developmental start to their life. I hope they thank you for it. In years to come.

They'll either thank me or be pissed, but I'm good either way. That's up to them four to eight.

Times per second, which is what you describe as theta activity. When you go into deep sleep, it now slows down much, much more. It's down to, as I said, sort of one to two sites.

I got to tell for people listening, I recommend a good number of books. In fact, I interview authors quite a lot on the show and at the end I always tell you the name of the book and where you can go to find it. And all of them are worthy of your time to read. And there's some that are more worthy than others. Just like I still would tell you that maybe rem, maybe that deep sleep is more important than REM sleep. If you could only get one cycles.

Per second, which is what we call delta activity. So what you're describing there is having theta bursts of activity and one of them.

But they're both necessary and all that. This is one of those short list books that you want to read if you want to perform better as a human being. And ostensibly that's probably why you listen to the show. So why We Sleep should be on your must read list up there with Robert Greene's last book, which is another fantastic episode, if you haven't heard that one, where we talk about the laws.

Of human nature, things that we've learned from alcohol or alcoholism and patients who are alcoholics. Alcohol is one of the best ways that we know of to block your dream sleep.

Sure, this is the basic stuff of being a human. There's plenty of diet books. I wrote one. There's hundreds of them. But there aren't that many really good sleep books. And as you heard on the show, sleep matters more than food because you can fast for a month. You can't go without sleep for a month. So get your sleep lined up the same way. You have your food and your stress and your exercise and all the other stuff.

And to excise and selectively deprive your brain of rapid eye movement sleep. Now, if you keep doing that, time and time and time again, the brain builds up what's called a REM sleep.

You will win and use this book to help you do it.

Deep pressure. In other words, it starts to have this increasing hunger for REM sleep. Sleep so much so that at some point, REM sleep being so essential, REM sleep just bursts onto the scene when you're awake because the brain is saying, look, if you're not giving me the chance to get REM sleep even when you're asleep, then I'm just going to take it whenever I can. And you get these intrusions of REM sleep during wakefulness, and that is the state that we call delirium trems, when alcoholics actually have these delusional psychotic episodes. It seems to be that what they're having is a bleed over of rapid eye movement sleep into the waking state. In other words, they're dreaming while they're awake because the brain is so hungry for REM sleep, it has to start taking its fill.

That is fascinating. Okay. There's two times in my life where I've had periods of intense, vivid nightmares. And one of them is when I was in a house that had toxic mold. And it turns out I did a whole documentary on toxic mold. And this is a common symptom of people who are in houses with high levels of stachybotrys and things like that. The other time was a couple years ago I had a relatively dangerous intestinal parasite. And the day I got it, I started. Well, I'm just going to say Disaster Pants became my friend. And I had it for four months and I saw three different experts, so I got rid of it. But every night for those four months, I had just something's trying to kill me. Dreams. I don't have nightmares. I haven't had nightmares in 25 years. They just aren't a part of my life. But I was having these. And the second I started taking the medication that killed the stuff in my gut, the dreams went away. So is that Common that when people get sick they have vivid nightmares or when there's something in their environment, pollution, noise, whatever. Tell me a little bit about those unusual, intense, vivid nightmares.

So we actually don't have too much data regarding serious infection and the association with nightmares rather than just standard dreaming. What we do know is that when you raise sort of body temperature, which normally happens when you have an infection, fever is often associated with a delirious state. You can say, you know, they were delirious with fever. And so one current way of thinking about that is that your core body temperature actually increases, and so much so, which it normally does with REM sleep. And by the way, that comes back to our earlier conversation, one way that you may be able to increase REM sleep is actually by warming the body back up. That's what I failed to complete my story with in terms of reverse engineering the drop in core body temperature with deep sleep. So you need to cool down to get deep sleep and perhaps you need to warm up to get more REM sleep, although we're still looking at that. We don't know. But that's one possibility you are having essentially this sort of morphed, this, you know, alternate version of REM sleep because of an increase in your body temperature. And it doesn't have to be marked. We're talking, you know, just 0.5 of a Fahrenheit in terms of degree change could trigger that. But in truth, we just don't know. I don't know of a single study that's demonstrated that right now. Again, doesn't mean it isn't, isn't plausible. You speak about ways that you can actually though suffer nightmares. And one of the things that we know tragically and reliably is trauma.

Yeah.

And the quintessential demonstration of this is PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress disorder. We've done a lot of work on sleep and mental health. I should note, by the way, that in the past 20 years of our work, I've not been able to discover a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. So I think sleep has a profound.