Sleep Need & Sleep Age Find Out Yours – Dan Gartenberg #583

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that I just got off 10 hours of flying and, well, if you can't hear it, my voice is a little dry. But I'm going to do this episode anyway because it is going to be awesome. And it's what I've been wanting to do for quite a while, to share something new with you guys. But that's not really the cool fact of the day. I'm just explaining why I sound a little different. The real cool fact of the day is that only 21% of people in the US get the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep each night. Not that you really need to get that much sleep necessarily. But in contrast, people in France sleep on average of 8.83 hours per day, which is the longest country for sleep in the developed world. Now, there are studies that show if you sleep more than eight hours a night, you're more likely to die from all cause mortality. So France, come on guys, sleep a little bit less. Maybe lay off the wine a little bit and you'll be okay. However, it turns out some people can survive on much less. About 1 to 3% of the population are short sleepers who need less than six hours a night. In the animal kingdom, a brown bat needs almost 20 hours a day, and a giraffe, which is obviously one of my spirit animals, only needs 1.9 hours of sleep a day. And this stuff came from Michael Bruce, the guy who wrote the Power of When and is also a former guest on Bulletproof Radio. But it's pretty neat to just look at the diversity of sleep that's going out there. And today's episode, as you might have guessed, has something to do with giraffes. Okay, maybe not has something to do with sleep, because the guy who's coming out today wants you to sleep better. And he's done insane amounts of research and even developed technology based on sound, light, temperature and relaxation to help you do just that. He's known as Dr. Snooze, although his actual name is Dan Gartenberg. He's co founder and CEO of Sonic Sleep and an adjunct assistant professor at Penn State university with a PhD in cognitive psychology and an expertise in sleep, AI and preventative health. And I've known Dan for several years. He's been granted multiple patents and developed a whole bunch of sleep tech. And you might have read about him in national magazines or seen him on the Today show. And today we're going to talk about Sonic Sleep and the technology behind getting better sleep. If you read Game Changers, you noticed that I mentioned Sonic Sleep as one of the sleep hacks that I recommend. Dan, welcome to the show.

Dave, great to be here.

Now, when I said that I wrote about Sonic Sleep in Game Changers, your eyes rolled. Am I remembering right that I put it in my manuscript, but it didn't make it all the way through my final edits? Did something happen there?

All is forgiven. No worries. We're getting into it now.

So in Game Changers, the book that's a concentration of all the many different podcasts I wrote about the importance of sleep because so many guests who've been on the show who aren't sleep experts said it mattered a lot. And I said, all right, here's my latest sleep hack you don't know about. When you're in a hotel, you can run sonic Sleep and it gets you more, basically more REM sleep or more deep sleep, and it blocks out bad sounds. And full disclosure, I invested in Sonic Sleep a while ago. And so I've been following this saying, all right, when's the time to share this? And you're waiting for the new app. So we're gonna talk a little about the app, but this is just more about the sleep stuff that I haven't talked about before on Bulletproof Radio. We all know maybe if it's darker, that's gonna be better, stuff like that, but we're going to go a little bit deeper. So, Dan, I'm stoked that you finally had the time to come on. As a busy startup entrepreneur, I'm so.

Excited to do this.

All right. I wrote a post, oh, geez, eight years ago about this thing called the Zeo. And the Zeo was the first EEG sleep monitor. It was this dumb looking headband. And Ben, the guy who started it, is still a friend, and I'd wear this thing and Lana, my wife, would just roll her eyes and be like, oh, my God, you're doing it again. And I got sleep data that led me to write the hacks about raw honey or brain octane or collagen before sleep and taping over LEDs that are now very common. Every sleep hack talks about that stuff, but I was measuring this way back in the day, and I said, here's how you change your sleep score. Because everyone says, oh, if you sleep eight hours, you get more, you know, you get more points. I didn't want to sleep eight hours. I only had six Hours. I just wanted, you know, four hours of deep sleep and two hours of REM sleep. Not that I've ever gotten that good. So was I right or was I wrong in terms of looking at efficiency versus quantity? And you're the pro, and tell me when I'm wrong. I want to hear it.

So, I mean, I think at the end of the day, it's quantity and quality.

So you're telling me I'm wrong, Dan?

No, I think, yeah, you're right. And it's complicated.

There you go. That's the real answer.

I mean, I actually was partly inspired by the Z Score, and they called it the ZQ Score way back eight years ago. I think your thing, if I remember correctly, was the Zeo Force Multiplier. Yeah, kind of a cool name for actually changing that value that you get when you wake up for how well you slept based on the sleep that you actually need or the sleep that you just had.

Like, if I only had five hours, tell me I did a good job or a bad job. I know I should have had more, but that's my life sometimes.

Yeah. So, I mean, quantity is a big part, but as you've talked about before, quality is such an important thing. And one thing that makes this question really complicated is that, you know, while the National Academy of Sleep Medicine says that people need at least seven hours on a regular basis and as much as nine if they're sick.

I'm sorry, I just had to say that.

No, that's exactly what I'm saying. If I'm going, sorry I stole your thunder. I mean, you need more sleep. If you're going through a lot of, like, you know, personal challenges. Like, this isn't just a sleep need based on an individual. This is actually intra individual and actually deal with this. Sometimes when I'm, like, really having a stressful day at work, I know that maybe I need to get a little extra sleep that night. And that also being said, if I can align my circadian rhythm, and I think you've really delved deeply into this, you can get better quality of sleep so that you can get by on less. And there's many other ways to try to hack your sleep quality to actually be able to get by on less sleep.

All right, so if it's possible to get by on less sleep, tell me what you think. Two nights ago, thank you. For huge amounts of wind that screwed up my flight, so it took hours longer than planned. I only slept three and a half hours. That's considered a crap night's Sleep. But according to my Oura ring, I got exactly one hour of REM sleep and 42 minutes of deep sleep in three and a half hours. How would I do?

I mean, so that would be a healthy amount of sleep. I mean, that's more deep sleep for your age group than if you had slept the whole night.

See, that's what I'm talking about, right?

So there's the Dave Asprey sleep need and then there's the general population sleep need. And you know, not everyone is doing all the things that you're doing to like optimize. So I'm just trying to speak to multiple. And this is why sleep is so complicated. Cause it's a very personalized thing. And I think why a lot of these companies like Zio hello is, you know, various companies in the sleep hardware space have failed is because the science of sleep is it's hard to give generic feedback. Because, for example, you know, if you were someone with insomnia, I might give almost the exact opposite feedback as someone that's just trying to optimize. Like maybe, you know, like you're trying to do.

Oh yeah.

And I think finally we're at a place with the technology where these hardware companies, I.e. apple Fitbit, are finally opening up their technology to third party developers. That is enabling people like me and my research lab at Penn State to do the hard science that's involved, to actually delivering people these personalized sleep improvement solutions.

All right, Dan, I've got to tell you this. You may actually save more human lives than almost anyone else alive. And here's my math, okay? If your tech and you, and there's a bunch of other sleep researchers working on this similar problem and from all sorts of different angles, if you were to take the however many billion people there are, what, about 6, 7 billion floating around? Something like that. So let's just save 7 billion people 2 hours of sleep a night so that they wake up, they have less health problems than they do with their crappy sleep now. And we all get two hours of more, like serving our communities, being parents, reading, playing Xbox, it doesn't matter whatever brings you joy as long as you're getting that quality sleep. If you look at 2 hours times 6 billion people, you know how many human lifetimes that is?

I'm serious, trust me. This is what has inspired me in this for 10 years. That very thought process.

It's like a Nobel Prize. I mean, seriously, it's that important.

Yeah.

Okay.

And I think the Nobel Prize a year or two ago was for some research on circadian rhythms.

Absolutely was.

Yeah.

All right, well, maybe when you just realized, okay, here's the personalized algorithms required basic monitoring. Do these 10 things and you'll get more deep sleep than most people get in a full night in three and a half hours. By the way, that probably wasn't enough time for my glymphatic system to wash my brain toxins. And if I did that every night, I would probably get Alzheimer's disease or something bad would happen over time. So unquestionably that was a bad practice. It's just I only had three and a half hours. That was my life that day. But, you know, I made the most of it. And that's, that's the, the real perspective here.

Yeah. Might as well get the most out of the sleep you're getting, right? And this, this question of, like, you just brought up Alzheimer's. You know, this is actually one of the big focuses that we're taking with this research because there's more and more evidence. Well, sleep is related to basically every chronic health illness, but especially, you know, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, stroke. But there's especially recent evidence relating it to Alzheimer's disease. And slow wave sleep in particular having to do with cleaning out beta amyloid plaques, basically is a simple way of putting it. That's the focus of my research is on regenerative slow wave sleep or deep sleep, and how that relates to both cognitive functioning. And recently, an angle that we're taking some of the grants that we have with the National Institute of Aging is to actually use sleep as a way to mitigate conversion to Alzheimer's disease, which is expected to triple in the next 20 years.

In my new book on anti aging that isn't out yet, but for all of you listening, I don't know if I've talked about it before. I'm in the late stages. I just finished the first draft of a book that's been in my head for at least five years. And like, this is the stuff I'm actually doing to live to at least 180 or die trying. And it looks like Alzheimer's is one of the big four things that's probably going to take you out unless you do something about it. And it comes from food, comes from environment, comes from toxins, and it comes from sleep, which is why I've had a variety of sleep experts on for a long time and why I decided I wanted to get behind Dan's work, because it's pretty heavy duty stuff. Now tell me about sleep. Age. Since we just hit on Alzheimer's, which is considered a disease of aging instead of a disease of inflammation and sleep age. Do you know your sleep age? What is that?

So this is something that we've tried to distill. The cool thing that inspired me about the ZQ score is that it was a value that represented, you know, what you did during the day or over the night that you could latch onto to make sense of how you slept. Then again, what does it actually mean when I have a ZQ score of 90? You got into what that means a little bit, but it's pretty opaque.

Just to be really clear, Zio, unless you're a super fan and you buy one on ebay, Zio went out of business because they were too early. So we're talking about the first major sleep tech out here that used EEG for you. But you can do similar types of things with an OURA ring and you can even use the algorithms that you've got. Dan, you're actually taking data from the OURA ring and then applying additional sleep research to that.

That's exactly right. Yeah.

So keep, keep going. I just want. I realize if someone's listening trying to buy a Zeo right now, they'd be pissed. So don't worry about buying a Zeo. You're going to want an OURA ring if you like what we're talking about here, but continue on your path.

Yeah, I mean, just the headset form factor is one of those things that it sometimes does more harm than good, I think for most people.

Yeah. If you like the other things you do in bed, I can tell you there's nothing sexier than a big old headset with a couple wires coming off it. Maybe if you're into like Borg sex or something.

Yeah, the sleep partner might not be too happy about that. Borg sex. That's hilarious.

Good thing my wife likes Star Trek. But Philips has a dream headset. So there are EEG headsets you can get now. I've got one of those. They're just bigger and they don't match your Victoria's Secret outfit. So in my mind, it's gotta be sort of low stress and it's gotta provide really clean data.

Exactly. And I actually published a paper in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing in grad school all about, you know, how do we get this data non invasively. And I love the ring for that. The OURA ring is a great form factor and the battery is great. We also develop our algorithm on Apple Watch.

Oh, cool.

And we've shown that the sensor of that is the sensors are basically just as accurate between Aura and the Apple Watch.

Is it actually Sonic Sleep itself or is it just some other way of working with what you're doing?

No. Yeah. So Sonic Sleep, we're about to. We have our app right now on iOS and Android and in about a month we're rolling it out on app.

Oh, beautiful.

Yeah. And then we're trying to get all the other wearables. My whole thing is like, I like a lot of the wearables and we're just trying to integrate with the best ones.

And the idea there is you can have university grade super detailed sleep analysis that goes along with the Wellness score and the recovery score and all the other good stuff that comes with each of those different devices. And the future that I predicted actually in a blue book that I wrote for investors about 10 years ago. Like, look, there will be a marketplace for ideas. And if you like Dan Gartenberg's Sleep professor stuff and you want him to look at your data and tell you what to do, then okay, great. And if you like Dave Asprey's biohacker stuff and you want me to look at your data and tell you what to do, great. And it just becomes a marketplace of ideas and maybe I'll try both and see which one works better. Gee, Dan kicked Dave's ass because he's actually a professor of sleep and Dave's a hacker. Okay, that's all good. But this needs to happen. And you're one of the current examples of this really happening. Instead of kind of the first wave of this that was maybe too early, that came out of Quantified Self a while back.

Yeah. And I Remember back in 2011, I think it was in one of those first Quantified Self conferences.

I have the poster from that hanging downstairs.

Yeah, I still have that poster too. It's the blue one with the little circle. It's a cool poster.

Yeah, totally.

That was a great conference. And I think you were talking about HRV even back then.

Yeah, in fact, I think I put HRV in the, in the sphere of biohacking before then. It was just a weird meditation thing or a hospital grade thing.

And you know, we all thought then, I don't know, that these new devices were going to change healthcare. You know, at that conference, I remember in particular, it felt very exciting. Yeah, we were right.

We were all just too eager in terms of the timeline.

Yeah, it was, you know, I guess we're a little presumptuous and maybe a little Naive, but I think now is actually finally the time. Yeah, but you know, back to. We kind of went on a circuitous route there to sleep age.

Right.

But back to sleep age. You know, we've kind of conceptualized the ZQ score as an age that maps onto what, for example, a 20 year old would be getting. So, for example, you know, deep sleep is something that generally decreases with age. So you know, a 20 year old usually spends about 20% of the night in deep sleep. And then, you know, if you look at the population stats, by the time you're 80, it goes down to 7.5%. So we measure various aspects of sleep quality, map it onto the population statistics, and actually tell you where you're lining up compared to other people in the United States.

I'm to the point now in my mid-40s. If I don't get at least an hour and a half of deep and an hour and a half of rem, I kind of consider that a sleep fail. And there are nights when I get two hours of one or the other and quite often two of each, even though I'm sleeping six or six and a half hours. And this was not happening for me even two years ago. So a lot of different things have worked to make it happen. But I don't call it sleep age because I don't have your algorithmic purity. But I do realize I'm sleeping like a 20 year old, which kind of makes me feel good.

If you're getting an hour and a half of deep sleep in REM at night, that is very good. Almost better than a 20 year old.

Especially in less than 8 hours. It's unbelievable. But I do all of the stuff in my books and I think the stem cells, the whole body, stem cell makeover. I just did an episode with Marcella about that. I think that getting stem cells in my brain really did give me a younger brain because my sleep quality shifted.

Yeah, you were saying that I was listening to that podcast actually, that you think you actually shifted your circadian rhythm a little bit too.

Yeah, that's really inconvenient. I woke up this morning at 6:30. It's still kind of dark at 6:30. It's horrible. I mean, I stay up late and I write my books and I'm losing my writing time. Between 11 and 2 is the sweet spot for really creativity for me. And now I'm like, I guess I could go to bed at 10:30, which has been an impossibility for probably 40 years of my life to do that. And now it's like, yeah, I could go to sleep and then I actually sleep really well. And yeah, if I go to sleep by 11:30, I do get at least an extra 20 minutes of deep sleep from doing that. And it's pissing me off.

Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think what you're hitting on here is a topic that I find fascinating. You know, based on your circadian rhythm, there's probably a better time in the day to do different activities.

Oh yeah.

And that's something we're working towards in some of our algorithm work is like. And this fluctuates if, you know, you've talked about it in some of your books with the different types of animals for different types of sleepers.

Yeah, that's Michael Bruce. Actually, those aren't my books. That's the Power of Wind. I quoted him earlier.

Oh yeah, right.

Yeah. But that work, it's totally real. Like there's a good time of day for sex, there's a good time of day for board meetings. And it's a big problem if your wife's time of day for sex is early morning and your time of day for sex is 10 at night. Well, maybe we have to meet in the middle somewhere and it's time for that lunch meeting.

Well, that's an interesting thing, is what if you could say the best time that's convenient for the relationship.

Well, he does that in his book. He explains it. It was mind blowing stuff because like, oh, and if you want to ask for a raise, maybe you shouldn't do it when your boss is completely like a curmudgeon because they had to come into work at 8am and they're not a morning person. Like maybe let's do a little bit later. Right. Like if you're a salesperson, oh, this matters so much. I'm super stoked on it. But tell me, tell me what you've learned. Like, what do you, what are you learning in the lab about this? Because Michael did it as a clinician, you're doing it as a university researcher, you're going to get different results.

Yeah. So let me just tell you kind of the way that I think about this with, you know, time of day and what sleep is actually doing. So the theory I subscribe to, and a lot of people in the research do as well for one of the main reasons, there's many reasons, but one of the main reasons why we sleep is something called the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. And so Julio Tononi kind of coined this theory. And it's basically that over the course of the day the activation of your neurons gradually increases. And I think that part of why you have more creativity towards the nighttime is because you have an overall higher neural activation. Your neurons are firing at a higher level. Basically you can think of it like that the main function of sleep according to this theory is that during deep sleep you down regulate all those relevant connections that you made during the day such that the relevant things to your survival rise to the top. So you know, it used to be like, you know, don't go to that part of the forest because the lions are over there now. It's like, you know, what did so and so say about me at the office? Or something like that. And then that happens in deep sleep you downregulate and then in rem you replay all the relevant things to your survival and then integrate that into your personality and your long term memory.

Basically that is pretty epic to understand. And what do I do with that? Even just sleep age? Okay, so someone figures I have an old sleep age, I have a young sleep age, or they look at the whole data set you just had there, what do you do with it?

So this is the main thing that has also been at the front of our minds is all these devices like Fitbit's like oh, you got so and so deep sleep. What do you do with that information? There's nothing that's that actionable about that. And so we're not just trying to track, but we're actually trying to enhance. And I think that's really where the field ought to go. So by more accurately measuring sleep based on your sleep stage, there's ways of actually enhancing your, for example, deep sleep in real time while you're sleeping through sound or temperature stimulation.

And that's something that I've been using your app to do, which is.

Yes.

Which is kind of cool.

Yes. So there's, there's two components of sound that we can think about here. A really low hanging fruit way to improve your sleep quality is to block out noise pollution.

Yeah.

So this is something that you know and it's actually a socioeconomic issue too. There's some recent research on this that's really kind of depressing a little bit. But basically urban environments that are louder and sometimes poorer, the people in those environments often get worse sleep. And part of the reason for that is you. And this was something that was very surprising to me when I was doing this research. Sounds wake up your brain throughout the night all the time without conscious awareness of it, of this happening. So when People come into our laboratory environment, we hook them up to the best wearables, we connect, connect them to polysomnography. And we work with this fabulous professor at Penn State, his name's Rafael Buxton, to conduct these trials. And then we have the EEG data giving us truth. While we're looking at that data, we have a postdoc, Margo Shade, who actually, her specialty is the understanding of how sleep impacts pain perception. And that's another whole thing we can talk about. But she'll look at the brain waves and then systematically administer sounds to people. And she'll literally play hundreds of these sounds to people throughout the night, louder than how I'm speaking to you right now. And people have absolutely no idea that the sounds were played, yet it's disrupting their sleep, basically. So step one is mitigate that impact with what we call is an acoustic cushion. So we basically measure the sound in the room and then adaptively ramp up the sound in order to mitigate the impact of noise pollution. So that's step one for me.

In hotels, I've really noticed a difference from just doing that with sonic sleep. Because at home the only noise pollution I had last night, I live on a small organic farm. A woodpecker lands on our chimney and they like to peck on the chimney because it resonates. So they make a lot of noise to attract a mate. And that's why I Woke up at 6:30 this morning. I'm like, I just wish that woodpecker would find a mate and stop doing that. But, you know, okay, that's not normal in hotels. It's elevators, it's people in the hallway, and it's just all the machinery in hotels that I find I get worse sleep just because of that. And when I turn on the acoustic cushion stuff, just on the phone next to my bed in airplane mode, I do sleep better.

And there might be another process that comes to mind for why that also might be is there's a really interesting effect in the sleep literature called the first night effect. And basically whenever someone goes to a new sleep environment, almost always they naturally have a little worse sleep quality.