10 Big Ideas to Optimize Your Sleep (An 80/20 Look at Why We Sleep, Why We Don't Sleep, and How To Optimize Our #1 Fundie)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize Mastery series, Module six, our third fundy sleep. We had the big picture discussion, then we talked about eating. Now it's time to talk about sleeping. And if you believe one of the world's leading sleep science researchers, Matthew Walker, this is actually the number one fundamental. We talked about how eating is arguably the number one fundamental. Well, guess what? Matthew Walker tells us this is the number one fundamental. And as it turns out, Katie Bowman, movement expert, tells us movement is actually the number one. Patrick McGowan other breathing experts will talk about next. They say breathing is the most fundamental. The reality is they all go together. And as we look at this virtuous circle and cycle and spiraling up of putting all the little pieces together, eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating, prospering, boom. Optimus us virtue embodied with mastery on these fundamentals. So today we're going to take a quick 80, 20 look at why we sleep, why we don't sleep, and how to optimize what might be the very foundation of our fundamentals. So as always, we have 10 big ideas. Let's take a quick look and then we will jump in. First, big idea, why we sleep. Why do we sleep? Interesting question answered in a fascinating book by the same name. Matthew Walker out of UC Berkeley, where I dropped out of law school. Go UC Berkeley. Bolt Law School. So Matthew Walker out of Berkeley tells us this is the very foundation. We're going to read a quote from him on why we sleep. Check out that book, why we Sleep. Check out the notes. And if you're going to read one book as you go through this program as an optimized coach, this is the one. It's certainly the one for sleep. And I would argue that Food Fix would be the book to read for nutrition and the overall systemic issues. Right. So we got Food Fix and then the movement book, the Joy of Movement for sure. Kelly McGonagall and then why we Sleep for sleep and then breathing we'll talk more about. But Patrick McGowan's the oxygen advantage or James Nestor's breath, we'll go with and we'll talk more about the other ones. But anyway, why we Sleep. Matthew Walker. We'll talk about some crazy stats. Two thirds of us are not getting the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep. And if you consistently sleep less than six or seven hours a night, you double your risk of getting cancer. So quick check in, how much sleep are you getting? Asterisks on that. The amount of time you're spending in bed doesn't count. There's something called sleep efficiency we're going to talk about. We want to know how much you sleep, not how long you were in bed. There's a difference. And if you get 85% sleep efficiency, that's considered good. So you can run the math on it, which we will, and find out how much sleep you're actually getting. And let's make sure you're not in the population that's not getting enough and is twice as likely to get cancer. Some serious sobering stats. Second big idea, why we sleep, why we don't sleep. We're gonna talk about the 10 Kryptonites that get in the way of us sleeping. Well, the first one is a little sneak peek. We don't take it seriously, so we need to take it seriously. Which leads us to the third big idea here, which is we are well adjusted, sleepwalking blind zombies. So the reality is, Matthew Walker tells us the more sleep deprived you are, the less you know you are sleep deprived. Seneca told us the worse a person is, the less he feels it, the less he's aware of it. So if you're so sleep deprived that you don't even know you're sleep deprived. Ah, we got to figure that out. We got to see the gorilla. Don't be a blind zombie. We'll talk about that. The fourth big idea is our number one. Actually, no. Our fourth big idea is a brief history of light. A brief history of light, specifically blue light. Then we'll talk about lightning as well. We have the sun. Been around for a while. Then we have fire. Been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Then we have candles, thousands of years. Then boom, let there be light. Less than 150 years ago, we have artificial light at night. Crazy fire versus light. Very different. Then TVs and now smartphones blasting blue light at us. That has not had a positive impact on our well being. You can look at sleep going down from 10 hours a night to 8 hours a night to less than 7 hours a night and watch chronic disease go up at the same time. So fifth idea is our number one tip, which is to break some icons, be an heroic iconoclast once again. Break some icons, break some screens, have a digital sunset. This is our number one wreck on sleep. As you know from our PM bookend, at least an hour before you plan to go to bed, turn off all your electronics. It's a big idea. Six is the decision. Do you want to be a hero or do you want to be entertained by sports heroes or pseudo false heroes in dramas on tv? Make the decision. What's more important to you? Do you want to be actualized or do you want to be entertained? The reality is we're wasting our time at night, we're blowing up our consciousness with unnecessary stuff, and we're choosing to be entertained rather than actualized. Let's be honest about it. Why is it you can't go to bed early? Yeah, maybe your kids are involved in some activities and maybe we want to revisit that because kids need sleep as much as anybody else. Or maybe we're blowing up our minds with nonsense and we just need to make the decision again to go for mastery rather than go through the motions. I'm going to be my usual intense self there. Seventh, big idea is some some curfews. We want five curfews installed, which will include caffeine, exercise, eating, work and technology. Our eighth idea is to train tranquility. This is a big, big idea and a big practice. We're going to talk about writing two algorithms for tranquility. One during the day, one at night. I'm really excited to share more here, but we need to get good at turning off our brains. If you are redlining yourself all day with input after input after input, email, smartphone, Instagram, incessantly, well, of course you're gonna have a hard time falling asleep at night. Your brain is hot. You've trained it to be compulsively wanting more inputs. You can't just flip the switch on that without training it and expect to fall asleep. And then when you wake up in the middle of the night, boom. Your brain is buzzing. Don't be surprised. You trained that level of lack of tranquility and perhaps even anxiety. So we're going to train our tranquility. We'll talk about some key algorithms before we move on to the ninth idea. You, as a professional optimizer, what's your identity? Energy wise? How do you live when you're showing up as that best version of you? Energy wise, act like you mean it, be that version of you. Now work your protocol and know that the number one scientific tip to optimize your sleep is consistency. Reduce the variability of your behavior. Have rituals that work and repeat them. Right. Identity, virtues, behavior, repeat. Tenth big idea. We're going to do some math. We talked about that. Sleep efficiency, number. Then we're going to be conquerors again, doing that math and writing prescriptions for us. What's the number one thing you know you could do to change your life by optimizing your sleep. Go do that. Continue to run some experiments, get a little better. Day in and day out, aggregate and compound those tiny gains and guess what? Voila. Your life permanently will fundamentally and permanently change. That's the overview. Let's jump in. Alright, our first big idea. Why We Sleep. The name of a great book by Matthew Walker. Again, number one recommendation of any book you can read. Read this one Life changing for you, for your family, for your clients, for your colleagues, et cetera. And I'm going to kick this idea off with a quote, a longer than normal quote. But I just love it when conservative scientists use a fictional ad to sell their fundamental. John Ratey does something similar in Spark, saying that exercise is like taking a little bit of Ritalin, a little bit of Prozac. We'll talk about another example in our session on Focus when we talk about the magic pill of meditation. For now, Matthew Walker, world's leading scientist, certainly one of the world's leading scientists studying sleep. He tells us this amazing breakthrough. Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you more attractive, look more attractive. Awesome. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and strokes, not to mention diabetes. You even feel happier, less depressed and less anxious. Are you interested? Then he continues by saying while it may sound hyperbolic, nothing about this fictitious advertisement would be inaccurate. If this were a drug, many people would be disbelieving. Those who were convinced would pay large sums of money for even the smallest dose. Should clinical trials back up the claims, share prices of the pharmaceutical company that invented the drug would skyrocket. And finally, he continues by saying, of course the ad is not describing some miracle new tincture or a cure all wonder drug, but rather the proven benefits of a full night of sleep. The evidence supporting these claims have been documented in more than 17,000 well scrutinized and scientific reports to date. As for the prescription cost, well, there isn't one. It's free. Yet all too often we shun the nightly invitations to receive our full dose of this all natural remedy with terrible consequences and finally failed by the lack of public education. Most of us do not realize how remarkable a panacea sleep truly is. Phenomenal 1 *. It does come with a cost. It's free money wise. But that's Never the most expensive price in anything. It's your consciousness, your energy. You need to pay for this good night of sleep with your own wisdom and, and your own self mastery. You need to know the game you're playing and how to play it. Well, that would be high fiving our inner daimon and remembering that a good night of sleep is a bridge from despair to hope. And then you need to pay the price with your self mastery, doing what needs to get done, whether you feel like it or not. As you use your willpower wisely to install habits that run on autopilot via algorithms. I heard we had a module about that and actually put this into practice. Then you get the miracle tincture that is truly a panacea. So that's why we sleep. It gives us all those benefits. Matthew goes so far as to say that in all of his research he's realized that he used to think that sleep was just another pillar. These guys usually think in threes, right? So eating, moving, sleeping, the three pillars of optimal health. We add in our own additional four, of course. Now he says after researching this, he thinks it's the very foundation on which the other pillars rest. And he makes a very strong case for why that's the case. And again, as I said in the prelude here, all of the experts would say, no, no, eating's the actual foundation. No, no moving. All your cells are triggered and tied to movement. And now we've got sleep and then we've got breathing. Well, look, you can live for days without water, for weeks without food, but only for moments without air. Matthew Walker would say the same thing. You can go without water or food, but you go without sleep for a day, right? And boom, you're going to start experiencing significant effects. One skipped night of sleep and you have a effectively the competence of being super drunk. Simply skipping or even skimping on your sleep dramatically diminishes not only your performance, but your psychological well being, etc. Now unfortunately, the recommendation that he offers is 8 hours of sleep. Read other sources, you'll see 7 to 9. Two thirds of the US adult population does not hit that standard. It's a staggering number. And you know what else that's related to? 2/3 are also overweight or obese. And he actually says the best diet is one more hour of sleep a night. All of a sudden you change your overall hormonal structure. Then again, it isn't an energy balance way of losing weight, it's a metabolic thing. You need to get your hormones balanced. Yes, the calories you consume matter and they're different. But guess what? Simply getting more sleep changes your insulin levels, which is how you store or burn fat. It's incredibly powerful. And to say it again, and I'll repeat myself many times on this particular subject, if you are consistently getting less than six to seven hours of sleep, you double your risk of cancer. You got that burned in your head. Yet if you consistently get less than six or seven hours of sleep, you double your risk of cancer. And as I said, and we will do the official math times, however much you spend in bed, by about 0.85, 0.9 if you're crushing it, 0.95 if you're really crushing it. But conservatively. Conservatively would be 0.8. If you're getting up in the middle of the night, you're probably only getting 0.8 times how long you're in bed. Right? So even if you're in bed for eight hours, you may not. You almost certainly aren't getting the recommended eight hours, obviously in and even the seven hours. Again, we'll talk about the math there, but do the quick math in your mind right now. Where are you following on the doubling or not doubling your cancer risk? Oh, he got some other fascinating research we talk about in the note. But to make the point on what one hour of sleep does for you, he says the largest study kind of conducted on this involves 2 billion people. 2 billion people, right, went through a sleep study unknowingly. It's called daylight savings time. When you spring forward, you effectively lose an hour of sleep. Whereas when you fall back in the fall, you get an hour of sleep. Does anything happen when we all go through that shift? Yes. People have actually studied the medical hospital admissions and records and stuff like that, and they found that that day, when we lose that hour of sleep, heart attacks go up, traffic incidents go up. And what's fascinating, he tells us, is when it falls back, those same numbers are reversed. You get an extra hour of sleep, you lose the hour, heart attacks go up, traffic accidents go up, you get the hour back, heart attacks go down, traffic accidents go down. And he says, look, I can overwhelm you with stats and terrify you and make you not even want to get out of bed, but that one stat often does the trick. The other phrase that I love, that brings the point home that we've talked about so many times. A good night of sleep is a bridge from despair to hope. But guess what? That bridge goes both ways. You get a bad night of sleep and you're going to go from hope to despair. Good news, you make a mistake and you need to get a better night's sleep. Just rebound and install the habits. Reinstall the habits. He also tells us that if you think you are one of the blessed few that just can get by on five or six hours of sleep, he says no. Out of 60 years of scientific research, he doesn't believe anyone who tells him, I can get by on four to five hours of sleep. Good luck with that. Now, statistically speaking, you may have a rare kind of genetic issue or mutation or whatever such that you can actually get by, but you know what the odds are of you having that. He says they're about as good as getting struck by lightning in your Life, which is 1 in 12,000, 1 in 12,000 likelihood. And he says round that to the nearest whole integer and you know what you get? What? Percentage zero. It's not likely get more sleep. It's essential to optimizing and actualizing in service to the world. Hey, this is Brian again. I hope you enjoyed that overview of a Mastery Series session and got some wisdom out of it. You can apply to your life today. What was it again? You can learn more about our Optimize Coach program at Optimize Me Coach. And here's a fun little video we put together featuring some of our Optimize Coach graduates describing what they got out of our program and why they loved it so much. You can also check out hundreds of other testimonials at Optimize Me Coach. Have an awesome day and let's do.