Interview: The Power of Rest with Dr. Matthew Edlund, M.D.

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Dr. Matthew Edlund, MD, who is known as the Rest Doctor. You can check him out at thereestdoctor.com and on Twitter thereestdoctor. Great book. The Power of Rest Subtitle why Sleep Alone Is Not Enough really, really powerful ideas on embracing the rhythms of life, which we're going to talk about today. And something called active rest. Mental, physical, social, spiritual. Again, we're going to talk about those ideas, but just so excited to be here chatting with you today and I appreciate you taking the time.

Dr. Edwin, thanks for having me.

Let's jump in. Talk to us about why rest is so powerful and so important.

The body is basically continually regenerating itself. That's how we survive. Most of us is gone in about three to four weeks. If you look at what happens in a cell, there's a billion billion protein interactions per cell per second. That's what we are. We are living information. We are always updating ourselves, always rebuilding ourselves. And people tend to think of rest as something that's unimportant. But in fact, during rest, whether it's active, like walking around with a friend in a park, or passive, as when you go to sleep, we're rebuilding ourselves constantly. And the real trick is to do what you can, lifestyle wise, to regenerate yourself every second of the day.

That's fantastic. And you talk about the rhythm of life and that life is timed and compared to music. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Well, time rules life. The Romans wrote that and it's still true. We're fundamentally rhythmic. We have inner rhythms of 24 hours, the kind of thing that I spent part of my time with working on. We have rhythms of 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes. We supposedly have rhythms of about 1 1200th of a second. There are yearly rhythms, there are monthly rhythms, but basically life is built on time. And if you use your time properly, if you recognize when you're up, when you're down, and just have a normal rhythm to your day, that fits what the body's really built to do, that fits how we're meant to live physically, mentally, socially, spiritually. People tend to last a long time and have a relatively good time doing it.

Two very good things. Before we get into the active rest, I'd like to talk about the passive and sleep and particularly just go into more detail on what I think you describe as the most important rhythm, which is the circadian rhythm. Why is that important and how can we pay more attention to that?

The circadian rhythm just means circadia. It's from the Latin for around a day. It's the 24 hour rhythm. And basically everything has a timing mechanism. And we have 24 hour rhythms in every one of our cells. In fact, a lot of people would argue that every cell of our 10 trillion has its own 24 hour clock. But we've got powerful clocks in the brain that really determine not just when we sleep and when we move, but when it's best for us to rest and when it's best for us to perform. For example, most human beings hit a performance bottom somewhere around 3 or 4 in the morning. And it's not a miracle that things like Three Mile island and Chernobyl and a lot of the major disasters that you read about tend to be much more disproportionate at 3 or 4 in the morning. Similarly, if you look to Olympic records, you'll find that they're disproportionately set up around 5 or 6pm so pretty much everything about us follows clocks. And if you get to know your own clock in terms of whether you're a morning person or an evening person and use that in terms of your own daily performance, you usually can find that you can improve not just how you feel, but how you do.

That's great. And just a question that comes to mind as you describe that. Are we all attuned or most of us attuned to the natural rhythms of the sun and day and night, or is that a more personal thing?

We all attuned, we're built that way. I mean, humans are basically built to fit our environment. That's what we do. We're always adapting to our environment. That's why we're always regenerating and updating ourselves. Because the environment's never the same. I mean, it takes about four hours for, oh, a hepatitis virus to mutate and come up with a different hepatitis virus. And if our immune systems weren't responding to that continually and rapidly, we'd be toast. So given that the environment's always changing, some things are constant, that is the effects of the sun, the effects of light and darkness. And we literally have inbuilt rhythms to live within that. So of course, what do we try and do violate them? Every day we spend longer and longer up late at night. We look at our cell phones, we look at our computer monitors. They're pumping out all this blue light, not only does that tend to keep us up, but it also changes our own biological clocks. It tends to make us go to bed later and get up later, and then we get cranky during the day because we haven't had enough rest, on and on. Basically, if you fit your life to the times of your inner body, people function a whole lot better.

And to make it explicit, do you recommend to your patients and clients and students and listeners to align with that and to get in the habit of turning off all the artificial stimulation and working in some cases hard to get aligned with that more natural rhythm?

Sure. And I prefer natural to artificial stimulation. What can I tell you? Some kinds of natural simulations are much more fun than others. But what it really comes down to is we didn't evolve with electric lights. And we have a completely different sleep wake cycle than before the time there were electric lights. In fact, in most languages you have a word for first sleep and a word for second sleep. Because routinely people used to wake up in the middle of the night and spend an hour rummaging around or doing housework or something and then going back to sleep and waking up around dawn. So for a lot of the population, if they can just rest before they sleep, if they can just turn off the electronics 60, 90 minutes before and develop their own sleep ritual, which most people have, they floss their teeth, they brush their teeth, they put down their clothes for the next day, they turn down the bed and then they read a book they should have read in high school but didn't. There's a whole lot of different ways for people to rest so that they can follow their own body rhythms. We tend to be most alert, most active, oddly enough, in the early evening. We tend to get pretty slow and a bit sleepy in the early mid afternoon. If people can recognize that and use that, they can usually improve their performance and not uncommonly improve their mood.

Let's talk about that and then we'll go into active rest. When I read the book, one of the ideas that I highlighted was if we want to get depressed, we should watch TV at night. And you cited some research at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard. Can you talk to us about that?

Well, if people are insomniac, they tend to get more depressed. And it seems, for example, that morning light is more effective at preventing depression than evening light. But basically, if you mess up people's cycles, which is what happens, for example, with shift work, which is about a quarter of the working population, people have higher rates of depression. They have Higher rates of GI problems, they have higher rates of hypertension, on and on. If we can get to bed at a set time, get up at a set time, have a period during the day where I call it going far, where we eat, we move, we rest, we set some kind of rhythm that fits us for the day, we're usually going to be a lot more happy and productive.

That's great. And one of the easiest things we can do if we're in the 75% of the people who aren't doing shift work is we don't need to artificially put ourselves into that by watching TV or being stimulated by the blue lights from all of our electronics.

Right, right. Well, the question is usually TV or not tv and what happens with monitors is the guys who make these things are not fools. They want people up and using them. Okay? It doesn't matter whether it's television companies or computer companies, they don't want you to quit the machine. Doesn't care if it's 4am or 4pm you do. And interestingly, they pump out a lot of blue light from the standard monitors. Blue light tends to be more alerting. Blue light tends to keep people up later. That's not happenstance, that's pretty much what they want. So in order to just rest the brain, in many cases you're much better off turning off the electronics for quite a while prior to sleep.

And you mentioned before, I think 60 to 90 minutes. I mentioned whenever I talk about rest that we have a digital sunset in our house. When the sun goes down, our electronics go off and really committed to attuning to that rhythm them good.

Do you feel better that way?

Oh, unbelievably better. When I look at the number one habit that keeps me most rhythmic and aligned and feeling alive, it's sleep. And if I start violating that, it's amazing to watch all the other kind of performance metrics go down. Therefore that's actually my most important habit is turn everything off when the sun goes down.

Yeah, and the same thing's true in terms of when people move and when people eat. Those have pretty big effects on productivity as well. I mean, mostly it's involving light, but physical activity is in there and when people eat is in there as well.

So let's talk about that briefly. So when do you recommend activity levels? At certain levels and then the food consumption as well?

Well, it depends on what you doing it for. But a lot of the population tends to feel better if they get out in some kind of light in the morning. Just Something about morning light. Not only do you see less colds, but you see better moods. So if people have that option, that really helps. And in places like Minneapolis in the wintertime, it's usually not a terrible idea to spend 65 bucks on a light box and use that in the morning. If you, for example, exercise on some machine and have a light box nearby, that will tend to be pretty helpful. Food is really going to be based socially. It depends on your work and depends on your family. But in general, if you have relatively regular times, you'll be better off and probably eating late. From the standpoint of reflux, the standpoint of sleep may not be the best idea. So a lot of people probably want to eat by 8 o', clock, but that's clearly going to vary depending on work schedules, which these days play havoc with everything because work is now 247 and a lot of companies treat their employees as if they were machines. And that's a real problem. You don't want to be a machine again.

So there are a lot of things that are out of our control. Those things that are within our control. We want to exercise the clarity and purpose and discipline to optimize those to give us the best shot to deal with all the other complexity that's come in in the last X years. Let's move into active rest. So we talked a little bit about sleep and circadian rhythms, and we've already touched on some of the other aspects. But the subtitle to the book, the Power of Rest is why Sleep Alone Is Not Enough. And as you said early on, we can use every second as an opportunity to. To create rhythms in our life. You identify four ways to actively rest in the book. Mentally, physically, socially and spiritually. I'd like to go through each of those and just hear your thoughts and favorite kind of best practices for each. Can we start, though with active rest? Why do we want to think about not just rest, but active rest?

Well, we want to think of rest as something that helps regenerating our body. Most people, when they hear the term rest, think, oh gosh, that's a waste of time, that's not productive. And that's one of the major beefs with sleep. There's a lot of people I run into who say, why do I have to sleep seven hours a night? Why can't I just sleep one or two? The answer is relatively simple. Because if you do that, you'll hallucinate. And if you keep people sleep for a long enough period of time, they really get pretty darn Ill. They look pre diabetic relatively quickly. So the real game is what's your body built to do? My argument is what you do is what you become. So physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, you can use all four of those for pretty much whatever problem you have, particularly any health problem you have. And what works physically. Basically, if people can be physically active as much as they can during the day, I'm not sure that sitting is the new smoking, but there clearly aren't a lot of advantages to sitting around all day. So when you can, you move around and you basically view anything that involves muscle action as physical activity. It doesn't have to be in a gym, it doesn't have to be with a machine. And the real tricks physically just seem to be one, have a regular pattern. Two, basically eat whole foods. There's lots of different diets out there that people seem to live long with. And then three, when you can move. And the Brits are now really pushing the idea of interval training, that if you can do 10, 20, 30 seconds at a time, where you walk as fast as you can or you run as fast as you can, where you go flat out physically for even short periods, if you can put together two or four minutes of that during the day, people seem to last longer and seem to have less diabetes, for example, and probably less. So how you exercise, when you exercise, where you exercise, all makes a difference. Next, mentally, the real trick there is see the world in terms of solutions, not just problems. Problems will be with us beyond the grave. What you really need is to train the brain to think. What's plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D? How do I fix this? How do I come to the best possible result? Some things you're not going to change. I really don't think I'm going to have much impact on American foreign policy, for example. But there are other areas where you can pick and choose where you will have an impact that you'll feel. So basically, it's a very simple version of cognitive behavioral thinking, but it's to see the world in terms of solutions, not just problems. Socially, that's probably one of the most underused thing in medicine available. Basically, the more connections people have, the more people they talk to, the more friends, colleagues, acquaintances they have, the longer they live. It seems there's a lot less heart attacks and strokes. Even certain tumors are cut back literally by the number of people you know. Now, I'm not sure this is going to work. As far as the net, having 5 million Facebook friends may not guarantee you A long life. But if you have people you actually interact with on a daily basis, face to face, you have a lot of them, and to some degree I hope you like them, you'll generally be in better shape. Finally, spiritually, deja vuhr isn't religion per se. It's connecting with something larger than oneself, feeling connected to something bigger. And that can be causes, that can be spiritual practice, that can be nature, that can be literally thousands of different things. And when people have that, once again, they tend to live longer and they tend to live somewhat happily. So think of it all four ways. What can I do physically, mentally, socially, spiritually to help out with whatever problem I have? If you take for example, a cold, and most people think, well, I can't really prevent colds to some extent, you can die just walking in the morning. There are studies out there that when people walk in the morning for a half hour, they have half as many colds and half the severity. Same thing mentally. When people get colds, they often get very dejected. What you have to tell people is, look, you'll be sick for a while, but then you'll get better. You have to get through this period. These are the things you can still do. And when you get sick, what's the body telling you? It's got to rest, it's got to rebuild tissue, it's got to take care of viruses, throw out the detritus, rebuild the places that have been hurt socially. Okay, when people feel down during a cold, basically the more connections they have, the better they feel. And there's evidence that when people have more social relations, they basically tend to have less colds. When they feel socially supported, they have less of a problem. Last, spiritually, if people feel connected to something larger, they just look at it and say, okay, I got sick for a while, I'm going to be okay. I'm going to get through this. This is what I'm looking forward to later. You can do it for any medical diagnosis you name. But if you take that approach, the fourfold path, what can I do physically? What can I do mentally? What can I do socially? What can I do spiritually? You're usually going to find there's a whole bunch of different things you can do that you haven't thought of before.

Such a simple but powerful frame as all good wisdom is, eh? I'd love to hear your thoughts on a few points within each of those. Or one I should say within a few of them. First, you referenced a study on naps, and even six minutes has been Proven to boost everything we want to boost. Can you talk to us about that briefly?

Well, basically, most of the population is sleep deprived. And if you look at what normal human sleep is, before industrial civilizations, people were sleeping in three different phases. They were going to bed a couple of hours after darkness. They were waking up in the middle of the night for an hour. They were waking up again around dawn, and they were taking naps in the daytime. Now, naps don't work for everybody, but for a lot of people, naps will replenish them. And the interesting thing is short naps seem to be more efficient. Why? If you nap longer, you tend to get into the deeper phases of sleep. And that causes something called sleep inertia, which is that dead, leaden feeling that you wake up with. Sometimes you don't want to do that. So naps of 6 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes for a lot of people make them feel a whole lot better. And you can even show, for example, if you give them mathematical questions or even a question like, what's the best car to buy? And here are three possible deals. If you give people a short nap, they usually come up with better answers. The brain's always working. It doesn't turn off. We're always renewing ourselves. We're always rebuilding ourselves. That's always occurring during rest. Most of the heart, for example, is gone in all of three days. Biology is fast, biology is violent. But the beauty is we always rebuild ourselves, we always regenerate ourselves. And if we do it right, we end up with a better result.

That's inspiring. Every three days, we're getting a new heart. And with those tiny, tiny little improvements of a little more deep breathing, which is one of the other ideas to a little more napping or going to bed a little earlier. Each of those has an incremental effect, which is significant, compounded over time.

Right. And compounded over people. Because what you do also affects the people around you. It's a sort of situation where you see that when people, for example, gain a lot of weight, the people around them tend to gain more weight. If people see you more relaxed, more concentrated, more focused, it affects them, too. This affects families, this affects job sites, and it affects communities. We're social animals. We're always paying attention to what's happening to the rest of us.

Can you tell us about why you're a fan of meditation? It's kind of known, but I'd love to hear your perspective on it.

I'm a fan of meditation because that's what makes the brain Better. I mean, for a lot of people, it's pretty much the only way they know these days to rest and relax. And as Bill Murray would say, most people do things better when they're relaxed. The brain has many different states and when people meditate, they're able to go back into certain states where function improves. So it's not just a matter of mood, it's a matter of literally allowing things to reset themselves so the brain can become not just less stressed, but more functional. I don't think we evolved for 21st century American life. We adjust to it rather well. But if we can meditate and if we can learn to meditate quickly, slowly, or even think of meditative practices throughout the 24 hour day, people are usually going to feel better and in many cases just perform better.

I love it. That would fall into your mental rest and then related but separate practice under spiritual rest would be to pray. You suggest we just pray for one minute. We don't need to make it a big deal. Can you talk to us about that?

Yeah, I have a one minute prayer in the book the Power of Rest. Basically because I was asked by people to come up with things that would be very quick because people don't have any time for anything these days. But I think it's more a question of mindset. It's just a sense of gratitude. It's a sense of being part of something larger. And that people can feel that in many ways very quickly just by getting their minds into a sense of where they fit in the whole picture. We get caught up in the day with all the minutiae around us and the thousand things we're supposed to be doing at the same time. And when we can focus a bit on where we fit into the whole, I think people can have a much healthier perspective on where things are going to go.

I love it. And it doesn't need to be complicated just to step back, feel that connection. And any one of the. You've shared a ton of little ideas we can implement. I know that we are running up on a hard stop with your fortunate patient that gets to see you and optimize. Is there anything that we. Is there anything that we haven't talked about yet that you want to make sure we touch on briefly?

Yeah. My new website is Regeneration Health News. And I just want people to recognize that their body is always regenerating, that their body is always rebuilding itself and to see themselves as living information. Physics has changed. A lot of people don't talk about quantum mechanics anymore. They Talk about quantum information theory, the idea that the universe itself is a form of information that gets written and rewritten. And I think if people see that about themselves, that they're this continuously changing information field that they have this enormous influence on. Because what you do is what you become and what kind of information you give to your body, whether it's how you think when you're walking, what you eat, all that's going to go into the mix and help determine what becomes of you. So if you see the world as information, if you see the world as having all these different influences coming in and out, and the body's responding to it in literally millions of different ways, of which presently we know very few, I really think we're ants in the kitchen trying to figure out a microwave. When you see yourself as living information, you start to see, I can change things, I can influence this stuff. I can make a difference. I don't have to do things exactly the same all the time. In fact, I can't, because the environment out there has already changed on me anyway. And it's a beautiful thing when you see your whole body as constantly renewing. I tell people when they wake up in the morning, they're partially reborn. It's literally true. We've changed our memories, we've changed our ways of storing and using information, we've rebuilt skin, we've completely taken care of lots of brain cell changes. The point is, we're always renewing. And if you see yourself as always renewing, you should always have hope that something can be done to make things.

Better that is both beautiful and inspiring. What you do is what you become. Quantum Information Theory. I'm looking forward to that book. Is that in the plans? No, I'll make a request. I'll lob in a request.

There's a guy named Vedrag. What's it? Vladik Vedral, who's a physicist at Oxford. And yes, I think one of his books is Decoding Reality. There's a lot of different things in this. The rest of the world's adjusted. The physicists are thinking this way more and more. The chemists are the biologists. To a fair degree. My medical colleagues. Forget it. They still see things in the nice little silos that we have around. That's why they can't figure out why something like your gut bacteria can affect your mood or change your immune function, or even affect what kinds of foods you want to have. Well, there's 100 trillion bacterial cells and there's 10 trillion human cells. So figure it out. We are constantly changing flows of information. We're always shifting the mix. The trick is to perform those things physically, mentally, socially and spiritually. That will move the mix in the directions you want to go. And that's where the real fun comes.

I love it. Can you tell us again the URL where people can check out this newest stuff?

Yeah, it's RegenerationHealthNews.com okay.

RegenerationHealthNews.com Dr. Matthew Edwin, MD thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you.

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