Dr. Matt Walker: Protocols to Improve Your Sleep | Huberman Lab Guest Series

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Guest series.

Where I and an expert guest discuss.

Science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today marks the second episode in our six episode series All About Sleep with our expert guest, Dr. Matthew Walker. During today's episode we discuss the do's and the do nots of sleep, focusing for instance on on how to use light and absence of light, as well as temperature, both of your sleep environment, specifically the room you're in, your body temperature, and much more in order to regulate the timing and quality of your sleep. And we discuss how things like alcohol, caffeine and cannabis impact sleep and the various stages of sleep. And we discuss the various tools that exist now and that are rapidly becoming available to improve your sleep. This episode is essential for anyone trying to optimize their sleep. And when I say optimize your sleep, I mean trying to optimize the formula that was addressed in in the first episode of the series, which is the QQRT formula, the quality, quantity, regularity and timing of your sleep. Four variables that combine to determine whether or not your sleep is optimized for you and thereby providing the most restoration and improvement to your mental health, physical health and performance. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. It's abundantly clear that sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. When we're getting enough quality sleep, everything in life goes so much better. And when we are not getting enough quality sleep, everything in life is that much more challenging. Now, one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to have the appropriate mattress. Everyone, however, has slightly different needs in terms of what would be the optimal mattress for them. Helix understands that people have unique sleep.

Needs and they've designed a brief two.

Minute quiz that asks you questions like.

Do you sleep on your back, your.

Side or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Or maybe you don't know the answers to those questions. If you go to the Helix site and take that brief quiz, they'll match you to a mattress that's optimal for you. For me, it turned out to be the Dusk dusk mattress. It's not too hard, not too soft, and I sleep so much better on my Helix mattress than on any other type of mattress I've used before. So if you're interested in upgrading your Mattress, go to helixsleep.com Huberman take their brief two minute sleep quiz and they'll match you to a customized mattress for you and you'll get up to $350 off any mattress order and two free pillows. Again, that's helixsleep.comhuberman to save up to $350 off and two free pillows. Today's episode is also brought to us by whoop. Whoop is a fitness wearable device that tracks your daily activity and sleep, but also goes beyond that by providing real time feedback on how to adjust your training and sleep schedule to perform better. I've been working with WHOOP on their Scientific Advisory Council to try and help advance whoop's mission of unlocking human performance. As a WHOOP user, I've experienced the health benefits of their technology firsthand for sleep tracking, for monitoring other features of my physiology, and for giving me a lot of feedback about metrics within my brain and body that tell me how hard I should train or not train and basically point to the things that I'm doing correctly and incorrectly in my daily life that I can adjust using protocols calls, some of which are actually within the Whoop app. Given that many of us have goals such as improving our sleep, building better habits, or just focusing more on our overall health, WHOOP is one of the tools that can really help you get personalized data, recommendations and coaching toward your overall health. If you're interested in trying Whoop, you can go to join.whoop.com huberman today to get your first month free. Again, that's join.whoop.com Huberman today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking up is a meditation app that has hundreds of different meditations as well as scripts for yoga, nidra and non Sleep Deep rest or NSDR protocols. By now, there's an abundance of data showing that even short daily meditations can greatly improve our mood, reduce anxiety, improve our ability to focus, and can improve our memory. And while there are many different forms of meditation, most people find it difficult to find and stick to a meditation practice in a way that is most beneficial for them. The Waking up app makes it extremely easy to learn how to meditate and to carry out your daily meditation practice in a way that's going to be most effective and efficient for you. It includes a variety of different types of meditations of different duration, as well as things like Yoga Nidra which place the brain and body into a sort of pseudo sleep that allows you to emerge feeling incredibly mentally refreshed. In fact, the science around Yoga Nidra is really impressive, showing that after a Yoga Nidra session, levels of dopamine in certain areas of the brain are enhanced by up to 60%, which places the brain and body into a state of enhanced readiness for mental work and for physical work. Another thing I really like about the Waking up app is that it provides a 30 day introduction course. So for those of you that have not meditated before or getting back to a meditation practice, that's fantastic. Or if you're somebody who's already a skilled and regular meditator, Waking up has more advanced meditations and Yoga Nidra sessions for you as well. If you'd like to try the Waking up app, you can go to wakingup.comhuberman and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.comhuberman. and now for my conversation with Dr. Matthew Walker.

Professor Matt Walker, welcome back. We're all so happy to have you here. And in episode one, you beautifully described.

The biology of sleep, why sleep is.

Important, what happens when we don't get enough sleep. And you incentivized getting enough, adequate amounts of great sleep. And you defined what great sleep is and you provided some excellent practical protocols and tools for getting great sleep. However, today you're going to tell us, I believe, about the protocols for really optimizing one's sleep. Both conventional tools and protocols and some.

Let'S say unconventional, not heretical, but unconventional.

Tools for optimizing one's sleep. So let's start with the basics. What are the basics of what I think I've heard you refer to previously as sleep hygiene?

Yeah, I think many of us can resonate with the idea of dental hygiene, but turns out there's something called sleep hygiene and there are probably, I would say, five edicts of sleep hygiene. I offer them as tools and not necessarily rules because I don't think people respond to rules. People respond to reasons and not rules. So if it's okay, I'll probably just unpack each one of them rather than just sort of bark them at you and hope people assume that it's the right answer. I'll explain the answer so people understand why. Why it's important. So, as I said, there are probably five things that you can start doing tonight to try to improve your sleep. The first we've spoken a little bit about in that first episode. It's part of the four macros of good sleep. First piece of advice, regularity. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time. No matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend, regularity is king. And the reason is because when you feed your brain the signals of timed regularity for your sleep, it will anchor your sleep and improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep. Because part of that signal of regularity going into your brain in terms of that repeated behavior night after night sleep, in other words, helps train that central 24 hour circadian clock that we also spoke about in the first episode. So that's the first piece of advice. Try to keep it as regular as you possibly can. The second piece of advice is darkness. In my view, we are a dark deprived society in this modern era and we need darkness at night as well. You've spoken about to release a hormone called melatonin. And melatonin will help time the regular onset of your sleep. So that sounds great, but what Boots on the ground, Matt, what does that mean? I would suggest the following. In the last hour before bed, try to dim down 50%, if not more, of your lights in your home. And you will be quite surprised at how sleepy and soporific that will make you feel. I will do this in a regimented way. I have a little reminder that pops up and tells me now is the time to dim the lights based on your bedtime. And I'll go around and I'll shut lights down in my bedroom. I will actually have a smart light bulb and it is way down to probably as little as maybe 5 lux. And looks is just a metric of the light. It's way down there and it's also very deep orange, sort of red. And we can come on to why that's the case. So that's the first thing, even before you're thinking about sleep, start to decrease the light. For example, if you were there at, let's say for a standard sleep schedule at 10pm and normally you are getting into bed at 10:30pm but you feel pretty wide awake. If there was an electrical blackout and you lost your phone, magnetic to phone goes down, lights go down, total blackout. My suspicion is that fairly soon you'd say, gosh, I actually feel quite sleepy. Whereas if the lights were blazing, you've got your phone, televisions on, lots of stimulation, you're probably going to think 10:30. No, I could, I could probably push through for at least another hour. So try to dissipate that light and then if you need to wear an eye mask, blackout curtains always good as well. But we need that darkness at night because when you give the brain the signal of darkness, it releases effectively a brake pedal. That brake pedal has normally been applied by way of light on the release of that spigot of melatonin. And when you take the brake pedal off, it starts pumping out into the brain. You can also then of course probably reverse engineer this trick in the morning. And this is another component of why you've been, I think so, such a wonderful advocate for light in the morning. It does many things, but one of the things that it does is reapply that break on melatonin and therefore you lose the signal to your brain of darkness. That's what melatonin in some ways is doing. We often call it the hormone of darkness or the vampire hormone. Not necessarily because it makes you look longingly at people's necklines and want to, to bite in, which is great if you're into that, but it's really simply about it's releasing melatonin which tells the brain, my goodness, it's nighttime. But if you've got bright light on, you come from your office, you're driving home, so you've got artificial light during the day which is probably not strong enough to stimulate you and bring you awake. You come home and you've got again bright light. But it's still strong enough now to, to prevent the release of melatonin. You start to shift in your timing and you may have problems with your sleep. So that's the second piece of advice I would love to ask you about that morning light two and the alertness benefits. I'm as a sleep researcher more focused on the evening component of light and decreasing it. But you've done a great job. I don't know if there's anything.

There are a couple of quick points that are based on some what I consider really nice studies. There's beautiful work in humans showing that bright light exposure in the morning, especially from sunlight. But if one doesn't have access to sunlight for whatever reason. There are commercially available so called SAD lamps, seasonal affective disorder lamps. They range anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 lux, very bright but, but certainly morning sunlight viewing and lamps of the sort I just described have been shown to increase the amplitude of the morning cortisol spike by as much as 50% 5, 0. So people hear cortisol and they freak out. They think, that's not good, I want my cortisol low.

But you actually want your cortisol highest.

In the morning and lower in the afternoon and evening. And there's a lot of reason for that. Elevated mood, focus and alertness in the morning and throughout the day and ease of getting to sleep at night, lower anxiety, lower depressive symptoms, and so on. So that bright light also serves to control the amplitude of cortisol in the direction you want in the early part of the day. The other thing that's just more of a underlying dynamics of the circadian visual system, which is a system that I worked on for years. These wonderful cells in the eyes that are not for image forming, but rather for detecting sunlight and bright light for sake of setting circadian rhythm, is that the sensitivity of that system early in the day is actually quite low. So you need a lot of bright light early in the day to effectively wake up your system and shut down the sleepiness signals, such as melatonin. But later in the day, it's a rather diabolical system. It takes very little light, even from artificial sources, to disrupt your circadian rhythm and quash melatonin. As little as 15 seconds of bright light in the evening, I think Chuck Zeissler's laboratory at Harvard Medical School showed, can quash melatonin in the evening. Now, I don't want people to freak out and think that they go into a hotel bathroom, which oftentimes those are very bright, in the middle of the.

Night, flip on the light, that they're.

Going to completely screw up their circadian rhythms. But if I'm honest, they'd be much better off using their phone as a flashlight to navigate. People always say, well, wait, but the flashlight on the phone is very bright. But let's just get logical here.

A light shone into your eyes, such.

As a flashlight, is very different than looking at a flashlight beam on the ground. Yeah, Far and away difference. So the point is that if you don't get enough bright sunlight or light in your eyes early in the day, and then you're indoors under artificial lighting, you might think, well, this is really bright lighting. This is the kind of lighting that could disrupt my circadian rhythm at night and therefore it's sufficient to wake up my system. No.

Early in the day and throughout the.

Day, you need a lot of bright light as much as safely possible to avoid sunburn and things of that sort, which you don't want. But then as the evening comes around, after sundown, you need very little artificial light in order to disrupt your circadian rhythm. And then just very quickly, light from candles, fireplaces is okay. This is kind of interesting. It seems bright, but the measurements indicate that that's not going to shift your circadian rhythm much. Candles are great, but of course, don't burn your house down so that the orange and red tones in the evening way dim down. That's the way to go early in the day. Bright, bright, bright light, as bright as you safely can tolerate.

And what I like about, firstly, your mention of cortisol. You described how cortisol is rising in the morning and that's a great thing and it is a good thing. And in the evening it's starting to drop. And if you look right around your prototypical bedtime, and we're going to speak later in this episode as to what your real natural bedtime is versus the one that you may be taking right now, it's very interesting. Cortisol will almost hit its lowest point, something that we call it's nadir. It's the lowest point in that trough of its decline right around the time when you should be sleeping. However, there's a great study that looked at people with insomnia and in subsequent episodes we'll discuss this too. But one of the ways that we think about or conceptualize insomnia is in two different flavors. Sleep onset insomnia, I can't fall asleep. And sleep maintenance insomnia, I wake up, I can't get back to sleep. And what they looked at was essentially cortisol levels. They had a catheter in the arm and they were sampling it from the bloodstream and they were able to do that every 30 minutes. So it's a little bit like time lapse photography and you're getting a data point every 30 minutes across the 24 hour period. Looking at cortisol across now a full 24 hour period. And sure enough, when you look at healthy controls who can sleep well and insomnia patients, they look almost identical across the day. But then when it comes to falling asleep right around that bedtime period, the healthy controls are going all the way down. The insomnia patients go down and down and down, and then they have a rise back up right around that sleep onset period. And then they start to drop back down again, just as the control group. But then they also often will have a spike in the middle of the night, which then comes down. And then both of them are staying low throughout the early morning period. And then it starts to rise back up so it's not as though net. Net Overall there is a higher level of cortisol in people with insomnia. It seems to be right at those trigger zones that map very nicely to sleep onset problems, sleep maintenance problems. Very interesting.

As somebody who wakes up in the middle of the night and sometimes has trouble getting back to sleep, that, that resonates. I have no trouble falling asleep whatsoever. Yeah, knock on wood. Superstitious about this at this point, but I use tools like non sleep, deep rest, yoga, Nidra long exhale breathing. But you know, and I think these wake up episodes seem to happen more when I'm processing a lot of stuff from my daily life.

That's right.

You know, the unconscious brain oftentimes is working through things and will wake us up.

Yeah. I often think that sleep maintenance insomnia that you've just described is the revenge of daytime emotions unresolved.

That's a great way to put it. Yeah.

So that would be. So we've spoken about regularity, we've spoken about darkness and we've spoken about the inverse of that in the morning, which is light, a little bit of cortisol. So the third out of the five is going to be temperature. And the advice here is keep it cool, as we mentioned a little bit in the first episode. And we will go into great detail when we speak not just about these conventional and unconventional tips, but we're also going to go into the future of science and where sleep science is taking us to in fact optimize and even enhance our sleep. We, we will speak a lot about temperature. Suffice to say that you need to drop your core body temperature and your brain temperature by a little less than 1 degree Celsius, 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit to get to sleep and stay asleep. The general target that we have in sleep science, if you look across the literature, is somewhere around about the 67 degree Fahrenheit, or I'm trying to do the calculation, maybe 18.5 ish degrees Celsius. Now I know that that sound cold and cold it is. But you can also wear thick socks to bed. You can have a hot water bottle at the end of the bed. That's great too. But the ambient must be cold. The fourth piece of advice is walk it out. And here what I mean is do not stay in bed for long periods of time awake. And I think we mentioned this perhaps in the first episode too when you are awake in your bed for long stretches of time because your brain is an incredibly associative device, it will quickly learn that this thing called my bed is the place where I'm awake and not asleep. And what you need to do is break that association if you've learned that time and time again because you've stayed in bed. And the rule of thumb, and it's just a rule of a rule of thumb, about 20, 25 minutes, if you can't fall back asleep or you can't fall asleep, it's okay, just say, tonight is not my night, it's not a problem, it's tomorrow is not completely shot, it's fine, I'm just going to get up, get out of bed if you can. If you're lucky enough, try to go to a different room and in dim light, read a book, listen to a podcast, whatever it is that relaxes you, just do that. Don't check email, don't eat, because if you start eating that again, trains your brain to start waking up and feeding at that time and only return to bed when you are sleepy. And there is no time limit for that. I don't want you to come back after half an hour when you are still awake and not feeling sleepy enough. Why? Because you're going to get back into bed and be in the same problem again. And gradually, if you do this and it's hard to do it, you will relearn the association that you had, I'm sure, as a child, which is that your bed is this place of sleepiness. Because often people will be saying, I feel so tired in the evening and then they get into bed and they say, but now I can't fall asleep at all. And I don't understand it. In part it's because of that learned association. So that would be the fourth tip. The fifth tip makes me even more unpopular as a personality and character, which is try to be mindful of your alcohol and caffeine. Now, in a subsequent episode, we'll go into great detail as to how caffeine works, its mechanisms, why it is sleep disruptive, and why in fact, I've even perhaps changed my mind on caffeine and its benefits from. But it also does have significant detriments to your sleep. So the rule of thumb here would be try to cut yourself off from caffeine probably at least 10 or so hours before you expect to go to bed. And you can just calculate back, calculate that and try to limit it so the dose and the timing make the poison cut yourself off after maybe two or three cups of coffee. And then that timing component, count yourself back, cut yourself off, decaffeinated coffee. Not too bad if you find the right thing too. If you need that fix. Alcohol is probably one of the most misunderstood sleep aids in quotes. That is it is no sleep aid at all. Now, if I didn't understand what I know about alcohol and, and sleep, I would think that too, which is, look, when I have a nightcap just before bed or two, even though I don't wear them, I. I may actually just fall asleep very easily. Feels like I stay asleep very soundly across the night. So it's a great sleep aid and it really helps me. There are at least I would say three issues with alcohol. The first is that alcohol is in a class of drugs that we call the sedatives. And sedation is not sleep. But when you take on board alcohol in the evening, you mistake the former for the latter and you think it helps you fall asleep. The second thing is that because it's sedation, or actually it's probably related to sedation, if I were to show you the electrical signature of your deep sleep when you're just sleeping naturally versus when you have alcohol in your system, it's not really the same. It's not a natural naturalistic form of deep sleep. It mimics it. It looks not too dissimilar. But if I really do my analyses, and I almost like that Pink Floyd album where I take the white light of electrical brain activity coming from your head as you're sleeping and split it apart into all of the different components, there are some components that are no longer present, or some that are abnormally present. The second issue with alcohol is that it fragments your sleep so it will litter your sleep with all these punctuated awakenings throughout the night. The danger there is that many of those awakenings with alcohol you don't remember because they're too brief. But then you wake up the next day and you think, well, I didn't have a problem falling asleep, I didn't have a problem staying asleep, but I just feel rough. I just don't feel restored by my sleep. And you don't add two and two together. The final concern with alcohol is that it's quite a potent blocker of your rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep. And in subsequent episodes we'll go into great detail as to the incredible learning and memory creativity benefits that come by way of REM sleep. Also, it's essential for our emotional regulation and recalibrating our moods. So for all of those reasons, I would say two things. First, if you are struggling with sleep, not feeling restored by your sleep. Keep in mind your alcohol intake and also just in general, be mindful of that if you are thinking about your sleep and want to preserve it.

So much of what you just said resonates. I confess that in my lifetime I've had periods of pretty spectacular sleep. I characterize myself as somebody that could fall asleep anywhere, anytime. But I've also experienced the extreme challenges of sleep and that relates to different things, life circumstances, et cetera. In fact, recently I've had some challenges with sleep, despite using the protocols that I and others suggest. I hadn't heard some of the things that you're referring to here. And middle of the night waking has become more of an issue. I communicated this to former girlfriend of mine who was. I was in relationship with when I was a junior professor, meaning before I got tenure. And she said, you don't remember you had a Andrew, but I do. You had a pattern back then of.

After I would fall asleep, you would.

Continue working on your laptop, probably on grants. And then I would fall asleep working. And then according to her, I would wake up in the middle of the night and work a little bit until I'd get tired again and then fall asleep and then this would repeat. So really stamping down the associative learning element that you talked about before. So that was probably the first period of time in my life in which I created this rather deleterious association of work in the middle of the night in bed. Right. And then more recently, I've had the experience of waking up, probably due to these like, daytime things, that I'm waking up in the middle of the night thinking about. And now, because of our discussion during the course of recording this series, I get out of bed after even 10, 15 minutes so that I can start to eliminate that association. And another piece is that I've always felt that when I get out of bed in the middle of the night, because I can't sleep and I go to the sofa, I often can sleep very well. Proving right, it's a control experiment proving that the location of sleep is the. And the association of wakefulness and sleep in bed as opposed to on the sofa is a clear component. And this is in an environment that's of equal temperature.

I mean, it's not a perfect experiment, right?

It's anecdote, as we say. But I think that the associative piece is oh so strong for many people. And so this is something to really take seriously.

I love that notion of. And people will often say, I just get up, I Go to the couch or the sofa, sofa. And that's where I'll wake up in the morning. Also they'll say, when I travel and I go to a hotel room, I just can sleep fine. Now for some people it's the inverse, but for those people it's the contextual difference, meaning the change of the environment is so unfamiliar that it has not been bound to association of wakefulness. It's related to sleep or at least the opportunity to sleep. Sometimes even I've heard from some people and there's no studies or data on this even turning yourself around. Now this is hard if you have a partner in bed, but you just switch top to bottom of the bed and you take your pillow and you pull the duvet all the way down and you put the pillow at the opposite end where your feet used to be and you get into bed. And even just looking around and sort of having a difference, that alone is so subtle, but it can make a real difference. So again, just keep these things in mind. I know it sounds strange, this whole sort of get up, get out of bed, break the associate and we'll come on to something. Well, actually I'll come onto it now because I think it's one of the unconventional tips and you mentioned it. A lot of people say to me that all sounds great, science makes sense, I just don't. It's dark, it's kind of cold, I really don't want to get out of bed. So give me some alternatives. I think the, the single best piece of unconventional sleep advice I can give you is do anything that gets your mind off itself. The principal reason that if you look at insomnia as a physiological condition or current working model, mechanistically of how insomnia plays out, is that you are in this state of almost low level anxiety and you are somewhat stressed. And when you go to sleep, or you try to go to sleep, or you wake back up and you try to get back to sleep, you just have this Rolodex of anxiety. In the modern world, we are constantly on reception and very rarely do we do reflection. And unfortunately for many of us, and I've been guilty of this, the only time we do reflection is when our head is placed on the pillow and we turn the light out. And that is the last time you want to be doing reflection. That's the worst moment. And at that point I think everyone can empathize with the idea of you turn the light out, you're under stress, your mind goes to those few things in the darkness. Of night, thoughts become almost 10 times worse than they do in the bright of day. And at that moment you start to ruminate. When you ruminate, you begin to catastrophize. And when you catastrophize, you're dead in the water for the next two hours. So what do you do? The problem is, as I said, your mind is on itself and it's going through these repeated loops. Anything you can do, for example, you can do some kind of a meditation. And I, when I was researching data for my book some years ago, I did look into meditation. And I wasn't a meditator, I was a hard nosed scientist. I didn't really kind of embrace with that notion or even that, that group of people. But time and again I read paper after paper and the data was very strong and it was coming from research groups that I respected for very much indeed. So I thought, well, okay, I should probably give this a try. And that was six years ago. And since then I now meditate for 10 minutes every single night before bed. I do a guided meditation because I'm not particularly skilled, so I use an app that moves me through that. But you can do whatever you have whatever meditation you like. That's one example. The second example is you can do breathing methods because again, you're focused on your breath and what are you not focused on? Your thoughts. And so anything that will allow you to explore some other focus. Maybe it's a body scan where you start at the top of your head or you start at your feet and you work your way up and you just say, you know, moving through now my neck, what sensations am I feeling now? Into my shoulders, moving down into my chest. Now I can feel the ends of my fingers. Am I sensing anything? And when you start doing that or any of these types of things, the next thing that you remember is your alarm going off in the morning because you've got your mind off itself. So I would say that that's probably one of the unconventional tips. But let me come back to the conventional. Anything else I've probably missed out or been unclear about there? Actually, I should probably say one thing in terms of these. They're not tips. I don't like the word. I know you don't either. Or hacks or. These are protocols and they're well informed scientific protocols. In all of this discussion today, you can get all of these things in place and still have problems with sleep. The reason is because you may be suffering from a sleep disorder. So the analogy would be, let's say that I'm your athletic coach and you're a sports superstar. I can perfect everything. I can perfect your diet, your supplements, we can perfect. Your technique, we can perfect. But if you've got a broken ankle, none of those things are going to alter your performance. Right now you've got to get to a doctor and get that seen to and then we can come back to fine tuning your performance. It's the same with sleep. If you've got a sleep disorder, such as snoring, sleep apnea, or insomnia, we need to get you to a doctor first and then only after that come back. Once you're resolved, then we can start to optimize. That's the only other thing I probably should mention.

Yeah, this is all very useful discussion because I think that of course there will be those folks out there that just like, what are they talking about? I sleep so well at night. You know, consider yourself blessed. Many, many people struggle with challenges with sleep. And I think it's fair to say that sooner or later, most everybody experiences some challenges with sleep. For whatever reason.

If you look at the statistics, that's highly likely in your lifetime, you are more than likely to go through either a period of challenging sleep or. Or in fact, a bout of insomnia.

I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin, mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens and is designed to meet all of your foundational nutritional needs. By now, I'm sure you've all heard me say that I've been taking AG1 since 2012, and indeed that is true. Now, of course, I do consume regular whole foods every day. I strive to get those foods mostly from unprocessed or minimally processed sources. However, I do find it hard to get enough servings of fruits and vegetables each day. So with AG1, I ensure that I get enough of the vitamins, minerals, prebiotic fiber, and other things typically found in fruits or vegetables. And of course, I still make sure to eat fruits and vegetables and in that way provide a sort of insurance that I'm getting enough of what I need. In addition, the adaptogens and other micronutrients in AG1 really help buffer against stress and ensure that the cells and organs and tissues of my body are getting the things they need. People often ask me that if they were going to take just one supplement, what that supplement should be, and I always answer AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.comhuberman to claim a special offer. You'll get five free travel packs, plus a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.comhuberman, you talked about alcohol.

I'm not a consumer of alcohol anymore.

Nor am I, and it's not because I have anything against it.

Yeah, many people do enjoy it and know we're not calling judgment on them. I mean, certainly much of the world enjoys alcohol. Could we talk a little bit more about, aside from demolishing REM sleep.

Do.

We know that alcohol causes these disruptions in sleep directly, meaning by changing the pattern of release of neurotransmitters like gaba, things of that sort? Or is this an indirect effect? Is this through the gut microbiome that then impacts sleep?

And the reason I ask is maybe.

We could get to some more specific do's and do not protocols. So for instance, if somebody wants to have a cocktail, how close to sleep can they get and not diminish their rapid eye movement? Sleep too much, because people are still going to want to drink. And with that said, if people do have a couple of drinks and then they go to sleep, is there anything they can do prior to sleep to try and rescue some of their quality sleep?

Great question. So in terms of the mechanism, it seems actually not to be the alcohol, but some of the metabolic byproducts of alcohol. We think that perhaps the main culprit may be some of the aldehydes that are the metabolic separate consequences of alcohol metabolism. You make a good point though. In terms of the dose response timing curve, how late or how early do I have to cut myself off from alcohol? People have done those studies and they have found that even an afternoon single glass of wine, if you measure sleep in the way that we measure it at Bicenta, with high fidelity, you can see compromises and impairments. I wish I could tell you otherwise. I would say that based on that data, the principal protocol advice I would have for you is go to the pub in the morning. That way by the time you're about to sleep, the alcohol is out your system and you could. No, no, I would never, As a, as a public scientist, I would never advocate necessarily for morning. I'm just kidding you. But that's, that's sort of one of the unfortunate consequences. There does seem to be an impact. To say that there isn't is just me not being truthful about the data. But again, if you think about the trade off here, if you're going out or you're Having friends over and you're going to make an incredible evening of memories and you're going to open a favorite bottle of wine and have a couple of glasses of wine. And is your sleep going to be compromised? Yes, it is. But maybe that's worth the trade off for that specific night. I would just not wish you to. And you've spoken a lot and so has our dear friend Peter a tear and others. There just doesn't seem to be any safe amount of alcohol. But I would say think about that trade off simply, however, don't make it a habit that you're doing it, you know, multiple nights a week or more. That would probably be the advice. Great.

What about food and sleep? How close to sleep is it okay to have a meal if you want to optimize your sleep? I like to eat my final meal.

Somewhere around 6:30pm and I go to.

Sleep somewhere around 8:39pm in an ideal world, sometimes I go to sleep a bit later, sometimes I eat a little bit later. It's just, you know, there's some variability with these. But put differently, what is the relationship between food intake and sleep quality in terms of timing of food intake? And then perhaps we can talk a little bit about food macronutrients.

It's very interesting. There was somewhat of a dogma out there that we have to stop eating, you know, three or four hours before bed for optimal sleep. If you look at the data, the data is quite a bread, no pun intended. There are some people for whom that works very well, and if they eat even two hours before bed, they just get disrupted in terms of their sleep. Some of that is about people just feeling too full and not feeling comfortable. Other aspects are that when you become recumbent, when you lie down, you have a higher risk of gastric reflux coming back up and therefore you get heartburn. And that's pretty miserable. And people will describe that too, by way of closer proximity of food intake relative to when you're falling asleep. Nevertheless, if you look at the data, and I did a recent very deep dive on this personally myself about 12 months ago, it's not quite as extreme as the dogma makes out. If you eat two hours before bed, on average, it doesn't seem to necessarily harm your sleep. Now, that's very different than saying what is best to improve or enhance your sleep. But the way these studies were designed, it was looking at detriments. They then went to 90 minutes before sleep onset, and even there, there didn't seem to be marked impairments. 60 minutes you started to see maybe some signs, but on average the effect size was somewhat weak. But then when you get close to sort of 45 minutes or so, then things did start to deteriorate. I think it depends hugely on your chronotype and also just on your appetite circadian rhythm preferences too. I am someone who, I do not feel very hungry when I first wake up in the morning. I don't feel very hungry throughout most of the day and I will onboard most of my calories probably in the hours, probably in about a four hour period, maybe less even three hour period. And then I will cut myself off about 90 minutes before sleep. So I classically, I would have been considered as, you know, violating this sleep dogma of cutting yourself off at least three hours. I think it's very personal though. Just experiment with it, you will know the situation. As for macros and specific food components, the data is a little bit mixed. Certainly what we know is that if you are eating a diet that is high in sugar and low in protein, your sleep is worse. Why would that be the case? Well, one of the reasons that we think is that if you onboard sugar, it can be somewhat metabolically active and when it becomes metabolically active, it can increase your body temperature, your core body temperature, even just very subtly. But that's enough to disrupt your sleep, as we spoke about with temperature. But I think in terms of really the, you know, what would be the ideal macronutrient and even micronutrient dietary recommendation that I would have for you. I don't think we have enough data yet above and beyond that, that statement.

Yeah, yeah, I, I've experienced when I eat a very low carbohydrate diet, which I've experimented with in the past, maybe even full ketogenic diet for brief periods of time. Although I'm an omnivore, so I eat meat and eggs and I also eat starches, pastas, rice, et cetera. But we know, based on beautiful work from, for example, Chris Palmer from Harvard Medical School, who is a guest on this podcast.

I listened to that. It was great podcast. Yeah.

Chris is spectacular and has advocated the exploration of ketogenic diets for the treatment of various psychiatric conditions. Not all, but psychiatric conditions. And it seems, and he agreed with me on this, that when people go on very low starch, very low carbohydrate diets, that sometimes they can experience a bit of hypomania. Some people can and challenge this with sleep. And sometimes there are psychiatric reasons why people stay on those diets anyway. And then they have to do other things to encourage their sleep, either pharmacology or supplementation or some combination. But I can say anecdotally for myself, if I don't eat starches for a extended amount of time, a couple of days, I find it very hard to get quality sleep as indicated by sleep trackers and just sleep latency to fall asleep is longer than it is, et cetera. So I've opted to eat most of my carbohydrates later in the evening, which kind of violates every rule of eat.

Your carbs early in the day.

And I think there are some data to support that. Eating carbohydrates early in the day may actually have certain benefits for weight maintenance or weight loss. So I realized that. But those aren't my goals at the moment. Weight maintenance, yes. Weight loss, no. So I think I certainly feel after eating a dinner that has a bit more starch, pasta, rice, these things of that sort, and a little bit lower protein, as opposed to the inverse, like eating a couple of ribeye steaks and a salad, but no starch, that my sleep is substantially better. And I always attributed that to the relationship between some of these starches and the tryptophan serotonin pathway.

Yeah, there is some data on that with the carbohydrate intake in the evening, and of course that tryptophan and that carbohydrate intake will contain the precursor ingredients to something else that we've spoken about, which is melatonin. And so that may actually help healthily boost that melatonin signal. And there's a little bit of data on that to support it, too. We also did a study where we, we were looking at night to night to night sleep and carbohydrate intake the next day, and it did seem to support what you're describing in terms of some of the carbohydrate benefits. We also found a strange result that was almost the opposite prediction that we made. Carbohydrate intake in the morning, too, equally help people wake up. And we were a little bit uncertain as to why. But we're going to go into more detail the reason that you mentioned the suggestion of not take on carbs in the evening.