NEUROSCIENTIST Reveals How To MASTER Your Sleep & Never Be Lazy Again | Andrew Huberman
In this conversation, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman discusses the critical role of sleep for survival, emphasizing that both non‑REM (deep) and REM (dream) sleep are essential, with animal studies showing rapid death from deprivation of either stage. He explains that REM sleep serves as an overnight emotional therapy, helping to process traumatic experiences, especially when the dream content directly addresses the emotional event. Huberman describes the neurobiology of dreaming, noting heightened activity in visual, motor, emotional, and memory regions during REM, while the prefrontal cortex is suppressed; during lucid dreaming the prefrontal cortex re‑engages, granting volitional control. The dialogue explores the prevalence of lucid dreaming, methods to increase its frequency (reality‑testing, mantra repetition, dream recall), and the limited scientific evidence on its health benefits. Huberman also clarifies sleep paralysis as a normal, often stress‑related phenomenon caused by a mismatch between brain wakefulness and muscle atonia, dispelling supernatural interpretations. Throughout, he frames sleep hygiene, the timing of deep versus REM sleep across the night, and the metabolic costs of dreaming, underscoring sleep’s indispensable role for cognition, emotion, and overall health.
Chapters
When we are in REM, rapid eye movement sleep, we have high degree of emotionality of dreams, but we are unable to release adrenaline. And if you deprive people selectively of this rapid eye movement sleep, one of the primary things that happens that's bad.
Is that a lot of people, it's hard for them to sleep because they can't shut their mind off.
Right.
Is there something we should be thinking before we shut it off to set our sleep up for success mentally, and then to really build into the next day where we wake up feeling clear-minded and without this brain fog, where we have more motivation, where we have more energy and excitement towards the next day, and then doing that in a pattern every night. Is there any science around that? Is it like listening to a hypnosis?
That could be very helpful.
Which will help you clean out whatever is going on through the day and get clear and ready for the next day, but also fall asleep so you're not thinking about it. You know, is there anything that can help you have better dreams so that you sleep better? Like, what have you found there in the neuroscience?
Yeah, so glad you asked this question. There's some really interesting data from a guy named Chuck Charles Zeisler, who is at Harvard Med. He's done beautiful studies on sleep in humans for many decades and a really fantastic physician and researcher. And they observed something interesting, which is that about 90 minutes or so before your natural bedtime, there's a spike in alertness, planning and almost anxiety that all people undergo and it's a normal healthy pattern. The idea, and it's a just so story because we don't really know I nor Chuck Ziesler nor anyone else was consulted at the design phase as we say, but we assume this came about because Prior to going to sleep, we need to shore up everything for safety. We need to lock things down, make sure everything's in its place because we are very vulnerable in sleep. Nowadays, this might manifest as you need to go to bed at 10:30 because you have to get up at 6, et cetera. And then right around 8:30 or 9, you start finding yourself running around doing various things. Many people worry about that and they think, oh, I'm really stressed because I actually need to go to sleep and here I am wide awake. It tends to subside very quickly. So just the knowledge that that's a normal healthy spike in alertness and activity, I think can help a number of people. I want to make sure I mentioned that. The other thing is preparing the mind, as you said, turning thoughts off. Turning thoughts off is a skill. We've talked before, gosh, almost a year or more now, about Yoga Nidra, which is there are many, many Yoga Nidra scripts available on YouTube free of cost. The ones I particularly like are the ones by Kamanee Desai. K-A-M-I-N-I-D-E-S-A-I. Kamanita Desai. I just really like her voice. I don't know Kamanita, never met her. These are free scripts. They're Yoga Nidra scripts that last about 20 minutes. They involve some breathing, some meditation type stuff. But they teach you to turn your thoughts off, which is really wonderful because a lot of people, they just get stuck in this rumination. Now, is there an ideal protocol prior to sleep? It depends because some people find they have their greatest clarity after the kids are asleep and they're sitting there. So I wouldn't say don't work or do work. You do wanna avoid strong stimuli before sleep. So do you really want to watch a politically charged or violent movie right before sleep? Well, that depends on how triggered you tend to be by politics or violence. Some people aren't triggered, other people are. But that aside, you don't want to go to bed either too hungry or too full, 'cause that can inhibit your sleep. So for most people, that's going to be finishing your last bite of food about two hours before bedtime. But I confess there are days when I work, work, work and arrive at a place, a hotel, order some food and just eat a massive meal and then pass out. Again, 80-20. Try and get it right 80% of the time.
What's harmful of being too hungry or being too full before you go to bed?
You'll have trouble falling asleep and waking and you'll wake up in the middle of the night. Both extremes. Both extremes. And I'm not a nutritionist or nutrition expert, but what I found works for me personally is I fast until about noon-ish each day and then my lunch is low carb. So, I tend to eat some grass-fed meat, some some veggies, maybe some starches if I trained, and a piece of fruit. If I didn't, I don't. And then, I also have an afternoon snack, but then in the evening my meals tend to be relatively low in meat and protein and higher in starches, which activate the tryptophan system and the serotonin system, which makes it easier to fall asleep. You can repack glycogen during the night so you can do muscular work the next day. Training of any kind, but also thinking. Your brain uses glucose. Sure. So at night I tend to eat pastas and vegetables and rice and risottos and things like that, not in huge volumes, but I tend to eat less protein. It's not that I don't eat any, but I don't tend to eat big steaks right before going to sleep. Again, 80-20, 80% of the time. So, foods, certain foods stimulate the neurotransmitter pathways like serotonin that facilitate the transition to sleep. Now, what could you take? Well, that's it. Some people will drink chamomile tea. Chamomile tea is enriched in something called apigenin. Apigenin is, I take it in supplement form, 50 milligrams of Apigenin, but it's really just chamomile extract. And it tends to make you a little drowsy. And many people experience excellent sleep when they take Apigenin, and normally they struggle with it. Again, with supplements, I don't have a relationship to an Apigenin company or anything like that. I want to be clear. And also supplements, check with your doctor, of course, all that.
But the one thing I don't recommend.
Is that people take melatonin.
Don't take melatonin.
I am not a fan of melatonin for the following reasons. First of all, melatonin does many more things besides just cause the transition to sleep. It also is involved in regulating some of the other hormones like testosterone, estrogen, and so on. Most of those studies are animal studies, but some of the data in humans indicate that as well. In kids, melatonin is one of the hormones responsible for suppressing puberty, and then melatonin rhythms change and then puberty happens. So, you know, if your kid has already been taking melatonin, I wouldn't be alarmed, but just be aware. And if you talk to your physician, most physicians aren't really aware of this. I would talk to an endocrinologist, frankly. Also, Matt Walker would also support this statement because I'm lifting it from him. So, which is that most melatonin supplements contain anywhere from 15% of what's listed on the bottle to 300% of what's listed on the bottle. The regulation of supplements is an issue. Even from a trusted brand, if you were to take, say, three milligrams or six milligrams of melatonin, it's a pretty standard dose out there, you are taking super physiological levels of melatonin. Your system does not see those levels of melatonin.
Chamomile tea is okay.
Chamomile tea or Apigenin, it's a little hard to find, but Apigenin is a great, it's chamomile extract essentially. There are a few other things. Again, margins for safety will depend. Magnesium threonate, which is T-H-R-E-O-N-A-T-E, threonate, 142 milligrams or so of magnesium threonate. Again, you could just shop for cost. I don't want to name brands, even though my podcast is associated with one. I don't want this to become about that. The magnesium threonate, many people take in 30 to 60 minutes before sleep with apigenin. many people find great benefit. I am not a fan of taking serotonin or serotonin precursors, 5-HTP, L-tryptophan prior to sleep for the following reason. The architecture of sleep, as Matt probably discussed here, I need to watch that episode, he's so good, includes a lot of slow wave sleep early in the night, repair and recovery of motor circuits in the brain and muscular tissue and connective tissue that might have been worked with or damaged during the day. And, the second half of sleep tends to be enriched in so-called REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, more dreams that are very intense, et cetera. That architecture is exquisitely controlled by levels of serotonin at one point and not having serotonin at others, having acetylcholine release being very tuned to particular times in the night. When you start messing with the serotonin system, you disrupt that. So, my experience with 5-HTP, I took it to go to sleep or L-Tryptophan as I fall asleep like I got clubbed over the head by a grizzly bear, but then I wake up an hour and a half later and I cannot fall asleep for me for two days. Wow. Very intense. Now, I'm pretty sensitive to these things, but that's why I'm not a fan of those and I rely on magnesium, threonine, apigenin, and some people also take theanine, but for the time being, I think magnesium, threonate, and apigenin or chamomile are great. If people don't want to take supplements, chamomile tea is a terrific mild sedative to just kind of turn off some of that thinking.
Relax. Okay. And what about working out and sleep?
Okay.
So you work out in the morning, afternoon, night, how does that affect to sleep when you work out and how you work out.
Yeah, well, I want to be fair to the fact that people have different schedules and different constraints and that work, you know, getting that 150 to 180 minutes of zone two cardio per week is essential. People should be doing some resistance training regardless of goals or in order to maintain muscle because it's so important to avoid injury and maintain metabolism, et cetera. So you need to get it in somehow, but you then have to ask yourself what's happening around that workout. So are you going into a brightly lit gym at 11 o'clock at night and blasting music and are you drinking three espresso or an energy drink before you go? You're going to be awake, you're going to have a hard time going to sleep. It's not just the workout, it's the context around the workout. My preference is always to work out as early in the day as possible. That's my preference. I don't always accomplish that. People should also know that if you work out at the same time for three or four days, your body builds in an anticipatory circuit, you will feel an energy increase a few minutes before that workout. So if you are working out at 10:00 p.m. at night and you're finding it hard to go to sleep, if you can shift that workout earlier in the day, you will soon become a morning person. It might not be as natural as somebody who naturally wakes up at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning, But let's say you want to get on an earlier schedule, you want to get that morning light, but also force yourself to work out in the morning. And then by the second or third day of doing that, you will start to feel more alert as you arrive to the workout because there are these anticipatory circuits.
That's cool.
Working out late at night, some people say cardio okay, but not weight. Some people say, I think it's highly individual. And I don't think there's ever been a really good study addressing that.
Mm-.
Regularity is key. I think for me, the best times to work out are three hours after waking up, 11 hours after waking up just based on body temperature rhythms, or immediately like get up and just put the shoes on and just go. And I don't tend to do that last thing very often these days. I tend to wake up and move through the morning a little bit like a lazy bear in the sunlight and wait for my caffeine and caffeine. But every time I do that early morning workout, I feel much better and more alert all day. And, you fall asleep probably easier. And, I fall asleep much more easily. And, the other thing you can do to fall asleep is this might seem a little counterintuitive. I said that you need to lower your body temperature by one to three degrees. You can take a hot shower or do a sauna, which you would think well it heats you up, but when you actually heat the surface of the body, your brain cools off your core body temperature. Unless you stay in that heat for a very long time. So, you take a brief, you know, I don't want to say how long people should shower. Warm, hot shower. Get in the sauna or whatnot, or a hot shower, and then, you know, maybe rinse off with some cool water for not cold, but cool water, lukewarm water for 10 seconds, and dry off and get into bed. Your body temperature will drop. If you get into an ice bath or a cold shower, you'll stay awake. It's very jolting. So, I don't recommend people do that late in the day unless they want to be awake for some reason at night. night. But the other thing is when this is a little counterintuitive, but my colleague at Stanford, Craig Heller, works on thermal regulation. If you are want to cool down and you put a cold towel or ice around your neck, you're cooling the surface of the body just like you would put a cold pack on a thermostat. What's going to happen? Your brain's going to start to heat you up. So I would avoid cold exposure right before sleep, especially if it's very stimulating, like to the point cold enough that.
You get that adrenaline Before we get back to more sleeping tips on this episode, I wanna take a second to highlight a sleep product that has truly transformed the way I sleep. Andrew Huberman actually has been using it too, and it's called Eight Sleep's Pod 3 Cover. This mattress cover dynamically heats or cools its temperature over the course of the night depending on your preferences, and I prefer it cold. The Pod Cover detects when you fall asleep, automatically adjusts the temperature, and turns on and off based on your sleep schedule. So no more waking up too hot or too cold. And I know a lot of us have different temperature needs than our partners and eight sleep pod covers. Take that into an account. Each side of the pod can cool or heat anywhere between 55 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit, so you don't have to worry. The pod cover customizes the sleep experience for each individual person. The pod cover also has a sensory layer that tracks your sleep and health metrics, heart rate, HRV and respiratory range, and gives you actionable tips on how to improve them so you can feel more restored after each night of sleep. No wearable is required. The 8 Sleep app unlocks the full intelligence of the Pod, personalizing your sleep experience. It's the ultimate sleep coach powered by real data. Take it from me and Andrew. This is life-changing product and a great solution to consistently get the sleep you need so you can be the best during the day. I personally use the pod cover on my mattress, but if you're on the hunt for a new mattress altogether, you can get eight sleeps pod, which offers all the same features in the form of a full mattress. The best part is eight sleep is giving me a special discount to offer my listeners and viewers for both of their products. So check out the description in this episode to learn more. So cold air is is key to drop keeping the temperature down.
Keeping the room cool.
Cool.
Yeah, but you don't want to be.
Like an ice box where you're shivering.
Exactly, the acute cold exposure as we call it of an ice bath or something, rather a sauna or a lot of people don't have access to sauna, maybe a warm or hot shower before sleep. But people tend to be very specific about this too. Some people like to shower in the morning, some people in the evening. I like to shower whenever I have an opportunity to shower. Generally, I try and shower after I work out because if I don't, everyone suffers. I think that if people don't have access to a sauna, that hot shower or warm shower before sleep can be very beneficial because the body will actually start to dump heat and cool off as you get into bed.
Gotcha.
And then in terms of the actual architecture of sleep and dreams, with dreams, you know that dreams in the beginning of the night tend to be kind of mundane and seem kind of ordinary, and the dreams toward morning tend to be more intense.
This is the-- you- wake up and you remember like what just happened.
That's right.
Not what happened in hours before.
Right, and the early part of the night, in very broad strokes, the early part of the night tends to be when we release growth hormone, when we tend to repair motor circuits and damaged tissues, and there's a real lack of emotional context to those dreams. Now, the dreams toward morning tend to have much more emotional enrichment and be very intense. Often, if people see visual hallucinations, that's in the the so-called REM sleep dreams. -Why is that? -It's interesting. Great question. Well, two things. You're also paralyzed during REM sleep. You can breathe, but you cannot move. And there's this interesting thing that happens in sleep where when we are in REM, rapid eye movement sleep, we have high degree of emotionality of dreams, but we are unable to release adrenaline. This is very much like trauma treatment where there's a desensitization. You're coupling an intense experience to an inability for your body to move or to have a reaction to that. Now, if you suddenly wake up, which I often do, you'll notice that the adrenaline kicks in. But this is kind of like therapy in your sleep or trauma release in your sleep. And if you deprive people selectively of this rapid eye movement sleep, a number of bad things happen. But one of the primary things that happens that's bad is that when you don't get enough REM sleep, you are more emotionally labile during the day. Little things bother you more. You feel more irritable. Yeah, anytime I see a comment on Instagram to me or anyone else and someone seems kind of prickly, I always just think to myself, I'm not getting enough sleep.
Wow.
Yeah. Or I tell myself that. Because I want to have some empathy for them. They're just not neurologically up to snuff, meaning they're not working as well as they could. Now, there are other reasons why people can be combative, but I think lack of REM sleep is one of the main reasons that we feel irritable, easily set off. There are a number of very powerful things that happen in REM sleep that we should all be seeking. So if you wake up in the middle of the night, you really do want to try and get back to sleep. And then as the night goes on, you're spending more, a greater proportion, excuse me, of your sleep in that rapid eye movement sleep. And those are when you have your very rich dreams. And when you wake up, oftentimes spending some time with a pad and paper, maybe while you're getting your afternoon, your outdoor sunlight is a great thing because you'll remember components of your dreams. The meaning of dreams has been debated for thousands of years. I would say, and I think you, I think Matt would agree, Matt Walker would agree that some dreams do have tremendous significance, others do not. There seems to be a very powerful effect of having a dream that makes people want to tell someone else their dream. I think we just have this need to want to put structure on something that seems very unstructured. It is a way, in a sense when we're dreaming, we're crazy. Space and time are completely fluid, everything's anything could happen. And when we have a dream that feels powerful to us, I think we understandably want to put some sort of interpretation on it.
Meaning behind it.
Yeah, I've had great insights through dreams. I've also had a lot of dreams that got me nothing. I wake up in the middle of the night and I tend to write things down that come to mind. I achieve my greatest clarity for psychological and relational things. When I wake up first, immediately, I'll have a solution in my head or I'll think, the other day this happened, as we were talking about before the recording, I've been working through a very complex set of personal interactions. And these are not traumatic or anything like that, but I've been working with somebody to try and resolve a really hard problem that we have and we were both committed to solving this problem. And I'll chip away at this and chip away at this and they are much smarter than I am. So I'm struggling and then I will go to sleep and I'll wake up at three in the morning and boom, the answer, at least to whatever it is that I'm trying to resolve, is right there. And I think it's because in sleep, you're getting those repeats of the different circuits, you're rehearsing things you learned during the day, you're dumping the emotional load through this trauma release type mechanism of REM sleep, and then answers just kind of geyser up to the top. But again, I'm speculating what we do know at the neural level, is that there's a replay of the neurons that were active during the day in sleep, but at much more rapid rates.
A lot of stuff we won't remember, is what you're saying.
Much of sleep is there, much of the dreaming in sleep is designed to get you to forget things that are meaningless.
What is happening to the brain as you're sleeping? Is it just connecting neurons? Is it flushing? Is it creating these images for you to remember? what's the actual mechanics of it?
Yeah, so several things are happening. One is this glymphatic washout. There's this literally a spin cycle on the brain of dumping all the junk. That's why you want your feet elevated. That's why you want your sleep. That's why you want your feet elevated. The glymphatic washout is one. The other is adenosine, this molecule that accumulates the longer that we are awake. That actually gets reduced during sleep so that we can wake up feeling rested. In other words, if you've been up for a day and a half, you've got tons of adenosine in your caffeine of any kind blocks adenosine function. I want to be careful because it's not actually an antagonist. It's a competitive agonist for the aficionados. But you're basically reducing adenosine function with caffeine. When you sleep, you reduce adenosine, which is why I delay my caffeine 90 to 120 minutes after waking up. So, you've got adenosine getting pushed back down. You've got the glymphatic system wash out. You have reordering of neurons. and creation of new connections so that what you couldn't do previously, you can do the next day and the next day. You're learning. The trigger for learning occurs during wakefulness through focused, alert, motivated states. The actual rewiring of neurons, meaning the changes in the connections, occurs during sleep, in particular deep sleep. So a lot's happening in there and during rapid eye movement sleep, the brain is incredibly metabolically active. It's just that the body is paralyzed. And some people experience this invasion of that sleep paralysis into the wakeful period. It's really scary. I've had this happen. You wake up and you're still paralyzed and you jolt out. Terrifying.
You can't move. I feel like I'm screaming but nothing's coming out.
It's really terrifying.
Terrifying.
It's called what? Sleep paralysis? Yes, essentially. But that's an invasion of sleep paralysis into the waking It's like wake paralysis. And I know you're not a pot smoker, but many pot smokers experience that more often than non-pot smokers for reasons that probably relate to the serotonin system and the so-called atonia, the inability to move. Interesting. So, there's that. What else happens during sleep? Well, there's all sorts of interesting resetting of the digestive system, the microbiome.
Are your muscles growing or Muscle growth.
Probably occurs throughout the 24 hour cycle, but a lot of repair of muscles and triggering a muscle growth probably occurred during sleep. He's passed now, he was 11 years old when I had to put him down, but I had this bulldog, Costello. He was a 90 pound English bulldog mastiff. When he was a puppy, I would take a picture of him and then the next day I'd take a picture of it when he was larger the next day. That's crazy. Well, they're just growing at such a tremendous rate. Right? And that's growth hormone. And during puberty, sometimes kids will be kind of locked up during sleep. You'll go in and see a kid sleeping, they'll be in some weird position. They'll get growing pains because actually the bones, it's a lot to orchestrate the growth of the bones and the connective tissue and the brain and all that.
It's not always perfect. And so sometimes there's a few days.
Where things are a little off. I remember for months my knees would hurt when I was a teenager. Yeah, and kids, my dad used to come in and push my knees down because he was worried that something was going on. That's the growing. You're growing. You're growing.
Bones are, like, spreading, right?
That's right. They're psychological growing pains and they're physical growing pains. And in your case, there was a lot of growing. A lot of physical growing.
I'm not short.
I'm 6'1, but you're 6'4. Yeah, you're a tall guy.
6'5 maybe. So, yeah. Wow.
So, there's a lot of stuff going on in sleep. And are you burning a lot of fat, too, during sleep? Yeah, a lot of metabolism is happening during sleep. There's a beautiful paper that just came out Gosh, I forget all the micro details. So I'm only gonna say a little bit about it. But a lot of the removal of fat from the body from when we burn fat is actually done through the breath. We exhale it. There's a carbon dioxide component.
Isn't that interesting? It's a sweat and the breath, right?
And then what just-- Not so much fecal elimination, but more your breathing.
Breathing burns more fat than-- well, no, no, sorry.
Elimination of fat. fat from the body if it's going to occur, because I have to be careful because the nutrition crowd online, they have claws, pitchforks, and they like to come after you. And they're ready fire aim type trigger. You said this. Exactly. So I want to be very clear. I believe in calories in, calories out. Yes. That's a basic principle. There are people out there arguing different, but basically if you ingest more calories than you burn, you're gonna gain weight. If you keep them more or less equal, you're gonna maintain. And if you burn more than you ingest, you're gonna lose weight. Whether or not you lose from muscle fat or other body compartments is a different story, but the utilization of fat as an energy source and the elimination of adipose tissue, of body fat, eventually boils down to something where yes indeed you are exhaling the eventual molecules. That's crazy. Among other, there are some other routes as well.
How much fat are we exhaling a week.
Well, it depends on whether or not.
You'Re in a caloric deficit or not.
If we're in a deficit, then we're exhaling that fat? Essentially, but it's been broken down into a number of different metabolic components. It's crazy. It's really wild to think about. Well, if you think, yeah, and you might think, well, why not just remove it through the digestive tract? But it's part of a whole lipolysis, meaning the utilization of fat for energy, lipolysis cycle and an energy cycle. Those of you that enjoyed or suffered through college or high school, you know, the Krebs cycle and ATP and ATP production in the mitochondria and cells and so on. That was a whole business there. But so in sleep, this paper shows that, you know, each stage of sleep is actually associated with a different mode of energy utilization and carbon dioxide offloading and so forth. Or in the last episode, we talked about ideally you are nose breathing during sleep. You are not mouth breathing. So some people actually will shut their mouth with a little bit of medical tape. Huge benefits to that for getting enhanced oxygenation of the brain and body. You do not want to have sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is associated with sexual side effects in men and women. It's associated with cardiac arrest. It's associated with a number of bad things. A lot of people who are carrying a lot of extra weight who sleep on their back or even just who are carrying a lot of extra weight, unfortunately, they're have a buildup of carbon dioxide in their system at night, especially if they're mouth breathing and they wake up not feeling rested in all individuals, regardless of phenotype as we say, their genotypes and their phenotypes, regardless of phenotype, the kind of droopiness and the bagging of the eyes that can occur from sleep apnea and the effects on. So, become a nose breather. We talked about that in the last episode, How to Become a Nose breather, but you want to nose breathe during sleep if you can. Yes. And your partner will thank you, too, because you're not snoring as much. Are you know, do you know, breathe asleep? I think I do. Yeah, I think I do. I, I'm told I snore a little bit from time to time. Right. And, you know, a lot of people, even people who aren't carrying a lot of fat, but people are carrying a lot of muscle who sleep on their back, oftentimes they are, they're kind of suffocating during sleep. Every time I hear about a bodybuilder or a very large athlete dying, it's almost always a heart attack during sleep. They're on their back. Or they're side, but they're asphyxiating and there's a beautiful relationship between breathing and heart rate. Simply, when you inhale, your heart rate goes up and when you exhale, your heart rate goes down. This has to do with the movement of the diaphragm and the change in the shape of the heart and signals from the brain. I won't go into all that, but when you inhale, your heart rate speeds up. And when you exhale, it slows down. And that's respiratory sinus arrhythmia for the efficacious and autos. So, you know, you wanna create an environment around your sleep where it's dim lights in the evening, you've had your meal, maybe a couple of chamomile tea, towards sleep, maybe use supplements, maybe you don't, you wake up, get sunlight in your eyes. This is the kind of landscape you wanna create. Sure. Cool room. you want to avoid very stimulating stuff, conversations and activity, you know, right before sleep.
Yeah.
Now, some stimulating activities before sleep, we won't go into details, have a rebound effect afterwards. Matthew Walker's actually talked about this, how certain types of activities cause a rebound and relax. You know, they're very sexual activities. Yes. I'm not trying to be vague here. Yes.
I'm just. What does that do for sleep if you have Sexual activities before sleep.
So, sexual activity includes a, it's really remarkable at the level of autonomic nervous system. So, sexual activity involves an increase at first in the so-called parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, the relaxation system. But then it involves increases in the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system. And orgasm in men and women is actually purely driven by the sympathetic nervous system, the stress system. And then the post-coital period is when the parasympathetic nervous system kicks back on and there's a deep relaxation.
So is it good to have sexual activity before bed or not that good?
According to the architecture of what I just described, yes. Yes, it's good? Yes, it's good. Yes, it's good. It helps people sleep. And Matt, actually when Matt Walker came on my podcast, talked a little bit about some of the data on this. Now, even then, you know, so there are all sorts of questions about this that are now coming out. Now, the interesting thing about studying sex in the laboratory is very hard to do, right? I mean, there are ethical reasons, there are complicated reasons, and good studies have to be done in laboratories or by self-report. And with self-report, people lie, right? And they make up stories in one direction or the other. They're doing more of what they would like to be, they're either reporting more of what they'd like to be reporting over less of what they like to be reporting less of. But doing those sorts of studies in the laboratory is very difficult. There are sleep laboratories, but it's not often that couples are coming in and staying in those sleep laboratories together, although that does happen from time to time. But yes, after sex, there's a rebound in the parasympathetic nervous system, which is a deeply relaxing component of the nervous system. And the reasons for that aren't clear. I mean, one idea is that it's designed to put people in close proximity, not just run off and look for another mate immediately, and to smell each other and pair bond through some of the pheromonal systems.
Powerful.
Yeah, yes, very powerful. An interesting form of pre-sleep biology, for sure, and one that, let's be fair, as we were talking about during the break, every species has two main goals: to protect its young and to make more of itself. and while not all sex is designed for reproduction or used for reproduction, I mean, the whole architecture of the reproductive axis, as we say, from brain down to genitals is designed for that arc of parasympathetic, sympathetic, and then parasympathetic.
That's interesting.
Yeah, so I think firstly in response to the general question, sleep is probably the single most effective thing that you can do to reset both your brain, but also your body health, of course. as well. And I don't say that flippantly against the notions of diet and exercise. Of course, both of those are fundamentally critical. But if I were to take you, Lewis, and I were to deprive you of sleep for 24 hours, deprive you of food for 24 hours, or deprive you of even water or exercise for 24 hours, and then I were to map the brain and body impairment that you would suffer after each one of those four, hands down by a country mile, a lack of sleep will implode your brain and body far more significantly. The only one I would probably lose out on is oxygen. At that point, I'll give it up. Sleep will take the silver medal. Oxygen definitely gets the gold. But thereafter, sleep seems to be paramount.
Of sleep, food, and water, sleep is the most important thing.
I would say, yeah, you know, I used to say that sleep was the third pillar of good health alongside diet and exercise, but I think the evidence has suggested that I was utterly wrong. That sleep, in fact, is the foundation on which those two other things sit. And you can do wonderful things in those two domains, but if you're not getting sufficient sleep, those things tend to be far more futile as a consequence.
And so what is sufficient sleep then?
So right now we recommend somewhere between seven to nine hours for the average adult. Once we know that you go below seven hours of sleep, we can start to measure objective impairments in your brain and your body. And in fact, the number of people who can survive on less than six hours of sleep without showing any impairment rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population is zero.
Without any impairment, what does that mean?
So, if I can measure lots of different operations of your brain, let's say your cognition, your attention, your learning and memory, also your moods and your emotions and your anxiety, or downstairs in the body, I can measure aspects of your cardiovascular system or your blood pressure, or I could measure your immune system or your metabolic system, how it's regulating your blood sugar and your glucose, I can measure this sort of pinwheel, this kaleidoscope of health metrics on Lewis Howes. And then I can see when I keep dialing you back with less and less sleep, at what point do I see at least one of those things demonstrating a breaking point? And it's very rare for us to be able to find any individual who can go below six hours of sleep and not show some kind of impairment. And a great, even frightening demonstration of this, a study took a group of perfectly healthy individuals and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week. And then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hour night of sleep.
And what happened?
And there were two critical findings. The first was that a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity caused by that one week of short sleep. And that's, you know, in some ways, I think about this, Lewis, because it's reality. We know that almost a third of the population is trying to survive on six hours of sleep or less. So it's not just, you know, total sleep deprivation, which doesn't happen very frequently, this is a common occurrence. What I found most interesting was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity The other half were decreased. Now, those genes that were suppressed were genes associated with your immune system. So you became immune compromised or immune deficient. Those genes that were increased in their activity or what we call overexpressed were genes associated with the promotion of tumors, genes that were associated with cardiovascular disease and stress, and genes that were associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body. and I make that point just because, you know, many people, I think, have this concern about things such as genetically modified embryos or even genetically modified food. But when we don't get sufficient sleep, we are unwittingly performing a genetic manipulation on ourselves. You know, if we don't let our kids get the sleep that they need, then we're inflicting a similar genetic engineering experiment on them as well.
Wow, this is crazy. So, what if you've been sleeping less than six hours a night for years? What is that saying to your genes? And is there a way to recover the gene damage and reverse and go back to a healthy genes, healthy body, healthy life?
So firstly, we know that short sleep duration, so using that sweet spot, and we can speak about oversleeping or excess sleep because I think that's an interesting part that hasn't been spoken about too much. But using that recommended CDC amount of seven to nine hours of sleep, there is a simple fact, firstly, across the lifespan, which is the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. That short sleep predicts all-cause mortality. But then we can dig a little bit deeper and start to sort of ask, you know, exactly what is going on? Why is there such mortality risk caused by insufficient sleep? and what we know is that a lack of sleep and typically getting certainly less than six hours of sleep is associated with a high risk of cardiovascular disease, high risk of diabetes, high risk of stroke, high risk of dementia, and I would love to double click on that and go into the Alzheimer's disease risk, because that now evidence is very, very strong. And then downstairs in the body, we know that there is links between a lack of sleep and certain forms of cancer. after if I were to take you and limit you to, let's say, four or 5 hours of sleep for one week, your blood sugar levels would be so disrupted that your doctor would classify you as being pre-diabetic.
Oh, my goodness.
So that's not a lifetime. That's just one week. And there's an even more interesting experiment that I speak, I think, speaks to the subtlety of this because the there is the largest sleep study that's ever been conducted. and it happens actually to around 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year, and it's called Daylight Savings Time. Now, in the spring when we lose just one hour of sleep opportunity, firstly, what we've seen is that there seems to be a 24% increase in relative heart attack risk the next day, which stuns me. And what's fascinating, in the fall, in the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, There's a 21% reduction in heart attacks. So it's bi-directional and that's just one hour of sleep. And you see, there was some great recent data, you see a very similar profile regarding that daylight saving shift for road traffic accidents on our streets.
I've heard about this.
Tragically, suicide rates as well. And then even more recently, what we discovered is that During that springtime shift when you lose an hour of sleep, the sentencing of federal judges is significantly harsher because their mood and their emotion is that much worse because of that one hour of lost sleep that they dole out harsher sentences. So, you know, we can walk, you know, you can ask the question, what about a lifetime? We don't even have to ask about a lifetime of short sleep. We can ask about these really, you know, one week of short sleep or even one night of one hour of lost sleep. And I think that's how fragile our brains and our bodies are to this thing called a lack of sleep. And you could then ask, well, you know, why are we so sensitive? Because I can go without food for 24 hours and I can go without water for 24 hours. You know, I'm still not too bad. I'm in fairly decent shape. why is sleep the exception to that rule? And the answer seems to be this: human beings are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason.
Why is that?
And it was such a unique thing. And what that means is that mother nature, through the course of evolution, because no other species does this without real need for survival, and I can speak about some of the exceptions, but human beings are strange like this. In other words, Mother Nature hasn't have to face the challenge of coming up with a solution called sleep deprivation, because she's never faced it in the course of evolution. And so there is no safety net in place here. And that's why we think human beings implode so quickly and thoroughly, mentally, cognitively, and physically, caused by insufficient sleep.
And why do you think, why is the majority of people bad at getting good sleep? Is it we're distracted? Is it we think we need to be doing more? Is it we're stressed and worried about the past and the future? Is it, you know, what we always want to work harder? What is the main cause of why we get poor sleep?
That's such a fundamental question. And in some ways, it's all of the above plus. So I think the first, and I've thought about this a great deal, why are we suffering this global sleep loss epidemic that we're under right now? I think the first thing is that unfortunately sleep has an image problem. That, you know, the PR agent for sleep should be fired because we associate sufficient sleep with this concept of being lazy, of being slothful. And that's a terrible disservice to this thing called sleep. and it is very different to things like diet and exercise. I think a lot of people like to virtue signal with what they eat, and they certainly are very proud to tell you, I work out five times a week, I'm in the gym at this time of morning, and all of which I think are great and to be applauded and supported. But we have the very opposite. We have this almost, well, we don't. some niches of society have this sleep machismo attitude. You know, this kind of you can sleep when you're dead mentality, which by the way, based on the evidence, is mortally unwise. Yeah, it will lead to both a shorter life and a life that is significantly less healthy. So I think the first thing is we need to change our cultural appreciation of sleep from something that is a waste of time to something that in fact is an incredible investment. It is probably the very best and the most freely available, democratic and painless health insurance policy that I could ever imagine. I think the next thing is the way that we work in society. We are working for longer hours and before the pandemic, people were commuting increasingly longer what that meant was that people were leaving the house earlier, they were arriving home later, and no one wants to shortchange time with family or Netflix or whatever it is, your poison. And so the one thing that has become squeezed like vice grips in the middle of the night is this thing called a sufficient bout of slumber. But then There are plenty of people who give themselves the opportunity to get enough sleep, but they can't obtain it. And that is where things such as insomnia or sleep disorders, things like snoring, come into play. And you touch up, and I know that you've spoken, and I'm so grateful for what you've done regarding discussions of mental health. We know that one of the principal roadblocks to getting this thing called a good night of sleep is anxiety.
Stress, worry, anxiety, regret, all those things.
Yep.
Resentment and holding on to all that stuff.
It is, that is toxic to sleep. You're absolutely right. And in fact, anxiety and physiological stress is our principal model for the explanation of insomnia right now. It's not the only cause, but it seems to be one of the principal causes. And In modern society, it's become so easy, and I'm not finger wagging, I'm just as guilty. We are constantly on reception, but rarely do we do reflection. And unfortunately, the time when most of us do reflection is when we turn off the light and our head hits the pillow. And that's the last time. That's the last time. Oh, you know, because I don't know about you, but at night, In the dark, thoughts are not the same thing. You know, concerns become twice as big or the 10x the size of concerns. I start to worry, I ruminate, I catastrophize. Yet in the light of day, those things seem very different. And so we can speak about sleep tips, perhaps later on, but certainly getting right with your emotions and your anxiety is key to good sleep. And that's one of the things that prevents sleep. I also think that there's an issue at the public health level. We've had in many first world nations wonderful government mandates regarding health, regarding drink driving, regarding safe sex, regarding drugs and alcohol and even food and even inactivity and sitting. When was the last time you heard of a first world nation provide a public health message and memorandum regarding sleep?
Never.
And I don't remember one either. So from every level at a public health global government level down to a workplace level, we lauded the airport warrior who's flown through four different time zones in the past three days. They were on email at 2:00 and then they're back in the office at 6:00. So we need to- We celebrated those people. We did. And the funny thing, by the way, is that after about 20 hours of being awake straight, you are as cognitively impaired as you would be if you were legally drunk. Now, I would never, as a CEO, say, I have got this fantastic team of people They're drunk all of the time. But we do say, I've got this fantastic group of people. They just are at it all hours. They are dedicated. They're always working. You know, they spend minimal time sleeping. They're just all out. They love this project. But we've got this strange mentality. And then I think it comes down to, you know, even within schools, we've got this incessant model of early school start times.
Super early, isn't it?
It's incredible.
We got to be there, what, 6:30 or 7 or something, right?
6:30, 7:30, and that data is actually very powerful. What we found is that when we delay school start times, first academic grades increase, truancy rates decrease, psychological and psychiatric issues decrease. But then what we also discovered is that the life expectancy of students increased. and you may be thinking, well, hang on a sec, you know, how do you measure that? And the leading cause of death in teenagers 16 to 18 is actually not suicide. That's second. It's road traffic accidents.
Really?
And here sleep matters enormously. And I'll give you one example. It was in Teton County in Wyoming. They delayed their school start times from 7:30 in the morning to 8:55 by the way, what are we doing trying to educate our children at 7:30 in the morning?
I can't think. Yeah, I mean, I remember being in school and being every day was hard for me. Every day I was tired, every day I was hard to focus or I'd be irritable or wanted to like, you know, jittery or something, but it was like so hard to focus. And then you're at lunchtime and then I eat and I'm tired again afterwards and you want me to focus and pay attention at a desk. It's like, right, it doesn't work like that for me. especially on no sleep or very little sleep.
Well, for any, any, you know, sort of developing brain, it doesn't work like that. And for some people to make a 7:30 a.m. start time, school buses will begin leaving at 6:00 or 5:30 in the morning. That means that some kids are having to wake up at 5:00, 5:15. This is lunacy. And what we've understood from the academic grades, and I'll come back to the car accidents in a second, When sleep is abundant, minds flourish. And when it's not, they don't. And what we've discovered with the road traffic accident in Tetten County, when they made that shift, the only thing more remarkable than the extra one hour of sleep that those kids reported getting was the reduction in car crashes. The following year, there was a 70% drop in vehicle accidents.
Wow.
And to put that in context, you know, the advent of ABS technology, anti-lock brake systems, that dropped accident rates by 20 to 25% and it was deemed a revolution. Here is the simple fact of getting enough sleep that will drop accident rates by 70%. So, you know, I need to get off my soapbox, but what I would say is this, I think if our goal as educators is to educate, and not risk lives in the process, then we are failing our children in the most spectacular manner with this incessant model of early school start times.
Is anyone listening to this that you've been speaking about this to and they're actually adopting this new model, whether it be work time or school time or just, you know, integrating this? Do you know systems that are integrating this?
There have been some, and I think I, I've tried to do this in the education domain. I've tried to do this within medicine because the way that we train residents is almost inhumane. Actually, it's not almost, it absolutely is inhumane. And the statistics there are stunning as well. And then I've tried to do it in the workplace too, because I do a lot of speaking events at Fortune 500 companies. And at first, I think I took the wrong approach where I was really speaking a little bit more about sort of the compassionate approach, you know, why it's good and kind for people to gift them more sleep. Because I see sleep as a biological necessity. And if it's a biological necessity, then I think it's a civil necessity. And if it's a civil necessity, sleep is a civil right. But what I would say is that that wasn't particularly well received. You know, I'd go into business companies and say, your You know, they're desperate for more sleep. They will be happier and healthier. Or I would speak about medicine and I would speak about what it was doing to the patients and the harm. And it would fall on deaf ears. What I then realized is that if you're going to change large organizations, you have to speak in their currency, which is money.
Money.
Yeah.
You need to.
And then I would describe the medical malpractice lawsuits that would come and the cost savings within medicine, firstly. and then administration started to change the tune. Because before that, there was almost this old boys' network in medicine where we went through residency and it's almost a hazing. And despite armed with incredible data to the contrary, I think the mentality 10 years ago when I started trying to do that was, my mind's made up, don't confuse me with the evidence.
Crazy. Why? Because they went through that themselves and so they want to pay it back or something.
I think so. I think there was some of that.
Through hell, so everyone else has to go through hell, yeah.
Right, it's a rite of passage. If you are tough enough, you'll make it through. It's kind of like boot camp, which I don't think we need to do anymore. And then within business, you could describe, the Rand Corporation did an independent survey a couple of years ago, and what they found was that insufficient sleep will cost most nations about 2% of their GDP, of their gross domestic product. so here in the US, that number was $411 billion of lost productivity due to insufficient sleep. In Japan, it was $130 billion. My home country, the UK, it was over $50 billion. So if I could solve the sleep loss crisis within the workplace, I could almost double the budget for education in the US, or I could halve the healthcare deficit. So one, you speak about money, then people start to listen. So that's how I've tried to communicate. But, and I don't think I'm a, I don't think I'm a particularly good communicator. And I've been sometimes bull in a china shop, as I probably have been for the first however long we've been talking. But it's just because I'm so, you know, I'm just desperately passionate about this thing called sleep. And some years ago, before I started trying, I wrote a book and then I've been doing podcasts. Sleep was the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of today. It was a second citizen. And I was so sad to see the disease, the sickness, the harm, the lack of productivity, the impact on education that a lack of sleep was having.
A healthy meal, let's say an hour before bed. I'm talking about grains and lean meat and healthy stuff. Or if you eat pizza an hour before bed, are they both going to impact your ability to sleep better? Or is the quality of the food before you go to bed matter?
Yeah, that's a really good question. The short answer is, yeah, it does matter. So probably the two things that would have the greatest determination would be the simplicity of the carbohydrates or the glycemic load, because that's going to impact the sort of glycemic roller coaster you go on at night, and then probably the amount of protein, because that has a greater contribution to what's called the thermogenic effect of food. So the thermogenic effect is how much does your body temperature actually rise to digest the food. Our bodies want to be very cold at night. So anything you do that opposes that leads to lousy sleep.
So what foods help you sleep better, that keep you colder? What are those foods? Whether it's an hour before or three hours before?
Yeah, honestly, it's like almost anything you're gonna eat is gonna come with something that's gonna slightly raise your temperature. I just generally say try to not eat too much before bed. And I go out of my way to avoid the two things that I think are worse. So I just say I wouldn't have huge protein before bed and I don't want to have anything that's going to raise my blood sugar before bed. So, you know, I'd have an avocado before bed. I'd have, you know, something that's like, you know, I just generally don't eat before bed.
The body really rewards you in terms of if you wait or if you don't eat right before bed, is it going to sleep better, sleep deeper? be cooler and therefore help you have more energy the next day if you don't eat before bed?
Yeah.
And this is at least for me been most easy to exhibit. And I think many of my patients would agree during periods of fasting. So, fasting is kind of a funky state because you're altering so many other things in the physiology. But one of the things that happens, especially by about the second day of a water-only fast, is you really are seeing the impacts of what deep sleep can look like in a state that is totally absent food. And it's very interesting because you're competing with two forces. One that's keeping you awake and one that's helping you sleep a lot deeper. The one that's keeping you awake is cortisol. You have more of it, you have more stress hormones when you're fasting because that's the thing from a prehistoric standpoint that would have been going on, right? Fasting would trigger a signal that says, go get more food.
Be alert, be focused, go get food.
Like we don't want to die. And so that's kind of keeping you awake. But the flip side of that is the total absence of nutrient is allowing you to get into this amazing sleep and your body temperature is really going down because your body's turning down its metabolism. So I actually find fasting sleep to be some of the most amazing physiology because I'm watching this plummeting temperature, rising heart rate variability, falling heart rate, all of these really valuable things, but a little bit of rising cortisol that can lead to shorter sleep times, but I still feel quite rejuvenated by sleep.
If you're a kid and you're eating a lot of junk food, you're not sleep, you're staying up late because you're whatever playing video games all night, but you've got all this energy all day and you're active. Is there a negative for in your early ages, teens, early 20s through lacking sleep, eating poorly, or is there a way to recover? in your twenties from the damage you've done in your before 20?
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, certainly you can break it down into sort of the behavioral habit side and you can talk about it through the physiologic lens. The good news is before the age of 20 or 30, we are pretty remarkably resilient. I mean, you're an athlete, so you can relate. How old are you now, Louis?
You're near 37. 37.
So you might not have fully appreciated, I'm 47, so I'm a full decade older than you. And when I think about 17 to 27 to 30 to 11 to 47. I can really talk about those decades through the lens of resilience. Like at 17, you could shoot me and I think I'd still get up the next day. Like you just couldn't, right?
You're Superman, yeah.
You're absolutely Superman. And I don't know, I feel like the first observation of not being Superman for me kind of kicked in about 42-ish, about five years ago was the first time I was like, oh, so this is what people talk about, right? Like, you can't just go out and crush it every minute of every day. And I think that's just one lens, which is through the lens of exercise. But the same is true of physiology, right? Like, or I'll give you another example. Many of my patients have observed this. I've observed this. Like, I was never a big drinker in college, but certainly there were enough occasions in med school or college where I'd go out and far more than anyone should. And yet somehow the next day I could get up at six in the morning and go and do whatever I need to do. I remember one night actually being out drinking until three in the morning. I mean, having so much to drink, it was ridiculous. And somehow getting up at six in that morning to do a 100-mile bike ride.
Oh my gosh, man.
Probably still partially drunk. But it felt fine by about two hours into the ride. today, if I had three glasses of wine, like the headache I'm gonna have the next day is gonna last me till the middle of the day.
Is that because your body was able to assimilate the glucose into the muscles and it used it for its to its advantage then? And now it's like it's a very good question.
I really, I mean, I could sort of speculate on what it is, but I just think there's an over, so there's this thing called homeostasis, right? Which is one of the hallmarks of youth. And it's one of the hallmarks of aging and, you know, it's the ability to, or it's our lack of homeostasis. We lose this ability to get the body back into the zone of optimal performance. So everything about the human body is very particular. For example, take pH, which is the amount of acidity in our body. We're so highly regulated, like our body really needs to be at a pH of 7.4. So seven would kill you and 7.6 or 7.7 would kill you. And this is a scale that goes from zero to 14. to put that in perspective. Okay, so tiny perturbations will kill you. How good is our body at staying in that? Amazing. Temperature, right? You go much below about 94, you're dead. You go much above about 104, you're dead. How good are we at staying in that range? Oh, I mean good. I mean, we generally stay within a 1.5 degree band. So this homeostasis thing is amazing. It gets weaker and weaker as we get older. And so your ability to tolerate bad food bad sleep, sedentary behavior, more stress, all those things. It just gets weaker and weaker and weaker. And I think it declines non-linearly. So again, what you experience is a decline between 30 and 40. It's bad. 40 to 50, yeah, that's worse. 50 to 60, you can fall off a cliff.
Is there a way to reverse this?
I don't think we know. I think you can definitely slow the progression of it. And you know what? I would say you probably can reverse it. So just as you can clearly reverse diabetes, diabetes is a glucose homeostasis problem, and it's clearly reversible. But, you know, so there are probably some variants of this that, that are harder to reverse than others. But, but no, I, I think we can reverse this process, but it gets, it gets harder, you know, it gets harder as time goes on. It gets harder the further, the further you are into, you know, sort of the physiologic trap.
What are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this kind of not maybe a cliff, but a dip over the last five years for yourself? How are you thinking about it?
Well, I sort of had a change of heart five years ago. So actually six years ago, 2014. So I sort of hung up my bike, which at that point I'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport. But at that point, a couple of things had happened. So, one, I had become very familiar with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training, which again is a rich man's problem.
Ultra marathons, ultra biking, ultra swimming, hiking.
That's right. That's right. So again, and it's the same sort of curve, right? Where as exercise dose of exercise goes up, mortality comes down, but it has this little bit of a J where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise, especially over the age of 40, you're actually driving an increase in mortality. Now, again, Yes.
Does that mean running a marathon once a year or is it running a marathon every week?
Yeah, great, great point. Running a marathon once a year, probably not increasing your mortality at all. But running 40, 50 miles a week probably is, especially at that age. Now, again, this gets to your point about resilience. Someone in their 20s doing that, doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality. It really only seems to be an issue if you continue. In fact, I did an interview with a cardiologist, James O'Keefe, on my podcast who is the world's expert on this. And it was actually James's work six years ago because I heard him speak at a conference 10 years ago. We became friends. It's one of those things I'm sure you've experienced this where you hear something and you don't want it to be true. So you basically come up with all the reasons you're gonna pock holes in.
It until you find the evidence the other way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And eventually it became very difficult to ignore that this hyper amount of exercise was counterproductive. So that's one piece of the change six years ago.
It's probably bad that I just committed to doing the marathon next year yesterday.
That's all right though. You'll be fine. I just think don't do one a month.
Yeah.
And then I think the second thing was I realized like, it was sort of funny, but I realized like my prime was so far behind me that I needed to think about like what was I doing this in service of, right? And not that I needed anyone other than myself to do these things because I'm very self-motivated. So I don't like, but just as a joke one day I asked my wife, I said, Hey, do you know what my PR is for 20K?
Like, Bike, run or swim?
Yeah, bike on a 20K bike on the time trial. and I was like, this is my wife. She hears me talk about this stuff all the time. I have spreadsheets and models and data, and I analyze my power data every single day. And I'm trying to break the record for San Diego. Like, I'm really so switched on to this. She'll probably get it within a minute. She'll guess what my PR is within a minute. She was off by 20 minutes, meaning she wasn't even in the zip code. So I was like, huh. That's funny. It's literally the most important person in my life couldn't care less about this. And what I realized was, I need to start thinking about a different sport, which is the sport of longevity. So what does it mean to be a kick-ass 100-year-old? And so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction called the Centenarian Olympics. So how do you train to kick ass at a hundred should you get there? And of course, everywhere along the way. So that now dominates my landscape of training, which means I don't, you know, care about how fast I can, you know, ride a 40 kilometer time trial, because that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do.
What is your mindset going into a 40 mile bike then or some type of experience? Is it more the joy of it?
So I don't I don't I don't train. No, my training is very specific, but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars. So the pillars being stability, strength, mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance. And so each of those then has a super layer detail approach. And I still ride my bike four hours a week. So it's a fraction of what I used to do. And it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training. Um, what was the fourth one? Stability, strength, mitochondria and mitochondrial efficiency or aerobic efficiency. And then the fourth and final one is anaerobic performance.
So you focus on those four metrics now on a day to day basis.
Yeah, yeah. Those, those four pillars sort of make up the training program, which is then in service of something that I invite every patient. to define for themselves, which is because you will have a different, you know, set of variables for me, potentially. But, you know, my centenarian Olympics has, you know, 18 events in it. You know, like, I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool that, you know, where there's a one foot gap between the water and the curb, like, lift myself up. I want to be able to hop over a three foot fence. I want to be able to walk three miles in an hour. I want to be able to carry two 10 pound bags up four flights of stairs. I want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds because that's about the weight of a kid. I want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands. So I could rattle off all of my 18 things and you would say, Peter, those seem really easy. And you'd be right. As a 37 year old stud. But the point is, as a 37.
Year old, a lot of them aren't easy.
Most 60 year olds couldn't do this if their life depended on it. And I have yet to meet but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can. And so that's the aspiration, is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s. How do you work that backwards to inform your training in your 60s, in your 50s and in your 40s? And it's actually very hard.
And as I'm getting into, you know, I'm three years away from 40. What should someone in my age range be thinking about when they're, you know, I'm healthy, I feel good, you know, maybe if aches and pains here and there when I'm training hard or something, but for the most part, I feel amazing. What should I be thinking about moving forward so that I continue to feel amazing and have the ability to do these things?
So I think it's never too late to at least become familiar with what these ideas mean. And it doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and devote yourself to this. Like I've obviously made a very conscious choice that I don't go to swim meets, I don't go to bike races. Like, I don't train for those things anymore. And a big part of that is just time. You know, there are only 168 hours in a week, and, you know, I have a very clear set of priorities, and I'm willing to set aside 10 to 12 hours a week for exercise, which by many people's standards is still quite a lot, but probably by the standards that you exercise and certainly by the standards that I used to exercise, you know, I've never exercised so little in my life. So I have to be very efficient with every one of those minutes. And that means I'm laser focused on the four principles of that. In your case, I think it comes down to saying, okay, how much time do you want to devote to the long game? How much time do you want to devote to the short game? Another way to think about this would be investing. If you're looking at an investment portfolio, you might say, how much do I want to put both time and money, so the actual capital I set aside, but also the amount of time I spend deliberating over it into my retirement account versus how much do I want to invest as a day trader for short-term gains for money that I'm going to be using in the near term that's maybe even supplementing my income today? You could have totally different strategies for that, and that's totally fine. So I'm just in the category where I'm only thinking about long-term permanent capital. And so that's the first question is you have to decide how do you want to do that? And it might be that you say, Peter at 37, I just want to focus on running a marathon. I've always wanted to do an Ironman, so I'm going to go and do that. And, you know, I want to climb Mount Everest, and that's going to require, like, you might have a whole bunch of these bucket list things, and truthfully, I would say do them now because it's only going to get harder because you're not gonna be able to do it later.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I don't think you're going to want to do it later, so. So get those things out of the way. Got nine pieces of Primal advice for athletes, but I think a lot of entrepreneurs could live this way, too, and still, like, be better entrepreneurs, be more productive, have better relationships, be sharper, all these different things.
I think everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur.
Absolutely, absolutely. But you talk about adequate sleep and this is something I've been talking about a lot lately on my podcast and.
Bringing out different sleep experts but why just emphasize is sleep important for you? I mean sleep is when the body renews and regenerates, repairs itself. It's when a lot of the neural networking happens to overlook sleep and to think, well, you know, I can sleep when I'm dead. Well, you know, that just is so such faulty logic. It's so critical and so important. I try to get eight hours a night myself. If I get less than six for some reason, I feel it, I know it, I try to make up for it, I try not to let that happen. I try not to schedule late nights because I wake up at the same time pretty much every morning. So if I... 6:00 AM wake up or... Yeah, 6:30, 6:00 AM, 6:30. But if I were to go to bed at 1:00, I'd still wake up at my normal time. So I have to really force myself to not force myself because I'm tired at the end of the day. And I have this whole wind down process. So my wife and I will watch some television after dinner. We'll catch up on, we'll do some binge watching catching up of whatever the latest series was. But around 10, we'll break. I have a pool in my backyard and a Jacuzzi. So I go into the pool's unheated. So in the wintertime, it might be in the 50s. I'll walk into the pool and hang out there for a couple of minutes and get really, really cold. But not to the point of shivering. It's kind of a process in and of itself. Then I'll get in the Jacuzzi. So my wife and I'll hang out in the Jacuzzi. We'll just recap what the day's events were. We turn off all the lights in the house. We have a fire pit out there. So there's a real sort of a primal cave caveman kind of thing to that. Then I'll just finish off with another minute in the cold and towel off and go up to bed and I sleep like a baby as a result of that.
The hot cold therapy.
Yeah, the hot cold therapy. And that's kind of how I wind my day down. And that prepares me to sleep, brings my body temperature down, which is, you know, they say that you should have a lower body temperature to sleep better. We keep the room around 67. We have blackout curtains. So it's a real cool sleeping environment.
I always like to keep it cold.
Yeah.
Okay, and so if you do like a cold shower before bed, you think that's a good thing?
I think it's a good thing.
It'll help you sleep better.
I think so. Try it. I mean, it can't hurt.
Okay. You talk about stress and rest balance. What does that mean?
Well, you know, there are certain stresses in your life that are unavoidable. Work stress, commuting stress, sometimes training, waiting in the lobby for 45 minutes stress.
Sorry.
Well, I'm more stressed about the traffic coming from it.
Right, right, right.
Because you never know what it's going to be. It could be, you know, I planned for two hours. I got here in an hour and, or I got here in less than an hour.
Right.
So it's good. Yeah. But, so, so you have these stresses and some of them are imagined even though your brain thinks they're real. They don't exist, you know, that our stress mechanisms in the body where they evolved to handle true life or death situations. You know, a tiger bearing down upon you, an infection that's gonna kill you, a broken leg that may, you know, whatever have its impact on you. Not, you know, am I gonna miss my kid's rehearsal or am I gonna be late for work or whatever. Those cause stress but they're not life-threatening. life threatening and yet the brain sees them as life threatening. So the message here is that you sort of have to identify stresses and then appropriately orchestrate certain rest and recovery. Now we talked about this before the show that meditation is a form of rest and recovery. But just taking maybe if you need a nap you can do that. But certainly that goes back to the whole sleep thing being critical. But the other part of rest is recognizing if you're an athlete, recognizing when it's just inappropriate to go out and train just because your schedule says I have to go do six miles today. If you wake up that day and you feel like crap and the metrics, the heart rate variability is wrong or you're just not feeling good, then you're better off taking that day off than plowing through it and being able to write in your log book, yeah, I got through the workout, felt like crap, but I got through the workout.
I was just rest at that time.
Just rest. Yeah, yeah.
Gotcha. Okay, the third thing you talk about is personalized schedule and inconsistency is the key.
So, in primal endurance, we go back to that philosophy that the body is a very sort of temperamental, it's in temperamental states back and forth. Sometimes you're in a state of energy and health and sometimes you're not and you can't really plan on when those states are going to be so you have to be willing to listen to the cues. and for that reason we say inconsistency is the key to consistent racing if you're an athlete. So it's when you feel good you can go hard, when you don't feel good back off, take time off. We use the term periodicity so you can periodize your training so that there.
Are.
Tranches of training days a week at a time where you're really going deep, deep, hard, hard and then you might take a week off or take it real easy and back off. you can break those further up into quarterly annual segments always with the idea that some days are going to be good, some days are going to be bad. You're going to trend toward wanting to build to ratchet up over time but you're okay kind of not doing stuff as hard. And so it doesn't become this linear kind of progress. It becomes more of a fractal thing that trends toward improvement.
Gotcha. The next thing you talk about is aerobic emphasis, train slow to race fast. What does that mean?
Yeah, so this is the toughest one for current endurance athletes to really to grok. And that is a lot of athletes, and I was certainly one for 20 years, you basically go out and you train to hurt. So you run or you ride or you swim at a heart rate that's 75 to 90% of your max heart rate. And you see how long you can hold that, right? and so you're training to hurt. And it hurts, you know, it hurts you. It does hurt you, but you feel tough as a result of it. But the problem is you're not really training the body to become more efficient. You're just training yourself to hurt. So when we talk about efficiency in racing, we go back to the original premise about glucose and glycogen being sort of this determining factor in muscle tissue. When you run out of glycogen, you sort of hit the wall. So how do you manage glycogen? well one way would be to eat a lot of carbohydrates and drink a lot of gels during the race. The other would be to become so good at burning fat that you never really tap into that glycogen. Interesting. So we train you to become so good at burning fat. Now that's the 80% that we talked.
About with the diet.
But the other part of that for the endurance athlete is if you train at a low enough heart rate that you are, it's typically it's 180 minus your age. So let's just say you are 40 years old. so 180 minus 40 is 140. So that's going to be your maximum heart rate. You're never in your training, you're not going to go above that. You set your watch, you set your heart monitor to give you a signal as soon as you get above 140. Now, you start out and at that 140, maybe you can only run 13 minute miles, even though you're capable of running 7 minute miles at 175 beats a minute or whatever. But now what we're doing is we're measuring how good you are at burning fat. fat. And we know that at that number, 180 minus your age, that's the highest rate that you could put oxygen through your system and know that you're burning mostly fat. And we know that because that's the pace at which you could close your mouth and breathe through your nose and get plenty of oxygen. Or that's the pace at which you could be with a training partner and talk without losing your breath. Once you start losing your or having to catch up or having to get winded, we know that you're going into burning you're building up lactic acid.
You're not burning fat.
You're not burning fat or you're burning less fat and starting to burn more sugar. So we want you to be at the highest end of your fat burning without tapping into your sort of glycolytic abilities. And we know that number to be generally around 180 minus your age. So now the idea is you go out and you train and the first day you go out you're running 13 minute miles and that's as fast as you can go without the heart rate bumping up over 140. Well, you're not very good at burning fat. You might be good at burning sugar. Like I say, you might be able to run seven minute miles or six minute miles. But over time, if you stay at that high heart, at that maximum heart rate of, which is low, much lower than you're used to, you find yourself running 12 minute miles, and then 11 minute miles, and then 10:30s and 10s and 9:30s. And what it means is, even though the heart rate hasn't changed, you're still putting the same amount of oxygen through, now you're burning more fat. so you're becoming more efficient at burning fat. So that when you do decide to ramp up and throw in the interval training and the weight stuff that we have you do in the gym, now you're starting from a baseline of being a much better fat burner than everyone else around you.
So just so I wrap my head around this, is your heart rate dictating how much fat you can burn based on how... No.
So your heart rate is dictating how much oxygen you're putting through your system. and it's because it's delivering oxygen to the muscles and the muscles are using oxygen to burn fat, they can burn glycogen or glucose with oxygen, but they also burn without oxygen. So, you know, like you could run a 100-meter sprint with your nose plugged and there's no oxygen involved. It's all. Yeah, you'd still want to breathe. You'd want to breathe at the end of it, but you'd have to recover to recycle, but you don't need that oxygen to burn that Full amount.
Gotcha.
So when we train the body to become more efficient at burning fat, and by the way, the heart, it's interesting, the heart, we're not training the heart to be stronger. The heart's already pretty strong. So the heart doesn't get stronger. The heart doesn't have a PR, right? You know what I mean? It does what it does. But what happens is you become more efficient with the materials that the heart gives you. So if the heart is pumping oxygen X amount of oxygen and you're not good at burning fat, you can't do anything with that oxygen. But the better you are at burning fat, the more you can use that oxygen and burn the fat in the mitochondria and avoid having to go into that glycogen storage situation.
Okay.
All right. So it's really about training you to become more efficient at burning fat. Not forever, but it's certainly through the base building. phase. And that's, that's a, just a huge hurdle for a lot of endurance athletes to overcome because they go, wait a minute, I can already run seven minute miles. Why am I dropping down to 13s? But invariably and across the board, we see as, if they stick to this for weeks at a time, they become more and more efficient. So now we know that, that now you're running 7 30, 7 minute 30 second miles and you're burning, you're getting 92% of your of your energy from fat. So that when you do decide to run those six-minute miles, now you're starting from having burned more fat and you don't have to use as much glycogen to get there.
Interesting. Okay, cool. Structured intensity, what does this mean?
It means partly means you've got to go into the gym and do some heavy lifting. Yes. But not a lot. Okay.
This is if you want to be an endurance athlete.
Yeah, if you want, even if you want to be an endurance athlete, One thing that athletes used to avoid like the plague was the gym. Or if they went, they would do 50 repetitions of a light weight because they're thinking, well, you know, I'm doing, when I'm running a marathon, I'm running 3,000 repetitions of leg turnover, so why don't I simulate that in the-- But.
You'Re saying lifting some weights is going to be key to your endurance as well.
So what happens in any long endurance contest, in addition to running out of fuel, is your power decreases because you haven't trained the power. An example would be you've got three hills to climb in a bike race. The first one you go up with 100% of your power. The second one, even though you have energy, your muscle fibers have been exhausted and they haven't trained to sustain your power. So now you go up the second hill at 82% of your max power. and you might go up the third hill at 65% of your max power. Well, if we could train those muscle fibers deeper and deeper to sustain power for those efforts that require actual power, we can maybe go up that first hill at 100 and go up that second hill at 100 and that third hill at 95. So we do this work in the gym where you load muscle fibers up with fairly heavy weights. It's typically 80% of your one rep max. and we do sequential repetitions with sequential rest in between. So it's not like you do three sets of five and you stop. It's like you do three repetitions rest 10 seconds, three repetitions rest 10 seconds, two repetitions rest 10 seconds, rest 20 seconds, and until you can't finish one good rep. And then the workouts over. So it's not you just did one set and it might have comprised 200 repetitions, but that maximally loaded the fibers deeper and deeper and gave you this ability to sustain power.
Gotcha. And the next thing you talk about is lifestyle practices. What do you mean by that?
Well, so now we talk about everything else but the training. So if you're, you know, it's spending time with your family, it's playing playing games with your, you know, playing frisbee with your dog, playing ultimate with your, with your, with your friends. It's, you know, it's all of the other things that make life enjoyable that as an endurance athlete, I know I used to go, well, I can't, I can't afford to do that. I might get injured or I might, you know, I can't, like, I can't go skiing because I might twist and twist a knee. Well, if you do the training right and you spend that time in the gym, you're less likely to twist a knee skiing than if you were just going to the slopes without having done any training at all.
Sure, sure.
Right?
So.
We want people to have a full life because training for endurance contests should be preparation for an undertaking that you would not want to encounter on a daily basis. You know, you want to wake up in the morning and go, I got that 10K today. I gotta go clean out my GI tract. I'm so nervous, you know? But you want to be that nervous because you want to put it all on the line that day. What we're saying is don't put it all on the line every day in your training. Have fun. Do the right sort of training that builds this beast that when you get to the race, you're gonna enjoy it, you're gonna have fun, you're gonna perform probably better than if you've done the old paradigm of training. But you'll have lived a life in the interim. I mean, I so many of my, you know, ex triathlete marathon buddies, you know, couldn't have a relationship. It was just, you know, imagine they.
Put all their energy in us one thing.
Yeah.
I mean, they, you know, it's like the wife says, can't you stay home and cuddle, you know, Saturday morning and the husband goes, no, I got a 100 mile ride I got to do.
Yeah.
You know, and then I'm going to go, you know, run after that. Then I'm going to take a nap because I'm going to feel like crap. Sure. I did so much. We try to look at the life in general and say, well, an awesome life includes participating in these events, Participating in life. and doing well, but it also includes participating in life.
Yeah.
Yeah. So not to the exclusion of all of everything else.
What feedback would you give an entrepreneur listening or someone with a busy schedule about how to live this lifestyle? You know, they want to be a primal athlete in their daily life, but they also want to run a business and they're spending a lot of time and energy into this one thing. Maybe their entrepreneurial life is like this marathon life that we're talking about where they put all their energy into this one thing and they're not doing anything else. What would you suggest? You're doing it, you've got the healthy lifestyle and you're running a multi-million dollar business, multiple of them. What would you suggest to them?
There are ways to have it all, but you can't be the best endurance athlete in the world and a really successful entrepreneur. So you've got to choose. how much of the endurance athlete you want to be, I would suggest that for me, the best choice was I want to tow the starting line with the least amount of training possible to still kick 90% of the field's ass. Right? So for me, the goal is almost how little can I get away with?
To get the maximum result.
To get the maximum result without having to go, okay, because if it's going to take 20% of the effort to get 80% of the result, I'm not willing to put in the other 80% to win the thing anymore. Or maybe I won't even win the thing because maybe I'll have overtrained. So now you're back to the entrepreneur slash endurance athlete. Get a stand-up desk and a tread desk. So I have a treadmill. Every one of my employees has a treadmill at their work. I don't force them to use it. They can't, but they can. They request it, I give it to them. So you could put in eight miles walking easily and no one on the phone or even on the Skype will know that you're walking.
Yes.
You know, because you can make it uphill, whatever. Take lots of, take frequent breaks and, you know, drop and do some push-ups or some air squats. What I do is I like to, I like to go for a paddle and I'll bring a recording device on a stand-up paddle board. And I'll, if I get my great ideas when I'm paddling, so I'll just record my ideas.
Right?
Or I don't fall in.
Well, it's a plastic bag. By the way, I almost never fall in. I typically will paddle for an hour and a half. I'll step on, get wet up to my calves and step off. Wet up to my calves. But the other thing is hiking. So if you want to do some serious hiking, bring a headset in your phone. Make business calls while you're hiking. I got a friend who's basically a billionaire and that's where he makes most of his business calls. He does two hours of hiking a day. Nobody knows he's hiking.
That he's hiking. Yeah. Wow.
Okay. Awesome. And then so the grunt work you do in the gym takes almost no time. It's not like you have to spend an hour in the gym doing any of this stuff. Like I said, that maximum sustained power workout I just described is basically a short warm-up, maybe 10 minutes of doing it, and then you're done. And if you could do it two days later or three days later, you didn't do it hard enough. that day, right? So we want you to take a week to recover from that, from that specific work. It doesn't mean you can't go walk the next day or do anything else the next day, but you just wouldn't want to repeat a heavy leg day the next day.
Right, right, exactly.
So it's how you, this is the sort of orchestrated structural components to this thing where when you put it all together, you can have it all. You can be an effective, efficient entrepreneur and you can compete against all of those other guys who are claiming they're going to kick your ass in the.
10K or the Spartan race or whatever it is. Right, right. I love that. And we talked about the diet already, but the last thing is proper recovery. So how much, you know, is when.
Do you know you're over training? Well, so there are all sorts of metrics. I mean, you just wake up in the morning and if you haven't slept well and you're, you know, you're sore, then you're probably over training. If you're-- Should we not feel that soreness at all? Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's appropriate to feel-- you can feel it on a day-to-day basis, but not on a week-to-week basis. so you can feel sore after a workout, you know, yesterday or two days ago, but I think if you're still feeling sore for days on end, then you're probably linking together too many hard workouts or you might have overreached on one of your workouts. So that's one indicator. We have a metric that we use called heart rate variability, HRV, and you can buy these apps that measure the time between heart beats. And you'd think that you'd want to see a metronomic beat, like an exact amount of time spaced between each heartbeat. But it turns out that that's an indication of overtraining. That in fact, the heart, we want the heart to be beating almost in demand to whatever is being called upon in real time. So there might be a 0.8 second skip and then a 1.1 second skip and then a 1.2 and then a 0.8 and then a 0.9.
Okay.
And that's heart rate variability.
Get more sunlight during the day. Get more sunlight during the day. So tell me about why is it important to have sunlight.
Awesome. Yes. So first thing to understand is that serotonin, right? Serotonin is a neurotransmitter and it's supposed to be like a feel good kind of compound. This is why so many antidepressant medications, they're serotonin reuptake inhibitors to help keep serotonin active in your system longer. Here's what's so cool is that serotonin gets converted into melatonin. We already talked about how important this is. That's the anti- precursor. It's a precursor to that. Right, right, right. And so, exposure to sunlight boosts your serotonin immediately. But also, exposure to sunlight helps to set your cortisol rhythm. So cortisol has been getting a pretty bad name in the media lately because it's like glorified stress hormone. We've got like 50 hormones and cortisol is the only bad guy now. But cortisol is incredibly important and valuable. It's just when it's out of balance, it can become a problem. And so sunlight is clinically proven. I cited one of the studies in the book to help to normalize your cortisol rhythm. So it helps to keep your cortisol lower in the evening if you get sunlight during the day, which will elevate your cortisol. In cortisol, melatonin have basically an inverse relationship. so when cortisol is high, melatonin is low. When melatonin is high, cortisol is low. So it helps to get that on track again. And it's not like rocket science, you know? Like we know that sunlight is valuable to human health, but we've been dissuaded in the media because of, you know, photoaging of the skin and skin cancer and things like that. And I actually talk about in the book and kind of demystify some of that because then we get into conversation about UVA and UVB and all this stuff. that stuff. But bottom line, make sure you're getting some exposure to sunlight every day. It's going to help you sleep better at night. And this can also be through your photoreceptors, so through your eyes as well. And just getting light in the room, natural sunlight, you know, every day. And that's going to help to kind.
Of set your circadian. What if in Chicago in the winter and there's no sunlight for, or St.
Louis and there's no sunlight for three months? Check this out. So, and I do recommend, and I share some hacks.
Right?
There are light boxes that are used clinically to help to address things like seasonal affective disorder.
Okay.
Right?
There are earbuds that shoot light through your ear canal.
Right.
There's visors you can wear and they're clinically proven to be effective.
So sunbathing in a tanning salon or no?
That actually does work. If it's the right time, the right light. So you need more UVB actually and really depending on where you are in the world, Pretty much the United States period is not getting UVB at certain times of the year. Alright, so we want to be proactive with this, but understand it's not just the exposure on your skin is what I'm talking about. Your skin has photo receptors that pick up light, but just the exposure in your room. Alright, so making sure you have an office with windows, access to windows. There was another study done, this is crazy, because some people work in like a cubicle dungeon. A dungeon, yeah. You know, and what they found was that office workers who are not exposed to windows actually got 173% less exposure to natural light and they ended up sleeping 46 minutes less every night as a result of that. And they saw this correlation which was so interesting and they reported more physical ailments, less energy and also a higher propensity towards diseases. So this is super important and even getting some exposure to sunlight on an overcast day It's like 50 times more valuable than any fancy light you can get exposed to. But those things are great hacks for sure. There's so many things there.
Of course. Okay, that was the first one. Second one, avoid screens before bedtime. And I think this is probably something that a lot of us are out of fault with.
I know you're kissing that phone goodnight.
Yeah, you know, I always tell myself like, okay, shutting it off by a certain time and like not having it in the room and all these other things. But it's It's a challenge, man.
It's definitely a challenge. Here's why, dude. Like, this is, with this book, I was able to dissect that because I knew that that would be the toughest one of the 21 strategies. This one is the toughest because we're addicted. We are, in fact, addicted. Here's why, here's what's happening. So there's this interesting compound called dopamine, right? And it was once thought that dopamine was related to pleasure, but it's not. It's dopamine is all about seeking. It's driving you to seek, right? And so the internet is perfect for this because there's infinite seeking. Instagram is perfect for this because you're continuously going and just there's more to see. But every time you find, you get a little hit from your opioid system. So it's like a slow drip of drugs. I seek, I find, I seek, I find, and you get looped in and it's very difficult to break that pattern. And everybody's had this happen where you're like, I'm gonna check my Instagram for a minute. I'll check Twitter for a minute.
Right.
And then it's 30 minutes later, an hour later, and you're still scrolling. This is what's going on. Like our brain is hardwired to get addicted to stuff like this. And these awesome social media apps know how to manipulate our mind and to take advantage of that. So this is a call to take your brain back. I'm not saying I love this stuff. I absolutely love it. But it has a place and it's being more aware. Now that you're aware, you can catch yourself. and break the pattern. So here's why it's an issue at night in particular. So there was a study done at Rinsler Polytechnic that found that just two hours of your device usage before bed was enough to suppress melatonin secretion. All right, so again, you can pass out before just being on it two hours before, you know, like that span. And so you can go to sleep or pass out, but that doesn't mean you're getting that rejuvenative sleep. So this is why a lot of people are sleeping eight hours, but they're still tired when they wake up in the morning because melatonin suppressed because they're on their device right before bed. And it's this blue spectrum of light that's shooting out, kind of pouring into your optical system.
What if you can stop that spectrum?
Is there shades?
Is there screen protectors? Is there glasses?
There's all of those things.
Now is that okay then if you have the best on it?
It's a hack.
It's not the optimal, but it's the better than.
Yes.
So absolutely, everybody today can get flux f. f. l ux.
Sorry.
F. l ux, which basically cools off your screen, you know, pulls off that troublesome.
Of course.
So I've got all my different. Want to see what it looks like.
Or is it just a film that's like, goes over the top?
Yeah.
So it's a cool app. It does this automatically.
It's an app.
Yeah.
So you just download it on your phone. Yeah. And it does this automatically based on your time zone. Oh, wow. And the time of year, all that stuff. Amazing. So pulls out that most troublesome spectrum of light. And so Harvard researchers found that it's not just light exposure, it's the color and it's the luminance, it's the strength of the light. Yes. You know, so green light was like three times less impactful to your sleep than blue light in their studies. Wow. So cool stuff like that. So flux, you can get the blue blocking glasses. Basically they're like sunglasses. Use those too?
With the orange tint.
Yeah, I do. Yeah, I've got those. You watch TV or something? Yeah. You know, like If you're gonna stay up late and watch a movie a little bit later, you know, but the whole thing is to not make that a habit because these are, of course, you know, these are hacks. But the best thing is, and this is so important, especially for, for, for our audiences, you know, who are really about taking their life to the next level. And they're missing out on this key component, which is you have to find something that's of greater or equal value to the device. So people, you know, actually connecting with real people.
A book, you know, something like that.
Yeah.
Playing games with your kids, talking to your family, have sex. There's other things that you can do. I hope you sleep well. Yeah, I talk about that in the book too, but you have to find something that fills you up because that addiction is so strong and that's really the best tool, which is to avoid the screens in the first place.
Yeah, okay, that's number two. Number three, I have a caffeine curfew. So what time, I mean, here's the thing. I feel like I don't have that much caffeine and I almost never drink coffee except for about a month ago I started doing some intermittent fasting testing until I have Bulletproof in the morning. It's like, what time is it? It's almost two o'clock. I still haven't eaten today. But before, if I'd have a cappuccino after dinner or something, it would never affect me. I never felt, oh, I'm wired now. I could always fall asleep, but I'm assuming that it still does something to my brain or my body, even in my system, to not allow me to fully rest. So what is the optimal time to How many hours before you sleep should we not have any caffeine?
Got it. And by the way, the hours before with the screen time, 60 to 90 minutes, that's all I recommend. So with the caffeine thing, you just set it perfectly. You can definitely go to sleep, but your nervous system can still be active because caffeine has something called... Caffeine can cause you to be crooked in your sleep.
Yeah.
It has a half-life of about eight hours. So if you have 200 milligrams of caffeine, eight hours later, 100 is still active in your system. And so this can keep you out of normal stages of REM sleep. and deep sleep. All right? So you can be physiologically laying down and think that you're getting eight hours sleep. And so this study that was done, they gave people caffeine right before bed, three hours before bed, and six hours before bed. And they found that even six hours out was enough to have noticeable. And they use, like, monitoring systems, you know, measuring their brain waves to find out that, whoa, their sleep is actually getting interrupted because of the caffeine. And then there was the Subjective, so there's the objective and subjective parts of this test and people thought like hey, I got enough sleep, like I feel great, but in actuality their body was lacking that rejuvenative sleep and what that does is you have this false sense of being well rested and you automatically unknowingly start using more caffeine at some point during the day because you're gonna have more daytime sleepiness, alright? So and that creates that whole vicious circle with caffeine to keep you going.
Sure.
Okay, so how many hours before? I recommend, and I'm a fan of caffeine, right? Just do it in the morning. Do it in the early part of the day. It depends on how sensitive you are. Before noon, real fast, would be ideal. But some people are hypersensitive to caffeine. Everybody's metabolism is different. Some people might need to lay off of it completely, but that's a whole.
Nother book on how to make it work. Sure, sure, sure. Okay, so no caffeine afternoon. This is my fourth one that I see here that I like. This is one of my favorites that I was doing that I needed before I learned about the power and the importance of sleep and that's be cool. I remember growing up in Ohio, my dad, we did not have air conditioning in our house and my dad was just like, well, I don't want to spend the money on this and it's only two months in the summer where you got to deal with it. St. Louis is the same as Ohio. Yes. And man, it was miserable. I couldn't wear sheets or anything. I'd just be laying there sweating with the fan on and my dad would make me turn the fan down because he didn't want me to get whatever.
I don't know.
So it was just misery and I couldn't sleep. I'm up all night. I wish my dad would have read this book. So you gotta understand the importance of being cool. But what does it mean to be cool? What's the optimal coolness that you should.
Be in or does it matter? Yeah, absolutely, man. And my story is very similar with yours. My bedroom was upstairs. It's on top of the freaking house. You know, heat rises, coolest drops. So, you know, so this is why our basements tend to be cooler. Upstairs, I would literally see those heat waves. Oh my gosh. Walking up there, 100 degree St. Louis weather. And so I would spray myself with a water bottle and then lay there butt naked and hope my brother doesn't come in the room, you know, when I'm trying to sleep. But yeah, man, it's not good no. And so this is really simple. You know, your body goes through a process. It's something called thermal regulation. And it does this every night. And we'll just say around 9 pm average, it does this process to lower your core body temperature to create the ideal environment for deep sleep.
Yeah.
All right.
Your body cools you off to sleep better.
Right.
So you want to support it and not work against it. So here's some simple tips. And it's going to sound a little Frosty to some people, but ideally your room temperature is going to be. And this is according to research, what experts say, 62 degrees to 68 degrees for sleeping, all right? And some people like, no way. My wife is actually, she's from Kenya. So hot climate, no, she's not having that. So I find a happy medium, you know? So you're at the top, you're at 68, 69. Like 69, you know? But, and also, you know, our friend Kelly Starrett, Dr. Kelly Starrett, he had a pretty big struggle with this, with being too hot. And he got it cold in the room. But it still was enough and he didn't want his wife to suffer. So he got something called a Chili Pad, which basically sits on your side.
Of the bed and he's like, he swears by it.
Underneath the mattress or underneath the sheet. Right on top of the mattress. Yeah, right on top of the sheet. Exactly. But it just keeps you cool underneath you.
Yeah.
Oh, interesting.
It's been a game changer for him, you know? So just cooling your body temperature.
Yeah.
Even just one degree difference.
It's huge.
It's huge. It's huge. Okay, cool. So be cool at night. Doesn't mean you can still, you know, you can still wrap yourself in a blanket, but keep the room cool.
Yeah.
Gotcha. I like that. Okay, so that was number four. Number five, let's do is get to bed at the right time. So why is it important to be at the right time? Should we be at the right same time every night? And what is that optimal time?
Good, good question, man. So timing your sleep is like timing an investment. If you invest a lot at the wrong time, you're gonna get pain. But if you invest even a little bit at the right time, you get some big rewards. And so according to research, our quote money time sleep is between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. and why that is, is this is when you're going to get your greatest increase of melatonin, which is going to help you to go through your normal sleep cycle and the greatest secretion of things like human growth hormone as well. So more recovery, more anabolic growth and.
Development between 10 and 2 a.m. That's right.
Yeah.
Is when you should be going to.
Sleep or that's when you get your optimal sleep.
Right.
If you can get some sleep in that window and some experts say that it's like twice as much value per hour.
Wow.
Right.
So if you go to bed at 9:30, 9:45 and you're asleep in that window that whole time, that's the optimal time. Yeah.
People will notice this when they tend to get to bed a little bit earlier, it's just like, wow, I slept really great.
Right.
You know, I see your face like, yeah, when that happens, but it rarely happens. you know? And so that's the kind of money time window, but it's not again, it's not about being perfect. If this doesn't fit your lifestyle, stack the other conditions, do the other things, you know? Because the timing does matter because your body's wired up to work with nature, you know? And only recently can we basically manufacture a second daytime, you know? And our systems, our genes are expecting a night cycle for us to get cozy, to get sleep, but we can throw on the, you know, do the laptop lap dance all night long today, you know, watch YouTube videos and Netflix and be on our social media. But our genes are not different from our ancestors even, you know, 100 years ago, let alone thousands.
If someone who has a horrible diet, they eat horrible, they smoke, they drink occasionally, but they get eight hours of sleep. versus someone who gets five hours of sleep but works out hard every day, eats perfect clean vegan, whatever the perfect clean diet is for them. Don't smoke, don't drink. I wonder who has more susceptibility to diseases and cancers and poor health and which problems are each case more prone to have. perfect eating but not proper half the amount of sleep four or five hours a night but you're taking care of physically, you're taking care of spiritually and nutrition versus you sleep perfect. Maybe you won't be able to sleep perfect if you're eating that bad but you sleep eight hours a night, nine hours a night but you're eating horrible. Who has it worse off?
So firstly, I think you should be a sleep scientist because it's a Fantastic question.
Good study.
It's a great study. And it's an incredibly complex but important study to do. The first answer is that no one has actually done that type of experiment. We've done a diluted version, a kind of, you know, diet, a light LITE version of it, which is we look at sleep and we ask, what is it in terms of the mortality risk and the health consequences? risk when you're not getting sufficient sleep. And then we take all of those other factors that you've described, smoking history, diet history, mental health history, et cetera, et cetera. And we add those as additional factors into the analysis and we absorb them and control for them so that we can say independent of those things or in spite or in the face of those things, sleep still carries a significant vote in determining your mortality, your rate, your date of ex expiration, as it were. So that's the only evidence that we have right now where you can at least control for those. But we haven't done what you're describing, which is the much more elegant, smart thing to do, which is, you know, can we put them sort of almost in a. A Coke Pepsi. Dr. Challenge kind of Dr. Pepper challenge. phase and see which one wins out. Diet, exercise or sleep, when those two other things are held constant, but you manipulate one of those, then hold the other two constant and manipulate one of lovely experiment, love to do it, but it's not been done.
God, so we don't know. What would your hypothesis be?
My suspicion is that sleep will still probably carry a larger influence than those two other factors. Now, there's a lot of assumptions I'm making there, but I'll give you another quick example. A study done back in the 1980s, which will probably never be repeated because of the moral and ethical issues, they took a group of rats, and what they found after sleep depriving the rats was that rats will die as quickly from sleep deprivation as they will from food deprivation. So sleep is that essential. those rats were dying usually within 20 days. So sleep seems to have a deathly consequence to it. What was also fascinating, however, is that they then, and maybe I'll back up a little bit, human beings and most mammalian species will have two main types of sleep, what we call non-rapid eye movement sleep or non-REM sleep and rapid eye movement sleep or dream sleep. And what they found was that total sleep deprivation will absolutely kill a rat. If you just selectively deprive the rat of either deep non-REM sleep or REM sleep or dream sleep, they found that the rats would still die of either one of those two. So both of those types of sleep are essential. But rats were dying almost as quickly from dream sleep deprivation as they would from total deprivation. Well, they died within about 40 days, whilst the rats who were deprived of deep non-rapid eye movement sleep, they died after about 60 days. So, you know, we can almost then, not that I would wish to pit the different types of sleep head to head and ask which is more important. Now, I should say all stages of sleep are critical. That's probably the one of the biggest messages that we've learned. Different types of sleep do different things for your brain and your body. at different times of night. All of them are important. But it seems as though if you want to ask the question of death risk, dream sleep may be more important than deep sleep on the consequence basis of how quickly you die. But you need all of them. Bad things happen when you don't get any one of them.
Gotcha. Can you talk about dreams and the importance of dreams?
Yeah, we've done quite a lot of work in this area and the belief maybe 20 or 30 years ago was that dreams were just an epi phenomenon. They were just a byproduct. And so the analogy would be, you know, think of the light bulbs that I think I can see behind you in that lovely background. You know, when you create this apparatus called a light bulb, to produce this thing called light in the same way that the brain has been created to produce this thing called dream sleep called REM sleep. When you create light in that way with the light bulb, you also produce this thing called heat. It was never the purpose of the light bulb. It's just what happens when you create light in that way. And the belief was the same thing for dreaming that when you create this thing called REM sleep, which serves lots of different functions. One of the conscious spinoffs, one of the byproducts, is this thing called dreaming. And that never made sense to me for the simple reason, which is this, when we are dreaming, it is more consciously, energetically demanding than not dreaming is my assumption from a brain-based perspective. And anytime Mother Nature burns the most valuable unit in your body, which is called an ATP molecule, an energy molecule, then it usually has some evolutionary advantage to it. In other words, if dreaming is metabolically more active and you could have REM sleep without dreaming, but she still added dreaming atop of REM sleep, then it must serve some benefit. And we've now discovered that it serves at least two vital functions.
Really?
The first is that dream sleep provides a form of almost overnight therapy. That dream sleep is emotional first aid.
Interesting.
And it's during dream sleep at night that your brain takes those difficult, emotionally charged experiences, sometimes even traumatic memories, and it acts like a nocturnal soothing balm. And it just takes the sharp edges off those painful difficult experiences so that you come back the next day and you feel better about those experiences. And in that way, it's not time that heals all wounds. It's time during dream sleep that provides emotional convalescence, as it were. And it's not just dream sleep, it's also even what you dream about. Not just that you dream. In other words, I'm talking about your dream content being important. Because there was a study done several years ago, and they looked at people going through a really tough time, a traumatic experience, such as a really painful and bitter divorce. And at the time when that was happening, they were recording their dreams. And then they tracked those individuals for a year. And one year later, about half of them had clinical resolution to their depression. and the other half did not. And then they went back and they separated the dreams of those two different groups. And what they found is that those people who were dreaming but not dreaming about the emotional events themselves, they didn't get clinical resolution one year later. Those people who were dreaming but dreaming of the event, they got the clinical resolution. So in other words, dreaming is necessary But it's not sufficient. You need to be dreaming of what those events are to process those.
How do we influence dreaming what we want to dream? And not nightmares.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, this moves us into the territory of what we call lucid dreaming.
Yes.
And for most people, lucid dreaming from within my field, within the scientific field, is actually a more simple definition. It's simply the moment that you become aware that you're dreaming.
That's your dream.
Whilst you're dreaming. Correct.
Does that exert more energy when having the dream creates, exerts more energy? If you're conscious and aware while dreaming, is that another level of energy that you're exerting?
Gosh, you need to be a sleep scientist. This is absolutely.
That's why I've got you on here.
You don't need me, actually. So, the answer is in part, yes. But what we've... So, for most people, though, lucid dreaming really means not only I'm aware that I'm dreaming, but now I can control what I'm dreaming about.
Do you often have lucid dreaming?
Do we often, as a group... Do you individually? No, I personally, I've only experienced lucid dreaming probably six or seven times. and it's great when it happens. But right now, we know based on the population statistics, about 80% of the population does not lucid dream. 20% of the population does lucid dream. Which then brings us back to your astute question, which is, can we control our dreams? And is that a good thing to gain lucidity and to gain control and to give over the driving seat to me, the individual, rather than to Mother Nature's blueprint that she's worked out. And I can play both sides of the theory equation here. On one side, I would say if lucid dreaming was so beneficial to you as a human being, as an organism, then many more people would be natural lucid dreamers than there are now. That would just there's that statistic would be reversed, if anything.
Well, I mean, if sleeping an extra couple hours a night is more beneficial, which it is, then more people would also be sleeping more.
Well, that's the hard part, is that with lucid dreaming, it's very difficult to control, but to choose not to sleep, that's unfortunately very easy to control.
A lot of people think it's difficult.
Well, we'll come back to it. I mean, there's really two separate things with insufficient sleep. There is, you either not giving yourself the opportunity to sleep or society not giving you the opportunity to sleep despite you being able to sleep very well.
Right, right.
Versus you giving yourself plenty of opportunity to sleep, but just because you have a sleep disorder or you have sleep issues, you cannot generate the sleep. So the difference is opportunity is present, but you can't create the sleep versus you can create the sleep but you don't have the opportunity to do so. And those two things are quite different. But from the lucid dreaming perspective, I could come back and argue the other side, which is to say my assumption there, the belief that Mother Nature would have had us all doing it if it was good, makes the wrong conclusion that we've stopped evolving. In other words, what if that 20% of the hominid population who are lucid dreaming is the next wave of evolution. They are the superhumans who will come next and succeed people like me who aren't natural lucid dreamers. So I can play both sides of it.
Interesting. Is there a way to train your mind and body in order to lucid dream more?
There have been some attempts. So there's a scientist called Stephen Laberge who actually has an Institute of Lucidity. And he's got different courses and classes. How effective they are, it's a little bit unclear. clear. And there are some simple techniques where you can firstly, before you go to bed at night, and it sounds hokey and strange, is just repeat like a mantra to yourself, I am going to try and become conscious in my dream. I'm going to try and become conscious. And then you can do virtual reality testing in the dream, and you can do this when you're awake. So right now, you know, I am looking at my laptop and if it's a physical entity and I'm in the real world and I'm awake, if I were to tap my screen, I can feel it physically. And you can go around and keep reminding yourself, I can go over to the light switch and turn it on, turn it off. Do I have voluntary control of what's going on in my environment? Because often you don't have in your dreams. And then by doing that in your waking day, you can try to train yourself to do that during your sleeping, dreaming life. At that point, when you flick the light switch and it doesn't change anything, or you tap the screen of your laptop and your hand goes completely through it, then you think, oh, hang on a second. This isn't waking. This is clearly a dream. So, there's different ways that you can test the reality of waking life versus dreaming life and adopt that mindset. The other thing is just to simply start trying to remember your dreams some more. So, in the morning, when you wake up, that's the first step towards a path of lucidity. Don't jump out of bed and sort of just close your eyes and try and remember your dream. Instead, wake up and then keep your eyes closed and don't try to write the dream down. Don't try to dictate it. Just rehearse the dream. Because dreams have this funny nature to them where as soon as we wake up, they almost evaporate. so quickly from our brain.
And so if, yeah, yeah, if you don't feel it right then in moments or minutes, it's gonna be gone.
It's gonna be gone. So just wait there and try to crystallize it. Try to set the dream in Amber by sort of, you know, going over it and rehearsing it, rehearsing it in your mind. Build that picture, build the memory, ingrain the memory, and then pick up your pad of paper and your pencil next to you on the bedside. and write it down. And gradually, as you start to remember more of your dreams, there is some evidence that that can also increase the probability of lucidity. But in truth, I'm not really, I don't know anyone who is truly an expert in being able to increase the frequency with which you can lucid dream from a scientific perspective. There's lots of people out there who claim, I've got this course that you can do. And But the science doesn't support it that well. But the science now has proven without a shadow of a doubt, by the way, that there is a thing called lucid dreaming. We used to think it was a charlatan science that it wasn't real. And we can go into the details as how you prove it, but it has been proven lots of different ways. Really?
Yeah.
And what is the... Do we have any research on what lucid dreaming does for healing the body or hurt in the body or the brain?
We haven't found evidence that it either hurts or helps right now. All we have is evidence understanding what happens when you become lucid as a dreamer. And this comes back to what you are asking about, which is, is there an additional metabolic consequence of going into lucid dreaming? One of the fascinating things when we go into dream sleep, well, there are many, but I'll give you just two. The first is that when you go into dream sleep, your brain paralyzes your body. You are utterly incarcerated in physical lockdown. And the reason is very simple. Your brain paralyzes your body so the mind can dream safely, so that you don't act out your dreams.
So you don't go move your body and yeah.
Correct. And so what we know is that the mechanisms that control REM sleep and non-REM sleep start deep down within the brain, in fact, in the brain stem. So if you were to take a pur, a fruit, like a pur, and you were to turn it upside down, it's that sort of, you know, thin end and the stem of the pur, that's your brain stem. It's there where the principal battle for non-REM and REM sleep plays out across the night to create the 90-minute cycle of non-REM to REM sleep in humans. But as it's expressed upstairs into your brain during REM sleep, which activates lots of brain areas, but also deactivates them. There's a separate signal sent south of your neck, right down into your spinal cord, which paralyzes what we call the alpha motor neurons, which is all of your voluntary skeletal muscles. Now, that fortunately means that your involuntary muscles, things like your heart and your inspiration, keep going. Don't worry, they keep going. Otherwise, we would have been popped out the gene pool together very quickly, but your voluntary muscles, those are paralyzed. The second interesting feature coming back to lucid dreaming though, is that many parts of your brain when you dream light up the visual areas at the back of the brain, the motor strip areas across the top of the brain, the emotional centers, and the memory centers. All of these things light up. And some of them in fact are up to 30% more active when you're in dream sleep than when you're awake, which in some ways is fascinating. But the one part of your brain that goes in the opposite direction is something called your prefrontal cortex. And this is sort of, you know, it's like the CEO of the brain. It's very good at making high level, top down executive control decisions and communication. That part of the brain, as we go into dream sleep, is actively inhibited. So your rational, logical brain is shut down and all of these emotional and memory centers light up. No wonder dreams are bizarre, illogical, hyper associative, filled with memories, filled with visual aspects, often have kinesthetic aspects to them. But what we've realized is that the difference between dreaming and lucid dreaming is that that prefrontal cortex part of the brain actually comes back online as we become lucid. In other words, as we gain volitional control over what we dream, the prefrontal cortex seems to be coming back online, gifting you that volition to do what you wish in your dreams.
I've had, I don't know, maybe a handful of times, where I've had this dream where I wake up, my eyes are still asleep, but I'm awake. And then I open my eyes, but I feel paralyzed. And I feel like I'm screaming yet nothing's coming out. And I can't move my arms. And I'm like, am I paralyzed? And then eventually something comes out of my mouth and I can move. But it always feels very weird. It's like paralysis.
I don't know if that's. And it's what it's called is sleep paralysis. It's a very well known thing. And normally what happens to all of us as were. So REM sleep and non-REM sleep, as I said, will go in this 90 minute cycle. But what's interesting is that in the first half of the night, that's when you get most of your deep non-REM sleep and you don't get very much REM sleep. In the second half of the night, that's when the seesaw balance shifts. And now you get much more of your dream sleep in those last few hours, especially. and normally as we're waking up out of sleep and therefore typically REM sleep and therefore typically dreaming, the brain has this beautiful synchrony, this lockstep of increasing Consciousness into wakefulness and increasing release of that brain body paralysis so that as you are regaining waking mental life, your body is released. from its physical lockdown, from physical incarceration. However, there are times when one leads too far in front of the other, and it's called sleep paralysis, and you've experienced it. I've experienced it too. Can often happen when we're under levels of high stress or we're typically sleep deprived. And at that point, you become a pseudo aware, you're sort of in this mixed state of consciousness, in your between the worlds of wake and sleep, as it were. But your body is still in the paralysis. So you are, you can't lift your eyelids. Why? Voluntary skeletal muscles. You can't shout out. Why? Voluntary skeletal muscles. And it's often paired with a sense, understandably so, of dread and fear and a presence of someone else being there. And it turns out that this phenomenon called sleep paralysis accurately explains most, if not all, of so-called alien abductions. Because when you, you know, when was the last time you heard on the news an alien abduction story that happened in the middle of the day? And, you know, people were outside at lunchtime with friends at work. You know, they're all eating their sandwiches, and then all of a sudden they heard this sound, whoosh. And it's like, my goodness. Did you see that Tommy was just abducted by aliens? It never happens like that. It's usually at night, you're usually by yourself, you describe a presence or a sense in the room, you say that they injected you with some kind of paralyzing agent, you tried to fight back but you couldn't. It's sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis, yeah.
Right. Now, by the way, it's not necessarily something to be worried about if you have it. seems to be somewhat normal. About 25% of the population will experience it. In other words, it's as common as hiccups. But just be aware that there's nothing wrong with you, and it's not that you're being visited by anything strange, or there have been some kind of worries in religious sort of domains that you require some kind of, you know, exorcism, or there's sort of a long history of that in the past. We understand the biology. It's a basic science fact. And it's Largely normal.
So, so when someone experiences it, what should they do? Just try to maintain calm and just wait for the body to wake up naturally.
That's exactly right. You will come out of it and try to, if you can, having heard this, understand what's going on. Sometimes even I don't recognize what's going on when it's going on despite knowing what I know. But gradually I get to the place where I realize what's happening and then I just relax. and I say, I'm just going to give it time and I may fall back asleep or I may continue with my, you know, runway jet propulsion and I hit escape velocity of both consciousness and physical paralysis and it will be just fine. But it's very disconcerting. It really is a very strange.
It's scary, right?
It's very scary. Very scary.
And I've measured myself eating three meals a day. and this is what happens. This is a typical person breakfast. Huge spike above, it goes up 150-200 units. And then you'll feel good for a while, and then three hours later, it's called postprandial, your body puts out a ton of insulin through pancreas.
More from Lewis
Secret Service Agent: Your Neutral Face Is Making People Distrust You (Here's How to Fix It)
