Why We Should Prioritize Sleep & Understanding The Impact of Dreams w/Dr. Matthew Walker EP 1154

This is episode number 1154 with the sleep expert, Dr. Matthew Walker.

Welcome to the School of Greatness.

My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.

Thanks for spending some time with me today.

Now let the class begin.

Zig Ziglar said, what you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals. And Wilma Rudolph said, Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion. The potential for greatness lives within each of us. Today's guest is Dr. Matthew Walker and Dr. Walker earned his degree in neuroscience from Nottingham University, UK and his PhD in neurophysiology from the Medical Research Council in London. He also he just became a professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, but he's currently the professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He's the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, and Dr. Walker's research examines the impact of sleep on the human health and disease. And with that research, he's written the international bestseller, why We Sleep, unlocking the power of sleep and dreams, as well as hosting the new podcast, the Matt Walker podcast, which is all about sleep, the brain and the body. And today's episode was so powerful that I want split it up into two parts. And the second half of this episode will come out later this week, and you do not want to miss it. But in this episode, we discuss why sleep is the foundational pillar for our overall health, why most people are terrible at prioritizing sleep and how to change that, the effects of poor sleep over time, and you need to know how bad this is for you over time, how anxiety and stress affect our sleep, the importance of dreams, and how we can influence them and so much more. This will be very powerful for you and so many people in your that are close to you. So make sure to listen to this, listen to part two, and share this with a friend because it could transform the power of your goals, your dreams, your overall health. This is extremely important to listen to. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Matthew Walker.

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Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. I'm very excited about our guest. Dr. Matthew Walker is in the house.

Good to see you, sir. How you doing? Good to see you, Lewis.

Thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm excited about this because as a as a former athlete, as a someone who's always wanted to perform at high levels in business and sports and just have a great life, I've been obsessed with the topic of sleep and I've been obsessed with creating sleep sanctuaries, you know, figuring out what plants you put in your room when you sleep, what temperature should it be, the blackout shades, like all this stuff. I've been obsessed with and I'd love to start with asking the question about if we sleep poorly, how does this impact our brain? If we just sleep poorly one night or over and over and over again, how does that impact the brain chemistry?

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. You know, sleep will take the silver medal. Oxygen definitely gets the gold. But thereafter, sleep seems to be paramount.

Over 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. And 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 five 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 bidirectional 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 spring time 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, why are the majority of people, bad at getting good sleep? Is it, 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 just 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. You know, I think a lot of people like to virtue signal with, you know, what they eat. And they certainly are very proud to tell you, you know, I work out five times a week. I'm in the gym at this time of morning and, you know, all of which I think are great and to be applauded and supported. But we have the very opposite. We have this almost, you know, well, we, we don't some niches of society have this sleep machismo attitude. You can sleep when you're dead mentality, which by the way, based on the evidence, is mortally unwise. 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 amounts of time. 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, you know, 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 is an issue at the public health level. You know, we've had in many first world nations, wonderful government mandates regarding health, regarding drink driving, regarding, you know, safe sex, regarding drugs and alcohol and even food and even inactivity and sitting and 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, you know, at a public health global, you know, government level down to a workplace level, you know, 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, you know, so we need to...

We celebrated those people.

We did, you know. 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, you know, 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've got to be there, what, 6:30 or 7:00 or something, right?

6:30, 7:00, 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, it doesn't work like that for me.

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Or very 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 six o'clock or 5 30 in the morning. That means that some kids are having to wake up at five, 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 accidents 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 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, employees, 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, you know, 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.

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 when 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, 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. And I think I just came out probably a little too strong. You know, it was sort of sleep or else... yeah.

I'm curious. Oh, go ahead.

Yeah, no, no, sorry, please.

I'm curious, what is the has there been research or studies done on if someone who has a horrible diet, they eat horrible, they smoke, they drink occasionally, but they get 8 hours of sleep versus someone who gets 5 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. It's a great 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 We've done a diluted version, a kind of, you know, diet, 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 consequence 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 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, can we put them sort of almost in a Coke-Pepsi-Dr. Pepper 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-REM 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 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 spin-offs, 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 emotional 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 whilst you're dreaming. Correct.

Does that exert more energy when having the dream 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.

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 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?

Are 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? 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.

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 or to choose not to sleep. That's unfortunately very easy to control or to choose not to sleep. 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 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. 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. And 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, you know, 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 to 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.

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And so if you don't feel it right then in moments or minutes, it's going to be gone.

It's going to 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, you know, 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 hurting 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, if not. 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 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. You're between the worlds of wake and sleep, as it were. But your body is still in the paralysis. So, 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, you know, did you see that Tommy was just abducted by alien? You know, it never happens like that. It's usually at night. You're usually by yourself. You 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. 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 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 field.

It's scary, right?

It's very scary. Very scary.

Very scary. What about, what's the science talk about with promontory dreams? And, is there any research on this of people able to kind of predict the future and have these dreams that then come true later in life or things like that? Is there science and research on this?

There's some very interesting data where people have called let's say, you know, emergency services or FBI or police to say, look, I had this dream that there was a plane that was going to, you know, undergo some kind of malicious, you know, attack. And it was this particular, you know, airline. And then the next day, something actually happens on that specific airline. And you think, Okay, surely this is real. Not so. So let's just play the statistics game. So you probably go through three or four or usually about four to five cycles of dream sleep a night. And let's just assume that you only have one dream for each one of those cycles. You usually have more, but let's just assume that. So you're going to have five dreams per night, and then that's, you know, six, five, six, whatever the recent count is, seven billion people. across the planet having 7 billion times five dreams per night. The statistical law of predictable averages would absolutely confirm that someone somewhere is going to have a dream that mimics something that happens the next day. It's just chance. It's just statistics working the way that they do. And of course, when we hear it, as I first described it, you think, that has to be real. But when you apply scientific rationale to the problem, you realise, in fact, there should be many more of those things than are reported based on statistical chance alone.

Interesting. So there's no science that backs that people can have dreams and they can predict events or things that have- There's.

No future forecasting that comes by way of dreams. No.

Really?

Interesting.

Okay.

What is the... Well, not that we have of yet. You know, as a scientist, you always have to take that mentality. I think it's very important that scientists should never forget the following truth: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

So it's potentially possible we just don't have evidence scientifically that backs it.

Yeah, right now all I can do is operate in the realm of rational fact. And on that basis, I can tell you we have no supportive evidence.

Have you studied any like quantum physics or done any research with quantum physics and dreams and how like any of that plays in, you know, just kind of thinking a positive thought and then in the dream creating it and then manifesting your life? Has any of that kind of weirdness come to you or that you've seen?

So, we've done a little bit of this that touches on the topic and what we've tried to do is, for example, manipulate people's emotions before sleep. So, firstly, what we know is that your emotional and mental health are very intimately related to your sleep health, and it's bi-directional. And so, oh, I forgot to speak about the second benefit of dreaming, but we'll come back to that, which is creativity and memory and sort of problem solving and insight. solving. But with emotions, it works both ways. So, if you manipulate people's mood during the day or particularly during the last hour before bed, mood and emotions will have an impact on your sleep. And then conversely, how well you've slept will change how emotionally reactive and pendulum-like and emotionally irrational you are the following day. So, to come to your point, we have which is sort of manifesting positive mindset or mood. If we do a negative mood induction before sleep and we get people to say, Focus on something that was really difficult in your life. Think about it. Increase that sadness. It has a deleterious impact on sleep. Whereas cultivating a positive mood before bedtime actually improves the quality of their sleep, what we call their sleep efficiency. and so that's about as far as we've got in terms of, you know, augmenting or changing your waking state before sleep to see if it can have either a beneficial enhancement or a blast radius consequence on your subsequent sleep at night. And then we've done the opposite. We've manipulated your sleep at night and then looked at how you become emotionally unhinged the next day. Right. As it were. And that should be no surprise for a parent. I don't have children, but it's often that idea of a parent holding a child, the child is crying, and they look at you and they say they just didn't sleep well last night. As if there's some universal parental knowledge that bad sleep the night before equals moodiness. Bad mood and emotional reactivity the next day. The same is true for healthy adults.

Yeah, exactly. have you ever heard about people that can have a dream and then connect with someone else in their dream and actually have, like, a conversation or share dream experiences? Is that a possibility? I'm throwing out some weirdness here. I'm just curious if this is any. Any studies of this or any research done where it's like, okay, me and you, we're going to try to find each other in a dream and experience the dream together. Is that even possible?

We've got no good evidence for that again. But the thing is, I don't think I don't know of anyone who's actually tried to study that. We're only now just trying to study cooperative brain activity in waking people. So normally the way that we do experiments with in brain science is that we will put people inside of a brain scanner and we'll do lots of different things with them and we'll try to understand how their brain is accomplishing those things. only recently because of expense in part and practicality, if you get two brain scanners in one room, you know, next to the other, and then you put two people in those brain scanners and you have them cooperate and perform at the same time, let's say they're doing some kind of cooperative gameplay or they're going through the same emotional experience, can you see similar coordinated brain activity? that's going on. Does that mean that they are psychically or physically bonded through some connection that we can't see? Probably not. It just means that when two brains are doing the same thing at the same time, they express the same pattern of signature activity. But we've, it's much more difficult to try to do that experiment with dreaming because most people can't, you know, it's hard for us to control what one person is dreaming about, let alone coordinate the co-experience of two people at the same time and be measuring their brain activity. So it's just a very difficult question, and I suspect probably not. I suspect most organisms, including humans, will retreat to a solo location, and sleep is typically, as a dream conscious experience, a unique individual experience. it's where we, if anything, stop processing external worlds and external events and people, and we start to focus internally on the information that we've gathered during that day and start to ask, based on everything that I've learned today, how does it fit into all of my back catalogue of autobiographical experience? And this is where we come to the second benefit of dream sleep, which is that dreaming is form of almost informational alchemy. Dreaming is a little bit like group therapy for memories. That sleep gathers in all of this information and in this wonderful, bizarre theater that we call dreaming at night, it starts to collide different pieces of information together and starts to test whether they should be connected. But it's not obvious logical connection. It's not when you're awake, you do a Google search gone right, which is your brain calculates the associations and it puts you on page one. When we're dreaming, it does the opposite. It takes you straight to page 20, which is some hyper associative crazy link. But I think that that's important because it's two different modes of processing logical, convergent, rational versus illogical, divergent, irrational. And when you do that type of hyper associative processing, you start to see patterns that you can't see while you're awake. And what we've discovered is that the second benefit of dreaming is creativity, that you go to sleep with the pieces of the jigsaw, but you wake up with the puzzle complete. And it's the reason that no one has ever told you to stay awake on a problem.

Yeah, they say sleep on it.

Correct.

Sleep on it. What, before you make a decision, sleep on it.

That's right.

Yeah.

Both from the emotional standpoint that it creates resolution so you're a more rational, balanced, emotional individual making the right choices and also from an ingenuity perspective as well, from a creativity perspective. You know, we We end up seeing solutions to previously impenetrable problems. Lots of anecdotal evidence for that in the sciences, in the arts, and in music. And then now in the laboratory, we've been able to replicate that same effect.

I want to ask you about the impact of love and sleep when someone feels an overwhelming feeling of love, connection, intimacy with a partner. Does that support their sleep and improve the quality of their sleep? Does it hurt the quality of their sleep? And is there a difference if they're actually hugging and feeling love and connection to their partner, feeling that heartbeat or that warmth or whatever it might be that they're feeling? Is there a difference if they're just feeling it but they're not next to them in the same bed? What's your thoughts on this topic?

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed this first part. Again, if you enjoyed this and you care about your friends and your family and you're following online and you want them to improve the quality of their health, they need to know about their sleep and how to improve the quality of their sleep. So make sure to share this resource with a friend and spread the message of greatness to the people you care about in your life. And make sure to click the Subscribe button over on Apple podcast right now so you can stay tuned to part two coming out next. And I want to leave you with this quote from Jim Roan, who says happiness is not by by chance, but by choice. I believe in this firmly, and it's all about perspective and what we create and how we perceive around the things that happen in our life, how we perceive the Gratitude we have around those things and the way we view ourselves based on the events that happen in our life. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Can't wait for part two and for you to experience the wisdom as well from Dr. Matthew Walker. But in the meantime, I want to remind you of no one's told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And you know what time it is? It's time to go out there and do something great.

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