Nick Norwitz argues eight hours of sleep matters less than deep sleep, when your brain's glymphatic system clears metabolic waste. Exercise, magnesium threonate, and side-sleeping boost deep sleep efficiency and may reduce Alzheimer's risk.
Stop chasing 8 hours of sleep. Here's why. Every night, your brain washes itself off, literally. During deep sleep, your brain requires less energy, so your blood vessels can constrict slightly, and what this does is it opens up literal channels around the blood vessels. The fancy term for this is the glymphatic system, but just think about it as your brain's daily shower, which it kind of needs 'cause it stinks after a long day. Then, cerebral spinal fluid, which normally bathes the brain, flows through these glymphatic channels, rinsing away metabolic waste that accumulated over the day. And this isn't a trivial process. If brain waste is not cleared efficiently, it can contribute to impaired recovery, cognitive decline, even Alzheimer's disease. Which brings me back to the 8-hour myth, because the goal isn't just to sleep longer, it's to sleep better. The goal is to get more of the sleep that matters, including deep sleep, because deep sleep is when much of this brain cleaning process occurs. But fortunately, there are ways to improve the amount and efficiency of deep sleep and glymphatic cleaning. This includes exercise— just don't Don't do it too close to bedtime. Magnesium threonate specifically, which was actually invented at MIT specifically to access the brain better than any other form of magnesium. You can try 1 to 2 grams daily, 30 to 60 minutes before bed. Even side sleeping may help, based on some interesting animal brain scan data where they took animals, put them in an MRI machine, and then flipped them around back, front, side, like flipping pancakes. We go into specifics and more tools, including promising peptides and light therapy, in the long-form content below. Check it out, subscribe for more, and sweet dreams.
