How To Get More Efficient Sleep | Vishen Lakhiani

Okay, so I really, really, really messed this one up. I used to think that I was optimizing my life by waking up an extra one hour early, sometimes like two hours before my wife would wake up so I could get work done. I could dive into emails and basically try to be more productive. But then I began to realize that what I was doing was actually completely counterproductive. See, I started looking at sleep and reading about sleep, and I realized some really fast, fascinating data that the vast majority of us would never expect. For example, did you know that you today could be getting as much as an hour to 90 minutes less sleep than what your body actually needs? And that by not giving yourself enough sleep, you could be lowering your cognitive functioning by almost one third? That's the equivalent of showing up to work having drowned a pint of beer before starting your workday. So here's the data on sleep that have completely changed my sleeping practices. This is how you can apply this data. And this is one of the most fascinating experiments you can do on yourself to boost your level of performance. Ready? Let's go. So, firstly, many of you may have heard of that famous Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers. And in that book, Gladwell speaks about this idea of 10,000 hours of practice. He says that the world's best performers typically have put in 10,000 hours of practice before becoming what he calls a maestro. For example, the Beatles, they spent 10,000 hours in bars in Berlin before they got famous. Now, Gladwell's study actually comes from a Swiss psychologist, K. Endus Ericsson, who studied violin players. And he found that the best violin players were not amazing musicians because they were born gifted. They were amazing musicians because they practice a lot. And that's where this first idea of the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice came into human society. But there was a second thing that he found unique about these violin players, and that is they were getting ungodly amounts of sleep. Now, these were not lazy people, but on average, the top performers were getting 8 hours and 36 minutes of sleep. Now, you want to know what the average American gets? 6 hours and 51 minutes. That is almost 100 minutes less than the top performers. So the idea here is that we think depriving ourselves of sleep give us more productivity within a day. But that's not necessarily true. In fact, science is now showing that the more you cut back on sleep, the effects on your body, on your health, on your thinking patterns, are so severe that you basically screw up your day. So with the right amount of sleep, you may have less hours in a given day. But in each of those hour blocks, you're able to do more. Because studies now show that lack of sleep will lower your memory. It lowers your moods, you're more likely to suffer from depression. It lowers your cognitive functioning, which is your ability to think and produce ideas, by a whopping one third. Here are some studies on sleep and sleep deprivation that will probably surprise you. A 2004 study shows that people who sleep less than six hours a day are 30% more likely to be obese. Lack of sleep actually causes your body to hold on to extra weight. If you aren't getting sleep, you're also more likely to suffer from depression. A 2007 study found that people who suffer from insomnia are 500% more likely to suffer from depression. Sleep deficiency dumbs you down. It affects your brain in interesting ways. You think slower, you, you process information slower. And as a result, it's not the best state to show up to work in. Now get this right. If you care about how you look, if you aren't getting enough sleep, your body produces more of a hormone called cortisol. Now cortisol actually breaks down skin collagen. Collagen is that quality of your skin that keeps your skin elastic and smooth. When your skin collagen breaks down, you basically don't have healthy looking skin. More sleep, you get healthier your skin. Okay, so that said, how do you optimize your sleep? So these are four hacks that I've brought into my life to help me sleep better. And the first idea involves nothing more than using your standard smartphone. So here's what you want to do. You want to try to get a sense of your body's natural requirement for sleep. So for a couple of days straight, try to go to bed without setting an alarm clock. See what time you get up. Now you're going to need a really patient spouse because you might oversleep and forget to drop the kids to school. But what you're trying to do here is go to bed a little bit extra. So if you typically sleep at midnight, try going to bed at 11pm but don't set an alarm and see at what time you wake up. Now this will help you figure out your body's natural requirement for sleep. Now so when I did this, what I found is that I needed seven to seven and a half hours. Now knowing that I have a discipline of going to bed at half past midnight and waking up at precisely 7:30 to take the kids to school, I know that that seven hours or more on the weekends is exactly what I need to function at my best. So that's tip number one. And all you want to use is your iPhone's natural alarm clock. On the iPhone, you can basically set your alarm to give you the precise amount of sleep you need. I always pick seven hours. Now, tip number two has to do with caffeine. Like me, many of you might absolutely freaking love your morning cup of coffee. So how much coffee should we take to allow us to sleep? Well, so coffee gives you a jolt in the morning, right? But here's what you got to know. Caffeine has a half life of about six hours for the average human body. Now, what this means is that if you take a cup of coffee at noon, by 6:00pm, half of that caffeine is still in your bloodstream. Here's the crazy thing. By midnight, 25% of that caffeine is still in your bloodstream, and it is going to affect your sleep. So when our body needs rest, our body produces a hormone called adenosine. Adenosine binds to certain receptors in neurological system. And when adenosine binds to these receptors, it's a sign for us to go to bed. Now, what caffeine does is that caffeine binds to these receptors instead of adenosine. And as a result, it prevents you from feeling sleepy. But the thing is, feeling sleepy is often your body's natural way of getting the rest. It needs to rejuvenate, to rebuild itself, to heal itself. And so caffeine, while it may give you a jolt in the morning, it screws up your body's natural healing mechanism. So you want to make sure that if you are hooked on caffeine, if you do need your caffeine, there's nothing wrong with that, but you want to have a cutoff time. So my Cutoff time is 2:00pm I try not to take caffeine after 2:00pm I, or if I have to, I go for decaf. So I asked a question to Dave Asprey, right? The founder of Bulletproof Coffee, one of the hottest trends in caffeine fueled productivity. And Dave Asprey himself said, look, if you need to take five cups of coffee a day, take two cups caffeine and three cups decaf. That's what he recommends. So I try to play my caffeine that way. And this way, by the time it's midnight, the caffeine in my bloodstream is relatively low and I can easily fall asleep. Now, hack number three has to do with napping. If you are feeling Tired in the middle of your day, feel free to take a nap. And I almost advocate that workspaces have a place where employees who need a nap can safely take a nap without being judged. Here's why. A NASA study showed that a 26 minute nap, just 26 minutes, can boost your performance by 34% and your alertness by 54%. Right? That is a massive boost. Now, I don't know how they came up with 26 minutes, but many biohackers suggest that if you wanna nap, time yourself to not NAP more than 26 minutes. 26 minutes or less is kind of that sweet spot. When you go beyond 26 minutes, it may interfere with your nighttime sleep schedule, which is also important. So nap that not more than 26 minutes. Now, tip number four has to do with sleeping pills. Basically, please try to get off them now. When I lived in America for almost a decade, I and I had difficulty sleeping, I would pop a pill. Problem there is that you often get hooked to these pills. I would find that the more sleeping pills I took, the more sleeping pills I needed. And sometimes I take these pills for like seven days straight, as if this was normal. Then I ended up marrying a woman who was European. And in Europe they have a far more careful approach to medication. Europeans do not take as many pills as Americans do. And my wife refused to take sleeping pills. She blatantly, she refused to take. But that rubbed off on me. And for the last decade I've been completely off sleep medication. So there may be a particular night when something is off in my biochemistry and I can't sleep. I just let that night happen without popping the sleeping pill because that sleeping pill to me is more dangerous. While it may get me to sleep that night, I know it's going to screw up my sleep for the following day. And worse, it could get me hooked. So. So I work with natural sleep aids. They are natural foods and supplements and herbs that you can take. For example, magnesium is known to help you sleep better. You can take these natural supplements which are not addictive, to help you sleep, but do not pop the pill. Pills may give you a temporary relief, but they rarely heal. What is the root cause? But the worst thing about pills, they get you hooked. Google sleeping pill side effects on WebMD and you'll be shocked at some of the dangerous side effects of sleeping pills. But of course, when it comes to pills, do always consult with your doctor. So those are four hacks to optimize your sleep. Now, I know some of you might be saying vishen I don't need this. I sleep six hours a day and I'm perfectly fine. Well, here's what you ought to know. Philip German, Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania Sleep center, said this studies show that over time, people who are getting six hours of sleep instead of of the seven or eight begin to feel that they've adapted to that sleep deprivation. They feel they've gotten used to it. But if you look at how they actually do an attest of mental alertness and performance, they continue to go downhill. So there's a point in sleep deprivation where we lose touch with how impaired we are. It's like the drunk guy saying, hey, I'm not drunk. Look, I'm still standing. So you got to understand, the study shows that sleep deprivation makes you actually believe that sleep deprivation is okay. So think about that and try out these four different hacks to optimize your sleep. And remember, the best performers, the healthiest people, sleep more, not less. Thank you, and I hope you enjoyed this video and you got some really practical tips out of this. Be sure to subscribe to Mindvalley's YouTube channel for more incredible content on health, performance, biohacking, mindfulness, cognitive ability enhancement from the world's greatest teachers.