Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Sleep Tips to Increase Longevity and Improve Health | Professor Matthew Walker #299

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel

Starting point is 00:00:51 packs to 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 147 of the podcast with world-leading sleep researcher, Professor Matthew Walker. In this clip, we explore why getting just an extra 15 minutes of sleep a day could increase our health span and our lifespan. And Matthew shares some of his top tips for better sleep. Why should we care about sleep we should care because sleep is the single most effective thing

Starting point is 00:01:52 that you can do to reset your brain and body health each and every day sleep is on the basis of all of the scientific evidence it is the elixir of life. It is the Swiss army knife of health. And I think the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a very clear and significant impact on our health and our wellness. If you use this sweet spot of seven to nine hours, which we'll come on to, there's a very simple truth, which is that the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all cause mortality. But to me, I think what's more important is that most people right now think of sleep as a cost. You know, how can I sleep less? Because I sort of want to be awake more and do more. And I see sleep as the opposite. I see sleep as an investment.

Starting point is 00:02:46 And it's an investment, not just in your lifespan, but it's an investment in something you care about so critically and I do, which is your health span. And both of those sleep, you know, sleep is almost like the tide that raises all of the health boats. And I think it's wonderful that people think about these individual silos of health, your cardiovascular health, your metabolic health, your mental health.

Starting point is 00:03:15 But what's remarkable is that you can focus on each one of those separately if you want. But there is this Archimedes lever. There is this one thing that if you improve it, all of the other health boats rise on that singular tide of sufficient sleep. That's why I think we should care about it and care about it very passionately. People often hear folks like me say, okay, how much sleep do we need? And the response is somewhere between seven to nine hours of sleep a night. That's what seems to maintain health. Once you get below seven hours, we can measure objective impairments in your brain and your body. But then people think, well, seven hours of sleep, so I'm okay to go to bed at 11 and wake up at six.

Starting point is 00:04:07 hours of sleep so I'm okay to go to bed at 11 and wake up at 6. That's actually not true because for you to get seven hours of sleep you normally have to be in bed for at least eight hours. Maybe you do believe that sleep is an investment and it's great and it helps with productivity but your day is just such that you can't manage that amount. I would then really start to take a step back and say but honestly is that true? Think about what you want in life. What do you really want and with concrete details do you want to live a life that is going to be filled with health and is not inviting disease and sickness into your body or your brain. And if those are goals that you have, which I think for most people are, then coming to terms with the reality that we just have to find the right amount of time. You know, I think

Starting point is 00:04:58 increasingly people are finding the right amount of time to exercise. And that also finding the ability to purchase food that is of better quality and make food that is of higher quality. And I think we need to take the same mentality approach to sleep. Sleep is not just about physical health. It's also about mental health. Previously on our last episode, we spoke about sleep and its structure, that we have these two types of sleep, non-rapid eye movement sleep or non-REM sleep and rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep. And REM sleep is the principal stage within which we dream. But you don't get equal proportions of those two types of sleep with each 90-minute sleep cycle across the night. What happens is that in the first half of the night, that's when you get most of your deep

Starting point is 00:05:53 non-REM sleep. But in the second half of the night, and particularly in the last couple of hours of the morning, that's when you get most of your REM sleep. What we've learned about REM sleep dreaming among many of its other benefits, not just in terms of increasing your lifespan and also promoting creativity, REM sleep is a form of emotional first aid. REM sleep provides this type of mental health therapy. It's overnight therapy. And what we've discovered is that it's during REM sleep and dreaming that we take these difficult, sometimes traumatic experiences from the day.

Starting point is 00:06:37 And REM sleep acts like a nocturnal soothing balm. And it just takes the sharp edges off those emotionally difficult concerns so that when we come back the next day, we've processed those emotions and we feel better about those concerns. So in other words, it's not time that heals all wounds. It's time during sleep and specifically dream sleep that provides that form of emotional convalescence. And I think when you have, and we've done this in the laboratory, we've seen this in our experimental work, when you challenge people with difficult emotional experiences during the day, they actually have a rebound that following night where they increase their amount of REM sleep, their dream sleep, as if the brain and the sleeping brain is responding

Starting point is 00:07:32 to the demands of your emotional life because you need more overnight therapy. It's really quite incredible to think about the REM sleep as emotional first aid. I think it's just a wonderful way to think about it. And we can talk about sleep for our risk of type 2 diabetes and our risk of cancer, but this is using sleep as a tool. This is using sleep as a way of processing your life enhancing your life you know um sleep tips let's see what are the most important things for people to think about when it comes to getting more sleep so i think in our last conversation we went through the typical sleep hygiene tips of sort of regularity, get some darkness at night, turn off those screens, but also dim down half of the lights

Starting point is 00:08:32 in your house before you go to sleep. The third is temperature that we've spoken about. Get your bedroom temperature to around about 18, 18.5 degrees Celsius is going to be optimal for sleep. Not lying in bed awake, we've spoken about that, and then avoiding alcohol and caffeine. Those are all good things I think that can help. The other tips I have, the first thing is have a wind down routine. You know, many of us expect inappropriate things of sleep. What I mean by this is we think that sleep should be like a light switch. Now, for some lucky people, that may be the case. In fact, I would argue that if you really just fall asleep within a minute or so, it's actually pathological.

Starting point is 00:09:17 It means that you're not getting enough sleep. Sleep is much more like landing a plane. It takes time to gradually descend down and you need to build in a routine. You know, with kids, you would never have a kid playing, you know, until right up until their bedtime, then stick them into bed and think that they can fall asleep. It's never gonna happen, you know?

Starting point is 00:09:38 Human adults are no different. So have a wind down routine and that could be having a bath or it could be reading for a little bit. It could be doing light stretching or it could be a meditation. Whatever it is, find out what works for you and stick to it. That's one of the best pieces of advice I can give you. The final thing I would say is practically, okay, how can you help me even just get a little bit more sleep in terms of opportunity time? I think there are several tricks. Often we have a wake up alarm.

Starting point is 00:10:14 Very few of us have a to bed alarm. Why not? And so set your alarm that would give you an eight hour sleep opportunity. Now, you're probably going to ignore it. You're probably going to, and give your ability to have a snooze button on that too. So you can say, okay, I'm going to watch five more minutes of Netflix and you snooze again. But that persistent nagging of the notification will probably get you into bed a little bit earlier. The second thing is this, at least an hour before you are planning to go to bed,

Starting point is 00:10:48 get changed into whatever you're going to wear for bed, and then brush your teeth, do everything that you would normally do just before you go to bed, but an hour before, so that when that to bed alarm goes off, you don't have this 15 or 20 minutes of, okay, I need to sort of now go into the bathroom, do all of these things. And instantly you will add 15 minutes of time to your sleep opportunity. That's like compounding interest on a loan. 15 minutes every night, every week, every month is non-trivial. every night, every week, every month is non-trivial. Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely brilliant. And I think what's really encouraging in terms of what you said there, Matt, is that you don't have to be black or white about this. You know, wherever you currently are,

Starting point is 00:11:40 assuming you're currently under slept, you're saying that even 15 minutes extra a day is going to have a difference on your health and wellbeing. And I think that's very powerful. It really can. If we look at the evidence, there was some fascinating data recently on the importance of REM sleep for lifespan. And what they found was that for, I think it was something like for every five or 10 minutes, or maybe it was 15 minutes of a reduction or a loss of REM sleep, there was a 13% relative increased risk of premature death. And so, you know, don't say, oh, I need to add now an hour and 20 minutes to sleep because I had Matt Walker going on about something. Just try 15 minutes, you know, and even if you can get to bed 15 minutes earlier, then set your wake up alarm five minutes later.

Starting point is 00:12:41 And that way you've already gained 20 minutes. And in truth, your life won't feel that much different, but yet you've given sleep 20 extra minutes back in terms of its longevity and healthspan boost. I hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Sleep Tips to Increase Longevity and Improve Health | Professor Matthew Walker #299

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