Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | This Type of Sleep Can Improve Mental Health | Professor Matthew Walker #409

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 packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 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. Sleep is not just important for our physical health, but for our mental and emotional health as well. In this clip, Matthew explains why sleep can be emotional first aid, and shares some of his top tips for better sleep. and share some of his top tips for better sleep.

Starting point is 00:01:54 For much of the past 20 or 30 years, despite the science changing, people still believe that when we sleep, our bodies simply are resting and our brain is dormant. And there couldn't be anything further from the truth. All of your major physiological systems in your body undergo a dramatic overhaul during sleep. And every operation of the mind, all of the networks of the brain are being augmented. Memories are being saved. Memories are being shifted from short-term to long-term. Your emotional networks of your brain are being recalibrated and retuned. Some parts of your brain are getting reconnected that have been degraded across the day, particularly with your prefrontal cortex. So you're better able to make decisions and be more

Starting point is 00:02:36 rational as an individual. In fact, some parts of your brain are up to 30% more active than when you're awake, when you're in certain stages of sleep. But we still have this belief that sleep, because it's a quote unquote dormant state, well, then it's a waste of time. And so why should we actually give people the opportunity to sleep if it's something that we don't see as virtuous? In fact, if anything, we see it as quite the opposite. And why do we see it as the opposite? Because we don't really understand how beneficial and how active and essential sleep is as a process. I mean, 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,

Starting point is 00:03:24 and rapid eye movement sleep or REM-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 non-REM sleep. But in the second half of the night, that's when you get most of your deep 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

Starting point is 00:04:08 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. 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

Starting point is 00:05:05 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 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 I've been thinking about emotions a lot recently and how much do we know about our emotions and our memories and how they all get rewired and processed when we sleep

Starting point is 00:05:56 so we used to think um that the way the memory worked is a little bit like a word document so you open it up and you type in all of that information, which is you having the experience and acquiring that. Let's say you're in a lecture and you're listening to a lecture. And then you hit the save button on that Word document, which is what we call the consolidation process. And then at some point, you can come back and you can double click that file and you can bring that memory back to mind. You access that memory, you recall the memory. But we used to think that that memory at that point was then fixed, that there was nothing that you could do about it. It would be

Starting point is 00:06:35 as though you double click that Word file and now it just is kind of grayed out. And if you try to type in anything, you can't change it. It's just fixed. That's the memory for life. It's not true now. What we've learned is that every time you recall a memory, just like a Word document, you open it back up to the possibility of change. Both you can change its content, you can update it, you can modify it. Maybe you can even remove some parts of it, update it. You can modify it. Maybe you can even remove some parts of it, but also you can update the context and specifically the emotional tenor of that memory. And then you hit the save button. So the memory originally, you created it and you saved it, which is called consolidation, but then you double-clicked it, you recalled it, you modified it, and then you re-consolidated it. And so why this is important is that if you have a memory

Starting point is 00:07:33 that is difficult or painful or challenging from your prior past, it doesn't need to remain that way. And this is what sort of reconsolidation therapy often focuses on. Let's bring that difficult experience back to mind and let's see if we can restructure it. Can we recontextualize it? Can we frame it in a different way that's neutral? It doesn't have to be positive, but can we reframe it in a way that's neutral? Or can we reassociate it with something that isn't traumatic and therefore can we dissipate that? What happens during sleep, however, is really interesting. We came up with a theory a while back that was looking at emotional experiences, emotional memories. And at the time we knew that sleep helped strengthen memories. But what we proposed is that when

Starting point is 00:08:34 it comes to emotional memories, you sleep to forget and you sleep to remember. You sleep to forget the emotional charge related to that memory, but yet you sleep to remember the details of that experience. Because let's say that you have a difficult experience such as a trauma event. Let's say you're a combat veteran or you're somebody, let's say, who's been assaulted. What you don't want to do is throw out that memory. That's not adaptive. You know, let's say that you were walking home at night and you chose the shortcut to walk down that alley. And then that's where the assault happened. You don't want to forget the important details of that experience because you don't want to walk back down that same alley again. That experience was meaningful and you should remember it. But the pathological part of that, when it becomes something like PTSD, is that the emotion stays with the memory. In other words,

Starting point is 00:09:38 every time the soldier is in the car park at Sainsbury's and they hear a car backfire, soldier is in the car park at Sainsbury's and they hear a car backfire, that immediately triggers that trauma event of the battlefield. What they are doing there is having a flashback memory. They are not only reliving the memory, the information of the experience, they are also regurgitating the same visceral emotion that they had at the time of the experience. Why is this relevant to sleep? Well, what we've discovered is that it's during sleep when the brain essentially depotentiates the emotion. In other words, REM sleep dreaming takes this sort of emotional memory and think about it like an orange, that you've got the fleshy good stuff in the middle, you know, that's the information. And then you've got this bitter

Starting point is 00:10:30 emotional rind around the informational orange. Well, what sleep will do is divorce the emotion from the memory so that when you wake up the next day, yes, you can still remember that information, but what you don't do is regurgitate the same visceral reaction that you had at the time of the experience. In other words, sleep has stripped away the emotion from the memory. And that's one of the most powerful reasons why we've come up with this idea of REM sleep dreaming being overnight therapy. You sleep to remember the experience, but you sleep to help forget some of that emotion. That's why to me, sleep is one of the best forms of therapy. And it's the reason I think there's a wonderful quote by an entrepreneur called E. Joseph Kossman.

Starting point is 00:11:31 He once said that the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night of sleep. Yeah, that says it all. It's really incredible, Matt, to hear. 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. Who wouldn't want all those benefits you just mentioned about our emotions? We know anxiety, depression, all kinds of things are going up year on year. And there's just so much in that, that if we can get in the habit of really prioritizing sleep, you know, I don't know about you, Matt, but certainly in

Starting point is 00:12:11 clinical practice for me, for many people, the first job is just to give it the priority. Yeah. Like it's just something that gets squeezed in and fits in around everything else. And once you understand it and you can give it a priority for many people, that's all they need to do. Of course, some people need a bit more help than that. So 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 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

Starting point is 00:12:58 Celsius is going to be optimal for sleep. Not lying in bed awake, we've spoken about that, 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. If you are struggling with sleep, remove all clock faces from your bedroom. Looking at the clock if you're struggling with sleep and knowing that it's 4.23 a.m. in the morning is not going to do you any favors whatsoever. Another thing is don't lie in bed counting sheep. The study has been done and it actually makes you have worse sleep. But if you are struggling with sleep and you don't want to get out of bed, per my advice, and you don't want to do meditation because that's not your thing, a great tip here is to get your mind off your mind. And because one of the reasons that we

Starting point is 00:13:53 can't fall asleep is because we start catastrophizing and ruminating, that rolodex of anxiety. So one trick that they've found that's useful is take yourself on a walk. Think about a walk that you can visualize. It's a walk in the woods or a walk on the beach and take yourself off on that walk for five or 10 minutes. And then the next thing you realize is that your alarm's going off and you're waking up in the morning. I would love it if people could keep technology out of their bedroom. I know it's hard. I know it's so, so hard. The last thing that most people touch at night is their phone. And the first thing that they touch in the morning is their phone.

Starting point is 00:14:32 And if you can, try just keeping it outside of your bedroom and see if you can hold off until you've brushed your teeth and then put it in the kitchen and see if you can not touch your phone until you have your first cup of tea. It's sort of keep pushing the boat out. But if you have to bring your phone into the bedroom at night, here is the following rule so that you don't use it in bed. You can only use your phone in the bedroom if you're standing up. And what will happen is that after about five or 10 minutes, you think, I just don't want to stand up any longer. If you can't stand up using your phone,

Starting point is 00:15:10 you need to sit down. Then at that point, you've got to put your phone away. And that's the kind of the hack. The next 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. It means that you're not getting enough sleep. You shouldn't fall asleep that quickly. But many of us think that sleep is like a light switch, that we took ourselves into bed, we turn off our light, and then we should be able to turn off our brain and fall asleep just as quickly. Sleep is not like that as a stick them into bed and think that they can fall asleep. It's never going to happen. You know, they need a wind down, they need a bath, they need to be read to. You find a wind down routine for

Starting point is 00:16:15 them and it works wonderfully. Human adults, just like human children, 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. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. These bite-sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. These bite-sized episodes will be back in the new year, but I'll be back as usual next week for a brand new long-form conversation on Wednesday. Thanks for listening. I'll see you then.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | This Type of Sleep Can Improve Mental Health | Professor Matthew Walker #409

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