FoundMyFitness - #008 Sleep, Daylight Anchoring, and Effects on Memory & Obesity with Dan Pardi

Episode Date: July 28, 2015

Dan Pardi Dr. Dan Pardi researches sleep neurobiology and is a co-founder of Dan's Plan, an online wellness and technology company. In this episode, we discuss... (00:00) Introduction (03:27) Circadian rhythms are key to health (07:07) Artificial lights suppress melatonin production (12:04) Sleep clears toxins from the brain (16:14) Sleep deprivation increases appetite and decreases energy expenditure  (24:09) Sleep is critical for creating long-term memories (31:29) Blue light can reset circadian rhythm in the Antarctic winter (36:57) Long-term exercise improves sleep quality in women  (44:43) Sleep deprivation worsens decision-making  (51:02) Practices that encourage healthy sleep (53:57) A healthy diet supports good sleep (59:59) Dan's plan bridges the gap between research and your personal health Join over 300,000 people and get the latest distilled information straight to your inbox weekly: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/newsletter Become a FoundMyFitness premium member to get access to exclusive episodes, emails, live Q+A's with Rhonda and more: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/crowdsponsor

Hello everyone. In today's podcast, I interviewed Dan Party. I first met Dan about a year and a half ago at a paleo-fx conference we both spoke at. Dan came up to me after my talk and we immediately hit it off. Dan researches sleep neurobiology both at Stanford and University of Lydon, and he's also pretty active in other areas of the health and fitness community. This is a really, really informative podcast, loaded with so much good information, including topics like what the determinants of good sleep are, such as duration, time, and intensity, the major causes of sleep loss in our society, and what the consequences of sleep loss are, including decreased purging of toxic substances from the brain, damage to neurons that signal to the brain to stay awake, and how this leads to that feeling that you need coffee in the morning, increased incidence of chronic diseases such as cancer and type 2 diabetes, cognitive and behavioral impairments, and the impact on eating behaviors and weight gain.

We also discuss the optimal amount of sleep, the importance of sleep timing, and keeping the same sleep schedule, as well as other ways to improve sleep. But before we get started, I want to take a moment to remind you guys of just two quick items. The first is that if you're not on my weekly email newsletter, you should be. The newsletter is your gateway to podcast notes and in-depth articles that I simply do not share anywhere else. The sign-up form can be found at foundmyfitness.com.

The second is that this episode of the Found My Fitness Podcast. is sponsored by people like you. You can check out my ongoing crowdfunding campaign where I'm inching towards my next major milestone that I'm trying to use as a jumping off point to dramatically increase the frequency of my videos, podcasts, and articles. You can find that at Patreon, p-a-t-r-e-on-com slash found my fitness. I hope you all enjoy this conversation with Dan Party as much as I did. Now on to the podcast. Dr. Renderpatrick here. Today I'm excited to be sitting with my friend, Dan Party.

Dan is a soon-to-be Ph.D. He researches sleep neurobiology at Stanford University and also at the Lighting University. I know you guys are all a bunch of sleepy heads, so I think that, Dan, why don't you tell us a little bit about sleep? It is a topic near and dear to my heart. Yeah, so I got into sleep probably 12 years ago, and it was very serendipitous. I was, there was a job opportunity for a place called Orphan Medical. And it's a pharmaceutical company that was working with the FDA to develop drugs for orphan disorders, which are usually considered disorders with 200,000 people or less.

So these are, they're not populations that are large enough to get large pharmaceutical companies to develop medications for them. So Orphan was looking at how to develop drugs for these populations. Narcolepsy, which is a sleep disorder, was on their radar. So they had a medication sodium oxibate or GHB. And they were hiring. I applied for the job. And I knew nothing about sleep, narcolepsy, or sodium oxibate before I started.

And it was a very fortunate experience for me because as soon as I started to understand more about sleep, it's just been, it's just a window into our world that's so important. It's so interesting. And it's truly one of these topics where the more you learn, the more you want to know. Absolutely. I am convinced that sleep is one of the key determinants of health, both performance and the way we age. It's regulating a lot of things. So, you know, if you could talk a little bit about the circadian rhythm and how that's connected

to sleep and why that's so important. Yeah. So that's a great point. So sleep is a circadian rhythm. And what a circadian rhythm is, is a repeatable 24-hour process. that usually we have cyclic activity for things like behavior, for cell cycle growth and repair processes, for all different activities in the body. And the timing of these rhythms are dependent on the system in, basically the system in the brain called the superkhyasmatic nucleus,

which is synchronizing with the light-dark cycle of the environment. And so then we have clock what are called clock cells within every tissue and cell in our body. And so there's basically two levels of synchronization that are taking place. The master clock in the brain with the light, dark cycle of the environment, and then all the cells in our tissues with the master clock. And that keeps our body in time. So it's doing the right behavior at the right time of day. Yeah, I think that's, if I'll just add on here, the thing that's to me so striking is

that these circadian rhythms, you say they run on the day night cycle or the light, dark cycle. Yeah. They're over 15% of the human encoding genome is regulated by the circadian rhythm. And what that means is that genes are being turned on so they're active and doing what they're supposed to do during a function or they're being turned off so that they're not active according to this rhythm. Yeah.

So you're talking about a huge amount of metabolic processes, you know, behavior. Stable processes, all these different processes that are controlled. That's right. And that's why there's really no part of the body that goes untouched when we're not getting good sleep or when we have mistimed circadian rhythms from what are called aberrant light environments or we're getting weird, funky light environments that our bodies are not used to in terms of our physiology. And so that is actually pretty descriptive of the modern world.

We spend 90% of our time indoors 200 years ago, 90% of our of the population was working in agrarian capacity outdoors all day long. In the evening, we can turn on artificial light, and we can watch high-definition screens, and we can use our e-readers, and all of these are emitting light, and our brains are trying to figure out what time of day is it? And because of that strange lighting environment, instead of having this waxing and waning of activity controlled by circadian clocks, then we have what's called asynchronization,

where there's not really a robust message that, hey, it's daytime, do daytime activities, and it's nighttime, do nighttime activities. And I think we're running, you know, a huge experiment with our biology right now, and the outcomes are probably not going to be very favorable. And we know that already through, you know, looking at people that have chronic sleep disorders, where they have disrupted sleep or shift workers where they're working during the day, sometimes a week, and during the night, other times a week, we see that when you don't have good sleep and when you have highly fluctuating or highly

variable periods where you're sleeping and therefore mistime circadian rhythms that you have really fourfold increases in cancer risk. You have multi-fold increases in risk for diabetes and for metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease. Our bodies are, it's not a nice to have. It's a must have. Right. Let's dive into that a little bit. So I know with the cancer, for example, the Cancer incidents, I've become particularly interested in the sleep, the connection between lack of sleep and cancer. And one thing in particular, you're talking about the super-chiasmatic nucleus and the sensing of light.

I know that one hormone involved in that is melatonin, right? That's right. And you mentioned something about, you know, exposure to light at night and things like that. So that's messing up our melatonin, correct? Yeah, that's right. And I'll tell you about how it's produced. And I bet you can tell me a lot more about how that works.

in the body. So we have, there are these cells in the back of the eye that are called retinal ganglion cells, and they were discovered in the mid-90s, and they act almost like rods and cones do, which detect light, excuse me, they're looking at light to detect color and light intensity, and then they can transduce a light signal into a nerve signal. Now, when rods and cones are triggered in that way, that message goes back to the primary visual cortex where we turn light into image. In the mid-90s, though, a different type of cell that previously had not been discovered was identified by a researcher Agnacio Provencio, and he found that, okay, there's another retinal ganglion cell that can also do this. It can also turn light into a nerve signal,

but that nerve signal is not going back to the visual cortex. It's going back to what's called the super-chaismatic nucleus, or the master clock. And that was a very important discovery. So, anyway, when melatonin is produced under something called, dim light melatonin onset. When the light dims in intensity and also the tone of the light changes or the color of the light changes, then this melatonin is produced in the pineal gland, this multisynaptic loop. So it is the perception of light by the eye, which is eventually the trigger to say, okay, it's becoming dark, produce melatonin. And then melatonin, we often, we think of that as a sleepiness hormone, but it has fairly weak, soporific activity,

which means it's not a very strong stimulator for sleep, but it's more of a reinforcer that it is, in fact, dark out. And so it's telling all the clocks within the super-chaismatic nucleus, yeah, it's now nighttime due nighttime activity. So it'll affect the transcription and a translation activity that's happening. Right. Yeah. Yeah, so that's, first, one thing that's where you might find really interesting

is that you're talking about, you know, this discovery back in the 90s. Recently, they discovered in some sort of, of aquatic organism. I think it was like flagellite, some dino phlegelite or something. I don't recall what specifically the organism was. But they produce melatonin. And the melatonin that they produce regulates them swimming up and down and up. And I thought that was so fascinating because it's just so evolutionarily conserved that it's like being produced in these little tiny sea creatures. Yeah. But back to the melatonin, the functions, you know, it's a hormone and it controls over 500 genes in the body.

And as you mentioned, it's shutting down certain metabolic processes and it's also the shutdown of those processes are important for other ones to be turned on at certain times. So it's very important for regulating metabolism. But what's also really interesting to bring it back to the cancer that you mentioned, you mentioned there was like a fourfold increase in cancer incidence with lack of sleep. And that's so interesting because there's been a couple of studies recently that have shown, For example, in mice when you engineer them to get breast cancer. You probably have seen this study.

And these mice, when they're exposed to light during their nighttime cycle, they are resistant to traditional chemotherapy treatment. So the breast cancer cells won't die. But if you expose them to this pure darkness, the cancer cells become sensitive to death. And what's interesting is that this is something in people. There's been, for example, blind people who are blind. They actually make more melatonin and they have twice less cancer incidents than people that are not blind.

And there's been studies that have been done with supplemental melatonin in breast cancer patients, two small clinical trials I've seen. There's been other cancer studies as well, but they've given them really high doses of melatonin. And in conjunction with other traditional therapies like radiation, it increases like the one-year survival rate from 36% to like 65% or something like that. So it's really interesting this link between melatonin and cancer. And if you look closely at some of the genes, melatonin regulates angiogenesis, which is the growth

of new blood vessels, which is how cancer cells metastasize and spread. It regulates natural killer cells, which are important for killing cancer cells. So very important in cancer. But some of the other things you had mentioned in a conversation that we've had before is the role of sleep in, since we're talking about diseases, clearing out toxic substances in the brain. This is a very interesting and hot subject. And right now there's been two pretty major studies that have come out. One in 2013, which was looking at something called beta amyloid, which is this potentially toxic

protein that is involved, we believe it's involved in Alzheimer's disease. And so there's one study that came out that showed that you're during sleep, the space between neurons expands, and that gives room for this goopy substance to actually get out of cells and get cleared by the cerebral spinal fluid. So the brain goes through this power cleanse in the evening. And it might be one of the major functions of sleep. And a more recent paper out of Berkeley by Matt Walker's lab, or he was on the paper, I'm not sure if his lab did it, they showed that this beta amyloid protein, particularly when it clusters

in a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, then that will suppress the generation of something called a type of slow wave sleep. So maybe I'll pause and I'll just mention the different stages of sleep real quick to give a little context. So when we go to sleep, generating sleep is an active process by the brain. And you go through different sleep stages. So you'll have non-REM, and out of non-REM, you'll have stage one, stage two, and then what's called slow-wave sleep. And then you will switch over into what's called paradoxical sleep or REM sleep, and you will go through five of those cycles over the course of the night. And it's funny because I get questioned a lot because of the work that I do, evangelizing the importance of sleep. People are always wanting to know what's the important stage of sleep.

and really they're all important. They're all doing something that's really critical for the brain and body to restore itself. So this study in particular showed that this area of the brain that I mentioned previously, the medial prefrontal cortex, it's very important for generating a type of slow wave sleep that then is important for clearing out beta amyloid. And so if you're not generating a lot of that type of sleep,

then you're going to have an accumulation of beta amyloid. And conversely, if you have a lot of beta amyloid, it's going to suppress that type of sleep. So feedback loop. It is. Wow, that's really cool. I didn't read that study, but I remember seeing the headline the second. So the glymphatic system, which is what Dan was referring to when he was talking about how cerebral spinal fluid squirts up through the brain, washes out all the toxic substances,

including amyloid beta, which aggregates outside of neurons and is thought to play a role in, you know, disrupting synapses, the connection between neurons and things like that. It's really important. When your brain swells, it literally swells, well, at least in rats or mice, they swell. But it's extremely important because that's one of the major ways that we can clear amyloid beta plaques from our brains. And so that sleep becomes just so critical. Not to mention you repairing damage when you sleep, DNA repair enzymes, antioxidant enzymes.

These are all being turned on, some of them by melatonin, some of them by possibly other circadian rhythm genes, but those are being turned on during sleep. So it's just, it's so important to take the garbage out, to repair the damage we've done throughout the day, you know, things like that. And I know personally, like when I don't sleep, well, I'm more susceptible to like, anything that, you know, sort of inflammatory that's going on is exacerbated. And that's very interesting. There's some other studies.

I don't know if you've seen pointing to. For example, in the gut, there's bacteria in our gut are also on a circadian rhythm. Yeah. Crazy. Yes. You know, and so when you disrupt, you know, our sleep is disrupted, these bacteria's there are circadian rhythms also disrupted and that affects metabolism. It affects the way they're metabolizing foods and things like that.

Yeah. So you also mentioned type 2 diabetes and obesity. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about mechanisms for how sleep? Sure. This one. So yeah, so this is an area that I do my work in. And I'd say that this subject became pretty hot probably 10 to 15 years ago.

And it started when people were doing sleep deprivation studies and they were looking at blood glucose levels. And they found that by either getting inadequate sleep, so not a complete night or total sleep deprivation, that people were looking pre-diabetic where before they were not. Yeah. And so you'd have this profile of regulating blood glucose if this was tested that seemed that you were just in a different place in your life because they would start with young, healthy adults and then all of a sudden after one night of sleep loss, they would look like

they were pre-diabetic. So that finding, which was fairly serendipitous, stimulated a whole line of research. And the next, after that, the next area of exploration was looking at all sorts of metabolic hormones, hormones that are involved in the regulation of energy expenditure or hunger. And these are things like leptin, which is released from fat tissue and is a signal to the brain of how much fat we're storing on our body. Also, another hormone called ghrelin, which is released by oxyntic cells in the stomach. And that's a fascinating hormone because it does quite a lot of things, but it's the only gut-derived hormone that will actually stimulate hunger. Most gut-derived peptides are actually

in response to a meal, and they stimulate satiety. So this hormone, grelin, actually will episodically, which means over the course of the day, its own activity will wax and wane. It's low after a meal, but then it'll gradually rise, and that is going to stimulate hunger. And what they found after sleep loss is that leptin levels were lower and that grelin levels were higher. And without getting into too much detail, that would basically, that profile would mean that you're going to be hungrier and you're going to have less energy expenditure the next day. Wow.

Yeah, so that was really exciting. That's a pretty big consequence. I mean, it also tells you that you probably, if you're going to get your blood tested, you know, by your doc or whoever, probably do it more than once. Because if you go and do it after a terrible night's sleep, you might look like your insulin resistant or pre-diabetic, right? Absolutely. That would be kind of terrifying.

Yeah. What about the effects of loss of sleep? We're talking about obesity, type-to-diabetes, and these hormones related to satiety and hunger. What about those hormones or neurotransmitters related to reward and food reward? Yeah. So that's a great question because as that line of research evolved, what basically there were several things that became of interest

to understand this association between sleep loss and obesity that seemed to be present. So at one point, it was a couple of years ago, but I had a slide in a presentation that was 81 out of 89 study, epidemiological or longitudinal studies that looked for an association between sleep loss and weight gain had a positive finding. So you had a 55% risk increase for obesity if you were getting less than six hours of sleep per night. So that was like, okay, something's there, but what's going on? And actually, when you looked further into this hormone regulation by the body, and I've actually published one study in narcoleptics and ghrelin, and we didn't find that there was any difference. And so I know that literature pretty well because some early findings showed, wow, there's really something going on here. But then subsequent findings didn't show that there was a change.

And so it was equivocal. There was sometimes it seemed that there was something going on. Other times there wasn't. And so whether or not one side of that is wrong or there's something else happening, like a lot of things in science, it's always good to repeat the study, right? But the next kind of hot thing became, because fMRI became more broad in terms of its usage, we started to look at the brains of sleep-deprived people and how they would function after sleep loss. and particularly after sleep loss in response to palatable foods,

foods that we know that we really like a lot, but may not be so good for us. Like John food? Like John food, yeah, exactly. This is usually energy-dense foods, a donut, you know, could be another example, our ice cream, stuff that we really do think is very tasty. And the response that our brains have to those foods that we like

is elevated so that it's if you were to look at things like you know you know for example the activity of certain areas that process hedonic stimuli or what that means is pleasurable areas that light up to pleasurable stimuli they would light up like a Christmas tree after the glass so your brain basically your okay so there's two things I'm thinking one it that's you know your reward center or is it's hyperactive so you're of course eating some terrible food and you're getting this major reward from it. But the second thing is what about addictive behavior? And if you think about most people that have insomnia, for example, they go to the doctor

and they say, you know, doc, I can't sleep, I have insomnia, what can I do? And the first sort of thing the doctor says is, well, here's this drug, this prescription pill, whether it's like Ambien or some other sleeping pill, you know, this may help you sleep. may actually be a terrible thing for someone who's already their brain chemistry is a little off because they're not getting sleep and so their rewards circuitries all screwed up. Now they take the sleeping pill. They may become more addicted to that sleeping pill. I mean theoretically. Yeah. No, I hadn't actually ever thought about that. You know, and it's interesting to think, you know, whenever you're doing science, it's interesting, you know, it's easier to study the short-term

effects of things, but then it's harder to study the effect. of persistent chronic exposure to whatever that situation is. And that, you know, there's something called allostasis, which is a type of stress response that can happen over longer-term exposure. And, you know, is there some sort of, is there a favorable kind of adaptation or acclamation that the body makes through repeated exposure to certain things where, you know, maybe you would have a blunted response to these sorts of foods

if you're always sleep deprived. I don't know. This is kind of speculation. I'm so glad you brought this up. Because if we talk, I mean, we've been talking a lot about some of the consequences of sleep loss. So you mentioned obesity, type-dude diabetes, Alzheimer's disease because, you know, the glymphatic system, if you're not sleeping, you're not clearing out the amyloid bioplax.

Cancer, you mentioned. Brain atrophies, another one, right? Learning and memory problems, so I guess, you know, there's a couple of studies I've seen. In fact, I've seen you share these, one study that I found particularly interesting. interesting was sleep, during sleep, I don't know what part of sleep it was, but oligodendricides, no, not oligic spines reproduce and they help form synapses or something. And this happens like after you learn something or like an episodic memory occurs or you're doing something where you're learning through an event and then you go to sleep,

you make these dendritic spines and they're making, or you know, somehow a final analyzing the synapses or something like that. Anyway, so I found that was very interesting, and I remember you shared that study. Yeah. I can share a little more about it. Awesome. So this is, you know, basically to kind of summarize my research a little bit, after wanting to understand more about how, you know, the body responds to sleep loss, particularly related

to food decisions and obesity, and I was also very interested then to understand, well, what are the cognitive effects of sleep loss, including learning and memory. And so during sleep, during the day, like for example, right now, you're listening to this message and you are getting, your synapses are getting challenged and stimulated, and that is going to cause kind of a modification of them. At night, you're going to have two things that are going to then facilitate a consolidation of that memory, which means it's going to then make it stronger. Your brain is going to replay that activity pattern in a very selective use pattern. Yeah. So if you use that part of the brain, it's that part of the brain at math. is going to be replayed.

Isn't there a chemical, like 4BP, something that you produce that's, like, involved in that? I remember reading a paper. There's several, yeah. So the key aspects are NMDA receptors and then protein kinase A. So if you block protein kinase A, then you will not have any long-term transformation of hippocampal memories, which are what you kind of, it's where memories go during the day when you're learning, over to more cortical areas at night where then those memories kind of, They move. They move from the hippocampus to the cortex. And you don't have that transformation

if you basically get sleep deprivation or if you will block NMDA receptors. And what ends up happening is usually you see a real enhancement of declarative memory, which is the learning of certain types of facts. It's two types of long-term memory. And you basically see a suppression of that. So usually you might see an increase in 20 percent. in terms of memory or attention after you let's see you were to study a list of words, you'd have 20% improvement in performance the next day after sleep. Without good sleep or blocking these NMD receptors, you're not going to see any of that benefit. Wow.

Yeah. What about GABA? What about the GABA system in that, in that process you were talking about where you're like reliving the memory or the experience you just had? Yeah. Does GABA play a role not? So Gapap play is, you know, it's a critical role as it's a major neuro, it's kind of the major neuro, the inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain.

And the way that the cortex, there's a good way to think about sleep is there is a system, it's not one monolithic kind of system that's waxing and waning, but you actually have a wake network, which is a clustering of different neurons, nerve cells. So you've got, you know, for example, an awake network? A wake network, yeah. So you've got a group of cells in the basal form for brain that are that use glutamine to activate the cortex You've got a group of neurons in the dorsal raffae which is a part of the brain that produces All serotonergic cells or serotonin producing cells that is activating the cortex

You've got an area in the locus serulius and you can name a bunch of these that are all involved in activating the cortex and those are orchestrated or basically they're coordinated by one group in the area of an area called the hypothalamus that produces hypocretin cells. And the reason I know about this pretty well is because people that have narcolepsy are missing these neurons. So what are they doing? So hypocretin, a good way to think of hypocretin is that it's a symphony conductor and it is telling the wake network, hey, it's daytime, beyond play.

And not only play, but play at a certain volume. And the reason it's telling, not only it's giving kind of like two levels of mental, messaging play and play at this level is because the wake kind of network is always acting proportional to how much sleep pressure you've built up. Sleep pressure is something that builds from the moment you wake up and it keeps building, building, building until you go to sleep. And the wake network is counteracting that all day long. And at the end of the day, the wake network goes to sleep or turns off and then you've got

all this unopposed sleep pressure and that will initiate sleep and keep you asleep for the rest of the night. So consolidate it as well. So that's kind of that dance that's going on during the day behind the scenes. And at night, the activity of GABA will activate in one area that is, it's funny. Parts of the brain become more active at night than any other part during a 24-hour period. And one of those areas is called the ventralateral preoptic area. It turns on to turn off the wake network.

And that's what is enabling you then to kind of get overcome by the feeling of sleepiness. and then that's why you feel sleepy and fall asleep and stay asleep. So what happens when you are not getting sleep? Let's say you have insomnia and we can talk about some of the causes of these sleep problems later. But what happens to that sleep network then? Sorry, the wake network. Yeah. The wake network, the timing of the weight network is off.

It is shifted. And so what ends up happening is that you can, have an under-alerted brain for most of the day because of artificial light, because of the lighting environment, which is the first thing we talked about, because we are getting too much light at night, it is telling our brain that it is daytime. And that causes our circadian rhythms to shift, right? A good way to think about how these circadian rhythms shift is, let's say you were to go from, you know, we're in San Francisco right now. And if you were to take a plane and you were to go to Italy, when you arrived, when we arrived, we would be, our biological time would be still set to

San Francisco. But over the course of five, seven days, because of light entering into our eye at a time that's appropriate for Italy, our own biology would shift to match that environmental pattern. Okay. So that's kind of a good way to think of it, because we all usually can understand, yeah, it takes a while to adjust to a new time zone. Well, we're basically putting ourselves in mini jet lag when we do this. And by living in this manner where we're getting not enough light during the day and we're getting too much at night. And what that does is it tells our brain thinks that it's daytime later than it should.

And that shifts our alertness rhythm. And there's two consequences to that. It means that because it's shifted, it's starting, our wake rhythm is starting too late in the day the next day. And that means that we're going to be under, it's going to be kind of understimulated during the day. Our brain is not going to have enough of that wake drive. And so that way, that's where we need coffee. Right. I was going to say that's why you wake up and you feel like you need coffee. Totally. And then at night, it's overactive because it's this, it's right, it's this kind of

cyclic activity. And so now you want to go to bed and I mean, I'm sure people are going to have experienced this. I was sleepy all day and then right before bed, I woke up and I felt more alert than I did all day and I couldn't sleep. And that is, again, characteristic of a, a, normally functioning body in an abnormal environment. So we're giving signals that our body is responding to appropriately, but it leads to inappropriate physiology as well. What about people that live in Alaska or Norway where it's like the light, daylight is all crazy at certain points?

Has there been any research on their circadian rhythm or have they adapt? Are there polymorphisms they have that adapt them to that? You know, I don't know about that, but I know that a colleague of mine did some work at the Concordia Bay Station in Antarctica. And the reason you would do that is if you're looking at the importance of light on health, it's great to go to a place like that where there's zero light for certain times of years. So you can study the effects of artificial light only on human physiology. And what they found is they had people in this base station that were living under normal room light. and what they found is that their mood was altered. They wanted to go to bed a little bit later every night.

They didn't have a good anchored rhythm, and their reaction time on something called a psychomotor vigilance test, which is a measurement of alertness, which is the way that you can think about that is it's how energized the brain feels. Basically, they were performing very poorly. And then when they put in blue-enriched white light, when they replaced normal light with blue-enriched white light, everything improved.

Their reaction time was better, their mood was better. And they went two weeks with normal light, two weeks with blue light, two weeks of normal light. They kept switching. And every time they would switch back and forth, they would notice that there was either, you know, really good effects or really bad effects. And it just speaks to the importance of having the right type of light. Bright light. So bright light shuts off melatonin, the blue light, right? Yeah.

So. You want a lot of it during the day. Bright light. And you don't want too much of it at night. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and there's talking about some of the causes of, you know, sleep problems, you're mentioning

that being a major one. What about, I know for me, one of the major, well, if I drink coffee late in the day, like, I actually drink mostly tea, so I drink coffee maybe one to two days a week because there are some benefits I like from the coffee. If I'm having an interview, I'll drink coffee, so I'm all pumped up, you know, I'm a little more sensitive to it. But one of the things that really affects me personally in terms of sleep, is that, I'm is negative thoughts, things that are causing anxiety, if I have a problem I haven't solved

or addressed, that can keep me up all night. Yeah. And that's something, you know, that I'm sure a lot of people relate to. I mean, that's, everyone's probably experienced that. Everybody. You know, but things that can help overcome that. Sure. Obviously dealing with a problem.

Yeah. What about like meditation, being mindful? Yeah. So give a little context to this. So we talked about that a little bit ago, is there's basically two different systems that are controlling how alert or how sleepy you feel at any point during the day. And one of them is this pressure for sleep and the other one is this wake drive, which is counteracting it. But then there are other modulators too, which is social interaction, which is urgency of situation. And so those things can kind of activate other resources that can then further activate the brain. So people that, you know, are experiencing, for example, post-traumatic stress, that they have an overactive fear center, which is in the amygdala. And you have kind of, I don't want this to be too much of a neuroanademy lesson, but earlier we talked about the medial prefrontal cortex. And that actually talks to the amygdala. And that, remember, that part of the brain remember is the part that's generating that really important slow wave activity, which is then clearing out beta amyloid. And the amygdala is a fear center.

And what happens if we are, you know, ruminating on something that was perhaps really that horrible that we saw or that happened to us, that can then suppress the activity of this medial prefrontal cortex. Additionally, yeah, what the, what that amygdala can do is that it can directly activate parts of the wake network, like the Locus Sorolius and some other side. Yeah. And so what ends up happening is people that. you know, have post-traumatic stress, or it could be any sort of a stressor.

It could be, you know, a love lost. It could be stress at work. You know, it's a lot of things. It can interfere with sleep in a very significant way. And the really crappy thing about that is that when you don't sleep well, you worry about your sleep. And it's a, yeah. It's a vicious cycle.

When you're not sleeping well, you're more emotional, you're more stressed. And so it's like this horrible feedback loop. Yeah. It's rough. There was an interesting study that was done. Where was it? I don't remember where it was done. I think it was published 2014 or 2013.

You may have seen this, but it was interesting because most people associate exercise with being able to sleep better. And it seems like if you're thinking about basic mechanisms, it seems logical. You know, you're stressing your body. you're stressing your mind, you know, you're going to sleep better to recover from that, I guess. But what was interesting is that there was a study, and there's been a lot of associative studies saying exercise is associated with improved sleep.

But this particular study that I remember was interesting to me because it was done in women that had insomnia and they were sedentary. So they didn't exercise. They had insomnia. They went for treatment. So they were part of this controlled trial. where they were then prescribed exercise. It was like 30 minutes a day for, and I don't remember how long, I think it was like a few months.

But the interesting thing from the study was that if they did just an acute, so they did like an acute, you know, dose like once or twice or a few times, and that did not make them sleep better. It actually exacerbated their sleep problems. But it wasn't until, and you mentioned this earlier, the repeated response and how you have feedback loops happening. So it wasn't until they had exercised for like a few months. that they were able to really have significant improvements in sleep.

Yeah. And so if you think about it, you know, if you're a stressed person, if you're emotional, if these things are causing sleep disturbances, you exercise, continually exercise, then you start to sort of dial back some of that arousal, emotional center. So, you know, it's kind of funny because my mom has sleep problems and I'm telling her about exercise, and she'll do it like once, and then it has no effect that she gives up. Yeah. So really, the bottom line here is don't give up.

You need a routine. You need a training program. And I don't know if you know anything about the types of exercise or if there's been any studies showing different types of sleep differently. Yeah. So, you know, early on in the 70s and 80s when we were just trying to understand some of the fundamentals, it was presumed that exercise had a favorable effect on sleep. the investigation into that, the early investigations, didn't actually show that there was

really much of a connection at all. Later, though, and I wish I knew this well enough to describe what the differences were between these studies, a friend of mine, Matt Buehman, who is on a paper that we're about to submit for some of my research, which we kind of talked around a little bit earlier, but he's actually done quite a bit of work looking at, does ex-good sleep, has good sleep help you maintain a physical activity program. Right. And does a regular physical activity program help you get good sleep?

And basically he's published several different papers that have looked at that kind of idea different ways. And yeah, I mean, you see that kind of directionality there. So sleep, good sleep helps you be physically active person and being physically active helps you sleep well. Both sleep and exercise are a fundamental part. Again, they're not nice to have, their need to have, is to have our body work well.

And now we're in a lot of ways trying to just play catch-up or we're trying to figure out, well, what is the minimal dose that I need in order to perform well? Because my job really requires that I sit at my desk all day. And it's such a, you know, it's such a frustrating thing. But I think life is going to be a lot different 15, 20 years from now because there's already real significant awareness. Environments are changing at work.

People are using standing desks, even, you know, know, treadmill desks, I think that in the future, when we go to work, we're going to be doing physical work and our mental work. There's an understanding that daytime physical work is going to stimulate a good positive mental state that'll help get work done. And it's also going to help you sleep well. You know, I think that environments and cultures, environments will be designed for and cultures will be designed for keeping the person healthy and that'll help keep the person productive. That'd be awesome. And I would love that. And I'm on that mission. I'm really trying to help, you know, promote that. So what do you think?

is the optimal amount of sleep. I've seen several studies showing different factors. What are your thoughts on optimal sleep and how? Yeah. So I like to promote... So the determinants of good sleep are timing, intensity, and duration. So duration is easy, and that's like, well, how much sleep do I need? And that's the one that most people go too readily.

How much time should I spend in bed? And that's one important component. So that one is really dependent on you. And it changes across the lifespan. And it can also change on whether you're fighting an infection or are doing really intense physical activity. You might need more than your average. So you're going to have some night-by-night variation.

What I like to do in order to get enough time in bed, I let my body determine how much sleep I want. So I try to give myself a little more time in bed than I expect to get for the amount of sleep I expect to get. So let's say I usually get eight hours. I try to be in bed for eight and a half. And yeah, maybe I'll wake up by my own, not by an alarm clock, by external means, but by my body waking up, I always want that to be the case. So the alarm clock is kind of like the stopgap. Like I really can't sleep in beyond that.

But I'm trying to plan enough time in bed so that I don't actually need it. That's awesome. That's kind of what I do. I most of the time don't use an alarm, but it's there programmed as a fail safe. Like, okay, if I don't get up, then I, if I have to be somewhere and I have to get up. But I think that's a really great bit of information is to give yourself more time. And that probably means getting into bed earlier, right? Yeah.

It does. And that's kind of the hard part, you know, because we, as work times extend and the, you know, work permeates into our life because we've got, you know, the ubiquity of devices that make time, you know, there's no boundaries anymore to work. You know, we can, it follows us everywhere we go. Yeah. So if you're in a culture where you're getting emails really late at night, it can make it really difficult. And, you know, if you're in a position where, let's say, a boss is sending you emails, and it might be hard to say, all right, I'm just going to turn it off and pay attention in the morning.

But it's also good to be able to do that. So, yeah, so anyway, I try to do exactly what you do. And I, so I focus on getting into bed at a certain time every night. And that keeps it really simple. And I know I want to be in bed by 11. And that's easy. And I know unless my time that I need to wake up, it changes, then I've basically worked backwards from the time I think I need,

and that's my time to be in bed. Yeah, the other thing is something that I do is I, because, you know, as you talked about, we talked in the beginning how important light exposure is at the right times and not having light exposure at night, I've got these Philip Hughes lights that are like orange light, and I have them in the house and so those go on at night

and then I also have an app on my computer screen because we don't have a TV we actually watch, Dan and I watch movies from a computer screen. So then we've got this app that filters out the blue light so I try to kind of minimize the amount of blue light.

I have a hard time with the emails because I'm answering them but that's my biggest thing I need to work on because you will, you'll get emotional and being emotional about something even if like a good emotion and like, I'm excited, whatever. It doesn't matter.

Just emotional. I have a hard time getting to sleep. Yeah. Under sleep deprivation and also during stress, emotions are heightened. So if it's negative, it's more negative. If it's positive, it's more positive. Pain, you have greater sensitivity to pain. There's just kind of a heightening.

I know that pain is not an emotion, but there's just a heightening of sensitivity. Yeah. So, yeah. So everyone should sleep. Yeah, exactly. Interestingly, and this is going to sound contradictory to what I've been saying so far, but a lot of creative thinkers and artists, like if you think about one or a lot of albums made, they're made late into the night. And there's an untethering of, so there's something

called the neurocompetitive model for decision making. And if you think about how the brain works, is that you have this impulsive brain that is just like, you know, saying yes to things that it finds pleasurable. And then there's an editorial component, which is in the frontal cortex, and it's saying, you know, maybe that's not such a good idea. You know, maybe you shouldn't have a donut, more or less, you know, 12. And so depending on, you know, which part of the brain wins out, it's going to determine the behavior that follows. And what I didn't mention previously during sleep deprivation,

not only do you have heightened emotional reactivity, but you also have suppressed cognitive control. So those areas of the brain are basically like offline. And, yeah. So you have what's called a shift in your economic preferences, which means that you're going to be more likely to, if you're gambling, you'll be like, you know, all right, put it all, you know, put it all on black. You know, you're going to, you're going to take larger risk and you're going to

take more frequent risk. And you're going to get rewarded. I mean, you're going to have that rewarding going on more for those, right? Like the donuts and if you're going to, you're going to eat more donuts. And yeah, anyways, that sounds, it sounds like sleep. I mean, there's so many different lifestyle factors that it's affecting. It's been associated with shorter telomeres, you know, aging, you know, the neurodegenerative disease, cancer, obesity, you know, emotional arousal, what else did we say? The addiction. Yeah, it's endless. It is. Yeah, it's that fundamental part of our physiology and it's not, it's a need to have, not a nice to have. And it's, even if you know, you know, so when I speak about sleep, I'm always interested to show the

connections so that people will kind of escalate its value because it comes down to their decision, the actual practical decision is, oh, one more game of, you know, episode of Game of Thrones. Right. It's something that you really want to do and you're already in the state where you're more likely to just say yes to that. We all want, you know, the point that I was good, that I didn't make clearly earlier is that as work kind of gets into our life, we're always going to try to fight for a little bit of personal time. And that oftentimes means that sleep is suffering. So knowing some of these connections, whether you could repeat these back or not, that's not important. You know that it's important.

And now it's kind of on you to say, okay, I need to then create what I call a sleep practice, which means what are the things that I need to do in order so that I'm getting good sleep regularly? Because not only will you benefit in the short term, you'll benefit in the long run, and it can change so much about how you're living your life. So what do we need to do? Okay. All right. Yeah.

Well, we were talking earlier. So the things that matter for our timing, intensity, and duration. We talked about duration. Timing is really critical. We're talking about light, right, exposure? No, sleep. Sleep, sleep duration. Yeah.

And so, you know, with my company dance plan, we try to help people live as a restorative sleeper. So the aspiration there is you wake refreshed and you feel alert all day every day. Cool. I want that. What do I do? So then the determinants of good sleep, the things that matter for sleep are timing intensity of duration, Duration is just getting adequate time for sleep within a 24-hour period. Timing is everything to do with our circadian rhythms.

So if you usually go to bed at midnight and wake up at 8, but then on one night you go to bed at 4 and wake up at noon, even though it's 8 hours, it's not going to be the same. And that's because so much of sleep is based off of a circadian rhythm. So when you're doing memory formation, you know, when memory formation is happening in your brain at night, there's a component of that that is absolutely determined by what time of day your body thinks that it is. So to get very efficient REM sleep, then if you're usually getting great amount of REM sleep at 4 a.m., then, but if that's now all of a sudden shifted to 8 a.m. Because that's just happened to what be when you're getting your REM sleep, it's just not going to be the same.

You're not going to be storing memories as well. You're not going to be clearing beta amyloid as well. you're not going to be doing all the things you want sleep to do. How long do those effects last? Can you recuperate from them? You can, but think about a great way to answer that question is think about how long it takes when you go from San Francisco to Italy, right? That the body can only adjust its circadian timing by about three hours a day.

Excuse me. What do you mean by that? Like you have a three-hour, like wiggle room kind of thing? Yeah, so it's not necessarily a wiggle room, but if I think, think if my body knows that it's midnight, you know, tonight at midnight, but then if I want to adjust my schedule so that I'm on New York's, you know, clock, it's going to take, you know, it can take me one day if I do everything right to fully adjust my physiology so that I am adjusted to New York time. But if it's more than that, right, then it's, it's a bit, basically you can

adjust your own physiological clock by three hours per day. I see. Okay. So, and no more than that. under perfect conditions. So, yeah, when you are shifting the timing of your sleep back and forth, then, yeah, there's going to be a little bit of consequence to that. You're not going to be getting as much benefit as you would otherwise if you were sleeping within the same circadian phase. So the lesson there is not only worry about getting the right amount of time in bed, but also that you've got very consistent timing of your sleep.

Yeah. And then for intensity, you really can't, it's not a directly action. thing. But physical activity and light exposure are going to affect the intensity of your sleep, which is really important because we want to get, again, a lot of that slow wave activity between 0.6 and 1 hertz, which is the one that's going to clear the beta amyloid. We want a lot of slow wave sleep, delta sleep, which is from 1 to 4 hertz. That's going to clear away a lot of the adenosine, which makes you sleepy. You know, all this stuff is happening during different processes.

Then REM sleep, you're doing a lot of what's called synaptic rescaling. That's where memories are getting played over and over again, and it's another component of memory formation and brain health. So the idea is what's that one phase of sleep that's important? No, they're all important. And one way to facilitate good rhythms is, again, adequate time, good regular timing, so you're sleeping always at the same phase, and then having enough physical activity during the day

and enough light exposure appropriate. light exposure. So the last, that kind of segues into the last part of the enduring mover, which is to not only kind of know what time you should go to bed, knowing what time you should go to bed solves a lot of problems. Because it's both timing and duration, really. But then you also want to maintain smart light rhythms day, evening, and night. And so what that means is you want to get about a half an hour of bright sunlight during the day, because that's going to, that strong light signal is going to help anchor your rhythm. And then you're going to want to get, in the evening, dim environmental lights do exactly like Rhonda does.

If you can, you know, adjust the light bulbs in your house. I actually wear glasses in the evening that kind of solve a lot. Yeah. And I got a nice pair of mates. They're not really awful looking. Oh, really? You have to show me. I will.

I wish I had them here. And I've been wearing those very consistently. And what I tell myself is that, all right, if I start to wear these two hours before bed, that is going to help me perform better tomorrow. Because again, it's helping my circadian rhythm know that it is daytime, excuse me, that it's nighttime when it's nighttime. And you can create something called circadian or virtual darkness where you can see. So you can be in a room with artificial light. You can look at a television screen.

You can look at an e-reader. But because it's filtering a lot of that blue light, that blue light is the really potent signal to those cells in the retina that it's day. And you want to block that. Right. Yeah. Yeah, Phillips Hughes makes a good light package where you can have the white, the blue, and the orange and have them turn on the white in the day and the orange at night. But it sounds like getting the bright light earlier in the day is probably the most important.

Yes, because if you don't get enough adequate light during the day, then your susceptibility to light at night, artificial light at night, shifting your rhythms, is much greater. So I think I always call daylight anchoring. It helps really anchor your circadian. rhythm. So if you get outside, take every opportunity that you can, if you work in an office, have lunch outside. If you want to take a break, go for a walk. Get outside. If you can exercise indoor versus outdoor, do it outside. And it's funny because some researchers looked at the difference between exercising indoors and outdoors. And some have shown that, you know,

the same type of exercise just has, it's healthier for some reason outside. And it's probably the circadian rhythm effects. Wow. Probably it's healthier outside during the day. Yeah, right. Yeah. That's really interesting. So some things people can do if they have trouble sleeping are exactly what you mentioned. Timing, making sure they go bed at the same time. You know, filtering out the blue light at night and getting enough of, and so getting enough blue light during the day and filtering out at night.

Exactly. Exercise. And then, you know, some other things that I've personally been interested in, but I think they're a little less likely to have a very robust effect on sleep. Some stuff coming out of a sleep lab in Oxford. And they've been doing some studies on some clinical trials on nutrition. And so I'll tell you, one of the interesting studies that I've read not too long ago, I do a lot of research on omega-3 and serotonin and serotonin and serotonin gets converted into melatonin

the pineal gland. So I know a bit about that. But DHA, DHA is important for one of the enzymes. that converts serotonin into melatonin, one of the n-acetyl transfraise, I think. But it's been interesting because there have been associative studies that have looked at omega-3 fatty acids in sleep and they've shown that there's deficiencies that correlated with poor sleep and vice versa, but of course those are associative, or millions of other things could be going on.

But there's been a couple of controlled trials out of the sleep lab in Oxford that have shown in children at least. They're given supplemental like DHA from an algal source. Like 600 milligrams, something like that. A day, it was dramatically improved their sleep quality. So I found that it was interesting just because there possibly is a mechanism with the conversion of serotonin to melaton. I don't think that, like I said, I think the other things that you discussed are paramount,

much more important. But there's also some other, you know, this interesting literature with B-6 specifically and magnesium, both affect. Again, B-6 affects the conversion. conversion of triptophan into serotonin, which then gets converted into melatonin. And magnesium affects the conversion of serotonin into melatonin and it's a GABA agonist. So I know there's been some, you know, associated studies with magnesium, and I don't know.

Personally, there's been people that have reached out to me and told me that after drinking a smoothie, my smoothie recipe, which has a lot of magnesium because it's a lot of dark greens that they sleep better. So it's totally anecdotal. But I find that interesting. Probably good nutrition, cutting out the crap and eating the good stuff, you know, I think that's also probably playing a role. And we may not know all the mechanisms yet, but, you know, I think people will start to tease

us out soon. Yeah. So I am not at all incredulous to the idea that good nutrition helps with sleep because it's a fun, it likes sleep and exercise are fundamental parts of a healthy physiology, so is nutrition obviously. Right. And so part of our ability. the ability of the body to generate good sleep is going to be dependent on the health of

itself that are doing that, that are involved in it, which are going to have these nutritional factors that are part of it. So there's not great research. There's not really robust research in nutrition on sleep. And I get asked that question a good amount. You know, it's more like if you have a carbohydrate-rich meal before bed or a fat-rich meal, all this sort of things, does it have an effect? And really, it's, you know, it's very equivocal.

You know, you might see a little bit of an effect one time, but then it's gone the next time. And, you know. Yeah, that's a short term. I mean, like, it's like, well, what about the effects of chronic inflammation? If you're eating, you know, processed carbohydrates and sugars all the time. Yeah. And you have chronic inflammation. How does that affect your sleep?

Yeah. Probably does. It probably does. And, you know, and so that's the area that is harder to really evaluate super well. Absolutely. But it's also one that's, of course, just as important. important as anything else. So, you know, I think generally having a very sound nutrient adequate diet, you know,

inadequacy is a term that sounds like, you know, I don't know, maybe not that impressive, but it means you're getting enough. And I, whatever you need, all the parts that are kind of involved, all the constituents that are involved in healthy physiological processing, we need a good diet to help us feel kind of robust enough to exercise for our body to be able to execute on all the sleep, you know, components that are necessary to generate good sleep. All these things are connected, you know. To repair the damage that we do when we sleep.

But yeah, so you, um, you're CEO and co-founder of Dan's plans health. Yeah. And that's, um, wellness, health and wellness and technology company where you kind of talk about some of these important factors and help people measure things, which I think is, um, super cool because you can't really, you have to be able to measure something to know what's really going on or if you're improving it. Yeah. As Peter Drucker says, what gets measured, gets managed.

And, you know, I, it's funny because there are, this is the quantified, field of quantified self, which is trackers like Apple Watch or Fitbit or just some examples of that. And it's this growing movement where there's a lot of excitement. And I speak on this quite a bit because we can't put too much faith that these days. devices, these devices help when they help us do the activities that get us results. They're not going to be healthy for us, right? So sometimes people think, well, if I could just track everything and everything would be fine. I'm also not really in that camp either. I think I have, I created a behavior model called the loop model to sustain health behaviors. And a part of that model is looking

at how trackers can help us be more mindful of how we're living and can also generate adequate insights to kind of maybe find things in our behavioral patterns that we might not be able to see readily or easily otherwise that can help us kind of shift how we live, right? It's all about creating an effective, in my opinion, an effective daily pattern of living that is going to then affect, you know, your trajectory of what your life looks like. So in terms of health, which and also what you choose to do, I mean, if you have poor health, it's going to significantly affect your own energy and it's going to affect the version of you that shows up on a day-by-day basis.

And so yeah, so all this is, you know, really has been motivating to me since I lost my father to cancer. And I was in a position where I thought I could help him. And I couldn't really bridge the gap between what I knew and what he needed to hear in order for him to kind of take some behavioral action. And so that kind of set me off into this mission to say, okay, how do you really bridge that gap? and dance plan, I'll even announce it here, we're going to be launching, dance plan will cease to exist and we're launching human OS later this fall, which I'm really excited about. And so we're going to have health courses so that you learn, you know,

what do you need to know on a subject that's important to your health, and so that you can learn it in a way where you can repeat it eight months later after the course. And then programs that should make it really easy for you to kind of follow through on a day-by-day basis, some tracking that helps keep you mindful of, how you're living. So it's all, I'm very, very excited about, you know, what I'm doing and why. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, there's, there's, I heard somebody say the other day from misery to mission. And that was kind of my experience, you know, the, the sadness of experience the loss of the loved one to like, okay, this is, this is,

this is kind of who I am and what I do. Right. And you're going to, you know, help, help a lot of other people out there. It's really awesome, Dan. So, um, where can people learn more about this human OS and about, you know, what you're doing, your research and et cetera. Sure, yeah. Well, I'm just, you can go to danceplan.com right now. If you sign up, everybody that is a member, it's free. You get rolled into human OS when that launches. So my research, you can go to PubMed and I'm going to be submitting a paper to one nutrition journal soon looking at. So I'll just give you a little quick synopsis. The research study that it just finished was looking at a lot of cognitive performance after sleep loss,

but it was what we called ecologically relevant. So instead of one day with no sleep at all, it was just, how did people perform on their cognitive performance tests if they just got one or two less hours for one night? And what we found is that there was a significant impairment in attention. So either somebody felt, or alertness, excuse me, somebody felt either subjectively sleepy or they had an objective. sleepiness or objective reaction time deficit. And both of those, the feeling of sleepiness or a slower reaction time changed the way that people ate. And so they were much more likely to choose foods that they rated as low health. And if you think about that, it could be a measurement or

marker of a defection from personal standards. And if you think, if you kind of extrapolate or speculate on what else that might lead to, if you're not getting enough sleep, even if you have a standard or a goal to eat a certain way and make it to the gym and do all these things that are related to your health, you might get a, you know, sleep loss can give you know a serious case of the, you know, the efforts. And you're like, you know, it's called effort discounting, where you're much less likely to make an effort towards something you value. This, that's super interesting. Like, congratulations on that. And that's, so it also affect attention. Though, I mean, that would, you know, that could, you know, affect the way you're learning and the way if you need to, you know,

do a task and wow that's just um and that was just one to two hours you said yeah and one night for one night yeah so all other previous researchers looked at either one night of total sleep deprivation and so a lot of those or you know five nights of four hours of sleep so those types of studies are testing the capacity of the system so is there is there anything there at all and what we were looking at is more like the sensitivity of the system and that which's really exciting about this is that yeah it's great to know that something's there but it might not be right relevant if that's just not realistic or what it's like in the modern world. But missing a night or two of, you know, an hour or two of sleep loss on any given night

is very common, very relevant. Yes. So, yeah, well, this study shows is that, yes, our eating behavior is change in a significant way when just a little bit of sleep loss. Wow. Yeah, I'm excited about it. So what about, like, social media? Oh, yeah.

So I tweet on Dan's plant health. I have to admit, it's mostly just when I read research papers. It's not the most, like, consumer-friendly Twitter, but... But they're interesting. I've seen your Twitter is interesting. I really like the studies you tweet. Yeah, there's definitely an audience for it for now. So I just put out, you know, I comb through articles and the ones that I take and read,

I'll usually tweet out some segments of them or the title just so that people get some exposure. I tweet a lot about microbiota. I'm fascinated by that subject. A lot about sleep and weight. Some about cognition. the occasional Golden State Warriors post just when they win the championship. Oakland last night was on, it was crazy. I bet.

It was like honking and hollering and fireworks going off just like all night. I bet. Well, you've done really well on very little sleep then. I've actually gotten sleep. Oh, good. Yeah. He didn't. Oh, you didn't?

Okay. But thanks again, Dan. This was such an interesting conversation. And I think that people will really enjoy hearing what you have to say and how much. how important sleep is and the simple solutions, you know, and lifestyle practices they can do to improve their sleep. Thank you so much. Yeah, I call it the mundane but meaningful. So it's easy to overlook, but once you're armed with knowledge, you can benefit if you act on it. And before we go, I always want to say that I really admire your work and learn a lot from you. So thanks for,

it's an honor to be on your show. Oh, thanks for having on. Yeah. Glad we're friends. Yeah, me too. We'll have conversations in the future for sure. I hope so. Let's do it. Yeah.