Huberman Lab - Essentials: Understand and Use Dreams to Learn and Forget

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explain the important role that sleep and dreams have in learning, regulating emotions, and recovering from trauma. I discuss how dreams during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep contribute to emotional learning and the processing of traumatic experiences. I also discuss the similarities of REM dreams to clinical treatments like ketamine and EMDR therapy. I explain how non-REM dreams function differently to support other types of learning. Additionally, I describe science-backed strategies to optimize both types of sleep for improved learning, mood and emotional regulation. Huberman Lab Essentials are short episodes (approximately 30 minutes) focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. Essentials will be released every Thursday, and our full-length episodes will still be released every Monday. Read the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Joovv: https://joovv.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman More Huberman Lab Huberman Lab Premium: https://go.hubermanlab.com/premium Huberman Lab Shop: https://go.hubermanlab.com/merch Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Dreaming, Learning & Un-learning  00:01:04 Types of Sleep 00:02:57 Slow-Wave Sleep, Motor Learning 00:06:23 Sponsor: AG1 00:07:30 REM Sleep, Paralysis, Unlearning of Emotional Events 00:12:29 Lack of REM Sleep, Emotionality 00:15:02 REM Sleep, Learning & Meaning 00:18:54 Sponsor: Joovv 00:20:08 EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing) Therapy, Trauma 00:26:48 Ketamine Therapy, PCP, Trauma 00:29:52 Sponsor: Eight Sleep 00:31:23 REM Sleep as Therapy, Emotions 00:33:40 Tool: Improve Slow-Wave & REM Sleep 00:37:05 Recap & Key Takeaways Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we're going to talk about dreaming, learning during dreaming, as well as unlearning during dreaming, in particular, unlearning of challenging emotional events. Now, numerous people throughout history have tried to make sense of dreams in some sort of organized way, the most famous of which, of course, is Sigmund Freud, who talked about symbolic representations in dreams. A lot of that has been kind of debunked, although I think that there's some interest in what the symbols of dreaming are. And this is something that we'll talk about in more depth today, although not Freudian theory in particular. So I think in order to really think about dreams and what to do with them and how to maximize

the dream experience for sake of learning and unlearning, the best way to address this is to look at the physiology of sleep, to really address what do we know concretely about sleep? So first of all, as we get sleepy, we tend to shut our eyes and that's because there are some autonomic centers in the brain, some neurons that control closing of the eyelids when we get sleep. sleepy and then we transition into sleep. And sleep, regardless of how long we sleep, is generally broken up into a series of 90 minute cycles, these ultradian cycles.

So early in the night, these 90 minute cycles tend to be comprised more of shallow sleep and slow wave sleep. And we tend to have less so-called REM sleep, R-E-M-Sleep, which stands for rapid eye movement sleep. For every 90-minute cycle that we have during a night of sleep, we tend to start having more and more REM sleep.

So more of that 90 minute cycle is comprised of REM sleep and less of slow wave sleep. Now this is true regardless of whether or not you wake up at the middle of the night to use the restroom or your sleep is broken. The more sleep you're getting across the night, the more REM sleep you're going to have. And REM sleep and non-REM, as I'll refer to it,

have distinctly different roles in learning and unlearning and they are responsible for learning and unlearning of distinctly different types of information. And this has enormous implications for learning of motor skills, for unlearning of traumatic events, or for processing emotionally challenging

as well as emotionally pleasing events. And as we'll see, one can actually leverage their daytime activities in order to access more slow wave sleep or non-REM sleep, as we'll call it, or more REM sleep depending on your particular emotional and physical needs. So it's really a remarkable stage of life. that we have a lot more control and power over

than you might believe. So let's start by talking about slow wave sleep or non-REM sleep. So slow wave sleep is characterized by a particular pattern of brain activity in which the brain is metabolically active but that there's these big sweeping waves of activity that include a lot of the brain.

Now the interesting thing about slow wave sleep are the neuromodulators that tend to be associated with it that are most active and least active during slow wave sleep. And here's why. To remind you, neuromodulators are these chemicals that act rather slowly, but their main role is to bias particular brain circuits to be active and other brain circuits to not be active.

And they are associated as a consequence with certain brain functions. So we know for instance, and just to review, acetycholine in waking states is a neuromodulator that tends to amplify the activity of brain circuits associated with focus and attention. Noropenephrine is a neuromodulator

that tends to amplify the brain circuits associated with alertness and the desire to move. Serotonin is the neuromodulator that's released and tends to amplify the circuits in the brain and body that are associated with bliss and the desire to remain still. And dopamine is the neuromodulator that's released and is associated with amplification of the neural circuits in the brain and body

associated with pursuing goals and pleasure and reward. So in slow wave sleep, something really interesting happens. There's essentially no acetylcholine. And acetycholine, as I just mentioned, is associated with focus. So you can think of slow wave sleep as these big sweeping waves of activity through the brain and a kind of distortion of space and time

so that we're not really focusing on any one thing. Now, the other molecules that are very active at that time are norepinephrine, which is a little bit surprising because normally in waking states, noropenephrine is going to be associated with a lot of alertness and the desire to move. But there's not a ton of noraphenephrin around in slow wave sleep, but it is around.

So there's something associated with the movement circuitry going on in slow wave sleep. And remember, this is happening mostly at the beginning of the night. Your sleep is dominated by slow wave sleep. So no acetylcholine, very little norephene, although there is some, and a lot of serotonin. And serotonin again is associated with this desire, the sensation of kind of bliss or well-being,

but not a lot of movement. And during sleep, you tend not to move. Now in slow-wave sleep, you can move. You're not paralyzed, so you can roll over. If people are going to sleepwalk, typically, it's going to be during slow-wave sleep. And what studies have shown through some kind of sadistic experiments where people are deprived specifically of slow-wave sleep,

and that can be done by waking them up as soon as the electrode recording shows, that they're in slow wave sleep or by chemically altering their sleep so that it biases them away from slow wave sleep. What studies have shown is that motor learning is generally occurring in slow wave sleep. So let's say the day before you go to sleep,

you were learning some new dance move or you were learning some specific motor skill, either a fine motor skill or a course motor skill. Learning of those skills is happening primarily during slow wave sleep in the early part of the night. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. By now, many of you have heard me say that if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1.

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When I do that, it clearly bolsters my energy, my immune system, and my gut microbiome. These are all critical to brain function, mood, physical performance, and much more. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim their special offer. Right now they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer. In addition, slow wave sleep has been shown to be important for the learning of detailed information. So we can think of slow wave sleep as important for motor learning, motor skill learning, and for the learning of specific details about specific events. And this turns out to be fundamentally important.

because now we know that slow wave sleep is primarily in the early part of the night and motor learning is occurring primarily early in the night and detail learning is occurring early in the night. I wanna talk about REM sleep or rapid eye movement sleep. Rem sleep and rapid eye movement sleep, as I mentioned before, occurs throughout the night, but you're gonna have more of it.

A larger percentage of these 90 minute sleep cycles is going to be comprised of REM sleep as you get toward morning. REM sleep is fascinating. It was discovered in the 50s when sleep laboratory in Chicago, the researchers observed that people's eyes were moving under their eyelids. Now, something very important that we're going to address

when we talk about trauma later is that the eye movements are not just side to side. They're very erratic in all different directions. One thing that I don't think anyone, I've never heard anyone really talk about publicly is why eye movements during sleep. Eyes are closed, And sometimes people's eyelids will be a little bit open

and their eyes are darting around, especially in little kids. I don't suggest you do this. I'm not even sure it's ethical, but it has been done where you pull back the eyelids of a kid while they're sleeping and their eyes are kind of darting all over the place. Rapid eye movement sleep is fascinating and occurs because there are connections between the brain stem,

an area called the pawns, and areas of the thalamus and the top of the brain stem that are involved in generating movements in different directions, sometimes called saccades, although sometimes during rapid eye movement sleep, it's not just rapid, it's kind of a jittery side to side thing, and then the eyeballs kind of roll.

It's really pretty creepy to look at if you see. So what's happening there is the circuitry that's involved in conscious eye movements is kind of going haywire, but it's not haywire. It's these waves of activity from the brain stem up to the so-called thalamus, which is an area that filter sensory information and then up to the cortex.

And the cortex, of course, is involved in conscious perception. In REM sleep, serotonin is essentially absent. Okay, so this molecule, this neuromodulator that tends to create the feeling of bliss and well-being and just calm, placidity is absent. In addition to that, norephenephrine, this molecule that's involved in movement and alertness is absolutely absent.

It's probably one of the few times in our life that epinephrine is essentially, at zero activity within our system. And that has a number of very important implications for the sorts of dreaming that occur during REM sleep and the sorts of learning that can occur in REM sleep and unlearning. First of all, in REM sleep, we are paralyzed. We are experiencing what's called atonia,

which just means that we're completely laid out and paralyzed. We also tend to experience whatever it is that we're dreaming about as a kind of hallucination or a hallucinatory activity. So in REM, our eyes are moving, but the rest of our body is paralyzed and we are hallucinating. There's no epinephrine around.

Epinephrine doesn't just create a desire to move and alertness. It is also the chemical signature of fear and anxiety. It's what's released from our adrenal glands when we experience something that's fearful or alerting. So if a car suddenly screeches

in front of us or we get a troubling text message. Adrenaline is deployed into our system. Adrenaline is epinephrine. Those are equivalent molecules. And epinephrine isn't just released from our adrenals. It's also released within our brain. So there's this weird stage of our life that happens more toward morning

that we call REM sleep, where we're hallucinating and having these outrageous experiences in our mind, but the chemical that's associated with fear and panic, and anxiety is not available to us. And that turns out to be very important. And you can imagine why that's important. It's important because it allows us to experience things,

both replay of things that did occur, as well as elaborate contortions of things that didn't occur, and it allows us to experience those in the absence of fear and anxiety. So we have this incredible period of sleep in which our experience of emotionally laid in events is dissociated. It's chemically blocked from us having the actual emotion.

So to just recap where we've gone so far, slow wave sleep early in the night has been shown to be important for motor learning and for detail learning. REM sleep has a certain dream component in which there's no epinephrine, therefore we can't experience anxiety, we are paralyzed,

Those dreams tend to be really vivid and have a lot of detail to them. And yet in REM sleep, what's very clear is that the sorts of learning that happen in REM sleep are not motor events. It's more about unlearning of emotional events. And now we know why, because the chemicals available for really feeling those emotions are not present.

Now that has very important implications. So let's address those implications from two sides. First of all, we should ask what happens if we don't get enough REM sleep? And a scenario that happens a lot where people don't get enough REM sleep is the following. I'll just explain the one that I'm familiar with because it happens to me a lot,

although I figured out ways to adjust. I go to sleep around 10.30, 11 o'clock. I fall asleep very easily and then I wake up around three or four a.m. I now know to use a NSDR, a non-sleep deep rest protocol, and that allows, me to fall back asleep, even though it's called non-sleep depressed. It really allows me to relax my body and brain

and I tend to fall back asleep and sleep till about 7 a.m. During which time I get a lot of REM sleep. And I know this because I've measured it and I know this because my dreams tend to be very intense of the sort that we know as typical of REM sleep. In this scenario, I've gotten my slow wave sleep early in the night and I've got my REM sleep toward morning. However, there are times when I don't go back to sleep.

Maybe I have a flight to catch that's happened. Sometimes I've got a lot on my mind and I don't go back to sleep. I can tell you and you've probably experienced that the lack of REM sleep tends to make people emotionally irritable. It tends to make us feel as if the little things are the big things. So it's very clear from laboratory studies where people have been deprived selectively of REM sleep

that our emotionality tends to get a little bit unhinged, and we tend to catastrophize small things. We tend to feel like the world is really daunting. We're never going to move forward in the ways that we want. We can't unlearn the emotional components of whatever it has been happening, even if it's not traumatic. The other thing that happens in REM sleep

is a replay of certain types of spatial information about where we were and why we were in those places. And this maps to some beautiful data and studies that were initiated by a guy named Matt Wilson, at MIT years ago showing that in rodents, and it turns out in other non-human primates and in humans, there's a replay of spatial information during REM sleep that almost precisely maps

to the activity that we experienced during the day as we move from one place to another. So here's a common world scenario. You go to a new place, you navigate through that city or that environment. This place doesn't have to be at the scale of a city. It can be a new building, it could be finding particular rooms,

new social interaction. You experience that and if it's important enough, that becomes solidified a few days later and you won't forget it. If it's unimportant, you'll probably forget it. During REM sleep, there's a literal replay of the exact firing of the neurons that occurred while you were navigating that same city

you're building earlier. So REM sleep seems to be involved in the generation of this detailed spatial information. But what is it that's actually happening in REM sleep? So there's this uncoupling of emotion, but most of all what's happening in REM sleep is that we're forming a relationship with particular rules or algorithms.

We're starting to figure out, based on all the experience that we had during the day, whether or not it's important that we avoid certain people or that we approach certain people, whether or not it's important that, you know, when we enter a building that we go into the elevator and turn left where the bathroom is, for instance, these general feelings,

of things and locations and how they fit together. And that has a word, it's called meaning. During our day, we're experiencing all sorts of things. Meaning is how we each individually piece together the relevance of one thing to the next, right? So if I suddenly told you that this pen was downloading all the information to my brain that was important to deliver this information,

you'd probably think I was a pretty strange character because typically we don't think of pens as downloading information to brains, but if I told you that I was getting information from my computer that was allowing me to say things to you, you'd say, well, that's perfectly reasonable. And that's because we have a clear and agreed upon association with computers and information and memory.

And we don't have that same association with pens. You might say, well, duh, but something in our brain needs to solidify those relationships and make sure that certain relationships don't exist. And it appears that REM sleep is important, for that because when you deprive yourself or people of REM, they start seeing odd associations. And we know that if people are deprived of REM sleep

for very long periods of time, they start hallucinating. They literally start seeing relationships and movement of objects that isn't happening. And so REM sleep is really where we establish the emotional load, but where we also start discarding of all the meanings that are irrelevant. And if you think about emotionality, a lot of over-

over-emotionality or catastrophizing is about seeing problems everywhere. It's very important in order to have healthy emotional and cognitive functioning that we have fairly narrow channels between individual things. If we see something on the news that's very troubling, well then it makes sense to be very troubled. But if we're troubled by everything and we start just saying, you know, everything is bothering me and I'm feeling highly irritable and everything is just distorting and troubling me, chances are we are not actively removing the meaning, the connectivity between life experiences as well as we

could. And that almost always maps back to a deficit in REM sleep. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Jouve. Jove makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, it's the incredible impact that light can have on our biology. Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near infrared light have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing,

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J-O-O-V-V-com slash Huberman. J-O-O-V-V-com slash Huberman. J-O-V-V-com slash Huberman. To get up to $400 off. So REM sleep seems to be where we uncouple the potential for emotionality between various experiences. And that brings us to the absolutely fundamental relationship and similarity of REM sleep

to some of the clinical practices that have been designed to eliminate emotionality and help people move through trauma and other troubling experiences. Many of you perhaps have heard of trauma treatments such as EMDR. I've movement desensitization, reprocessing or ketamine treatment for trauma,

something that recently became legal and is in fairly widespread clinical use. Interestingly enough, EMDR and ketamine at kind of a core level bear very similar features to REM sleep. So let's talk about EMDR first. EMDR eye movement desensitization reprocessing is something that was developed by a psychologist

Francine Shapiro. She actually was in Palo Alto. And the story goes that she was walking, not so incidentally in the trees and forest behind Stanford. And she was recalling a troubling event in her own mind. So this would be from her own life. And she realized that as she was walking, the emotional load of that experience

was not as intense or severe. She extrapolated from that, that experience of walking and not feeling as stressed about the stressful event to a practice that she put into work with her clients, with her patients, and that now has become fairly widespread. It's actually one of the few behaviorally, the behavior treatments that are approved

by the American Psychological Association for the treatment of trauma. What she had her clients and patients do was move their eyes from side to side while recounting some traumatic or troubling event. Why eye movements? Well, she never really said why eye movements,

but soon I'll tell you why the decision to select these lateralized eye movements for the work in the clinic was the right one. So these eye movements, they look silly, but they basically involve sitting in a chair and moving one's eyes from side to side for 30, 60 seconds, then describing this challenging procedure. Now, as a vision scientist who also worked

on stress. When I first heard this, I thought it was crazy, frankly. People would ask me about EMDR and I just thought, that's crazy. I went and looked up some of the theories about why EMDR might work. And there were a bunch of theories, oh, it mimics the eye movements during REM sleep.

That was one. Turns out that's not true and I'll explain why. The other one was, oh, it synchronizes the activity on the two sides of the brain. Well, sort of. I mean, when you look in, to both sides of the binocular visual field, you activate the visual cortex,

but this whole idea of synchrony between the two sides of the brain is something that I think modern neuroscience is starting to, let's just say, gently or not so gently move away from this whole right brain left brain business. It turns out, however, that I move into the sort that I just did and that Francine Shapiro

took from this walk experience and brought to her clients in the clinic, are the sorts of eye movements that you generate whenever you're moving through space when you are self generating that movement. So not so much when you're driving a car, but certainly if you were riding a bicycle or you were walking or you were running,

you don't realize it, but you have these reflexive subconscious eye movements that go from side to side. And they are associated with the motor system. So when you move forward, your eyes go like this. There have been a number of studies showing that these lateralized eye movements helped people move through or,

dissociate the emotional experience of particular traumas with those experiences such that they could recall those experiences after the treatment and not feel stressed about them or they didn't report them as traumatic any longer. Now, the success rate wasn't 100%, but they were statistically significant in a number of studies. In the last five years, there have been no fewer

than five journals and papers showing that lateralized eye movements of the sort that I just did, and if you're just listening to this, is just sweeping the eyes from side to side with eyes open, that those eye movements, but not vertical eye movements, suppress the activity of the amygdala, which is this brain region that is involved

in threat detection, stress, anxiety, and fear. There are some forms of fear that are not amygdala dependent, but the amygdala, it's not a fear center, but it is critical for the fear response and for the experience of anxiety. So that's interesting. We've got a clinical, tool now that indeed shows a lot of success in a good number of people where eye movements

from side to side are suppressing the amygdala and the general theme is to use those eye movements to suppress the fear response and then to recount or repeat the experience and over time uncouple the heavy emotional load, the sadness, the depression, the anxiety, the fear from whatever it was that happened that was traumatic. This is important to understand because, because you know, I'd love to be able to tell somebody who had a traumatic experience that they would forget that experience. But the truth is you never forget the traumatic experience. What you do is you remove the emotional load.

Eventually it really does lose its potency. The emotional potency is alleviated. Now EMDR, I should just mention, tends to be most successful for single event or very specific kinds of trauma that happened over and over, as opposed to say an entire childhood, or an entire divorce. They tend to be, it tends to be most effective

for single event kinds of things, car crashes, et cetera, where people can really recall the events in quite a lot of detail. It's not for everybody and it should be done, if it's going to be done for trauma, it should be done in a clinical setting with somebody who's certified to do this. But that bears a lot of resemblance to REM sleep, right?

This experience in our sleep where our eyes are moving, excuse me, although in a different way, but we don't have, have the chemical epinephrine in order to generate the fear response and yet we're remembering the event from the previous day or days. And then now there's this chemical treatment with the drug ketamine, which also bears a lot of resemblance

to the sorts of things that happen in REM sleep. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic. It is remarkably similar to the drug called PCP, which is certainly a hazardous, drug for people to use. Ketamine and PCP both function to disrupt the activity of a particular receptor in the brain called the NMDA receptor, N-Methyl D-A-Sparate receptor.

This is a receptor that's in the surface of neurons or on the surface of neurons for which most of the time it's not active. But when something very extreme happens and there's a lot of activity in the neural pathway, impinges on that receptor, it opens and it allows the entry of molecules, ions, that trigger a cellular process that we call long-term potentiation. And long-term potentiation translates to a change in connectivity so that later you don't need

that intense event for the neuron to become active again. Ketamine blocks this NMDA receptor. So how is ketamine being used? is being used to prevent learning of emotions very soon after trauma. Ketamine is being stocked in a number of different emergency rooms where if people are brought in quickly and these are hard to describe even,

but you know, a horrible experience of, you know, somebody seeing a loved one next to them killed in a car accident and they were driving that car. This isn't for everybody, certainly, and you need to talk to your physician, but ketamine is being used so they might infuse somebody with ketamine so that their emotion is,

it can still occur, but that the plasticity, the change in the wiring of their brain won't allow that intense emotion to be attached to the experience. Now immediately you can imagine the sort of ethical implications of this, right? Because certain emotions need to be coupled to experiences. But in the clinical setting,

the basis of ketamine-assisted therapies are really to remove emotion. Ketamine is about becoming dissociative or removed from the emotional component of the experience. So now we have ketamine, which chemically blocks plasticity and prevents the connection between an emotion and an experience. That's a pharmacologic intervention.

We have EMDR, which is this eye movement thing that is designed to suppress the amygdala and is designed to remove emotionality while somebody recounts an experience. And we have REM sleep where the chemical epinephrine that allows for signaling of intense emotion and the experience of intense emotion the brain and body is not allowed.

And so we're starting to see a organizational logic, which is that a certain component of our sleeping life is acting like therapy. And that's really what REM sleep is about. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Now, I've spoken before on this podcast

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Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman. We should really think about REM sleep and slow wave sleep as both critical slow wave sleep for motor learning and detailed learning, REM sleep for attaching of emotions to particular experiences and then for making sure that the emotions are not attached to the wrong experiences and for unlearning emotional responses if they're too intense or severe. And this all speaks to the great importance of mastering one's sleep, something that we talked about in episode two of the podcast and making sure that if life has disruptive events either due to travel or stress or changes in school or or food schedule, something that we talked about

in episodes three and four, that one can still grab a hold and manage one's sleep life. Because fundamentally, the unlearning of emotions that are troubling to us is what allows us to move forward in life. And indeed, the REM deprivation studies show that people become hyper-emotional.

They start to catastrophize. And it's no surprise, therefore, that sleep disturbances correlate with so many emotional, and psychological disturbances. By now it should just be obvious why that would be the case. I was in a discussion with a colleague of mine who's down in Australia, Dr. Sarah McKay,

I've known her for two decades now from the time she was at Oxford. And Sarah studies among other things menopause in the brain. And she was saying that a lot of the emotional effects of menopause actually are not directly related to the hormones. There have been some really nice studies showing that the disruptions in temperature regulation

and menopause map to changes in sleep regulation that then impact emotionality and inability to correctly adjust the circuits related to emotionality. So sleep deprivation isn't just deprivation of energy. It's not just deprivation of immune function. It is deprivation of self-induced therapy every time we go to sleep.

So these things like EMD, PR and ketamine therapies are in clinic therapies, but REM sleep is the one that you're giving yourself every night when you go to sleep, which raises, I think the other important question, which is how to get and how to know if you're getting the appropriate amount of REM sleep and slow wave sleep.

Turns out that for sake of learning new information, limiting the variation in the amount of your sleep, is at least as important and perhaps more important than just getting more sleep overall. I find great relief personally in the fact that consistently getting for me about six hours or six and a half hours is going to be more beneficial than constantly striving for eight or nine

and finding that some nights I'm getting five and sometimes I'm getting nine and varying around the mean. Now ideally you're getting the full complement of slow wave sleep early in night and sleep toward morning, which is REM sleep, which brings us to how to get more REM sleep. Well, there are a couple different ways,

but here's how to, not get more REM sleep. All right? First of all, drink a lot of fluid right before going to sleep. One of the reasons why we wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom is because when our bladder is full,

there is a neural connection, literally a set of neurons and a nerve circuit that goes to the brainstem that wakes us up. So having a full bladder is one way to disrupt your sleep. The other one is a tryptophan or anything that contains 5HTP, which is serotonin or a precursor de serotonin, serotonin is made from tryptophan.

For some people those supplements might work, but beware serotonin supplements could disrupt the timing of REM sleep and slow wave sleep. Now, if you want to increase your slow wave sleep, that's interesting. There are ways to do that. One of the most powerful ways to increase slow wave sleep, the percentage of slow wave sleep,

apparently without any disruption to the other components of sleep and learning, is to engage, in resistance exercise. It's pretty clear that resistance exercise triggers a number of metabolic and endocrine pathways that lend themselves to release of growth hormone, which happens early in the night.

And resistance exercise therefore can induce a greater percentage of slow wave sleep. It doesn't have to be done very close to going to bedtime. In fact, for some people that the exercise could be disruptive for reasons I've talked about in previous episodes. But resistance exercise, unlike aerobic exercise, does seem to increase.

the amount of slow wave sleep, which as we know is involved in motor learning and the acquisition of fine detailed information, not general rules or the emotional components of experiences. Alcohol. Alcohol and marijuana are well known to induce states that are pseudo sleep-like, especially when people fall asleep while after having consumed alcohol or THC,

the active component, one of the active components in marijuana. Alcohol, THC, THC, and most things like them, meaning things that increase serotonin or GABA, are going to disrupt the pattern of sleep. They're going to disrupt the depth, they're going to disrupt the overall sequencing of more slow wave sleep early in the night

and more REM sleep later in the night. That's just the reality. Now of course, if that's what you need in order to sleep and that's within your protocols, as I've said here before, I'm not suggesting people taking anything. I'm not a medical doctor, I'm not a cop, so I'm not trying to regulate anyone's behavior, I'm just telling you what the literature says.

Today we've been in a deep dive of sleep and dreaming, learning and unlearning. And I just want to recap a few of the highlights and important points. A lot more slow wave sleep and less REM early in the night. More REM and less slow wave sleep later in the night. REM sleep is associated with intense experiences without this chemical epinephrine

that allows us the anxiety or anxiety, or fear and almost certainly has an important role in uncoupling of emotion from experiences, kind of self-induced therapy that we go into each night. That bears striking resemblance to things like EMDR and ketamine therapies and so forth. Slow wave sleep is critical, however. It's critical mostly for motor learning

and the learning of specific details. So REM is kind of emotions and general themes and meaning and slow wave sleep, motor learning and details. I personally find it fascinating that consistency of sleep, meaning getting six hours every night is better than getting 10, one night, eight the next, five the next, four the next.

I find that fascinating and I think I also like it because it's something I can control better than just trying to sleep more, which I think I'm not alone and agreeing that that's just hard for a lot of people to do. Thank you for joining me in this journey of the nervous system in biology and trying to understand

the mechanisms that make us who we are and how we function in sleep and in wakefulness. It's really an incredible landscape to consider and I hope that you're getting a lot out of the information. As always, thank you for your interest in science.