The Bossticks - Matthew Walker, PhD. - How To Master Sleep, Cure Chronic Sleep Issues, & Make Every Area Of Your Life Better

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

#744: On today's episode we are sitting down with Matthew Walker, PhD. He is a Professor of Neuroscience & Psychology at UC Berkeley, including the Founder & Director of their Center for Human Sleep Science. In this episode we will discuss the importance of sleep, its impacts on our health and wellbeing, and most importantly, how to get better sleep! From beauty sleep, to exploring the connections between sleep problems and disease, to the impact of sleep on the brain and body. We're sitting down to learn how to get the best night's sleep to level up your health & wellbeing.   To connect with Matthew Walker click HERE   To connect with Lauryn Bosstick click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE To Watch the Show click HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential Head to the HIM & HER Show ShopMy page HERE to find all of Michael and Lauryn's favorite products mentioned on their latest episodes. This episode is sponsored by Fatty15   Fatty15 is on a mission to replenish your C15 levels and restore your long-term health. You can get an additional 15% off their 90-day subscription Starter Kit by going to fatty15.com/SKINNY and using code SKINNY at checkout.   This episode is sponsored by Vegamour   Learn more at Vegamour.com/SKINNY, code SKINNY to save 20% on your first order.    This episode is sponsored by Equip Foods   Do your body a favor like we did and check out Equip Foods' grass-fed beefPrime Protein by heading Equipfoods.com/SKINNY. Use code SKINNY at checkout to get 20% off your first order OR you can stack it with a subscription for 35% off your first month - that's a huge amount of savings youdon't want to miss!   This episode is sponsored by Smartwater   Life's full of choices. Smartwater is a simple one. Visit drinksmartwater.com to learn more.   This episode is sponsored by Cotton   Cotton is The Fabric of Now. Learn more at TheFabricOfOurLives.com.   This episode is sponsored by Clarins   Go to Clarins.com/SKINNY and get Double Serum for 10%, a free 8-piece welcome gift, plus free shipping on your first order.   Produced by Dear Media

The following podcast is a dear media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her.

If that 10 hours of sleep is, for the most part, beautifully consistent, sleep, meaning it's not fragmented. with lots of awakenings at night, then I would say that is perfectly healthy sleep. The only time we don't like to hear a report of, I'm in bed for 10 hours every single night, that can indicate that your quality is so poor that maybe you're getting just six and a half hours of sleep, but it takes you 10 hours in bed because you're awake, you're asleep, you're awake, you're asleep, so you have to compensate. And that's the worst thing. But if you're sleeping for 10 hours and it's good quality of sleep, that is your natural sleep need.

Embrace it. Celebrate it. Do not be sheepish about it. Sleep has an image problem in society. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the skinny confidential, him and her show. Today we have a long awaited episode, one that both Lauren and I were extremely excited to get on the books and do. One that we've been trying to get on the books for a long time.

And that is with Matthew Walker. Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Brewer. and founder and director of the school's Center for Human Sleep Science. Professor Walker is the author of the New York Times International Bestseller Why We Sleep, Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. His TED Talk, Sleep is Your Superpower, has garnered over 20 million views to date. His research examines the impact of sleep on human health and disease. He is also the host of the celebrated Matt Walker podcast

and the founder and director of the Global Sleep Education Foundation. This episode is all about sleep. If you're an individual that wants to get better sleep, If you're someone who wants to feel better, get stronger, basically improve every single area of your life. If you're someone that's been suffering from insomnia or anxiety or you're having trouble with fat loss or metabolic health, this episode is one of those that literally applies to every single person on the planet. Sleep is the foundation of health, performance, and so many other things. And this episode unlocks all of the different ways you can sleep better, have more impact while sleeping,

and just feel better throughout your life. I'm confident if you unlock the power of sleep, every single thing in your life will improve. who better to do this episode with than the sleepmaster himself. Matthew Walker, welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her show. This is the skinny confidential, him and her. Matthew Walker, it is rare that I am insecure in front of another man's hair. You might have the best hair I've ever seen in the studio. I don't know what to do now. Well, apparently no one told me that the pandemic was over and you could actually get your hair cut. So I think that's my claim that it's not a midlife crisis. Really?

probably is. It looks good. Don't trust anyone with this longer her in terms of a male, perhaps. But anyway, it can tell you've been getting your sleep. It is where it's at. Yeah, I'll take it. You know what? Just it's all about fun. This is the perfect intro to my question. Which, you couldn't have set that up better for me. Is there a such thing as beauty sleep? Is that real? Great question. And I think everyone kind of has that sense. Your partner can come through into the morning.

I've got to be really careful when you say this, by the way, but you say, did you not sleep well? You look a little tired. Long in the two. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a very diplomatic, it's a much more diplomatic way of saying it. And what that tells us is that we have a sense that insufficient sleep leads us to be less than optimal in appearance. But what's the data? Because you've got me here as a scientist.

There was a great study from a group in Sweden. and they took some perfectly healthy young individuals, and they did a photo shoot with them, and they repeated that photo shoot twice. So essentially a portrait, and it's a headshot, and you do it twice. What was different? What was different was that in one of those conditions, they'd had a good night of sleep before, and the other, they'd been sleep deprived. So that was part one of the experiment. So now you've got all of these headshots of these individuals, and there's two headshots for each individual. They then take another group of participants and they're going to be the beauty judges in this situation. And they're going to be shown each of these images in random order.

And they simply have to rate how tired, how healthy or unhealthy and how attractive did these people look in the picture. But they knew nothing about the rest of the experiment. They didn't know that in one shot they'd been sleep deprived. They had no knowledge of that. Reliably, statistically, the images of those individuals when they were sleep deprived were rated as looking more sickly, as looking more unhealthy, and looking significantly less attractive. So it was the first definitive scientific proof that there is such a thing called beauty sleep. When you dial it up, you look at your best form of your physical appearance self, and you dial it, pilot down goes the other way.

I did an experiment on myself. These are always dangerous, on me? Where I just looked what I looked like in high school when my parents would wake me up at 6.30 in the morning. And I remember being in high school, being like, oh, my God, waking up at 630 is like putting makeup on a pig. It's like I needed that extra for me at the time. It was probably two hours because I was in high school.

I'd say I'd like to have slept till 830. Now it's about 7.30. but I remember putting makeup on and being sleep deprived and being like, this is not cute. Your skin is dry. You're tired. Your eyes are red. So agreed with you that there is such thing.

Yeah, you're also catching us. We got out, I can't believe I'm doing this with you today. We got off a plane last night at 1.30 to get home. Okay. For people that don't, I'm sure many do.

And we've, like I said, we've wanted you on this podcast for a long time now. So thank you for being here. For people that don't have a lot of, context of you. How do you, what's the boilerplate explanation at this point? Author, scientist, like, I'll let you take it away for a second. Yeah, so I'm a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. I'm also an author of a book called Why We Sleep,

done a few TED Talks, and really the place that if people want to come find me and explore sleep would be my podcast. And it is creatively called, it took so long to come up with the title. It's called The Matt Walker Podcast. Yeah, exactly. I've been researching sleep for, gosh, almost 20 years now, and I fell in love with it as a topic. I have remained beguiled by this subject called sleep. It is a lover for that's lasted me decades. And I think, although I'm biased, it is the most fascinating topic in all of science. And what was the initial kind of spark that got you so interested in this topic? And, in, in, made you dedicate your life to it. It's a good question because most of us, us being sleep scientists, were accidental sleep researchers. No one, when you're five years old going around the classroom and they say, what would you like to be when you grow up? God, I would love to be a sleep scientist.

No one's doing that. And I was studying for my PhD, people with dementia and looking at their brainwave activity, seeing if I could diagnose what type of dementia that they had very early on. failing miserably. And at weekends, I used to go home with all of my journals and I'd sit in this little igloo of journals in the doctor's residence, which by the way, probably tells you everything about my social life, if that's what I'm doing at the weekend. And I discovered that in some of these dementias, they would eat away at sleep centers. And in other types of dementia, they wouldn't touch those sleep centers. So I thought, well, I'm measuring my patient's brainwave activity at the wrong time when they're awake during the day. Started measuring sleep at night.

found dramatic differences. And at that point, I thought, I wonder if their sleep problems are not a symptom of the dementia. I wonder if it's an underlying cause of the dementia. Then I started to read everything I could about sleep. 20 years ago, we didn't have a definitive answer as to why we sleep. The best that we had was we sleep to cure sleepiness. Which is like saying, we eat to cure hunger. No, that doesn't tell you anything about the nutritional and physiological benefits of food. Same with sleep. So at that point, I started to read everything I could, and I just was in rapture. That was it for me.

I just knew it. I just had to study sleep. At the time, as I said, no one could really quite tell you why we slept. So I thought, I'll go and figure that out in two years, and then I'll come back to this dementia question, not realizing that some of the most brilliant minds had tried to answer, why do we sleep? And I thought with not hubris, but just naivety that I would figure it out in two years, that was 20 years ago. So could you give now just, is it even as simple as giving a sentence or two and why we sleep? Or is it a much more complex answer?

In some ways, yes, but also no, maybe two sentences. First, I would say that sleep is the single most effective thing that you can do to reset your brain and body health. The second sentence would be now going back to that question, why do we sleep? We've had to upend the question. We now have to ask, is there any major physiological system of your body, or is there any mental operation of your mind that isn't wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it or demonstrably impaired when you don't get enough? And the answer seems to be no.

There is not one thing in the body that doesn't like heal and reduce. from sleep. It's been very difficult to find anything that is impermeable or invulnerable to a lack of sleep. I'll give you an example. There was a study looking at even your DNA buried deep in your cells. And they took a group of, again, perfectly healthy individuals. And they limited them to six hours of sleep for one week. And then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to those same individual. getting a full eight hours of sleep. And there were two key findings. First, a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity caused by that six hours of sleep. Now, by the way, we know that many people you pass on the street are trying to survive during the week on six

hours of sleep or less. We won't come back to what time you got in on the flight last night. Don't worry, Matt. I don't sleep like that normal. Normally it's in bed at nine, up by seven. Love it. Okay. If that's the flag that you're hoisting, I will salute it five ways till Tuesday. But the second result was that about half of those genes were increased in their activity. The other half were decreased. Those genes that were upregulated were genes that were associated with stress, genes that were associated with the promotion of tumors and genes that were associated with long-term chronic inflammation. Whereas genes that were sort of switched off or turned down were genes associated with your immune system. So what that tells us is that in terms of to your question, there is no aspect of your wellness that can retreat at the sign of sleep deprivation and get away unscathed. You know, it's like a broken water pipe in your home. It will just leak down into every knuck and cranny of your physiology. If you could wave a wand for everyone who's listening and do one thing when it comes to their sleep. Yeah.

Getting in bed early, waking up later, whatever. know what it is. No light in the room. What is the one thing you wish you could wave your wand? Trying very hard not to say masturbation with the wand reference, but what, and we can come on to that, but maybe what I would say is, masturbation works. And we will definitely, let's definitely have a conversation. But I would say in all truth, regularity, go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time. And people, by the way, don't respond to rules. They respond to reasons, not rules. And the reason that regularity is king is because it will anchor your sleep and it will feed signals to the 24 hour clock in your brain. And when you anchor your sleep consistently, it will improve both the

quantity and the quality. And so we're so keen to race out to the natural food store and look at the latest and greatest supplements for sleep. If you do that, you're majoring in the minors and you're minoring in the majors, just focus on regularity and then get some darkness at night, last hour before bed, switch half the lights out in your home. You'd be stunned by how sleepy it makes you feel. Be mindful of alcohol and caffeine. Alcohol does you no favors.

It's often used as a sleeper aid. And then I would say, just try to think about your stress and try to manage that, not easy. But if you were to ask me for one tip, regularity. We, I want to know if this is approved. I sometimes sleep 10 hours a night. Is that too long? No, it's not too long.

With one slight caveat. What? I would want to at least look at some of your either sleep tracking data or have you come into the laboratory at the center that I run. I would love to. And let's just see. And we can even send a crew out to you. I'll just put some electrodes on your head.

We'll leave you to go to bed. It's an ambulatory system. You just take it to bed. It's fine. and then we'll come back in the morning and we'll look at your sleep. High fidelity, high grade. So someone comes, they put the little things on my head. Little electrodes with some wires.

They put into a little... I'm not sleeping with another guy, don't worry. And you're not in a strange center somewhere in Northern California. Yeah, because your sleep, my sleep would be effective if I was in a strange center. Correct. So what I want is Lauren's naturalistic sleep. Got it. Give that to me.

Okay. And so then what I would say is if that 10 hours of sleep is, for the most part, beautifully consistent sleep, meaning it's not fragmented with lots of awakenings at night, then I would say that is perfectly healthy sleep. The only time we don't like to hear a report of, I'm in bed for 10 hours every single night, that can indicate that your quality is so poor that maybe you're getting just six and a half hours of sleep, but it takes you 10 hours in bed because you're awake, you're asleep, you're awake, you're asleep, so you have to compensate.

And that's the worst thing. In fact, what we do is we then constrain your bedtime and we limit you to about six hours of time in bed. And it brute forces the brain to think, my goodness, I can't be lazy anymore. I can't take 10 hours to get six and a half hours. Night after night, it starts to realize, I don't have this luxury.

And all of a sudden, it gets very efficient with your sleep. And you start sleeping continuously throughout the night and then gradually after we've retrained your system, we back it out. We start to give you more time in bed. We never go back to 10 hours. We try to limit you to maybe about 8 hours. What if I'm sleeping for 10 hours?

But if you're sleeping for 10 hours and it's good quality of sleep, that is your natural sleep need. Embrace it, celebrate it. Do not be sheepish about it. Sleep has an image problem in society. I think it's so cool. I don't care what anyone says. I want to be like an athlete with my business.

and I have to sleep. And if I don't sleep, I'm not effective. I don't care if people judge 10 hours. I feel the best with 9 to 10 hours of sleep. Well, I think, you know, round of applause. When Lauren and I lived in L.A., we were guilty at times of being the people

that kind of look down on sleep. And I think there was a period of culturedally, where I was like, go, go, go, go. When we moved out here, I mean, like, the place we lived in was crazy loud, lights everywhere, big TV in the room, like stimulation all over. Now our house has no TV.

Lights are off, dark, red. at, you know, like, 9 p.m. Wow, really? You know, it's a, well, and also, though, we have the benefit of speaking to people like yourself and Tia and Huberman and all these, all these amazing people that have come on the show and taught us about this.

This is like a four-year thing that we've like really cleaned up our sleep hygiene. But to start, and I think this is important for people here in the beginning, outside of maybe not looking as well, what are some of the things that you've noticed in your research, some of the most common things for sleep-deprived people, People that say, hey, I only need six hours of sleep or four or eight, whatever it is. And they're asleep, what are the most common issues that you see long term manifesting? Yeah, so a lot of people will say, firstly, I can do just fine on five hours of sleep.

I'm great. The problem there is twofold. You are, your subjective sense of how well you're doing on insufficient sleep is unfortunately a miserable predictor of objectively how well you're doing on insufficient sleep. So it would be a little bit like a drunk driver at a bar. You know, they've had six beers, they've had three or four shots. They pick up their car keys and they say, honestly, I'm fine to drive home. And your response is, I know that you think you're fine to drive.

Trust me, you're not. Let me just call you a taxi. Be fine. That's the same problem with a lack of sleep, unfortunately. I think the other issue with that mentality is the question of why. Why is it that you feel as though you need to stay awake for as long as you do? not give yourself the chance to sleep. And people often then say, well, look, I'm just so busy. I've got so much to do. Part of that is the braggadocio that if you're not busy or if you're

taking that amount of time sort of to work so long, then you must be important because we peg busyness with importance. And no one wants to suggest that they're not important. I get it. But when you are working with insufficient sleep, when we've done to study after study on this, And it comes on to your point, Lauren, your efficiency during the day is that much worse. And I'm sure people, five hours of sleep, have been looking at that report, reading it and I think, this is the third time I've read that paragraph. And I still don't understand what's going on. Why would you boil a pot of water on medium heat when you could do it in half the time on high? That's a good night of sleep.

And so you'll start to notice some of those things. if someone would to say, how do I know that I'm getting sufficient sleep? If you didn't set your alarm, would you sleep past that alarm time? And if the answer is yes, then you're probably not getting the sleep that you need. I don't believe in alarms.

I believe that this is my theory. I think something waking me up brazes my cortisol in the morning to a place where I feel stressed the second I opened my eyes. So I don't turn on an alarm. I just wake up when I want to wake up. Yeah, but Lauren, it is worth mentioning that some people, like, you get to set your own schedule.

Some people don't. Of course. I'm not saying I'm other people. I'm not saying anyone's like me. I'm just saying, I, for me, don't like to set an alarm. And what that's done is it's trained my body to wake up between 7 and 7.30. And then I'll go straight out to sunlight. Yeah.

And that feels really nice. I know this is weird on my hormones. Am I crazy? No, you're not. And I would also say that, you're right, Michael. that if not all of us have that luxury and understanding that, nevertheless, I would say, the fear that people have, even if they had that flexibility, is that they would then wake up at 11 o'clock in the morning. Now, for the first day or so, that may be true. Why? Because you've carried

such a sleep debt into finally allowing your body the sleep that it needs. No wonder it oversleaps, quote, unquote, and tries to get back some of that debt. But after about three or four days, you start to acquiesce and just find this beautiful sweet spot. And lo and behold, you will reliably start to wake up, you know, within plus or minus 10 minutes, which is what you were describing. So I think it's a fascinating. There is no other species that we know of that will artificially terminate sleep without being done. You know, it's, we are the only species that will deliberately deprive ourselves of sleep for no apparent evolutionary significant reason. Do you think that it's productive that my husband tries to wake up to the succession theme soundtrack in the morning. I heard

it go off the other day and I was like, I'm literally going to apply for divorce. That is my is so opposite. No, but I actually, as you were talking, this is like, by the way, I can't have to say that's kind of genius. It's my favorite. And I may even just try it for myself just a little bit. It's just wake up naturally. It's my favorite. Listen, it used to be the narcos soundtrack. I do want to say, though, that you maybe have a little bit of people. PTSD around sleep because of the way your family, his dad used to walk into his room at like 5.30 in the morning and be like, get up. And I like to be woken up like a cat. Well, listen, I think a lot of our parents' generation and a lot of even like people are still learning. Like there, there was a period

of time where people like it was that hustle culture, go, go, go. There wasn't as much of an emphasis put on sleep. You know, it's so funny. I was thinking as you were talking last night, we had a job and we got in really late, which I told you. And we're pretty consistent about going to the gym. And I would have prioritized that in the past. Like, go get the workout. Yeah. But last night I knew, I was like, okay, I'm not getting to bed to 1.30, which is not,

that's like four or five hours later than I usually go to bed. And so this morning, I said, I'm not going to go to that workout. And I'm going to prioritize sleep. And I slept in today, which is very uncommon for me until like 9.30. Normally I'm up at like 637, naturally without an alarm. But I just knew I'm like, I can't go and do four podcasts and do all this stuff after going to bed at 1.30 and then waking up at 7.30. It's just, it's not enough sleep. And it's so smart because in part, when you are staying awake longer than you need to, your body starts to go into a

catabolic state rather than an anabolic state, meaning that if you don't get the sleep that you need, your body's going to start breaking down material. And it preferentially breaks down, unfortunately, muscle versus fat. There's a great study where they took individuals and they were dieting. And what they found is that individuals who were dieting but not getting sufficient sleep, 60% of all of the weight that they lost came from lean muscle mass and not fat. In other words, your body becomes stingy in giving up its fat when you are sleep deprived. And as a consequence, you lose what you want to keep, which is muscle, and you keep what you want to lose, which is fat. The other thing too is that if you're trying to exercise not just for muscle mass and muscle hypertrophy,

but you're also going for cardiovascular conditioning, but also trying to manage weight through calorie burning. If you go to the gym early, you're shortchanging on your sleep, your appetite regulating hormones go awry, and you will probably overeat for the rest of that day, and in excess of the calories that you burned by getting up early to go to the gym so it's counterproductive and your risk of injury far higher to so it was the smarter choice overall.

Yeah, and it's funny because like I said, a few years ago, I would have been like, I got to go to the gym to get the muscle, but to your point, I'd actually be doing myself a bigger disservice and losing more muscle by not getting the great sleep and then overeating throughout the day. Correct.

I think people don't, a lot of people just don't realize this. And so now after I've had these kind of conversation of read your book and learn more, I put sleep as the number one thing for pretty much number one thing for everything and recovery. And I would rather, if I had the choice, get eight hours asleep and miss a workout as opposed to doing a workout and not getting the sleep. Yeah. And, you know, I'm like you, I've been an exercise nut for all of my life. When I started to learn about sleep, it was so hard for me to change. It was so ingrained in me, this sort of mentality of rise

and grind, get your workout in. And gradually, the day, because I'm a scientist, I couldn't argue with it. And now I take exactly that same mentality approach that you do too. So coming back to your alarm point, though, by the way, there's a study done on alarm clock awakenings. And sure enough, what they found was that cortisol levels spiked when the alarm went off and also heart rate escalated. Now, you could argue I gave you the advice of regularity, go to bed at the same time, wake up. So let's just say that for life's sake and regularity sake, you do have to use an alarm clock in the morning. I would very much suggest resist the snooze button because what you're doing is two things. First, you're repeatedly

shocking your heart quite literally time and time again with the alarm. Not ideal. And you think, well, look, it's pretty benign. It's just my alarm clock. I do it maybe three times. But scale that day after day, month after month, year after year, that's like compounding interest on a bad loan. You probably don't wish that for your cardiovascular system. It's honestly, you just, if you're waking up, like you said, just over and over to that sound, it can't be good for you. You almost go into sleep, having anxiety that your alarm's going to wake you up. Do you like this strategy?

Because Lauren doesn't even know that this is my strategy. I try to wake up with regularity between 630 and 7 naturally every day, right? And we have this window that automatically at 7 a.m. It goes on and lets the sun in. Great. Yeah. That's what you like. But at 7.10, I do have an alarm that'll go off.

But I'm typically awake before that happens. It's mostly so that if I sleep past it, that I'm trying to wake up with the regularity. But normally I wake up and don't need it. He doesn't want you to spike your heart rate. But I also have it across the room. So if I do sleep past my regular wake time, I go and walk over it and then I'm awake. So this is actually kind of genius. What you're doing is you're doing a hybrid model.

Yes, it's a hybrid. Between sort of this, you know, true regularity of what Matt is saying versus sort of Lauren's just natural waking up. You're saying, I am going to set my alarm later than I typically naturally wake up just as a security measure. And in some ways, it is the inverse of what we were describing before, which is anticipatory anxiety. That if you know you always wake up with the alarm. alarm because it's past your natural wake-up time. That just means, okay, I always know it's going to go off. I'm never going to wake up naturally, and that's just a stressor, and that's what we call

anticipatory anxiety, not good for sleep. But your model, it's very clever. It says, well, I'm just going to set it later. There is my insurance policy. Rather than giving me anxiety, it reduces my anxiety, because I know that even if I don't naturally wake up, which normally I do, so excellent, I've still got an insurance policy and I'll be fine. Quick break to talk about one of our most favorite discoveries. As of recent, Lauren and I are no strangers to talking about great supplements, which is why I am so excited today to tell you about Fatty 15's C15 supplement. C15 is the first essential fatty acid to be discovered in 90 years and get this.

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And of course, we have a special offer. Faddy 15 is on a mission to replenish your C-15 levels and restore your long-term health. can get an additional 15% off their 90-day subscription starter kit by going to fatty15.com slash skinny and using code skinny at checkout again. That's fatty 15.com slash skinny and use code skinny. I am so serious about growing my hair. I've never been so serious about anything in my life. I eat my bowls and meat every single day. That's helped with amino acids. I micro needle my scalp. I do scalp massage. And I even take my scalp massage up to another level with a hair serum. The one that I use is by Vagamore.

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You can use code skinny to save 20% on your first order. V-E-G-A-M-O-U-R.com slash skinny, code skinny. One thing Michael and I love to do every single day with our kids is make a quick smoothie. and we'll usually do this when we get back from the gym. My son goes wild for it. He loves to make a smoothie, especially with his dad. And I kind of like multitask and kind of make Michael do it and manipulate him with the ingredients. But that's neither here nor there.

And what we use is grass-fed beef protein. Have you guys ever heard of this? I had never heard of it before I tried Equipped Foods Prime Protein. So essentially prime protein is made with grass-fed beef, but it tastes like dessert. As we've discussed many times on the show, beef is the supreme source of protein. It's my favorite protein. I love beef. It has a robust micronutrient profile that no other proteins have. And I've learned from the show that it's a complete protein. It contains all nine essential amino acids, which we love for hair and nails and skin. It's hard to consider going back to weigh or plant-based

protein after trying this specific protein for the first time. It's a game changer. So if you want a protein that's grass-fed beef, it's clean, it's no bloat. It has 20 plus grams of protein, which is equivalent I found to four ounces of beef. Do your body a favor like we did and check out Equipped Foods Grass-fed Beef Prime protein by heading to equipfoods.com slash skinny. You guys can also use Code Skinny at checkout. You get 20% off your first order, or you can stack it up with a subscription. So you get 35% off your first month. That's a huge amount of savings you don't want to miss. I tried the 5 a.m. club. I did all that thing. Get up and it's not for me. I couldn't. I mean, I did it because I, like, I had the discipline and I would wake up and it would spike my cortisol and I'd get up and do all the stuff and stare into the big light before the sun came. And I realize I'm like, I'm just not somebody that functions naturally well artificially reducing my sleep time and waking up at that time. I know a lot of people argue for that early, but what I realize, like, I'm much more effective if I go to bed around 10 and wake up around 6 or 7 and then charge through the day. And I, I, I'm better as a husband.

I'm better as a business person. I'm better in a million ways. So I was like, I'm not going to force myself to get up at 5 a.m. Because of a. What did you think about the 5 a.m. sleep club? I say that for a subset of the population, it's perfect. For a larger majority of the population, biologically non-optimal. And it's because we all have something called a chronotype.

Are you a morning type, evening type, or some reason. in between. The unfortunate thing is you don't get to decide. It's genetically determined. It's gifted to you at birth. You don't have a choice. And it's very difficult for an evening type or a neutral to become a morning type. And when you fight your biology, you normally lose. And the way you know you've lost is disease and sickness. So the evidence is very clear. If you are a neutral, like me, sort of, I'm a sort of an 11 to 7 kind of guy, and you guys are not too far off, the neutral sort of territory. I don't like when he talks to me before 11. But right, exactly. Yeah, easy there. But so I would, when you are trying to sleep in a misaligned way with your natural biological tendency,

your chronotype, then you don't sleep as well because you're sleeping, you're trying to go to bed too early because you have to wake up at five. So the first half of the night, your sleep actually not as good as it could be, if only you'd gone to bed at 10 p.m. And then on the back end, you miss out on some of the good sleep cycles that would have happened later into the morning. So you're shortchanging on both ends of the spectrum. So I would say for the extreme morning types, 5 a.m. is probably great. They wake up naturally energize a bunny. They are just bright. Now, if you ask me to wake up at 5 a.m., I'd be saying, you know, darling, I'm so sorry. I'm not the best version of myself. I didn't mean that. And I know I just left the dishes in the cell. Oh, my goodness.

You know, that is just a disaster. Yes, thumbs up for those chronotypes for which it works. Thumbs down, rejected. Embrace your chronotype for those who don't. How do you know your chronotype? You can do a genetic test, but you can do a much cheaper version, much more quickly. And if people listening, just type into Google, M.E.Q, which stands for the morningness, eveningness questionnaire test, so M-E-Q test, and I'm sure we can put it in the show notes. Yep. You, it asks you a collection of questions. It takes about three minutes, and then it will give you a score, and it will categorize you. And in fact, in sleep science, we typically spread it out

into five categories. Extreme morning type, morning type, neutral, evening type, and extreme evening type. And you'll figure out which one. And what's nice about the questionnaire is that it actually gets very close to the genetic precision that you would have to do with the test. So that's an easy way to know it. In truth, you could answer the following question. You're on a desert island, nothing to wake up for, no one else around, no responsibilities. What time do you think your body would naturally like to go to bed and wake up? And the reason I emphasize body is because if I just ask you, what time do you think you would like to go to?

We're already so biased by society. And whatever your answer is there, dislocated from modernity, you're probably. probably going to get close to this questionnaire, but it's this 5 a.m. club, sure enough, the early bird may catch the worm, but I would say that the second mouse gets the cheese. I don't know that the early bird catches the worm. I don't know. I feel like... Well, I think the worm gets kind of screwed in that process, too. You know what? I heard a study, and I would love if you could confirm or deny this, that men wake up with a surge of testosterone and women wake up with a lot less testosterone.

testosterone, which is why sometimes in the morning we're misaligned because we'll be driving and he'll want to have a conversation about where he wants to retire. And I'm like, wait, I never, that's not true. Whatever. Like, I'm like, I'm like, I got to like have some coffee and work out before I have this conversation about mathematics. It might not be going to call on sleep, Lauren. You might need to wake up. No, I just need like a beat. Yeah. Is that true, the testosterone situation? Well, both males and females release their peak levels of testosterone. during a stage of sleep called rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep. And most of your REM sleep comes in the last couple of hours of the morning.

So that is a time when you will be more testosterone flush, as it were. And of course, testosterone is critical for men and women. It's just that men have a log order magnitude, more testosterone. What's probably happening there is, firstly, cortisol is the main thing that we experience to wake us up in the morning. And some people, and it doesn't really indicate anything about your sleep being problematic, some people have what's called sleep inertia. Where when they wake up, and I have this too, like you learn,

I'm a little bit like a classic car engine. I just need about half an hour before my engine oil is up to operating temperature. And we've seen it. So we've done brain scans where we do basically a time lapse photography. We wake you up, do a brain scan after five minutes, then after 15 minutes, then after 30 minutes, then after an hour. And there's a critical part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex that sits right above your eyes. And it's the part that makes us most human. It helps us with rational thought and decision making. It also helps us with emotion regulation.

And that part is the slowest part to rise to optimal temperature. And that's why in part, people in the first half an hour of the day, they just think, there's no way I can face looking at the report right now. Just put on a podcast. I'll just listen to some music when I'm driving. I can't think about anything right now. Other people don't have as much sleep inertia. And they all, they wake up naturally. And it could be that you're both waking up at the right time in accordance with your chronotype. It's just that one suffers a little bit more sleep inertia than the other. And the other is, really, they are locked and loaded. They are ready to go. They have precision, clarity of thought. They are 1080 DPI. Whereas I am kind of like 240 DPI in terms of

my brain resolution at that point. So, yeah. You just described my entire relationship since I was 21 years old that no one's been able to eloquently describe. He wakes up and it's like, it's like, I've said it. I mean, I've never seen anything like it. I'm like, I need to go outside. I need to meditate.

I need to listen to chimes. I might need to listen to Louise. Hey, I might need to cold plunge. I need to have some coffee. I need to work out. I don't even want to look at my phone. I don't want to see a text. Well, it's why I'm very like, I need to listen.

some space. I understand the, like we, you know, as you can imagine on this show, we have a lot of characters that come on and talk about these really extensive morning routines, which are great if that works for them. But for me, I don't. And they're like, they, I've kind of gotten beat up over the years. Like, why don't you have this extensive routine? And I'm like, why just feel like, I like, well, I have a routine, but it's not, I don't

have to like prime through the whole thing to get. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm ready to, I'm kind of, like. I want to do Tai Chi. My morning routine is rather simple. It's like, I get up. I have a ton of water and hydrate and get some minerals. And then about 90 minutes in, I'll have a.

one coffee only, that's it. And then that's it. That's it. That's fantastic. You know that it works for you because you've had enough beta testing essentially of all of the versions of it. And you just know that works for you. You know, Florin, you just know that I've just got this window of time, which is basically, you know, tread carefully. And this could be a break glass in case of emergency situation. I can't tell right now. I'm just still kind of sleepy. I told him, even if he's murdered, he's going to have to call a friend. Like, I don't know. He's going to have to call.

Like, it's not me. If you could, okay, if you, in this modern age we all live in, what would you say are the, I don't know, like maybe pick five to 10 most common sleep inhibitors that you see in your work or that you see in people that write into you? The things that if you could just say, hey, eliminate these things and you're going to go, you know, you're going to improve drastically. Yeah, I would probably bucket them into. internal versus external. Internal, hands down, probably the thing that is keeping society awake most

right now is this thing called anxiety, that we see these people come into the sleep center all the time and they say, I am tired. I am just so, so tired, but I'm so wired that I can't fall asleep. It's the tired but wide phenomena. And it's in the modern era, we have this rolladex of anxiety, we're constantly on reception. Very rarely do we do reflection. And the only time we typically do reflection now is when our head hits the pillow. And that is the last time that you want to do reflection. Because at that point, rolladex of anxiety, you start to ruminate. When you ruminate, you catastrophes. And when you catastrophes, you're dead in the water for the next two hours because everything feels worse in the dark of night than it does in the light of day. So internal,

the first issue is anxiety. Second internal, physical pain. It's the thing that we see most common. So try to think about managing your physical pain if it's disrupting your sleep. Then the externalities, these are manyfold. We can speak about alcohol, caffeine, THC, CBD. We can speak about the pollution of light that we're getting too much junk light at night. And from phones, we can also speak about the misnomer that blue light is the principal disrupting force from our screens. It's actually not. It's been disproven. There was some great data. Now, it does contribute. Blue light at night from your screens will block your melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone that will rise at night and it signals to your brain in your body. It's time to sleep. And those devices with the blue light will stamp

the brakes on melatonin. But that's not really what's disrupting sleep. It's that these devices that we all use in the last hour before bed, sometimes in the last five minutes before sleep, they are attention capture devices. They are designed to activate you and engage you. And you need to be disengaging and deactivating to fall asleep at night. That's the principal reason.

But I would say there are just the exogenous substances, you know, alcohol, caffeine. We can think about supplements that you think work that don't. Melatonin is a great demonstration. Melatonin, I think there is a subset of individuals for whom melatonin does work. But if you look at what's called metra-analyses, which is where they gather all of the individual scientific studies, put them in a big statistical bucket and say, what's the general effect? Melatonin only improves the speed with which you fall asleep by about 3.9 minutes, not much more

than placebo, and it only improves the efficiency of your sleep by about 2.2%. Not great. And the other issue with melatonin here in the United States is not regulated by the FDA. So there was a study where they looked at lots of different vendors of melatonin. Based on what it said on the bottle versus what was actually in the pill that you were swallowing, it ranged from 78% less than what was stated on the bottle to 480% more than what was stated on the bottle. And you've got to be a bit careful with melatonin. Largely, it's an inert substance. But more and more now, you go down the shopping aisle and there is this big section of the supplements that is purple. That's the melatonin. And you see pediatric melatonin. Now, melatonin is a bio of active hormone. Melatonin is also involved

not just in sleep-wake regulation, but also during development, particularly in gonadal development in males. And they've done some studies in rats where they were giving higher doses of melatonin, and it caused testicular atrophy and testicular reduction in development. So imagine if I were to come to the school system of your children and speaking to the parents and the teachers and say, tonight, I would like you to start dosing your children with a dose that is far higher than their bodies would release. It's called a super physiological dose. It's a bioactive hormone, and it is a hormone that will potentially stunt their sexual development. And I would like you to administer it every single night. Who's on board with me? Now, that's hyperbolic, of course. I'm just trying to make the

point, but it may not be too far off the truth when we think about that. There was a recent CDC report. They demonstrated that admissions for melatonin overdose in the emergency rooms for poisonous melatonin overdose have increased 503% in the last 10 years. But here's what I'm noticing across the board in every single different arena. We just had someone come on the podcast that said that we don't need our wisdom, teeth removed, and we don't need braces. Yeah.

But we've been told and ingrained that we do. and she explained why. Then we had someone else who came on that said, you don't need a root canal ever. And here's why. And he explained, and that's his specialty. What I'm noticing is that we almost have this like Stockholm syndrome

of being manipulated by the media with these certain words. Melatonin is a great one where we think we need it because we've been fed it down our throats for so long. You know how many melatonin supplements exist now? We just think you need braces. We just think you need wisdom teeth out. We just, it's almost like it becomes.

ingrained in society that we, oh, we need melatonin to sleep. Great. It becomes a societal norm. And we, of course, why would we ever put thought into it? Because it's here. It seems to be in the all natural aisle of the supermarket. You know, Stephen and Jane's parents said that they've been giving it to the child and it's been working great. And so it seems natural. It seems societally appropriate. And I've just seen so, you know, I go on to Amazon. I look for sleep supplements. It's, there's, there's, melatonin everywhere. Why would you question it? So when someone comes to you or they're writing into you for advice or they're coming to your facility and they haven't been sleeping well,

what are like the Matthew Walker prescriptions? What are the things that you say, okay, this is where we're going to start and, you know, if that works great and if it doesn't, is we're going to move on to. Like where can people jump into it? Because I think to your point, and what we're talking about here is people just dive into the supplement aisle and they say, I need this thing and then they're on a whole different path. Like what are the, the things that you prescribe. First thing we want to do is scream for sleep disorders. Do you have insomnia?

Do you have sleep apnea, significant snoring? Do you have something called restless leg syndrome where your legs just feel really uncomfortable and you just have to keep moving them? First thing, so we do a clinical screening, we make sure you don't have a sleep disorder. Next level down, if you're still coming to me to say, look, I struggle to either fall asleep

or I struggle to stay asleep. Falling asleep, sleep, onset issues, not being able to stay asleep, sleep maintenance issues, those are different. Then we'll start to do inventory and say, okay, let's look at your alcohol, let's look at your caffeine, let's look at your stress levels. Are you using any substances? Are you, you know, taking in THC, CBD? What's your regiment? Are you doing physical activity? What's your degree of, for example, bedroom temperature your regulation. Is your bedroom regulated? What do you set? Is that going? So 69 is probably, it's right there on the cusp of a little bit too high. I like 67. I like 67. And yeah. So I would say

67 is, if I could, to be honest. Yeah, exactly. And in truth, men do firmly run hotter than women. So there is a reason for that. That's why, you know, I do quite like some of these more smarter mattresses that are on. I do. And I, the reason I didn't say that. I, I do. And I, I, I, I, the reason I didn't say that, is because I've been using it for a couple of years, really like the product, think it's fantastic. And recently, myself, Andrew Huberman and Peter Atier, we all joined the scientific advisory board. So I have to make that as a company. So they're a partner of the show, so we can say it. Okay.

Yeah. So take what I say with a grain of salt knowing that. But I think it's a fantastic product because what it tries to do, you need to drop your core brain and body temperature by 1 degree Celsius or about 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit to 4. fall asleep and stay asleep. But sleep isn't quite that simple with temperature. It's a three-part equation. You need to warm up to cool down to fall asleep. You need to stay cool to stay asleep. And then you need to warm up to wake up. And what I mean the first one, it sounds strange and paradoxical. You need to warm up to cool down. I need to warm up the surface of your skin to almost like a snake charmer,

draw all of the trapped hot blood in the core of my body out to the surface and that causes a massive temperature radiation. Is that why when I cold plunge sauna at night I have the best sleep of my life? Correct. As long as you're continuing to heat up the externality,

the cold plunge is good because it allows you greater amounts of time in the sauna. But it's the same reason a hot bath and a shower will work. we all think I get out the bath in the shower. My cheeks would be nice and rosy. And then I think I'm all sort of toasty. And that's why I sleep well.

It's not. It's that when I get out the bath, all of the blood is raced to the surface of my skin. It radiates the heat out of my body. My core body temperature plummet. And that's so you've got to warm up the surface to cool down at the core to fall asleep. Then you have to stay cool to stay asleep and get deep sleep.

and then you reverse engineer it warming up to wake up. And that's the reason I like these smart mattresses, because unlike a thermostat, which is a constant throughout the night, although you can now program with smart thermostat's at a temperature gradient too, but the mattress, direct contact onto body, and you can create this almost temperature signature that seems to try to warm you up, to cool you down, then cool you down further to keep you asleep,

then warm you up to wake up. And then because the mattress is tracking your sleep, it says, was that thermal signature for Lauren tonight? Was that good or bad? Let's keep going. Okay, after a week of data, I think we can do better. Let's tweak that curve of temperature regulation on the mattress. Did you get better? Great. Let's lean into that. Or if it starts to get worse, then it bends the thermal gradient through artificial intelligence. So we can do very clever things now. That's why I like the approach. I think it's a great vehicle through which we can augment human sleep. When would you stop drinking caffeine if it's you and you want to say it's me. We'll just pick on me. I want to be, I want to try to get in bed if I can by nine and then potentially read until 10 and fall asleep by 10. Yeah.

When would be in your prescription? When would be my last cup of coffee? I would usually say try to cut yourself off about 10 a.m. in the morning. And it's going to be very different for different people and I explain why. but caffeine has a half-life of about five to six hours, meaning after you've drunk your cup of coffee, five hours later, half of that caffeine is still in your system,

which means that caffeine has a quarter life of 10 to 12 hours for the average individual. So if you have it at noon, it's still in your system. So yeah, so if you have a cup of coffee at noon, a quarter of that caffeine is still in your brain at midnight. And so none of us would expect to have, you know,

a final quarter of a cup of coffee, right before we turn the light out and hope for a good night of sleep, it's probably less likely to happen that way. That was one of the biggest things that I got under control with my sleep was I basically now have this routine I mentioned earlier where I wake up 90 minutes

after I have the coffee and it's the last cup of coffee I have the other day. I only need one now. Yeah. Because I realize, like, I was screwing up my sleep and I needed a lot more coffee before because I was tired.

But now that I've got rid of this, like I mean, if I finished drinking it by 9 a.m., it's completely gone by 9 a.m. What else is in your prescription? We kind of got derailed. I want to make sure we get the Matthew Walker prescription. So then I would say if we've got sleep disorders out the way, we've got your caffeine

under control. We say, think about alcohol. Alcohol is in a class of drugs that we call the sedative hypnotics. And most people think, if I have a couple of nightcaps in the evening, it really helps me fall asleep. Unfortunately, you're mistaking sedation for sleep. You're simply knocking your brain out. And that's the first issue.

The second with alcohol, it will fragment your sleep. So it comes back to us this sort of notion that quality is important. And your alcohol will litter your sleep with all these punctuated awakenings. They're so short, however, you typically don't remember them. So you wake up the next morning. You don't feel restored, but you don't think, I woke up at night. And I fell asleep real quick. Well, you didn't.

You were sedated. And then you woke up, but you didn't remember it. So no wonder you feel pretty unrestored. And then the third aspect is that alcohol is pretty good at blocking your REM sleep, which we've spoken about is critical for hormonal regulation, as well as emotional and mental health. So the next thing we've got to do is get your alcohol under control. I would say that all of this, by the way, is me speaking about the ideal world and drumroll, no one listening or watching lives in the real world. Sorry, in the ideal world. They live in the real world. So what I don't want to sound is puritanical.

For goodness sake, life is to be lived. I don't want to be the healthiest person in the graveyard. And so I want to live a little bit. So just think and so we encourage people to say, just consider you the use of alcohol and caffeine in moderation. You know, and have a bottle of wine with some friends, you know, at a weekend. That's great. But for the most part, try to stay away. Smart water. It's always in my bag. It's always in my carry-on. It's always in my diaper bag. I do not like to go anywhere without smart water. The one I like is smart water alkaline. This is going to keep you hydrated throughout your active life. I travel all the time for work, for fun, and I like a specific water. So whether you're running to the gym or you're running meetings or you're running your kids and traveling, this is a great water to grab on the go. This is so random.

but I just love how the bottle looks and the shape. It just fits perfectly into my purse, which I love. And it's just a great water all around. It's a vapor distilled bottled bottle water with added electrolytes. It has this very distinct, pure, crisp, pristine taste that I really love. It's refreshing. It's made with 9.5 plus pH and it has added antioxidants. This is the water that I give my kids. This is the water that I like to mix my aminos in. This is the water that I drink when it's plain. I'll make tea out of it. I really like this water so much that I had a case shipped to our hotel where we're staying in L.A. I like insisted that they had to ship like three cases. I begged them. Smart water is the water for you and life is full of choices. Smart water is the water for you.

If you like it as much as I do, check them out. Life is full of choices. Smart water. is a simple one. Visit Drink Smart Water to learn more. I am all about breathable, natural, long-lasting cotton. So we're teaming up with cotton, the fabric of our lives. I am really trying to be so intentional and mindful about what I'm wearing when I'm home, relaxing with my kids, being present. So when Cotton reached out, I was so excited. I'm sure all you guys know that going natural with Cotton is the move. Cotton comes from the earth, unlike synthetic and man. made fibers. I am trying to be more mindful and present in every area of my life. I want to stay grounded, especially when I'm home. You guys all know cotton. Who doesn't like cotton? It's breathable, natural,

long-lasting cotton. It's amazing. And cotton is natural. Cotton comes from the earth. So there's a lot of synthetic and man-made fibers out there in our clothes. I actually just learned, and I had no idea about this, that polyester is made from crude oil. That is the same oil that's the same oil that's used to make fuel for cars, which is wild. I also didn't know that every time we wash synthetic fabrics like polyester clothing, we're contributing to microplastics in our waterways. Cotton has really taught me a lot about synthetic fabrics, and I'm trying to learn more and more. I'm trying to carry like cotton totes to the farmer's market. I don't want to use a lot of plastic bags. I'm just doing anything that I can do and basically my part.

So remember to check the label for Cotton and take a deep breath and focus on the present. Cotton is the fabric of now. Learn more at the fabric of our lives.com. When I was in high school, I would always see my mom using Clarence. And I've just always been a fan of the brand. I find it really nostalgic and they just know what they're talking about. So they have this new double serum. And the double serum is super interesting because it's a new formula that helps neutralize the visible

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welcome gift and free shipping on your first order. One thing that has made me sleep through the night and I would love to know your opinion is I mouth tape every night and it's changed my life. with so much more energy. I used to wake up probably three times a night. I don't wake up anymore. And we just interviewed someone on how important bones and alignment are to your sleep. Because if your airway is narrow, as I mean, as you know from like sleep apnea and all these different things, you're not getting the best sleep. What is your opinion on nose breathing, mouth tape, all those types of things? I think the data right now is equivocal. There have been some studies looking at this. Certainly

what they've done is looked at people with sleep apnea, sort of heavy snoring. And the data would suggest that mouth taping did seem to improve the number of times they stopped breathing or had partial breathing blocks throughout the night, which is really what we think of as sleep apnea. So that evidence would somewhat favorite. So I think right now we don't have enough data. Certainly I don't feel comfortable going on record or on a podcast and say definitively mouth taping is the right way forward. Some people have argued from a sort of a dental perspective that it's beneficial that by taping the mouth shut, it keeps the mouth more moist. And therefore, with the saliva locked in, it produces better gum health. So from that perspective, you could argue it's

potentially beneficial too. Right now, I think it's a little bit unclear. Do the experiment on yourself. And you see, some of these sleep tracking devices these days will actually measure your blood, oxygen, saturation. So you could always just check to see nights when I've done it, nights when I haven't, do the experiment. I will do that experiment. And I do notice what you're saying about the mouth being more moist when it's closed. Yeah. I just note, the main thing I notice is like the energy I have in the morning is, like, if I don't do it for one night, it is a completely different day. I think for people that primarily breathe out of their mouth and they're sleeping instead of their nose nasally, like it's maybe more beneficial than having your mouth hang open all night, yeah?

And it's certainly, I think this is one of those situations where it could be dramatically inter- interpersonal dependent meaning from one individual to the next. Makes sense. It could be quite different based on the facial. anatomy and the airway anatomy involved. So right now, the problem is few people are going to fund those studies, you know, because the National Institutes of Health probably doesn't see mouth taping as the thing that they would probably like to try and solve, you know, cancer and Alzheimer's disease. So I wonder if we'll ever get the data. What I think is nice, though, is with the rise of

quantified self-movement sleep tracking, you can start to tag in these apps, you know, what are you doing and what would be great. And a lot of them, if they're good sleep trackers, they will give you something called an API, which is just simply a web interface. And you can go into your data and you can download your data if you're really nerdy like me, or you can just visualize it and eyeball it and do a two-week experiment on off. And ask yourself, as long as everything else is constant, was my sleep better looking at these sleep trackers? Or was my data worse with versus without without mouth taping, and you can objectively try to prove it to yourself. Subjectively, you're already sensing it, though.

Oh, my God. I can't even tell you the difference. I literally, it's like a different person. We also got this mattress, and I'm curious to know that if you think mattresses have a big impact on your sleep, that slightly raises our feet when we're sleeping. And I know that does something maybe to the lymphatic system. Is it important to you of what kind of mattress people are sleeping on? the more spongy the mattress typically the worse sleep because what happens is that that sort of saggy mattress leads to a saggy unsupported skeletal mass meaning that your spinal sort of vertebrae start to

just bend and don't forget you're here for hours in that position so imagine just laying in a position let's say that you're a stomach sleeper and you're you've got this this really nasty arch in your back. And someone says, I want you to lie there still like that for maybe five or six hours. And then get up and stretch and think, do you feel good? And you're probably going to say, I don't feel good at all. So firmness is good to try to keep the spine aligned in its natural sort of horizontal position when you're on the bed. The only thing I would be concerned about with foot raising is that if you are a side sleeper or a front sleeper,

raising your feet is only going to, if you're a front sleeper, almost banana-shaped bow your spinal cord even more so because it's kind of forcing your feet towards the back of your head. And if you are back sleepers, though, that may be quite optimal for you as a consequence. This is a weird question. I don't think you've ever asked this question. If you have, I'll be shocked. Yeah, let me know. I am someone who thinks that the detergent that you use on your sheets and your pillow is really important because you're breathing it in all night. Do you think, like I'm very specific about the detergent I use. It's all non-toxic. Do you think that some of these detergents that people are wrapping their body in are affecting our sleep?

There is no data that we have regarding the chemical composition. of what you dress yourself in, be it clothing, and then sheets at top of self in bed. What we do know, however, is that the scent of your sheets makes a difference. Wow. And this is one of the reasons why a lot of people say it goes, it's actually almost a bifurcation. When they go to a hotel, they sleep terribly or they sleep really well. If they sleep really well, one of the reasons that they tell you is because the sheets were just, just smelt so clean and fresh and that sensation, you know, as again, as a hard, you know, I'm a neuroscientist.

And when I'm reading these types of reports, you know, that lavender scent or I just think this is a, this is not particularly good. But the data was really quite consistent. Fresh smelling, clean smelling, scented sheets promote better subjective quality of sleep consistently. So the only data that I know of when it comes to sort of the material, cultured, that you adorn at night is really around the smell and the freshness of it. But if the data is there for during the day, I don't see why it would be any different at night. Is it a perception of cleanliness? Is that potentially it? It is. It's a perception of cleanliness that you are, I mean, this was one of the reasons way back when in, I can't remember, it was probably coming towards

the end of the Dickensian era, when affluent society started to sleep apart, when couples would sleep apart. And part of the reason that they would sleep apart is they believe that at night we had malodorous sort of smells that would pervade from one person to the next and could be deleterious to your health. So as a consequence, so yes, to your point, it's there is a cleanliness signal that from an evolutionary perspective, you could well imagine, makes a lot of sense. Why would you sleep from a hunter-gatherer perspective, in a location that smells rancid, that usually means that something probably around is either dead or I'm next to non-fresh water. And as a result, you're not going to be in the ideal conditions.

That should signal, you know, danger. Should we start sweeping apart? Well, it's a thing right now. The data is saying a lot more people are actually considering this now, right? Yeah, it's having a, I mean, I don't like the term, but it's having a sleep divorce to prevent a real one. Wow. And if you survey people, one in three individuals will say that they sleep in separate locations. If you look closer to the data, almost one out of every two individuals will say that they go to bed in the same location, but they wake up in a different location. And there's a terrible stigma that is associated with this notion of a sleep divorce, which is that, look, if you're not sleeping together, then you're not sleeping. together. And if you look at the data, it's quite the opposite for those couples. Now, it's not a one-size-fits-all, by the way. For some couples, it works wonderfully well. They say that the subjective quality, they feel

better about their sleep. Now, even if they say that, when we measure their sleep objectively, they typically sleep worse together than when they're apart because of either snoring or movement, perturbation, but nevertheless, some people say, I sleep, I feel like I sleep better. But there's a large majority of people who say, I don't sleep anywhere near as well. And when you are sleeping well as a couple, firstly, sex hormones are increased markedly. Estrogen and progesterone in women, testosterone in men, greats that he looked at putting healthy young males on a diet of about four or five hours of sleep for one week. At the end of that one week, they had a level of testosterone, which is that of someone 10 years, they're senior. Wow. So insufficient sleep will age a man by a decade,

just by way of that testosterone measure. So firstly, your sex hormones are improved when you're sleeping well. And if sleeping well means you sleep apart, then the opposite is going to be true in terms of your sexual vibrancy and desire for your partner. There was another study that looked prospectively. And what they found was that for every one hour of extra sleep, a woman obtained, her interest in being intimate with her partner went up by 14%. Now, to give you some context here, the sort of libido medications that are out there for women, things like Vileisi, for example, they will increase libido by maybe about 24%. But you can get more than 50%, you can get more than 50, percent of the way there by just sleeping an extra hour. The other reason that the misnomer of sleeping apart

means an absent sexual life is that the pleasure of sex increases. We know that women who are sleeping well by way of those sex hormones increasing usually leads to greater vaginal lubrication, which ends up resulting in greater sexual pleasure through that act of intimacy. So on all of these counts, it seems as though if it's your thing and it's not for everyone, but sleeping apart does not mean that your sexual life suffers. In fact, if anything, your sex life can improve when you are sleeping well. Well, it looks like I'm moving to the guest room. If you want to move to the guest room, you go ahead.

I personally like you sleeping with me because then I don't have to worry about any burglars. Like, I just feel like it doesn't give me any anxiety. No, that's one of the main reasons that a partner will. say safety. I don't have to worry about it. Like, I'm... Hold on. I thought you were going to get the burglar. No, no, no, no. I'm not doing the burglar. I do a lot of things. I don't get the burglar. I love Michael's reaction there, which is right. I'm sleeping in the guest room. And by the way, that 10 hours of sleep, darling. Oh, that's great. If you want to lean into 11, you go for it.

No problem at all. Yeah, exactly. I'll take care of the business. We have covered a lot of ground here. So I think in a nutshell, though, people should really start to consider sleep as almost their number one activity above everything else. Yeah, I would say that it's, I used to think of it as the third pillar of good health alongside diet and exercise, or maybe the fourth diet exercise and mental health. It's not. Sleep is the foundation on which all of those other things said. And what's remarkable is that when you put that foundation in place, many of those other things will course correct themselves. We've not been able to discover in the past 20 years, a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. That is stunning to me.

And that tells me so much about the intimate relationship between your sleep health and your mental health. So get sleep in place. And many of the emotional and mental health issues can often improve. We know that you're going to start eating better. So your dietary intake will be better when you're sleeping. You will be more excited and more motivated to exercise as a consequence. So every, every one of those other pillars of health that we speak about for brain and body is improved when the bedrock of sleep is in place. Can I ask you just before you go, it's like more of a strategy question. Say somebody's like, okay, I'm ready to get my sleep in order and I want it to be regular and I'd like to go to bed and I'd like to go to bed at 10 o'clock in the night and I'd

like to wake up at 6 a.m. But they've been going to bed at 12 or 1 and they've been waking up, struggling to wake up with an alarm at like 7 or 8. Yeah. Would a decent strategy be, okay, get in bed at 10 or 9, even if you struggle to fall asleep, set an alarm that first time per six and force yourself to get up, even if you have a terrible night and do that until you start to get regular, like almost go through the first week sleep deprived just to get on it? Or would you say, no, you can't do that? I would say, firstly, do your chronotype test and figure out exactly whether that new schedule that you're trying to align yourself to truly is your own innate biologics.

schedule. But let's assume that it is. Let's assume that you are at 10 to sort of six person, but your lifestyle has been having you sleep, you know, going to bed at one. I would say, try not to do the cold turkey approach and drag yourself all the way back to 10. Start to thin slice it and just take that window of sleep opportunity. Firstly, probably elongate it because you're probably not getting enough sleep. And then gradually just nudge it back by half an hour each night, that's probably an easier way to do it. Or you can simply just brute force yourself, as you said, to wake up at that earlier 6 a.m. time, start there. And what will happen is even if you want to go to bed at 1 a.m. After about three or four nights, by 10.30, 11, you just think, I just can't take this.

I'm just so tired of got to go to bed. And so by waking up, that wake up time that consistent, will almost brute force you on the back end for sleep onset to have no choice than to otherwise adopt the new schedule that you're trying to accommodate towards. Arnold Schwarzenegger, of all people, who's, you know, he's said he's not been a fan of, now I think as he's gotten older, he says he gets better sleep, but there was a period. But he said something that I thought was interesting because I used to be one of those people that would get anxious at night and ruminate and do all my thinking when I'm trying to go to bed, which wasn't good.

And the way he described it was when he goes to sleep, he looks at it like, his job is to sleep. Like he almost looks at like part of his profession. Like he's there to sleep. That's his job. And when I started thinking about it like that, now that's all I allow myself to do is like I don't allow myself to do anything but sleep. I like that because it makes it complete sense.

If you're someone who has the predilection of really trying to optimize and be incredibly action based and be able to execute very well, then why not take that mentality that served you so well before. but right now is actually doing you a disservice when it comes to sleep. And if you apply the same filter to sleep, you change your relationship with sleep. Now sleep is no longer a cost to you. Sleep is an investment in tomorrow that you have to execute every night in an efficient manner. That's why I kind of love it.

It's a very clever way of utilizing potentially a very effective tool for you that has been compromising your sleep. and turning the tables and trying to optimize sleep. I think it's a great approach. That's a lot of anxious people, right? They go to bed and it's like, what, that's when, and I think that's how I had to, that's how I had to categorize it in my mind.

Matthew, that was so eloquent what you just said, that sentence, that's exactly how I think of my sleep. It's like, I have to get the sleep so I can execute the next day and be effective. If you look at it like that, it changes it. That's right, because so many of us think that sleep is this waste of time. and that I am going to de-invest in that.

I'm like, no, I don't want to sleep when you're dead. I'm like, no, I don't want to sleep when I'm dead. You can take that approach. And the only problem is that you will be both dead sooner. And the quality of your life will be significantly worse as a consequence. I also like enjoy sleeping. Like, I don't know why that's like, is that lazy to say? I enjoy sleeping.

I thoroughly enjoy the act of getting in bed and listening to my meditation. Like, I'm, it's like, I like it like a habit stack almost. It's a pleasurable thing. And that's how it should be. The only place and time that that goes wrong is if you're struggling with insomnia. And at that point, it's the exact opposite that you walk into the bedroom and you have no confidence in your sleep. And at that point, your sleep controls you.

And so instead of looking forward to sleep as a nocturnal pleasure, you see it as a battleground and it's your adversarial across the room. And in that case, we try to say, don't stress. about sleep, don't listen to idiots like that British guy with a terrible bad hair who I, you know, I worry about in terms of style. Thank you. Instead, just say, look, tonight may not be my night. And instead, what I'm going to do is only go to bed when I'm tired.

If you're suffering from insomnia, I would say the two most effective things that you can do or three, the first thing, get your anxiety under control. It's probably the thing that's starting the insomnia. The second is do not go to bed until you are absolutely sleepy. Also, if you're staring at your phone for two hours, I can't talk to you about insomnia. Digital detox. Like I cannot, when someone comes to me and they're like, oh, I can't sleep. And I'm like, well, what were you doing two hours before bed?

And you're saying you're scrolling Instagram. Of course you can't sleep. If I scrolled Instagram for two hours before I went to bed, I wouldn't be able to sleep either. And you would sleep, you would go to bed much later. It's called sleep procrastination. And that's exactly what those devices will do. I would also then say for the insomnia patient, try to consider if you wake up and you can't get back to sleep, don't stress. Instead, change your sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger, like change your mentality and just say, you know what, if someone came in the middle of the workday and told me, I don't want you to sleep, but just lie on the couch, just rest.

Have a rest for the next hour. Just lie there, just have a rest. How does that sound? You think it sounds rather nice to me. Well, think about that in bed. Just say, look, I'm not, I don't feel sleepy. I'm not going to get out of bed. I'm just going to rest. I'm just going to enjoy rest. I'm just going to keep my eyes open and enjoy being awake and just at rest. And gradually, you find that it's quite hard to keep your eyes open. You could just listen to your voice. Your voice is kind of relaxing.

I just went to sleep right there. Your voice is relaxing. Put a little red light on and I'm asleep. Oh, my goodness. I would, I don't know about the voice. I would say both the voice and the personality are probably. be the best prophylactic known to man. So anyway. Where can everyone find you? Your book, pimp yourself out, your podcast, your TED Talk, Sleep is Your superpower, has garnered over 20 million views to date. Where can everyone find you? Probably the easiest place to come find me is at my podcast. If you're Sleep Curious, the podcast is a little different. I am nowhere near as elegant as you guys in terms of interviewing. So my podcast is, they are largely monologues. They are short-form podcasts about 20 to 40 minutes.

monologues from yours truly and you will find just about every sleep topic addressed out there. So it's the Matt Walker podcast. And if you want to visit me on social media, I am Sleep Diplomat on Twitter and I am Dr. Matt Walker on Instagram. And also if you feel compelled and you would like to try to support sleep science, I have a public foundation, a charity. You can just go to why we sleep.org. and there you can take a personalized sleep assessment for free,

and you can even get a four-week program that will help you course-correct your sleep based on your answers. And all we ask is that for a cup of coffee or a few cups of coffee, you donate to sleep science. I love it. I brought you mouth tape for you to try. I love it. Thank you so much. Maybe you can give me like a scientific breakdown.

I will take that. I've got so many sleep gadgets monitoring me at night, that I'll have that amount of data, and I will do the objective test. And if you ever want some of our team to come out and do a sleep recording for both of you, we'll make that happen. I love it. Matthew, thank you for coming on the show.

You're amazing. Thank you so much, folks.