The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 112 - Want To Sleep Better? Listen To This: Matthew Walker

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

It seems that it is harder and harder to get a good nights sleep in the modern world, despite the miraculous benefits of sleep becoming increasingly known. In this moment the sleep expert himself Dr. Matthew Walker provides the 5 sleep hygiene tips you need for deeper sleep. These tips range from giving yourself a bed time to walking it out, in this moment Dr. Walker provides all the solutions you will need for the best possible sleep. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/b7y7TmgehAb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Matthew: https://www.instagram.com/drmattwalker/?hl=en https://www.sleepdiplomat.com My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business, Marketing & Life' per order link: ⁠https://smarturl.it/DOACbook

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. My question is, what are the things that in the modern society are standing in the way of sleep we've touched on some of them loosely but some of the like big obvious things the things that you would suggest doing very actionable things we could do straight away to improve our chances of having that healthy um deep sleep that we need to be um optimal in every regard of our health and performance.

There's probably, I think, five standard tips, what we call sort of sleep hygiene that you can do. And then I'll come on to maybe just some unconventional tips that we've sort of touched on. And we've spoken about many of these. The first thing I would recommend people to do, this is why when some people say, what about this new sleep supplement or, you know, it's 40 quid for this bottle of these new sleep natural medications, I'm going to give it a try. I would say, try these tried and true things first before you spend your money on supplements. The first thing is regularity. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend. Your brain expects regularity. It thrives best under conditions of regularity. When you give it regularity, you can improve the quantity and the quantity of your sleep. The second thing is get

some darkness at night. As I said, we don't get enough darkness in the modern world. And so the trick I would offer, and I don't use it, I don't like the word hack, but the sort of suggestion would be in the last hour before bed, try this experiment for everyone listening for the next week, dim down half of the lights or switch off half of the lights or even three quarters of the lights in your home in the last hour before bed. All of the lights in every room. In all of the rooms, you know, switch off almost all of the light. Now I'm not suggesting be unsafe and walk around in the darkness in the last hour. That's not what I'm saying.

Just dimmed out, you know, switch off half of the lights. You will be surprised at how sleepy that darkness will make you feel. And it's also an incredible behavioral trigger to signal to your brain that it is time for sleep, that darkness is around me. That's the second tip is darkness. The third tip is temperature. Most people sleep in an ambient bedroom temperature that is too high. And you need to in an ambient bedroom temperature that is too high and you

need to aim for a bedroom temperature of about 18 18 and a half degrees celsius around about 65 to 68 degrees fahrenheit if i'm probably butchering the the mathematics there on that but um you need to get cool now you can wear thick socks you can have a hot water bottle that's fine but the ambient needs to be cold because you need to drop your core body temperature and your brain temperature by about one degree Celsius to fall asleep and stay asleep. And it's the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. So make your bedroom cold, make it dark like a cave. The fourth question would be sort of what we've, or fourth suggestion would be walk it out. And we've spoken about this, the 30 minute rule, you know, get up, do something different or meditate. Don't lie in bed awake for too long.

Then the final two things we've spoken about, well, we've spoken about caffeine. We haven't spoken about alcohol, but let me just say as the kind of headline of it, alcohol is not a sleep aid. Many people use it as a sleep aid. It is not your friend. Alcohol, again, is a sedative, so it knocks you out. The second is that it fragments your sleep. So you wake up, your sleep is littered with all of these small awakenings. Most of them you don't remember because they're too brief, but it makes for miserable, lousy quality sleep. And the final thing is that alcohol is very good at blocking your REM sleep or your dream sleep, which we know is critical for many other functions as well. So alcohol is not your friend. That's the sort of the

final tip. Again, you know, just every, if you're with friends, have a glass of red wine, just know, okay, my sleep's not going to be great. No, thank you, Matt. I'm joking. You know, I'm not, yeah, I'm, it's just, you know, live life too. Of course, yeah. I'm not saying that. I was, I was thinking there about the other sort of behavioral things that we do that

harm our sleep as well. We talked about coffee earlier on, avoiding that. It's weird that people drink it after dessert in the evening so i never understood that because that's an old tradition um but the other thing obviously that the modern generation are even more susceptible to is to have a quick tick tock look at the social media account or something now i thought you know there's a lot of different products out there that are trying to help with the the light that comes from these screens that i think is the cause of what's keeping us awake but there's this little button called dark mode on my ipad there's also one called night shift so if i just pop that

on bob's your uncle and this and i can crack on with my screen time true or false partly true oh good okay so i can just pop that on night mode in dark mode and then i can carry on using my ipad partly true so it turns out that the blue light from screens does have an impact on sleep so there's a great study done by harford medical school by some colleagues there and they showed that reading for an hour on an iPad just before bed, relative to just reading a book in dim light. Firstly, it delayed the time with which people fell asleep. So it took them a lot longer to fall asleep. Second, it reduced the total amount of sleep that they had. Third, it decreased a sleep-related hormone called melatonin. It

delayed the release of that melatonin and it reduced the amount of melatonin. And finally, it reduced the amount of rapid eye movement sleep. So it had- Significantly. Significantly. The melatonin point, how significantly? So it delayed the release by about somewhere between 90 minutes to two hours across the individuals. So in other words, your brain wasn't, so what melatonin does, it's a, it's called the hormone of darkness or the vampire hormone, just because not because it makes you want to bite into people's necks,

because it signals to your brain that it's nighttime, that it's darkness. And so your brain needs the signal of melatonin for it to understand when is it dark. In other words, it needs to understand by way of melatonin when it is time to fall asleep. And when you're bathed in electric light at night, and especially when you're getting blue light from these devices, your brain is fooled into thinking it's still daytime. And when there is light emitting through your retina coming into your brain, it signals to a part of your brain to hit the brakes on melatonin and your brain will not release melatonin. So what was happening with this iPad reading is that you were artificially telling the

brain it's still daytime and the brakes on melatonin was still shut on. And so melatonin was not starting to be released until much later. And what was also interesting about that study, by the way, is that when they stopped the iPad reading, the sleep disrupted pattern continued for several days later. In other words, it was almost like a drug that it had a washout period that was a blast radius to it. Now, there's been some great work by a wonderful sleep scientist in Australia, Michael Gradozar. And he has added to this story. And he said, it's not just the blue light these devices the principal function of these devices is that they are attention capture devices just like you said

i'm just going to have a wee little tiktok before bed they are in the attention economy and all they care about is capturing your attention for current currency and they make a lot of money from it what that attention does is that it stimulates your brain and when your brain is stimulated it's very difficult for you to fall asleep and it creates what we call sleep procrastination where you're lying in bed and you could be perfectly sleepy and you could fall asleep right now but then you sort of check social media and you think, oh, I'll just shoot that last email. Oh, then I'll order that last thing on sort of, you know, Amazon. And then you get a text back from your friend and you start texting them. And then you look up and it's now an hour later and you're an hour deficient on sleep. So it's the activation of your cerebral cortex by

these devices that is perhaps the more harmful aspect of them regarding your sleep. Now, here again, I don't want to be finger wagging. You know, the genie of technology is out the bottle and it's not going back in any time soon. There's nothing that I'm going to say as a sleep researcher that's going to change that. I don't take my phone into my bedroom. I put my phone out in the kitchen and I don't see it until morning. But lots of people do and fair enough. But there's another rule that I've stolen from another friend

called Michael Grandner, who's here in America at the University of Tucson in Arizona. He has this great rule regarding technology and it's the following, that if you really must take your phone into your bedroom, you can only use it standing up. And what you'll find is that after about six or seven minutes standing up, you think,

I'm just gonna sit down on the bed. And at that point, as soon as your backside hits the bed, you're done, you've got to put the phone away. I think it's a great rule of thumb if you need to take technology in the bedroom. I have some breaking news. And no, this is an emergency. I've spent the last two years writing a book

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