The Peter Attia Drive - Qualy #129 - Evolutionary reasons to sleep

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

Today's episode of The Qualys is from podcast #47 – Matthew Walker, Ph.D., on sleep – Part I of III: Dangers of poor sleep, Alzheimer’s risk, mental health, memory consolidation, and more.   The Qualys is a subscriber-exclusive podcast, released Tuesday through Friday, and published exclusively on our private, subscriber-only podcast feed. Qualys is short-hand for “qualifying round,” which are typically the fastest laps driven in a race car—done before the race to determine starting position on the grid for race day. The Qualys are short (i.e., “fast”), typically less than ten minutes, and highlight the best questions, topics, and tactics discussed on The Drive. Occasionally, we will also release an episode on the main podcast feed for non-subscribers, which is what you are listening to now. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/podcast/qualys/   Subscribe to receive access to all episodes of The Qualys (and other exclusive subscriber-only content): https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/  Connect with Peter on Facebook.com/PeterAttiaMD | Twitter.com/PeterAttiaMD | Instagram.com/PeterAttiaMD 

Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Peter Atia Qualies, a member exclusive podcast. The Qualies is just a shorthand slang for Qualification Round, which is something you do prior to the race, just much quicker. The Qualies highlight the best of the questions, topics and tactics that are discussed in previous episodes of the drive. So if you enjoy the quality, you can access dozens more of them through our membership program. Without further delay, I hope you enjoy today's quality. Firstly, you know, it took Mother Nature 3.6 million years to put this eight-hour thing called

a night of sleep in place. And within the space of 70 years, if you look at the data, we've locked off almost 20 to 25 percent of that. Imagine coming along and saying, in the next 100 years, I think what I'm going to do is for the entirety of human society, I'm going to reduce their oxygen saturation by about 20 to 25%. Do you think that's a good idea? I'm the answer is no. No, it's such a great example.

I'll pause for a moment just to tell a funny story that you and I have talked about off-mic, which is up until about 2012, I was in the, I'll sleep when I'm dead camp. And I know what led to that. it wasn't that there was a very deliberate decision at the end of medical school when a good friend of mine with all the best intentions who was a year ahead of me so he was now in that the end of his internship as I was about to begin mine He said and this is in the days when we didn't have the 80 hour work week requirement and residency.

So we averaged, I think, about 114 hours a week in the hospital. So he said to me, look, Peter, you're signing up for whatever, five, seven years of this thing. If you spent every moment outside of the hospital sleeping, you would still be tired. And when difference is you wouldn't have any fun. So make sure you live every moment that you're not in the hospital to the fullest. And so for me, that basically meant, if I wasn't in the hospital, I was swimming,

I was going out with my friends, I was trying to meet girls, like, and I was doing anything, everything. Such that during that period of my life, I just know, because I was pretty adamant about recording how much time, like I was very wed to this idea, there's 168 hours in a week, if I'm spending 114 of them here, and I spend this many driving,

and I spend this many getting groceries, and I spend this many swimming, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think I was about 28 hours a week of sleep. So it wasn't for every night, because you'd have none, then six and then three and then eight. Like you could binge sleep from time to time, but it was pretty much 28 a week. I'll come back to some of the implications of that. But fast forward a few years, I'm talking to a good friend of mine, Kirk Parsley, who's a physician who, like you, is adamant about, you know, the importance of

sleep. And we're having dinner one night. And he says, he's challenging me on this. And he says, so let me get this straight. You've just decided that you're going to sleep half of what is evolutionarily programmed. And I said, yeah, because does it strike you as odd that evolution would have designed us to spend a third of our life not mating, not watching out for predators, not hunting for food, but doing this thing for some other purpose. You think that thing must have been important. And it was such an obvious argument, but it really overnight changed the way I thought about this, which was evolution went to great lengths to do this.

And superficially, at great cost to us, right? I mean, you could argue, well, imagine you didn't need to sleep and you could spend 24 hours a day foraging for food or a mate or some other thing, but it didn't. So it's sort of, it's sort of like there's probably a reason we are not anaerobic to your point about reducing oxygen saturation by 25%. You know, if you were to think about that, you know, during sleep, just as you said, you're not eating, you're not finding food, you're not finding a mate, you're not reproducing,

you're not caring for your young, you're vulnerable to predation on any one of those grounds, but especially all of them put together as a collective. It's completely anti-evolutionary. It sounds like the dumbest thing. And you know, often said, and it has been said before, if sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital set of functions, it's the biggest mistake that the evolutionary process

has ever made. And we now realize from this constellation of evidence that Mother Nature did not make a spectacular blunder in putting this thing called an eight-hour sort of need of sleep in place. It is the greatest life support system that you could ever wish for. It is a remarkable health insurance policy, and what's great is that it's largely democratic, it's mostly free, and in terms of a prescription from a doctor, it's largely painless. So, I almost wanted to title a book, Consciousness is Overrated, or just sometimes,

dot, dot, dot, consciousness is overrated. But when you really look at the evidence in terms of risk, de-risking, just about every disease that is killing us in the developed world. It's very hard to look no further than sleep, and that's why I don't want to trivialize diet, and I don't want to trivialize movement and activity. But what I would say is that if you want to put sleep up against either one of those two and kind of play the whole head-to-head game, which I don't think we need to do here. I would simply say that sleep is the foundation on which those two are the things sit. It's not the third pillar of good health. I think it is the foundation.

That's a really interesting way to think about it, because I typically describe four pillars or five if you include all of the exogenous molecules that you could lump together. But another way to think about it, which again, I don't think is necessarily the right way to think about it, but sometimes it makes the point. If you deprive yourself of food, how long can you survive? Well, we have one person up to 382 days, even someone who's as lean as you could survive 30 days with no food. How long could you survive without water? Depends greatly on the temperature, et cetera. But you could make the case that deprivation of sleep would result in the quickest reduction of health.

Certainly more than not eating or not exercising for a period of time. And those studies have been done in rats. And actually, we know some of this from humans who have been trying to, in fact, didn't they Guinness Book of World Records? I can't remember if I read this in your work, they've actually banned attempts at longest period of sleep deprivation. So I mentioned this. Yeah, you know, they've been in the book.

When you could still try and beat the world record of sleep deprivation and it got up to about, sort of, I think the last true effort was about 24 days. I think the last true effort was about 24 days. But I think it was debatable that one. But based on the weight of the scientific data, the relationship with between sleep loss and mental health, sleep loss and cancer, sleep loss cardiovascular disease, sleep loss and metabolic syndrome, Guinness started to feel very, very uncomfortable and then when suicide came on the table, it pulled it. So in other words, think about this,

you know, there was a gentleman Felix Baumgartner, I think his name was, who sponsored by Red Bull, went up in a capsule in a hot air balloon to the outer surface of our planet. This was about four years ago. Four years ago. He opened the door and then he jumped out and he fell back down to earth at over a thousand kilometers an hour using his body alone. He broke the sound barrier

and he successfully came down. And now Guinness says for that, just fine. However, to sleep deprived yourself, no, much more unsafe. We're not going to let it happen. You are allowed just to put it in context. So you're allowed up to 12 jumps off Niagara Falls. Basically, but that's okay, but no, no, no, you're not going to. That's such a great point.

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