WHOOP Podcast - How Better Sleep Can Transform Your Memory & Learning with Dr. Gina Poe

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

This week on the WHOOP Podcast, WHOOP Global Head of Human Performance, Principal Scientist, Dr. Kristen Holmes sits down with Dr. Gina Poe, neurobiologist and expert in REM sleep and memory consolidation. Together, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Poe unpack what actually happens when you’re asleep and why sleep is essential not just for memory, but emotional resilience, longevity, and high performance. This episode breaks down the different stages of sleep and how they reshape the brain, regulate the nervous system, and actually clean the brain. Dr. Holmes and Dr. Poe provide insight on daily habits to optimize sleep quality, including timing, exercise, and stress regulation.(00:23) Introduction to Dr. Gina Poe(00:58) Dr. Poe’s Journey to Sleep Research (06:58) Sleep Timing in Relation to The Body’s Physiological Rhythm(12:29) Sleep Pressure and Melatonin Production(14:52) REM Sleep Reshaping the Brain Each Night(21:03) Effects of Short Sleep Cycles (30:17) Relationship Between Skipped Sleep Cycles and Neurodegenerative Disease(31:36) The Importance of Sleep Spindles & Exercise on Sleep Performance(40:46) How Sleep Spindles Change Over A Lifespan(43:44) Daily Practices That Promote Healthy Sleep (49:15) Shift Work, Sleep Cycles, & Human Growth Hormone(55:01) Metabolism and Sleep Cycles: What Happens To The Body’s Energy Storage(59:21) Dr. Poe’s Dream Sleep Study(01:01:09) What Healthy Sleep Looks Like(01:05:38) Rapid Fire TakeawaysDr. Gina Poe:XRelated Episodes:The Science of Stress & Sleep For Optimal Performance with Dr. Bill von HippelSpotifyAppleYouTubeHow to Sleep Better with Dr. Shelby HarrisSpotifyAppleYouTubeSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Exercise really helps boost the amplitude of our slow waves. We don't know exactly why. I mean, that's got to be the number one thing for brain health. Yes, exercise is really good. Cleaning the brain is really, really important to prevent neurodegenerative diseases. As we get older and older, the amplitude of our slow waves gets smaller and smaller, unfortunately. But exercise can help reverse that. Dr. Gina Poe.

Hello, Dr. Holmes. Welcome. I'm just beyond thrilled to have you here today. been such an admirer of your work. And when I just look back on all the work that you've done, you know, looking at, you know, memory and learning and, you know, kind of digging into REM in a way that has really transformed our understanding of that stage of sleep and its role. And when we look at how your work has evolved our understanding of memory difficulties and PTSD and schizophrenia and Alzheimer's. And it's really just a Herculean kind of level of contribution. So thank you.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. When did you become, you know, interested in sleep. Yeah, that's a great question. My mother was always a very regular, normal, good sleeper. And my father felt like it was a waste of time. And so he did as little of it as possible. And that was to his detriment, really. He wanted to spend more time working. He was a very hard worker. But, you know, there's so many things that sleep is really important for that he was depriving himself of. But still, you know, me, I'm kind of a night owl person and, you know, have so much fomo. I never want to fall asleep because I want to do, I want to see, I want to read. So I deprived myself of sleep a lot as a high school student and as a college student also to my

detriment. I don't even remember some of the classes I took in college, you know. Totally. Just blackout. Yeah, just blackout. But my senior year of college, I took a class called neurophysiology. And the first lecture was given by Craig Heller. He's a biologist. And he was in charge of the human biology degree at that time. And he studies thermoregulation. And he gave us a lecture about how he had discovered that when we go into rapid eye movement sleep, we stop thermoregulating. We stop monitoring what the temperature of our body is. So we won't shiver if it gets cold. We won't sweat if it gets hot. It's a very dangerous state. And he discovered that, you know, it was so dangerous. So I thought, that's weird, you know.

A lot of the great discoveries in science start with the words, that's weird. Weird. That's really strange. Why is that? But it was my senior year. I had senioritis. I took clay modeling and dance and dropped the physiology class. It was just too much work, even though that was the most fascinating lecture I had really heard.

And then I moved to Los Angeles with my roommate who was going to law school at UCLA. And I was going to go to med school or I was going to do a Ph.D. in public health. I didn't know which, or maybe both. And I wanted to work for the World Health Organization. I wanted to help countries get better health care, kind of like the Chancellor of UCLA did himself. So I needed a job. I needed to take a few classes. And I started as a waitress. I kind of sucked as a waitress. I kept forgetting people's orders and having to go back to the table. I was sleep deprived. I would go back to the table. What did you order? And so I didn't make much money and I was not making the rent. So I sort of put out all my feelers and my stepdad contacted his cousin who had a good friend at the VA hospital in Sepulveda who needed a lab technician. So I was like, okay, wow, biology. At least I could use my degree. You know, it didn't pay much, but I said, okay, I've never done research before. I'll try this. And so, I did, and it was just amazing. I couldn't believe, and it happened to be a sleep research lab.

So they invited me to go to a conference. There, I met all the sleep researchers in the world, pretty much, and they had no idea why we sleep or how we sleep. And I was fascinated by the fact that these regular people, these good people who were curious, could make such a difference. You know, each one of their experiments took us a long way in understanding what sleep was. And sitting in this week-long conference, I could come up with some hypotheses about what sleep was for, given what I was learning, and figure out some ways to test it. So I said, this is a place where even me, just little old me, can make a difference. And once you find something, that's forever, right? It's not like politics, which is really great and very, very important, but it can change with the wind.

science produces things that are forever and can help people and other animals forever. So I kind of got captured by that job where every day you're facing new puzzles and new challenges and by that conference. And then the first time I presented my own finding, which was about consciousness and performance and found that other people were actually interested in it and big wig people. I'm like, oh, man, this is where I've got to be. So you got hooked. Yeah, I got hooked.

Well, every day there's something surprising I see in the data. You know, we have millions of data sets that we have access to, you know, and it's just this treasure trove of just potential insights, you know, and just I share your enthusiasm. It's just this incredible field that we shockingly still do not know. We still don't know. There's so much. We're at the tip of the iceberg. We are, which is exciting. Yeah.

Yeah. But it's a really exciting time to be a scientist because there's so many more tools that we have now than even 30 years ago when I started. And there are so many more bright young minds, you know, plowing away and getting answers. So there's this groundswell of discovery that I think will really get us over the hill to actually, you know, find some cures for some of these currently incurable diseases. and make all of our lives. And that's what I get so excited about. And preventing. It's kind of understanding the role and, you know, the sleep consistency, for example, to understand, like, how crucial that is for physiological resilience, you know, is like such a, and I think, you know, with technology getting, you know, we're like at a point where our sleep staging accuracy relative to, you know, sleep that goal standard is 86.

Like it's just getting, you know, just in the last like five years, we've gone from 70% to 86. It's like wild, right? Yeah, and 8 to 6 is as good as one human score. Exactly. And another human score. Right, right. So, you know, we just have this opportunity to look at massive, massive amounts of sleep, you know, that can help us, you know, disentangle some of these crazy questions.

Yes. And you said something really important that I wanted to just get at. We're probably going to talk about it some more later. But the timing of sleep in relation to your own body's physiological rhythms, I just wanted to sort of underscore that because the sleep research field. it doesn't really pay attention as much to the timing of sleep. But the circadian field, which recognizes that our bodies have a clock in them that's aligned with the day, has known that that circadian rhythm is very consistent. We can manipulate it with light, especially, but it's very consistent.

And only recently have we, I think, really realize, at least in the sleep research field, that the alignment of sleep with that clock is critical. to the functions of sleep, to achieving all of the best functions of sleep. So even though, you know, you can switch your sleep because it's, you know, influenced by both circadian and homeostatic need. So Aprilly late one night, the next night you can go to bed earlier and get sleep earlier and then you might wake up earlier that day. And you can switch your sleep around somewhat during the day. But if it doesn't align with that very rock-steady circadian preference, then you're not getting sleep at the time when so much of your body is ready to accomplish

its functions of the functions that sleep allows. I love that you brought that up because I think that just because we can switch doesn't mean it's good for us. Exactly. I think there's a lot of folks who are the night owl, right? And this idea that going to bed late is okay. And it does come at a cost, though. It does.

So I think it's kind of reconciling that, all right, you, You might have this preference, right, to go to bed later, but you have to understand that there are repercussions to bypassing what would be your maybe natural pressure for sleep. That's right. So I guess the question I have for you is how much variety is there really in the chronotypes? Right. You know, because when you look at the hunter-gatherer and some of Kenneth Wright's work, it seems that we're all roughly going to want to fall asleep around 3.3 hours after the sunsets

and, you know, within 30 minutes of each other in the absence of artificial light. So I just have a really hard time with reconciling the conversations that are happening around when we can go to sleep and just, hey, go to sleep whenever you want, but just make it regular. That seems like wrong advice. I agree with you. I think the reason why, I don't know, just a hypothesis, that the reason why night owls are night owls are maybe because they're more attuned to social pressures. So if you don't, if you live in a society where there's no social pressure at all to stay up late, if you, everybody else around you is asleep, and there's nothing to do, go to sleep, right? Yeah.

So people that are a little more, have more FOMO. Yeah. Maybe the ones. That's wonderful. Good for you. You are free. Yeah, those who have more FOMO, you know, if somebody's up, they're going to want to be up. They're going to be, you know, what are you doing?

Can I help? Can I participate? And so even though their own natural body is driving them to go to sleep at their regular time, their social brain, you know, keeps them up. I say they. I mean, our, because I'm one of these people. And that does come at a cost. It really does.

People who are night owls live less long. And there was a huge study in Great Britain. I'm sure you know about it. There are hundreds of thousands of people, if not. Maybe it was 80,000 people. I can't remember. A lot of people. 83,000.

Yeah, 83,000. Thank you. Thank you. But if they expose themselves to light late at night outside of the standard deviation, of the regular population, they will die of all-cause mortality and especially cardiovascular mortality. So decreased lifespan of 10 years. Yeah, I mean.

It's significant. That's really significant. So it's, yeah, I think the title of that, the study was, you know, brighter, brighter nights, darker days. Is that the one that you're referring to? Yes, that's what I'm referring to, yeah. Yeah. So I think, like, you know, it's not to make people feel bad, but I think a lot of it is, you know, just modernity, you know, has kind of created a scenario.

where we can just bypass all of these endogenous preferences, you know, going back to sleep timing, because I think this is an area that doesn't get talked about enough, or I don't know that people are aware of what happens to human growth hormone. Like there's something magic before midnight. Yeah, no, it's really interesting to see that, and this is something we've known actually quite a long time, that growth hormone, the release of the biggest bolus of growth hormone aligns with sleep and the deep slowly state of sleep. And if you're not in that state at the right time, because it also aligns with their circadian rhythms, you just won't get that big bolus of growth hormone release. So you actually, if you're awake during the time when

you should be asleep, that early part of the night, then you will get maybe just as much growth hormone across the day, but it won't be in that big, beautiful bolus that does so much. relate to melatonin release because there's probably like some sort of you know there is a timing relationship yeah absolutely again this is not my particular field but i i've seen it and i've read the articles there is a specific timing relationship what i don't know and maybe you know this better than i do is if you suppress melatonin release will you get that growth hormone release that's a big question yeah i don't know that we have the answer yeah you know and so if you so by suppressing melatonin you mean actually bypassing kind of that natural release of melatonin.

Like we all have this like natural preference, right? And would you say that most folks don't actually know when that is? Yeah. Because of society, like because of not artificial light. And like we all have this natural preference for melatonin, right? Yeah. And it's not like you can feel your melatonin being released. But so you don't really know.

Sleep pressure, right? Yeah, yeah. So sleep pressure, you know, the longer you're awake, the more pressure you have that's process S, sleep, process sleep. Process C, circadian process, is aligned with a light, dark cycle. Normally, those two are really well aligned. If you get up in the morning, expose yourself to light, you're resetting your circadian, and you're starting your process S buildup. So. It's just totally lines up to go to sleep, you know, at a beautiful time. And some people, it's nine o'clock, some people, it's 10 o'clock. Or something like that.

16 hours. 16 hours, yeah. Something like that. If you fight that urge to sleep and suppress your melatonin with exposure to light, it's a, melatonin is the hormone of darkness. It actually won't get released if you've got lights on. Let's put it this way. If you're able to sleep in a bright environment, your eyes are closed, so it's a lot darker, but if it's a very bright environment, like you're outdoors, taking a nap, then your melatonin will still be suppressed. Even if you're asleep, your melatonin will be suppressed, what happens then to your growth hormone release? So growth hormone release and melatonin are very much aligned. I think they're, I think it was something like 20 minutes or

half an hour difference between one and the other. And you want them to be aligned because both of them are doing important things inside our cells that help the cells survive and thrive. Because your clocks are expecting that melatonin and growth hormone to come at certain times. Yeah. They're both orchestrating that timing wonderfully. Like, I think the word orchestrating is perfect because it's like an orchestra. You need different parts of the orchestra to come in at the right time. Otherwise, you just have noise, right? Even if you, everybody's got the same score in front of them. If they're playing at different times, there's nothing but noise. And that's what happens to our bodies if we're doing things at the wrong time. So I want to dig into REM. Yes, absolutely. That's my field. I know it is. I know. Thank you. We're getting to it. I know. And yeah, we've been a little off on a little bit of a tangent.

But I think an important one, you know, because I think folks are recognizing now. It's in the public consciousness that, okay, sleep is actually important. I need to prioritize it like your dad, you know, who's kind of like sleep doesn't really matter potentially, right? Yeah, in the 50s, you know, that's what people thought. Exactly. So, you know, we're kind of evolving. And so I think one of the questions we just get a lot is about timing. So I wanted to just get your thoughts on that.

As it relates to REM, what do your first? finding specifically reveal about how REM sleep reshapes the brain each night? That's my jam right there. It sure is. Oh, my goodness. When I started in sleep research, really wasn't known what REM sleep is for. It's this dangerous state where you're not thermoregulating and you're not responding to the external world.

And we're actually inhibiting our muscles active activity so that we don't act out our dreams. So in a lot of ways, we're super vulnerable. And in fact, you won't go into REM sleep unless your body is ready in a thermoneutral zone. So we didn't really know what it was for, but we knew that even if you deprived animals of only REM sleep, let them have as much non-REM sleep as they wanted. In fact, they could get more of it. But if you deprive them only of REM sleep, they had all of the same problems that came up if you deprive them of total sleep. So your immune system goes haywire, thermoregulatory system goes haywire, and metabolism goes haywire, and you feel bad, and lots of things happen.

So we knew it was important, and then there were a few decades of studies in the 70s and 80s that really showed that if you learned something important, but then deprived yourself specifically of REM sleep in the hours after you learned it, you wouldn't consolidate, you wouldn't strengthen and hang on to that memory and put it away into long-term memory structures. But there was a hypothesis that maybe REM sleep is for erasing all those things that you learn during the day that you don't want to remember, that you would just gunk your brain with. Just take up space. You take up space, useless, you know, facts.

And it was a hypothesis that wasn't testable at the time of Francis Crick and Graham Mitchison put it out there. And it was intriguing. but, you know, the sleep research fields, what are you talking about? We know that REM sleep is really important for memory, not for forgetting. So I was going to the University of Arizona for my postdoc. I was learning a technique where I could record from neurons in the hippocampus, which is important for that short-term associative learning and memory,

and also important for consolidating that memory out to the long-term storage in the rest of the brain, the neocortex. So you need it for a particular amount of time to both acquire those memories and to put them where they go. And then you don't really need it. I mean, you will use it every day while you're recalling memories, but you don't really need it for a long-term memory recall. I mean, it's always better for richer long-term memory recall, but the semantic facts, all of those are stored away. So we knew that it's important for a particular amount of time. And that time seemed to be about a week. About a week. It depended on the complexity of the memory, you know, on how much,

the more complex, the more different modalities were involved in that memory, the longer you needed to consolidate. But, and the more kind of mind-blowing this thing that you learned is, the longer you need to consolidate. But about a week is a good rule of thumb. So if we deprive REM sleep right away after learning something, we knew that we didn't consolidate it. We needed REM sleep. And we also need hippocampus for about that amount of time. So I knew I was going to be recording from this hippocampus area, important for learning and memory and for memory consolidation. I wanted to see nobody had really looked at what the hippocampus was doing during sleep, during REM sleep in particular. And I thought, I was so excited. I'm going to be able to see, is the hippocampus active

in a way that's consistent with holding onto those memories? Or is it consistent with erasing those memories. And so this was the study I did at the University of Arizona. I also did a really cool aging study that was a lot of fun. And I also did a study with NASA where we sent some rats into space about navigation. But this one about REM sleep and the function of REM sleep, I knew was going to be my bread and better, no matter how it came out, whether REM sleep was for memory or for forgetting. It's a win-win. Yeah, as a win-win. Yeah. Does it happen often? I suppose, right. I suppose it could have been for nothing and then I would have been back to baseline. You know, there's something about it. Obviously, we can't get at it with recording this way. But so the brain taught me

that my hypothesis was just all wrong because what it taught me is that Ram Sleep is both for remembering and consolidating and hanging on to those brand new memories until it can get consolidated. And then later, it's for erasing from this temporary memory structure of the hippocampus, those once novel memories that have now been consolidated so that you can refresh the hippocampus make it able to learn something new the next day, which we do need our hippocampus all of our lives to do any kind of new associative learning and memory. And it can get saturated. If we don't clear it, it can get saturated. During sleep. That's the only time. Yeah, exactly. During sleep is the time when we can put those memories away and refresh. What's up, folks? If you are

are enjoying this podcast, or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain, and you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com.

Back to the guest. what does it look like if someone is continually getting short sleep you know is not going through kind of the you know the typical four to five sleep you know 90 minutes sleep cycles yeah what is what is that human being look like yeah you know after a period of time if you can give us yeah well okay lots of things you know yeah cost you know yeah so let's start with memory our hippocampus can get saturated with the old memories so we can't learn new things and And in fact, even with one night of total sleep deprivation, your hippocampus is like it's not even there. It's not even there able to allow you to learn something new the next day.

It's like a functional hippocampalectomy, ectomy being something like you're cutting, you've cut it out. This is a feature of PTSD? So this is what we're researching right now. Yes. Yes. So people with PTSD can get totally normal amounts of REM sleep, but that REM sleep has become maladaptive and dysfunctional. Because one thing that needs to fall silent during REM sleep is the sympathetic nervous system. And the driver in the central nervous system of the, you know,

fight or flight that needs to fall silent during REM sleep is the locus serulus. And that provides what's called neurodrenaline for the brain, which works just like adrenaline for the rest of the body. It sort of juices it up. It helps us to learn much faster. But during REM sleep, we need it to be absent. And people with PTSD don't have that absence of noropenephrine or noradrenaline during REM sleep. And so instead of REM sleep allowing us to erase what was once novel from this temporary memory structure, it instead continues to reinforce that traumatic memory and keep the synapses in our brains saturated with that traumatic memory so that we can't ever sort of put it to rest. Once we've consolidated it, yeah, this happened to me, semantic memory, the story of it, all consolidated.

You should be able to erase it from the novelty encoding circuitry of the hippocampus. So this is really an injury of the nervous system that's impacting the brain. Yes. So you have to address. I work with a research out of Northwestern who does a lot of this kind of work with PTSD. And, you know, his hypothesis is that, you know, PTSD is very much an injury of the nervous system if you don't address autonomic nervous. system functioning, you can't address sleep, for example. You know, so you kind of have to get that back online and be able to retrain the heart to respond to the inputs of the automatic nervous

system. You know, I just think the autonomic nervous system is this incredible entry point for beautiful sleep, right? Like when our autonomic nervous system is dysfunctional, that's really what you're finding. Yes, exactly. Yeah. That just is like, so cool. Right. So heart rate, for example, you mentioned the heart, is supposed to be variable and dependent on the input. that are coming in. It also during sleep varies with every breath we take. Totally. It's a beautiful, big, juicy signal.

If your neuradenergic system is constantly on, it's almost, yeah, it's almost like you can't respond anymore to every breath you take. You're just flat. Dull. Yeah, it's just, muted. Yeah, it's almost as if it's just constantly on. And then you can't be responsive and you can't adapt. like you need to.

When we have decreased REM onset latency, for example, is that a indicator of depression risk? There's been some evidence that that's true. And I, yeah, just wondering, but there's a lot of arguments about whether that or not that's true. Right. No, no, there is a decreased latency to REM. And when you have that, it's often because the pressure for a REM is higher. And so why is the pressure for REM higher in people with depression? and it might be because there are things going on during the day, things you're learning

or hanging on to that your brain says, we need more REM to put this away and to put these things to rest. But what seems to be the case is that that REM sleep is also not able to do its function. So that increased pressure for REM or that earlier REM onset time is is probably indicative of the fact that the brain isn't able to do during REM sleep what it needs to do. And it's trying to get more to get it and it's just not able to. It's kind of like just running faster to stay in the same place. Gosh. One of the things that we see, we're trying to disentangle this right now.

I'm working with Jamie Zitzer at Stanford and Dr. Sather and Prather and Partharra at University of Arizona on this question. But one of the things that we see in the data, which is counter to kind of, I think, what we think about activity levels during the day and increasing our need for sleep at night. Yes. Well, one of the things that we see is that's not true potentially that, you know, folks who are really active during the day, actually sleep way more efficiently and do better in terms of the resting physiology when they're getting actually a bit less sleep. So there's that. And then the other one is, is basically looking at kind of high fit versus low fit. So kind of categorizing

individuals and really high fit, you know, as measured by, you know, BMI and basically all the information that we have about the individual in terms of the resting physiology. And so high fit versus low fit, basically we see that low fit have this decreased REM onset latency feature. High fit, they are kind of what we would think is normal in terms of when they drop into REM. So there's something about the low fit and low fit sleep way longer than the high fit. Yeah. And I've heard you talk about this, I think, on Dr. Huberman's podcast in terms of like

that's something that you've seen or know about. or so just curious about those dynamics and just your thoughts. Sure, sure. So let's just step back a second. There are two states of sleep majorly, non-REM and REM sleep. And the two are as different from one another as night and day or as waking from sleep. So the neurotransmitter levels change. The neural signatures, the way that your neurons are active, are really different between those two states.

And in a way, you can think of them as competing with one another. or actually also cooperating because non-rem sleep, that comes first, usually, is filled with all kinds of amazing events that set the brain up for really efficient, beautiful REM sleep, including protein synthesis to stabilize the memories that you formed during the day and muscles and, et cetera. Energy, metabolism, restoration, so you build up your ATP again, which is, you know, the power structure for the whole body. Oh, and the first steps of consolidating memory from the hippocampus to the neocortex all happen in that transition to REM sleep. The other thing I forgot to mention, but I really want to stress here is, is cleaning

the brain. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So those deep slow waves of deep slow wave sleep actually have been found to clean the brain through the glymphatic system. So, and we're still just learning about how this, what the mechanism is. But one of my next studies is actually going to be on the locus surrealist, the neurodrenaline structure, which is organized anatomically from the brain stem, goes to the forebrain and then back through to the back of the brain. And it fires, this is some studies by Axan Ischenko and Susan Sarah, it fires at the rising phase of that slow wave, of slow wave sleep. And it's unmyelinated axons, which means that when it fires, it takes a while for the signal to get to its structure, because it's like it's an uninsulated wire. It takes a while

to get there. And then that structure, that anatomical structure of it, sweeps noradrenaline from the front of the brain to the back of the brain. So non-REM sleep is not a time when there's no neurodrenaline in the brain. It's a time when there is neuradrenaline, but it's very specifically timed to those slow waves. And one of the things that it does, just like adrenaline does, is it constricts our blood vessels so that we can, you know, it increases our blood pressure and it helps blood flow more quickly. And the tissues, like I mean, gosh, like the downstream effect of that is massive inflammation. It's really massive. Yes, exactly. And so if it's pumping, it's active at about 1 hertz or slower. And it's causing this wave of vaso constriction to go from front to back. It helps clear all of the junk from our brain into our glymphatic system and out. So it's a beautiful time when we're cleaning our brain. And if we don't get it, if we don't get deep, big, beautiful slow waves that sweet through the brain, we're just

less efficient, much less efficient at cleaning our brain. Do we know if there's an association between that cleaning process and neurodegenerative diseases and there's got to be, is it bidirectional? Yes. Yes. So that's one of the things that exercise really helps boost the amplitude of our slow waves. We don't know exactly why, but it does. I mean, that's got to be the number one thing for brain health. Yes. I think so. I think it is. Because it helps you sleep better. I mean, just the downstream effect of exercise. Yes. It is. It is. You don't want exercise like boxing that'll injure your brain. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, not to say anything against boxers, but, you know, repeated injuries to the head is just obviously not a good thing and especially leads to a lot of neurodegenergogenic diseases. So other than that, exercise is really good. And so cleaning the brain is really, really important to prevent neurodegenerative diseases. As we get older and older, the amplitude of our slow waves gets smaller and smaller, unfortunately. But exercise can help reverse that amplitude decrement as we get older. So it is kind of no wonder, really, that we develop mild cognitive impairment, memory difficulties, and neurodegenerative diseases, much more susceptible to it as we get

older and older because the amplitude of our slow waves and our brain cleaning process becomes less and less efficient. So you'd say one of the number one tactical things that you can do during the day to initiate this beautiful process that you just. describe. Like, it's really poetic. Like, how you describe it? I just found myself, like, oh. Is exercise during the day? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It really, really, really helps. High intensity. Does it matter? Like, just like anything? You know, I don't really know. I think even walking, you know, long distances would help. But I think probably just given my own physiology, what really does help is if you can get the blood flowing. Yeah. You know, if I can feel like out of breath, it's a.

aerobic exercise, that just helps me sleep a lot better at night. It's not just slow strolling, although that's not bad for you, but something that gets the blood moving. Something vigorous. There's something, I think, like psychological to that, you know, that's powerful, you know, and you feel like you've just put in some work, you know, it's kind of like, all right, I can rest now. Like you've kind of earned it, which I know people don't like to hear that, but there's

something to do that, you know. Right. And it might also be an ex-sleepier. Yes, yes. And it might be that in one way it stresses the autonomic nervous system and causes it to be more elastic in the sense that, you know, it pushes it and then allows it to relax so that you can then fall asleep just beautifully. So some of the things that happen, or many of the things that happen, so many different things happen during non-REM sleep, including these things called sleep spindles and. Blaine what a sleep spindle is. Yeah, sleep spindles are these crazy, amazing. It's really amazing little one and a half second long happens a few times a minute that they come from the thalamus, which is called the gateway to consciousness.

It's where incoming sensory information gets sort of through a circuit board translated to our cortex, which handles what is this, why is it, you know, how does it relate to each other? So it's kind of the circuit board for that. Anyway, the thalamus and the neocortex communicates really uniquely positively well. during sleep spindles. And it is when the hippocampus seems to start to translate or put those memories away into a schema. So, for example, you know, if you learn calculus for the first time, how does calculus fit in with the rest of the world?

That sleep spindle state is the time when you're starting to, you know, make those connections and put them into the right places, the new things that you're learning. into the schema that you already have about the world. The frequency of sleep spindles is 10 to 15 hertz. So 10 to 15 times per second for one and a half seconds, your thalamus and cortex are going, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing, back and forth, communicating. And the number of times you have that per minute

is interestingly associated with your IQ. So, yeah, the more sleep spindles you have, it's a really pretty direct correlation with at least some types of IQ. Is that genetic or is that like how your early sleep, like how you're sleeping as an infant and child? I think it's set you up. Yes, I think it sets you up for having a schema with which to understand the world more intelligently. So, yeah. That's why I have never heard that.

Interestingly, marijuana destroys your sleep spindles. And also an interesting link between sleep spindles and schizophrenia and the high THC levels in today's marijuana and the ability or the tendency for young people, especially, to tip over into psychotic breaks. So anyway, that's just, that's an aside, but sleep spindles are destroyed by, by THC. THC also destroys REM sleep. So it kind of takes over all of REM sleep with this kind of 10 to 15 hertz, yes, but instead of organizing a spindle organization, it's just kind of constant. So too much of a good thing is a bad thing. And I think each sleep spindle needs to be ended after one and a half seconds.

And it's ended by the locuserilus neuronergic pulse, which probably what stamps that new memory that's being written into your schema with just a little surge of adrenaline that really just says, okay, this is what is now. So when you learn something new, no matter what your basal frequency of sleep spindles is, if that learning is able to push your sleep into. a higher number of sleep spindles, then it's a sign that you've really learned that thing and consolidated into your memory. What else destroys the sleep spindles? Oh, yeah. So, THC. Yeah.

Alcohol? Well, yeah. Alcohol. Sleeping pills, many of them destroy sleep spindles, not all of them. So pay attention to which one you're being prescribed if you're taking a sleeping pill. But yes, alcohol does. And that type of sleep is called the N2. stage of sleep. So you talked about Zone 2 exercise. This is N2 stage of sleep, which has these

sleep spindles. Sleep spindles, it's easily destroyed. So you really need to have, you know, sleep in the right place to you. Schizophrenia. People don't have good sleep spindles with schizophrenia. It's the chicken or the egg, you know, like I think about like, you know, early childhood. Yes. You know, and I think about this from this perspective of, you know, sleep health equity, like just thinking of urban environments, underserved communities, you know, just like... War zones. Yeah.

Sleep is not good. Sleep gets disrupted if your parent has to work three jobs and you have to be put in daycare early and sharing a room with three other siblings. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's disruption of sleep is not good. And so, yeah, sleep is extremely important.

And these sleep spindles are really important to developing your brain into all that it can be. So do not sleep deprive your child. Do not, if you can possibly avoid it. Yeah, let your kids sleep. Yeah, let them sleep. Don't wake them up to, you know, stimulate them with more learning. Your brain is working hard when you sleep. It's doing really important things.

It's not a waste of time. Yeah. So that's an N2 sleep. And then from N2 sleep, you go into REM sleep. Right. And so all of those deep slow waves and sleep spindles set up your brain. your brain to consolidate, start consolidating those memories so that during REM sleep, your brain is actually as active as it is during wakefulness, but in a different way. So instead of being

attuned to the outside world like we are when we're awake, listening to each other, talk, et cetera, during REM sleep, we're attuned to our internal conversation. So, and that's when we are able to sort of reformulate our schema based on the disparate things that we learned during the day and erase some things that are no longer working for us and instead strengthen other things that allow us to be more creative and insightful. And really clearing, actually, that's the unique time when you can clear the brain of things that are no longer working for us, no longer true,

and downscaling the novelty of what happened the day before so that it doesn't remain as though it was novel whenever we recall it, which is not good, especially for bad memories. You know, it's, it's, you want to not have to relive when you're recalling a memory, all of the emotional activation and intensity of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You want to be able to remember all the facts, the important things about it. Right. But not. At that level of intensity. Not that, not as though it's happening right now again. Right. Wow. So that's, that's my research is that dual activity of REM sleep, the dual function of REM sleep,

both to strengthen the things. that are important, put them away, re-formulate your schema based on the new information, and to put to rest the parts of their memories that they're not needed. The brain is really a metabolically expensive place to be. It's only 2% of our body weight, but it takes, even at rest, 20% of our metabolic energy. So we need to tightly maintain which synapses, which connections between neurons, which are expensive metabolic to maintain, and which we need to not maintain in order to preserve for our entire lives, our ability to respond to the environment in an adaptive way.

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know what a disease spindle looks like versus a healthy spindle. I don't know myself as much how spindles change with age. Sleep definitely changes with age in general, the amplitude of our slow waves we talked about already. Is it a marker of neurological health? It is. I think it is because one thing that changes with age is our spindle, and with insomnia as well, is our spindle sleep and our REM sleep, it's much more fractionated. So it's long consolidated, you know, wakefulness-free selves. Instead, we are awake up a lot more often. And I think that's due to an autonomic nervous system dysfunction that can build.

Actually, that local surrelus area that I talked about is so important for our ability to respond to the world around us. it is actually the first to be compromised when we deprive ourselves of sleep. And it is the first to show a buildup of misfolded proteins called tau proteins, hyperphosphorated tau. That is really the degree of hyperphosphorrelated tau that builds up in our locus serilis is also really linearly related to our susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease. And so even in very, very, you know, in brains that we get from people who have died before they got Alzheimer's, you can start to see there might be a buildup. And the greater the BRAC diagnosis of Alzheimer's and memory dysfunction and all of that, the bigger the buildup of this hyperphosphory-related tau.

And it seems to start just really early. It's also builds up in Parkinson's disease. So the locust rilus is kind of a downstream, upstream. The earliest with Parkinson's disease, the dopaminergic cells, to which the locus surlis projects, start to build up their misfolded proteins and compromises our ability to move. So then our question is, you know, how do you prevent that? How do you get good, healthy sleep to make sure your hyperphosphor-related towel clears? And one of those is sort of a positive feedback loop, great, slow.

waves, then feedback can clear that hyperphosphor-related tau, and then the locus rails can cause great slow waves. It's kind of this positive feedback loop. And we don't really know how and why exercise helps that process. It's an area that needs to be further investigated. It seems like anything that we do during the day that helps create better conditions for sleep at night, like you just, you know, whether it's managing stress throughout the day in a proactive way, like engaging in breath work and mindfulness and tending to your relationships, look at your purpose, all of these things, right? Absolutely.

Look at your purpose is a good one, actually. One of the things that calms the locusts us down during the day and reduces our neurodrenergic levels is learning, actually. So if we, for example, you know, have something terrible happen to us, if we can, you know, remember our purpose and think about, you know, the, how this might fit in with the grand scheme of things, this terrible thing that happened, and sort of figure out a way to learn from it, you know, what not to do next or what to do next to avoid it or think about something, the greater good. That feeds back a signal to our

locus thrillus to say, okay, you've done your job, we've learned from this now, you can calm down. And there are actual, you know, transmitters and that go back to the locus thrillers. have it calm down. You don't want it to be sustained activity over long periods of times. It needs to be responsive to acute stressors. And then once it's done its job, it needs to calm down again. And it needs to calm down before you go to sleep. So breathwork is a good way to do it. Again, we don't know exactly why. But it's interesting. The locus is positioned in a place in our brainstem that is right next to cistern of cerebral spinal fluid. And every time you breathe, it gets compressed. And then every time you breathe out,

it gets relaxed and compressed and relaxed. And that actually moves the locuserlus. If you've seen this video that I've seen, I try and find it for you, of every breath you take and every pump of your heart really actually physically moves your brain stem. It massages it. It massages it. Yes. That's a good way to say it. Yeah. It's massaging it back there. And it might be what helps to clear it. Yeah, we could hypothesize that exercise when you're really pumping it, you're really getting like the Swedish massage versus just like that's a great way to think of it. So I, you know, with the learning, I think about like when I'm really engaged in a task and I'm super fired up about like the thing that I'm doing, like I'm just in the present. Yeah.

You know, and that changes my nervous system in ways that are really profound, you know, like I'm not thinking about the future of the past. And not worrying. Yeah, like I wonder if there's some sort of. relationship there, like why learning is the thing that you've found that really does help. Yeah. Well, I think the locusts real activity really is to, the reason why it's active is to help us learn. It actually helps us put just one-time learning into a long consolidated state. So it makes sense that once you've learned, you know, that learning signal feeds back and says,

okay, great, stop, you know, you're good. Okay. So maybe the sympathetic nervous system needs not just to be fight or flight. It needs to be fight, fight, fight, learn. Interesting. The other thing I wanted to ask you about just, is there anything during wakefulness that mimics sleep? You know, there's yoga nidra, like, you know, kind of the non-sleep, deep breaths, like, you know, is there any evidence that? Well, the problem is that a lot of the things that we know about sleep, we know.

through pretty invasive measures, you know, measuring neurotransmitter release in the brain, you know, requires a probe in the brain, measuring which parts of the brain are doing what. And there aren't many people who are instrumented in that way. And we can't teach rats how to do yoga need to. At least we haven't succeeded yet. Actually, Jack Feldman at UCLA is as a way to control our breathing. I love them. Yeah.

In the brainstem. The astrological sign? Yes. So he can control the breathing of rats such that they are breathing like breathwork. Interesting. And interestingly, they also are able to not get PTSD as much from a traumatic, you know, event. So breathing is training their nervous. Yeah.

Yeah. So that is interesting. But in terms of other things, it's just there's a limit between what we can do in other animals and what we can do in humans. So we don't know the answer to that question. really, except that I have seen a study with people who can achieve really great levels of transcendental meditation. And the brainwave activity you see in them, one they're meditating, is this theta rhythm that you get during REM sleep. But we aren't able to tell whether other neurotransmitters like noradrenaline and serotonin, which are normally off during REM sleep,

are also off in people who have transcendental meditation. So we are, We don't know if it can accomplish all the same things that REM sleep can, even if you have a theta, a beautiful theta rhythm. So so far, I would say the answer is no. There's nothing that can replace sleep. And in fact, no one has been able to replace. If you don't sleep, you die. And there's so many things that happen during sleep. Like I said, metabolic immunologic cleaning and consolidating, et cetera, that even if you're,

you could replace three of them, but not the rest, you're going to suffer. I do a lot of research with shift work, you know, which is really an interesting population. You know, the goal to just see, hey, you know, what are some things that we can do to offset some of these deleterious effects of being up during the biological night? And, you know, we're seeing exercise really does seem to help breasting physiology just generally. But are there anything, anything that you'd recommend for shift work that you found maybe in your research that would be useful for that population to just call out? Yeah. Yeah, I think what you would probably say, too, is as long as you, the better you can align your circadian rhythm with your sleep rhythm, the better off you're going to be. Just on average, as much as humanly possible. As much as humanly possible. So if you're a shift worker and you can really use blackout curtains during the daytime so you don't see that bright sunlight. So you protect that sleep. Yeah, protect that sleep and that circadian alignment. You're not then suppressing your melatonin. them, et cetera. If you can, as a shift worker, say you work midnight to 6 a.m. or whatever, 10 p.m.

to 6 a.m. If you can treat your body as though you have flown around to the other side of the world, that much control over your light, dark cycle, your activity, your meals, all that, obviously, or not obviously, but I'll tell you that if you do fly around to the other side of the world. It takes a while for your circadian sleep, you know, and social world to all align. But they do eventually align. And you're fine. You're absolutely fine. But if you're trying to fly around the world every three or four days, like some shift workers unfortunately have to do, your body never really has time to catch up. So you're constantly misaligned. Yeah, you're constantly misaligned. And it is deleterious to your health, all kinds of ways. So we're under review.

right now and it was a 270 acute care surgeons and just to talk about how deleterious it is to the health of these humans but they basically was the mean age of the group was 43 and they had on average over the course of the last 10 years had at least two nights where they were on call per month was the average and the resting physiology again mean age 43 resting physiology looks like a 60 year old I totally believe it yes I totally believe I wonder, and it brings me to the question of, is the quality of melatonin and the bolus of HGH that's released when you're falling asleep during the day, is it just simply different than, you know, because of the clock, the expectations of what should be happening

indigenously is just misaligned with the natural light, dark cycle, regardless of like Yeah, there have been studies to show that shift workers, for example, the less aligned, everything is, the smaller the human growth hormone release is. So less aligned in terms of the natural light, dark cycle. Yeah. So like, okay, so even though I'm regularly going to bed at, you know, 10 a.m. Well, and waking up at 4 p.m. No. So, you don't say, like, I'm just wondering, like, is that okay?

If you're regularly doing that and you're controlling your exposure to light to be aligned as though that were your new day, that's okay. That's actually not so bad. Okay. It doesn't really matter what side of the earth you're on as long as you're, you're aligned with all of the rhythms. So if you're on, you know, the wrong side of the earth for your work shift, as long as you can control your environment such that your body believes it's on the right side of the earth. Even artificially.

Even artificial light. Yeah. Yeah. Then it'll be fine. It's going to be okay. Yeah, yeah. There's one study I'm thinking about where they take animals and shift them, you know, six hours or 12 hours. And it was only measuring up.

across a few weeks, and across those few weeks, as long as they controlled everything, they were able to get everything aligned again. It was a little muted in terms of its total amplitude, but it was at least aligned. So it might never be as good. And again, it's really controlling the world around you. You have to basically live in a cave because stuff happens around you. Or we just all have to get in the cahoots to just align ourselves with a naturally dark cycle. Right, exactly.

Yeah. It's not going to happen. No. It's kind of my dream, though. Well, I mean, there are things that have to happen. Hospitals have to be staffed in the middle of the night, you know. Well, decrease the amount of folks who need to be in that situation, you know. Yeah.

Build a roster sizes. So, you know, people only have to do it, you know, once a month maybe as opposed to, you know, like, I don't know. I have so much, like, empathy for that group. You know, there's just really amazing what they do for our society. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, emergency workers. for example. I mean, emergencies happen all times day and night. They're constantly having to

disrupt their circadian. And they are, these first responders are putting their lives on the line for us, not just in terms of putting themselves in danger at the moment, but putting their long-term survival. Yeah, really trying to figure out, you know, what are the, I mean, creatine has been a really cool, I don't know if you've heard much about, you know, the use of creatine to offset sleep deprivation and help with cognitive functioning and yeah it's a merging area it's it's funny it's it's a molecule that it's been studied for you know yeah it's the metabolism yeah yeah it's you know it's so it's cool to kind of see that more research going into this area of like okay how do we help these folks you know like just pay down some of this yeah yeah i really think

the Nobel Prize winning research is going to be about metabolism interesting and sleep and sleep yeah what gets you really really excited in the next five to ten years in terms of kind of, you know, sleep, cognition, performance. Like, you know, what do you get really fired up about? Yeah. Well, ATP energy is important for everything that our cells do and our entire bodies. And it is, the longer we're awake, actually, the more ATP gets broken down to ATP stands for adenosine trifosate. I know you do that. The next, when it gets broken down by the metabolic cycle to give energy to cells, the next stage is ADP, adenosine diphosphate, then AMP, Adenicine-Milifosate,

and by the time it gets to just adenosine, it no longer holds any power to, for our cells. And the longer we're awake, the more ATP gets broken down into adenosine. So somehow during wakefulness, we're not able to keep up. We're just not able to keep up with it. The first thing to happen when we fall asleep, you know, this is why a power nap is called a power nap, is our mitochondria catch up and turn adenosine into ATP again. And that adenosine signal, that buildup of adenosine is part of process S that drives us to sleep because our body is saying, our brains are saying, ah, too much adenosine, we need to convert it to ATP again. So when we are sleep deprived, even if we've drunk caffeine and we don't feel sleepy, that's because we've blocked that adenosine signal.

So our brains don't know how much adenosine is built up there. So when we're sleep deprived, that adenosine just keeps building. And our brains become less and less metabolically able to keep up, not just our brains, the rest of our body as well. And so we are actually causing all kinds of damage, reactive oxygen species. disease we're going to become vulnerable to. I mean, we're an allostatic overload. Yeah. This is the basis for aging and disease essentially. Exactly. Exactly. With aging, or mitochondria are liable to keep up. And the relationship between sleep and aging and mitochondria function is really interesting. I think when we're sleep deprived, the first thing that happens when we're, you know, at 4 in the morning, when I'm staying up all night, I get really hungry for high energy foods like, you know, candy bars. And that's because my body is recognizing I'm in a deficit here, an energy deficit, give me high energy food, you know, and forget the salads.

I just want something really high energy to feed me. Our brains work on the aerobic system. It can't work anaerobically. So it needs glucose to function. That is, of course, very unhealthy for many other things. Yeah. I mean, the sleep-derived person's going to eat roughly somewhere in the tune of 300 more calories a day, just because they can't, they're out of whack in terms of their perception of what's actually happening. That's right. And I know that burning 300 calories a day is enough to get you from overweight to a beautiful weight, a very healthy weight. So 300 calories can make all the difference in the world. So yeah, the other thing that happens is actually our metabolism goes haywire. And if you do it with a rat and to measure how much they're burning,

they're actually burning more energy. They're eating more food. They're burning more energy. they're just not able to keep up. I also feel really cold about four in the morning. It could be sympathetic drive. It's resa constriction. My hands and feet just get really, really, really cold. Interestingly, I'm throwing all kinds of facts at you right now. Melatonin is part of the signal that vasodilates. So actually you can tell, you can tell when your melatonin is being released and it's a good time to go to sleep because the vasodilation, it induces, actually makes our hands and feet warmer. Yeah, it draws from the core.

Yes, because we are trying to cool our bodies. Right, right, on the inside. I don't know exactly why we want to cool our bodies, but that is what happens. And so a flushing of our hands and feet ears. You can see kids when they get melatonin release, their ears get bright red, right? And it probably, because the vasodilation makes them itch, and so they start, you know, rubbing their ears. Oh, that's so cute. So put that kid to bed immediately.

Let them go to sleep. Yeah. That is the signal. Yeah. That's fascinating. So what is your dream study to do right now? And maybe you're already doing it. I know. No, there's so many. It's so, like, that's the thing that keeps me up in. Yeah. It's just like, there's too many questions. Like, I can't even like. Well, one dream study is how can we deepen sleep? How can we? So your hypothesis, healthy sleep. Deeper sleep's better. Deeper sleep is better. Deeper sleep does all of, you know, sleep aligned with your mel. Melatonin rhythm and growth hormone and big, beautiful, deep sleep that slow waves that clean your brain. All of that makes sleep more efficient. And so how do you prevent the age-related decrease in slow-wave amplitude, the disease-related decrease in slow-wave amplitude, the non-exercise-related, you know, decrease in slow-wave amplitude so that we can do a better job, a more efficient job at cleaning our brains, setting us up for the next stage of sleep, which is that spindle stage when we're consolidating

our memories, and the very energy taxing state of REM sleep. So you build up that beautiful energy, ATP, so that when you go into REM sleep and you're doing all the really hard work of pruning and increasing synapses. So, you know, how do we make sleep more efficient? And so I kind of am interested in all phases of that, deeper, deep sleep. sleep, more efficient, beautiful spindles, and a deeper, more prolonged and healthy, adaptive REM sleep. Those are the three areas that I think are really exciting. And I started with REM sleep and I'm moving back to non-REM stage two.

And now I'm moving back to deep slow-wave sleep. So, you know, because I see they're all related to one another. You're all interrelated. If you were to have to define healthy sleep, what would that definition look like? Yeah. So on a macro level, it would be actually, interestingly, so a healthy person given all the time, no social pressure, no work pressure, all the time they want to sleep. In fact, more time than they want to sleep. Nothing to do but in a darkened room, but to sleep. They will still only sleep eight and a half hours a day. Eight hours, 12 minutes. Yeah, eight hours. It depends on the study. Eight hours and 12 minutes. In one study, it was eight hours and 45 minutes. Yeah, but that gave them 16 hours a day with nothing else to do.

So it's around eight and a half, something like that. Eight hours and 15 minutes, something like that. That's in a very, you know, rarefied condition. In our actual modern life, those who do the best are the seems to be those who sleep about seven and a half hours, something like that. So that is five cycles, is that right, 90-minute cycles? Yeah. And you can see the sleep change across, you know, more deep, slowly sleep in the first part

of the night, more room sleep than last part of the night, that seems to be a good night. Now, it's not seven and a half hours in bed. That's seven and a half hours asleep. Exactly. So that's a longer time in bed. I try and sleep without an alarm. Those who can just wake up spontaneously, so much better than an alarm waking you up out of the wrong cycle, for example, stage of the cycle. I think that that's what healthy, I mean, some people can do okay, at least on much less sleep. And I do okay on much less sleep, but I think it's at a cost. Maybe cognitively, am I okay? You think you're okay?

I think I'm okay. David's work at you Penn. Right. I think it's not, it's not, we can't perceive our own. Yeah, you can't perceive our own. I think my muscles aren't being repaired as well. I think. Something.

My metabolism is still being screwed up. So I think I'm okay. But in fact, there's a lot of stuff I can't perceive. Yeah. We see that that sweet spot for our population in terms of like the really physiologically healthy folks, you know, the BMI, that everything is about seven hours and 42 minutes. Yeah. Totally believe that.

Yeah. That's really beautiful. I love that. There's some data. The less, yeah, are spending way more time in bed because I think there's inflammation. There's things that their body needs to do, right, in order to repair and regenerate. And it takes way more time. It does.

It does. If you're able to get that much sleep and that's what you get consistently and you get at a consistent time of night, I think you're doing well. I think it's going to be hard to better. maximize what you're, what you're already doing. If you find yourself at a time of life when you suddenly need a lot more sleep, enough is not enough anymore. It might be that your sleep has changed and it's become inefficient and you need to address whatever physiological concern. Paramedopause, menopause. Yeah. Estrogen goes offline and all of a sudden you're like,

yes. Yeah. Yeah. Spending more time or, you know, just really inefficient sleep. Right. Or you've gained weight and your or your muscle is being lost and you get sleep apnea. You're being awakened a lot. You're being awakened a lot more times than you know, then you realize during the night. And so suddenly you need nine hours of sleep, you should go to a doctor and see what's going on if that suddenly happens. Or you may have an infection. Sleep is really good for helping us fight infections. So on the precipice of sickness. Yeah. Don't deprive. If you need nine hours and you get it. Absolutely, because there's something probably going on during that extra time. We have really good data on, you know, people who are, we have kind of a sick prediction algorithm, we can basically tell

when you're sick, you know, because we have so much data about the individual. But one of the things we haven't looked in is just when people are really sick, what does their sleep architecture look like? And exactly, how long are they sleeping? And I'm pretty sure they're probably sleeping longer, you know, to try to, you know, recover from it. Even we're able to kind of detect sickness three days prior to even symptom onset, you know, which is kind of interesting. So just looking at, you know, how kind of that manifests would be interesting. Yeah, interleukins. affect our sleep. I think the other thing, like the quality of your muscle tissue and how that impacts sleep. And, you know, I think that's another thing that we could lean into from a

metabolic standpoint, you know, that I think there's probably really strong relationships as people age, you know, if the quality of the muscle tissue is good, you know, you can probably preserve sleep, yeah, I would think. Yeah, and vice versa. And vice versa. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, so many interesting questions. All right, Gina, we're coming up on time here. I've got a little rapid fire for you. Okay. These are true, false, yes, no. Okay.

Okay. Uh-oh. I know. All right. True or false. REM sleep is mainly for dreaming. False. I think there's a lot of things that go on during REM sleep.

We always dream. And it's the fun part of REM sleep. It's not rapid fire. But I think that the same neural activity that causes dreams is the thing that causes insights and causes us to make new connections. between things in our schema, and also helps us to divorce emotions from memories. So I think dreams are part of it. Dreams are the conscious tip of the iceberg, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

Amazing. Okay. Yes or no. Can you actually catch up on sleep after several nights of sleep deprivation? Yes and no. I'm thwarting your rapid fire yes, no. They're great questions. They're great questions.

So some things catch up within two or three days. Other things take a lot longer, and we actually haven't even found the end of some of these processes. So try not to do it. For example, the locus serilis, even if you're sleep depriving yourself for fun reasons, you're going to a concert or you're at, you know, Magic Mountain at some, you know, a theme park, I'll say. Your locus serilis is under stress. The longer we stay awake, the more stressed it is. and if we don't have antioxidants to prevent it, our locustics will actually degrade. And it will degenerate.

And it's melatonin is so critical for that, right? Melatonin is really important. People realize that's not just the sleepy hormone. It does so many other protective functions. Exactly. Exactly. So if you find yourself having to stay up late, eat a handful of blueberries, something with antioxidants in it.

And when you're sleeping, certain genes are going to turn on and off, right, that you never get back. Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness. Like, that's what I always think of it. Yeah. Because I'm never going to be able to catch up on those genes that should have gone on off like during sleep. Our DNA is repaired. Yes.

During sleep. So if you're not repairing your DNA, the cell will die. And then you'll never get that cell back. So it's basically you're withdrawing from the bank account. You never get that money back. Yes, exactly. And speaking of bank account, that's one of your questions, can you bank sleep? No.

And not bank sleep. So that's interesting. You can't put sleep in a savings account. There's no. So some people, there are researchers, sleep researchers who really say that you can bank sleep. No, no. What you can do is you can be sleep replete. And then if you're a sleep replete, yeah, fill up the tank as high as it goes.

But as soon as you sleep deprive yourself, you're going to be depriving yourself of that. So it's not like you can go over the amount of that you need and then draw down to normal levels when you're sleep depriving yourself. You start with as much as you need. and then every time you sleep deprive yourself you're getting less of that what you need got it okay amazing that's a really good one because we've been wondering about that okay one more thing about that yes ma'am if you start below the maximum that you need and you start sleep depriving yourself you'll get to the bottom much faster right so okay yeah so the more sleep deprived you are before that you're just your declines are going to happen faster yes faster and faster all right all right true or false forgetting is

just as important as remembering when it comes to healthy brain function. Yes. And you went into down. Yeah, I wouldn't call it forgetting so much as eliminating those synapses that you don't need. Yes or no. Is it possible to improve emotional resilience simply by improving sleep quality? Yes, easy one. That's exciting. True or false, sleep affects your ability to make complex decisions and solve problems creatively. Yes. One of the reasons why teenagers, I think, are so much more, emotionally labile is because they are kind of chronically sleep deprived relative to their own circadian drive. And so there was a beautiful study that showed that if you paid teenagers to sleep, they will sleep more. And this was done for an entire month. And they feel better. They do better

cognitively. They do better in school. Their parents, their teachers, their friends, everybody says, oh, they are so much better. They say they feel better. But as soon as you, as you've removed that impetus, because of social pressures, school pressures, they will sleep deprive themselves again and feel bad again. And to be emotionally liable. So if you have a teenager, if you're a parent, have a teenager who's really emotionally labile, maybe you should think about finding a way to help them get more sleep. Yeah. Pay them to sleep. Pay them to sleep. I know. And it's controlled. I have two teenagers, so I get it. You know, the technology, you know, It's so hard. It's just like such a, it takes over the brain in ways that I don't think we, it is addictive. Yeah. And it's just like you have to get that in control. But yeah, just protecting the kid's sleep. I feel so grateful that my kids really buy in, you know, to that. I know. It's like the one thing I, you know, I know we got right, you know. Yeah. And the problem is if you're sleep deprived, it's like being drunk. Your judgment goes out the window and you can't even at a time. Yeah. Yeah. You can't then make the good judgment to go to bed.

end time because your brain is already you know not making yeah the prefrontal cortex especially it's one of the first areas to be and that's their judgment decision making yeah which is in teenagers still forming like it's not even actually like fully formed yes and sleep is an important part of formulation of that exactly yeah i know i i think we need like a whole like national global rejig on you know kind of sleep health for for teen adolescents and just even from babies on up, you know, just given what we know about, you know, obviously there's genetic component to disease and predispositions and whatnot. But I think there's just a lot of environmental things that I just feel like all of our resources, government, if it went into

kind of sleep health and autonomic regulation. The world would be a happier place. Just think about like all of the leaders in our history who are operating on short sleep. Yes. Like let's just do that analysis. Yes, exactly. Dr. Poe, I cannot thank you enough. Thank you for being so gracious with your time and just all the contributions that you've made to this space. You are just a phenomenal human and scientist. Thank you. Thanks for the good work you do. I'm here at WOOP. I appreciate that. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of the Woop Podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question was answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-434349.52. If you think we're going to be able to you. If you

about joining whoop, you can visit whoop.com, sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members can use the code will, W-I-L-L, to get a $60 credit on W-UP accessories when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.