Matthew Walker: Why We Sleep
EPISODE 157
All living creatures need sleep. The question is: why? In Why We Sleep, neuroscientist and sleep expert Dr. Matthew Walker presents groundbreaking discoveries about sleep and how it affects all aspects of our physical, mental, and emotional health, including our creativity and longevity.
So why should you sleep, and how can you improve your quantity and quality of sleep? Unfortunately, most people in modern societies are sleep-deprived, and we don’t even realize it because we’re so used to operating at suboptimal levels.
It’s time we understand and unlock the transformative power of sleep.
SHOW OUTLINE
INTRO
Matthew and the importance of sleep
Sleep is your way of saving information (3m04)
SCIENCE
Matthew and the discovery around the aging effect on sleep quality
Sleep and the brain (2m41)
Matthew and your immune system responding to sleep
Sleep and the body (2m51)
IMPROVE YOUR SLEEP HYGIENE
Matthew’s tips for a good night sleep, Part 1
Regularity, Making it dark and Keeping it cool (1m55)
Matthew’s tips for a good night sleep, Part 2
Avoid alcohol and Caffeine, and Get up and out of bed (2m53)
OUTRO
Matthew and how sleep is a necessity for all of us
The swiss army knife of health (1m22)
CLIP CREDITS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MuIMqhT8DM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MuIMqhT8DM&ab_channel=TED
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to the moonshots podcast. It's episode 157. I'm your co-host Mike Parsons. And as always, I'm joined by the sleeping giant himself. Mr. Mark Pearson Freeland. Hey, good morning, Mike. You're right. There's no sleeping on the job here, but there's certainly a lot of learning out loud, particularly in today's episode.
Isn't there. How good is that? And we are about to disrupt ourselves. I think for a second time in this health series only mark that's right today and to show number 157, we're jumping in Mike into Dr. Matthew. Walker's why we sleep (Avalable on Amazon) the new science of sleep and dreams, which is number two in our brand new never touched before health center.
And boy, this health series is rocking our world a little bit. We focused on something that we do perhaps more than anything else [00:01:00] breathing in our last episode. And I tell you what mark something I'm quite partial to is a good old nap, the afternoon nap, or just a big eight hour block of sleeping.
It just. The rejuvenation that comes from sleep. So what a delight it is to study author Matthew Walker and his very popular book, why we sleep and we've got science, we've got practical tips. We've got some hacks that you can do. We're going all throughout the universe of sleeping and mark, I think the short of it is if you want to be at your best at home or in the office, anywhere in between.
You got to get your sleep sorted. So you should buckle in for this show is I think we're gonna share a number of tips. Some of which, even I did not know. That's right. And as a quick scene, set a mic for you and I and our listeners. If you what's a Google, how much you sleep in your lifetime. The [00:02:00] average number of years that people tend to sleep in their life is around 26.
26 years of your life, obviously on how you go is spent asleep. So I think it's something that we all do exactly. Like you just said, breathing, I think breathing and sleep as things that so intrinsic to all of us and we do a lot of, but I think until now, and getting, digging into Matthew Walker's book.
I didn't really appreciate it either. How fundamentally important and even surprising the importance of sleep can be for us. So I think today we've got that action packed show and loads of great clips from that. Fantastic. The opportunity for you, me and all of our listeners is to in fact, learn out loud, maybe to get some of the science behind sleeping maybe to share some of these ideas that sleeping and a good sleep is [00:03:00] more than just feeling.
Like capable and competent when you wake up mark, I've been very guilty of just like one of those guys that just worked really hard during the week and tried to catch up. On the weekend, I was guilty of being like pretty exhausted by Thursday. Certainly by Friday, I. I, I'm going to go.
And as far as saying that for a lot of my career, all in 20 years, I've just been a mess by Friday, just due to working so hard. So intensely, maybe cutting corners on my sleep. And it's just not good. You hear so many habit hacking approaches in life oh, you want to start your own business, stay up late or wake up early.
And I think this is very true for a lot of. Where we've perhaps sacrificed how [00:04:00] much you get a good night's sleep in favor of doing that work. And I think what Matthew reveals to us today in show 157 is exactly that the importance of sleep goes far beyond just the ability to perform the next day or the next week.
But in fact, as a whole in your being. It's so fundamental to being the best version of yourself, it's unavoidable and we should all take ownership and control over how much good sleep we get every single day. You're absolutely right. So I think you've just set it up perfectly. So with no further ado, let's listen to author Matthew Walker, who wrote why we sleep (Available on Amazon).
Let's listen to Matthew talking about the importance of sleep. Let me start with the brain and the functions of learning and memory, because what we've discovered over the past 10 or so years is that you need sleep after learning to essentially hit the save button on those new memories so that you don't [00:05:00] forget.
But recently we discovered that you also need sleep before learning and now to actually prepare your. Almost like a dry sponge, ready to initially soak up new information and without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain essentially become water logged as it were. And you can't absorb new memories.
So let me show you the data here in this study, we decided to test the hypothesis that pulling the all-nighter was a good idea. So we took a group of individuals and we assigned them to one of two experimental groups, a sleep group, and a sleep deprivation group. Now the sleep group, they're going to get a full eight hours of slumber, but the deprivation group, we're going to keep them awake in the laboratory under false.
There's no naps or caffeine by the way. So it's miserable for everyone involved. And then [00:06:00] the next day we're going to place those participants inside an MRI scanner. And we're going to have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we're taking snapshots of brain activity. And then we'll go into test them to see how effective that learning has been.
And that's what you're looking at here on the vertical axis. And when you put those two groups head to head, what you find is a quite significant 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep. I think this should be concerning considering what we know is happening to sleep in our education populations right now.
In fact, to put that in context, it would be the difference in a child. ACEing an exam versus failing it miserably. And we've gone on to discover what goes wrong within your brain to produce these types of learning disabilities. And there's a [00:07:00] structure that sits on the left and the right side of your brain called the hippocampus.
And you can think of the hippocampus, almost like the informational inbox of your brain. It's very good at receiving new memory files and then holding on to them. And when you look at this structure and those people, who'd had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning related activity. Get in those people who are sleep deprived, we actually couldn't find any significant signal whatsoever.
So it's almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox and any new incoming files. They were just being bounced. You couldn't effectively commit new experiences to memory. Mike waterway to kick off the show with a dose of truth from Dr. Matthew Walker. Yeah. It wasn't an interesting [00:08:00] that he used this analogy that sleep is like a save button.
So it's not only about being awake, ready to learn and perform, but it's how you with. With hold and retain and build upon that knowledge or that work or that, that experience. That was quite interesting for me because we often just think about, oh, I have to get a good night's sleep so I can do my big thing tomorrow so I can perform.
But he's actually making the case that you actually need to do it just to. Hit the save button on everything that happened during the day. Yeah. It's really interesting for me. There's been times in my life as I'm sure there are for yourself and our listeners where I've pulled all-nighters whether as a child playing video games all night long, or when I got into my career, Genuinely pulling all nighters in the office, sleeping under a desk for maybe half an hour before a client turns up at 9:00 AM.
I think we've all probably done that before. And I think [00:09:00] the, this really surprising thing actually for me is the sign. That proves as Massey's broken down with MRI scans, the deficit of 40% in performance. If I'm building on what Matthew was saying, it is the difference between an a grade for a student and maybe a D grade, so pass or fail.
But also as I think about my own career, what impact. 40% deficit has had on my work the following days or maybe even the week following is absolutely staggering. And this idea of hitting the save button, allowing yourself to rest, and most importantly, allowing your brain to make those cyanotic connections, retain that information and actually be ready for the next day.
In order to absorb more information is absolutely staggering and surprising. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot inside of the book.[00:10:00] That really is like a big slap in the face. Isn't it like just a few things that I've pulled from the book. If you have 10 days with just seven hours of sleep, this is equal.
To a 24 hour sleep deprivation period and the brain dysfunction caused from that. So let me, let's just unpack that for a second. So you go 10 days with seven hours sleep that is equal to having an all-nighter and all the dysfunction that comes from having an all-nighter. So think about this.
How many of us you meet and all of our listeners have perhaps had a week. Or at least one, maybe two weeks in a row where you've only on average, got seven hours of sleep that is equal. If you do that fitness 10 days, that is the equivalent to going [00:11:00] 24 hours without sleep. And just when you've done that, just remember how dysfunctional we're like zombies barely compass mentors.
That's just shaving off one hour a day. That's what it does, mark. So let me build on that because this is fascinating. So they're 30 days in a month. So let's say to every 10 days you go with only seven hours of sleep, this is the equivalent of having three or nighters every single month. Most one a week.
I, if I did that, I would be exhausted and I would obviously not be able to perform to the best of my ability, but the truth is there's certainly been times in my life when I've probably gone more than a week, maybe even two, three, maybe even four weeks of less than seven hours sleep. I had no idea that's the effect and the dysfunction that it has on my brain until now.
That's fascinating. Yeah. And look, I think that the key thing here. [00:12:00] Is, we have a choice. Do we want to make his sleep like a non-negotiable? I think and it's what you're going to hear in the rest of the clips is that this is way, way more than just feeling like energized or alert during the day, this will affect our performance, our overall health there's even direct.
Links to the lack of sleep and cancer. So sustained the lack of sleep results in really genetic disease. And so this really makes it. A moment for us mark and all of our listeners to say, do we want to prioritize sleep? Do we want to make that as an essential habit? And we've done a lot around habit design.
So what's coming up for the rest of the show is that we're going to get into like the brain and how it really is affected by sleep, how our [00:13:00] bodies we're going to get into what it takes to get a good night's sleep. Some of the things we can do and. We're going to bring it really home and show and demonstrate how good sleep behavior is going to result in benefits far beyond just being a good entrepreneur.
So that's pretty action packed. Isn't that? Isn't that's very action packed and talk about action packed, Mike, we've got a number of. Members and listeners who deserve a bit of a shout out don't they, they're certainly not. I'm hoping they're getting good night's sleep and I'm sure they will after today's show, but they're certainly joining us in the moonshot show alive and kicking aren't.
They. Absolutely. And I think it's only appropriate that we do a shout out. So mark let's let's tip the hat to all of our members on Patrion. That's right. Members on patron drum roll, please. Welcome back Bob and Niles, John Terry and Brighty Nile and Sandy modular. And in case. [00:14:00] DMR Tom Byron and mark Halena, Yaniv, Yom margin, Connor and Rodrigo.
Welcome guys. And thank you for joining us via the Patreon platform. Great to have you here. Yes. And if you do want to become a member head over to moonshots.io, click on the big member button, because once you're a member, you will get access to our exclusive master series where we go even deeper than we do on this show.
So head over to moonshots dot AAO, become a member. It's all hooked up through Patrion. So it's nice and easy. And your support is very much appreciated because when you contribute to us, it helps us pay our hosting bills our website bill and it actually helps us put together such a regular every single week, 52 weeks a year.
We put this show together for you, our listeners, the moon shutters. So we deeply appreciate your support. We're very grateful for you. Learning out [00:15:00] loud with us and talking about learning, mark. I feel like my brain wants to understand sleep. Yeah, that's right. I went to bed nice and early last night. So I would absorb and retain information much like Matthew was calling it on that first clip.
So then this next clip, we've got Matthew going one level deeper. He's going to break down for us the idea on sleep and the aging effect that it has for us. If we don't get it. So this next clip we're going to hear from is Matthew breaking down sleep and our brains because it's of course no secret that as we get older, our learning and memory abilities begin to fade and decline.
But what we've also discovered is that a physiological signature of aging is that your sleep gets was especially that deep quality of sleep that I was just discussing. And only last year, we finally published evidence that these two things they're not simply co-occurring, they are significantly [00:16:00] interrelated and it suggests that the disruption of deep sleep is an underappreciated factor that is contributing to cognitive decline or memory decline in aging.
And most recently we've discovered in outsiders diseases. Now, I know this is remarkably depressing news. It's in the mail. It's coming at you, but there's a potential silver lining here. Unlike many of the other factors that we know are associated with aging for example, changes in the physical structure of the brain.
That's fiendishly difficult to do. But that sleep is a missing piece in the explanatory puzzle of aging and Alzheimer's is exciting because we may be able to do something about it. I'm one way that we are approaching this at my sleep center is not by using sleeping pills by the way. Unfortunately, they are [00:17:00] blunt instruments that do not produce naturalistic.
Instead, we're actually developing a method based on this it's called direct current brain stimulation. You insert a small amount of voltage into the brain, so small. You typically don't feel it, but it has a measurable impact. Now, if you apply this stimulation during sleep in young, healthy adult as if you're singing in time with those deep sleep brainwaves, not only can you amplify the size of those deep sleep brainwaves, but in doing so, we can almost double the amount of memory benefit that you get from sleep.
The question now is whether we can translate the same affordable, potentially portable piece of technology into older adults, and those with. Can we restore back some healthy quality of deep sleep and in doing so, [00:18:00] can we salvage aspects of their learning and memory function? That is my real hope. Now that's one of our moonshot goals.
A moonshot he's talking out languages and he might, yeah, he is. He's talking our language. Thanks Matthew, for giving us a shoutout. Now here's the thing, Mike, when we talk about sleep and the brain, when I have had a good pattern of sleep and it's not just one or two days let me go. As far as saying if I have two weeks of really good consistency, Here's how I feel during my day.
I don't feel when, at that moment of waking, like when I've really slept well, I don't feel like I'm battling gravity to get out of the bed. It's almost like I just flow and crews out of the [00:19:00] bed, like naturally, you know how sometimes you can feel really heavy when you get out of bed. Like it's like gravity is pulling you back into the bed.
Do you ever have that? Yeah, there's plenty of times when I've woken up. Even if I haven't had a drink the night before and I have a drink where you wake up and you think, oh, I'm a bit. A bit heavy and it is it's my brain reacting and responding to, to, I think not having that great night's sleep.
So what it does is it impacts my, my, my mood, my ability to have that get up and go at it. Yeah. Now the once you've wrestled yourself out of bed the other thing I noticed, like to create this very stark contrast when I have had that period of good sleep. So let's say. The other thing I noticed is that I'm more [00:20:00] inclined to be genuinely naturally optimistic and positive about the morning.
Like I just know, notice that my mood. Instantly before stretching before a cup of coffee or some journaling or breathing excess, whatever I'm going to do in the morning. I just generally have a better disposition to the world. But the big one I want to pitch to you, Mac around cognitive function is that when I'm working, when I'm writing, discussing and thinking, I feel like.
Seeing an imagining the world through high definition. Whereas when I not well sled I'm a little bit foggy. My, my thoughts are not as crisp. My responses are a bit more modeled. For example, if I'm discussing some approach, an idea with a [00:21:00] client, I think I notice I take a little while to get going.
If I haven't slept. Whereas when I'm well slept and. In a good rhythm. My thinking is like a laser light precise in my mind, it feels crisp high definition. And I'm able to perform at a very high level relative to my potential, whatever that may be. But I feel like I'm really well geared and Also my capacity to recall previous conversations is much more instant.
Like I can connect dots and so forth. For me, that's what how I relate to sleep and the brain. How do you when you heard the author, Matthew Walker, they're talking about our recall and the relationship of brain and sleep. What comes to your mind? Like how do you see it in your life?[00:22:00]
For me, it's definitely an impact on focus. Like you were saying. So if I'm waking up and I'm feeling pretty good, there are less distractions in my brain. There's less. Things that are pulling my attention away from whatever it is that I have to do, whether it's on the weekend and I want to have a good weekend planned, maybe it's active.
Maybe it's just seeing family and friends. There's that laser like focus. But also during the week when I'm working on a project or like you say, with a client, or even on the moonshot show, my focus is far more concise and precise because I've woken up feeling. To be honest, I think a good night's sleep makes me feel happier.
It makes me feel happier, healthier, and therefore, I don't have all of those distractions that might be playing in my mind around, oh, I, I haven't had a good night's sleep, so therefore I'm not going to perform my best. And then my confidence takes a hit. Then my [00:23:00] general wellbeing takes a hit. And what happens is that day.
Or at least the morning becomes you almost feel like it's a write-off and you assume, oh, I can't do this. So I'm going to make an excuse. Yeah. You're so true. But listen, it doesn't stop there. Mark. Actually, what Matthew Walker goes on to do is say there's this direct relationship between sleep and the brain.
Here's the good news. What we're going to do now is hear from Matthew Walker about sleep and the. But as a deeper dive, I want to focus on this sleep loss and your immune system. And here I'll introduce these delightful blue elements in the image. They are called natural killer cells, and you can think of natural killer cells, almost like the secret service agents of your immune system.
And they are very good at identifying dangerous unwanted elements and eliminate. In fact, what they're doing here is [00:24:00] destroying a cancerous tumor mass. What you wish for is a virile set of these immune assassins at all times and tragically. That's what you don't have if you're not sleeping enough. So here in this experiment, you're not going to have your sleep deprived for an entire night.
You're simply going to have your sleep restricted to four hours for one single night. And then we're going to look to see what's the percent reduction in immune cell activity that you suffer. And it's not small. It's not 10%. It's not 20%. There was a 70% drop in natural killer cell activity. That's a concerning stays of immune deficiency.
And you can perhaps understand why we're now finding significant links between short sleep duration and your risk for the development of [00:25:00] numerous forms of cancer. Currently, that list includes cancer of the bowel cancer of the prostate and cancer of the brain. In fact, the link between a lack of sleep and cancer is now so strong that the world health organization has classified any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen because of a disruption of your sleep wake rhythms.
So you may have heard of that old max. That you can sleep when you're dead. I'm being quite serious. Now. It is mortally unwise advice. We know this from epidemiological studies, across millions of individuals. There's a simple truth. The shorter, your sleep, the shorter, your life, short sleep predicts all cause mortality.
And if increasing your risk for the development of cancer [00:26:00] or even outsiders. We're not sufficiently disquieting. We have since discovered that a lack of sleep will even erode the very fabric of biological life itself, your DNA genetics. My boy Mack, did he bring it then? That was like a sledgehammer, wasn't it?
Yeah. I try not to go for too many superlatives on the show. But I have a feeling that might be one of the most important lessons that I've learned in recent memory. There's some facts that, that he found through the experiment that just reducing your sleep to four hours a night.
Leads to a 70% drop in his immune assassin test. This is mindblowing to, to use a superlative for a second because I don't think I really anticipated [00:27:00] or nor expected that to have such a profound impact on my body's ability to not only fight off disease, but actually be preventative for disease because.
I understand my body's ability to unconsciously combat bad cells keep myself healthy, but I did not appreciate that having shorter sleep would lead so directly to these terrible diseases. That is referencing that I had no idea. Yeah, I think this clip was in service to all of our listeners.
Just to say, if we didn't convince you that you just want to wake up feeling better or you wanted to have better memory, let's just drop the big cancer threat right up front in the show to say, listen, Series of part, one of our health series was all about breathe and breathe properly. [00:28:00] I think part two of our messages is sleep and sleep properly.
It is so fundamental to your performance, to your overwhelmed genetic health cellular level, this gets to, and I think, wow, we've really got some science to, to get us on the right track here. Don't we mind? Yeah. I think with sleep it's something that I always took for granted. It's something that we all do and we have to do.
And like I mentioned, at the beginning of the show, an average of 26 years, I think that's 29 million hours or something like that. And again, I just took it for granted and I just thought, yeah, I'll go to sleep. I'll feel well, rested. It's good time for me to reset my brain. I'll wake up the next day feeling better, but I totally underappreciated the actual physical.
Impact it has on me. I can see it from an emotional perspective. I can wake up. I can feel focused. I can feel happy, but having this knock on effect down the line and impacting my body [00:29:00] is not an area that I would have anticipated before. And the call-out to shift. Nighttime shift work have a mean classified by the world health organization as a carcinogenic threat.
Again, I had no idea before delving into Matthew's book and that's pretty frightening, actually. It is, it really is. But I think the service that we're doing for ourselves might for you and I, and for the listener is too. Basically support the notion of, we all know that when we've had a good sleep, we feel pretty good, but it's more than that.
And you can't discount it. You can't cheat this actually, you just might just you might focus on exercise and getting enough exercise each day, breathing right every day, eating right every day. You also need to sleep right every day. And hopefully what everybody has. [00:30:00] Really taken out of the first half of the show is something that I feel personally has been a real aha, which is I must sleep well to be the best version of myself.
I have to get a good eight hours for me. It's that 10 to six block I wake up naturally feel good. And I've just started the day in a winning way. What I know for sure. And as I as I get a little grayer mark, what I know for sure is if I cut corners on sleep, I am feeling it almost immediately.
And if I do it several nights in a row, I'm a bumbling mess, mark, but it's more than that. I'm actually doing. More longer-term damage. And so this is not a discount I am personally willing to take anymore. So sleep is of the essence much like breathwork and many other things like [00:31:00] meditation. And I think.
We would deeply take the message of Matthew Walker and his book of why we sleep and look you can negotiate and argue some of the science in his book. So it's an extremely popular book. There are people that love it. There are people who are arguing some of the data put all of that aside.
I think there's enough here with not only Matthew Walker, but James nester, and many other of these authors that are talking about breath, work and sleep, and the interrelationship with that and memory and performance and emotional wellbeing. This is our case for, if you want to shoot for the moon, go for a moonshot, you've got to get good sleep, right?
Yeah, I totally agree. And the grand news listeners is we've got an action packed. Second half of the show coming up where we're going to hear from Matthew again, giving us some good tips. So you'll hear from Mike and I giving our little breakdown on the hacks that we might do, but also you're going to hear from [00:32:00] Dr.
Walker as well, giving us practical tips on how to improve your sleep. Yeah. And listen, talking about an essential practice. I think listening to the moonshots master series, that sounds pretty essential to me, mark. And we're so excited to announce that for the past period, our moonshots master series is actually also available.
Through the apple podcast app. And this is for those of you who might prefer to listen to the master series on their on their apple podcast app. And you don't want to do the whole Patrion thing. We've made the podcast available as well. So if right now you're listening on an iPhone just to open up the podcast app and actually search for moonshots master series.
And you will actually find that you can subscribe directly in. To the master series, where you're going to hear these really deep [00:33:00] dives and I'm talking 90 minute masterclasses, how to get motivated, how to think better. There's a ton of great shows. I think mark, where we've already produced five of those master series.
The six one will be coming soon. And we're delighted to say that when we announced this last week, we've already had a bunch of you in and subscribe to our moonshots master series. Market's pretty cool to see the little moonshots media empire expanding throughout the world and in different platforms.
Isn't it. That's where it's great. We're always going to be pumping out our weekly shows for you, our moonshot listeners, but now you've got the chance to also join us on the master series, which is comprehensive deep dives into topics like motivation. First principle, thinking teamwork. How to generate and maintain good habits, as well as how to control and be aware of your circle of influence.
So already we've got five huge topics that we deep dive into and [00:34:00] learn out loud together on the master series. So come join us in your apple podcast channel because we'd love to see. Totally. Now we're going to get into the hard yards. We're going to roll up the sleeves and we're going to do the really important habit design of making sure.
That we sleep well. So we've hit you with the science, the data. Now we're going to hit you with some serious do's and don'ts, and we're going to try and unearth how we can all sleep better. And to kick that off, we're going to listen to Matthew Walker and we're going to get into his tips on how we can have a good night.
What's the things that we can all do tonight and in the future to start getting better sleep well beyond carving out a non-negotiable eight hour sleep opportunity. There are probably at least five things that we can do the first is that. To try and maintain [00:35:00] regularity. And if there's one thing that you take away from this, it would be going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend, even if you've had a bad night of sleep, still wake up at the same time of day.
And. The second thing is that we are a dark deprived society in this modern era. And we need darkness in the evening to allow the release of a hormone called melatonin and melatonin helps the healthy timing of our sleep. So try to dim down. The lights in your home in the hour before bed stay away from screens, especially there's led screens.
They emit blue light that actually puts the brakes on melatonin and those blue light emitting devices, fool your brain into thinking that it's still daytime, even though it's nighttime and you want to get to sleep. The third key ingredient is to keep it [00:36:00] cool. Many of us actually have a bedroom. To warm in terms of temperature.
So an optimal temperature is about 68 degrees Fahrenheit or about 18 and a half degrees Celsius. And the reason is that your brain and your body needs to drop the core temperature by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate good sleep. And that's the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too.
So having a cool room actually takes your brain and body in the right temperature direction to get good sleep. Great, Mike. So we've got three big tips there and we'll follow it up with another two from Matthew in the next clip as well. So apart from having a good solid eight hours of sleep, what Matthew is calling out to you and I, and our listeners is to have a regular routine.
Very similar to what you were just saying. Mike, about the 10 to six keeping in. As well as keeping it. Cool. How are [00:37:00] you tracking Mike? When you think about your sleep pattern, are you maintaining those three big tips? Oh I T I try to that's for sure, but I will tell you one thing that I learned from preparing this show with you, mark, which was.
I have been guilty of when I'm, when I have a backlog of sleep to make up to doing like the epics sleeping. And what he's saying is do not do that. If you have had a bad night's sleep and let's say your wake up time is six and you're feeling like I could really take another couple of hours.
He's actually saying that's actually harmful to your sleep pattern because you the habit, which makes it now I think about it. It makes total sense. Doesn't it? Because even I just got back from traveling in Europe and it was a big trip and I traveled over 15,000 [00:38:00] kilometers from Sydney to, to Bucharest and I was really jet lagged when I got back.
And one particular night I slept. From 12, midnight to 12 in the following day. Now I, and this was just last week and I'm somebody who's pretty, self-aware on sleep. I thought, oh, that was a good one. I really smashed away that full bonus hours there. But actually as we listened to Matthew Walker, you realize actually that wasn't so great.
What I want to do is. Keep to my 10 to six schedule. And interestingly enough, it has been the last two nights that I've largely done that. And I feel so much better, like totally beat the jet lag, but I think that's one thing that I've been a little bit guilty of is doing those catch-ups. [00:39:00] How did you respond to his first three tips on how we can build a good sleep?
The one that stands out to me is the idea of keeping it dark. We tend to. Be overexposed to devices. Then we, whether it's television, your laptop, your iPad, your phone, and what Matthew's reminding us there is they all have these light-emitting diodes. And the blue light that we've all heard about now is actually tricking your brain.
It's falling over. Into thinking that it's still daylight. So it makes perfect sense. Once Matthew Walker breaks it down for us that if he gets to a nine, 10:00 PM and you're still using your device worse still, you're using your device in bed. Your brain is, and that's a big no-no, it's your, you're not setting yourself up for a good night's sleep because actually fundamentally.
Turning off it's as though your brain still thinks it's daylight. So it's not [00:40:00] releasing that melatonin and it's not relaxing down. So therefore, when people struggle to fall asleep well it's because you're using your device too much or watching the television or playing video games too much. And for me, Mike, at least over the last.
Maybe even 10 years, actually, I've really actively avoided keeping a television in my bedroom because it's almost too tempting to after dinner or late into the night say, oh, you know what, I'm just going to watch an hour in bed or I'll play a video game in bed. And when I hear colleagues or friends of mine who do that, It's such a big no-no for me, that I'm surprised that they would do it because I need my bedroom and I need my routine leading up to when I get to sleep to be light free or at least blue light for in order to.
Ramp it down and get ready for sleep. I think that's a really big reminder and it's similar to what Cal Newport was revealing to us with his [00:41:00] digital detox work with regards to focus and not being distracted while you're doing one thing. I think the same is true here. You're focusing on going to.
So don't be distracted. Yeah. That's it. Great tape, Mike. I love that. Look, I think just a few a few things that have just been great for me is no phone in the bedroom. Huge mark. How do you go? Are you able to resist the temptation or does that little iPhone snaking I'm good at resisting it before?
I'll put it into a mode focus mode an hour before going to bed. Admittedly in the morning, I'll tend to take a look at it, maybe after a certain period of time, but I've very actively try hard to not reach for it. As soon as I wake up, because I'm aware that light will suddenly trigger my brain into.
Kind of an anxious mode actually. So it does sneak in the room. It does sneak in my room because [00:42:00] it's my alarm clock and that's the falsehood that I have here and I need to get myself an old fashioned wind up clock, I think totally. Or use your apple watch. Yes. Honestly I would say.
I'm not bringing the phone into the bedroom, huge breakthrough for improving my sleep. The next one is having a Kindle. So that I'm not getting an led screen, I'm just getting YG. And I have this great ritual. It's a little bit frustrating. I read in bed. And the funny thing is though, because of the ritualization I've done of going to bed and training my body is that I can only ever read about four or five pages.
And then every time I start. Oh, I don't remember reading this space, so I have to go back. So [00:43:00] I'm like the slowest reader. And I choose not to read anything work-related and in fact, one thing I've been doing recently is I used to read like a lot of spy, thrillers and stuff, totally unrelated to work.
I'm now just reading like the history of great philosophers and stuff like this, because what I noticed is I'm reading this great series at the moment. And it's so captivating that actually keeps me awake. So I'm now trying to find more boring academic stuff to read in bed in order to knock myself off.
But the point here is that get that phone, the hell out of the bedroom. And another thing to build on. No, I signed Kindle only. The other thing is even what I do is that last 30 minutes before I go [00:44:00] to bed, if I've been wearing a jumper or a ho. I take it off. So I'm just in a, t-shirt just to cool down a little bit, take off socks.
It's another thing that I just re worked out works for me really well. And then this is going to sound really silly, but it totally works is I don't rush around the house. I deliberately walk and move. Slower. Just to always keep my heart rate down.
So I'm really almost going into this semi hibernation mode before entering the bedroom. Oh, I like that. I like the tips there on reducing your core temperature, like Matthew was saying, so removing the socks themselves, but I also like the slower pace. I think that's a really nice. Yeah, I think it's critical because [00:45:00] Explore test and experiment with what you think can help just get the system to slow down.
Cause then when the heart rate slows down and you're not too hot, you're breathing well, then that transition is just really easy. And we've got another quick set of tips here. And these are the ones that that Matthew Walker says don't make him so pop. But nevertheless they're important.
The fourth critical factor is actually avoiding alcohol and caffeine. Unfortunately this makes me deeply unpopular, but alcohol is perhaps the most misunderstood drug when it comes to sleep. People think that it helps them fall asleep. That's not actually true. Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call the sedatives.
And what you're doing is just knocking your brain out. Putting it into [00:46:00] natural sleep. We also know that alcohol will fragment your sleep. So you'll wake up many more times throughout the night. And alcohol is also a very potent chemical for blocking your dream sleep or your rapid eye movement. Caffeine is also a problem.
Many of us know that caffeine can keep us awake. It's an alerting chemical, it's a stimulant in terms of a class of drugs, but few people know that even if you can have a cup of coffee after dinner and you fall asleep fine, and maybe you stay asleep, the depth of the deep sleep that you have when there is caffeine within your brain.
Isn't as deep as when you have abstained from that cup of coffee after. So as a consequence, you wake up the next morning, you feel unrefreshed and you don't remember waking up or having a difficult time falling asleep, but now you find yourself reaching for two or three cups of coffee in the morning, and you develop this dependency, this addiction cycle, the [00:47:00] fifth and final.
Tip for better sleep is to not stay in bed awake. So if you haven't fallen asleep within 20 or so minutes, or you've woken up and you're finding it difficult to fall back asleep, don't stay in bed awake. The reason is that your brain very quickly starts to learn the association between your. Being about the place that you're awake rather than your bed being about sleep.
So the advice is to get up, go to another room and in dim light, just read a book, no screens, no email checking, no food. And only when you feel sleepy, should you return to bed? And that way you can actually then relearn the association between your bedroom being about the place of. Rather than being awake.
I should also note that some people don't like the idea of getting up and going out to a different room. If it's dark and warm in [00:48:00] bed, an alternative is actually meditation. Meditation has been demonstrated in clinical trials to help people just relax the body, calm down the fight or flight branch of the nervous system that can happen when we wake up in the middle of the night.
Half that Rolodex and anxiety thoughts by meditating, you can start to quiet the mind as well as the body. And that also helps you fall back asleep more easily. That's quite a surprising tip for me, Mike, this idea that if I can't fall asleep, rather than perhaps lying there and then getting frustrated, you know how bad that is when you're thinking, why can't I sleep?
And then your mind goes off on a tangent and you start thinking, oh, maybe I can't sleep because of work or is it something I ate or whatever? So you can start that cycle of wondering why can't I sleep and then therefore you don't sleep. I like this quite surprising idea from Matthew, they're [00:49:00] saying just get up and change the association that your body's going to have with going to bed and create a slightly better habit.
I made the mistake of fighting the good fight to get back to sleep. Yes. That's definitely been, have you, you've been the same. Have you always try to wrestle back to sleep for like maybe 10, 20, 30 minutes? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Whether it's just lying there in the dark, looking up at the ceiling.
Or whether it's having an active mind or running around trying to count sheep, I've tried to catch a sheep in the past. I don't know whether you at work. No, it didn't. If anything, I was more stimulated because I was wondering how high the number I could get to look. There are definitely some good techniques on YouTube to get yourself back to sleep.
One of them is You breathe in and breathe out and you're like in, and you say the word in out, like it put all your [00:50:00] attention on breath. And pretty soon that the brain just turns off all sorts of stuff to do that. The lesson here is like self-awareness alcohol caffeine. Like you are in control.
These are all choices you can make about how you want to sleep. And hopefully we've made today on this show, the case for why that's so damn in potent even if all the size doesn't get you, please you'll just feel better. Good sleep. Feel good. Go make the day happen. So I think at this point, mark, it is.
Only fitting that we returned from one last time to Matthew Walker and he's going to try, and I think he's going to make a very good case for sleep and the power that it has and why. In fact, it's just like a Swiss army knife. And then finally, in taking a step back then, what is the mission critical statement [00:51:00] here?
I think it may be there. Sleep, unfortunately is not an optional lifestyle. Luxury sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity. It is your life support system and it is mother nature's best effort yet at immortality and the decimation of. Throughout industrialized nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health, our wellness, even the safety and the education of our children.
It's a silent sleep loss epidemic, and it is fast becoming one of the greatest public health challenges that we face in the 21st century. I believe it is now time for us to reclaim our right to a full night of sleep and without embarrassment or that [00:52:00] unfortunate stigma of laziness and in doing so we can be reunited with the most powerful elixir of life, the Swiss army knife of health, as it was.
Sleep is the Swiss army knife of health, the life support system, maybe even the elixir of life. I mean my waterway to around our show and Dr. Matthew Walker and his book, why we sleep? I know it's that was a very good case for it. Thinking of it as an opportunity to. Reclaim our right, like this is a theme that has come up a lot because I've often mentioned in the show.
I think we're at a war for our attention. Like we have so much. Notifications and screens that we can become quite [00:53:00] unaware and fall victim to serving the screens rather than serving ourselves. You know what I mean? There are emails, notifications are voice commands, smart devices. W we're being bombarded.
And sleep is like a sanctuary, isn't it? Yeah. Sleep is perhaps the only time that a lot of us spend any time disconnected from work, from friends, from family because you have the assumption that I must reply right now. I need to be effective. I need to be efficient. If I don't respond right now, what's going to happen.
And what ends up happening is much more personal to you because it has that impact on your brain. It has that impact on your body and your immune system. And I think. What I've learned from today's show. Mike is actually how important that sleep really is. Not only from like we've covered an emotional and a healthy and happy perspective from a mindset, [00:54:00] but actually far more deep rooted in my body and my DNA.
This has been a pretty impactful show for me. And as part of the health series, it feels like it's a no. Utility within my belt that I can work on in order to be more focused and better at what I do, or just avoid doing some of that genetic damage or immune system damage that Matthew Walker pointed out.
Yeah, it's crazy. Isn't it? It's really surprising. And what a great set of lessons, both practical as well as scientific the Matthew had for us today. What's the one thing that changes mark, now that we've done the sleep show, what changes in the Matt Pearson Freeland habit system? Actually I think I'm going to maintain the sort of habits I have around sleep with regards to routine, with regards to avoid.
[00:55:00] Alcohol caffeine. I also avoid sugar when it gets late into the evening. I think that has an impact as well. The thing I'm going to change is actually, Mike, it's the bills that you had, which was losing your jumper or your socks in order to help bring yourself into a slightly cooler temperature prior to getting down.
Cause I run pretty hot. So I think that's a really nice, very practical and actionable tip that I'm going to start giving you. Yeah. And what we learnt in the last show is that when you get that heart rate down, which obviously being, if you really warm, your heart rate is up when your heart rate is slower, you're calmer, but it's also the perfect segue to sleep.
What I think about it as is going into this kind of monk mode before sleep, that just is about mindset, cooling the jets down and being ready to put away a good eight hours. Yeah. Mark. Thank you. Thank you for all your help [00:56:00] pulling together this show and this health series, which is absolutely bringing me new insights and challenging me to think holistically about being the best.
Of myself and thank you to you, our listeners for joining us on this journey of health. And today it was all about breath with the author, Matthew Walker and his book, why we sleep. So it is sleep. That is where the good things happen. In fact, what we learned from him is sleep is our way of saying.
Information it's heading that save button. And the science really tells us that sleep has a direct relationship with the brain and with the immune system to better memory, better health, less of those gremlins in your health system, so that you can be the very best you can be. So how do we do it? It's about making it regular, keeping the room.
Cool. And da and avoiding those elixirs of alcohol and [00:57:00] caffeine. And if you do wake, get the hell out of bed, cause she'd never want to make that association with bed and being awake, do these things. And you'll not only be feeling good. You will have tapped into your right is in fact, Matthew said, reclaim your right to a good night's sleep.
And you will have a Swiss army knife, not only for sleep, but for health so that you can be the very best version of yourself. And that's what we're all about here at the moonshots podcast veteran.