How Getting Bad Sleep Is Affecting Your Health [MASTERCLASS] EP 1339

Today’s Masterclass episode is all about sleep. Three experts on sleep share their tips and advice for how you can sleep both longer and deeper and the benefits sufficient sleep can have for your body. In this episode, Dr. Peter Attia, physician & podcast host, shares the foods we should eat and avoid to get better sleep and why exercising too much is counterproductive. Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford, explains the risks of not getting enough sleep and why an excellent night’s sleep actually starts in the morning. Dr. Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, teaches how not getting sufficient sleep affects our genetics and why we need to shift the cultural appreciation of sleep. For more, go to lewishowes.com/1339Full Episodes:Dr. Peter Attia: https://link.chtbl.com/1045-podAndrew Huberman: https://link.chtbl.com/1204-podDr. Matthew Walker: https://link.chtbl.com/1154-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dr. Matthew Walker?

  What is going on? Why is there such mortality risk caused by insufficient sleep? And what we know is that a lack of sleep and typically getting certainly less than six hours of sleep is associated with a higher risk.

• 0:12Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:36Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to this special masterclass. We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in.

• 0:54Dr. Matthew Walker?

  Yeah, so I think firstly, in response to the general question, sleep is probably the single most effective thing that you can do to reset both your brain, but also your body health, of course, as well. And I don't say that flippantly against the notions of diet and exercise, of course. Both of those are fundamentally critical. But if I were to take you, Lewis, and I were to deprive you of sleep for 24 hours, deprive you of food for 24 hours, or deprive you of even water or exercise for 24 hours, and then I were to map the brain and body impairment that you would suffer after each one of those four.

• 1:33Dr. Matthew Walker?

  Hands down, by a country mile, a lack of sleep will implode your brain and body far more significantly. The only one I would probably lose out on is oxygen.

• 1:46Dr. Matthew Walker?

  At that point, I'll give it up. You know, sleep will take the silver medal. Oxygen definitely gets the gold, but thereafter, sleep seems to be paramount.

• 1:55Lewis Howes?

  Over sleep, food and water, sleep is the most important thing.

• 2:00Dr. Matthew Walker?

  I would, yeah, you know, I I used to say that sleep was the third pillar of good health alongside diet and exercise, but I think the evidence has suggested that I was utterly wrong, that sleep in fact is the foundation on which those two other things sit. And you can do wonderful things in those two mains domains, but if you're not getting sufficient sleep, those things tend to be far more futile as a consequence.

• 2:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And so what is sufficient sleep then?

• 2:27Dr. Matthew Walker?

  So right now, we recommend somewhere between seven to nine hours for the average adult. Once we know that you go below seven hours of sleep, we can start to measure objective impairments in your brain and your body. And in fact, the number of people who can survive on less than six hours of sleep without showing any impairment, rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population, is zero.

• 2:55Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Without any impairment, what does that mean?

• 2:59Dr. Matthew Walker?

  So if I can measure lots of different operations of your brain, let's say your cognition, your attention, your learning and memory, also your moods and your emotions and your anxiety, or downstairs in the body, I can measure aspects of your cardiovascular system or your blood pressure, or I could measure your immune system or your metabolic system, how it's regulating your blood sugar and your glucose. I can measure this sort of pinwheel, this kaleidoscope of health metrics on Lewis Howes. And then I can see, when I keep dialing you back with less and less sleep, at what point do I see at least one of those things demonstrating a breaking point?

• 3:40Dr. Matthew Walker?

  And it's very rare for us to be able to find any individual who can go below six hours of sleep and not show some kind of impairment. And a great, even frightening demonstration of this, a study took a group of perfectly healthy individuals, and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week. And then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hour night of sleep.

• 4:09Lewis Howes?

  And what happened?

• 4:10Dr. Matthew Walker?

  And there were two critical findings. The first was that a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity caused by that one week of short sleep. And that's, you know, in some ways, I think about this, Lewis, because it's It's reality. We know that almost a third of the population is trying to survive on six hours of sleep or less. So it's it's not just, you know, total sleep deprivation, which doesn't happen very frequently. It's a common occurrence. What I found most interesting was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity. The other half were decreased. Now, those genes that were suppressed were genes associated with your immune system. So you became immune compromised or immune deficient.

• 4:56Dr. Matthew Walker?

  Those genes that were increased in their activity, or what we call overexpressed, were genes associated with the promotion of tumors, genes that were associated with cardiovascular disease and stress, and genes that were associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body. And I I make that point just because, you know, many people, I think, have this concern about things such as genetically modified embryos, or even genetically modified food. But when we don't get sufficient sleep, we are unwittingly performing a genetic manipulation on ourselves. You know, if we don't let our kids get the sleep that they need, then we're inflicting a similar genetic engineering experiment on them as well.

• 5:39Lewis Howes?

  Wow. This is crazy. So what if you've been sleeping less than six hours a night for years? What is that saying to your genes? And is there a way to recover the gene damage and reverse and go back to a healthy genes, healthy body, healthy life?

• 6:00Dr. Matthew Walker?

  So firstly, we know that short sleep duration, so using that sweet spot, and we can speak about oversleeping or excess sleep, because I think that's an interesting part that hasn't been spoken about too much. But using that recommended CDC amount of seven to nine hours of sleep, there is a simple fact firstly, across the lifespan, which is the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. That short sleep predicts all-cause mortality. But then we can dig a little bit deeper and start to sort of ask, you know, exactly what is going on? Why is there such mortality risk caused by insufficient sleep? And what we know is that a lack of sleep and typically getting certainly less than six hours

• 6:41Dr. Matthew Walker?

  of sleep is associated with a high risk of cardiovascular disease, high risk of diabetes, high risk of stroke, higher risk of dementia. And I would love to double click on that and go into the Alzheimer's disease risk because that now evidence is very, very strong. And then downstairs in the body, we know that there is links between a lack of sleep and certain forms of cancer. After, if I were to take you and limit you to, let's say, four or five hours of sleep for one week, your blood sugar levels would be so disrupted that your doctor would classify you as being prediabetic. Oh, my goodness. So that's not a lifetime, that's just one week. And there's an even more interesting experiment that I think speaks to the subtlety of this, because there is the largest sleep

• 7:26Dr. Matthew Walker?

  study that's ever been conducted, and it happens actually to around 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year, and it's called daylight savings time. Now, in the spring, when we lose just one hour of sleep opportunity, firstly, what we've seen is that there seems to be a 24% increase in relative heart attack risk the next day, which stuns me. And what's fascinating, in the fall, in the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, there's a 21% reduction in heart attacks. So it's bidirectional, and that's just one hour of sleep. And you see, there was some

• 8:07Dr. Matthew Walker?

  great recent data, you see a very similar profile regarding that daylight savings shift for road traffic accidents on our streets. I've heard about this. Tragically, suicide rates as well. And then even more recently, what we discovered is that during that springtime shift, when you lose an hour of sleep, the sentencing of federal judges is significantly harsher because their mood and their emotion is that much worse because of that one hour of lost sleep, that they dole out harsher sentences.

• 8:42Dr. Matthew Walker?

  So, you know, we can walk, you know, you can ask the question, what about a lifetime? We don't even have to ask about a lifetime of short sleep. We can ask about these really, you know, one week of short sleep or even one night of one hour of lost sleep. And I think that's how fragile our brains and our bodies are to this thing called a lack of sleep. And you could then ask, well, you know, why are we so sensitive? Because I can go without food for 24 hours and I can go without water for 24 hours. You know, I'm still not too bad. I'm in fairly decent shape. Why is sleep the exception to that rule? And the answer seems to be this.

• 9:23Dr. Matthew Walker?

  Human beings are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason.

• 9:30Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 9:31Dr. Matthew Walker?

  And it was such a unique thing. And what that means is that Mother Nature, through the course of evolution, because no other species does this without real need for survival, and I can speak about some of the exceptions, but human beings are strange like this. In other words, Mother Nature hasn't have to face the challenge of coming up with a solution called sleep deprivation because she's never faced it in the course of evolution. And so there is no safety net in place here. And that's why we think human beings implode so quickly and thoroughly mentally, cognitively and physically caused by insufficient sleep.

• 10:11Lewis Howes?

  Why do you think, why is the, why are the majority of people bad at getting good sleep? Is it, what is it, we're distracted? Is it, we think we need to be doing more? Is it, we're stressed and worried about the past and the future? Is it, you know, what, we just want to work harder? What is the main cause of why we get poor sleep?

• 10:31Dr. Matthew Walker?

  That's, it's such a fundamental question. And in some ways, it's all of the above plus. So I think the first, and I've thought about this a great deal. Why are we suffering this global sleep loss epidemic that we're under right now? I think the first thing is that unfortunately, sleep has an image problem. That, you know, the PR agent for sleep should be fired because we associate sufficient sleep with this concept of being lazy, of being slothful. And that's a terrible disservice to this thing called sleep. And it is very different to things like diet and exercise. You know, I think a lot of people like to virtue signal with, you know, what they eat,

• 11:16Dr. Matthew Walker?

  and they certainly are very proud to tell you, you know, I work out five times a week, I'm in the gym at this time of morning, and, you know, all of which I think are great and to be applauded and supported. But we have the very opposite. We have this almost, you know, well, we, we don't. Some, some niches of society have this sleep machismo attitude, you know, this kind of you can sleep when you're dead mentality, which by the way, based on the evidence is mortally unwise. Yeah, it will lead to both a shorter life and a life that is significantly less healthy. So I think the first thing is we need to change our cultural appreciation of sleep from something that is a waste of

• 11:59Dr. Matthew Walker?

  time to something that in fact is an incredible investment. It is probably the very best and the most freely available democratic and painless health insurance policy that I could ever imagine. I think the next thing is the way that we work in society. We are working for longer hours. And before the pandemic, people were commuting increasingly longer amounts of time. What that meant was that people were leaving the house earlier, they were arriving home later, and no one wants to shortchange time with family or Netflix or whatever is your poison. And so the one thing that has become squeezed

• 12:42Dr. Matthew Walker?

  like vice grips in the middle of the night is this thing called a sufficient bout of slumber. But then there are plenty of people who give themselves the opportunity to get enough sleep, but they can't obtain it. And that is where things such as insomnia or sleep disorders, things like snoring come into play. And you touch on, and I know that you've spoken, and I'm so grateful for what you've done regarding discussions of mental health. We know that one of the principal roadblocks to getting this thing called a good night of sleep is anxiety.

• 13:19Lewis Howes?

  Stress, worry, anxiety, regret, all those things.

• 13:22Dr. Matthew Walker?

  Yep.

• 13:23Lewis Howes?

  Resentment, holding on to all that stuff.

• 13:25Dr. Matthew Walker?

  It is, that is toxic to sleep. You're absolutely right. And in fact, anxiety and physiological stress is our principal model for the explanation of insomnia right now. It's not the only cause, but it seems to be one of the principal causes. And in modern society, it's become so easy, and I'm not finger wagging, I, you know, I'm just as guilty. We are constantly on reception, but rarely do we do reflection. And unfortunately, the time when most of us do reflection is when we turn off the light and our head hits the pillow.

• 14:02Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 14:03Dr. Matthew Walker?

  And that's the last time.

• 14:04Lewis Howes?

  The worst time.

• 14:05Dr. Matthew Walker?

  Oh, you know, because I don't know about you, Lewis, but, you know, at night in the dark, thoughts are not the same thing, you know, concerns become twice as big or you're 10x the size of concerns. I start to worry, I ruminate, I catastrophize. Yet in the light of day, those things seem very different. And so we can speak about sleep tips perhaps later on, but certainly getting right with your emotions and your anxiety is key to good sleep. And that's one of the things that prevents sleep. I also think that there's a, an issue at the public health level. You know, we've had in many first world nations,

• 14:48Dr. Matthew Walker?

  wonderful government mandates regarding health, regarding drink driving, regarding, you know, safe sex, regarding drugs and alcohol, and even food, and even inactivity and sitting. And when was the last time you heard of a first world nation provide a public health message and memorandum regarding sleep?

• 15:11Lewis Howes?

  Never.

• 15:12Dr. Matthew Walker?

  And I don't remember one either. So from every level at, you know, at a public health, global, you know, government level down to a workplace level, you know, we lord the airport warrior who's flown through four different time zones in the past three days. They were on email at two and then they're back in the office at six, you know, we, so we need to.

• 15:36Lewis Howes?

  We celebrated those people.

• 15:38Dr. Matthew Walker?

  We did, you know, and the funny thing, by the way, is that after about twenty hours of being awake straight, you are as cognitively impaired as you would be if you were legally drunk. Now, I would never, you know, as a CEO, say, I have got this fantastic team of people. They're drunk all of the time. But we do say, I've got this fantastic group of people. They just are at it all hours. They are dedicated. They're always working, you know, they spend minimal time sleeping. They're just all out. They love this project. But we've got this strange mentality. And then I think it comes down to, um, you know, even within schools, we've got this

• 16:20Dr. Matthew Walker?

  incessant model of early school start times and.

• 16:24Lewis Howes?

  Super early, isn't it?

• 16:25Dr. Matthew Walker?

  It's, it's.

• 16:26Lewis Howes?

  We gotta be there, what, six thirty or seven or something, right?

• 16:28Dr. Matthew Walker?

  Six thirty, seven, seven thirty. And that data is actually very powerful. What we found is that when we delay school start times, first academic grades increase.

• 16:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 16:39Dr. Matthew Walker?

  Truancy rates decrease. Psychological and psychiatric issues decrease. But then what we also discovered is that the life expectancy of students increased. And you may be thinking, well, hang on a sec, you know, how do you, how do you measure that? And the leading cause of death in teenagers sixteen to eighteen is actually not suicide. That's second. It's road traffic accidents.

• 17:08Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 17:09Dr. Matthew Walker?

  And here, sleep matters enormously. And I'll give you one example. It was in Teton County in Wyoming. They delayed their school start times from seven thirty in the morning to night, to eight fifty-five. By the way, what are we doing trying to educate our children at seven thirty in the morning?

• 17:27Lewis Howes?

  I can't think. Yeah, I mean, I remember being in school and being, every day was hard for me. Every day I was tired, every day it was hard to focus, or I'd be. Irritable or wanted to like, you know, jittery or something, but it was like so hard to focus. And then you're at lunchtime and then I eat and I'm tired again afterwards and you want me to focus and pay attention at a desk. It's like, that doesn't work like that for me, especially on no sleep or very little.

• 17:51Dr. Matthew Walker?

  For any, any, you know, in sort of developing brain, it doesn't work like that. And for some people to make a seven thirty AM start time, school buses will begin leaving at six o'clock or five thirty in the morning. That means that some kids are having to wake up at five, five fifteen. This is lunacy. And, and what we've understood from the academic grades, and I'll come back to the car accidents in a second. When sleep is abundant, minds flourish. And when it's not, they don't.

• 18:26Dr. Matthew Walker?

  And what we've discovered with the road traffic accidents in Teton County, when they made that shift. Um, the only thing more remarkable than the extra one hour of sleep that those kids reported getting was the reduction in car crashes. The following year, there was a seventy percent drop in vehicle accidents.

• 18:44Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 18:45Dr. Matthew Walker?

  And to put that in context, you know, the advent of ABS technology, anti-lock brake systems, that dropped accident rates by twenty to twenty-five percent. And it was deemed a revolution. Here is the simple fact of getting enough sleep that will drop accident rates by seventy percent. So, you know, I, I, I need to get off my soapbox, but what I would say is this, I think if our goal as educators is to educate and not risk lives in the process, then we are failing our children in the most spectacular manner with this incessant model of early school start times.

• 19:20Lewis Howes?

  Is anyone listening to this that you've been speaking about this too? And they're actually adopting this new model, whether it be work time or school time or just, you know, integrating this. Do you know systems that are integrating this?

• 19:34Dr. Matthew Walker?

  There have been some, and I think I I've tried to do this in the education domain. I've tried to do this within medicine because the way that we train residents is is almost inhumane. Actually, it's not almost, it absolutely is inhumane, and the statistics there are stunning as well. And then I've tried to do it in the workplace too, because I do a lot of speaking events at sort of Fortune 500 companies. And at first, I think I took the wrong approach where I was really speaking a little bit more about sort of the compassionate approach, you know, why it's good and kind for people to gift them more sleep. Because I see sleep as a biological necessity.

• 20:17Dr. Matthew Walker?

  And if it's a biological necessity, then I think it's a civil necessity. And if it's a civil necessity, sleep is a civil right. But what I would say is that that wasn't particularly well received. You know, I'd go into business companies and say, your employees, you know, they're desperate for more sleep. They will be happier and healthier. Or I would speak about medicine and I would speak about, you know, what it was doing to the patients and the harm. And it would fall on deaf ears. What I then realized is that if you're going to change large organizations, you have to speak in their currency, which is

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Money.

• 20:55Dr. Matthew Walker?

  Money.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, you need to.

• 20:56Dr. Matthew Walker?

  And then I would describe the medical malpractice lawsuits that would come and they cost savings within medicine firstly. And then administration started to change the tune. Because before that, you know, there was almost this old boys' network in medicine where we went through residency and it's almost a hazing.

• 21:17Dr. Matthew Walker?

  And despite armed with incredible data, to the contrary, I think the mentality 10 years ago when I started trying to do that was my mind's made up. Don't confuse me with the evidence.

• 21:29Lewis Howes?

  Crazy. Why? It's because they went through that themselves and so they want to pay it back or something.

• 21:33Dr. Matthew Walker?

  I think so. I think there was some of that.

• 21:35Lewis Howes?

  I went through hell, so everyone else has to go through hell. Yeah.

• 21:38Dr. Matthew Walker?

  Right. It's a rite of passage. You know, if you are tough enough, you'll make it through. It's kind of like boot camp. Which I don't think we need to do anymore. And then within business, you could describe, you know, the Rand Corporation did an independent survey a couple of years ago and what they found was that insufficient sleep will cost most nations about 2% of their GDP of their gross domestic product. So here in the US, that number was $411 billion of lost productivity due to insufficient sleep. In Japan, it was $130 billion. My home country, the UK, it was over $50 billion. So if I could solve the sleep loss crisis within the workplace, I could almost double

• 22:20Dr. Matthew Walker?

  the budget for education in the US, or I could halve the healthcare deficit. So when you speak about money, then people start to listen. So that's how I've tried to communicate, but and I don't think I'm a, I don't think I'm a particularly good communicator and I've been sometimes bull in a china shop as I probably have been for the first, however long we've been talking, but it's just because I'm so, you know, I'm just desperately passionate about this thing called sleep and some years ago before I started trying to, I wrote a book and then I've been doing podcasts. Sleep was the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of today. It was a second citizen.

• 23:02Dr. Matthew Walker?

  And I was so sad to see the disease, the sickness, the harm, the lack of productivity, the impact on education that a lack of sleep was having.

• 23:14Lewis Howes?

  Your thoughts about sleep and how you frame this, some of the research and the science that you've studied around this and what we should be thinking about around sleep.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Sure. So sleep is the fundamental layer of mental and physical health. If there's one thing that we should all be doing is working toward.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Sleeping long enough and deeply enough, eighty percent of the time.

• 23:41Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  I think that eighty percent is a good goal.

• 23:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Because things happen.

• 23:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Travel happens, kids happen.

• 23:46Lewis Howes?

  Weekend, you're going out, whatever, yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Until you are sleeping long enough and deeply enough, eighty percent of the nights of your life, you are functioning suboptimally.

• 23:58Lewis Howes?

  And what's the biggest risk then if we're not getting enough sleep?

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Okay, so there are a number of risks to not getting enough sleep. Deficits in learning, deficits in the immune system, reduction in testosterone and estrogen in both men and women, so disruption of hormones, disruption of gut microbiome, increased cancer risk, there are a bunch of things. The severity of those things depends on a lot of other things too. Prior health, other health conditions, context, age, occupation. You know, if you're not getting enough sleep and you're a high-rise construction worker, it's different than if you're an office worker.

• 24:33Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  So, we need to sleep enough. Now, what's enough sleep? This is an interesting question. Enough sleep has been argued at six hours, other people, it's seven hours, other people, it's eight hours. It's basically waking up without an alarm clock and feeling rested.

• 24:50Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Insomnia is actually a medical term nowadays, and insomnia is essentially diagnosed as falling asleep during the middle of the day due to lack of sleep at nighttime.

• 25:04Lewis Howes?

  Oh, okay.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  But many people who are having trouble sleeping at night are not falling asleep during the middle of the day. They're dealing with grogginess or crankiness or other effects of having fragmented sleep.

• 25:17Lewis Howes?

  What are the, what are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep? Is it rumination? Is it traumas that you're holding on to? Is it arguments? Is it self-doubt or insecurities? Is it you nap too much? Is it the foods you ate too late? Like, what would you say are the main causes?

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Of not being able to fall asleep. All of the above. But the the primary one is a failure to turn off your thoughts. Okay. And I think that might provide a good anchor point for us to talk about some protocols. Really, a excellent night's sleep begins in the morning. I talked about this on the previous episode, so I won't go into detail, but everyone should get as much bright light in their eyes, ideally from sunlight, first thing in the morning, ten to thirty minutes outside, depending on how bright it is.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Eyeglasses or contact lenses are fine. Don't wear sunglasses if you can do it safely. If you wake up before the sun rises, turn on bright lights, then go outside once the sun rises. If you have no access to sunlight, use a daytime simulator or similar, like a ring light, and get that light in your eyes. Okay. So that's all of that in a compact form. Caffeine, you can inhibit falling asleep with caffeine. You have to figure out when your threshold is for me, I can drink caffeine up until about three, even four o'clock in the afternoon and sleep like a baby. And still sleep well. Yes, and Matt Walker, our good friend Matt Walker, would say that my sleep isn't as good as it would be had I cut caffeine out earlier. By like eleven or twelve, yeah, AM. Right, and and I I want to acknowledge, you know, Matt is the Michael Jordan of sleep science, and so I'm not gonna.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  You're the LeBron James. Well, no, no, and in fair, thank you for the the compliment, but but no, I'm not. I know a lot of the science and the protocols, but that's Matt's wheelhouse. And so if he says something, it's true, and if I say something and and our opinions conflict, it's likely to be something that the data are still emerging, or in in that case, default to to Matt. Gotcha. Being correct, because I, just out of due respect for his expertise. So caffeine, you know, for some people, they can have a two o'clock espresso, two PM espresso, some people it's four PM. Some people can drink caffeine at eight PM and fall asleep, but there I would say it's problematic

• 27:37Speaker 02

  because you're disrupting the architecture of sleep and and the brainwaves associated with sleep, the chemicals and so forth. So get that morning light. Cut your caffeine off at the time that allows you to fall asleep. That morning light also sets a timer on your melatonin rhythm. So you have this gland in your brain called the pineal gland. That pineal is the source of melatonin. Melatonin makes you sleepy, but it does not keep you asleep.

• 28:00Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Melatonin starts to rise in the late evening and continues into the night and then eventually tapers off. This is naturally occurring melatonin release, not supplemented melatonin release. The fastest way to slam melatonin to the pavement and eliminate it in your system is to look at bright light for, I hate to tell you this, even a few seconds. So.

• 28:24Lewis Howes?

  You mean at night?

• 28:26Speaker 02

  At night is typically when melatonin rises. It's when it's released in the bloodstream and when it has this effect of making us sleepy. It does a number of other things.

• 28:33Lewis Howes?

  You want more melatonin at night, is that right?

• 28:36Speaker 02

  You do. And if you wake up in the middle of the night or it's eight o'clock and you decide you want to go to bed at nine or it's nine o'clock, you want to go to bed at 10 and you go into the bathroom and you flip on the bright lights, your melatonin levels just got crushed down.

• 28:48Lewis Howes?

  Having lights on is the worst thing you can do.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Yes, and it doesn't matter if it's blue light, red light, purple light, green light. Bright lights inhibit melatonin very acutely. And therefore you want to avoid exposure to bright lights at night if your goal is to be asleep. So the simple rule that governs all this stuff is when you want to be alert, get bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight. So that's true in the morning and throughout the day. And when you want to be sleepy or asleep, avoid bright light in your eyes. Now, many home environments don't allow you to have zero lights. And that's not actually necessary. You can just dim the lights in the evening. Ideally, you also avoid overhead lights because the neurons in the eye that trigger this melatonin suppression and so forth,

• 29:34Speaker 02

  they reside in an area of the eye that views upper visual space. So you could have desk lamps or and just dim those down. If you're going to work on a screen, dim it way down. Will blue blockers help? Yes, but if the light is bright enough, they.

• 29:50Lewis Howes?

  It's still gonna go through.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  You're still gonna inhibit melatonin.

• 29:52Lewis Howes?

  So how bad is watching TV at night?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  If the TV isn't too bright and.

• 29:56Lewis Howes?

  If it's farther away.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Farther away. Yeah, and you're and maybe you wear blue blockers.

• 30:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  And or or I mean, some people are go take this to the extreme. They wear sunglasses. I think that's a little extreme. Now, candlelight and moonlight, surprisingly, doesn't seem to block melatonin.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Now, maybe a really bright moonlit night, full moon. Can, you know, the lunacy associated with the full moon might actually be due to a suppression of melatonin and an increase in alertness. So those are the things as it relates to light. Yes. Then, there's this issue of people who have trouble staying asleep. So they can fall asleep, fine, but they wake up at two or three in the morning. I happen to do this. If I go to bed around 10:30, I tend to wake up around three and I use the restroom. Yeah, I tend to drink a lot of fluids and I have to use the restroom. This is true at every age. This is not just some aging-related thing. Um, that's fine. I just keep the lights dim. Right. And use the bathroom and then you go back to sleep. Fall back to sleep. Very normal, very healthy.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  One of the best things I ever did for my sleep was to keep my phone out of the room so that when I wake up at three in the morning, I just didn't start scrolling the newspapers is typically what I would do online. Gotcha. And then you're just waking up your brain, not just by the light, but by the content. And, you know. You're activating it again as opposed to going back to sleep. Exactly, and sometimes there's a comment and they're like, why is this, you know, your thinking is not very good in the middle of the night. The other thing is you want to keep the room cool. So in order to fall asleep, your body has to undergo a drop of, in temperature of one to three degrees. There are a couple of ways to accomplish this. One is keeping the room cool. The other is to, um, and that's ideal, actually, because you can put a hand or a foot out. We actually lose a lot of our heat through what's called our glabrous skin, so the palms

• 31:40Speaker 02

  of our hands, the bottoms of the feet. I always put my feet out of the sheets and just let them feel the cool air. That's right, and that's a great way to cool off your core body temperature. You're probably doing that unconsciously in your sleep as well. If the room were too warm, the only way for you to cool off would be for you to put your hand in a bucket of cold water, and generally, people don't have that accessible. And then you're gonna go pee if you're doing that too. Right, exactly. And then, of course, there are all these products nowadays of, you know, things that cover, yeah, that cover, that cool the bed. I'm supposed to try one of these soon. I haven't tried one yet. I tend to just keep the room cool. Cool, yeah. And. What do you keep it at? Do you keep it around 67, 65? Uh, that's a little cooler than what I do. I put it at about 67, 68. Okay. Um, but I tend to wake up hot in the middle of the night, like, ah, throw the comforter

• 32:25Speaker 02

  off, um, and go put some cold water on my face. Wow. Um, so don't obsess over waking up too much, and if you do, try and stay away from screens. Or if, um, you know, some people will read a book, dim light again. Yeah. Uh, and then falling back asleep. Some people are waking up at two or three because they are going to bed too late. Their melatonin has run out. So imagine that you're that you're naturally somebody who should go to bed early around nine. But we all have this ability to push forward and stay awake if we have to. Much easier to stay awake than to force yourself to go to sleep.

• 33:05Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Very hard to force yourself to go to sleep. So let's say your system, you start releasing melatonin around nine P M. But you stay up until eleven. Then you get into bed, you fall asleep around eleven thirty and at three in the morning, you suddenly wake up. Well, that's because your melatonin tapered off.

• 33:21Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  And there's a wakefulness that's occurring. And so ideally you would start going to bed earlier. Now, there's a lot of discussion out there about so-called chronotypes. So night owls, morning people, people that follow a more typical schedule. Typical would be going to sleep somewhere between ten thirty and eleven thirty, waking up somewhere between six thirty and eight. Then there are the people that like to go to bed at two A M, sleep till ten. And then there are people that like to go to bed at eight and wake up at four.

• 33:47Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Huge variation out there. It tends to change across the lifetime.

• 33:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, your season of life for years.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  That's right, and adolescents and teenagers tend to stay up later and wants to sleep in. And there's actually some evidence that they can learn better if they are allowed to to use that schedule. But most schools won't adhere to that schedule.

• 34:06Lewis Howes?

  You gotta wake up at six and go to school at eight or whatever, yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Once you enter adult life, you're generally somebody who's gonna have to learn how to go to bed early and wake up early. Early or at least wake up early. Now, naps, you should feel comfortable, the data say, naps, you should feel comfortable napping for ninety minutes or less. At any point throughout the day, as long as it doesn't interfere with your nighttime sleep. So some people like me, I love naps, but it doesn't interfere with my nighttime sleep.

• 34:33Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Does not.

• 34:34Lewis Howes?

  So you take a sixty minute nap.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Generally twenty to forty five minutes.

• 34:38Lewis Howes?

  And then you you fully fall asleep or you're kind of like awake and just resting?

• 34:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime. I can fall asleep at a gun range, yeah. It's um, it's in, it's in.

• 34:49Lewis Howes?

  Can you sleep sitting up too like this?

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Plane anywhere. That's a gift. It is, although it could reflect that I'm pushing my system a little too hard. Oh. Um, but it is, it is useful at times. Incredible. It is useful. You can fall asleep right on a plane or? Anywhere, leaning against a. Oh, my gosh. In a subway station and anywhere. Yeah, if I need sleep, I'm going down. That's incredible. Yeah. So the, um, the other thing is that during sleep, a number of things happen and we can talk about slow wave sleep and REM sleep. But one of the most important physiological functions of sleep is to clear out some of the cellular debris that accumulates throughout the day. The cellular debris creates cognitive deficits.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  It actually may be related to the aggregation of proteins and things that relate to dementia and Alzheimer's. It's the so-called glymphatic system. The lymphatic system is a system of moving through immune cells and clearing out of debris from the body. The glymphatic system is a kind of a, a equivalent system that exists in the brain that involves so-called glial cells, which are support cells, but also do many things actively. They're not just doing the support. The glymphatic system is like a washout of the brain's debris. And that system seems to function best when feet are slightly elevated above the brain. There's some interesting data from University of South Carolina coming out now

• 36:14Speaker 02

  that show that if you can get your ankles elevated a little bit higher than your chin, that's great. When you're sleeping? While you're sleeping. What's it do for you? It increases the glymphatic clearance. And there are some data that it can improve function of the brain. The studies that are happening now that I'm aware of, I'm in touch with that group are mainly geared towards people that have had head injuries. So concussion and TBI of various kinds, but they also are seeing interesting effects in typical folks that don't have any traumatic brain injury. So I put a pillow underneath my ankles when I fall asleep. And to get a little bit of that elevation. And then during the day, if ever you can't get a nap, or you are going to get a nap, put your ankles up on the couch and lie down on the floor.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  That that itself can get some of the clearance of the glymphatic system.

• 37:01Lewis Howes?

  And that helps you sleep better? It helps you just clean out the system?

• 37:04Speaker 02

  It helps your brain function better when you wake up from sleep.

• 37:07Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  That's what the data are starting to show. You know, some of the things I described, like the light viewing, is baked into the neuroscience literature. Hundreds of papers, published papers. Some of the things like the glymphatic system is kind of cutting edge. It's on the way. But because the safety margins of raising your ankles are so large. I mean, there's nothing dangerous about that.

• 37:28Lewis Howes?

  Sure. How long do you need to do it for to get the benefits?

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Oh, I think these are immediate benefits.

• 37:34Lewis Howes?

  Two minutes or 10 minutes?

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Oh, no, you're doing this the whole night that you're asleep. Your ankles are elevated. If you wake up and you happen to kick the pillow out, it's not the end of the world. But the idea is that you don't want to be sleeping with your head above your ankles either. There is some evidence that when people travel on planes and they're sleeping in chairs, that that's not equivalent to the kind of sleep they'd get when they're lying flat.

• 37:52Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  Independent of all the other things that are happening. And we know this because there are great sleep labs at Stanford, School of Medicine, at UPenn, back east and elsewhere, where people actually go into a clinic and sleep either upright or at different angles. And they're looking at all this at the level of data.

• 38:09Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so here's one for you. What's the best position to sleep? On your back, on your side, on your stomach?

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Great question, and it really, truly depends. And it probably depends on how hot you run. So I tend to run really warm. A lot of the cooling of the body occurs from the palms and bottoms of the feet, but also from the upper back and scapulae, because we accumulate what's called brown fat there. It's not the blubbery fat that's under the skin. It's like a furnace. Actually, you can increase the density of brown fat by going into cold water repeatedly for, you know, one to three minutes several times each week. It means your furnace actually burns hotter. It allows you to be in cold temperatures more comfortably. Some really beautiful data just published on this. So I don't like to sleep on my back because I start heating up.

• 38:57Lewis Howes?

  Start sweating.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  That's right. So I tend to sleep on my side. I sleep in that, what is that? It's like soldier position.

• 39:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  But then again, there are some people that have shoulder issues and then they can't do that. I'm relatively flexible through my shoulders, not super flexible, so I can do that. It really depends. Now, of course, if you're sleeping on your stomach, how do you elevate your ankles? You know, it starts becoming a little bit, you know, we are not just science experiments. And so you have to, you have to assume that you're not going to get everything exactly right. But keeping the room cool, keeping the cool being under a warm enough blanket, but then extending a hand or an ankle out so that you could cool off during the middle of the night. That's going to be good. Keep the room dark, although complete pitch black doesn't seem to be as good as having a little bit of light somewhere in the room. But you don't want a bright blue light or red light anywhere in the room.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  That's going to wake you up. Some people like me have very thin eyelids, exceedingly thin eyelids. Some people have very thick eyelids. So some people are more bothered by a light in the room than others. It really varies. So you have to just tune things to your particular environment.

• 40:01Lewis Howes?

  I'm curious about the neuroscience before you go to sleep. How do we set our minds up to, you were saying before about a lot of people, it's hard for them to sleep because they can't shut their mind off.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:14Lewis Howes?

  Is there something we should be thinking before we shut it off to set our sleep up for success mentally? And then to really build into the next day where we wake up feeling like clear minded and without this brain fog, where we have more motivation, where we have more, you know, energy and excitement towards the next day and then doing that in a pattern every night. Is there any science around that? Is it like listening to a hypnosis?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  That could be very helpful.

• 40:41Lewis Howes?

  Which will help you clean, clean out whatever's going on through the day and get clear and ready for the next day, but also fall asleep so you're not thinking about it. You know, is there anything that can help you have better dreams so that you sleep better? Like, what have you found there in the neuroscience?

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the, I'm so glad you asked this question. There's some really interesting data from a guy named Chuck, Charles Zeissler, who is at Harvard Med, sent beautiful studies on sleep in humans for many decades, and a really fantastic physician and researcher. And they observed something interesting, which is that about 90 minutes or so before your natural bedtime, there's a spike in alertness, planning, and almost anxiety that all people undergo, and it's a normal, healthy pattern. The idea, and it's a just-so story, because we don't really know. I, nor Chuck Zeissler, nor anyone else was consulted at the design phase, as we say. But we assume this came about because prior to going to sleep,

• 41:40Speaker 02

  we need to shore up everything for safety. We need to, you know, lock things down, make sure everything's in its place, because we are very vulnerable in sleep. Nowadays, this would might manifest as, you know, you're, you need to go to bed at 10:30 because you have to get up at 6, etc. And then, right around 8:30 or 9, you start finding yourself running around doing various things. Many people worry about that, and they think, oh, I'm really stressed because I actually need to go to sleep, and here I am wide awake. It tends to subside very quickly. So, just the knowledge that that's a normal, healthy spike in alertness and activity, I think can help a number of people. I'm gonna make sure I mention that.

• 42:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  The other thing is preparing the mind, as you said, turning thoughts off. Turning thoughts off is a skill. We've talked before, gosh, almost a year or more now, ago, about yoga nidra.

• 42:29Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Which is, there are many, many yoga nidra scripts available on YouTube, free of cost. The ones I particularly like are the ones by Kamini Desai. K.A.M.I.N.I.D.E.S.A.I. Kamini Desai. I just really like her voice. I don't know Kamini, never met her. These are free scripts. They're yoga nidra scripts that last about 20 minutes. They involve some breathing, some meditation-type stuff. They, but they teach you to turn your thoughts off, which is really wonderful, because a lot of people, they just get stuck in this rumination. Now, is there an ideal protocol prior to sleep?

• 43:09Speaker 02

  It depends because some people find they have their greatest clarity after the kids are asleep and they're sitting there. So I wouldn't say don't work or do work. You know, you do want to avoid strong stimuli before sleep. So do you really want to watch, uh, you know, politically charged or a violent movie right before sleep? Well, that depends on how triggered you tend to be by politics or violence. Some people aren't triggered, other people are.

• 43:36Peter Attia?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Uh, but you know, that aside, you, you don't want to go to bed either too hungry or too full because that can inhibit your sleep.

• 43:49Lewis Howes?

  A healthy meal, let's say an hour before bed. I'm talking about grains and lean meat and healthy stuff. Or if you eat pizza an hour before bed, are they both going to impact your ability to sleep better? Or is the quality of the food before you go to bed matter?

• 44:06Peter Attia?

  Yeah, that's a, that's a really good question. Uh, the short answer is yeah, it does matter. Um, so the, probably the two things that would have the greatest determination, um, would be the simplicity or glycemic, the simplicity of the carbohydrates or the glycemic load because that's going to impact the sort of glycemic roller coaster you go on at night. And then probably the amount of protein because that has a greater contribution to what's called the thermogenic effect of food. Uh, so the thermogenic effect is how much does your body temperature actually rise to digest the food? Um, our bodies want to be very cold at night. So anything you do that opposes that leads to lousy sleep.

• 44:46Lewis Howes?

  So what foods help you sleep better that keep you colder? What are those foods? Whether it's an hour before or three hours before?

• 44:53Peter Attia?

  Yeah, I, I, I honestly, it's like almost anything you're going to eat is going to come with something that's going to slightly raise your temperature. So I just generally say, try to not eat too much before bed. Um, and, and I go out of my way to avoid the two things that I think are worse. So I just say, I wouldn't have huge protein before bed and I don't want to have anything that's going to raise my blood sugar before bed. So, you know, I'd have an avocado before bed. I'd have, you know, something that's like, you know, I just generally don't eat before bed.

• 45:22Lewis Howes?

  The body really rewards you in terms of if you wait or if you don't eat right before bed, is it going to sleep better, sleep deeper, be cooler and therefore help we, help you have more energy the next day if you don't eat before bed?

• 45:35Peter Attia?

  Yeah, and this is at least for me been most easy to exhibit and I think many of my patients would agree during periods of fasting. So fasting is kind of a funky state because you're altering so many other things in the physiology. But one of the things that happens, especially by about the second day of a water only fast, is you really are seeing the impacts of what deep sleep can look like in a state that is totally absent food. And it's very interesting because you're competing with two forces, one that's keeping you awake and one that's helping you sleep a lot deeper. The one that's keeping you awake is cortisol. You have more of it. You have more stress hormones when you're fasting because that's the thing from a prehistoric standpoint that would have been going on,

• 46:20Peter Attia?

  right? Fasting would trigger a signal that says, go get more food, right?

• 46:25Lewis Howes?

  Be alert, be focused.

• 46:26Peter Attia?

  Be alert, go get food, like, we don't want to die. And so that's kind of keeping you awake. But the flip side of that is, the total absence of nutrient is allowing you to get into this amazing sleep and your body temperature is really going down because your body's turning down its metabolism. So I actually find fasting sleep to be some of the most amazing physiology because I'm watching this plummeting temperature, rising heart rate variability, falling heart rate, all of these really valuable things, but a little bit of rising cortisol that can lead to shorter sleep times. But I still feel quite rejuvenated by sleep.

• 47:02Lewis Howes?

  If you're a kid and you're eating a lot of junk food, you're not sleeping, you're staying up late because you're whatever, playing video games all night, but you've got all this energy all day and you're active, is there a negative for in your early ages, teens, early twenties through lacking sleep, eating poorly? Or is there a way to recover in your twenties from the damage you've done in your before twenty?

• 47:26Peter Attia?

  Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, certainly, you can break it down into sort of the behavioral habit side and you can talk about it through the physiological lens. The good news is, before the age of twenty or thirty, we are Pretty remarkably resilient. I mean, you're an athlete, so you can relate. How, how old are you now, Louis? You're near 30. Thirty-seven, thirty-seven. So you, you might not have fully appreciated. I'm 47, sir. I'm a full decade older than you. And when I think about 17 to 27 to 30 to 7 to 47, I can really talk about those decades through the lens of resilience. Like at 17, you could shoot me and I think I'd still get up the next day. Like you just couldn't, right?

• 48:11Peter Attia?

  You're Superman. Yeah. You're absolutely Superman. And I don't know, I, I feel like the first observation of not being Superman for me kinda kicked in about 42-ish, about five years ago, was the first time I was like, oh, so this is what people talk about, right? Like you can't just go out and crush it every minute of every day. And I think that's just one lens, which is through the lens of exercise. But the same is true of physiology, right? Like, or I'll give you another example. Many of my patients have observed this. I've observed this. Like, I was never a big drinker in college, but certainly there were enough

• 48:53Peter Attia?

  occasions in med school or college where I'd go out and drink far more than anyone should. And yet somehow the next day I could like, get up at six in the morning and go and do whatever I need to do. Like, I, I remember one night actually being out drinking until three in the morning. I mean, having so much to drink, it was ridiculous. And somehow getting up at six in that morning to do a hundred mile bike ride. Oh, my gosh, man. Probably, probably still partially drunk. And, but, but felt fine by about like two hours into the ride. Today, if I had three glasses of wine, like the headache I'm gonna have the next day is gonna last me till the middle of the day.

• 49:30Lewis Howes?

  Is that because your body was able to assimilate the glucose into the muscles and it used it for its, to its advantage then and now it's like takes over?

• 49:38Peter Attia?

  It's a very good question. I really, I mean, I could, I could sort of, you know, speculate on what it is, but I, I just think there's an over, so there's this thing called homeostasis, right? Which is one of the hallmarks of youth. And it's one of the hallmarks of aging. And, you know, it's, it's the ability to, or it's, it's our lack of homeostasis. We lose this ability to get the body back into the zone of optimal performance. So, everything about the human body is very particular. For example, take pH, which is the amount of acidity in our body. We're so highly regulated, like our body really needs to be at a pH of 7.4. So, 7 would kill you and 7.6 or 7.7 would kill you. And this is a scale that goes from 0 to 14, to put that in perspective.

• 50:23Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 50:24Peter Attia?

  Okay, so tiny perturbations will kill you. How good is our body at staying in that? Amazing. Temperature, right? You go much below about 94, you're dead. You go much above about 104, you're dead. How good are we at staying in that range? Oh, I mean, good. I mean, we generally stay within a 1.5 degree band. So this homeostasis thing is amazing. It gets weaker and weaker as we get older. And so, your ability to tolerate bad food, bad sleep, sedentary behavior, more stress, all those things, it just gets weaker and weaker and weaker. And I think it declines non-linearly. So, again, what you experience as a decline between 30 and 40, eh, it's bad. 40 to 50, yeah, that's

• 51:08Peter Attia?

  worse. 50 to 60, you can fall off a cliff.

• 51:11Lewis Howes?

  Is there a way to reverse this?

• 51:12Peter Attia?

  I don't think we know. I think you can definitely slow the progression of it. And, uh, you know what? I would say you probably can reverse it, right? So just as you can clearly reverse diabetes, diabetes is a glucose homeostasis problem. And it's clearly reversible.

• 51:29Peter Attia?

  But, you know, so there are probably some variants of this that, that are harder to reverse than others. Uh, but, but no, I, I think we can reverse this process. Uh, but it gets, it gets harder, you know, it gets harder as time goes on. And it gets harder the further, the further you are into, you know, sort of the physiologic trap.

• 51:46Lewis Howes?

  What are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this kind of, not maybe a cliff, but a dip over the last five years for yourself? How are you thinking about it?

• 51:56Peter Attia?

  Well, I sort of had a change of heart five years ago. So actually, six years ago, 2014. So I sort of hung up my bike, which at that point, I'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport. But I, you know, at that point, a couple of things had happened. So one, I had become very familiar with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training, which again, is a rich man's problem.

• 52:22Lewis Howes?

  Ultra marathons, ultra biking, ultra swimming, hiking.

• 52:25Peter Attia?

  That's, that's right. That's right. So again, and it's the same sort of curve, right? Where as exercise, dose of exercise goes up, mortality comes down, but it has this little bit of a J, where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise, especially over the age of 40, you're actually driving an increase in mortality. Now again, Yes.

• 52:49Lewis Howes?

  Does that mean like running a marathon once a year? Or is it running a marathon every week?

• 52:55Peter Attia?

  Yeah, great, great point. Running a marathon once a year, probably not increasing your mortality at all. But you know, running 40, 50 miles a week, probably is. Especially at that age. Now again, this gets to your point about resilience. Someone in their twenties doing that, doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality. It really only seems to be an issue if you continue. In fact, I did an interview with a cardiologist, James O'Keefe, on my podcast, who is, you know, the world's expert on this. And it was actually James's work six years ago, because I heard him speak at a conference 10 years ago. We became friends. You know, it's one of those things, I'm sure you've experienced this, where you hear something and you don't want it to be true.

• 53:38Peter Attia?

  So you basically come up with all the reasons you're gonna poke holes in it until you can't anymore.

• 53:43Lewis Howes?

  You find the evidence the other way, yeah.

• 53:45Peter Attia?

  Yeah, yeah. And eventually it became very difficult to ignore that this hyper amount of exercise was counterproductive. So that's one piece of the change six years ago. The second piece-

• 53:54Lewis Howes?

  It's probably bad that I just committed to doing the marathon next year yesterday.

• 53:58Peter Attia?

  That's all right, though. You'll be fine. I just think, don't do one a month, you know? And then, and then I think the second thing was I realized, like, It was sort of funny, but I realized like my prime was so far behind me that I needed to think about like what, what was, what was I doing this in service of, right? Like, and not that I needed anyone other than myself to do these things because I'm very self motivated. So I don't like, but just as a joke, one day I asked my wife, I said, Hey, do you know what my PR is for 20K?

• 54:32Lewis Howes?

  Bike, run or swim?

• 54:34Peter Attia?

  Yeah, bike on a, on a 20K bike on the time trial. And I was like, this is my wife. She hears me talk about this stuff all the time. I have spreadsheets and models and data, and I analyze my power data every single day. And I'm trying to break the record for San Diego. Like, I'm really so switched on to this. She'll probably get it within a minute. She'll guess what my PR is within a minute. She was off by 20 minutes, meaning she wasn't even in the zip code. So I was like, huh, that's funny. Like, it's like literally the most important person in my life couldn't care less about this. And what I realized was, you know, I need to start thinking about a different sport, which is the sport of longevity. So what does

• 55:18Peter Attia?

  it mean to be a kick ass 100 year old? And so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction called the Centenarian Olympics. So how do you train to kick ass at 100 should you get there? And of course, everywhere along the way. So that now dominates my landscape of training, which means I don't, you know, care about how fast I can, you know, ride a 40 kilometer time trial because that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do.

• 55:55Lewis Howes?

  What is your mindset going into a? Forty mile bike then, or some type of experience? Is it more the joy of it?

• 56:02Peter Attia?

  So I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't train. No, my training is very specific, but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars. So the pillars being stability, strength, mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance. And so each of those then has a super layered detail approach. And I still ride my bike four hours a week, so it's a fraction of what I used to do. And it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training.

• 56:32Lewis Howes?

  What was the fourth one? Stability, strength, mitochondria and?

• 56:35Peter Attia?

  Mitochondrial efficiency or aerobic efficiency. And then the fourth and final one is anaerobic performance.

• 56:40Lewis Howes?

  So you focus on those four metrics now on a day to day basis?

• 56:44Peter Attia?

  Yeah, yeah, those, those four pillars sort of make up the training program, which is then in service of something that I invite every patient to define for themselves, which is, because you will have a different, you know, set of variables from me potentially, but you know, my centenary Olympics has, you know, 18 events in it. You know, like I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool that, you know, where there's a one foot gap between the water and the curb, like lift myself up. I want to be able to hop over a three foot fence. I want to be able to walk three miles in an hour. I want to be able to carry two 10 pound bags up four flights of stairs. I want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds, because that's about the weight of a kid. I want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands.

• 57:30Peter Attia?

  So I could rattle off all of my 18 things and you would say, Peter, those seem really easy. And you'd be right as a 37 year old stud, but the point is.

• 57:40Lewis Howes?

  As a 60 year old, a lot of them aren't easy.

• 57:43Peter Attia?

  Most 60 year olds couldn't do this if their life depended on it. And I have yet to meet, but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can. And so that's the aspiration is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s. How do you work that backwards to inform your training in your 60s, in your 50s and in your 40s? And it's actually very hard.

• 58:04Lewis Howes?

  And as I'm getting into, you know, I'm three years away from 40. What should someone in my age range be thinking about when they're, you know, I'm healthy, I feel good, you know, maybe have some aches and pains here and there when I'm training hard or something. But for the most part, I feel amazing. What should I be thinking about? Moving forward so that I continue to feel amazing and have the ability to do these things.

• 58:27Peter Attia?

  So I don't, I think it's never too late to at least become familiar with what these ideas mean. And it doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and devote yourself to this. Like, I've obviously made a very conscious choice that I don't go to swim meets, I don't go to bike races, like, I don't train for those things anymore. And a big part of that is just time. You know, there are only 168 hours in a week and, you know, I have a very clear set of priorities and I'm willing to set aside 10 to 12 hours a week for exercise, which by many people's standards is still quite a lot, but probably by the standards that you exercise and certainly by the standards that I used to exercise, you know, I've never exercised so little in my life. So I have to be very efficient with every one of those minutes.

• 59:12Peter Attia?

  And that means I'm laser focused on the four principles of that. In your case, I think it comes down to saying, okay, how much time do you want to devote, devote to the long game? How much time do you want to devote to the short game? Another way to think about this would be investing. If you're looking at an investment portfolio, you might say, how much do I want to put both time and money, so the actual capital I set aside, but also the amount of time I spend deliberating over it into my retirement account versus how much do I want to invest as a day trader for short-term gains, um, for, you know, money that I'm going to be using in the near term that's maybe even supplementing my income today? You could have totally different strategies for that and that's totally fine.

• 59:55Peter Attia?

  So I'm just in the category where I'm only thinking about long-term permanent capital. And so, um, so that's the first question is you have to decide, how do you want to do that? And it might be that you say, you know, Peter, at 37, I just want to focus on running a marathon. I've always wanted to do an Ironman, so I'm going to go and do that. And, you know, I want to climb Mount Everest and that's going to require, like, you might have a whole bunch of these bucket list things. And truthfully, I would say, do them now because it's only going to get harder.

• 1:00:20Lewis Howes?

  Because you're not going to be able to do it later. Yeah.

• 1:00:21Peter Attia?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't think you're going to want to do it later. So, so get those things out of the way.

• 1:00:25Lewis Howes?

  I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.

• 1:01:09Lewis Howes?

  And now it's time to go out there and do something great.