Your Brain On Sleep: A Compilation On Brain States, Biological Rhythms & Why Sleep Deprivation Is Sabotaging Your Life

This is the ultimate sleep compilation featuring Bryan Johnson, Andrew Huberman, Matthew Walker, and Simon Hill. These conversations explore the mythology of sleep deprivation, why hustle culture is biologically devastating, and how circadian rhythms govern your brain states. From the paradoxical relationship between exhaustion and productivity to why what you eat before bed can wreak havoc on your sleep quality. I reveal my own Mount Everest—the arithmetic of nighttime eating that's been leading me astray for years. Sleep isn't lost time. It's the highest return on time you'll ever get. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Whoop: The all-new WHOOP 5.0 is here! Get your first month FREE👉https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll BetterHelp: Get 10% OFF the first month👉 https://www.betterhelp.com/richroll AG1: Get a FREE AG1 "Morning Person" hat, welcome kit, and more! 👉https://www.drinkag1.com/richroll Roka: Unlock 20% OFF your order with code RICHROLL👉https://www. ROKA.com/RICHROLL ProLon: Get 15% OFF plus a FREE bonus gift 👉 https://www.prolonlife.com/richroll Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉https://www.rivian.com Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  When sleep is abundant, minds flourish. When it's not, they don't.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  We should be accessing as much uninterrupted deep sleep as we can.

• 0:11Bryan Johnson?

  Everything revolves around sleep. Nothing changes existence more than sleep.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  It is never too late to start sleeping better.

• 0:19Simon Hill?

  We know that this chronic circadian disruption significantly increases risk of metabolic diseases.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  The leading cause of death in late-stage adolescent teens is road traffic accidents. And here, sleep matters enormously.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  The thing that we are all a slave to, all of us, is the 24-hour circadian cycle. I love this late data.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  I started to look at the data. The data was immensely powerful.

• 0:45Bryan Johnson?

  Everything falls apart without sleep. I don't know how to communicate any better.

• 0:56Rich Roll?

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• 1:40Rich Roll?

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• 2:01Bryan Johnson?

  There was this reporter that wrote an article recently for GQ. I was at this anti-aging conference. And this person who interviewed me said, you know, like, what is the number one thing you do for, you know, anti-aging? And this reporter, she told a story like, so people are there like listening, like, what's Brian Johnson going to say about this thing? Is he going to say like some peptide or, you know, Sana or whatever protocol? And then he says, sleep. And she said, then like the crowd just has this collective sigh of disappointment.

• 2:31Rich Roll?

  Right, because it's much sexier to talk about rapamycin.

• 2:34Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Whether that was true or not, she was just like, everyone was so disappointed with my response. But, you know, like, I don't know how to communicate more, that everything revolves around sleep. Nothing changes existence more than sleep. You have more willpower, you have more zest for life, you have more energy. Yeah, I just, everything falls apart without sleep.

• 2:55Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 2:56Bryan Johnson?

  I don't know how to communicate any better.

• 2:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and when people want to hear you elaborate on that, the focus tends to be on the blackout curtains and the type of sheets and the air purifier that you have in the room and the temperature of the room. And those are all fine and well and important and play their part. But to really appreciate it, you have to, you have to actually embrace the entirety of the program.

• 3:20Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly right. I mean, I think we're all competing for status and power in society, you know, like in all of our own little circles and places. And there's so much mythology caught up in the hero being sleep deprived and sleeping under the desk and going days without sleeping. It's so built into the psychology that people are trying to signal to others, I'm worthy of being respected, I'm worthy of this status, I'm worthy of being admired, I'm worthy of this mythology. So they're doing things to play this script because they think it generates the respect of others. And in their mind, they may believe it too, like, this is how genius is achieved, you know, I can think of so many examples of people who have done this. And so it's so deep in our psychology that sleep deprivation is somehow positive.

• 4:07Bryan Johnson?

  That that's what stops most people from adopting it.

• 4:10Rich Roll?

  That hustle porn culture and notion of sleep is in its twilight. Like, I feel like we've really gone a long way towards raising awareness around that. Like, that shifted a lot, even in the last couple of years, I think.

• 4:24Bryan Johnson?

  I concur. Yeah, just even like when I talk to my friends, like, they'll come to me and say, like, I want this so badly. We have to engage in a therapy session where I'm like, what's up? How's it going? And then we dig into deep into their psychology and they uncover and unravel that they really are trying to be on mythology level with their levels of accomplishment. Now, it takes a lot of vulnerability for the person to be that honest. But like, once we do that in private and they're like, oh, my God, this is totally unnecessary. I can achieve my objectives of ambition and status and power and wealth and success. And I don't have to do this sleep deprivation thing. And it's so liberating for them. They actually become better at their craft.

• 5:06Simon Hill?

  These circadian rhythms are primarily affected by two external cues

• 5:16Simon Hill?

  in our environment. There's two things that can really throw them out of whack. One is light exposure. So if we're sitting up late at night in very, very, very bright lights, it's, let's say it's 9:00 PM.

• 5:34Simon Hill?

  Our body, and it's dark outside, our body, we might be sitting in LA, but our body thinks we're in Sydney.

• 5:42Simon Hill?

  So we can cause some dysregulation of our circadian rhythms. And then that affects the release of melatonin, which has an effect on your sleep, for example. We can also dramatically affect these circadian rhythms through the timing in which we eat. That's the other really important signal here. So within this challenge, we have two different habits that speak to nurturing our circadian rhythms. One is light exposure. We want people in the morning to get outside, get at least 10 minutes of natural light exposure in the first couple of hours of waking up. That's important. That sets your clock.

• 6:26Rich Roll?

  This is the Huberman protocol around morning sunlight.

• 6:30Simon Hill?

  And then at nighttime.

• 6:33Simon Hill?

  When, as the sun's going down, ideally you're, you know, you don't have to turn all the lights off in the house, but it will be helpful if you dim the lights down. And if you're using screens, you can adjust the brightness on those and put them into night mode. And then with regards to the timing of our food, there's some really interesting research that has come out of Courtney Peterson's lab. I interviewed her, looking at how efficiently is our body utilizing nutrients at different times of the day?

• 7:10Simon Hill?

  And it seems that particularly at nighttime, a couple of hours before we go to bed, we have changes in hormones that make things like glucose metabolism much less effective. How, it makes sense, our body is getting ready to go to sleep, not to digest food and convert it into energy. The ideal kind of eating window, and some people have described this as a circadian biology eating window, circadian fasting, it's not, I don't think it's really a crazy

• 7:50Simon Hill?

  fast, is you're in bed for eight hours a night, that's what we said just before. And when you wake up, not eating for one or two hours upon waking, and before you go to bed, not eating for one or two hours. Before you go to bed? Before you go to bed. Now, if you, let's say you do that as two hours, so you're in bed for eight, you don't eat for the first two hours of waking up, and then before you go to bed, you're not eating in the two hours leading up to bed. Automatically, that means your eating window is at 12 hours. Mm-hmm. The average person's eating window in America is 15 to 16 hours. Hmm.

• 8:34Simon Hill?

  So pretty much rolling out of bed, having a bite of a donut, and eating all the way up to going to sleep again.

• 8:45Simon Hill?

  The reason why all of this is important is that we know that this chronic circadian disruption significantly increases risk of metabolic diseases, significantly increases risk of obesity, of cardiovascular disease. So there are repercussions if we're living in a way where our circadian rhythms are disrupted. And it's not just the long term. If you're experiencing chronic circadian disruption, you're likely to feel more brain fog, more fatigue, less lower energy or lethargy on a daily basis. So just getting some routine in place where

• 9:27Simon Hill?

  we're in bed for eight hours, which thinking about light exposure, and then we're eating at a regular time, trying to avoid eating too close to waking up or going to bed, can make a very big difference.

• 9:40Rich Roll?

  This is like my Mount Everest because I get so hungry at night, man. It's very difficult for me to not eat in the two hours before I go to sleep. Like, that is my Achilles heel. So if I accomplish nothing other than figuring out how to master that as a result of doing this challenge, that would be a huge win for me.

• 10:03Simon Hill?

  Have you played around with the types of food that you're eating?

• 10:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And, and, you know, when I was wearing a continuous glucose monitor, it's very evident, like, when I would eat, like, right before going to bed, how it would wreak havoc on me. And, and, and, you know, I wake up, I would wake up in the middle of the night and stuff like that, and my blood glucose regulation is, is, you know, super dysregulated as a result of that. Like, I know, I know I shouldn't do it, and I, it's just, this is a habit that's been very difficult for me to break.

• 10:37Simon Hill?

  I haven't seen this formally studied, so I can't speak to an intervention, but I have a hypothesis here, and I'm not sure whether you've tried this, but I'd be interested to see what happens if you have a slightly lower carbohydrate dinner and higher fat.

• 10:55Simon Hill?

  And I suspect because that will be slower to digest and metabolize, that you might feel fuller for longer.

• 11:05Rich Roll?

  It's a weird satiety thing, and I don't know if it's just mental or emotional. But if I don't feel full when I get into bed, like I feel like agitated. You know, I feel like I need to, there's something emotional or physiological about, you know, how you kind of relax when you've, when you've, when you've just eaten, like your anxiety and your stress level lowers. And for some reason, if I'm going to bed and I'm hungry, like it becomes very difficult for me to fall asleep.

• 11:38Simon Hill?

  I get that. You might need a bigger, bigger plate at dinner.

• 11:40Rich Roll?

  I eat, I eat plenty. Trust me, dude. Anyway, I don't want to get too sidetracked on that, but I think that's really important. And that's great. And if you want to be more rigorous about your sleep tracking, there's always, you know, like a woo or something like that that you can get. That, you know, listen, I never take this thing off. And it's really been helpful in keeping me on track. Not so much for the day to day, but more for the trends and just understanding the types of behaviors and habits that influence things like HRV and the amount of REM or deep sleep that I'm getting every night and how that impacts resting heart rate, stress, like all those sorts of things.

• 12:21Rich Roll?

  Like just, it's just information that arms you with the data points to kind of solve the arithmetic of what works for you and what's leading you astray.

• 12:33Simon Hill?

  Yeah, I, I love the sleep data. And, you know, I agree, I've, I've been able to identify a few different kind of patterns. I've noticed if I'm, if I'm working really late, then my restorative deep sleep is much lower. Probably going to bed thinking about all the things I do.

• 12:55Rich Roll?

  And then if you correlated that with what your, where your stress levels are and how long it takes them to go down as you go to sleep. Because if you haven't reduced those before going to bed, you're going to have a less restful evening of, of sleep.

• 13:08Simon Hill?

  Yeah, my recovery today was 86%.

• 13:11Rich Roll?

  That's pretty good.

• 13:12Simon Hill?

  I was happy with that.

• 13:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right on.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  One thing that's clear from the work on sleep that's now working its way into the naming and understanding of brain states and wakefulness is that one state precedes another. Now, your bike ride where you're listening to the audiobook is a way in which you're coordinating your respiration physiology, your breathing and your motor output, your bike riding with the ability to access auditory information and remember it well. So you've figured out something about that state. But the neuroscientist in me says, "Okay, but what follows that state when you get back? What state are you in then? Is it a state of exhaustion that allows you to go into deep rest to access neuroplasticity? Or is it a state of where you've essentially moved all that excess autonomic arousal out of your body?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  And now finally, you can sit down and just focus your cone of attention on your work? So one state precedes another. And one thing that I think can be incredibly useful to people would be to think about two hallmarks of brain states in order to access them more readily. One is that the thing that we are all a slave to, all of us, is the 24-hour circadian cycle. Every cell in our body has a 24-hour clock that runs at the level of genes and the level of cellular processes. And every network in our body, whether it's nervous system, spleen, whatever, is governed by this 24-hour clock. We can fairly crudely, but still accurately

• 14:37Speaker 01

  subdivide that 24-hour period into three phases. What I would call Phase 1, and I'm just naming it Phase 1 because we don't have a better name for it, is from about 0 until about 8 or 9 hours after you wake up. Phase 2 is from about 9 hours after you wake up until about 16 hours after you've woken up. And Phase 3 would be from about 17 hours to 24 hours. The 17-hour to 24-hour period that we're calling Phase 3 is sleep. And we know what we should be doing in that state. We should be accessing as much uninterrupted deep sleep as we can. And the beautiful work that Matt's done and others have done says, "Okay, lower the temperature in the room, you know, elevate your feet a little bit, etc., etc., keep it dark." I mean, there's a lot of things that we could talk about there.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Phase one and phase two, we know, based on really good neuroscience, have certain signature patterns of neurotransmitter release and autonomic arousal that lend themselves better to certain activities, both mental and physical, and not others. So phase one, for instance, is always accompanied by an increase in cortisol. This is a healthy release of cortisol, a stress hormone that wakes us up. It's part of the wake-up system. And the release of epinephrine, which is also called adrenaline, and the molecule dopamine. It turns out epinephrine and dopamine, dopamine actually manufactures epinephrine there biochemically. So that phase one of the day, in many ways, is ideal for any kind of linear action-oriented items. People will differ.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Some people say, "I do creative work best early in the day." But most people are going to do best at kind of correct answer type work, meaning where there is a correct linear output. It's going to be accounting-type work, or it's going to be exercise, where you might not know exactly what you're going to do, but there is a process that you can follow. It's going to be punching out a certain amount of words on a page, because you're just trying to get the words down on the page for the book, or doing math, or doing any kind of linear operations during that first phase one. Phase two has a signature pattern of neurotransmitter release in the brain and body that are more closely associated, not exclusively, but more closely associated with the release of things like serotonin. These are neuromodulators that tend to make us feel a little bit calmer, and they disrupt,

• 16:50Speaker 01

  or I should say they alter, because it's not a pathological shift, but they alter our perception of space and time in a way that allows us to make mental associations that are a little bit looser, they can be nonlinear. So that's a time that's excellent for creative work, or for brainstorming. And you might notice that when you're a little bit fatigued, your mind is a little freer, and if you're very fatigued, your mind is all over the place. So one thing that I think has been missing from the brain state work has been a kind of cohesive framework. And yet, everyone, I think every neuroscientist would agree that the 24-hour cycle really governs not just digestion and bodily temperature, because it does. Temperature is higher in the morning, rising, rising, rising to the afternoon, then starts coming down, and then you go into sleep in phase three, because your body temperature is lowered.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  So those three phases really drive our brain states, and one precedes the other. This is the key thing. We can never look at a state in isolation. But if you wanted to understand, for instance, how to access a state of heightened creativity, you might try placing it in phase two of the day. So 10 to 16 hours after you've been awake, and see how that works for you, and pay attention to your state of mind before you attempt to go into that state, and as you exit that state. And so I think that if we've learned anything from the sleep science, it's that we can't look at one state of mind in isolation. We need to ask what preceded it and what follows it in order to understand its structure and how to access it better.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  The rates of suicide are far higher in young residents. And what we've discovered over the past, maybe 10 years, and we've been doing a lot of this work too, is the intimate relationship between sleep and your mental health. And what we know is that when you are not getting sufficient sleep, your suicidal thoughts increase, suicidal planning increases, suicide attempts increase, and tragically, suicide completion also increases as well. And more generally, what we've discovered, and I've been doing this for about 20 years now, we have not been able to discover a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  And so I think sleep is a profound story to tell in our understanding, our treatment, maybe even our prevention of grave mental illness.

• 19:10Rich Roll?

  Well, certainly in saying that, it should be the first stop on the kind of treatment protocol, right? Like, how is your sleep? Let's deal with that first before we look at pharmaceutical interventions.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a stabilizing force, and we know it's a stabilizing force, both in terms of your psychology, as we mentioned, impulsivity, but also just from a basic reward brain sensitivity, that your addiction potential, from a brain perspective, is higher with insufficient sleep. Same individual, two different sleep conditions, two different addictive profiles.

• 19:45Rich Roll?

  Right, wow. Wow, I have to reassess my whole life now.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm so sorry.

• 19:50Rich Roll?

  No, it's fine. No, it's good. I want to talk about sleep in adolescents and in teens, because I think the work that you're doing here and the issues that you're trying to raise awareness around are super important. The implications of chronic sleep deprivation in young people, the relationship to, you know, early school hours, and how this plays out in terms of academic potential and the mental health implications that you just mentioned.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's been a remarkable amount of work looking at this issue of early school start times, this incessant model of marching back the school clock hours. And the summary of the evidence, really, I think it goes the following. Firstly, we see that academic, when you shift schools to a later school start time, so when you do a causal intervention, what happens? Firstly, academic grades increase, attruency rates decrease, psychological and psychiatric referrals also decrease. But what we also discovered is that the life expectancy of those students increased.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  And you may think, well, hang on a second, how do you, how does that work? Well, the leading cause of death in late-stage adolescent teens is actually not suicide, it's road traffic accidents. And here, sleep matters enormously. And there was one good example, I think it came from Teton County in Wyoming. They shifted their school start times from around 7:30 in the morning to just before 9 o'clock in the morning. The only thing more remarkable than the extra hour of sleep that those kids reported getting was the drop in road traffic accidents. That following year after the time switch, there was a 70%, seven zero reduction in car crashes in students 16 to 18.

• 21:43Rich Roll?

  Statistically unbelievable.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  It blows my mind. Now, you know, statistically, you can give a relevance to that. Think of the advent of ABS systems in cars, anti-lock brake systems that stop your wheels from locking up under hard braking. That dropped accident rates by around 20 to 25% and it was deemed a revolution. Yet here is a simple biological factor, giving our kids the sleep that they need, that will drop accident rates by up to 70%. So if our goal as educators truly is to educate and not risk lives in the process, then we are failing our children in a most spectacular manner with this incessant model of early school start times. You know, when sleep is abundant, minds flourish.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  When it's not, they don't.

• 22:31Rich Roll?

  Right. There's so much education, I think, that that needs to be done in this area. As a, as a parent of, of two teens, I've got four kids, two older boys. Any parent knows how difficult it is to wake up a young adolescent in the morning and the frustration that comes with that. But what I've come to better understand by dint of your work is how crucial sleep is for that developing brain. And during COVID, we have one child, our younger child, who's being homeschooled right now, we've let her sleep in as long as she wants and we don't start her, her first class until noon.

• 23:13Rich Roll?

  And so she's getting a ton of sleep, but if you even tried to wake her up at nine o'clock, I mean, just forget it. You're going to spend the next hour and a half trying to get this kid up. So clearly there's a reason why that state of sleep is so deep, right? Like that, that it is crucial in this developing, you know, in this developing mind.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you know, we often have that classic idea of, you know, a parent at the weekend pulling the sheets off, you know, the teenager ripping open the curtains and saying, you know, you're wasting the day. But firstly, what we know is that it's not their fault because during that adolescent transition, there is a biological shift in their 24 hour rhythm that they now want to go to bed later and wake up later. So asking a teenager to wake up at seven o'clock in the morning and operate and conduct themselves with good grace and be able to learn effectively is like asking an adult to, you know, to wake up at three thirty or four in the morning and be the best version of yourself.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  You know, if, if I was to wake up at, you know, three o'clock in the morning and come through to the kitchen and or we both wake, I'd have to say to my partner, you know, I would say to, look darling, and she would say like, why are you so moody? I'm just not the best version of myself because I've, I've woken up too early. And, and she will definitely tell you that. But I think it's, it's the same, you know, misgiving because we don't understand how sleep works with our teenagers. And so putting them in the school at that time, seven or eight in the morning essentially is, you know, educating them amnesic. Right. They are, at that stage, they are leaky sieves and what will go in will just come out the other side. So that's the first thing that's happening. It's not their fault, it's just their biology.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  And then second, at the weekend, they're trying to sleep off a debt that we've lumbered them with during the week because of these early school start times. And if you ask parents, if you sort of question parents of teenagers, what proportion of parents think that their teen is getting sufficient sleep? And more than 70% of them say, I think my teen is doing fine. I think they're getting the sleep that they need. When in reality, less than 15% of those teens are actually getting the sleep that they need. So there is a parent to child mismatch in sleep understanding. And as a consequence, there is a parent to child transmission of sleep neglect. They parents don't see it. They don't understand it.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  And so, you know, in fifteen or, you know, ten or twenty years' time, that teenager, lo and behold, seems to have amnesia. And they, with their own kids, will do the same thing. They'll pull the sheets off and say, you're wasting the day. Because it was taught to them by their parents that sleep and getting the right timing of sleep and the right amount of sleep is something shameful.

• 26:10Rich Roll?

  So for that young person, do they need more hours?

• 26:16Speaker 00

  They do. So

• 26:17Rich Roll?

  So the eight-hour rule doesn't really apply.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  No, that's for adults. And in fact, the brain doesn't stop developing until it's about twenty-five years old. And sleep plays a critical role in what we call brain plasticity, which is modeling the brain. It plays a role early in life, in the first couple of years. Sleep seems to actually help wire up the brain. So it's almost like sleep at that time of life comes in to a new neighborhood. And like an internet service provider, it wires all of those homes with high-speed fiber optic cables. But then, later in life, that's when, during the teenage years, we've actually realized which homes are using the high bandwidth

• 27:04Speaker 00

  and which homes aren't really sort of drawing on that sort of, you know, that broadband speed. And so then, the role of the brain, it goes from expanding and creating lots of connections, which is called neurogenesis, to then actually synaptic pruning, which is where we now have to make the brain efficient for adulthood.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Should we be sleeping, though, differently than the way that we are in modernity? And I actually think there is an argument for this. Because if you look at hunter-gatherer tribes whose way of life hasn't changed for thousands of years.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  They don't sleep the way that we do. They don't sleep in what we call a monophasic pattern, which is trying to get one long, single bout at night and then we're awake for 16 hours. They sleep biphasically. So typically, depending on what season, be it winter versus summer, they will sleep for anywhere between sort of six to seven hours at night. And then they will have this siesta-like behavior in the afternoon where they have a nap, getting this sort of fuller opportunity. So I think modernity, you could argue, has actually dislocated us from how unnatural edict of sleep schedule. Is there any other evidence to support that? There actually is. Most people will know this.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Somewhere between about 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. every day, you will have a drop, a pre-programmed and it's genetically hardwired drop in your alertness. It's sort of, you know, that you're around the boardroom table after lunch and all of a sudden you start to see these head bobs going on, you know. It's not people listening to good music. They're just giving way to what we call the post-prandial dip in alertness.

• 28:51Rich Roll?

  And it is decoupled on some level from the food coma, right? Like, part of it is, oh, I ate a big lunch, but this is independent of that.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  You can prevent people from having lunch and they still have, you know, and I put electrodes on their head. We can still measure this alertness drop. So it is independent of food.

• 29:08Rich Roll?

  Right, so siesta.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  So siesta, you know, and you can ask, well, if that is how we were designed to sleep, is there any evidence that something goes wrong when you change that natural behavior? And that actually happened as a natural, well, an unfortunate natural experiment in Greece a couple of decades ago. They decided that they were going to do away with the siesta policy. So if you went to Greece, you know, in the 1980s and you walked around the towns, you would see on the shop windows, it would say, open from, you know, 10:00 to 2:00 p.m., close from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. and then open from 5:00 to 10:00 p.m. because there was a standardized siesta practice. They decided to do away with that. And so Harvard researchers said,

• 29:54Speaker 00

  okay, we're going to see what happens. What are the consequences? And they focused on cardiovascular disease. So they tracked the sleep and the health, the cardiovascular health of well over 23,000 Greeks.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  And what they found is that across that five-year period, there was a seven, sorry, there was a 37% increased likelihood of having a heart attack.

• 30:19Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  In fact, it was worse in males. In males, there was a 60% increase in likelihood of having a heart attack. And what was happening, it seemed, if you looked at the data, is that they were still sleeping the same, maybe just six hours a night, and they were doing away with the nap during the day, and they weren't replacing that sleep time back into their night phase. They were staying true to what they'd been doing before at night, and they'd just been short-changed of their sleep during the day, and that led to cardiovascular health consequences.

• 30:55Rich Roll?

  Wow. So if no siesta, you got to make sure you get the eight hours. But if you're doing, if you're engaging in that hunter-gatherer practice, you can go six and two or whatever, and that seems to be fine.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  I would say that there's probably a couple of caveats with naps, though. Naps are a double-edged sword. If you are struggling with sleep at night, the recommendation is do not nap during the day. Because what you want to do is build up all of that healthy sleepiness, and it's a chemical called adenosine. It's sleep pressure, essentially. And the longer that you've been awake, the more of that adenosine, the more of that sleep pressure builds up. And it's not a mechanical pressure in your brain, don't worry, it's a chemical pressure to sleep. And then after about 16 hours of being awake, there seems to be enough adenosine, enough sort of sleepiness to be weighing down on your shoulders, that now you can fall asleep and then stay asleep. So if you're someone who has fragile sleep

• 31:52Speaker 00

  or insomnia, you shouldn't nap during the day, because taking a nap during the day will actually just, it's almost like a pressure valve on a steam cooker, you just release some of that healthy sleep pressure that's been building up. And now, when it comes time to fall asleep or stay asleep at night, it's that much harder. So the advice would be if you can, if you don't have sleep problems and you can nap regularly, then I would say naps are just fine. But if you can't do it regularly, and especially if you suffer from sleep problems, try to stay away from naps. If you're going to nap... Nap before 2:00 PM in the afternoon. Going later than that can be problematic for your sleep. You know, it's a little bit like snacking before your main meal.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  It just takes the edge off your appetite. It's the same way with naps.

• 32:48Rich Roll?

  I'm sure you or somebody has studied what happens if you take exogenous adenosine, right? Like, wouldn't that seem to be the way in to resolving this problem for people that have insomnia?

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Hard to get it across the brain barrier, which is a protective layer around the brain. And, you know, there's some issues around toxicity as well. So, um, yeah, that certainly would have been the idea. But what's lovely is that, you know, you can increase sort of sleep pressure in a number of non-pharmacological ways. And exercise is a great demonstration of that. And I think, you know, we can speak about all of these different over-the-counter medications that people try to invest in and think that that's going to give them a good night of sleep. But there are probably two really simple things that you can do, non-medication, that are, if you look at the data, are almost guaranteed to improve your sleep, which is some form of physical activity most days, or at least several days a week.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  And the second is deal with your anxiety. Anxiety is the principal cause of insomnia. It's not the only cause, but it's our current working model of insomnia, that people who have a high fight-or-flight activation of their nervous system, um, branch of the nervous system, they also have high levels of stress chemicals, such as cortisol. And that seems to be very predictive of their insomnia. And if you can start to manage your anxiety, for example, meditation is a fantastic practice. And, you know, before I was writing the book and I was, um, sort of starting to research, I was, I was a bit of a stupid, hard-nosed scientist.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  You know, I just thought this meditation stuff was maybe a little bit woo-woo and sort of, you know, kumbaya and we all hold hands. And I started to look at the data. The data was immensely powerful and very robust that people, when they are suffering from insomnia, if you put them into a meditation and mindful practice, you can actually drop the severity of the insomnia in a way that medications, such even prescription medications, can't come close to.

• 34:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I just know, well, first of all, if I don't exercise, forget about it. I know I'm going to struggle with sleep.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, me too.

• 35:06Rich Roll?

  At night. And if and when I have difficulty falling asleep, or I wake up in the middle of the night, I've become very attuned to what my mind is doing. And it will generally default to some problem that I'm having, or conflict that I'm trying to resolve, and I'll just loop some narrative. And that produces a tremendous amount of anxiety, which obviously prevents me from falling asleep. So I noticed that, and then I course correct through either some kind of mindfulness practice to kind of create space and push that narrative aside, or overcome it with a different narrative.

• 35:47Rich Roll?

  And sometimes I'll just think about a book that I'm reading, or a movie that I saw, and I'll just immerse myself in that narrative. And that's like a distraction.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 35:59Rich Roll?

  That literally short circuits that other anxiety-producing narrative, and I fall asleep.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  You're so right. So I think, you know, in this modern day and age, sort of, you know, the empty fee, fast food, 24/7 society, we're constantly on sort of reception, particularly with now all of this digital technology, and rarely do we do reflection. Unfortunately, the one time when we do reflection is when a head hits the pillow, and that's the last time that you want to go into rumination. You know, you don't want the rolodex of anxiety spinning up, which is what you're sort of, you know, describing, because that leads to something that we call catastrophization, that you start thinking, oh, what didn't I do today? And what do I need to do more of tomorrow? And then I forgot this. And at that point, you know, good sleep is not going to be invited into the brain.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  By the way, counting sheep does not work. There was a scientific study done by a colleague of mine at UC Berkeley that demonstrated, in fact, if anything, it hurts your sleep.

• 36:59Rich Roll?

  But if you're catastrophizing, it would probably be better to start counting sheep.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  It could be, but what you described was actually what she found. Far better was to engage in some kind of a mental aspect. And what they found was, take yourself on a walk. Think about a walk that you know in the forest, or in nature, or down on the beach. And just start to try to walk yourself through that. Or think about a book that you're reading, or think about sort of a podcast, and anything to get the mind off itself. So, for example, I feel embarrassed to say this, but I love racing cars. And so, if I'm struggling with sleep, which I do too, you know, I am not immune to bad nights of sleep, and I have bad bouts of insomnia.

• 37:44Rich Roll?

  So comforting to hear that.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  You know, I'm just as fragile. And so, what I'll do is, you know, I'll put myself, and I'll think about the track, and I'll, you know, drive myself around the track. I know when I need to, which gear I need to be in, where my braking zones are. And then, the next thing I know is I'm waking up in the morning. And I just drifted off.

• 38:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's great. It's sort of a different version of what I do. What kind of cars do you race?

• 38:08Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh, I've raced all sorts, BMWs, Porsches. But my real love, and the car that I own, is a little Mazda Miata. When you're a professor, you can't really go racing in, you know, half million dollar cars. And I love it to pieces. It is a car, unlike, you know, a Ferrari or a Porsche. When you're going 40 miles an hour, it feels like you're doing 100. Whereas in a Porsche, when you're doing 100, it feels like 40 miles an hour. So, I'm usually the slowest guy on track, but it brings me a lot of joy and satisfaction.

• 38:44Rich Roll?

  That's cool. Well, let's talk a little bit about best practices then. I feel like we're at that juncture. And I want to do this by walking you through the extreme lengths that...

• 38:55Speaker 00

  I know a little of your sleep history.

• 38:58Rich Roll?

  So.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Tent included.

• 38:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I sleep in a tent, causes a lot of consternation and confusion from people that listen to this show. But I'll just provide a little background to that. Like, historically, I've had issues falling asleep. Part of it, and I'm interested in your take on this, is I think, my sense is that it germinates somewhat from being like an extreme ultra endurance athlete. I've gone through periods of my life where I've put my body through just unbelievable rigor, like 25 hour training weeks where you're just so exhausted. Sleep is a non-issue. Sleep is not a problem when you're pushing yourself that hard. But it's been many years

• 39:41Rich Roll?

  since I've been kind of inhabiting that space. And now, but I've acclimated, my physical body is acclimated to doing that, right? So now, if I go out for a one hour run, or I go on a casual bike ride, it's not enough. Like, I'm not getting enough of the fatigue to create the restful state that I aspire to be in. Like, I really, I have to exercise more than the average person, which is challenging when you're a busy person. So there's that. On top of that, my body's like a furnace. Like, I literally burn hot. And my wife likes the bedroom a lot warmer than I do. And we would have these, this back and forth over

• 40:24Rich Roll?

  many years where, you know, it's too cold for her, it's too, I'm on top of all the covers, she's underneath them, shivering, it wasn't working. And as kind of a joke, I went and we have a flat roof off of our bedroom, and I went and I just, you know, pulled a twin mattress up there and slept there one night, had an unbelievable night of sleep. I thought, this is fantastic. It's nice and cold out, the desert air, even in the summer. And that, I graduated from that into getting a tent. And I've been sleeping in a tent ever since. I absolutely love it. The cold air, being under the stars, and being under a bunch of blankets, including a gravity blanket, which I'd love your thoughts on, which I found to be really helpful, speaking about the sympathetic nervous system and

• 41:06Rich Roll?

  trying to calm myself down. And eye mask, and nature sounds, and, you know, magnesium, like, all kinds of stuff. And.

• 41:16Rich Roll?

  The idea being, of course, to create the optimal situation for the best opportunity for eight hours of sleep every night. And like yourself, I don't always, despite all of that, sleep still eludes me many nights. But more often than not, I'm getting more high-quality sleep than I used to. But I'm interested in how this kind of measures up with what you found through your studies about best practices, specifically temperature, air quality, all these kinds of things.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so I think there are probably maybe five tips for better sleep tonight, if you could suggest that, or trying to optimize your sleep. And temperature, regularity, darkness, walk it out, and then alcohol and caffeine. I'll save the last one because it usually, if you don't find me deeply unappealing right now, you will after that fifth one. Temperature is a fascinating one. We know that your brain and your body need to drop their core temperature by about one degree Celsius, or about two to three degrees Fahrenheit, for you to fall asleep and then stay asleep across the night. And that's

• 42:30Speaker 00

  the reason that you'll always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot, because too cold is taking you in the right thermal direction for good sleep. And that's why sleeping in a tent, you're, now, we understand we're in Southern California, but nevertheless, it can get, it gets cooler at night than it is during the day.

• 42:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I wouldn't be doing this in Boston.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  Right, yeah.

• 42:52Rich Roll?

  It's still, I mean, typically, it's low 40s, and it goes down into the high 30s. And I've never not slept in the tent because it was too cold. I know that in your research, you found there is an inflection point, at which point, perhaps, too cold is not so good.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, once you get into an extreme.

• 43:09Rich Roll?

  But I have to tell you, like, when it's 38 degrees, I'm happy. I sleep pretty dang well.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:16Rich Roll?

  I mean, I got a lot of blankets on.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so it's sort of, you know, the local temperature may not quite be that.

• 43:23Rich Roll?

  And here's the other thing. I always have my feet sticking out. I cannot have my feet under the covers.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  And do you know why?

• 43:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think I know, but go ahead.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  Because it's your hands and your feet that are these incredible radiators of heat. Your hands and your feet are highly vascular. In other words, there is this crisscross of vessels very close to the surface and it's very rich in its vascular nature, both your hands and your feet. And so at night, what the body wants to do is almost like a snake charmer, draw the heat out of the core of the body and evacuate it through the extremities. And the extremities, in this case for us human beings, are hands and feet as well as head. And that's why you will sometimes see rebellious, you know, when you see your kids and you kind of tuck them in all nicely and, you know, you look at your wife and you smile and it's all beautiful.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  And then you go back in two hours later, just before, you know, you go to bed, and these rebellious legs are dangling out, you know, sticking out. It's because you're trying to evacuate the heat. So you're wise in doing that because they are wonderful thermal discharges. So that's temperature. And we do need to drop that that temperature. It's different for different people, but I think the recommendation would probably be about, you know, sixty-five degrees or so for most people. Now, that's obviously averaging across men and women, and it's different there too, as you mentioned, which is around about, if I do my math correctly, it's probably around about eighteen, eighteen point three degrees Celsius.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  So that's temperature, and that's why I think you definitely will start to sleep better than you at least would do otherwise on a constant temperature. Because, you know, there's another way that modernity has dislocated us from our natural addictive sleep, which is we set a thermostat of maybe seventy or seventy-two degrees throughout the day and the night, and that's not how we were sleeping. Now, if you go back to those hunter-gatherers, by the way, for whom you are in some ways mimicking their sleeping existence, they don't go to bed really on the basis of light, which is what we thought. They usually will go to bed about an hour and a half to two hours after sundown.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  And then when they wake up, and they don't have alarms, if you ask them about this idea of, you know, artificially terminating sleep with an alarm, they're perplexed. Also, you know, rates of insomnia in the general first world population is somewhere between ten to fifteen percent. In those hunter-gatherer tribes, it's less than five percent. So some things-

• 46:02Rich Roll?

  They're also moving all day long.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  They're moving all day long and, you know, we can look at diet as well. But so what is determining their sleep onset and their sleep offset is not light, it's temperature. So when the, and if you ask people, if you just bring them into the laboratory and you say, um, you know, at what point do you feel sleepy at night? It's at the point where their core body temperature is on the steepest decline. Now, they don't know that, um, even though unfortunately we've placed a rectal probe inside of them, which is no fun for either the experimenter to insert or for the participant to receive. But they are on the awesome downslope of their thermal evacuation and that's when they feel sleepy.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  And when those hunter gatherer tribes wish to wake up is before dawn, just before dawn, but it's as the temperature starts to rise back up. So it turns out that we actually need to warm up a little bit to get cold. We need to bring the blood to the surface of the skin. That's why cold it must be in the bedroom, but you can wear socks if you want, or you can have a hot water bottle, but keep it cold because warming the feet or sticking them out of, you know, the mattress will help your body evacuate the heat and plummet your core body temperature. And it's the reason, by the way, that hot baths and showers work for good sleep as well. I think many of us, even if we've got blackout curtains and sort of, you know, we're wearing

• 47:33Speaker 00

  an eye mask, we will wake up and I think we have some general sense, but maybe plus or minus an hour in terms of accuracy, that, okay, it's still probably the middle of the night or it kind of feels like late in the morning. And in part, that's because you do have an internal 24 hour clock. But I also think that there's something that we've lost in terms of our light exposure that you have gained back, which is that it's not just that your internal clock, which may get you within one hour plus or minus. It's not bad at doing that, but when you open up your eyes and you get additional

• 48:14Speaker 00

  exogenous information, which is from the outside world, rather than the endogenous clock time that your 24 hour clock is giving you, then you shift from plus or minus an hour of accuracy to maybe plus or minus five minutes. Yeah, fascinating. I love this. It's something I... When I retire, maybe I'll look at this because there's something very strange about sleep and time that is utterly paradoxical. And what I mean by this is you can say, okay, I've got to wake up because I'm going to, I'm going to fly out and meet Matt Walker in Berkeley and we're going to grab coffee. And I've got to get this early morning flight from LAX.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  And you set your alarm for five o'clock in the morning and guaranteed you will wake up at 4:58. Hundred percent. How is that possible? It's crazy. And it happens too frequently for it to be just by chance. So somewhere, your brain has this quartz-like precision of clock counting. However, there is an absence of time, particularly in dreaming, because all of us have probably had that experience that our alarm goes off and we were in this strange dream and then we hit the snooze button and our snooze button is just two minutes. And we go back and we go right back into the dream again and then the snooze button goes off and you think, no, hang on a second.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  I was, that felt like almost an hour of an experience. So there is this temporal mismatch.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Where when we go into the dream state, we can almost fold and compress time like a concertina.

• 49:58Rich Roll?

  It's like inception.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think it's no big surprise that Nolan picked up on that, you know, with the help of maybe some, you know, sleep specialists offering that advice. We know that you get this, you know, this dilation, I've called it sort of dream dilation or dream time dilation, where time is no longer time.

• 50:17Rich Roll?

  Right, like, so what do you, what do you make of that? Like, what would be the evolutionary advantage of that?

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Well, it may be that there is no necessarily evolutionary advantage, but there may be a brain mechanism that explains it, because what we know is that memories are replayed during both deep sleep and REM sleep. Now, when we are in deep sleep, memories are actually sped up. The brain will actually be replaying those memories anywhere between five to 20 times faster. But when we go into dream sleep, the replay is actually much slower. Is there a potential long-term organic atrophy consequence of insufficient sleep on the brain? We seem to think that there is, yes.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  But again, I think I want to be really careful here, and I don't want to be causing people alarm. And what I would say is that it is never too late to start sleeping better. And that's not just me sort of pulling out the pom poms and trying to be positive. We've got data. So in a series of studies, and we've done a lot of work in, as I mentioned, in older adults, but if you take a group of midlife adults who are suffering from untreated sleep apnea, heavy snoring, and then you put them on treatment, which is called a CPAP machine, C, CPAP, the Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. And by the way, if anyone's listening to this and they think that they suffer from sleep apnea, or they have a partner who does, please go and get diagnosed.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  It is a deathly disease untreated. And what they found is that about half of those participants complied to the treatment and about half didn't. And they tracked them over a 10-year period. And what they found is that those individuals who complied to the treatment and whose sleep was improved as a consequence, they staved off the onslaught of Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline by anywhere between 10 to 15 years relative to those who remained untreated or uncompliant with their treatment. In other words, even in midlife, there is evidence to say it's never too late to start sleeping.

• 52:25Rich Roll?

  But can those those brain centers that that have atrophy be regenerated? Or is that a permanent thing?

• 52:31Speaker 00

  We don't know. It depends on what extent of atrophy. We do. We used to think, maybe 30 years ago, that the brain didn't produce new brain cells. Once it had matured and once you were an adult, that was your sort of smorgasbord of brain cells. And as you lost them through time, you never got them back.

• 52:52Rich Roll?

  When you drink, you kill brain cells. They never come back.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  They never come back.

• 52:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  Well, that's not true. There are, in many regions of the brain, that is true. But there are a couple of regions that it's not true. And in fact, these memory centers, the hippocampus, that's one of the centers that does actually seem to have some degree of regenerative capacity. You know, how capable of meeting the demand of brain atrophy and damage that that system is of regeneration is unclear. What I should note, by the way, is that that system of the creation of new brain cells, it's what we call neurogenesis, which I think is a great alternative name for a band rather than just genesis, Phil.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  You know, if you deprive a rat of sleep, it fails to have the regulation of that neurogenesis. You lose the capacity for neurogenesis when you are underslept. So it becomes this self-fulfilling negative vicious cycle of prophecy that if you are not getting sufficient sleep, those brain cells start to deteriorate and atrophy. And then the one thing that could help you get them back is the one thing that you keep depriving yourself of. So you lose even the salvaging of that.

• 54:11Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or a comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep

• 54:55Rich Roll?

  this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Pryor. And of course, our theme music was created, all the way back in 2012, by Tyler Pyatt,

• 55:36Rich Roll?

  Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.