Sleep Expert Matthew Walker: Do THIS to Sleep Through The Night And Never Wake Up Tired Again

How well did you sleep last night? Do you wake up feeling rested? Today, Jay welcomes renowned neuroscientist, sleep expert, and bestselling author Dr. Matthew Walker to unpack the profound importance of sleep and how it shapes every facet of our health and wellbeing. Bestselling author of Why We Sleep, Dr. Matthew Walker brings scientific rigor and heartfelt clarity to one of the most misunderstood and underestimated aspects of our lives. Matthew opens the discussion by challenging the myth of the 'eight-hour rule.' While the average adult does best with seven to nine hours of sleep, the focus quickly shifts beyond just duration. Instead, Matthew introduces a more holistic four part framework—Quantity, Quality, Regularity, and Timing, or QQRT. This framework highlights how sleep is not simply about how long one sleeps, but also how deeply, how consistently, and how well it aligns with our natural biological rhythms. Jay and Matthew's conversation also tackles common disruptors of restorative sleep, including caffeine, alcohol, and excessive exposure to artificial light. Dr. Walker discusses how these elements can interfere with the brain’s ability to enter deep and REM sleep, the latter being especially important for emotional processing, hormonal regulation, and memory consolidation. Sleep, it turns out, influences far more than individual health. In this interview, you'll learn: How to Know If You’re Getting Enough Sleep How to Improve Sleep Using the QQRT Formula How to Align Your Sleep With Your Body’s Internal Clock How to Avoid Waking Up Tired Every Morning How to Optimize Your Evening Routine for Better Sleep How to Fall Back Asleep After Waking Up at Night How to Diagnose Sleep Apnea at Home With scientific insight and practical wisdom, the episode paints a vivid picture of how sleep, when prioritized and protected, can serve as a catalyst for healing, clarity, and sustainable energy. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty Join over 750,000 people to receive my most transformative wisdom directly in your inbox every single week with my free newsletter. Subscribe here. Join Jay for his first ever, On Purpose Live Tour! Tickets are on sale now. Hope to see you there! What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 01:12 The Four Metrics That Define Great Sleep 06:03 Can You Actually Change Your Sleep Cycle? 09:45 Why You Wake Up Tired—Even After a Full Night’s Sleep 14:29 What Sleep Apnea Really Is and Why It’s Often Missed 19:21 The Body-Wide Damage Caused by Sleep Loss 23:20 The Hormone That Increases Late-Night Cravings 28:42 Best Types of Food to Eat Before Bed 33:48 How Late-Night Eating Disrupts Your Sleep Rhythm 37:23 The Truth About Melatonin Supplements 40:47 Should You Give Melatonin To Your Children? 44:25 The Evolution of Sleeping Pills Explained 52:36 The Best Nighttime Routine For Optimal Sleep 55:07 Three Practical Tricks to Fall Back Asleep 01:04:58 What It Really Takes to Clear Caffeine From Your System 01:08:01 Surprising Health Benefits of Drinking Coffee 01:10:02 How Alcohol Quietly Ruins Your Sleep 01:13:06 Can Sleeping Well Actually Make you More Successful? 01:16:40 The Real Risks of Losing Just One Hour of Sleep 01:21:16 What Regular Sleep and a Digital Detox Can Do For Your Life 01:22:45 Why Weekend “Catch-Up” Sleep Doesn’t Work 01:24:09 The Overlooked Link Between Sleep and Mental Health 01:27:32 How Poor Sleep Fuels Loneliness and Disconnection 01:30:58 Why Self-Forgiveness Might Be the Ultimate Sleep Tool Episode Resources: Matthew Walker | Website Matthew Walker | Instagram Matthew Walker | LinkedIn Matthew Walker | X The Matt Walker Podcast Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 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.

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

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• 0:44Jay Shetty?

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• 1:30Jay Shetty?

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• 1:39Speaker 01

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• 2:10Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone, it's Jay Shetty and I'm thrilled to announce my podcast tour. For the first time ever, you can experience on purpose, in person. Join me in a city near you for meaningful, insightful conversations with surprise guests. It could be a celebrity, top wellness expert, or a CEO or business leader. We'll dive into experiences designed to experience growth, spark learning, and build real connections. I can't wait to meet you. There are a limited number of VIP experiences for a private Q and A, intimate meditation, and a meet and greet with photos. Tickets are on sale now. Head to jayshetty.me/tour and get yours today.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Right now, we estimate that approximately 80% of people who have sleep apnea are undiagnosed.

• 3:00Jay Shetty?

  That's crazy.

• 3:02Jay Shetty?

  Please welcome Matt Walker.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  What is good sleep? And should we just use the metric of quantity? The range is somewhere between seven to nine hours. Once you start to get less, the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  When sleep is abundant, all of a sudden your appetite hormones are rebalanced. So you naturally stop eating as much as you wanted to. The weight starts to come off you and you're simply sleeping the weight off yourself.

• 3:30Jay Shetty?

  It sounds like you're saying that sleep is that number one domino that then naturally helps all of the others.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  If you are not sleeping in harmony with your natural biological sort of rhythm, then your sleep quantity and quality is worse. Regularity may be as if not more important than quantity. And I would say to anyone listening, if you're going to do anything with this podcast, just do this one thing.

• 3:57Speaker 03

  The number one health and wellness podcast.

• 3:59Speaker 04

  Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty.

• 4:05Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier and more healed. Three of the most important priorities in our lives. Today's guest is someone that I've been wanting to speak to for a long, long time about a subject that I believe is critical to our health, happiness and healing. Today I get to speak to Matthew Walker, a sleep expert scientist, author, podcast host and professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Translated in 40 different languages, his bestselling book, Why We Sleep, explores the goal to reunite humanity with sleep. Matthew's work has shaped public understanding of how a simple thing like

• 4:48Jay Shetty?

  sleep impacts memory, aging and disease prevention. Please welcome to On Purpose, Matthew Walker. Matt, it's great to have you here.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Jay, an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me and giving me the opportunity to speak the voice of sleep. So thank you.

• 5:05Jay Shetty?

  I love it. I love it. Matthew, let's dive straight in because there's so much to decipher with you. And I want to start off by asking you, how much sleep do we actually need?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an interesting question and there is definitely a range. You know, I think there is, and perhaps even populated by idiots like me, that there was this magical eight hour number that was, you know, necessary and get anything less and there's doom and gloom. The range is somewhere between seven to nine hours for the average adult. And what we certainly know is that once you start to get less than seven hours of sleep, we can measure impairment in both your brain performance as well as your body metrics. So there is a range, but in some ways, it's also a question of what is good sleep? And should we just use the metric of quantity? And we absolutely should because using that sweet spot of seven to nine

• 6:00Speaker 02

  hours, it looks as though the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality. So duration, total amount is necessary.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  But if you actually look at the science, what is good sleep can be really answered by a four-part equation that in my mind, there are really sort of four macros of good sleep. Three macros of food, fat, protein, carbohydrate. For sleep, four macros. And you can remember it by the acronym Q Q R T. And it stands for quantity, quality, regularity, and timing. So quantity, you're absolutely right, somewhere between seven to nine is that fit. Quality is about the continuity of your sleep. Is your sleep fragmented and littered with all of these awakenings and you're awake for a lot of the night? That's not good quality of sleep. So you could be in bed for nine and a half hours and still get seven hours

• 6:54Speaker 02

  of sleep, but you're spending two and a half hours of time awake. That's not good quality of sleep. Then we can speak about regularity. Going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time. It sounds very benign. Well, do I really have to worry about regularity? There's a great study and they looked at regularity and quantity. Both of them predicted all-cause mortality. So if you're very regular and you get that seven to nine hours of sleep, you have the lowest mortality risk. But then, because they had these two measures in the same individuals, they put them in the same statistical analysis and did the sort of Coke Pepsi challenge between the two. What they found is that regularity beat out quantity

• 7:38Speaker 02

  in terms of predicting your mortality, meaning regularity may be as if not more important than quantity. Now, you've got to get both, but so Q Q R, quantity, quality, regularity, timing. Timing sounds like regularity and you think, well, what's the difference? Timing is about your chronotype. Are you a morning type, evening type, or a neutral? And it turns out, by the way, that if you're a night owl, it's not your fault. It is genetically or largely genetically determined. There are at least 22 different genes that dictate whether you want to be a morning person or an evening person. So you don't get the choice. It's gifted to you at birth.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  And what we find is that if you are not sleeping in harmony with your natural biological sort of rhythm, then your sleep quantity and quality is worse. So let's just say we take someone who goes to bed at 10pm and wakes up at 6am. Well, if you're a slight morning type, that's actually quite ideal for you. But if you're an evening type who likes to go to bed at 2am and maybe wake up at 10am, then it's the same eight hour window that they're getting. But if the night owl, 2am to 10am, is forced to sleep from 10pm to 6am, still eight hours, the quality of their sleep that they get will nowhere be as sufficient

• 9:03Speaker 02

  as the morning type. So some people will come to our sleep centre and say, I have terrible sleep onset insomnia. I get into bed and I'm awake for the first two hours and then I fall asleep. And we do a chronotype assessment, which is morning type, evening type. And by the way, people can do this online very quickly right now. You can just type into Google MEQ test, MEQ, it stands for morningness eveningness questionnaire. And it fits very well with your genetics, takes about three minutes. When we do this type of assessment with them, what we realise is that they don't have insomnia. They're a night owl, but they're trying to sleep like a morning type. And so when you sleep

• 9:48Speaker 02

  sort of against your natural biological predilection, your sleep is not going to be as good as it could be if you moved yourself closer to your natural innate biological tendency. Does that make some sense?

• 10:02Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  So those to me would be...

• 10:04Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, can you shift your sleep time? If people want to, if someone said, Matt, that makes so much sense. I've been a night owl my whole life, but I just feel like I should be trying to sleep early and wake up early. It would be better for my partner, it would be better for my lifestyle, better for my kids, whatever it is. Can you shift your type?

• 10:24Speaker 02

  It's a really good question. I get asked that a lot because in some ways, what I'm talking about is the ideal world. And drumroll, none of us live in the ideal world. We live in this thing called the real world. So, you know, stop your fancy sleep science and tell me, just, you know, can that change? There was a study done in, by a group in Australia. And they took, I think it was about 11 different things that you had to do as a night owl to see if they could drag you back so you felt more capable of going to sleep earlier. And it was things like, as soon as you wake up, eat a large breakfast, go and get daylight first thing, exercise before midday, do not nap, take an earlier lunch, don't nap again in the afternoon.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  In the afternoon, start to get as much darkness as you can, meaning put shades on if you're going to go outside. In the evening, make sure that you eat at least three hours before you expect to go to bed. And then try to push your sort of alarm clock the next morning by about one to two hours. And they collected all of these different sort of regiments. And sure enough, they were able to drag people back by a little bit over one hour. Which sounds great, but the problem is, these were extreme night owls who would prefer to go to sleep at maybe, let's say, 1:30 a.m. That means they're still having to go to bed biologically at 12:30 a.m. It's not the 9:30 p.m. or the 10:00 p.m. that you would prefer.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  And imagine trying to capitulate and adhere to that regiment for the rest of your life. So there is some wiggle room, it seems, that you can sort of manipulate. But in truth, I think what we have to try and do as best we can is to say, how can I align myself better with my biology? When you fight biology, you normally lose. And the way you know you've lost is disease and sickness. And that's what we see with night owls who are sort of trying to sleep against their tendency. That said, though, Is there a way that you can, I mean, hack isn't the right word, but there are ways that you can try to help yourself. So think about what you do in the morning that takes time.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  So is it that you sort of, you know, make the coffee? You put the coffee in the coffee pot. You get your clothes ready for work. You pack your bag for the gym after work. All of these things you can do ahead of time the night before to take that 15 minutes of added time the next morning and say, allow yourself to sleep a little bit later. So you're at least getting closer to your natural tendency. Then go to the front end of sleep and say, what is it that I do in the last 15 minutes before I go to bed? Well, I usually sort of, maybe I take a shower. Maybe I change for bed. Maybe, you know, I brush my teeth. Maybe some people take their makeup off, whatever it is. Set an alarm two hours before bed. Do all of those things.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  And then, right before you go to bed, when that alarm goes off, the to bed alarm, all you do is get up and you go straight to bed. So you've saved yourself 15 minutes on the front end. So you can go to bed 15 minutes sort of later and you can wake up 15 minutes later. But you're not necessarily having to go to work any later.

• 13:41Jay Shetty?

  Right.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  What, so does that make some sense? So you can try to short sort of thin slice some of that a little bit.

• 13:46Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. If you're someone who's waking up tired regularly, like right now, someone's listening and they're just like, Jay and Matt, I wake up every day and I'm just tired.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:57Jay Shetty?

  And I'm trying to get the right amount of sleep, but I'm still figuring it out. Where do I start? What would you encourage them to look at?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  So I think the first thing, let's go back to the four principles. Are you getting a consistent seven to nine hours of time, at least in bed? Next, are you trying to assess your sleep and say, am I waking up a lot throughout the night? I would say that's one of the first places I would go to.

• 14:21Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, let's focus on that.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, if the, if you're not feeling restored and refreshed by your sleep the next day and you're getting four hours of sleep a night, then it's obvious, it's just not the right quantity. But if you're being good and you're spending sufficient time in bed, but still feeling unrefreshed and refreshed. We have to ask, are you waking up a lot throughout the night? If you are, let's figure out why. Is it that you are, for example, snoring a lot throughout the night? And you have undiagnosed sleep apnea? And you can just download an app on your phone. I have no association with them. It's called Snore Lab. So snore L A B. And you download it. It records your breathing. You place the phone next to you on your bed.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Then in the morning, it shows you a Richter shock sort of scale throughout the night. And it quantifies your snoring into quiet, moderate, loud and epic. And the frightening thing is you can then tap anywhere throughout the night. And you can hear yourself snoring in a way that we don't. So next thing is, let's make sure that you don't have an undiagnosed sleep disorder. Then I would say, is it a case that you're maybe over consuming on caffeine during the day? Some people will feel completely comfortable having an espresso with dinner. And they say, I fall asleep and I stay asleep. So I'm one of those, and it is genetically determined who can metabolize caffeine quickly. And it has no effect. We've done studies and unfortunately, even if you do fall asleep and stay asleep,

• 15:49Speaker 02

  that caffeine can prevent you from going into the deepest stages of what we call deep, non-rapid eye movement sleep. That's where you get a lot of restoration sensation from. So maybe we need to ask, how much caffeine are you taking? The dose and the timing make the poison. Try to cut yourself off after about three cups. And try to stay away from caffeine at least 10 to 12 hours before you expect to go to bed. The final thing I would probably say is, are you also using anything in the evening to help you fall asleep? And the principal thing I'm talking about here is alcohol. It's probably the most misunderstood sleep aid that there is out there. It's actually not a sleep aid. And it will fragment your sleep and block you from getting rapid eye movement sleep.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  So what we would do is we would march you through a set of environment or behavioral things. What are you doing in terms of your bed timing? Are you spending a lot of time awake? And also the things that you're taking into your body? Alcohol, caffeine, et cetera. The final thing I would say is stress and anxiety. If there is one outside of skeletal pain. The principal reason that we as a society seem not to be sleeping is this rolodex of anxiety. Because, and you've spoken so eloquently about this, in this modern era, we are constantly on reception. Very rarely do we do reflection. And the only time now in the modern world when we do reflection is when our head hits the pillow.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  And that's the last time that we need to do reflection because at that point, the rolodex of anxiety starts whirring. At that point, you start to ruminate. When we ruminate, we catastrophize. And then everything feels twice as bad in the dark of night than it does in the light of day. And at that point, we're dead in the water for the next two hours. So the final thing I would say is, let's speak about your mental state. So does that give you a sense of the pinwheel diagnostics that we would go through?

• 17:46Jay Shetty?

  I absolutely love it. I love it. I love the acronym. I love how simple and formulaic it is for us to be able to actually measure what's going wrong. And I can, I'm fortunate and very grateful and knock on wood, sleep very, very well and and generally always have. But whenever I have had disturbances in my sleep, I can easily pinpoint it to something you've said. And that shows me how great the model is because as someone who is lucky and fortunate enough to have great sleep, when I have been disrupted, it's always been related either to caffeine, distress and anxiety. I can easily draw the parallels because it's such a rare occurrence. And so I can see why and when. I want to dive into each of those.

• 18:31Jay Shetty?

  Let's start with sleep apnea because I think that's something a lot of us don't actually know enough about. And so I love the fact that people can use the app Snore Lab, as you mentioned. How many people actually struggling with sleep apnea don't even know about it? And what is actually happening if you have sleep apnea?

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, two great questions. So right now, we estimate that approximately eighty percent of people who have sleep apnea are undiagnosed.

• 18:58Jay Shetty?

  That's crazy.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Which, if you look at the numbers, is going to be a non-trivial proportion of the population. And the reason it's so dangerous is because when you have sleep apnea, essentially what's happening is that your airway is either partially becoming obstructed, or, like a straw, it's collapsing flat entirely. Now, if it starts to become obstructed, so let's say you're sleeping on your back, and the airway flaps in that airway are starting to give way to gravity, then you'll start to get a partial blocking, a partial, what we call occlusion of the airway. And that's what you hear when you hear the [huff] sound. That's the sort of the flapping of the partial occlusion. And then, when you stop breathing entirely,

• 19:43Speaker 02

  at that point, the airway has completely collapsed, the straw has gone flat. And after about fifteen or twenty seconds, your brainstem registers the alarming buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood, because at that point, you are slowly asphyxiating. And it sends a wake-up trigger up to your cortex, and then all of a sudden, you hear [gasps], and you gasp, and you're awake. So imagine now, we have a way that we measure these sort of occlusions and these partial collapses. And it's called the AHI score. Don't worry about this, but the apnea hypopnea index. Suffice it to say that we look to see how many events like

• 20:25Speaker 02

  this are you having per hour of sleep. And if you were to have very mild sleep apnea, you may be having five, ten, fifteen of these events. That's considered mild. Some people could have eighty of them per hour. But let's just say you have mild sleep apnea, ten of these events an hour, and you're in bed for eight hours. So imagine the following scenario with undiagnosed mild sleep apnea. What if I were to say, tonight, I'm going to come into your bedroom, Jay, and every hour, I'm going to throttle you, strangle you to the point where you actually stop breathing. And I'm going to do that ten times every hour for every one of the eight hours. So I'm going to do that eighty times throughout the night. Do you think you're going to feel restored and refreshed by your sleep the next morning?

• 21:09Jay Shetty?

  Never.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  And the answer is no, but that's what in now that's hyperbolic, of course, but in some ways that's what we're facing, even with the mildest version of undiagnosed sleep apnea. That's why sleep apnea untreated is associated with a very significant increase in all cause mortality, as well as increases in mortality related to diabetes, to cardiovascular disease, as well as certain forms of cancer. So I think for me, it's the case of it's not only going to erode the quantity of your life, meaning your lifespan, it will certainly shorten your health span. That's what most of us are worried about, not really our lifespan, it's our health span. None of us want to live with disease or sickness. I certainly don't want to.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  And I remember there was a patient that we work with, with sleep apnea. And after they were treated, they were saying, well, before that, I just thought this was me at 57 years old. I just thought I would deteriorate with age. And I realized there was someone in there that wasn't the way I felt. And when you treated me with sleep apnea, it was almost as though someone cognitively had wiped a fogged glass clear and finally I could see again. And so that's why I think so many people can benefit by way of just simply doing, taking this app, seeing whether you snore. Also, you can do something called the STOP BANG questionnaire.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  So S T O P, all in caps, dash, B A N G. And you can do it also online and it's a very quick questionnaire, probably about two minutes, and it will evaluate your risk likelihood of having sleep apnea. One of those two, if you fear that you have sleep apnea, or if you know that your partner has sleep apnea, please go and get it seen to. It's a laughing, you know, we think, well, they, they sound like a chainsaw, they wake the neighbors up. It's almost this thing of sort of humor.

• 23:08Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Trust me, when it comes to your health and your wellness, it is anything but a funny story when it comes to undiagnosed sleep apnea.

• 23:15Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. Thank you so much for giving such practical tips as to how we can check as well. And I hope everyone who's listening and watching, please go do that because the fact that 80% of people may not have a clue. And that could be the secret behind better sleep. Is crazy to me that we haven't uncovered it for eighty percent of people. That's huge.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  And so many downstream consequences happen when they get treated.

• 23:40Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  That they are typically overweight. They usually have high levels of blood sugar, of blood glucose. They typically have hypertension, high blood pressure. And what's nice is that when you were to say, okay, we've got to have you reducing your food intake. We need to stop you from eating sugar. We need to get you to the gym. All of those things have Herculean in their challenge. And people often in that state of being overweight, hypertensive, high glycemic. They just find it so hard to change. But if you treat them with sleep apnea, when sleep is abundant in good quantity and quality, which it will be when you treat them, all of a sudden your appetite hormones are rebalanced.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  So you naturally stop eating as much as you wanted to. The weight starts to come off you and you're simply sleeping the weight off yourself. It's a largely painless equation. You don't crave those sugary, sort of high sugar, sort of immediate hit foods. So your blood sugar comes back into control and you're more motivated to be physically active, meaning that your cardiovascular health. So I sometimes think of sleep, you know, if you've seen one of those fancy music studios where they've got all of the dials on the mixing deck and you can move any one of them. But sleep to me is that one dial all the way at the far left, that if you move it, all of those other dials just kind of move up.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  It's the tide that floats all of our other health boats. And so if you get that one straight, so many things as a manifold, it's almost like an Archimedes lever, will consequently change downstream for the better. You don't even have to do anything. You just have to start sleeping better.

• 25:22Jay Shetty?

  Let's take a short break to hear from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Vinted. Value can be found anywhere, even in the clothes sitting untouched in our closets. That's where Vinted comes in. Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes you no longer want and get more value out of them, whether you're running out of space, moving or simply updating your wardrobe. Listing items is a quick and simple process and once something sells, Vinted creates a prepaid shipping label for you. And the best part, there are no seller fees, so you keep what you earn. It's a simple way to clear out your closet, be less wasteful, and maybe make some extra money along the way. Give your clothes a second life with Vinted.

• 26:06Jay Shetty?

  Download the Vinted app for free to start selling with no seller fees, so you keep every dollar you earn. This episode is brought to you by Orange Theory Fitness. One of the best investments you can make is in your own strength. The choices you make today can help shape how you feel for years to come. Orange Theory Fitness provides a one-hour workout to build strength, burn fat, and build muscle, with an expert coach guiding you every step of the way. Head to orangetheory.com/onpurpose to learn more and get your first class free. Orange Theory Fitness, helping people live longer, more vibrant lives. Terms and conditions apply. See webpage and studio for details.

• 26:47Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. I know how important every hire is for a business. If you need to make the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed sponsored jobs helps find quality candidates when you need them most. You can reach who you need based on whatever criteria you're looking for, like skills, certifications, or location. In fact, people are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In the minute I've been talking to you, companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast.

• 27:30Jay Shetty?

  That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And let's get back to our episode. It sounds like you're saying that sleep is that number one domino that then naturally helps all of the others.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:49Jay Shetty?

  And I've had everything that you just said, I... For the past six weeks, I've been in L A, which is rare in terms of I haven't travelled, I haven't jumped on a plane. I've been in one place. And because of that, I've been able to really dial in on everything from sleep, working out, eating right, because I've had no reason to have an error because I've been at home.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:09Jay Shetty?

  And, you know, when you travel, you may be whatever, right? You you eat something that wasn't great.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  It's hard to stay on those things.

• 28:14Jay Shetty?

  Hotel room, whatever it may be. I've been here for six weeks. I've been on a phenomenal schedule. Last week, I I was only gone for like four hours away. I took a three hour flight, took a three hour flight back. I was gone for like four to six hours in total. And I landed back at four A M., which is rare for me. I don't do that. I usually sleep by nine thirty P M. I'm a morning person for sure. And I got back at four A M. I tried to get some sleep. I probably got up at eight A M. Because that's all I could sleep at that time. I got in a workout, but I had to tell my trainer to lower my level of workout because I was more tired than I've felt for a long time. And I actually felt weaker. So I've been feeling really strong across the last six weeks.

• 28:55Jay Shetty?

  But I felt weaker. I was like, I don't think I can lift that much today. I'm not feeling up to it. On top of that, all my sugar cravings went through the roof that day.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Isn't it interesting?

• 29:04Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and I know, and you notice it so significantly when you're at the other end, where you're like, oh, wait, I haven't needed refined sugar for like weeks on end now, but this one day, all I'm craving is fats and sugars, and that's that's all I'm after.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:19Jay Shetty?

  And I did give in and I was okay about it. But but it's so interesting to feel it that abruptly and that extremely.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:26Jay Shetty?

  And and you're so right. I I wanted the sugars. I wanted the fats. I wanted, I couldn't, I couldn't work out as well. All of it makes a difference.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  And in some ways, what's great now is the science is compelling in terms of the mechanism, such that firstly, there are two appetite regulating hormones. They're called leptin and ghrelin. Now leptin is an appetite hormone that when it's released, it says, okay, you're satisfied with your food. You don't want to eat more. You're satiated. Ghrelin is the opposite. It says, you're not satisfied. You're still hungry. You need to eat more.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  When we start to sort of thin slice people's sleep, and it doesn't take very much, you can sort of get maybe six hours of sleep for five nights, or five hours of sleep for four nights. All of a sudden, the hormone leptin, which says, you're satisfied, you're good, you don't need to eat anymore, that starts to decrease.

• 30:20Jay Shetty?

  At what point?

• 30:21Speaker 02

  It, well, it usually takes about four nights of somewhere between four to five hours of sleep reduction to already see those changes and see appetite behavior changes as a consequence. So it doesn't take very much. And then if that wasn't bad enough, ghrelin, the hormone that says, oh, no, no, no, you're still hungry, please, please eat more, that goes up. So in some ways, it's double jeopardy that you're getting punished twice for the same crime of insufficient sleep. Once by switching off the signal of, I'm full, I don't need to eat. And once again by, I'm hungry and I need to eat more. Then what we have also found is that we have inside of us what we call endocannabinoids.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  So people have heard of sort of cannabis, the way that most people have heard about it is an exogenous sort of, you know, intake of cannabis. But we have naturally occurring cannabinoids in our system called endocannabinoids. Now, many people will, um, let's say, know someone, of course, I'm not going to judge anyone, will know someone who've said, when I, you know, when I smoke weed, I get, I get the munchies, I get hungry. That seems to be one of the consequences of these cannabinoids. Now, endocannabinoids inside of us also do the same thing, they can make us more hungry. When you are underslept, your naturally occurring cannabinoids, these endocannabinoids, they also increase. And that drives you to eat even more in addition to the changes in leptin and ghrelin.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  And then finally, we did a study with brain imaging where we scanned people's brains with and without good sleep, looking at different food items from highly desirable to highly healthy. When you are underslept, the rational control regions of your brain in the frontal cortex, they get shut down. And these more hedonic, deep emotional brain centers that respond

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Rewarding, pleasurable foods, they started to become much more reactive. And it set you on this path of almost obesogenic eating. Where you crave those sort of, you know, the sugars, the chocolates, the stodgy carbohydrates. And you don't go towards the leafy greens and the healthy nuts. You go after the pizza and sort of the salty snacks. So all of which is to say, you get this sort of conspiring both within the body. And also at the level of the brain that explains exactly what you were just describing as a sort of a phenomenon. And that's why I think this, you've always got to be careful with epidemiological studies where you say, okay. Shorter sleep equals higher body mass index, higher chances of obesity. There could be many things.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  But when you experimentally manipulate sleep and you can unpack the mechanism, then we can entertain causality.

• 33:02Jay Shetty?

  For sure. So what's the, you said earlier, we should be eating three hours before we go to bed. What's the ideal meal type three hours before we go to bed? A, so that we don't get hungry just before we go to bed.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:16Jay Shetty?

  And B, because I also understand that the digestive process can actually make sleeping much harder.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:24Jay Shetty?

  And so what should we be trying to digest in those three hours that keeps us full and doesn't disrupt our sleep?

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a really good question. And so there, the sort of the three hours. What we were trying to do is take those night owls and try to drag them back in time. But if you're not a night owl trying to sort of manipulate your sort of sleep timing. We can then just ask for anyone who's just, you know, in their standard sleep regiment. When should you cut yourself off? And it's actually a bit of a myth because there is, there's this strong sentiment out there on social media. You need to stop eating maybe three or four hours before bed. If you look at the data and I did this sort of analysis of all the literature. If you eat as close as 60 minutes before bed, it doesn't seem to hurt your sleep.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Now, if you sort of go 45 minutes or 30 minutes, then yes, it does seem to have an impact blast radius on your sleep. Nevertheless, that's a very different question than saying, what would be beneficial to my sleep? I'm phrasing the question as, at what point does it become harmful for your sleep? And the answer is, you can eat up to an hour before bed and show no harm on your sleep. But that's very different than saying, but what if you'd stopped eating two hours or two and a half hours? Would that have actually improved your sleep? I think what we're seeing in the data is that it's very idiosyncratic, that you need to test drive it and you will know which kind of quote unquote type you are.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Some people, mostly night owls, have a preference to eat late in the day or early in the evening and very little in the morning, whereas morning types like to eat sort of breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper. You know, they scale down. I think it's dependent on your chronotype. That said, though, the two ways that food can disrupt us, first, if we're eating high sugar content foods at night, it has a disruptive impact. And we know this in part because it could be the, not just the activating level of sort of alertness in the brain that happens with a sugar hit.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  It's also that simple sugars are what we call thermogenic, meaning that when we take on board sugar, it can just very gently increase our core body temperature quite quickly. And it turns out temperature is key for sleep. We need to drop our brain and our body temperature by about one degree Celsius or about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to fall asleep and stay asleep. And it's the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. The room that's too cold, it's taking you in the right direction for good sleep at night. So when you onboard a simple sugars at night, it starts to just moderately, just gently increase your core body temperature, which can disrupt your sleep.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  So I would say content, try to aim for, if you're going to go after sort of carbohydrate, make sure that they're complex carbohydrates that really... Release that energy in a much slower fashion. Also, try to aim for a protein based, you know, yogurt is fantastic at that point. Make sure it's not, you know, highly sweetened yogurt because then you're taking on board sugar, unfortunately. So yogurt, together with some kind of slow release carbohydrate is probably a fantastic approach to to food. The second way, though, that you can disrupt yourself above and beyond the the macros of food is that when you eat too late, particularly spicy food, it can cause acid reflux.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  And that reflux is one of the other reasons that eating too close to bed will disrupt the quality of your sleep. So try to go after more of a slow release sort of protein, maybe a casein based protein. And then aim for, if you're going to go after carbohydrate, just make it a smaller portion and make it a complex carbohydrate. That's probably the best recommendation.

• 37:19Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, no, it's so important to hear about all the versions of it because I do think sometimes when you hear, oh, yeah, you can eat up until, you know, the last hour, you'll be fine. It's so different to, well, how do I get into performing at my best?

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:35Jay Shetty?

  And feeling at my best. And when you're already struggling with the quality of sleep, every minute kind of factor is going to make a difference.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah.

• 37:44Jay Shetty?

  And and it's just, yeah, I'm really happy that you've gone into the detail there of like, you know, why is it that we're saying three hours or what does that look like? As I was hearing you speak, I was just thinking about just how hard it's become for people to regulate their lives and and manage this. I know in some cultures, it's just so natural to eat really late before you go to bed. How much does eating a late meal also push back your time of wanting to go to sleep? Or is there no correlation there?

• 38:17Speaker 02

  No, there actually is a correlation. It's a very astute observation, actually, which is you can have one type of biological chronotype predilection, but you can almost violate that biology and override some of it by creating sort of certain conditions under which it will distort your natural rhythm. One way that this rhythm is played out is the release of something called melatonin. And melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone, and it simply tells your brain and your body when it is darkness, when it is night, which is to say melatonin helps with the timing of our sleep. And there are ways that you can artificially delay your natural melatonin

• 39:01Speaker 02

  release. A good one would be being exposed to too much light in the evening, too much artificial light, what I would think of as junk light. You know, there was this concept a while back of junk DNA. Well, I think there is something called junk light, and we get too much of it at night because we are a dark deprived society in this modern era. But there's other ways that you can delay your natural biology. And if, let's say that all food was taken away, all electric light was gone, all internet service was down, and you know, the lights were out, you would naturally say to me, well, I'm someone who would probably not get sleepy until midnight. And then all of a sudden, as I said, no food, electromagnetic pulse takes out all electricity, everything is gone. All of a sudden, you'd

• 39:45Speaker 02

  probably say, gosh, it's 10:15 PM. I actually feel quite sleepy. And it's because modernity, through all of its changes, light, social media, you know, sort of entertainment that we're constantly exposed to, it's dislocated us from our natural sensation of biology telling us it's time to sleep. Most of us think that, well, I'm probably, you know, a midnight to 8:00 AM type person. When if I took you camping in the Sierras for two weeks, and we had all of our sort of fancy technology measuring your sleep-wake rhythms, and we

• 40:23Speaker 02

  would actually find, no, you're much closer to a 10:20 to 6:30 AM kind of person. But modern sort of industrial life has come in the way of that, and it has modified our perception. So to come back to your elegant insight, there are ways that we can almost contort our natural biology, one of which is things like social media, electric light. But another one is that you can just manipulate things like food timing. And that food timing will create an activating alertness sensation in the brain and the body and force you perhaps to go to bed or feel tired and two hours later than you naturally would otherwise.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  So you have, the way that we usually measure someone's natural sort of tendencies is we bring them into the laboratory and we say, say goodbye to your friends and your family for the next week. We take all daylight away, no windows, no nothing. And we just measure your natural biology when we separate you from everything that is in the outside world. And that way we can bring you back to your innate tendencies. And usually there is quite the mismatch between when we interview you and say, what is your natural rhythm versus when we measure you, what is your biological rhythm? Those two things are often quite different.

• 41:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, thank you so much. As you were talking, you mentioned melatonin. And I was thinking about obviously the rise in melatonin gummies, melatonin supplements, I guess you could take before going to bed. And then you also have sleeping pills. Walk us through what's, what's in sleeping pills versus melatonin gummies or the sort. And what's your take on both?

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's very interesting. And obviously just being a scientist rather than a medical doctor, what I could offer you is sort of scientifically descriptive advice rather than necessarily medically prescriptive advice. But melatonin has had this meteoric rise in the sleep supplement world. And now here, at least in America, where it's not regulated by the FDA, you can go into a supermarket or a grocery store and down the sort of the health food section, there is this big sort of purple sector. And that is the melatonin sector. Melatonin, it can be useful to help regulate your circadian rhythm. And so I will use it strategically if I'm traveling.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  If let's say I go back home to the United Kingdom and I live just outside of San Francisco. It's eight hours ahead. So I can use it to try to trick my brain into thinking, oh, it's nighttime on the first night I arrive in the UK. When in fact, my melatonin peak is not going to arrive for at least another eight hours because I'm still back on California time. So, but for the most part, the way people use melatonin is night after night after night. And if you look at the studies, melatonin will only increase the speed with which you fall asleep by about 2.2 minutes, and it will only increase the efficiency of your

• 43:24Speaker 02

  sleep by about 3.7%, which isn't that much more above and beyond placebo. And the reason is because melatonin doesn't participate in the generation of sleep. Melatonin is a little bit like the starting official at the 100 meter race. It brings all of the great sleep races to the line and begins the great sleep race, but it doesn't participate in that sleep race. That's a whole different set of brain chemicals, which we'll come on to with sleeping pills. So that's the reason that melatonin isn't a particularly effective sleep aid. It's the reason that you will never see people being prescribed melatonin for insomnia, for the most part, unless they have some kind of circadian rhythm

• 44:04Speaker 02

  disorder. So I would say if you're using melatonin for the purposes of improving the speed with which you fall asleep, or the generation of sleep, it may be a placebo effect. And by the way, the placebo effect is the most reliable effect in all pharmacology, so maybe no harm, no foul. The only other caveats I would offer with melatonin, first, because it's not regulated here by the FDA, you don't know the purity. And there was a great study that's been replicated, and they looked at, I think it was about 20 different vendors of melatonin, and they sampled what was inside of the pill. Based on what they said on the bottle versus what was actually in the pill, it ranged from

• 44:45Speaker 02

  about 80% less than what it said to 460% more than what it stated on the label. So it's a bit of a Wild West. You don't quite know what you're getting when you

• 44:56Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's misleading.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you've got to, I would say, be a little bit careful. For the most part, melatonin is largely an inert compound anyway, so we don't need to get sort of, you know, too phosphor related about it.

• 45:08Jay Shetty?

  What's your take on the fact that when we're taking these, I guess, artificial supplements of melatonin, that it depletes our body's ability to make it and regulate it at the right times that we actually need it?

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's another critical question, and that's one of the fears that we have. I think the data, we don't have right now to say one way or the other, but if you think about, let's say, a male who's undergoing a hormone replacement therapy with exogenous testosterone. What we know is with certain forms of testosterone replacement therapy, after some period of time, the testes will stop producing their own testosterone. And even if you were to stop your exogenous injection of testosterone, your production of testosterone innately never returns.

• 45:56Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  And the worry is, is that the case with melatonin? Now, there have been a number of case studies that have looked at melatonin use, let's say, for up to four or even six weeks of constant use. And when they stop, melatonin production returns. So it looks as though we don't have to worry. My worry, though, with those data, when someone has sort of offered them to me, is to say, but most people in society, they're not using melatonin like that. They've been using it for years.

• 46:24Jay Shetty?

  Years, yeah.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Not six weeks. So I think I'm still a little bit sort of concerned. The other thing, or two other things. One is that the dose that people typically take is what we call a supraphysiological dose, meaning it's far higher than anything your body would naturally release. So people are taking five milligrams, 10 milligrams, maybe sometimes even 20 milligrams. Whereas what we would recommend in sleep medicine is somewhere around about one, maybe maximum of three milligrams. So, you know, log orders of magnitude higher. The other thing, too, to keep in mind is that melatonin now is being more and more used in the pediatric setting. So you'll see these melatonin gummies for kids.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  And there was some data, gosh, now probably 30 years ago, looking at juvenile male rats, meaning that they're going through that sort of adolescent phase, and they were getting dosed with high amounts of melatonin. And that high dosing of melatonin in the juvenile male rats actually stunted their sexual development. So it stunted testicular growth and it caused testicular atrophy, meaning shrinking of the testes. Imagine if I were to go to, let's say, a teacher and parent meeting one evening at a school and get up there and say, I would like you this evening to start dosing your children with a bioactive hormone. And it is a hormone that I would like you to dose your children with every night at

• 47:52Speaker 02

  maybe five to 10 times their natural release. And also, it's a hormone that may actually disrupt their sexual maturation and development. Who's with me? And at that point, people would, you know, you'd boo you off the stage, rightly so. Now, again, I'm being hyperbolic and we don't know if there is that concern or not. I'm simply saying that if we don't know, my sort of suspicion, at least personally, would be, I'd probably err on the side of caution, at least at this stage, particularly because the FDA recently released data demonstrating that admissions to hospitals for melatonin overdose have increased by 503% in the past 10 years.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  So there is something going on with melatonin, I think, that we need to be mindful of. Again, though, it's largely an inert compound, so I don't mean to be scaremongering here. Your second part of the question was sleeping pills. Yeah. And it's a really interesting evolution. I think we're now at the stage of sleeping pills 3.0. We sort of web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. It's kind of the same with sleeping pills. We started off with the classic benzodiazepines, things like Valium. And they work to go after an inhibitory chemical in the brain, neurotransmitter in the brain called GABA, which stands for gamma-aminobutyrin acid. Don't worry about the name, it's simply the red light stop sign for brain activity.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  These things like Valium, they would go after this GABA system in the brain and they would activate it and essentially just knock out your cortex. And then the second generation of sleeping pills came along, the Ambien, Lannister, Sonatas of this world. They also go after that GABA inhibitory neurotransmitter system in the brain, but they just sort of tickle the receptor in the brain a little bit differently. But for the most part, they are doing the same thing. And that's why we call them the sedative hypnotics, because they are sedating your cortex. Now, if you take an Ambien at full dose, I'm not going to argue that you're awake. You're clearly not awake.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  But to argue that you're in naturalistic sleep, in some ways, is an equal fallacy. Because if I show you the electrical signature of your sleep with and without Ambien, they're not the same. And in some ways, Ambien will come in and it will take a bite out of the deepest of the deep, slow brainwaves of deep non-REM sleep. Sort of this big dent that you see that happens. And so, again, it's not necessarily to say that there isn't a time and a place for the use of those medications. Sleep medicine right now does recognize them as being useful potentially in the short term to start to begin treatment for insomnia. But they are no longer the first line recommended treatment.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  And one of the reasons that in a book that I wrote where I was sort of, I probably wasn't overly enthusiastic about those Web 2.0 sleeping pills, the Ambien's, Lenist's and Sonatus. And it was for several reasons. First, because sedation is not sleep. And when you take those medications, you mistake the former for the latter. But it's not natural sleep. We also know that those sleeping pills have been associated with higher risks of mortality and certain forms of cancer. Now, those associations, we don't know necessarily that that's causal. But then there was another very interesting study where they looked at how sleep helps your learning and your memory. And one of the incredible things about sleep is that it will take recently learned memories.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  And that memory circuit in the brain, sleep will strengthen the synapses. So that you come back the next day and that memory is almost, it's like hitting the save button on those memories. Oh, wow. You cement it into the architecture of the brain. And they did a study where they dosed animals after learning a maze or different types of learning. And they could measure the strength of the memory circuit. And then they gave them natural sleep. And sure enough, the next day, sleep had almost doubled the strength of the memory. Then they did a version where they dosed the animals with a body-appropriate amount of Ambien. And those animals slept longer. And you would think, well, if sleep is helping the memories and strengthening that memory circuit,

• 52:14Speaker 02

  sleeping longer should lead to an even greater strengthening of the memory. Unfortunately, Ambien had unwired the memory. And it had actually reduced the strength of the memory by 50%, 5-0. So to me, that's just a demonstration that... Perhaps the the the quality of sleep is not a naturalistic quality of sleep, and it may not therefore be transacting the natural functions that sleep typically provides, like learning and memory. There is a newer class of medications, though, out on the market, and I think the the evidence right now is still early, but so far, I actually think that they look really quite effective.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  And again, I think people had taken my stance to be, I'm very anti-pharmacology in general. I'm not, I'm I'm very pro-pharmacology, if the pharmacology is good and not necessarily causing you harm. Yeah. And these new class of medications, they are called the DORAS drugs, and it's D O R A small s. And it's a class of drugs, and there are currently three FDA approved. Probably the first one was called Bell Somra, and it's a play on sort of beautiful sleep. And the actual chemical name is Suborexent. These medications do something really much more elegant. The Ambien's and the Lannisters, as I said, that's just a sedative hit to the cortex.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  These new class of medications, the DORAS, they go after a wake-promoting chemical called erexin. You can think of erexin like the the wakefulness volume button, and when it's turned up, we're wide awake. And these medications, they come in and they act like an additional set of chemical fingers, and they just go after the volume button of wakefulness of erexin, and they just dial it down, and then they step back, and they allow the antithesis of wakefulness to come in its place, which is this thing called naturalistic sleep. And so I I think right now, I'm probably more bullish on those medications. Again, a lot of water to pass under the bridge before we understand them, but so far, I

• 54:19Speaker 02

  think that there are much more elegant and nuanced way of manipulating sleep. The other thing I would be remiss to to mention is, there is an alternative to these medications in general, and it's called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBTI for short. It is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term, but what's nice is that when you stop working with your therapist after maybe six or eight sessions, not only do you, with with a sleeping pill like Ambien, when you stop, you typically go back to the bad sleep that you are having, or you actually have rebound insomnia where your sleep is even worse. But with a therapist, they're giving you the tools and techniques. It's sort of the difference between, let's say, you know, giving a woman or a man a fish versus

• 55:03Speaker 02

  teaching them how to fish. This way, you actually understand how to manipulate your sleep. They give you the tools and then you can continue to sleep better for years later, even after you've stopped utilizing the therapy, unlike medications. So I would just say that that's a little bit about both melatonin, the sort of the emergence of these new flavors of sleep medications and then an alternative should people wish for that.

• 55:27Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's it's so worrying because I think we've got so used to treating our brain and our mind like technology and this desire to just switch it on and off. Power up, power down, power on, power off. It's almost like you don't ever really stop to think what's happening in order for that to happen. And I know I didn't for a long time where I grew up and you'd just pop a, well, paracetamol from where we're from, but I grew up from, you know, in the US and you've got a headache, just take this, it's gone, you know, you you can't sleep, take this, you fall asleep. And you're not really recognizing what's happening at a chemical level.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:05Jay Shetty?

  And how many consequences there are and what's what's actually happening beneath the scenes. And I think it's so easy to forget because it's giving you the instant thing that you want in that moment.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:17Jay Shetty?

  But the kind of circuitry that it's kicking off or or closing down has far more long term consequences that, like you said, we're not even aware of. It's sad and hard and difficult that wanting to get these natural things to happen that we are naturally wired to do, right? These chemicals are being naturally produced and there are natural things we can do to boost those chemicals within ourselves that will hopefully get us to go to sleep, as you talked about, like seeing light first thing in the morning, like. You know, be being outdoor more, reducing blue light in the evening, reducing exposure to junk light, as you called it in the evening. I've definitely seen that one make a big difference. I'm someone who generally loves light.

• 57:01Jay Shetty?

  I really like being in bright places. My wife's the opposite. She knows, she's very much like wants to follow the sun. And so when it's dark, she'll be like, all the lights have to be off in the house. And recently, when we've been watching our shows, we've been watching our shows in total darkness, apart from the screen, obviously.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:17Jay Shetty?

  And it's so natural for both of us to just feel tired earlier.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:22Jay Shetty?

  And we'll be like, all right, time to go to bed. And we don't have our screen in our bedroom. And so we'll finish watching whatever we're watching and we've, sometimes we're both even like, you can tell we're just falling asleep while watching. We figure it out, turn it off and go to our bed and we're out to sleep. And in just simply completely making it dark in the evening has had a huge, huge impact on.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  Honestly, I, I love that you bring this up. And I would say to anyone listening, if you're going to do anything with this podcast in terms of an actionable, you know, event, just do this one thing for the next week, if you get the opportunity, just do me this favor. Set a to bed alarm one hour before you would normally go to bed. And when that alarm goes off, shut down 50%, if not 75% of all of the lights in your home. And then see how soporific that will make you feel, how sleepy that you will make you feel.

• 58:18Jay Shetty?

  It works.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  It, it's really quite striking. And then don't just stop there. Do what I would call the off, on, off version of the experiment. So baseline, you're coming in, you're normally leaving the lights on blazing. Now we go into the on version of the experiment, the intervention, which is darkness one hour before bed. And then after that one week, go back to doing what you used to do. Keep all of the lights blazing for right up until you go to bed. And don't just ask the question, did my sleep get any better when I did the manipulation of one hour before bed, switch the lights off? Ask the question, did my sleep go back to being actually worse when I returned to keeping the lights on?

• 59:03Speaker 02

  And so you show bidirectionality. And when you show bidirectionality, it's usually a much more powerful version of the experiment. And if honestly, you can say to me, it made no difference to my sensation of feeling drowsy and sleepy, or the quality of my sleep, then no problem at all. Keep doing what you're doing and it just didn't work for you. That's fine, too.

• 59:25Jay Shetty?

  But first, here's a quick word from the brands that support the show. This episode is brought to you by Mazda. The best habits are the ones we hardly notice, the ones that quietly shape the way we move through life, giving us the confidence to focus on what really matters. That's Mazda's approach to safety. Every Mazda is designed with proactive safety features that help keep you more aware, more connected and more engaged with your drive, so you can stay present behind the wheel. That commitment has earned Mazda recognition as Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. And as of July 2026, Mazda has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus awards than any other car brand. Visit www.iihs.org to learn more.

• 1:00:09Jay Shetty?

  A lot can happen when an accident doesn't. Mazda, more of what matters to you. Visit MazdaUSA.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is the chance to step outside of our routine. Travel is a way of slowing us down and shifting our perspective, and with the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, every journey becomes even more rewarding. Earn four times the points on flights and hotels booked direct, enjoy access to award-winning airport lounges, three times the points on dining, and reserve exclusive tables. Learn more at chase.com/sapphirereserve.

• 1:00:54Jay Shetty?

  Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, NA Member FDIC. Subject to credit approval, terms apply. This episode is brought to you by Wayfair. Home should be a place that feels like a sanctuary, a space that truly reflects who you are. But it can be challenging to balance style, budget and endless options. I was looking to create a dedicated calm space for my morning meditation and reading, but I was struggling to find pieces that felt grounding but could also stand up to daily use. I went on Wayfair and found a beautiful, solid wood accent chair and a bookshelf. Now that corner is my favorite place to anchor my day. The quality is incredible, it's built to last, and it completely shifted the energy of the room. Plus, you can shop with Wayfair Verified,

• 1:01:38Jay Shetty?

  where product specialists carefully vet items for quality and functionality, so you can shop with more confidence. And if putting it all together sounds like a headache, Wayfair can handle delivery, installation and assembly. Join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5% back on every purchase and start saving on your next home upgrade. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W A Y F A I R dot com. Wayfair, every style, every home. All right, thank you to our sponsors. Now let's dive back in. I love what the advice you gave for people who are struggling with insomnia. For someone who's waking up, they go to sleep for three hours but then they're up. They finally put themselves back to sleep after an hour and a half

• 1:02:23Jay Shetty?

  and they sleep for maybe another three hours and then they're back up again. For that person, what's the most helpful way for them to be able to fall back asleep in that moment? So we've talked about the roots of the issues and the core from the acronym, but what about that person who's just like, "I just wanna know how to get back to sleep for another three, four hours if I could." What's the quickest way I can do that?

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  I would say there are three things to keep in mind here. When I often hear that description, people will say, "I always wake up at it's about 3:15 in the morning or it's 4:10 and it just happens so reliably." My first question to them is, "How do you know it's four o'clock in the morning?" That's your problem. You're looking at the clock and knowing that it's 3:15 or 4 a.m. in the morning does you no favors at all. It's not going to change the outcome. So the first recommendation is remove all clock faces from the bedroom. It's okay to, if you really must do, keep your phone next to your bed, but keep it out of sight. Even though I would strongly recommend that you keep your phone in the kitchen or even better still, a friend of mine recommended recently, just put it in the garage.

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  Put it in your car in the garage and that way it, the amount of motivation effort to go and get your phone within the first 10 minutes of the morning is very, very high, meaning you're probably not going to do it. So let's baby steps. Let's just say crawl, walk, run. First thing to do, just make sure you can't see any clock faces. And if you wake up, resist the urge because as soon as you start doing that night after night, you're actually training your brain, reinforcing it to wake up at 3:15 in the morning. So we've started that. The next question is, well, what should you do about it? You know, don't tell me the fancy remove the clock. Help me. At that point at night, either if you've woken up or you just can't fall asleep. It works for both of these.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  The problem here is that you have to get your mind off itself. Because at that moment, when you're awake, you start thinking, okay, I'm awake. This is now going to just obliterate my day tomorrow. I've got that important meeting. I'm now going to be underslept. At that point, the anxiety starts to begin. Then you start thinking, oh, gosh, I remember now I didn't do that one thing that I should have done for tomorrow morning. And then I've got to do that thing for next week. And I also didn't do that thing last week for, and again, at that point, that's going to keep you awake for the next one or two hours. So your job to try to get back asleep is to disengage the mind. How do you do that? I would say there are probably four or five different tools that you can use.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  The first is meditation.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  It may be or may not be for you, but if you look at the data, meditation for sleep, immensely powerful. If meditation is not your thing, just do something simple like breath work and you can just Google box breathing and anything like that is great. You could also just do a simple body scan. Start at the top of the head, move down, just and again, Google body scan and you can start to train yourself to do that. The next thing you could do is listen to a sleep story or just listen to a podcast. Make sure it's on a timed sort of shut off. But again, all of these things, common across all of them, is you're getting your mind off itself. If I'm meditating, I'm not thinking about my worries. If I'm breathing,

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  I'm focusing on the breath. If I'm doing some kind of a relaxation, a body scan again, I'm just moving through my body. It's very hard for me to think about my anxieties. If I'm listening to a sleep story, I'm engaging in the sort of the externality of the story, not my own internal worries. And then the final thing that was done, it's a great study done at UC Berkeley, not by my group. They found that taking yourself on a mental walk in hyper detail was wonderful. So let's say it's a walk that I take with my dog and you've got to remember it in high detail. So I think, okay, I open the drawer, which colored leash am I going to take? I'll take the blue one. Clip it in with my right hand, with my left hand, I open the door, take a left down the stairs, go up. It's at that level of detail.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  And all of these things are taking your mind off itself because at that time of night, sleep is a little bit like trying to remember someone's name. Sleep is not something that you make happen. Sleep is something that happens to you. And like trying to remember someone's name, the harder you try, the further you push it away. And it's only when you stop trying. Does it return to you?

• 1:06:52Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  And that's the same way with sleep. And normally, if you engage in some of these methods and tools, the next thing that you remember is your alarm going off in the morning. Why? Because you tuck your mind off itself.

• 1:07:04Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  If that doesn't work and you are consistently waking up and spending long amounts of time in bed awake, then we may have to implement one of the methods in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which is something called bed time restructuring. It used to be called sleep restriction therapy. And for reasons, obviously, you can think it's not the best name, where you come to me and say, look, I'm having real problems getting enough sleep. My say, great, we're going to do sleep restriction therapy. And you say, no, no, wait a second. You didn't hear me. I can't get enough sleep. And you're saying you're going to restrict my sleep. It's actually not sleep restriction. It's time in bed restriction. So you tell me, okay, I am in bed for eight hours

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  and I'm awake for two hours across the night. So I'm only getting six hours of sleep, but I'm in bed for eight hours. To me, as a sleep scientist, I then know we've got to constrain the time with which you are giving your brain the opportunity to sleep, because your brain has become inefficient. It's like saying, I go to the gym and I take an hour to work out. But if you were to actually observe me, I'm actually only working out for about 25 minutes, because, you know, at the end, I finish my, you know, my last rep. Then I do the 11th rep, which is I pick up my phone and I start checking social media. And then I'm talking to people and utterly inefficient. But then, at some point, someone says to me, look, today, you've only got a maximum of 30 minutes in the gym.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  And as soon as your 30 minutes is up, we kick you out. The first couple of days, I'm still doing what I normally do. And I get through maybe 15% of my workout, because I'm not doing it efficiently. After a week of doing that, I now realize, as soon as I go into the gym, I put my phone down and I just go at it real hard. And I still get my 25 minutes of workout in the 30 minutes. It's the same with sleep restriction. You tell me, okay, I'm in bed for eight hours and I only get about sort of six hours of sleep. Well, now I'm going to say, I'm going to limit you and I'm going to take one hour of sleep away from you. You wake up at the same time, but I want you to go to bed consistently one hour later, maybe even one and a half hours later. You tell me I go to bed normally at 10 P M.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  I say, you are now not allowed to get into bed until 11:30 P M. Push through, I don't care. And then you've got to wake up at the same time. And after about three or four days of this, your brain starts to build up. Now, the first couple of nights, you're still going to be sleeping bad. But then, after a couple of nights, your brain starts to build up this starvation, this hunger for sleep. It creates a sleep debt. And then after a while, it's like resetting the Wi-Fi button on your router. The brain thinks, gosh, I don't have the luxury of eight and a half hours of time in bed. I'm only allowed six and a half now, or seven. And now, all of a sudden, it becomes incredibly efficient. You stop waking up in the middle of the night. If you do wake up, you fall back asleep very quickly.

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  And you end up getting maybe six and three quarter hours of sleep within seven, whereas you used to get six and a half hours of sleep with eight and a half hours of time in bed. So it's a quite convoluted method.

• 1:10:15Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  But I would say I would use that as the last approach.

• 1:10:18Jay Shetty?

  Got it.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Firstly, try to get your mind off itself. If it's still not working, think about sleep restriction therapy. You can just Google it. It's pretty simple.

• 1:10:26Jay Shetty?

  Great advice. Thank you so much. I love how tactical and practical you are.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:10:30Jay Shetty?

  It's so helpful. Like, if there's anyone who's listening to this episode right now, and you have a friend or a family member who's struggling with sleep, please pass this episode on because I've never heard someone make it that granular as you are. Honestly, it's so brilliant and it's so helpful because it's so easy to get philosophical about these ideas. And we all understand how important sleep is and how much we need it. And, you know, I can hear everyone going, yeah, but what do I do? And you're really, you've created a map for people. So thank you so much for your work.

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  Well, I think I was very guilty of doing this. You know, when I first came out a couple of years ago, speaking about sleep, I was speaking all about the science of sleep and the bad things that happen about sleep. And I think someone even said my TED Talk, which I think was called, they name it Sleep is Your Superpower or something. It should have really been called Sleep or Else... And it did people with insomnia no favors. I understand that now, but. I think what I've tried to do is people have said, okay, I get it. Sleep is important, but how? How do I get it? And I completely suffered what we call in neurology is hemi neglect. One half of what I needed to do as a sort of a public intellectual regarding sleep was missing,

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  which is I was telling everyone how critical it was and the bad things that happen when you don't get it. But I wasn't being very helpful because I wasn't telling anyone how it works and how, you know, where is the user manual for sleep? And that's what I'm now trying to do. So thank you for saying I'm trying to do a little bit better. You really are. Trying to do less bad, let's just say that.

• 1:12:04Jay Shetty?

  No, it's coming across. Great. I want to move on to talk about caffeine and coffee. You spoke earlier, you said we should be having our last cup of coffee or caffeine at 10 to 12 hours before we go to bed.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:16Jay Shetty?

  And when I was listening to that, I was like, I think a lot of people are not doing that. Like from what, at least from the conversations I'm having, I think people are having it much closer to bed. Or they're having so much that it's affecting their bed. If you had to tell people just a couple of things about caffeine or coffee and sleep, what would you want them to know?

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  I think I would say that firstly, caffeine has a half life for the average adult of five to six hours, which means that after about five to six hours, 50% of the caffeine is still circulating in your brain. That means that caffeine has a quarter life of 10 to 12 hours. So if you have a cup of coffee at noon, 25% of that, a quarter of that cup of coffee is still in your brain at midnight. So I don't think many of us would get into bed and sort of pour a quarter of a cup of coffee and then swig it and then, you know, put your head on the pillow. We understand that that probably doesn't lead to good sleep. But in some ways, that's not dissimilar to what you're doing if you have a cup of coffee at noon.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Keep in mind, however, there is variability that some people have a faster capability to metabolize or at least clear caffeine from the system. And you can do these genetic tests and there's an enzyme called the CYP1A2 gene. And that will dictate the speed of it, a sort of a liver enzyme, a cytochrome enzyme that will speed or slow down. And you will know if you're caffeine sensitive or not. So firstly, the timing of caffeine can be important. Also, the dose, and that's why we've looked at people, even if you just have one weekly sort of drip brewed cup of coffee in the evening, let's say it's just a hundred

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  milligrams of caffeine, it will not necessarily prevent you from falling asleep as efficiently, but it will increase the chances with which you wake up. And if you wake up, it will increase the duration with which it takes you to fall back asleep. And if it doesn't do that, it can also reduce down the depth of your deep sleep. And we know, for example, that it's during that deep sleep when your brain has a cleansing system that washes away things like the Alzheimer's proteins, amyloid and tau protein. So you really would prefer not to try to degrade the quality of your deep sleep, considering all that it does for your brain and your body. But in some ways, that's what many of us are

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  inadvertently doing if we have caffeine too late in the day. I would say, though, that I've probably changed my tune a little bit on coffee. I would say, drink coffee, but the dose and the timing make the poison. Try to, as I said, cut yourself off after about three cups of coffee and try to, you know, cut yourself off at least 10 hours, you know, as a rule of thumb before bed. The reason I reverted back in some ways to say coffee is not necessarily a bad thing to drink. If you look at the relationship between drinking coffee and the health benefits, they are non-negotiable astronomically impressive.

• 1:15:25Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  Drinking coffee seems to be a very good thing. Now, again, it's dose dependent. Once you get past about four cups of coffee, then it goes in the opposite direction. It's not a good thing. And if you look at that list, and it is quite a list of health benefits and disease de-risking that drinking coffee provides, and you compare that to all of the health benefits that sleep provides, it's a remarkable overlap. So people were saying to me, how do you square that circle? Because that doesn't make any sense. Well, if you look at the data, the reason that drinking coffee is so beneficial is because the coffee bean itself contains a whopping dose of antioxidants.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  And because in the Western world, we're so deficient in our dietary intake of antioxidants. This one thing, the coffee bean, has been asked to carry the Herculean weight of all of our antioxidant needs. And therefore, that's why drinking coffee has such a health predictive signal in the literature. Case in point, if you look at decaffeinated coffee, it has almost the same health benefits. So it's not the caffeine, it's the antioxidants in the coffee bean itself. So again, with all of these things, with alcohol and caffeine, I am just a scientist. I have no right to tell anyone how to live their life. And I don't want to be the healthiest person in the graveyard either.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  Life is to be lived, you know, joie de vivre, for goodness sake, live a little bit. All I simply want to do is empower you with the scientific evidence. And then you can make an informed choice as to how you want to live your life. But does that help a little bit in terms of navigating caffeine?

• 1:17:08Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely, huge. And the other thing you mentioned at this point of the, the acronym is alcohol. And, and you were talking about how just the negative effects of alcohol in terms of that disruption of our sleep. If there were a couple of things you wanted people to know about alcohol and sleep, what would they, what would they be?

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, there, I think I probably haven't changed my tune and I, I don't see any upside in terms of alcohol for health or certainly for sleep. Alcohol is probably the most misunderstood sleep aid that there is out there. Unfortunately, it's not an aid at all. Alcohol will hurt your sleep in at least one of three different ways. The first thing is that alcohol is also in the class of drugs that we call the sedatives. And again, when you have a couple of sort of nightcaps in the evening, you say, it helps me fall asleep. Alcohol is simply helping you lose consciousness more quickly. It's not really putting you into natural sleep.

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  The second thing is that alcohol will fragment your sleep in the first half of the night. And the reason that it does that is that alcohol will activate the fight or flight branch of the nervous system. Now, in the first half of the night, that's when we get most of our deep sleep. And when we go into deep sleep, we shift from the fight or flight branch of the nervous system over to what we call the parasympathetic nervous system, which is this quiescent nervous branch. Now, alcohol will crank you back over to the fight or flight sympathetic nervous system, which then makes your sleep, the depth of your sleep, far more shallow, so you don't get as much deep sleep. You wake up more frequently, but those awakenings

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  are so brief that you never commit them to memory. So you never think alcohol is harming my sleep by fragmenting it and sort of littering it with all of these awakenings. So your deep sleep suffers, your sleep is fragmented. And then finally, alcohol is very potent at blocking your dream sleep or your rapid eye movement sleep. And dream sleep is critical for things like emotional and mental health. It's essential for creativity. It's also important for hormonal health. It's during REM sleep when we release our peak levels of testosterone in both men and women. And alcohol will sort of shortchange you of that REM sleep. So on all of those counts, you know, I just can't say in good conscience,

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  even a glass of wine with dinner, you know, is that okay? We can see the blast radius. It is in some ways both a dose and also time-dependent process, such that if you have, let's say, a glass of wine with lunch versus a glass of wine with dinner, the glass of wine with lunch will have less of a damaging impact on your sleep at night. So the completely politically incorrect thing that I would never say on a podcast would be, go to the pub in the morning, and that way the alcohol is out your system in the evening, and no harm, no foul. But no, of course, I would never suggest something like that. But um, yeah, what are you doing tomorrow morning now?

• 1:20:12Speaker 06

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• 1:20:17Jay Shetty?

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• 1:21:00Jay Shetty?

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• 1:21:54Jay Shetty?

  And back to our episode. Like you said, I think it's so easy for human, just ideas that become prevalent in human society that we just take as being normal, or habits and practices that become normalised over a certain period of time. And we just start operating like it's normal, it's okay, it's accepted, and not really realising what's going on. And I'm also of the spirit of we should enjoy life and appreciate life and everything else. But I think to really appreciate life, it means to know what works for you and what doesn't, and what helps you and what doesn't.

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:34Jay Shetty?

  And to really recognise the value of the impact of that. Because I think it's really easy to be like, oh yeah, well, you know, let's just see how things go. And then all of a sudden, you hear about a family member or a friend who gets a diagnosis and then... That's when it kind of really hits you.

• 1:22:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:49Jay Shetty?

  And I've had that far too often where I've had friends and family members at young ages diagnosed with things. And it's consistent with a habit. And by the way, sometimes someone gets something and it's got nothing to do with their habits and it's bad luck and it's, you know, everything else. And both of those are positions to be compassionate and empathetic. But I think when it comes to ourselves, I look at it and go, I would like it to not be my own fault. If it happens from something beyond me, great.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:17Jay Shetty?

  But if I can avoid it by taking responsibility and accountability for my health, then that's probably a good play and a good way to live.

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I like the way that you're thinking there in the sense that so many of us see sleep as a cost to our lives.

• 1:23:33Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:23:34Speaker 02

  And instead, I think what we have to realize is think of sleep like an investment in tomorrow, not a cost of what I get for today.

• 1:23:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  And you're right, when you look at, you know, some of the mentality of, you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead. I mean, firstly, what we know from the data is that if we adopt that mentality, you will be both dead sooner. And the quality of your life will be significantly worse as a consequence. But also, if you look at the data between short sleep and cardiovascular disease, if you look at short sleep and certain forms of cancer, not all forms of cancer, short sleep and dementia risk. Imagine if you were to say in 20 years' time, when you're at the hospital and you've just lost a third of your heart function because you've had a massive coronary blockage.

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  If I were to at that point say, I could wave a magic wand right now in the hospital at your bedside. And if only you could go back 20 years and start investing in your sleep. Instead of maybe adopting what some, not all people, but some have this sort of almost this, it's almost like a sleep machismo attitude. I think in certain sectors of the workplace, we've got this competitive undersleeping, you know, mentality, the sleep braggadocio notion. But I know no one who 20 years later in a hospital wouldn't say, if I could go back and remove all of this cardiovascular consequence that you've just had by way of this heart attack.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  If only you'd gone back and started just to try to invest even just five or six days a week in consistent good sleep, would you do it? Most people at that point would say absolutely, I wish I could take it back. But it's so hard for us to prospect into the future and do backcasting. Many of us just can't do forecasting at all very well in terms of our health. So what do we do? We burn the candle at both ends. Also, I think it's not anyone's fault regarding this global sleep loss epidemic and this It isn't. Consistent sort of sleep neglect because firstly, I think society is conspiring against us to get sufficient sleep because sleep has this image problem.

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  We think of people who get sufficient sleep as slothful, as lazy, that sleep, whoever the PR agent for sleep has been, we probably should have fired them long ago because You're the new PR agent. Well, I'm gonna try and push back at least. But also from a perspective of someone who doesn't know anything about sleep, I would just think, well, my body's at rest, my mind is dormant. How much danger is there really in losing one hour of of sleep or even two hours of sleep? Surely there's not much danger. It can even actually change your very nucleic alphabet. So I'll tell you about a fascinating study that impressed upon me the importance. They took perfectly healthy individuals and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week.

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  By the way, six hours of sleep a night for one week is actually what many people are getting in society. At least a third of the population seems to be getting six hours or less during the week. So it was a very sort of ecologically relevant experiment. 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. And there were two key findings. First, a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity caused by that six hours a night of sleep. If that wasn't impressive enough, the second was that about half of those genes were increased in their activity, the other half were decreased.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  Now, the genes that were increased in their activity were genes that were associated with biological stress and cardiovascular disease, genes that were associated with the promotion of tumors, and genes that were associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body. Whereas those genes that were actually switched off or turned down were genes associated with your immune system. And so, to me, what that demonstrated was that there's no aspect of our wellness that can retreat at the sign of sleep deprivation and get away unscathed. That it's almost like a broken water pipe in your home. That sleep loss will leak down into every nook and cranny of your physiology and even tamper

• 1:28:03Speaker 02

  with the very DNA alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative. And so, why, if you didn't know that evidence, why would you think that sleep is so necessarily important? If I, just as a layperson, would be thinking, well, my mind's dormant, my body gets a bit of a rest. Well, I can rest when I'm watching Netflix. My body gets plenty of enough rest there, so I don't need my sleep. But if you think about it, sleep is the most idiotic of all evolutionary creations. You know, finding a mate, you're not reproducing, you're not caring for your young, you're not foraging for food, and worse, you're vulnerable to predation. Sleep should have been strongly selected against during the course of evolution

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  if it wasn't important. It is absolutely important. It serves a constellation of different vital functions for brain and body. But if I didn't know about them, of course I'd neglect my sleep. So I'm simply saying that to both impress the importance of sleep, but also try to be compassionately sensitive to why I understand people neglect it. Not because they're trying to show how brave and Teflon-coated they are. It's just because no one understands sleep. So that's why I've tried to sort of make it impart a mission for life, is sleep has been the neglected stepsister in the health conversation of today. We speak a lot about diet and exercise, and that's great. And because of people like you, I think we're

• 1:29:27Speaker 02

  speaking so much more about emotional and mental health, which to me is the fourth pillar of life and health. Sleep is one of those pillars too, though, and so hopefully this helps a little bit.

• 1:29:38Jay Shetty?

  No, it's brilliant. Matt, I think you are the best PR agent that sleep could ever ask for. I think you're... Method of communication, the empathy and compassion that comes with it, the lack of judgment and, and at the same time waking us up to the reality, which I think is an important part of the narrative, comes across extremely clearly. Uh, and I'm so grateful and I hope you'll come back on many, many times.

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  I would love to.

• 1:30:03Jay Shetty?

  To deepen this discussion, to extend it. There's so much we didn't even get to today, but we end every On Purpose episode with a final five. And these have to be answered in one word or one sentence maximum.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 1:30:14Jay Shetty?

  But I know I'm going to break that rule with you already. So the first question is, what is the best sleep advice you've ever heard, received or given?

• 1:30:24Speaker 02

  Regularity, digital detox. Going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time. Do that. So many other things like quantity and quality will fall into place. And then the second is as much as you can in the last hour before bed, try to stay off your phone and in the morning, give yourself 10 minutes. Why? Because what we do is we train ourselves. What's the first thing that most people do when they wake up? They open their phone.

• 1:30:52Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  And there's this wave, the tsunami of anxiety comes flooding in. Every day you are training yourself when you go to bed at night to expect that huge wave of anxiety when you wake up. It's what we call anticipatory anxiety. And most people will have had this. You have an early morning flight and you know you've got to wake up for it. It's essential. And you also know that your sleep that night will be so shallow and so sort of diminutive.

• 1:31:21Jay Shetty?

  Totally.

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  Well, this is a diet version of that. But every single day, by way of swiping open on your phone next to you, just give yourself 10 minutes in the morning. I promise your sleep will be better. So regularity, digital detox.

• 1:31:35Jay Shetty?

  I love it. Uh, question number two, what's the worst sleep advice you've ever heard, received or given?

• 1:31:40Speaker 02

  That you can make up sleep at the weekend. You can't accumulate a debt. And then hope to fully pay it off at the weekend. There's some great evidence looking at all sorts of brain and body metrics. That for the most part, some of them, you can kind of sleep back at the weekend. But for the most part, when you look at your cardiovascular system, your metabolic system, your immune system, your hormonal system. If you look at your brain processes, your cognition, your emotional stability or instability. All of these things do not fully recover by way of weekend sleep. So you can't do this binge purge process.

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

  So I would say that the myth of makeup sleep is unfortunately just that, that it's not like the bank.

• 1:32:26Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, so you just have to get into a good rhythm and a good pattern and invest in it. It's just, it's never, yeah.

• 1:32:31Speaker 02

  If it was like that, trust me, you know, mother nature would have figured out a way to have us short sleeping all the time. Because it's sleep is so deleterious to any organism. And if there was a way to short change, we would have been short changing long ago and it would be baked into our sort of sleep DNA biology. The fact that it's not that human beings are the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent good reason. Is testament to the fact that you just can't make it up like that. The system doesn't work like that.

• 1:33:01Jay Shetty?

  Question number three, how does, what does bad sleep do to your mental health?

• 1:33:07Speaker 02

  Firstly, you become much more emotionally erratic. You become pendulum like.

• 1:33:12Jay Shetty?

  Why, why is that?

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, part of the reason is because there is a part of your prefrontal cortex right down in the middle. So my prefrontal cortex sits right above my eyes. It's the most evolved part of our sort of hominid brain. It's what makes us human beings. That middle part of the brain acts like almost a brake pedal on our emotional accelerator regions deep in the brain. And when we are underslept, that part of the brain gets shut down. So now we become all emotional gas pedal and too little regulatory control brake, as it were. And that's why we become so reactive. We become, you know, it's that I just snapped, dot, dot, dot, fill in the blank when I am underslept.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  So firstly, our regulation of our emotions becomes impaired as a consequence. Secondly, the anxiety centers of the brain can become thirty to forty percent more reactive when we're not getting sufficient sleep.

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  You can flip that narrative then and say, well, if that's the bad that happens when I take sleep away, what is it about sleep when I do get it that is beneficial? And what we've discovered is that it's REM sleep or dream sleep that provides a form of almost overnight therapy. Dream sleep is emotional first aid. And it's during dream sleep that your brain takes those painful, difficult experiences and acts almost like a nocturnal soothing balm. And it just takes the sharp edges off those painful, difficult experiences so that we come back the next day and we feel better about them. It's that idea of it's not time that heals all wounds.

• 1:34:56Speaker 02

  It's time during sleep and specifically dream sleep that provides emotional convalescence. And there's a wonderful, gosh, I wish I'd come up with this quote by an American entrepreneur, E. Joseph Kosman. And he once said that the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night of sleep. That's exactly what dream sleep provides.

• 1:35:17Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. If you love your family, the best thing you can do is get a good night's sleep.

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  When you have had a good night of sleep, I think we all sense this. You wake up and you are dressed in a different set of psychological clothes.

• 1:35:32Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely.

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  It's almost as though sleep provides this sort of emotional windscreen wiper benefit and we can see clearly. And to me, that's, I think, one of the most powerful aspects. Sleep gives me back the rose in the tint of my worldview glasses every single morning.

• 1:35:51Jay Shetty?

  I mean, I experienced that all the time. I know what I can be like if I haven't had a good night's sleep.

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. You know, I'll sometimes say that to my much better half, you know, when I wake up, I'll say to her, look, you know, darling, I am, I am so sorry, I didn't sleep well last night.

• 1:36:05Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  I am not the best version of myself for whatever I do today, whatever idiocy that I, you know, enunciate or behave in. Yeah, please forgive me and I will make sure that I will do all the dishes for the next two months.

• 1:36:19Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, sleep affects our emotional relationships, our intimacy, everything. Question number four.

• 1:36:27Jay Shetty?

  I have something in my mind, I was gonna ask you, what have you seen as being a surprising connection that's connected to sleep? Something that sleep impacts that surprised you, something a bit that we might not have heard of?

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  We've done some studies looking at what I would think of as more complex pro-social behaviour. And what we found is that a lack of sleep will immediately make someone become more asocial, meaning that they withdraw socially. They do not wish to have the contact with other people that they typically do. They become therefore more isolated, they feel more lonely as a consequence. And we know that there is this epidemic of loneliness happening. We didn't realise how much a lack of sleep was contributing to that. Worse still, when you interact with someone who is sleep deprived and you are well rested,

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  having had that interaction with the sleep deprived person, when we asked that person, "Do you feel any more or less lonely in this moment?", they rate themselves as now feeling more lonely themselves, having interacted with a sleep deprived individual. In other words, the loneliness that a lack of sleep creates is contagious and it is transmitted from one person to the next. The second thing that we looked at was perhaps one of the most fundamental components of us Homo sapiens, which is that we help each other. It's what we call pro-social behaviour. And I cannot imagine any modern civilisation that has emerged

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  without pro-social helping between individuals. It's a fundamental ingredient, we help each other. And what we found is that when you are underslept, you withdraw your natural tendency to help other human beings. We observed it at the level of me helping other people. We observed it at the level of entire groups helping each other. And we also found it across entire nations. And you think, how do you figure that one out? There is a global experiment that's performed on 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year, and it's called daylight savings time.

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  And what we did, we looked at the national donation database across the United States, which is in some ways a measure of selfless giving. I give to charities, I give to other people. And what we found is that in the days after the spring daylight savings time, when we lose one hour of sleep, there was this huge dent in proactive giving by way of donations to charities. We become more stingy, we become more self-centered.

• 1:39:18Jay Shetty?

  That's crazy.

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  So I would say that it's this new wave of sleep science that goes beyond the DNA nucleus that we spoke about. It goes beyond cells, it goes beyond physiological systems, it goes beyond entire brain networks, it goes beyond the organism themselves. It now translates to a lack of sleep impacting our interrelationships and impacting the very fabric of society itself. That to me has been stunning and quite a surprise.

• 1:39:47Jay Shetty?

  That, yeah, that is a surprise. I was not expecting that.

• 1:39:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:50Jay Shetty?

  Uh, fifth and final question, we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show, Matt, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

• 1:39:59Speaker 02

  Self-forgiveness.

• 1:40:00Jay Shetty?

  Why?

• 1:40:01Speaker 02

  Because I think that there is so much ill grace that is enacted by ourselves on others because we are not good with ourselves, that it makes me sad at some times. And I think so much of what we react to others is really about a mirror being held up to ourselves and the pain of that, that if we just let go and gave ourselves self-compassion and self-forgiveness, society would be, I think, demonstrably, which is to say demonstrably, better as a result. In truth, though, that's probably me just holding a mirror up to myself to your question.

• 1:40:45Jay Shetty?

  Beautiful. Uh, Matt, thank you so much for your incredible work, uh, incredible sharing of insights today. And I really hope you'll come back for another episode because I have another million questions to ask you. Uh, thank you so much. I'm so grateful for your time and energy. I hope everyone who's been listening and watching back at home, at work, whether you're on a hike, whether you're with your dog, whether you're driving right now, wherever you are, I hope that you will find it. Possible to try some, just one, even if you just try one of Matt's suggestions today, I really truly believe your life will change. And as Matt said, it will impact all other areas of our lives. Please prioritize your sleep and watch how your life changes. Thank

• 1:41:30Jay Shetty?

  you so much, Matt.

• 1:41:31Speaker 02

  Thank you. And can I just say thank you to you for what you do for society? You have dedicated yourself to the wellness and the health of the rest of humanity. But what I see as a big differentiator is that you have a very genuine passion for doing this. You mean it when you say it.

• 1:41:51Jay Shetty?

  Thank you.

• 1:41:52Speaker 02

  And I think that's why in part you've had just this incredible impact on society. Authenticity is a very rare thing. And as human beings, we're actually very good at identifying it and also identifying its absence. And one of the reasons that I just have such admiration for what you do is not just that what you're doing is an incredible service, but the authentic way that you're doing it, because you genuinely mean it, is something that I think is a remarkable beauty to behold. So for all that you do for society, thank you so much.

• 1:42:26Jay Shetty?

  Well, thank you, Matt. That's extremely gracious and kind, genuinely that. Touch my heart. Thank you so much.

• 1:42:31Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:42:32Jay Shetty?

  If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.

• 1:42:40Speaker 07

  If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with a healthy brain. You know, I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over a thousand convicted felons and over a hundred murderers, and their brains are very damaged.

• 1:42:57Speaker 06

  Mr. President, my company, the explosion on our rear on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:43:13Speaker 08

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what?

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:43:21Speaker 08

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under seventeen. Not a minute without parent.