AMA #2: Improve Sleep, Reduce Sugar Cravings, Optimal Protein Intake, Stretching Frequency & More

This episode is an "ask me anything" (AMA) installment, part of the Huberman Lab premium subscriber content. The host, who introduces himself as Andrew Huberman, a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine, says the premium channel exists to raise support for the standard weekly podcast, which still comes out every Monday at zero cost to consumers. It is also meant to support human research at universities such as Stanford that should lead to protocols for mental health, physical health and performance.

Subscription details are given as $10 a month or $100 a year, with a lifetime option, at hubermanlab.com/premium. Non-subscribers can hear roughly the first 15 minutes, which is meant to help them decide whether to subscribe. The host promises to be "as accurate as possible, as thorough as possible, and yet as concise as possible."

The first question, from Jack Pritchard, received many upvotes and asks how to improve deep sleep, also called slow-wave sleep. Jack reports that his sleep analyzer shows a lot of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, about 30% of his total sleep, while his deep sleep is often low, around 10%. He wants to know whether any science-backed protocols specifically increase deep sleep. The host points to earlier full-length episodes, Master Your Sleep and Perfect Your Sleep, and to a free downloadable sleep toolkit PDF at hubermanlab.com that lists behavioral and other tools.

The host explains that "deep sleep" and "slow-wave sleep" are often used interchangeably. He notes they "aren't necessarily the same thing, but they fall under the same mechanistic umbrella." Across the night a sleeper cycles through several stages. In roughly the first half of the night most sleep is slow-wave deep sleep, and in the second half more of it is REM sleep. He describes this as the typical pattern when sleep architecture is not being disrupted by things like caffeine and alcohol.

He describes several functions of deep sleep. It is "vitally important in particular for repair of bodily tissues." Growth hormone is secreted every night, but most of that release is restricted to the first half of the night. He links growth hormone to metabolism, protein synthesis, muscle repair and repair of all cell types and tissues. Dreams in deep sleep tend to be less emotional than REM dreams, "somewhat mundane, sometimes a little bizarre," though he adds that this can change when someone faces a lot of emotionally laden circumstances in waking life.