Moment 112 - Want To Sleep Better? Listen To This: Matthew Walker

00:02my question is what are the things that in the modern society are standing in the way of sleep we've touched on some of them loosely but some of the like big obvious things the things that you would suggest doing very actionable things we could do straight away to improve our chances of having that healthy um deep sleep that we need to be um optimal in every regard of our health and performance? There's probably, I think, five standard tips, what we call sort of sleep hygiene that you can do. And then I'll come on to maybe just some unconventional tips that we've sort of touched on. And we've spoken about many of these. The first thing I would recommend people to do, and this is why when some people say, what about this new sleep supplement or, you know, it's 40 quid for this bottle of these new sleep natural medications, I'm going to give it a try. I would say try these tried and true things first before you spend your money on supplements the first thing is regularity go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend your brain expects regularity it thrives best under conditions of regularity when you give it regularity you can improve the quantity and the quantity of your

01:14sleep the second thing is get some darkness at night as i said we don't get enough darkness in the modern world and so the trick i would offer and i don't use it i don't like the word hack but the sort of suggestion would be in the last hour before bed try this experiment for everyone listening for the next week dim down half of the lights or switch off half of the lights or even a three quarters of the lights in your home in the last hour before bed all of the lights in every room in all of the rooms you know switch off almost all of the light now i'm not suggesting be unsafe and walk around in the darkness in the last hour that's not what i'm saying just dimmed out you know switch off half of the lights you will be surprised at how sleepy that darkness will make you feel and it's also an incredible behavioral trigger to signal to your brain that it is time for sleep, that darkness is around me.

02:16That's the second tip is darkness. The third tip is temperature. Most people sleep in an ambient bedroom temperature that is too high. And you need to aim for a bedroom temperature of about 18, 18 and a half degrees Celsius around about 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm probably butchering the mathematics there on that. But you need to get cool. Now you can wear thick socks, you can have a hot water bottle, that's fine, but the ambient needs to be cold.

02:47Because you need to drop your core body temperature and your brain temperature by about one degree Celsius to fall asleep and stay asleep. And it's the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. So make your bedroom cold, make it dark like a cave. the the fourth question would be sort of what we've or fourth suggestion would be walk it out and we've spoken about this the 30 minute rule you know get up do something different or meditate you know don't lie in bed awake for too long then the final two things we've spoken about well we've spoken about caffeine we haven't spoken about alcohol but let me just say as the kind of headline of it alcohol is not a sleep aid many people use it as a sleep aid it is not your friend Alcohol, again, is a sedative, so it knocks you out.

03:37The second is that it fragments your sleep. So you wake up, your sleep is littered with all of these small awakenings. Most of them you don't remember because they're too brief, but it makes for miserable, lousy quality sleep. And the final thing is that alcohol is very good at blocking your REM sleep or your dream sleep, which we know is critical for many other functions as well. So alcohol is not your friend. That's sort of the final tip. again you know just every if you're with friends have a glass of red wine just know okay my sleep's not going to be great thank you matt i'm joking you know i'm not yeah i'm uh whatever it's just you know live life too of course yeah i'm not saying that i i was i was thinking there about the other sort of behavioral things that we do that harm our sleep as well we talked about coffee earlier on avoiding that it's weird that people drink it off to dessert in the evenings never understood that because that's an old tradition um but the other thing obviously that the modern generation are even more susceptible to is to have a quick tiktok look at the social media account or something now i thought you know there's a lot of different products out there that are trying to

04:42help with the the light that comes from these screens that i think is the cause of what's keeping us awake but there's this little button called dark mode on my ipad there's also one called night shift so if i just pop that on bob's your uncle and this and i can crack on with my screen time true or false partly true oh good okay so i can just pop that on night mode in dark mode and then i can carry on using my ipad partly true so it turns out that the blue light from screens does have an impact on sleep so there's a great study done by harford medical school by some colleagues there and they showed that reading for an hour on an ipad just before bed relative to just reading a book in dim light firstly it delayed the time with which people fell asleep so it took them a lot longer to fall asleep second it reduced the total amount of sleep that they had third it decreased a sleep related hormone called melatonin it delayed the release of that melatonin and it reduced the amount of melatonin and finally it reduced the amount of rapid eye movement sleep so it has significantly significantly melatonin point yeah so it delayed the release by about somewhere between 90 minutes to two hours across the individuals so in other words your brain

06:00wasn't so what melatonin does it's a it's called the hormone of darkness or the vampire hormone just because not because it makes you want to bite into people's necks because it signals to your brain that it's nighttime that it's darkness and so your brain needs the signal of melatonin for it to understand when is it dark. In other words, it needs to understand by way of melatonin when it is time to fall asleep. And when you're bathed in electric light at night, and especially when you're getting blue light from these devices, your brain is fooled into thinking it's still daytime.

06:34And when there is light emitting through your retina coming into your brain, it signals to a part of your brain to hit the brakes on melatonin and your brain will not release melatonin. So what was happening with this iPad reading is that you were artificially telling the brain it's still daytime and the brakes on melatonin were still shut on. And so melatonin was not starting to be released until much later. And what was also interesting about the study, by the way, is that when they stopped the iPad reading, the sleep disrupted pattern continued for several days later.

07:08In other words, it was almost like a drug that it had a washout period that was a blast radius to it. now there's been some great work by a wonderful sleep scientist in australia michael gradazar and he has added to this story and he said it's not just the blue light these devices the principal function of these devices is that they are attention capture devices just like you said i'm just going to have a wee little tiktok before bed they are in the attention economy and all they care about is capturing your attention for a current currency and they make a lot of money from it what that attention does is that it stimulates your brain and when your brain is stimulated it's very difficult for you to fall asleep and it creates what we call sleep procrastination where you're lying in bed and you could be perfectly sleepy and you could fall asleep right now but then you sort of check social media and they think oh i'll just shoot that last email and then I'll order that last thing on sort of, you know, Amazon.

08:09And then you get a text back from your friend and you start texting them. And then you look up and it's now an hour later and you're an hour deficient on sleep. So it's the activation of your cerebral cortex by these devices that is perhaps the more harmful aspect of them regarding your sleep. Now, here again, I don't want to be finger wagging. You know, the genie of technology is out the bottle and it's not going back in any time soon. There's nothing that I'm going to say as a sleep researcher that's going to change that.

08:40I don't take my phone into my bedroom. I put my phone out in the kitchen. I don't see it until morning, but lots of people do and fair enough. But there's another rule that I've stolen from another friend called Michael Grandner, who's here in America at the University of Tucson in Arizona. He has this great rule regarding technology and it's the following that if you really must take your phone into your bedroom you can only use it standing up and what you'll find is that after about six or seven minutes standing up you think i'm just gonna i'm just gonna sit down on the bed and at that point as soon as your backside hits the bed you're done you've got to put the phone away i think it's a great rule of thumb if if you need to take technology in the bedroom i have some breaking news and no this is an emergency I've spent the last two years writing a book and I've written 33 laws for business marketing and life that I derive from all of these conversations I've had here I traveled the world to write this book I interviewed some of the most incredible people I did six months of extensive research on scientific studies and principles to corroborate everything that I wrote into these 33 laws

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