Master Your Sleep & Be More Alert When Awake

Master Your Sleep & Be More Alert When Awake | Huberman Lab Essentials

Channel: Andrew Huberman / Huberman Lab
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIo9FcrljDk

Transcript

[00:00] ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where
[00:02] we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable
[00:06] science based tools for mental health, physical health,
[00:08] and performance.
[00:09] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:11] I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor
[00:13] of neurobiology and ophthalmology
[00:15] at Stanford School of Medicine.
[00:17] Today’s podcast episode is all about sleep.
[00:21] We’re also going to talk about the mirror image of sleep,
[00:24] which is wakefulness.
[00:25] Now, these two phases of our life, sleep and wakefulness
[00:29] govern everything about our mental and physical health.
[00:33] And we’re not just going to talk about what’s useful about sleep.
[00:37] We’re also going to talk about how to get better at sleeping,
[00:40] and that will include how to get better
[00:41] at falling asleep, timing your sleep
[00:44] and accessing better sleep quality.
[00:47] In doing so, we’re also going to discuss
[00:48] how to get more focused and alert in wakefulness.
[00:52] So if you’re like most people, which includes me,
[00:56] you have some challenges with sleep.
[00:58] At least every third or fifth night or so,
[01:00] and maybe even more often.
[01:02] So we’re really going to go tool heavy today
[01:04] and talk about tools that can help you fall asleep,
[01:07] sleep better and emerge from sleep feeling more rested.
[01:11] So what determines how well we sleep
[01:13] and the quality of our wakeful state?
[01:16] It turns out that’s governed by two forces.
[01:19] The first force is a chemical force.
[01:21] It’s called adenosine.
[01:23] Adenosine is a molecule in our nervous system and body
[01:27] that builds up the longer we are awake.
[01:30] So if you’ve just slept for eight or nine or ten really
[01:34] deep restful hours, adenosine is going
[01:36] to be very low in your brain and body.
[01:39] If, however, you’ve been awake for 10, 15 or more hours,
[01:43] adenosine levels are going to be much higher.
[01:46] Adenosine creates a sort of sleep drive or a sleep hunger.
[01:50] And a good way to remember this and think about adenosine
[01:54] is to think about caffeine.
[01:56] Caffeine for most people wakes them up.
[01:59] It makes them feel more alert.
[02:01] Caffeine acts as an adenosine antagonist.
[02:06] What that means is that when you ingest caffeine, whether or not
[02:09] it’s coffee or soda or tea or in any other form,
[02:12] it binds to the adenosine receptor.
[02:15] It sort of parks there just like a car would
[02:17] park in a given parking slot.
[02:19] And therefore adenosine can’t park in that slot.
[02:22] Now, when caffeine parks in the adenosine receptor slot,
[02:26] nothing really happens downstream of that receptor.
[02:30] The receptor can’t engage the normal cellular functions
[02:32] of making that cell and you feel sleepy.
[02:36] So the reason caffeine wakes you up
[02:39] is because it blocks the sleepiness receptor.
[02:42] It blocks the sleepy signal.
[02:44] And this is why when that caffeine wears off,
[02:47] adenosine will bind to that receptor
[02:49] sometimes with even greater what we call affinity.
[02:52] And you feel the crash, you feel especially tired.
[02:55] Caffeine has a lot of health benefits.
[02:58] It also, for some people, can be problematic for health,
[03:01] it can raise blood pressure, et cetera.
[03:03] Caffeine increases this molecule that’s a neuromodulator
[03:07] that we call dopamine.
[03:08] We discussed this in episode one, which
[03:10] tends to make us feel good, motivated and give us energy,
[03:14] because as you may have learned in episode one,
[03:17] dopamine is related to another neuromodulator called
[03:21] epinephrine, which gives us energy.
[03:22] In fact, epinephrine is made from dopamine.
[03:25] So let’s just take a step back and think
[03:27] about what we’re talking about when
[03:28] we’re talking about sleepiness.
[03:30] If you’ve ever pulled an all-nighter,
[03:31] you’ll noticed something interesting.
[03:33] As morning rolls around, you’ll suddenly
[03:36] feel an increase in your energy and alertness
[03:38] again, even though adenosine has been building up
[03:41] for the entire night.
[03:44] Now, why is that?
[03:45] The reason that is because there’s
[03:47] a second force which is governing when you sleep
[03:50] and when you’re awake.
[03:51] And that force is a so-called circadian force.
[03:55] Circadian means about a day or about 24 hours.
[04:00] And inside all of us is a clock that
[04:02] exists in your brain and my brain
[04:05] and the brain of every animal that we’re
[04:07] aware of that determines when we want to be sleepy
[04:11] and when we want to be awake.
[04:13] That block of sleep and when it falls within each 24 hour cycle
[04:18] is governed by a number of different things.
[04:21] But the most powerful thing that’s
[04:23] governing when you want to be asleep
[04:24] and when you want to be awake is light.
[04:28] And in particular, it’s governed by sunlight.
[04:31] Now, I can’t emphasize enough how important
[04:33] and how actionable this relationship is between light
[04:37] and when you want to sleep.
[04:40] It’s quite simple on the face of it,
[04:43] and it’s quite simple to resolve.
[04:44] But people tend to make a big mess of this whole circadian
[04:47] literature, frankly.
[04:49] So let’s just break it down from the standpoint
[04:52] of what’s going on in your brain and body
[04:54] as you go through one 24 hour day.
[04:58] Let’s start with waking.
[04:59] So regardless of how well you slept at night
[05:01] or whether or not you were up all night,
[05:03] most people tend to wake up sometime
[05:05] around when the sun rises.
[05:08] When you wake up in the morning, you
[05:10] wake up because a particular hormone
[05:12] called cortisol is released from your adrenal glands.
[05:16] Your adrenal glands sit right above your kidneys
[05:18] and there’s a little pulse of cortisol.
[05:20] There’s also a pulse of epinephrine,
[05:22] which is adrenaline from your adrenals and also in your brain.
[05:27] And you feel awake.
[05:29] Now, that pulse of cortisol and adrenaline and epinephrine
[05:32] might come from your alarm clock.
[05:34] It might come from you naturally waking up.
[05:36] But it tends to alert your whole system and your body
[05:40] that it’s time to increase your heart rate.
[05:41] It’s time to start tensing your muscles.
[05:43] It’s time to start moving about.
[05:45] It’s very important that that cortisol pulse
[05:48] come early in the day, or at least early
[05:51] in your period of wakefulness.
[05:53] When you wake up in the morning and you experience
[05:55] that rise in cortisol, there’s a timer that starts going
[06:00] and these are cellular timers and they’re
[06:02] dictated by the relation between different organs
[06:04] in your body that says to your brain and body
[06:08] that in about 12 to 14 hours a different hormone.
[06:12] This hormone we’re calling melatonin
[06:14] will be released from your pineal gland.
[06:16] So there’s two mechanisms here a wakefulness signal
[06:19] and a sleepiness signal.
[06:21] And the wakefulness signal triggers
[06:23] the onset of the timer for the sleepiness signal.
[06:26] OK, so the rhythm of cortisol and melatonin
[06:30] is what we call endogenous.
[06:32] It’s happening in us all the time without any external input.
[06:36] In fact, if we were in complete darkness, living in a cave
[06:39] with no artificial lights whatsoever,
[06:41] these rhythms of cortisol and melatonin would continue.
[06:45] So if you were in complete darkness,
[06:48] it would happen once per 24 hour cycle,
[06:51] but it would be somewhat later and later each day.
[06:55] Whereas under normal circumstances, what happens
[07:00] is you wake up.
[07:01] And what happens when you wake up?
[07:03] You open your eyes.
[07:04] When you open your eyes.
[07:06] Light comes into your eyes.
[07:07] Now, the way this system works is
[07:09] that you have a particular set of neurons in your eye.
[07:12] They’re called retinal ganglion cells.
[07:14] When light comes into the eye, there’s
[07:16] a particular group of retinal ganglion cells
[07:18] or type of retinal ganglion cells
[07:21] that perceives a particular type of light
[07:24] and communicates that to this clock that resides right
[07:27] above the roof of your mouth called
[07:28] the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
[07:30] And the suprachiasmatic nucleus has
[07:33] connections with essentially every cell
[07:36] and organ of your body.
[07:38] Now, it’s vitally important that we
[07:40] get light communicated to this central clock in order
[07:43] to time the cortisol and melatonin properly.
[07:47] When I say properly, I can say that with confidence
[07:50] because we know based on a lot of evidence
[07:52] that if you don’t get your cortisol and melatonin rhythms
[07:56] right, there are tremendously broad
[08:00] and bad effects on cardiovascular health,
[08:04] metabolic effects, learning, depression, dementia.
[08:08] So let’s think about what happens
[08:10] when we do this correctly and how to do it correctly.
[08:12] When we wake up, our eyes open.
[08:15] Now, if we’re in a dark room, there
[08:17] isn’t enough light to trigger the correct timing
[08:21] of this cortisol melatonin thing.
[08:24] These rhythms, you might say, well, why won’t any light do it?
[08:28] Well, it turns out that these neurons
[08:31] in our eye that set the circadian clock
[08:33] and then allow our circadian clock to set
[08:35] all the clocks of all the cells and organs and tissues
[08:38] of our body, responds best to a particular quality of light
[08:43] an amount of light.
[08:45] And those are the qualities of light and amount of light
[08:49] that come from sunlight.
[08:51] So these neurons, what they’re really looking for,
[08:56] although they don’t have a mind of their own,
[08:58] is the sun at what we call low solar angle.
[09:01] The eye and the nervous system don’t know anything
[09:03] about sunrises or sunsets.
[09:05] It only knows the quality of light
[09:07] that comes in when the sun is low in the sky.
[09:10] This system evolved so that when the sun is low in the sky,
[09:14] there’s a particular contrast between yellows and blues
[09:17] that triggers the activation of these cells.
[09:20] However, if you wake up a few hours
[09:22] after the sunrise, which I tend to most days personally,
[09:26] you still want to get outside and view sunlight.
[09:29] You don’t need the sunlight beaming you directly
[09:32] in the eyes.
[09:33] There’s a lot of photons, light energy that scattered
[09:36] from sunlight at this time.
[09:37] But the key is to get that light energy from sunlight ideally
[09:43] into your eyes.
[09:44] It’s critically important that you get outside
[09:46] to get this light.
[09:47] I had a discussion with a colleague of mine, Dr. Jamie
[09:50] Zeitzer, who’s in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral
[09:53] Sciences at Stanford, a world expert in this.
[09:58] And he tells me that it’s 50 times less effective
[10:03] to view this sunlight through a window, through a car windshield
[10:08] or through a side window of a car
[10:10] than it is to just get outside with no sunglasses and view
[10:14] light early in the day.
[10:15] Once the sun is overhead, the quality of light
[10:18] shifts so that you miss this opportunity to time
[10:22] the cortisol pulse.
[10:23] And that turns out to be a bad thing to do.
[10:26] You really want to time that cortisol pulse properly.
[10:29] Because we’ll get into this a little bit more later.
[10:33] But a late shifted cortisol pulse in particular a 9:00 PM
[10:37] or 8:00 PM increase in cortisol is one of the consequences
[10:42] and maybe one of the causes of a lot of anxiety disorders
[10:47] and depression.
[10:48] So it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing.
[10:49] We don’t know whether or not it’s the correlated with it’s
[10:52] the cause or the effect, but it’s
[10:53] a signature of depression and anxiety disorder.
[10:56] Bringing that cortisol pulse earlier in your wakeful period,
[11:00] earlier in your day has positive benefits,
[11:03] ranging from blood pressure to mental health etcetera.
[11:06] I’m not going to list them all off because they’re just
[11:09] so many of them.
[11:10] But many, many positive things happen
[11:12] when you are getting the cortisol early in the day,
[11:15] far away from your melatonin pulse.
[11:18] So how long should you be outside?
[11:21] Well, this is going to vary tremendously,
[11:23] because some people live in environments where
[11:24] it’s very bright.
[11:25] So let’s say it’s Colorado in the middle of winter,
[11:29] there’s a snow field, there’s no cloud cover.
[11:31] And you walk outside, there’s going
[11:33] to be so much photon light energy arriving
[11:36] on your retina that probably only takes
[11:38] 30 to 60 seconds to trigger the central clock
[11:41] and set your cortisol and melatonin
[11:43] rhythms properly and get everything in lined up nicely.
[11:47] Whereas if you’re in Scandinavia in the depths of winter and you
[11:51] wake up at 5:00 AM and the sun is just barely creeping across
[11:54] the horizon and then goes back down again a few hours later,
[11:57] you probably are not getting enough sunlight in order to set
[12:01] these rhythms.
[12:02] So many people find that they need
[12:05] to use sunlight simulators in the form of particular lights
[12:09] that were designed to simulate sunlight.
[12:11] You could say, well, the lights in my house or my phone
[12:14] are really, really bright.
[12:15] Everyone’s telling us to stay off our phones at night
[12:17] because they’re really bright.
[12:19] But guess what?
[12:20] It turns out that early in the day,
[12:22] your retina is not very sensitive,
[12:25] which means you need a lot of photons,
[12:28] ideally coming from sunlight to set these clock mechanisms.
[12:31] So looking at your phone or artificial lights
[12:33] is fine if you wake up before sunrise,
[12:35] but it’s not going to work to set these clock mechanisms.
[12:40] So you want to use sunlight.
[12:42] If you can’t see sunlight because of your environment,
[12:45] then you are going to have to opt for artificial light.
[12:48] And in that case, you’re going to want an artificial light
[12:51] that either simulates sunlight or has a lot of blue light.
[12:54] Now, without going off course here, you might be saying, wait,
[12:58] I’ve heard blue light is bad for me.
[12:59] Actually, blue light is great for this mechanism
[13:02] during the day.
[13:03] A lot of people will say I should be wearing blue blockers
[13:06] throughout the day.
[13:07] No, that’s the exact wrong thing.
[13:09] That should be reserved for late in the evening.
[13:12] Because light suppresses melatonin.
[13:15] Sunlight inhibits the pineal.
[13:18] It prevents it from releasing melatonin.
[13:21] Darkness allows the pineal to release melatonin.
[13:25] So the pineal is not the gland or the organ of sunlight.
[13:29] It is the gland of darkness.
[13:31] In fact, melatonin can be thought
[13:33] of as a sleepiness signal that’s correlated with darkness.
[13:36] So get up each morning, try and get outside.
[13:39] I know that can be challenging for people,
[13:41] but anywhere from two to ten minutes of sunlight exposure
[13:45] is going to work well for most people.
[13:47] If you can’t do it every day or you
[13:48] sleep through this period of the early day low solar angle,
[13:51] don’t worry about it.
[13:53] The systems in the body, these hormone systems
[13:55] and neurotransmitter systems that
[13:57] make you awake at certain periods of the day
[13:59] and sleepy at other times are operating
[14:03] by averaging when you view the brightest light.
[14:08] Some of you, many of you might be asking,
[14:10] what else can help set this rhythm?
[14:12] Well, it turns out that light is what
[14:14] we call the primary zeitgeber, the time giver.
[14:18] But other things can help establish
[14:21] this rhythm of cortisol, followed by melatonin
[14:24] 12 to 16 hours later as well.
[14:26] The other things besides light are timing of food intake,
[14:31] timing of exercise, as well as various drugs or chemicals
[14:36] that one might ingest.
[14:38] Not illegal drugs, although those
[14:39] will impact circadian mechanisms, as well.
[14:42] The other thing is sunset, when the sun is also
[14:46] at low solar angle low close to the horizon.
[14:50] By viewing sunlight at that time of day,
[14:52] in the evening or afternoon, depending on what time of year
[14:55] it is and where you are in the world.
[14:57] These melanopsin cells, these neurons in your eye
[15:00] signal the central circadian clock
[15:02] that it’s the end of the day.
[15:04] There was a really nice study that
[15:06] showed that viewing sunlight around the time of sunset
[15:11] doesn’t have to be just crossing the horizon,
[15:13] but circa sunset within an hour or so of sunset
[15:17] prevents some of the bad effects of light
[15:22] in preventing melatonin release later that same night.
[15:26] So let me repeat this viewing light early in the day is key.
[15:28] Viewing light later in the day when
[15:31] the sun is setting or around that time
[15:33] can help protect these mechanisms, your brain and body
[15:37] against the negative effects of light later in the day.
[15:41] So let me talk about how you would do that.
[15:43] You’d go view the sunset or you would go outside
[15:46] in the late afternoon or evening.
[15:48] Again, if you want to do this through a window at work,
[15:50] that’s fine, but it’ll take 50 times longer.
[15:52] So the best thing to do is just to get outside
[15:54] for a few minutes, anywhere from two to ten minutes also
[15:57] in the afternoon.
[15:58] Having those two signals arriving
[16:00] to your central clock that your body,
[16:03] your internal world knows when it’s morning
[16:05] and knows when it’s evening is tremendously powerful.
[16:08] There’s always a lot of questions about how long?
[16:11] How much How do I know if I’ve had enough?
[16:12] You’ll know because your rhythm will
[16:14] start to fall into some degree of normalcy.
[16:18] You’ll start to wake up at more or less the same time each day.
[16:20] You’ll fall asleep more easily at night.
[16:22] Generally, it takes about two or three days for these systems
[16:24] to align.
[16:25] So if you’ve not been doing these behaviors,
[16:27] it’s going to take a few days.
[16:29] But they can have tremendous benefits
[16:31] and sometimes rather quickly on a number
[16:33] of different mental and physical aspects of your health.
[16:36] Now let’s talk about the bad effects of light.
[16:39] Because light is not supposed to arrive in our system
[16:44] at any time.
[16:45] And nowadays, because of screens and artificial light,
[16:48] we have access to light at times of day and night that normally
[16:53] we wouldn’t.
[16:54] Now, earlier I said that you need
[16:56] a lot of light in particular sunlight
[16:58] to set these clock mechanisms.
[17:00] That’s true.
[17:01] But there’s a kind of diabolical feature to the way
[17:03] all this works, which is the longer you’ve been awake,
[17:07] the more sensitive your retina and these cells are to light.
[17:11] So that if you’ve been awake for 10, 12, 14 hours,
[17:15] it becomes very easy for even a small amount of light coming
[17:19] from a screen or from an overhead light
[17:23] to trigger the activation of the clock and make
[17:26] you feel like you want to stay up later,
[17:27] make it harder to fall asleep and disrupt your sleep pattern.
[17:31] OK, so the simple way to think about this
[17:33] is want as much light as safely possible
[17:36] early in the day, morning and throughout the day,
[17:38] including blue light.
[17:40] And you want as little light coming into your eyes,
[17:43] artificial or sunlight after, say 8:00 PM.
[17:46] And certainly you do not want to get bright light exposure
[17:49] to your eyes between 11 PM and 4 AM.
[17:51] And here’s why.
[17:52] Light that arrives to the eyes between 11:00 PM and 4:00 AM
[17:58] approximately, suppresses the release of dopamine.
[18:04] This neuromodulator that makes us feel good
[18:06] is sort of an endogenous antidepressant
[18:09] and can inhibit learning and create all sorts
[18:11] of other detrimental effects.
[18:14] It does this through a mechanism for those of you
[18:16] who want to the neural pathways that involves light to the eyes.
[18:19] That’s then signaled to a structure called the habenula.
[18:22] When that habenula gets activated,
[18:24] it’s actually called the disappointment nucleus
[18:26] because it actually makes us feel less happy and more
[18:31] disappointed and can lead to certain forms of depression
[18:34] in the wakeful state.
[18:35] Now, if you wake up in the middle of the night
[18:37] and you need to use the bathroom or you’re on an all night flight
[18:40] and you need to read or whatever it is, fine.
[18:44] Every once in a while it’s not going
[18:46] to be a problem to get bright light exposure to your eyes
[18:49] in the middle of the night.
[18:50] But if you think about our lifestyle
[18:52] nowadays and being up late looking at phones,
[18:55] even if you dim that screen, you’re
[18:57] triggering this activation because your retinal sensitivity
[19:00] and the sensitivity of these neurons
[19:01] has gone up late in the day.
[19:03] For those of you that are experiencing challenges
[19:05] with mood, those of you that have anxiety, learning problems,
[19:08] issues, focusing, the questions I usually get
[19:10] are how can I focus better?
[19:11] One of the best ways you can support your mechanisms
[19:13] for good mood, mental health, learning, focus, metabolism,
[19:18] et cetera, is to take control of this light exposure behavior
[19:22] at night and not get much or any bright light exposure
[19:26] in the middle of the night.
[19:27] These cells in our eye, these neurons that
[19:30] signal the central clock reside mostly
[19:33] not exclusively, but mostly in the bottom half of our retina.
[19:36] And because we have a lens in front of our retina
[19:39] and because of the optics of lenses,
[19:41] that means that these cells are actually
[19:43] viewing our upper visual field.
[19:45] This is probably not coincidental
[19:48] that these cells were essentially
[19:51] designed to detect sunlight, which is overhead, of course.
[19:55] So if you want to avoid improper activation of these neurons,
[20:02] it’s better to place lights that you
[20:05] use in the evening low in your physical environment.
[20:08] So on desktops or even the floor, if you want to go
[20:11] that way as opposed to overhead lights.
[20:15] So overhead fluorescent lights would be the worst.
[20:18] That would be the worst case scenario.
[20:20] Lights that are overhead that are
[20:22] a little bit softer of the yellow or reddish tints
[20:25] would be slightly better.
[20:26] But dim lights that are set low in the room
[20:28] are going to be best because they aren’t going
[20:31] to activate these neurons and therefore shift your circadian
[20:35] clock.
[20:36] But let’s talk about what light can
[20:39] do in terms of shifting us in healthy ways.
[20:42] So the way to think about this whole system again,
[20:45] is you’ve got adenosine building up
[20:47] depending on how long you’ve been awake
[20:48] and it’s making you sleepy.
[20:50] And then you’ve got their circadian mechanisms
[20:51] that are timing your wakefulness and timing
[20:54] when you want to be asleep, mainly
[20:55] through cortisol and melatonin.
[20:57] But there are a bunch of other things
[20:58] that are downstream of cortisol and melatonin
[21:00] like we tend to be hungrier during our wakeful period
[21:05] than late at night.
[21:06] Some people like to eat it late at night.
[21:07] But if you’re finding that you can’t become a day
[21:10] person or a morning person, shifting your light exposure,
[21:14] exercise and food intake to the daytime will help.
[21:17] Jamie Zeitzer and colleagues did a beautiful study
[21:20] showing that if you turn on the lights before waking up,
[21:25] so around 45 minutes to an hour before waking up.
[21:28] Even if your eyelids are closed provided
[21:30] you’re not under the covers.
[21:33] After doing that for a few days, that
[21:36] increases your total sleep time and shifts forward the time
[21:40] at which you feel sleepy.
[21:41] It makes you want to go to bed earlier each night.
[21:44] Now, in a kind of diabolical way,
[21:47] they did this with teenagers who are
[21:49] notorious for wanting to wake up late and stay up late.
[21:51] And what they found was bright light flashes just turning
[21:53] on the lights in their environment, overhead lights,
[21:56] because they’re trying to activate the system.
[21:58] And that’s why they’re using overhead lights even
[22:00] through the eyelids before these kids woke up,
[22:03] then made those kids naturally want to go to bed earlier
[22:06] and they ended up sleeping longer.
[22:08] So that’s something you could try.
[22:09] You could put your lights on a timer to go on early in the day
[22:13] before you wake up.
[22:14] You could open your blinds so that sunlight is coming through.
[22:18] And again, if you curl up under the covers,
[22:20] then it’s not going to reach these neurons.
[22:23] But it’s remarkable, the light can actually
[22:24] penetrate the eyelids, activate these neurons
[22:27] and go to the central clock.
[22:29] That study illustrates a really important principle
[22:31] of how you’re built, which is have
[22:34] the capacity for what are called phase advances and phase delays.
[22:38] And I don’t want to complicate this too much.
[22:41] So the simplest way to think about phase advances and phase
[22:45] delays is that if you see light late in the day
[22:49] and in particular in the middle of the night, your brain
[22:52] and body, for reasons that now you
[22:54] understand will think that that’s morning light, even
[22:58] though it’s not sunlight, because you have this heightened
[23:00] sensitivity and it will phase delay, it will delay your clock.
[23:04] It will essentially make you want to get up later
[23:06] and go to sleep later.
[23:07] So the simple way to think about this
[23:09] is if you’re having trouble waking up early
[23:12] and feeling alert early in the day,
[23:14] you’re going to want to try and get bright light exposure even
[23:17] before waking up because it will advance your clock.
[23:21] It’s sort of like turning the clock forward.
[23:23] Whereas if you are having trouble waking up early,
[23:26] you definitely don’t want to get too much light exposure
[23:29] or any light exposure to your eyes late in the evening
[23:31] and in the middle of the night because it’s just going to delay
[23:34] your clock more and more.
[23:36] And what you’re trying to do is provide them anchors.
[23:39] You’re trying to provide them consistent, powerful anchors so
[23:43] that your cortisol, your melatonin, and then everything
[23:46] that cascades down from that, like your metabolism
[23:49] and your ability to learn and your sense of alertness,
[23:52] your dopamine, your serotonin, all that stuff
[23:55] is timed regularly.
[23:58] One of the reasons why there’s so much
[24:00] challenge out there with focus and anxiety and depression.
[24:06] There are a lot of reasons for that.
[24:07] But one of the reasons is that people’s internal mechanisms
[24:11] aren’t anchored to anything regular.
[24:13] These systems, again, will average,
[24:15] but if you can provide them consistent light anchors early
[24:18] in the day and in the evening and avoiding light at night,
[24:21] you will be amazed at the tremendous number
[24:24] of positive effects that can come
[24:25] from that at the level of metabolic factors, hormones,
[24:29] and just general feelings of well-being.
[24:31] And this is why whenever people ask me, what should I take?
[24:34] Which is one of the most common questions I get.
[24:36] What supplements should I take?
[24:37] What drugs should I be taking?
[24:39] What things should I be taking?
[24:40] The first question I always ask them is how is your sleep?
[24:45] And 90% of the time they tell me they
[24:47] either have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep
[24:50] or they don’t feel rested throughout the day.
[24:52] A brief note about naps.
[24:54] Naps provided that they’re less than one ultradian cycle,
[24:58] provided they’re 20 minutes or 30 minutes
[24:59] or even an hour can be very beneficial for a lot of people.
[25:02] You don’t have to take them, but many people naturally
[25:06] feel a dip in energy and focus late in the afternoon.
[25:09] In fact, if we were going to look at wakefulness, what
[25:11] we would find is that you get that morning light exposure,
[25:13] hopefully your cortisol goes up, people start feeling awake
[25:15] and then around 2 or 3 or 4 in the afternoon,
[25:18] there’s a spike in everything from alertness to ability
[25:22] to learn.
[25:23] Some metabolic factors drop and then it just naturally
[25:25] comes back up.
[25:26] And then it tapers off as the night goes on.
[25:29] So for some of you, naps are great.
[25:32] I love taking naps.
[25:33] Some people, they wake up from naps, feeling really groggy.
[25:36] That’s probably because they’re not
[25:38] sleeping as well as they should at night
[25:40] or as long as they should at night.
[25:42] And so they’re dropping into REM sleep or deeper forms of sleep
[25:46] in the daytime.
[25:47] And then they wake up and they feel kind of disoriented.
[25:49] Other people feel great after a nap.
[25:51] So that’s another case where just like with caffeine,
[25:53] you sort of have to evaluate for yourself.
[25:55] OK, so naps are going to be good for some people, not for others.
[25:58] I personally like to take a nap around 3 or 4 PM,
[26:01] but there’s a practice that I’ve adopted in the last five years
[26:05] that I’ve found to be immensely beneficial.
[26:08] That is sort of like napping but isn’t napping.
[26:10] It’s a thing that they call yoga nidra.
[26:14] Yoga nidra actually means yoga sleep.
[26:16] And it’s a sort of meditation that you listen to.
[26:19] Meditation and yoga nidra scripts
[26:21] have been immensely helpful for me
[26:23] in terms of accelerating the transition to sleep.
[26:26] So they involve taking a few minutes, 10 to 30 minutes or so,
[26:31] just like you would for a nap and just
[26:33] listening to a script almost passively,
[26:35] and it has do some particular patterns of breathing
[26:38] and some other kind of body scan things that can really
[26:42] help people learn to relax, not just in that moment,
[26:45] but get better at relaxing and turning off
[26:48] thinking in order to fall asleep when
[26:49] they want to do that at night.
[26:51] In other words, they’re always good for you
[26:53] because it’s a training mechanism by which you self
[26:55] train your nervous system to go from a state of heightened
[26:59] alertness, that you don’t want to heighten,
[27:01] relaxation that you do want.
[27:03] And so it’s really teaching you to hit the brake.
[27:06] And that brings us to an even more important point, perhaps,
[27:09] which is we’ve all experienced that we can stay up
[27:13] if we want to.
[27:14] If we want to stay up late on New Year’s or we
[27:17] want to push an all-nighter.
[27:18] Some people can do that more easily than others,
[27:20] but we’re all capable of doing that.
[27:23] But it’s very hard to make ourselves fall asleep.
[27:26] And so there’s a sort of asymmetry to the way
[27:28] our autonomic nervous system, which
[27:30] governs this alertness, calmness thing,
[27:32] the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system,
[27:34] there’s an asymmetry there where we
[27:36] are more easily able to engage wakefulness and drive
[27:40] wakefulness.
[27:40] We can force ourselves to stay awake
[27:43] than we are able to force ourselves to fall asleep.
[27:46] And one of the things that I say over and over again
[27:49] and I’m going to continue to say over and over again
[27:51] is it’s very hard to control the mind with the mind.
[27:54] When you have trouble falling asleep,
[27:56] you need to look to some mechanism that
[27:58] involves the body.
[27:59] And all the things I described meditation, hypnosis, yoga
[28:02] nidra, all involve exhale, emphasized,
[28:06] breathing certain ways of lying down and controlling the body.
[28:10] We’re going to get into breathing in real depth
[28:12] at another time.
[28:13] But all of those involve using the body to control the mind
[28:16] rather than trying to wrestle your mind into a certain pattern
[28:21] of relaxation.
[28:22] And when we’re having trouble controlling the mind,
[28:25] I encourage people to look towards the body,
[28:27] look toward sunlight, avoid sunlight and bright light
[28:30] if that happens to be late at night.
[28:32] So there’s a theme that’s starting to emerge,
[28:34] which is in order to control this thing that we call
[28:36] the nervous system, we have to look back
[28:38] to some of the things we discussed earlier,
[28:40] like sensation, perception, etcetera.
[28:42] But we have to ask, what can we control?
[28:45] Well, I’m talking about controlling light exposure,
[28:47] controlling your breathing and body,
[28:49] non-sleep deep rest or what I hereafter
[28:52] we will refer to as NSDR non-sleep deep rest as a way
[28:58] to reset one’s ability to be awake
[29:01] after you emerge from NSDR.
[29:03] So to get some more wakefulness and ability
[29:05] to attend some emotional stability reset,
[29:08] as well as make it better and easier
[29:11] to fall asleep when you want to go to sleep at night.
[29:14] Now, non-sleep deep rest does have some research
[29:17] to support it.
[29:18] There’s a beautiful study done out of a university in Denmark.
[29:22] I will later provide a link to that study that
[29:25] showed that this meditation and yoga nidra type
[29:29] meditation allows dopamine and other neuromodulators
[29:33] in an area of the brain called the striatum that’s
[29:35] involved in motor planning and motor execution to reset itself.
[29:39] In other words, this NSDR can reset our ability
[29:43] to engage in the world in a way that’s very deliberate.
[29:46] OK, so what about things that we can and maybe
[29:49] should or should not take in order
[29:51] to control and access better sleep and better wakefulness?
[29:55] There are a couple of things that
[29:56] are directly in line with the biology
[29:58] related to falling and staying asleep and directly
[30:00] in line with the biology of wakefulness.
[30:03] There’s a whole category of things like stimulants, cocaine,
[30:07] amphetamine and prescription stimulants
[30:10] that are the prescription ones were
[30:12] designed for the treatment of narcolepsy.
[30:13] So things like modafinil or armodafinil
[30:17] that are designed to create wakefulness,
[30:18] they are all essentially chemical variants
[30:23] of things that increase epinephrine and dopamine.
[30:26] Now, of course, I’m of the standpoint
[30:28] that things like cocaine and amphetamine
[30:30] are just across the board bad.
[30:31] They have so many addictive and terrible effects.
[30:34] In the proper setting prescribed by the proper professional,
[30:38] things like modafinil for narcolepsy might be appropriate.
[30:42] I know that a lot of people out there take Adderall,
[30:46] even though they haven’t been prescribed Adderall in order
[30:49] to increase wakefulness.
[30:50] That is essentially, well, it’s illegal for one,
[30:54] but it’s also abusing the system in the sense
[30:57] that you’re pushing back on the adenosine system,
[30:59] slightly differently than you do caffeine.
[31:01] It will make you feel more alert.
[31:02] There tends to be a heavy rebound
[31:04] and they do have an addictive potential.
[31:05] There are also some other effects
[31:07] of those that can be quite bad.
[31:08] But there are some supplements and some things
[31:10] that are safer, certainly safer, and that in cases where you’re
[31:16] doing all the right behaviors, you’re exercising and eating
[31:19] correctly and you’re still having trouble
[31:21] with sleep, that can be beneficial for falling
[31:24] and staying asleep.
[31:25] Now, I want to be very clear.
[31:26] I am not pushing supplements.
[31:28] I’m just pointing you toward some things
[31:30] that have been shown in peer reviewed studies
[31:32] to have some benefit.
[31:34] The first one is magnesium.
[31:37] There are many forms of magnesium,
[31:38] but certain forms of magnesium can have positive effects
[31:41] on sleepiness and the ability to stay asleep,
[31:44] mainly by way of increasing neurotransmitters, like GABA.
[31:48] There are a lot of forms of magnesium out there,
[31:50] but one in particular is magnesium threonate.
[31:53] T-H-R-E-O-N-A-T-E, which you have to check to see if this is
[31:59] right for you.
[31:59] Check with your doctor.
[32:00] The other thing is theanine.
[32:02] T-H-E-A— T-H-E-A-N-I-N-E. Theanine.
[32:09] 100 to 200 milligrams of theanine for me
[32:12] also helps me turn off my mind and fall asleep.
[32:15] Interestingly, theanine is now being introduced
[32:17] to a lot of energy drinks in order
[32:20] to take away the jitters that are associated
[32:22] with drinking too much caffeine or with some other things that
[32:24] are in the energy drinks.
[32:26] So just a consideration.
[32:28] Again, I’m not here to tell you what
[32:29] to do or not do, but just want to arm you with information.
[32:33] The thing about theanine and magnesium is taken together,
[32:38] they do for some people, they can make them so sleepy
[32:41] and sleep so deeply that they actually have trouble waking up
[32:43] in the morning.
[32:44] So you have to play with these things and titrate them
[32:46] if you decide to use them again, if you decide to go this route,
[32:49] I would not start by taking supplements.
[32:51] I would start by getting your light viewing behavior correct.
[32:54] And then think about your nutrition
[32:56] and then think about your activity
[32:57] and then think about whether or not you want to supplement.
[33:00] We already talked about melatonin earlier.
[33:02] There’s another supplement that can be quite useful,
[33:04] which is apigenin.
[33:05] A-P-I-G-E-N-I-N, which is the derivative of chamomile.
[33:09] 50 milligrams of apigenin also can augment or support
[33:14] this kind of creation of a sleepiness to help fall asleep
[33:18] and stay asleep.
[33:20] As an important point, apigenin is a fairly potent estrogen
[33:24] inhibitor.
[33:25] So women who want to keep their estrogen levels high
[33:28] or at whatever levels they happen to be at
[33:31] should probably avoid apigenin altogether.
[33:33] And men take that into consideration as well.
[33:37] Men need estrogen also.
[33:38] You don’t want to completely eliminate your estrogen.
[33:40] That can create all sorts of bad effects
[33:42] on libido and cognition, etcetera.
[33:45] So apigenin in some people is going
[33:47] to be a pretty strong estrogen inhibitor.
[33:49] So keep that in mind.
[33:50] So thank you so much for your time and attention.
[33:52] And above all, thank you for your interest in science.
[33:54] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[33:57]