Skip to content
Modern WisdomModern Wisdom

How To Fix Your Sleep & Supercharge Your Life - Dr Matthew Walker

Dr. Matthew Walker is a neuroscientist, professor at UC Berkley, and author. Many of the mental and physical challenges you might be facing could have a surprisingly simple solution: more sleep. But why is sleep so essential? What happens when we sleep, and how can we optimize our sleep to maximize its benefits? Expect to learn what defines good sleep, how stress impacts your sleep, the keys to getting and maintaining a regular sleep pattern, the best sleeping positions, how to stop snoring, why sleeping with your partner is making your sleep worse, if alcohol, THC and other supplements actually give you a better nights rest, the evolutionary reasons why we dream, the latest science and tech for hacking your sleep and much more...  - 0:00 Conceptualising Good Sleep 02:08 Becoming an Efficient Sleeper 08:00 How High Stress Impacts Sleep 16:10 Improving Sleep Quality 21:18 How Regular Should Sleep Patterns Be? 32:00 The Danger of Sleep Procrastination 36:35 How Bad is Blue Light Before Sleep? 44:05 The Timing of Your Sleep 55:29 How Sleep Changes as You Age 1:02:08 Do Sleep Positions Matter? 1:11:44 Treating Snoring & Mild Sleep Apnea 1:16:45 Tips for Couples Sleeping Together 1:32:08 How Caffeine & Alcohol Impacts Sleep 1:48:59 Can THC & CBD Help With Sleep? 1:54:06 Using Melatonin & Other Supplements 2:03:18 New Sleep-Aiding Technologies 2:22:30 What Causes Chronic Fatigue? 2:24:08 Why We Dream 2:41:29 Where to Find Matthew - Get the world's comfiest sleep mask at https://mantasleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the best bloodwork analysis in America and bypass Function’s 400,000-person waitlist at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Chris WilliamsonhostDr. Matthew Walkerguest
Dec 30, 20242h 42mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:08

    Conceptualising Good Sleep

    1. CW

      You might be the British man with the best hair that I know-

    2. MW

      (laughs)

    3. CW

      ... at the moment.

    4. MW

      I think it is the greatest cry of a mid-life crisis that you are ever going to see. It's a total train wreck. I'm suggesting that no one tell me the pandemic was over, and that you can get your hair cut.

    5. CW

      Right.

    6. MW

      This is the consequence of it. So, um, for anyone who is watching, any therapy pill, uh, bills that you have to, uh, have after seeing me and being fronted by me-

    7. CW

      (laughs)

    8. MW

      ... send them to me. I will pay for them. Oh my goodness.

    9. CW

      Fantastic. Well, uh-

    10. MW

      What a good opening to it. (laughs)

    11. CW

      Look, it is, it is, it is what it is. Um, talking about sleep today. We've had a lot of conversations about it on the show previously, but I really wanna dig into some sort of more rare insights that people probably know that they need to know, but don't yet know. So just to get started, w- how do you come to think about what good sleep is? How do we conceptualize good sleep?

    12. MW

      Yeah, it's, it's an interesting question because I think everyone most mornings, let's say you've got a significant other, you come down the stairs and you say, you know, "How'd you sleep?" And they'll say, "I slept well," or, "I didn't sleep well." So everyone themselves has a subjective estimate of what this thing called good versus bad sleep is. Science is a little different though, and medicine teaches us that there are essentially what I would describe as the four macros of good sleep, and so three macros of food, fat, carbohydrate, and protein, four of sleep, and you can remember it by the acronym QQRT, quantity, quality, regularity, timing. And there's all sorts of stuff on the internet about, you know, take this supplement, do this particular thing and, and it's the Shangri-La of all good sleep, and you'll have this utopian blissful night. Honestly, if you just focus on these four main principles, you're 80% of the way there. So quantity is what we used to espouse in sleep as the measure of good sleep, which is somewhere between seven to nine hours for the average adult, and there is variability. Um, the next one is quality, and I think this is probably-

    13. CW

      Actually, I need to jump in on the quantity before you even move on.

    14. MW

      Yeah.

  2. 2:08 – 8:00

    Becoming an Efficient Sleeper

    1. MW

    2. CW

      Quantity of sleep, time in bed, time asleep?

    3. MW

      Mm. Astute question. Most of us conflate the former for the latter, and it's potentially dangerous. So if you are a good sleeper, you will have what we call a sleep efficiency of at least 85%, which means, uh, so sleep efficiency of the time that you're in bed, what percent of that time are you asleep? And really good sleepers will have, let's say, 80 to 90% sleep efficiency. So even if you're in bed for seven hours, you're not getting seven hours of sleep.

    4. CW

      You're looking at closer to six.

    5. MW

      Correct. So to get at least the minimum, according to the CDC, of seven hours, you actually have to be on average in bed maybe about eight, eight hours and 15 minutes. So it's a really astute point that we sort of misconstrue the question of total sleep duration as total time in bed, and you have to subtract one from the other. And that's why I think there is some legitimacy in looking at, say, sleep tracking data, because at least that will tell you total sleep time-

    6. CW

      I mean, that was the-

    7. MW

      ... absent of, you know...

    8. CW

      Exactly. That was the biggest realization. I've, I, uh, looked at my end of year review for Whoop and, um, I've worn this thing for 1,600 nights, since way before they were a partner on the show, and, uh, the biggest realization... I've said I think Whoop's great and you can sign up for it if you want, but I can tell you what the realization is, the main realization that you're all gonna come to, which is-

    9. MW

      Mm-hmm.

    10. CW

      ... eight hours in bed does not mean eight hours asleep. That's the biggest realization. Everybody comes away from they go, "Well, I was sure I was in bed for eight. I thought I got eight hours." And he goes, "Well, it told me that I was actually only in bed for seven and a half, and, uh, kind of had a bit of a bad night, so I had like six 15-"

    11. MW

      Yeah.

    12. CW

      "... of sleep last night."

    13. MW

      Yeah.

    14. CW

      "I thought I was in bed for eight." You go, "That's a red pill that everybody needs to take."

    15. MW

      Yeah. So I think it's, it's one of those areas that is not highlighted enough, and that's why you can actually then come on to the second of the cues, which is quality, and that in fact is efficiency, sleep efficiency. Well, there's two ways we measure quality. The first is sleep efficiency. So as I said, I want to see you at least asleep 85 to 90% of the time that you're in bed. If you are staying in bed let's say for nine hours and your sleep efficiency is 70, maybe 65, then my recommendation is perhaps surprising. Do not get into bed that early, and do not stay in bed that late. I want to cinch you down-

    16. CW

      Mm.

    17. MW

      ... to maybe even just six and a half hours of time in bed. And we've already said, well, hang on a sec, six and a half hours of time in bed is too little to get seven hours of sleep by the mathematics, even maybe six. But what I'm going to do by way of constraining your bedtime there is force efficiency out of your system. I go to the gym, I'm there for an hour. I start working out. I do the 11th rep, pull out my phone, I'm there looking at Twitter, you know, looking at Chris Williamson's content, and then, you know, I'm chatting to people. I'm not efficient, and maybe I am only working out for 30 minutes. Next day someone comes in, two bouncers on the door, "You've only got 25 minutes in the gym." First couple of days, I'm just as lazy and I get maybe 40% of my workout done, and I get ejected. By day three or four, my, the pressure that's built up for me to want to exercise and get it all in is so high that I go into the gym, my phone's down on the counter, I speak to no one, and I blast through my workout and I get it done. It's the same with sleep. I build up night after night this increasing hunger-

    18. CW

      Mm.

    19. MW

      ... where your system was lazy before, it had inefficiency, and after a while, it's essentially like hitting the reset button on your wifi router.

    20. CW

      Mm.

    21. MW

      I retrain your brain to realize-I don't have eight and a half, nine hours of time in bed anymore to be lazy. He's only giving me six and a half hours. I've got to get busy. And all of a sudden you've got 95% sleep efficiency cause as soon as the- you get into bed, you are asleep-

    22. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    23. MW

      ...and you sleep almost through the night. Then gradually I will step you back out. If you start to get lazy again, we stitch you back up again-

    24. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    25. MW

      ...and gradually that's how we retrain the system.

    26. CW

      What about the reverse when it comes to sleep quality that somebody is staying in bed for a good amount of time but that quality doesn't seem to want to change? Cinching it down doesn't really seem to make that much of a difference. They're just waking up too much throughout the evening, they're not hitting REM, they're staying quite light, they're getting up earlier than they want to, et cetera, et cetera.

    27. MW

      Yeah. At that point we've got to then start to ask if the, uh, if we've driven enough pressure in the system, what we call sleep pressure or sleep debt, and you are still waking up throughout the night, first, medical conditions. Let's do blood work, let's see if you're suffering from a sleep disorder like sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome. If we exclude all of those, that you're medically healthy, then we have to ask what are you doing in your life? Exogenous components principally, caffeine, alcohol, light, and the principal, principal one that we don't talk about is stress and anxiety. If there is a principal reason why most people in society absent sleep disorders are not sleeping well, it's because of this wired but tired phenomenon. We have people come to my sleep center all the time and they say, "I am just so tired. I'm so tired, but I'm just so wired that I can't fall asleep or stay asleep."

    28. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    29. MW

      So at that point when we've built up all of that pressure, forced you to be efficient and you haven't been efficient, we exclude you medically that you're healthy, no sleep disorders, then we've got to figure out what's going on in your life.

    30. CW

      Let's dig into that

  3. 8:00 – 16:10

    How High Stress Impacts Sleep

    1. CW

      wired but tired stress thing. What is going on in the body from a sleep perspective, in the body and the brain, uh, when you're in a high-stress lifestyle?

    2. MW

      Yeah. There's probably at least two things going on in the body and at least one thing going up in the brain. The first in the body is the balance between the two branches of your nervous system. One is the fight or flight branch called the sympathetic nervous system. It's very poorly named. It's anything but sympathetic. It's very agitating and activating. And then there's the parasympathetic. That's the kind of quiescent branch of your nervous system. If you're a good healthy sleeper and you don't have too much stress in your life, you ha- you naturally switch over to that restful quiescent branch of the nervous system, and that is the royal kind of pathway to good sleep. And the alacrity of sleep, the speed with which sleep arrives to you when you disengage from the fight or flight branch is really speedy and rather beautiful. If you are so wired though, however, the sympathetic, the fight or flight branch is activated, your heart rate is jacked, your blood pressure is too high, your temperature because of that activated state, your core body temperature is also too high. If you are too hot, your heart is racing and your blood pressure is high, it's very difficult for you to fall asleep. At a top of that, a second system in the body, which is what we call the HPA axis or the, um, it- it's essentially the stress axis which descends down from a brain stem area, the hypothalamus, down to the pituitary, releases adrenaline, all of a sudden you are cortisol flooded. And I think everyone has had that sense where whether it's let's say you've been on stage, you've been on tour, you come off stage and you are wired. Now, this is not you're anxious, but you're still wired. Cortisol is streaming, your heart rate is jacked, and you can say, "I was up at 7:00 this morning and it's now 2:00 cause all is said and done, I am still unable to fall asleep. I'm so tired, but I am way too cortisol, you know, sort of concentrated."

    3. CW

      Dominated, yeah.

    4. MW

      Yeah, exactly. So those two things in the body are what we will presumably I think most people will cleave to as the, the ingredients to the tired but wired phenomena. I also think upstairs, and they are interrelated, upstairs in the brain you start to get this Rolodex of anxiety. And I think we've all had that where we're stressed, you... In the modern world we're constantly on reception. Very rarely do we do reflection. And now the only time based on modernity and how it inflects us that we do reflection is when our head hits the pillow at night. That's the worst time to do reflection because when you start to have that kind of wheel of anxiety whirring, you begin to ruminate. When you ruminate, you catastrophize. Everything seems twice as bad in the dark of night versus the light of day. And at that point you're dead in the water for the next two hours, and that will then only feed in to jacking up the fight or flight branch cause you're-

    5. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    6. MW

      ...kind of going through what didn't I do today, what should I have done, what do I need to do tomorrow, I forgot to do that thing that's critical for next week. It's- it's a mental sort of, you know, train wreck in terms of your sleep that then just further perpetuates those two downstream physiological malsort of consequences to the body-

    7. CW

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    8. MW

      ...and then they ramp up and that leads to more.

    9. CW

      Yeah. Talk to me about interventions for those three.

    10. MW

      So the principle o- one is that you've got to process that, and this is the hard part of the equation. Mental health work is tough work.You can take medications, and that can be one path for people. You can take certain medications that can try to lower your heart rate, shift you back over into that quiescent state. But most people don't want to reach for a pill immediately necessarily. One thing you can do is just catharsis. Two or three hours before bed, not right before bed, pad of- paper and a pen, and just write down... I just want you to vomit out all of your stresses and anxieties. And it turns out that simply doing that will decrease the time it takes you to fall asleep by 50%.

    11. CW

      No way.

    12. MW

      Zero. Yeah. It's a great study. Michael Scullin, fantastic work. So the first thing is just get it all out of you, so it's not inside of you.

    13. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    14. MW

      That said, you can still be burdened with this egregious kind of stress and anxiety nevertheless. So what do you do about that? At that moment in time, whether it's you falling asleep or you've woken up at 3:00 AM and it's happening and you need to get back to sleep, at that point let's get your mind off itself. That is the goal. How do you do that? Maybe at least four things. First, meditation. The data is really strong. Now, I was researching this for, um, a book, and I just thought, "Look, you know, I'm a hard-nosed scientist. I'm here at UC Berkeley, you know, San Francisco f- Uh, it's all a bit woo-woo, this meditation thing, um, sort of holding hands and people strumming guitars at the end of the day. What is going on? I don't believe this." Studies were so powerful though. So I thought, "Well, I best bloody try some of this myself." And that was six years ago, and I now meditate for 10 minutes every night before bed.

    15. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    16. MW

      Um, so the first is meditation, but people just may not feel particularly compelled towards meditation. No problem. Next one is breath work, and you can do... You can just Google different types of breath, you know, box breathing sort of, you know, three-seven-four, there's all sorts of different patterns. But that breathing can also just try to bring the nervous system back down into that zone of sleep permission versus sleep prevention when it's too high. If that isn't your thing, you can do a body scan. So just close your eyes, start at the top of your head, and just start to relax back. Feel your neck, feel how tense it is. Start to relax it. Maybe even your forehead is that tense, and just move through the rest of the body. Go all the way down through your arms, through your chest, your back, and just... You're not making any judgments, you're just being aware of your body. That's fantastic too. The final thing, if none of those appeal, mental walk in hyper detail. So think about, let's say, a walk that you do with your dog. And what I want you to do is think about this at the level of, "Okay, I open the drawer, which leash am I gonna take, the blue or the red? I'll take the blue one. Clip the dog in with my right hand, I'm closing the drawer with my left, open the front door with the left, I go down the stairs, I look across, there's that weird Berkeley house. It's kind of just a little bit hippie, but no problem. And then the cars always come too quickly around that." Th- That's the level of hyper detail. And what's interesting, if you look across all four of the things I've just described, the commonality is that they all get your mind off itself.

    17. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    18. MW

      Meditation, you're starting to focus on something other than your mind. If you're doing box breathing, you're all of a sudden body centric, not mind centric. If you're starting to do some type of body scan, again, it's hard for you to think about your worries and your stresses if you're doing it. Mental walk, same thing. Because sleep at that time of night is a little bit like trying to remember someone's name. The harder you try, the further you push it away.

    19. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    20. MW

      Sleep... Sleep is something that happens to us, it's not something that we make happen. And when you get that mind distracted away from itself, the next thing you typically remember is the alarm going off in the morning. Why? Because you got your mind off itself.

  4. 16:10 – 21:18

    Improving Sleep Quality

    1. MW

    2. CW

      Okay. So first one, quantity. Second one, quality, that being a component of that. Is there anything else to say on quality before we move on?

    3. MW

      Yeah, probably the other m- way that we measure, and most people can't do this, but, um, is in the sleep laboratory we place electrodes on your head, you look like a spaghetti monster. And the other way we measure quality is the depth of your deep non-REM sleep. So we have two main types of sleep, REM and non-REM. Non-REM, for most sleep trackers, you divide it into light non-REM and deep non-REM. Deep non-REM is where you get these incredible deep, powerful, slow brainwaves. They're just epic. Um, and the depth, the size of those brainwaves and how dense they are, the number of them that you're having is another great measure of the quality, the electrophysiological quality of your sleep versus the, are you waking up lots throughout the night and therefore you're spending a lot of time awake? That sleep efficiency, that's another measure of quality. So they're sort of orthogonal, but both bleed into this kind of second silo of sleep quality. So QQ. Next one is regularity. Going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time. And you think this sounds fairly rudimentary and basic. Part of the reason is because you have a 24-hour master clock in your brain, and that clock thrives under conditions of regularity. And when you feed it signals of regularity, like going to bed and waking up at the same time, it improves both the quantity and the quality of your sleep. That's what I used to preach as why it was important until... There was a great study published probably two and a half years ago, and it was, I think over 300,000 indi- individuals that they tracked with sleep, um, assessments over a good period of time. And then they looked at them across a much longer lifespan period of time, and they looked at mortality risk, and they also looked at different forms of mortality risk, cancer mortality risk, cardiovascular disease mortality risk.And they measured sleep quantity. Sure enough, just like we've seen in many other studies, using that sweet spot of seven to nine hours, the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicted all-cause mortality. That's the quantity measure.

    4. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    5. MW

      They looked at regularity. Regularity demonstrated the same thing. Those who were in the lowest quartile, th- those who were least regular, highly erratic-

    6. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    7. MW

      ... they had far higher rates of mortality relative to the people who were in the top quartile who were incredibly regular.

    8. CW

      Wh- how did that compare to the quantity in terms of predictive power?

    9. MW

      (laughs) Genius. And that was the brilliance of the study that really made me double down on regularity, because then what they did, they said, "Well, if we've got these two measures, quantity and regularity, let's not look at them individually. Let's put them in the same statistical model and do a Coke-Pepsi challenge between the two." And all of us in the sleep field, you know, you're betting that quantity is going to be the more powerful statistical, um, variable. Wasn't. Regularity beat out-

    10. CW

      No it wouldn't.

    11. MW

      ... quantity in predicting all-cause mortality, cancer mortality, cardiovascular mortality. Now, it's not to say that you can get away with short quantity of sleep-

    12. CW

      As long as it's at the same time. Yeah, yeah.

    13. MW

      ... even if you're highly regular, you know, getting four hours of sleep at the same time every night-

    14. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    15. MW

      ... you still have markedly elevated mortality risk. But nevertheless, I was pretty stunned by how powerful that was, and made me, even someone who was pretty regular before, get a bit more ev- evangelical about it-

    16. CW

      (laughs)

    17. MW

      ... you know?

    18. CW

      We'll get back to talking to Matthew in one minute, but first, I need to tell you about Manta Sleep. There are thousands of dollars of lights pointed at my face right now, but because of Manta Sleep mask, all I can see is complete blackness. Literally, I, it feels like I'm in pitch black at the moment. That's why I'm a massive fan of them. The problem with most sleep masks is that they're made with cheap materials, they let too much light in, they push up against your eyelids, and they're just uncomfortable, especially for side sleepers. Look at that. You can see here how amazing this, like, the inner part of the eye mask is, where it doesn't touch your eyelids at all. Manta's masks were made with all of this in mind to make the perfect mask for all types of sleepers, made of soft, breathable materials. They've got an adjustable strap that can fit even the weirdest shaped head. Dr. Mike Israetel, this could be for you. I use this mask every night when I'm at home. I use it when I'm on travel. There's one in every single travel bag I've got, even for midday naps. This thing is unbeatable, so comfortable, and they've got a 60-night sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep with it on for 59 nights, and if you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back. Plus, they offer free US shipping and they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 10% off the best sleep mask on the planet by going to the link in the description below or heading to MantaSleep.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's M-A-N-T-A Sleep.com/modernwisdom, and MODERNWISDOM

  5. 21:18 – 32:00

    How Regular Should Sleep Patterns Be?

    1. CW

      at checkout. How big of a wobble are we talking in terms of tolerance here? People can't just go to, go to sleep-

    2. MW

      (laughs)

    3. CW

      ... at the same time, the same minute, every single night. What's an acceptable tolerance window for swings, and is there a difference for going-to-sleep time versus waking-up time? How can people navigate this regularity landscape?

    4. MW

      Yeah, beautifully put. So it's a two by two, you know, is it, um, is it offset versus onset of sleep, getting into bed, getting out, out, which is the more powerful? Right now, we don't know which one you should keep as more regular. We haven't been able to dissect that yet. However, to your question, what's the amount of wiggle room, I'm describing here in terms of the four macros this ideal world of good sleep, and it turns out, drumroll, none of us live in the ideal world. (laughs) We all live in this thing called the real world, so just for goodness sakes, stop being so puritanical.

    5. CW

      (laughs)

    6. MW

      It turns out that you've got a wiggle room of about 15 to 20 minutes on either side of it.

    7. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    8. MW

      So there is some degree of play in the system.

    9. CW

      But not much.

    10. MW

      But not too much. But-

    11. CW

      And this is to be, uh, a, this is to not have sleep regularity have a negative impact on your mortality outcomes. Is that the measure that we're looking at?

    12. MW

      Correct, yeah.

    13. CW

      Right. Understood.

    14. MW

      Or just your mortality in terms of cancer, or your mortality in terms of cardiovascular disease, or all of the mortality buckets thrown together into a big old mix.

    15. CW

      Presumably including car accidents and all manner of other things that can occur.

    16. MW

      Correct, by way of microsleeps and all of that.

    17. CW

      Yeah.

    18. MW

      You know, that's the way that a lack of sleep will pop you out the gene pool, you know, very quickly rather than chronically through disease and sickness.

    19. CW

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay, so talk to me, you know, people might not be able to work out what the different quartiles would be if 15 to 20 minutes of wiggle room for both going to sleep and waking up, I would actually guess that most people, more people in terms of regularity, will have their wake time versus their sleep time in that most people have a thing that they need to do-

    20. MW

      Correct.

    21. CW

      ... uh, the alarm goes off, and whether you like it or not, you are up for many people.

    22. MW

      Yeah.

    23. CW

      The same isn't true when you go to sleep. So I mean, imagine that there's more wobble on the bottom end-

    24. MW

      Yeah.

    25. CW

      ... and less wobble on the top end. Uh, but talk to me about what's the upper quartile and what, what are we looking at here? How, how, uh, deep does the trough go of, of swings?

    26. MW

      Yeah. The highly irregular people were somewhere between two to two and a half hours variable. So, in other words, they may have an offset of going to bed or waking up or just some wiggle room of an hour, you know, one side of their mean-

    27. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    28. MW

      ... or, uh, and then an hour the other side of the mean.

    29. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    30. MW

      So again, it, it doesn't sound like too much.

  6. 32:00 – 36:35

    The Danger of Sleep Procrastination

    1. CW

      What else is there to say on regularity? So we mentioned gold standard, 15 to 20 minutes of wobble for sleep time, 15 to 20 minutes of wobble for wake time.

    2. MW

      Yep.

    3. CW

      Black standard at the bottom end, freaking bottom quartile, two hours of wobble, so from when you typically, on average, would go to sleep an hour earlier or an hour later and the same at, at your wake time. Is there anything else to say when it comes to regularity?

    4. MW

      I think there is. I think it's probably you, you came onto it beautifully with the Netflix, you know, description, which is where most of us get hammered with our regularity is the front end of sleep going to bed. And the Netflix phenomenon is really what we call sleep procrastination, which is you are plenty tired enough to sleep, but there are things that are getting in the way, be it online shopping, checking social media. And what to do about that, I would just at least say set a to-bed alarm, not just a wake-up alarm, but a to-bed alarm. It goes off one hour before bed, maybe even let's just say 30 minutes before bed, and live in the real world.

    5. CW

      Hmm.

    6. MW

      At that moment, at least dim down half of the lights in your house and see if you can do at least a digital detox. Fine, keep watching your Netflix on your TV, but for the most part, see if you can put your phone away. My goodness, that's the other thing that will activate you. We used to think it was the blue light from tablets and screens, and there was a great city from Harvard that indicated certainly one hour of, you know, blue light exposure before bed blunts something called melatonin, which is this bioactive nighttime hormone which signals sleepiness. Uh, it certainly did that, and it disrupted sleep, and we were all on the good bus of blue light is, you know, the nefarious agent that will, you know, fleece you of your sleep. Then came along some great work by a guy called Michael Gradazar, and he actually argued now, I think, very powerfully, it's not the blue light. It's that these devices are attention capture devices, and they are designed to ruthlessly fleece you of your attention economy.

    7. CW

      Mm.

    8. MW

      And my goodness are they good at doing it, 'cause they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing that technology. And as a consequence, you become so cerebrally activated that it masks your state of sleepiness. So you could be saying, okay, if there was an e- an electromagnetic blast that came through Austin at 11:00 PM at night, you would normally say, "Look, I'm not sleepy until midnight-

    9. CW

      Hmm.

    10. MW

      ... and my, and, and I just don't feel sleepy right now," because I'm on my phone and you're getting activated. All of a sudden that goes out. Within 10 or 15 minutes, you actually get hit by this wall of sleepiness, and you think, "Jesus, I actually, I'm pretty sleepy."

    11. CW

      Hmm.

    12. MW

      Because it hits the mute button on the signal, the physiological signal of sleepiness, because it overdrives it with activation.

    13. CW

      Well, I mean, the converse, which is pretty easy, and I, I, I, I think that you're so right as well, that, um, there is something triggering about activating, about that kind of use. You're, you're involved, it's engaging, you're, you're sort of thinking about stuff. It's kind of passive but boring at the same time, but also engaging. Very interesting. Uh, but I used to use it if I was, uh, stuck in traffic or whatever, and I was tired after driving back. I would make sure I had a really compelling YouTube video on, so I would use that effect on the opposite side, and I'd stay awake.

    14. MW

      Yeah, you would reverse engineer it-

    15. CW

      Yes.

    16. MW

      ... to keep you awake, yeah.

    17. CW

      Exactly. Correct. Quick note, talking with Matthew really drives home how much our overall health depends on the basics, like getting a good night's rest, which is why I've been prioritizing tracking my health more closely and Function has made it unbelievably easy to get a clear picture of what's happening inside of my body. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that then take that data and put it in a simple dashboard and give you insights and actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your hormones to your nutrient levels, two key areas that affect your sleep. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from your annual physical. Best of all, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Walker's colleague, is their scientific advisor, so you can trust that the data and insights you receive are scientifically sound and practical. Getting your blood work done and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's only $500. Right now, you can get the exact same blood panels I get and bypass their wait list by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/... Modern Wisdom.

  7. 36:35 – 44:05

    How Bad is Blue Light Before Sleep?

    1. CW

      I'm interested in, I saw a study a little while ago, I don't know whether it ever got replicated, looking at e-readers and looking at the effect of e-readers. Most of them now, you know, the- the best Kindles have got a warmth level as well as a brightness level.

    2. MW

      Yeah.

    3. CW

      Have you looked at, a lot of people want to read, but if you're reading and you're reading a paper book, that means you gotta have a light on. Light's quite bright.

    4. MW

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      So you can go to a Kindle and you can pull that down, but that's a screen. Have you looked at anything to do with light exposure from e-readers impacting sleep quality?

    6. MW

      It's really interesting, and that's actually a great way to continue to engage with, you know, digital media in terms of reading, if that's all you're doing. So the page is black, the text is a cream or a white, therefore the amount of lux that's coming from the screen is already lower versus, because obviously the background is the far more dominant constituent of that page. So black paper, white text, that's perfectly fine. You've got to be a bit careful in terms of what you're reading, if it's the content, you know, if it's-

    7. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    8. MW

      ... all sorts of salacious stuff, then, you know-

    9. CW

      (laughs)

    10. MW

      ... maybe the heart rate is going in the wrong direction. But for the most part, that's completely fine. Um, but I would say even, if you, two things about your phone. If you have to take the phone into your room, because again, I don't want to be puritanical, that genie of the phone being in the room is out the bottle and it's not going back in.

    11. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    12. MW

      No matter what I say. Two rules. If you can, you can find some software that can try to turn the screen monochromatic, so everything goes black and white.

    13. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    14. MW

      And it's pretty surprising at how reduced in terms of the activation-

    15. CW

      Where's my phone? Oh, my phone's next door. Let me show you this. I'm gonna, hang on. Wait there, people.

    16. MW

      I promise people who are listening, we did not plan this. This is completely...

    17. CW

      So you'll know that there's a accessibility function that allows you to turn things grayscale.

    18. MW

      Yeah.

    19. CW

      Have you ever seen anyone do that?

    20. MW

      Oh, that's genius.

    21. CW

      And turn it, turn all of the blue off and turn it just red? So you can see here.

    22. MW

      How on Earth did you do that?

    23. CW

      Just internally on the, on iPhone. So you go into settings and accessibility, and then you, the same as you triple click to go grayscale-

    24. MW

      Yeah.

    25. CW

      ... the same function, but you just use the slider on the red side.

    26. MW

      Oh.

    27. CW

      And you kill all of the color-

    28. MW

      Genius.

    29. CW

      ... except for red and that means it's so much darker. So when you do this, especially if you need to use it a little bit later on in an evening, uh, you just, and I triple click and it goes from...

    30. MW

      You just stack the two things, which is first, it's almost monochromatic, but second, it's desaturated the blue light and it's the blue light which is the lower wavelengths that are most deleterious to harming your melatonin. It's that cool-

  8. 44:05 – 55:29

    The Timing of Your Sleep

    1. MW

      but-

    2. CW

      Yes, please. Timing.

    3. MW

      Timing. So timing, so QQRT, timing sounds like regularity and you think, "Hang on a second, that's, that's one and the same." It's not. Timing is your chronotype. Are you a morning type, evening type, or somewhere in between? If you're an evening type, the headline piece of news is, it's not your fault because it is largely genetically determined. There are at least 22 different genes that dictate your morningness or your eveningness.

    4. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    5. MW

      And therefore you don't really get to decide. It's gifted to you at birth, and it's very hard to change. They tried it with a great study out of Australia where they took night owls who were kind of 1:30 AM, 2:00 AM type people, and they gave them, I think it was a total of 11 different rules, and I'll forget some of them, but it was wake up two hours earlier. As soon as you wake up, have breakfast. Right after that, get at least 30 minutes of daylight. Don't nap. Cut caffeine off after midnight. Don't nap in the afternoon. In the afternoon if you go outside, you've got to wear shades, start to get dimness already. Eat two hours earlier, and make sure that you're eating at least three hours before bed-

    6. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    7. MW

      ...and then make sure you get into bed at least an hour and a half before you normally would do. And they were able to bring those night owls back by about 60 minutes.

    8. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    9. MW

      But if you're going to bed at 1:30 AM normally and you drag back to... You're still a 12:30 AM type person.

    10. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    11. MW

      And that was extre- Imagine trying to do that every day for the rest of your life with those nine to 12 different rules, the adherence to that protocol is probably going to be very difficult and unsustainable throughout life. So even with all of that extreme, it's hard to do. Why is your chronotype knowledge important? By the way, you can just go onto Google and just type MEQ test, which stands for morningness/eveningness questionnaire test. Takes about three minutes, and it gets you about 80 to 90% accurate close to your actual genetic chronotype, um, distinction. So it's a pretty good test for what you are. You probably already know what you are. You can probably answer it by a simple question. If we put Chris on a desert island, nothing to wake up for, no responsibilities, no clocks, no nothing, what time do you think your body would naturally like to go to bed and naturally like to wake up? And the reason, by the way, I say your body rather than what time would you, you're already too biased by society's predilection to morning types are the best types. You know, it's the early bird catches the worm type mentality. So you, w- I would, to which I would say, by the way, that the second mouse gets the cheese, but I'll, let's move on. The, I would still say, though, that it's so difficult to fight against that, and we see this also at the sleep center. People will come in and say, "I've got terrible sleep onset insomnia that I get into bed, for the first hour and a half, two hours, I'm awake. I just can't fall asleep. I've got insomnia." And then we do a chronotype test with them, and for some of them what we find is that they're a night owl and that they'd like to go to bed at midnight-

    12. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    13. MW

      ...but because of the way life is structured for them, they're getting into bed at 10:00 PM and they're awake for the first two hours. They don't have insomnia. They have a mismatch between when they're trying to sleep versus when their biology wants them to sleep. And when you sleep in synchrony with your chronotype, you get a beautiful distribution of quantity and quality. When you fight against your biology, you normally lose.

    14. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    15. MW

      And the way you know you've lost is typically disease, sickness, and bad sleep. So, so that's why I would always try to emphasize your chronotype as a critical last component.

    16. CW

      S- so I think I'm probably a pretty good example of somebody that was, uh, like a, how would you say, chronotype fluid. Um...

    17. MW

      (laughs)

    18. CW

      Being, being in my-

    19. MW

      Oh, you're a genius, Chris. I love it.

    20. CW

      Uh, being in my 20s, and I, I, like I say, I was adamant. I, I'm just, you know, I'm a, I'm, I'm a night owl. Um, I finished my every single assignment, uh, my two degrees at uni were all done at 3:00 in the morning. You know, that was sort of where I came alive. I used to have my most, my most sort of creative moments between about 10:00 PM and maybe 1:00 in the morning. I could really sort of drill down. Um, and then COVID comes along, and I was, I was already starting... I mean, this is after your episode on Rogan had come out, so I'd already realized I needed to start to prioritize sleep in a different kind of a way. And then COVID comes along and I was like, "Well, I'll just see what happens, I guess." And I started to get myself a morning routine that was unnecessarily e- elaborate.

    21. MW

      Mm-hmm.

    22. CW

      And then...I, over the last, what, four, four and a half years since that came along, my natural wake time now is 7:00 AM. If you don't put an alarm on, I will get up at 7:00 AM. I will go to bed, at the moment I'm going to bed at like 7:00 PM or 8:00 PM, which I need to have a chat with you about.

    23. MW

      Yeah.

    24. CW

      But, uh, I will get up at 7:00 AM, and I don't know, I, I don't know how much of it, uh, you know, the chronotype thing, the night owl, early bird or something in between, although useful and powerful, I worry will be used by a lot of people to justify their poor or obsessive sleep habits in whichever direction that they kind of want to rationalize that they should take it. Like I say, I-

    25. MW

      Which is so natural. I understand that, but.

    26. CW

      Absolutely. I mean, I was somebody that had Stockholm syndrome from his own industry. You know, I, I, like-

    27. MW

      (laughs) Yeah

    28. CW

      ... the, the, whatever, the prison guards had become my friends, uh, because I did what I needed to do in order to be able to survive in the world that I was living in. But liberated from that, free from that for a full y- four years, right, where I was no longer having to do this. And I was actually incentivized to maybe get up a little bit earlier 'cause I could train and then prep and do the episodes and so on and so forth. Oh, well, it seems like my body works in a different way. Uh, so yeah, very fluid in that regard.

    29. MW

      Yeah, and I think, you know, you, so we definitely need to have a discussion if you're going to bed that early, 'cause I'd, I'd love to see your sleep efficiency.

    30. CW

      Mm-hmm.

  9. 55:29 – 1:02:08

    How Sleep Changes as You Age

    1. CW

      me. So, I guess a question I've got, what happens to all of the cues, the R and the T, uh, as we age over time? Wha- what starts to get manipulated and changed in terms of all of those as we grow up, as we get older?

    2. MW

      Yeah. Bloody great question. Um, the first two cues get much harder. It's much harder to get the same amount of sleep that you did in your 30s, 20s, or 40s when you're 60, 70, or 80. And this is one of the myths in sleep. People used to think, "Well, older adults need less sleep." And if you look they'll, on average, get maybe six, six and a half hours of sleep. What we now understand is that older adults still need the same amount of sleep as they did when they were in their 40s. The difference is their brains simply can't generate the sleep that they need. And I've always been perplexed by that mentality of people just saying, "Well, older adults get less sleep, so older adults need less sleep." That's the equivalent of saying, "Well, older adults have weaker bones because older adults just don't need bones that are as strong in later life." No. We don't say that. We treat them with calcium and resistance training to try to maintain that bone density. Why don't we take the same mentality with sleep? So, firstly, quantity gets much harder. It's harder to generate the sleep. And we know why, because as we get older, just like our body deteriorates, our brain also deteriorates. The problem is that your brain does not deteriorate in a homogeneous manner. What I mean by that is some parts of your brain rapidly deteriorate or at least more rapidly than other parts of the brain. And when we've mapped that, what we call brain atrophy, and you can almost play a movie now where you look at it across decades and you can see these beautiful sort of morphological changes in the brain. The two, two areas that, or at least one of the main areas that generates your deep non-REM sleep, is right here in the frontal lobe, right in the middle. It's called the medial prefrontal cortex. That area is the epicenter for the generation of deep sleep, and that degrades most rapidly when we get older.

    3. CW

      Mm.

    4. MW

      So, unfortunately, the aging brain is a sleep-dependent aging brain. It's especially, um, sort of ravaged by the process of chronology relative to other parts of the brain. So, that's the first issue. The second is quality, and quality is here coming back to you are nice and continuously asleep for most of the night, versus you're awake, you're asleep, you're awake, you're asleep, or you're awake for long periods of time. That is much more like age-related sleep. If I were to show you sort of the, what we call the hypnogram of sleep, which is what you see on your sleep trackers, it looks time of night along the horizontal axis, you've got these different sleep stages, and you go on this beautiful rollercoaster ride, REM, non-REM. But then if you look at the aging brain, you've just got all of these kind of like a dolphin going up surfacing for wakefulness all the time. It's fragmented sleep, poor quality of sleep. Part of the reason is because the, the release of melatonin is not in the standard beautiful where melatonin peaks just before you go to sleep, stays high, and then drops down low. You just get this really flat profile of melatonin as you get older. Secondly, you've got the sleep generating, the deep sleep generating brain regions deteriorating. So, you can't stay in deep sleep. You surface in these lighter stages where you are more vulnerable to being woken up. And then the, the other sort of component of, of age-related sleep decline comes onto the aspect of your chronotype. You are, you are given your chronotype at birth, but it's highly age dependent in terms of where you are sleeping on the clock face. So, as let's say, a six-year-old, we all wanted to be awake with the adults at the weekend and try to stay awake and we would try and try, but, you know, I just remember at nine o'clock being kind of like lifted up to bed because I'd fallen asleep. He used to annoy the living daylights out of me. So there, even though I'm mostly a neutral, I'm kind of like an 11:00 to 7:30 kind of guy. There, I still had my neutral chronotype, but as a child, my neutral chronotype was sort of 9:00 to 6:00 AM, uh, in the morning. And then as I got older, I moved forward in time and I found my adult sweet spot. But then per your question, as you get older in late life, now you start to regress back and you become more childlike.

    5. CW

      Mm.

    6. MW

      You want to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier.

    7. CW

      Mm.

    8. MW

      It's the reason that if you go to Florida, you know, when you've got a lot of retirees, you've got the early bird special where people now are eating at 4:30. You know, they finish their, their meal, they're home by 8:00 and they're in bed by 9:00 because they've regressed. But even if you take, you know, a hundred 80 year olds in Florida, you'll still get a distribution of some people wanting to go to bed at, you know, 8:30, uh, PM others more close to 10:00 PM. There's still the variability of morning types and evening types. It's just that where that morningness and eveningness sits on the 24-hour clock face gets dragged around across the lifespan. I know that's a complicated way of... But does that make some sense?

    9. CW

      Absolutely.

    10. MW

      Okay.

    11. CW

      Yeah, yeah, yeah, it makes complete sense. You might have heard me say that I took my testosterone level from 495 to 1,006 last year, and one of the supplements I used throughout that was...... Tongkat Ali. I first heard Dr. Andrew Huberman talk about the really impressive effects that tons of research was showing, which sounds great until you realize that most supplements don't actually contain what they're advertising. Momentous makes the only NSF certified Tongkat Ali on the planet, which means it's tested so rigorously that even Olympic athletes can use it, and that is why I partnered with them, because they make the most carefully tested highest quality supplements on earth. So, if you're not performing in the gym or the bedroom the way that you would like, or if you just want to improve your testosterone naturally, Tongkat Ali is a fantastic research-backed place to start. Best of all, there is a 30-day money back guarantee, so you can buy completely risk-free. And if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get a 20% discount off all their products by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom, using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com/modernwisdom, and MODERNWISDOM

  10. 1:02:08 – 1:11:44

    Do Sleep Positions Matter?

    1. CW

      at checkout. One question I had, do sleeping positions matter? Why?

    2. MW

      Mm-hmm.

    3. CW

      Why, why do people have habits when it comes to their sleeping positions?

    4. MW

      It's really interesting that people say, "I'm a back sleeper, I'm a side sleeper." That's not really true. You will typically sleep in almost all of those positions throughout the night. It's just what is the dominant position. And when people say, "I am a X sleeper or Y sleeper," you're just talking about what you typically do more often relative to the other positions.

    5. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    6. MW

      More people are side sleepers than front sleepers or back sleepers. About 60% of people are most often side sleeping. Position doesn't m- matter with probably, huh, two exceptions, although one of them has an asterisk, which is I don't wanna scare monger. The first is definitive. If you are snoring, if you have sleep apnea or undi-... If you know anyone who is snoring and they have not been tested for sleep apnea, go and get them tested. Or if you are, go and get tested. It's real easy to figure out if you're a snorer or not. Download an app, I have no association with them. It's called Snore Lab, Snore L-A-B, Android, Apple. You open it up, you hit record, you place the phone down by your bedside. It listens to you snoring, and then at the end of the night, you can see the amount of snoring and it grades it from quiet, moderate, loud, and epic. (laughs)

    7. CW

      (laughs)

    8. MW

      And you see these Richter shocks throughout the night. The worse still, you can then go and tap at any moment in your night and you can listen to yourself gasping for breath-

    9. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    10. MW

      ... and snoring. Because snoring, what happens when you snore is that the airway starts to partially collapse. And when it starts to partially collapse like a straw that gets bent, sort of, you start to get these fluctuations, these eddies in the airway. And that's the sound of, (snorts) that's the partial collapsing of the airway. When the airway collapses completely, the straw goes flat effectively, that's when you stop breathing entirely. And you can be there for 15, 20 seconds an- and your blood oxygen saturation just starts to plummet. And at some point, your brainstem, which picks up the ratio of the gases in your bloodstream between carbon dioxide and oxygen, says, "Break glass in case of emergency."

    11. CW

      Wake him up.

    12. MW

      We, we've gotta wake him up. And that's the moment where you hear (gasps) and you gasp and you're back up again. As a consequence, you're never going into deep sleep. You stay in those shallows of sleep. Now, mild sleep apnea, if you have these, what we call apnea events, and apnea is a word, beautiful, um, pnea is breath, the, from a Latin dr- derivative. Anything in medicine that has the word A before it is usually the absence of it, you know, arrhythmia, um, the absence of a normal rhythmic heart. Apnea is the absence of breath. And mild sleep apnea is you having maybe five to 15 of the events per hour. That's how we grade it. For each hour of sleep, how many of these events are you having? Mild sleep apnea, let's just call it 10 events, and you're asleep for eight hours. Imagine if I were to come in and say, "Tonight, Chris, I'm gonna come into your room, and for the entire night, maybe 80 times throughout the night, I'm gonna come in and I'm going to throttle you around your throat to the point where your oxygen saturation drops below 80%." Do you think you're gonna feel good by tomorrow morning? The answer is no, but so many people are living with undiagnosed sleep apnea. We think at least 80% of people who have sleep apnea are undiagnosed right now.

    13. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    14. MW

      And that will put you in an early grave.

    15. CW

      Is snoring the same as sleep apnea?

    16. MW

      No, it's not. You can have snoring and it will not classify as sleep apnea. You still want to understand why you are snoring, but nevertheless, you can just get a very simple home test. In fact, you can look at your risk for sleep apnea already. Go online and type in the, uh, the search term stop-bang questionnaire, stop-bang questionnaire. And again, it takes probably two minutes to fill out, and it will give you a risk-hazard ratio of how likely is it that you have sleep apnea. And it correlates very well with an at-home sleep apnea test. So it's a good quick proxy. I love Snore Lab though. That's another great way to frighten yourself into understanding what's exactly happening.

    17. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    18. MW

      Um, so all of which to say, I think I, I'm forgetting how we got here, but nevertheless-

    19. CW

      Sleeping positions.

    20. MW

      ... sleeping position is one of those situations where when you are lying on your back, you are allowing your airway the direct access to this thing called gravity. And when gravity is present with back sleeping, it's far easier to pull that straw flat shut. So that's why we typically don't like people with sleep apnea sleeping on their back. The old school approach, gosh, when I was coming up to sort of start to treat was, or to at least get you away from a back sleeping position, was you would ask the gentleman, usually the more heavy set, you would ask them, find a T-shirt from your wife, usually smaller-And get that T-shirt that has a pocket on the breast. And then I want you to wear that tight T-shirt back to front, and then I want your wife to take a tennis ball before you sleep-

    21. CW

      And put it in the pocket.

    22. MW

      ...and put it in the pocket.

    23. CW

      Yeah.

    24. MW

      And every time you roll over, it's so uncomfortable that you train yourself out of back sleeping.

    25. CW

      Wow.

    26. MW

      And so that's the way, that's the old school.

    27. CW

      Is that, um ... So w- why do we have preferences for sleeping position? Is this chronotype? Is this just habitual? Can we train ourselves out to be in the-

    28. MW

      Usually based on your skeletal ergonomics-

    29. CW

      Wow.

    30. MW

      ...and how you want to sleep. It's also in part driven absent of your body based on your mattress.

  11. 1:11:44 – 1:16:45

    Treating Snoring & Mild Sleep Apnea

    1. MW

      worry about that.

    2. CW

      Is there anything else to say on snoring, people that snore, why we snore, and then sort of progressing through that to treat sleep apnea?

    3. MW

      I would simply say that coming back to being insufficiently slept and that mood dysregulation and you not knowing what you, the true self, actually was, is ever more true in untreated sleep apnea patients. And I remember we were doing a study with one group and we started to treat these individuals. Now, there are numerous new treatments out there. If you have mild sleep apnea, you may not need one of these masks, these nasal pillows, which are called CPAP machines, C-P-A-P, and it stands for continuous positive airway pressure. This little nasal pillow pushes, um, pressured air up your nose and it acts like a- an airway splint to keep the airway open-

    4. CW

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    5. MW

      ...so it doesn't collapse. Now, if you have severe sleep apnea, I know that these machines can be invasive, although people like ResMed are, have really great machines now, The old school kind of mask, fighter pilot, Tom Cruise, those were tough to live with. Now they're much better. Nevertheless, I would say even if you feel as though you're not, you're struggling to sleep because of this kind of pipe that's coming off you, that's still far better than you sleeping without it and having the horrific oxygen desaturation and minimal sleep quality that you get otherwise. So nevertheless, if you have mild sleep apnea, you now have these, uh, mandibular augmenting devices. So it looks like a sports gum guard top and bottom, but it's hinged. And what it tries to do is move the lower jaw forward by just a couple of millimeters. And what's fun is that you can do this test at home, lie on your back and just sort of lie there and s- m- start making the snoring noise. So, h- h- h- so I can make the snoring noise. And then just try to move your jaw forward.

    6. CW

      (laughs)

    7. MW

      It's actually much harder to snore.

    8. CW

      Wow.

    9. MW

      And it's a tiny change anatomically in the jaw-

    10. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    11. MW

      ... but it can make a vast difference. So now these new mandibular devices are out that there's all sorts of new ways. There are also, uh, some people obviously rightly don't wish for this, there are more invasive surgeries where you'll put a neurostimulator that stimulates the airway-

    12. CW

      Oh, hell.

    13. MW

      ... and forces it open-

    14. CW

      Wow.

    15. MW

      ... and that saves you from having the CPAP machine, and some people end up-

    16. CW

      Permanent CPAP machine?

    17. MW

      Yeah, it's a permanent CPAP machine. So there are lots of great ways to treat it.

    18. CW

      What about snoring? What about reducing snoring, something that's presumably more common than sleep apnea?

    19. MW

      Yeah. So there, I would probably go to a mandibular device. Speak to your dentist. If they don't know about it, go find a dentist who does. They can make up these devices, and most of them are covered by insurance. You can buy them on Amazon. Make sure that you just look at the star ratings and make sure it's rated by at least a couple of 500, 600 people, and then believe the rating.

    20. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    21. MW

      And y- you've got to get a bit used to it, and, you know, I've, I actually about three or four years ago, um, because I would track ruthlessly every night my SnoreLab, I could start to see a little bit of snoring coming on. Now, that's just my age. As we age, you know, just like the rest of your body, it becomes a bit saggy, my muscle tone isn't what it used to be. And so I started to see signs of very mild sleep apnea.

    22. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    23. MW

      Now, I wasn't in anywhere close to the region of needing to be treated, but because I know so much about sleep, I don't want to live a shorter life nor do I want to live a life with disease, so I just bought myself one of these devices. I ended up then, um, having a, a great dentist friend who specializes, and we actually got the, the proper device-

    24. CW

      Custom scan.

    25. MW

      So this custom device, and yeah. But you can buy them on Amazon. You put them in hot water.

    26. CW

      Like a gum guard.

    27. MW

      You bite down, gum guard, and they're actually not too bad as you, if you can tolerate them. For smaller people who don't have jaws like m- my jaw and certainly your jaw, you know, it's gonna be a bit, you know, tough for... You know, if my wife, very slim, refined woman, you know, she's probably not going to be able to tolerate it 'cause the jaw mass is just not sufficient. So you've got to be a... I'm not trying to say it's a one-size-fits-all for everyone-

    28. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    29. MW

      ... but for those who can, if you have some mild snoring, it will clean it right up. It's very impressive.

    30. CW

      In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the United States. They're the driving force behind Gymshark and SKIMS and Alo and Nutonic, and that is why I partnered with them. Look, you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do backend inventory management. Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Best of all, their award-winning support is there to help you every step of the way so you can upgrade your business and get the same checkout we use at Nutonic with Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com/modernwisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com/modernwisdom to upgrade your selling today. Let's talk about

  12. 1:16:45 – 1:32:08

    Tips for Couples Sleeping Together

    1. CW

      sleep and relationships. I think, uh, two people trying to sleep together, uh, w- wonderful pairing, they're so in love, everything's great, and yet the m- one of the best predictors for their lifespan, their healthspan, their mood, their emotional regulation, the way they feel the next day, the achievement of their goals, their memory, the fact that they're not gonna fall asleep at the wheel and die, uh, w- wonderful-

    2. MW

      That's my next book right there, (laughs) Cris Williamson. (laughs)

    3. CW

      ... wonderful partners in waking, terrible partners in sleeping.

    4. MW

      Mm-hmm.

    5. CW

      Um, talk to me about the relationship between sleep and relationships.

    6. MW

      Yeah, there's some really great research on this. Um, pioneer in this field is Wendy Troxel, d- uh, wrote a great book. Um, and what we find is that if you survey people and you ask, "Do you sleep in the same bed together?" one out of four people will say that they do not sleep in the same bed. And if you then survey them anonymously, bec- because there's such a stigma associated with not sleeping together, about one in three couples will say, "I wake up in a different location than this bed that I went to sleep in with my partner."

    7. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    8. MW

      So in other words, they got up during the night, and they just went, and they-

    9. CW

      I'm saying.

    10. MW

      ... slept on the couch, and yeah, exactly. So, so it's certainly, it's certainly a common practice, and it's increasingly so, this idea, I think, poorly named, which is this idea of a sleep divorce to prevent a real one.

    11. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    12. MW

      And I'm not suggesting again here that it is a one-size-fits-all. It's absolutely not. Some couples can sleep together, and they sleep really well, and they have a preference for that. What's interesting, though, is that if you measure them objectively, you always see that when couples sleep together versus when couples sleep separately, their sleep is always objectively, as we measure it with sleep trackers or, you know, polysomnography in the laboratory, it's always worse when they're sleeping together on average than when they're sleeping separately. However, if you ask them subjectively, "What do you think of your sleep?" They'll say, well, about half of them will say, "I actually feel my sleep is much better quality when I'm sleeping with my partner versus when I'm not." Some of that has to do with perhaps the si- societal bias that they think they have to cleave to. Others, it's about safety, that they just feel safer.

    13. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    14. MW

      And others, it's just more intimate. But what we have definitely found is that it's... if you start to under sleep a male, if you short sleep them, and if you look at the average data, they could be in bed, let's say, seven hours. With a partner, they could be down to around five and a half hours because of the sleep disruption.

    15. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    16. MW

      If you put a male, healthy male in their 20s, on five hours of sleep for five nights, they have a level of testosterone of someone who's 10 years older than them. So, and you see ef- equivalent impairments in female reproductive health, follicular stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, uh, progesterone.These are all critical sex hormones that promote superior libido drive, and it also promotes superior sensation and sexual pleasure during the act of intimacy. So firstly, when you're under-slept, and again, this is not a one-size-fits-all, but for those that it's not working for, stigma in society is that if you're not sleeping together, hmm, you're not sleeping together.

Episode duration: 2:42:57

Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript

Transcript of episode Hf_NTmu2uvg

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

Add to Chrome