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

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

(laughs)

... at the moment.

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.

Right.

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-

(laughs)

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

Fantastic. Well, uh-

What a good opening to it. (laughs)

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?

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-

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

Yeah.

Quantity of sleep, time in bed, time asleep?

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.