Guest Series | Dr. Matthew Walker: Protocols to Improve Your Sleep｜Huberman Lab

Welcome to the Hubertman Lab guest series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Hubertman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and

ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today marks the second episode in our six episode series all about sleep with our expert guest Dr. Matthew Walker.

During today's episode we discuss the dos and the do-nots of sleep.

Focusing for instance on how to use light and absence of light as well as temperature both of your sleep environment specifically the room you're in your body temperature and much more in order to regulate the timing and quality of your sleep.

And we discuss how things like alcohol, caffeine and cannabis impact sleep and the various stages of sleep.

And we discuss the various tools that exist now and that are rapidly becoming available to improve your sleep.

This episode is essential for anyone trying to optimize their sleep and when I say optimize your sleep, I mean trying to optimize the formula that was addressed in the first episode of the series which is the QQRT formula, the quality, quantity,

regularity and timing of your sleep.

Four variables that combine to determine whether or not your sleep is optimized for you and thereby providing the most restoration and improvement to your mental health, physical health and performance.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is Helix Sleep.

Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs.

It's abundantly clear that sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance.

When we're getting enough quality sleep, everything in life goes so much better and when we are not getting enough quality sleep, everything in life is that much more challenging.

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It's not too hard, not too soft and I sleep so much better on my Helix mattress than on any other type of mattress I've used before.

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Today's episode is also brought to us by Woop.

Woop is a fitness wearable device that tracks your daily activity and sleep, but also goes beyond that by providing real-time feedback on how to adjust your training and sleep schedule to perform better.

I've been working with Woop on their scientific advisory council to try and help advance Woop's mission of unlocking human performance.

As a Woop user, I've experienced the health benefits of their technology firsthand for sleep tracking, for monitoring other features of my physiology,

and for giving me a lot of feedback about metrics within my brain and body that tell me how hard I should train or not train,

and basically point to the things that I'm doing correctly and incorrectly in my daily life that I can adjust using protocols, some of which are actually within the Woop app.

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Again, that's join.woop.com slash huberman.

Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that has hundreds of different meditations, as well as scripts for Yoganidra and non-sleep deep rest or NSDR protocols.

By now there's an abundance of data showing that even short daily meditations can greatly improve our mood, reduce anxiety, improve our ability to focus, and can improve our memory.

And while there are many different forms of meditation, most people find it difficult to find and stick to a meditation practice in a way that is most beneficial for them.

The Waking Up app makes it extremely easy to learn how to meditate and to carry out your daily meditation practice in a way that's going to be most effective and efficient for you.

It includes a variety of different types of meditations of different duration, as well as things like Yoganidra, which place the brain and body into a sort of pseudo sleep that allows you to emerge,

feeling incredibly mentally refreshed. In fact, the science around Yoganidra is really impressive showing that after a Yoganidra session, levels of dopamine in certain areas of the brain are enhanced by up to 60% which places the brain and body into a state of enhanced readiness for mental work and for physical work.

Another thing I really like about the Waking Up app is that it provides a 30-day introduction course.

So for those of you that have not meditated before or getting back to a meditation practice, that's fantastic. Or if you're somebody who's already a skilled and regular meditator, Waking Up has more advanced meditations in Yoganidra sessions for you as well.

If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, you can go to WakingUp.com slash Huberman and access a free 30-day trial. Again, that's WakingUp.com slash Huberman.

And now for my conversation with Dr. Matthew Walker, Professor Matt Walker. Welcome back.

We're also happy to have you here. And in episode one, you beautifully described the biology of sleep. Why sleep is important? What happens when we don't get enough sleep? And you incentivized getting adequate amounts of great sleep.

And you defined what great sleep is. And you provided some excellent practical protocols and tools for getting great sleep. However, today you're going to tell us, I believe, about the protocols for sleep.

The protocols for really optimizing one sleep, both conventional tools and protocols and some, let's say, unconventional, not heretical, but unconventional tools for optimizing one sleep.

So let's start with the basics. What are the basics of what I think of her? You referred to previously as sleep hygiene.

I think we, many of us can resonate with the idea of dental hygiene, but turns out there's something called sleep hygiene. And there are probably, I would say five edicts of sleep hygiene.

They offer them as tools and not necessarily rules, because I don't think people respond to rules. People respond to reasons and not rules. So if it's okay, I'll probably just unpack each one of them rather than just sort of bark them at you and hope people assume that it's the right answer.

So people understand why it's important. So as I said, there are probably five things that you can start doing tonight to try to improve your sleep.

The first we've spoken a little bit about in that first episode. It's part of the four macros of good sleep. First piece of advice, regularity.

Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend. Regularity is king.

And the reason is because when you feed your brain, the signals of timed regularity for your sleep, it will anchor your sleep and improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep.

Because part of that signal of regularity going into your brain in terms of that repeated behavior night after night sleep, in other words, helps train that central 24 hours circadian clock that we also spoke about in the first episode.

So that's the first piece of advice. Try to keep it as regular as you possibly can.

The second piece of advice is darkness. In my view, we are a dark deprived society in this modern era. And we need darkness at night as well you've spoken about to release a hormone called melatonin.

And melatonin will help time the regular onset of your sleep. So that sounds great, but what boots on the ground mat, what does that mean?

I would suggest the following in the last hour before bed, try to dim down 50% if not more of your lights in your home.

You will be quite surprised at how sleepy and so horrific that will make you feel I will do this in a regimented way I have a little reminder that pops up and tells me now is the time to dim the lights based on your bedtime.

I'll go around and I'll shut lights down in my bedroom. I will actually have a smart light bulb and it is way down to probably as little as maybe five looks when and looks is just a metric of the light.

It's way down there and it's also very deep orange sort of red and we can come on to why that's the case.

So that's the first thing even before you're thinking about sleep start to decrease the light. For example, if you were there at let's say for a standard sleep schedule at 10 p.m.

And normally you are getting into bed at 10 30 p.m. But you feel pretty wide awake. If there was an electrical blackout and you lost your phone magnetic to phone goes down lights go down total blackout.

My suspicion is that fairly soon you'd say gosh actually feel quite sleepy. Whereas if the lights were blazing you've got your phone televisions on lots of stimulation.

You're probably going to think 10 30 now I could I could probably push through for at least another hour. So try to dissipate that light.

And then if you need to wear an I mask blackout curtains always good as well. But we need that darkness at night because when you give the brain the signal of darkness it releases effectively a break pedal that break pedal has normally been applied by way of light on the release of that spigot of melatonin.

And when you take the break pedal off it starts starts pumping out into the brain. You can also then of course probably reverse engineer this trick in the morning.

And this is another component of why you've been I think so such a wonderful advocate for light in the morning it does many things but one of the things that it does is reapply that break on melatonin.

And therefore you lose the signal to your brain of darkness that's what melatonin in some ways is doing we often call it the hormone of darkness or the vampire hormone not necessarily because it makes you look longingly at people's necklines and want to to bite in which is great if you're into that but it's really simply about it's releasing melatonin which tells the brain.

My goodness it's nighttime but if you've got bright light on you come from your office you're driving home so you've got artificial light during the day which is probably not strong enough to stimulate you and bring you awake you come home and you've got again bright light but it's still strong enough now to prevent the release of melatonin you start to shift in your timing and you may have problems with your sleep so that's the second piece of advice I would love to ask you about that.

Morning light to and the alertness benefits I'm as a sleep researcher more focused on the evening component of light and decreasing it but you've done a great job I don't know if there's anything I get there a couple of quick points that are based on some what I consider really nice studies.

There's beautiful work in human showing that bright light exposure in the morning especially from sunlight but if one doesn't have access to sunlight for whatever reason there are commercially available so called sad lamps seasonal effective disorder lamps they range anywhere from 5000 to 10,000 locks very bright but certainly morning sunlight viewing and lamps of the sort I just described have been shown to increase the amplitude of the morning cortisol spike by as much as 50.

50% 50 so people here cortisol and they freak out they think that's not good I want my cortisol low but you actually want your cortisol highest in the morning and lower in the afternoon and evening and there's a lot of reason for that elevated mood focus in alertness in the morning and throughout the day and ease of getting to sleep at night lower anxiety lower depressive symptoms and so on so that bright light also serves to control the amplitude of cortisol in the direct light.

It in the direction you want in the early part of the day the other thing that's just more of a underlying dynamics of the circadian visual system which is a system that I worked on for years these wonderful cells in the eyes that are not for image forming but rather for detecting sunlight and bright light for sake of setting circadian rhythm is that the sensitivity of that system early in the day is actually quite low so you need a lot of bright light early in the day to effectively wake up your system and shut down the system.

And shut down the sleeping the signals such as melatonin but later in the day rather diabolical system it takes very little light even from artificial sources to disrupt your circadian rhythm and quash melatonin as little as 15 seconds of bright light in the evening I think Chuck's isolars laboratory at Harvard medical school showed can quash melatonin in the evening I don't want people to freak out and think that they go into a hotel bathroom which oftentimes those are very bright.

In the middle of the night flip on the light that they're going to completely screw up their circadian rhythms but if I'm honest they'd be much better off using their phone as a flashlight to navigate people always say well wait but the flashlight on the phone is very bright but let's just get logical here a light shown into your eyes such as a flashlight is very different than looking at a flashlight beam on the ground far and away difference.

So the point is that if you don't get enough bright sunlight or light in your eyes early in the day and then your indoors under artificial lighting you might think well this is really bright lighting this is the kind of lighting that could disrupt my circadian rhythm at night and therefore it's sufficient to wake up my system no early in the day throughout the day you need a lot of bright light as much as safely possible to avoid sunburn and things of that sort which you don't want.

But then as the evening comes around after sundown you need very little artificial light in order to disrupt your circadian rhythm and then just very quickly light from candles fireplaces is okay this is kind of interesting it seems bright it's but the but the measurements indicate that that's not going to shift your circadian rhythm much candles are great but of course don't burn your house down so that the orange and red tones in the evening way dimmed down that's the way to go early in the day.

Bright bright bright light as bright as you safely can tolerate and what I like about firstly your mention of cortisol you described how cortisol is rising in the morning and that's a great thing and it is a good thing and in the evening it's starting to drop and if you look right around your prototypical bedtime and we're going to speak later in this episode as to what your real natural bedtime is versus the one that you may be taking right now.

It's very interesting cortisol will almost hit its lowest point something that we call it's an idea it's the lowest point in that trough of its decline right around the time when you should be sleeping however.

So great study that looked at people with insomnia and in subsequent episodes we'll discuss this too but one of the ways that we think about conceptualize insomnia is in two different flavors sleep onset insomnia I can't fall asleep and sleep maintenance insomnia I wake up I can't get back to sleep.

And what they looked at was essentially cortisol levels they had a catheter in the arm and they were sampling it from the bloodstream and they were able to do that every 30 minutes so it's a little bit like time lapse photography and you're getting a data point every 30 minutes across the 24 hour period looking at cortisol cross now a full 24 hour period.

And sure enough when you look at healthy controls who can sleep well and insomnia patients they look almost identical across the day.

But then when it comes to falling asleep right around that bedtime period the healthy controls are going all the way down the insomnia patients go down and down and down and then they have a rise back up right around that sleep onset period.

And then they start to drop back down again just as the control group but then they also often will have a spike in the middle of the night which then comes down and then both of them are staying low throughout the early morning period and then it starts to rise back up so it's not as though net net overall there is a higher level of cortisol in people with insomnia it seems to be right at those trigger zones that map very nicely to sleep onset problems sleep maintenance.

Very interesting as somebody who wakes up in the middle of the night and sometimes has trouble getting back to sleep that resonates I have no trouble falling asleep whatsoever yeah knock on wood.

Super dishes about this at this point but I use tools like non sleep deep rest yoga knee draw long exhale breathing but you know it and I think these wake up.

That episode seemed to happen more when I'm processing a lot of stuff from my daily life that's right you know it's on the unconscious brain oftentimes is working through things and and we'll wake us up yeah I often think that.

Sleep maintenance insomnia that you've just described is the revenge of daytime emotions and unresolved.

So that would be so we're spoken about regularity we've spoken about darkness and we've spoken about the inverse of that in the morning which is light a little bit of cortisol so the third out of the five is going to be temperature and the advice here is keep it cool.

As we mentioned a little bit in the first episode and we will go into great detail when we speak not just about these conventional and unconventional tips but we're also going to go into the future of science and were sleep scientists taking goes to.

In fact optimize and even enhance our sleep we will speak a lot about temperature suffice to say that you need to.

Drop your core body temperature in your brain temperature by a little less than one degree Celsius two to three degrees Fahrenheit to get to sleep and stay asleep.

The general target that we have in sleep science if you look across the literature is somewhere around about the 67 degree Fahrenheit or I'm trying to do the calculation maybe 18.5 ish degrees Celsius now I know that that sounds cold.

It is but you can also worth thick socks to bed you can have a hot water bottle at the end of the bed that's great to but the ambient must be cold.

The fourth piece of advice is walk it out and here what I mean is do not stay in bed for long periods of time awake and I think we mentioned this perhaps in the first episode two.

When you are awake in your bed for long stretches of time because your brain is an incredibly associative device it will quickly learn that this thing caught my bed is the place where I'm awake and not asleep.

And what you need to do is break that association if you've learned that time and time again because you've stayed in bed and the rule of thumb it's just a rule of thumb about 20 25 minutes if you can't fall back asleep or you can't fall asleep it's okay just say tonight is not my night.

It's not a problem it's tomorrow is not completely shot it's fine I'm just going to get up get out of bed if you can if you're looking enough try to go to a different room and in dim light read a book listen to podcast whatever it is that relaxes you just do that don't check email don't eat because if you start eating that again trains your brain to start waking up and feeding at that time.

And only return to bed when you are sleepy and there is no time limit for that I don't want you to come back after half an hour when you are still awake and not feeling sleepy enough why because you're going to get back into bed and be in the same problem again and gradually if you do this and it's hard to do it.

You will re-learn the association that you had I'm sure as a child which is that your bed is this place of sleepiness because often people will be saying I feel so tired in the evening and then they get into bed and they say but now I can't fall asleep at all and I don't understand it in pod it's because of that learned association so that would be the fourth tip.

The fifth tip makes me even more unpopular as a personality character which is try to be mindful of your alcohol and caffeine now in a subsequent episode we'll go into great detail as to how caffeine works its mechanisms why it is sleep disruptive and why in fact I've even perhaps changed my mind on caffeine and it's benefits but it also does have significant details.

So the rule of thumb here would be try to cut yourself off from caffeine probably at least 10 or so hours before you expect to go to bed and you can just calculate back calculate that and try to limit it so the dose and the timing make the poison.

Cut yourself off after maybe two or three cups of coffee and then the timing component count yourself back.

Decaffinate a coffee not too bad if you find the right thing to if you need that fix alcohol is probably one of the most misunderstood sleep aids in quotes that that is it is no sleep aid at all now if I didn't understand what I know about alcohol and sleep I would think that too which is like when I have a night cap just before bed or two

even though I don't worry them I I may actually just fall asleep very easily it feels like I stay asleep very soundly across the night so it's a great sleep aid and it really helps me there are at least I would say three issues with alcohol the first is that alcohol is in a class of drugs that we call the sedatives and sedation is not sleep but when you take on board alcohol in the evening

you mistake the former for the latter and you think it helps you fall asleep the second thing is that because it's sedation actually is probably related to station if I were to show you the electrical signature of your deep sleep when you're just sleeping naturally versus when you have alcohol in your system it's not really the same it's not a naturalistic form of deep sleep it mimics it it looks not too dissimilar

but if I really do mine analyses and I almost like that pink Floyd album where I take the white light of electrical brain activity coming from your head as you're sleeping and split it apart into all of the different components there are some components that are no longer present or some that are abnormally present the second issue with alcohol is that it fragments your sleep so it will litter your sleep with all these punctuated awakenings throughout the night

the danger there is that many of those awakenings with alcohol you don't remember because they're too brief but then you wake up the next day and you think well I didn't have a problem falling asleep I didn't have a problem staying asleep but I just feel rough I just don't feel restored by my sleep and you don't add two and two together

the final concern with alcohol is that it's quite a potent blocker of your rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep and in subsequent episodes we'll go into great detail as to the incredible learning and memory creativity benefits that come by way of REM sleep

also it's essential for our emotional regulation and recalibrating our moods so for all of those reasons I would say two things first if you are struggling with sleep not feeling restored by your sleep keep in mind your alcohol intake

and also just in general be mindful of that if you are thinking about your sleep and want to preserve it so much of what you just said resonates I confess that in my lifetime I've had periods of pretty spectacular sleep I characterize myself as somebody they could fall asleep anywhere anytime

but I've also experienced the extreme challenges of sleep and that relates to different things life circumstances etc. In fact recently I've had some challenges with sleep despite using the protocols that I and others suggest I hadn't heard some of the things that you're referring to here

and middle of the night waking has become more of an issue I communicated this to a former girlfriend of mine who was I was in relationship with when I was a junior professor meaning before I got tenure

and she said you don't remember you had a Andrew but I do you had a pattern back then of after I would fall asleep you would continue working on your laptop probably on grants

and then I would fall asleep working and then according to her I would wake up in the middle of the night and work a little bit until I get tired again and then fall asleep and then this would repeat so really stamping down the associative learning element that you talked about before

so that was probably the first period of time in my life in which I created this rather deleterious association of work in the middle of the night in bed

and then more recently I've had the experience of waking up probably due to these like daytime things that I'm waking up in the middle of the night thinking about

and now because of our discussion during the course of recording this series I get out of bed after even 10-15 minutes so that I can start to eliminate that association

and another piece is that I've always felt that when I get out of bed in the middle of the night because I can't sleep and I go to the sofa I often can sleep very well

and the reason being that the location of sleep is the association of wakefulness sleep in bed as opposed to on the sofa is a clear component and this is in an environment that's of equal temperature and it's not perfect experiment

and it's in a data as we say but I think that the associative piece is oh so strong for many people and so this is something to really take seriously.

I love that notion of people will often say I just get up I go to the couch of the sofa and that's where I'll wake up in the morning.

Also they'll say when I travel and I go to a hotel room I just can sleep fine out for some people it's the inverse but for those people it's the contextual difference meaning the change of the environment is so unfamiliar that it is not being bound to association of wakefulness it's related to sleep or at least the opportunity to sleep.

Sometimes even I've heard from some people and there's no studies or data on this even turning yourself around now this is hard if you have a partner in bed but you just switch top to bottom of the bed and you take your pillow and you pull the doofay all the way down and you put the pillow at the opposite end where your feet used to be and you get into bed and even just looking around and sort of having a difference that alone is so subtle but it can make a real difference.

So again just keep these things in my I know it sounds strange or this whole sort of get up get out of bed break the associate and we'll come on to something well actually I'll come onto it now because I think it's one of the unconventional tips and you mentioned it a lot of people say to me that all sounds great.

Science makes sense I just don't wait dark it's kind of cold I really don't want to get out of bed so give me some alternatives.

I think the single best piece of unconventional sleep advice I can give you is do anything that gets your mind off itself.

The whole reason that if you look at insomnia as a physiological condition or current working model mechanistically of how insomnia plays out is that you are in this state of almost low level anxiety and you are somewhat stressed and when you go to sleep where you try to go to sleep or you wake back up and you try to get back to sleep you just have this roll the decks of anxiety.

So in the world we are constantly on reception and very rarely do we do reflection.

And unfortunately for many of us and I've been guilty of this the only time we do reflection is when our head is placed on the pillow and we turn the light out and that is the last time you want to be doing reflection that's the worst moment.

At that point I think everyone can empathize with the idea of you turn the light out your under stress your mind goes to those few things in the darkness of night thoughts become almost 10 times worse than they do in the bright of day.

So at that moment you start to ruminate when you ruminate you begin to catastrophize when you catastrophize you're dead in the water for the next two hours.

So what do you do the problem is as I said your mind is on itself and it's going through these repeated loops anything you can do for example you can do some kind of a meditation.

When I was researching data for my books some years ago I did look into meditation and I wasn't a meditator I was a hard no scientist didn't really kind of embrace with that notion or even that group of people.

But time and again I read paper after paper and the date it was very strong and it was coming from research groups that I respected very much indeed so I thought well okay I should probably give this a try.

And that was six years ago and since then I now meditate for ten minutes every single night before bed I do a guided meditation because I'm not particularly skilled so I use an app that moves me through that.

But you can do whatever you have whatever meditation you like that's one example the second example is you can do breathing methods because again you're focused on your breath and what are you not focused on your thoughts.

And so anything that will allow you to explore some other focus maybe it's a body scan where you start at the top of your head or your feet and you work your way up and you just say you know moving through now my neck what sensations am I feeling now into my shoulders moving down into my chest now I can feel the ends of my fingers and I sensing anything.

And when you start doing that or any of these types of things the next thing that you remember is your alarm going off in the morning because you got your mind off itself so I would say that that's probably one of the unconventional tips but let me come back to the conventional anything else I've probably missed out or being unclear about the actually I should probably say one thing in terms of these not the not tips I don't like the word I know you don't either or hacks or.

So these are protocols and they're well informed scientific protocols in all of this discussion today you can get all of these things in place and still have problems with sleep.

The reason is because you may be suffering from a sleep disorder so the analogy would be let's say that I'm your athletic coach and your sport superstar I can perfect everything I can perfect your.

Higher your supplements we can perfect your technique we can perfect but if you've got a broken ankle.

None of those things are going to alter your performance right now you've got to get to a doctor and get that scene to and then we can come back to fine tuning your performance it's the same with sleep if you've got a sleep disorder such as snoring sleep apnea or insomnia we need to get you to a doctor first and then only after that come back once you're resolved then we can start.

That's the only other thing I probably should mention this is all very useful discussion because I think that.

Of course there will be those folks out there that just like what are they talking about I sleep so well and I you know consider yourself blessed many many people struggle with.

Challenges with sleep and I think it's fair to say that sooner or later most everybody experiences some challenges with sleep for whatever reason you look at the statistics that's highly likely in your lifetime you are more than likely to go through either a period of challenging sleep or in fact about of insomnia.

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You talked about alcohol I'm not a consumer of alcohol anymore.

No, I'm not because I have anything against it. Yeah many people do enjoy it and and no we're not calling judgment on them. I mean certainly much of the world enjoys alcohol.

We talk a little bit more about aside from demolishing REM sleep. Do we know that alcohol causes these disruptions and sleep directly meaning by changing the pattern of release of neurotransmitters like GABA things of that sort or is this an indirect effect like you know is this like through the gut microbiome that then impacts sleep.

And the reason I ask is maybe we could get to some more specific. Do's and do not protocols so for instance if somebody wants to have a cocktail how close to sleep can they get and not diminish their rapid eye movement sleep too much because people are still going to want to drink.

And with that said if people do have a couple of drinks and then they go to see if is there is there anything they can do prior to sleep to trying to rescue.

There are some of their quality sleep. Great question so in terms of the mechanism it seems actually not to be the alcohol but some of the metabolic byproducts of alcohol.

And we think that perhaps the main culprit maybe some of the aldehydes that are the metabolic separate consequences of alcohol metabolism.

So you make a good point though in terms of the dose response timing curve how late or how early do I have to cut myself off from alcohol people have done those studies and they have found that even an afternoon single glass of wine if you measure sleep in the way that we measure it at my center with high fidelity you can see compromises and impairments I wish I could tell you otherwise.

I would say that based on that data the principle protocol advice I would have for you is go to the pub in the morning that way by the time you're about to sleep the alcohol is out your system you can you know I would never as a as a public scientist I would never advocate necessarily for wanting I'm just kidding you but

that's that's sort of one of the unfortunate consequences that does seem to be an impact to say that there isn't is just me not being truthful about the data.

Again, if you think about the trade off here if you're going out or you're having friends over and you're going to make an incredible evening of memories and you're going to open a favor bottle of wine and have a couple of glasses of wine is just sleep going to be compromised yes it is.

But maybe that's worth the trade off for that specific night I would just not wish you to and you've spoken a lot and so is our dear friend Peter here and others there just doesn't seem to be any safe amount of alcohol.

But I would say think about that trade off simply however don't make it habit that you're doing it you know multiple nights a week or more that would probably be the advice great what about food and sleep how close to sleep is it okay to have a meal if you want to optimize your sleep I like to eat my final meal somewhere around six

thirty p.m. but and I go to sleep somewhere around eight thirty nine p.m. Yeah and an ideal world sometimes I go to sleep a bit later sometimes I eat a little bit later is this you know there's some variability with these but

put differently what is the relationship between food intake and sleep quality in terms of timing of food intake and then perhaps we can talk a little bit about food macro nutrients.

Very interesting there was somewhat of a dogma out there that we have to stop eating you know three or four hours before bed for optimal sleep if you look at the data data is quite a spread no pun intended there is there are some people for whom that works very well and if they eat even two hours before bed they just

get disrupted in terms of the sleep some of that is about people just feeling too full and not feeling comfortable other aspects of that when you become

recumbent when you lie down you have a high risk of gastric reflux coming back up and therefore you get heartburn and that's pretty miserable and people will describe that too by way of

close proximity of food intake relative to when you're falling asleep never the less if you look at the data and I did a recent very deep dive on this person in myself about 12 months ago it's not quite as extreme as the dogma

out if you eat two hours before bed on average it doesn't seem to necessarily harm your sleep now that's very different than saying what is best to improve or enhance your sleep but the way these

cities were designed it was looking at detriment they then went to 90 minutes before sleep onset and even there they didn't seem to be market impermanence 60 minutes you started to see maybe

some signs but on average the effect size was somewhat weak but then when you get close to sort of 45 minutes or so then things did start to deteriorate I think it depends hugely on your

type and also just on your appetite circadian rhythm preferences to I am someone who I do not feel very hungry when I first wake up in the morning I don't feel very hungry throughout most of the day and I will on board most of my calories probably

the hours probably in about a four hour period maybe less even three hour period and then I will cut myself off about 90 minutes before sleep so I classically I would have been considered as you know violating this sleep dogma

of cutting yourself off at least three hours I think it's very personal though just experiment with it you will know the situation as for macros and specific food components the data is a little bit mixed certainly what we know is that if you're eating a diet that is high in sugar

and low in protein your sleep is worse why would that be the case well one of the reasons that we think is that if you on board sugar it can be somewhat metabolically active and when it becomes

metabolically active it can increase your body temperature your core body temperature even just very subtly but that's enough to disrupt your sleep as we spoke about with temperature but I think in terms of really the you know what would be the ideal macro nutrient and even

micro nutrient dietary recommendation that I would have for you I don't think we have enough data yet above and beyond that statement yeah I I've experienced when I eat a very low carbohydrate diet which I've experimented within the past maybe in four ketogenic diet for real

we're brief periods of time although I'm an omnivore so I eat meat and eggs and aisle sweet starches pasta's rice etc but we know based on beautiful work from for example Chris Palmer from from Harvard Medical School who is a guest on this podcast

I listen to that there's great podcast yeah Chris is spectacular and has advocated the exploration of ketogenic diets for the treatment of various psychiatric conditions not all but psychiatric conditions

and and it seems and he agreed with me on this that when people go on very low starch very low carbohydrate diets that sometimes they can experience a bit of hypomania some people can and and challenges with sleep and sometimes there are

psychiatric reasons why people stay on those diets anyway and then they have to do other things to encourage their sleep by their pharmacology or supplementation or some combination

but I can say anecdotally for myself if I if I don't eat starches for a extended amount of time a couple of days I find it very hard to get quality sleep as indicated by sleep trackers

and and just sleep late late and see the fall asleep is longer than it is etc so I've opted to eat most of my carbohydrates later in the evening

which and violates you know every rule of you know eat your carbs early in the day and and I think there are some data to support that eating carbohydrates early in the day may actually have certain benefits for weight maintenance or weight loss so I realized that but those aren't my my goals at the moment I weight maintenance yes weight loss no so I think I certainly feel after eating a dinner that has a bit more starch pasta rice these things

that sort and a little bit lower protein as opposed to the inverse like eating a couple of rib steaks in a salad but no starch that my sleep is substantially better and I always

attributed that to the relationship between some of these starches and the trip to fans slash Sir Tony and palo there is some data on that with the carbohydrate intake in the evening and of course that that trip to fan and that carbohydrate intake will contain the precursor ingredients to something else that we've spoken about which is melatonin

and so that may actually help healthily boost that melatonin signal is a little bit of data on that to support it to we also did a study where we we were looking at night to night to night sleep and carbohydrate intake the next day and it did seem to support what you're describing in terms of some of the carbohydrate benefits we also found a strange result that was almost the opposite prediction that we made

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