#131 Matthew Walker: The Power of Sleep

Experiment: If you regularly set an alarm clock, would you wake up at that same relative time without the alarm clock?

If the answer is no, you’re not listening to your body’s needs and are probably running on a sleep deficit.

Don’t force sleep, it’s dangerous to stay awake in bed for long periods of time.

Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning: your brain will begin to bond a negative association with your bed and being awake

“You’d never sit at the dinner table waiting to get hungry, so why would you lie in bed waiting to get sleepy?”

The harder you try to sleep, the harder it becomes

• Don’t count sheep, take yourself on a long mental journey. Take your mind off of itself.
• Matthew loves racing cars, he guides himself through this activity as he falls asleep

Don’t try to catch up on sleep. If you’ve had a bad night of sleep, do not adjust your personal sleep schedule to compensate.

• Don’t let one bad night of sleep compound into another
• If you’re going to nap, make them brief (10-15min) and before 1 pm

Have a wind-down routine before you go to bed, sleeping is not like a light switch

• This could be stretching, meditating,shower etc

Drinking coffee is objectively good, the timing and dosage is the problem

• Due to common diet deficiencies, the coffee bean often serves as a main provider of antioxidants
• Caffeine has a half-life of five to six hours
• If you have a cup of coffee at midday, 50% will be in your system at 6 pm and still 25% at midnight
• Caffeine in the late day can reduce the amount of deep sleep you get by 20%-40% (stage three & four non-REM)
• Cut off caffeine consumption 10 hours before bed

Alcohol can activate the fight or flight response system even while you sleeping–causing sleep fragmentation

• Sleep-onset insomnia: the inability to fall asleep
• Sleep-maintenance insomnia: the ability to fall asleep but difficulty staying asleep
• Nonrestorative sleep: following normal sleep patterns but still feeling insufficiently refreshed
• Insomnia is about 30% genetically inheritable, but mental distress is one of the greatest drivers of insomnia
• Hyperarousal: over-active neurobiological and psychological systems contribute to difficulty sleeping
• Matthew references Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) as a potential long-term treatment for insomnia

Metrics that Matthew uses for sleep tracking:

• Sleep efficiency: the percentage of time in bed that you are sleeping. Target is 85%-90%.
• Sleep latency: how long it takes to fall asleep. Falling asleep too quickly can imply a sleep debt.
• REM/Non-REM sleep cycles

Orthosomnia: the anxiety of perfecting your sleep routine ends up being counterproductive

• Sleep tracking can distort your psychology–what if you feel like you slept well, but your tracker says otherwise?
• Gamifying your sleep can make you lose sight of the intrinsic benefits