Joe Rogan Experience #1109 — Matthew Walker Transcript

Transcript

0:00 And we're live. in a week because I'll do like a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, like with gigs. And then by Those people that work at the Department of Motor Vehicles, they work half asleep. But yeah. So when you're in a hotel room, what is happening that half your brain is not really sleeping? It is true, but I think it's also our low IQ. But it's the deep stages of sleep, three and four of

2:36 it fills in the blanks of like, why, even if I get, you know, seven, eight hours sleep on the Yeah. Like what is happening there? Yeah, so both of those chemicals, both of which are used as a sleep aid, alcohol and marijuana, are actually very good at blocking your dream sleep, your rapid eye movement sleep. normally have you get that plus the brain tries to get back some of that dream sleep that it's

4:56 What happens there is a kind of an acute version where the alcohol is swilling around in your system. Yeah. So marijuana, it does help people. Well, help it. It puts people to sleep quicker. REM sleep. It will start to block the process. We think perhaps at the level of the brainstem, There what happens is that the alcohol has been blocking dream sleep for so long and the pressure for dream sleep is built up so powerfully in the

7:31 Okay, yeah. Wow. we've lopped off almost 20% of that, if you look at the data. Wow. We had a woman on the podcast. Her name is Courtney DeWalter, and she's a ultra marathon runner. minute one minute the entire time she tried to lie this is over three days I think it took her And he was like, one minute. So she just keeps going. And that's exactly what they do too.

11:23 is a very bad idea based on what we know. He was seeing spiders in his shoes. You believe things that couldn't possibly be true. if not all of that dream experience. So we're suffering from amnesia. When you go into REM sleep, firstly, some parts of your brain become 30% more active than when you're awake. So, you know, we think of sleep as this sort of,

13:52 So it's almost as though, you know, the prison guards are gone and everyone runs amok because Why do we forget those dreams? absolutely true like like factual you could check it you could research it you know what the facts Is that it's just simply a reconstruction when you wake up it just, and it's gone. And then two days later, you're in the shower, you sort of washing yourself,

17:20 There's great brain science about this non-conscious memory processing. in relation to an actual experience. Like if we went outside and we saw some lady walk up to some guy and kick him in the balls, we'd be like, whoa! I remember it like it was yesterday because it was right. Yeah, but a dream Noradrenaline actually plummets to the lowest levels. It's actually,

19:42 information flow into the memory centers of the brain. Well, so you're in REM sleep. committing it to memory, But when you have a DMT experience, after it's over, the memory fades very rapidly. while you're in heavy REM sleep, I think I saw it in that. through the wall and I went oh I'm fucking I really hope I'm not just a fictive character in your dreams.

23:21 One possibility, which is deeply unsatisfying, is that it's just a byproduct. And REM sleep serves lots of other functions. I read some article about the lack of REM sleep with marijuana users, and it was trying to say, and it made me super skeptical even as a pot smoker, it was trying to say that it's not bad for you because what it's essentially doing is bypassing the REM sleep and going directly into the deep sleep.

25:01 You're definitely not dislikable. And he was a real psychedelic adventurer. and it doesn't have the same impact. They're just so paranoid and thinking about everything and freaking out and all these You know, firstly, you're vulnerable to predation. And that counts for all of the stages of sleep, too. au contraire potheads um so what is happening to the body during REM sleep that's so critical, that one particular aspect of sleep?

28:59 If you're thinking that you're this world champion mixed martial arts person, and it's in the middle back to sleep again. But I was obviously dreaming about competing and my leg would extend. what you can do is you can place these electrodes into centers of the brain. those rats sleep the exact same sequence, But, you know, that notion of time compression and time dilation that Christopher Nolan played so well with in that movie,

32:35 And practice does not make perfect. Practice with a night of sleep is what makes perfect because you your time to physical exhaustion drops by up to 30%. So you could spend all of your time training for a 10 round fight Yeah. And my cardio always sucked. hanging out with my kids all day, went to get some sleep, but then I had to do some stuff I was like, ugh.

36:25 Feel great now. Like, two days in difference. I mean, that's the difference. The difference is one day I got real sleep. One day I didn't. I did the exact same thing even more today. I did. I lifted weights today as well. And I just feel great. So I could see I could see it physiologically in the difference in my performance in 24 hours. Yeah, and that's noticeable. I mean, we see that too.

36:44 and they've just plotted, you know, how frequently will they get injured? a knee? Yeah, it's all of those things. particularly in terms of combating and placating injury risk too. So if you just it's the same thing as what's happening when you're sleeping, just maybe to a lesser extent? instructor, he's always comparing it to tying your shoe. And he said, do you know

40:07 If you tried to ask me to explain how I tie my shoe, I'd be like, how do I tie my shoe? Where in your skill performance does sleep give you the benefit? playing musicianship. And you learn and you learn and you get better. And let's say that you type a Like a sentence. It goes in, finds that problem point, that friction point in your motor skill sort of deficit, and it smooths it out.

43:14 overwhelming. You just can't concentrate on anything else but this problem, whatever it is. So it's almost like informational alchemy and you wake up the next morning with a revised mind wide web that is now capable of His sleeping brain solved the problem. And he used sleep ruthlessly as a tool for creativity. And he would sit at his desk and he would have a sort of pad of paper and a pencil. And he had a chair with armrests and he would pick up two steel ball bearings and

45:32 that he was having. I should note, I think it's important that the French translation is much closer to you sleep But I won't either. My goodness. I'm an idiot. Not necessarily create the light bulb, but he really, you know, gave, shifted us from a point where now we controlled the night in terms of illumination. it's somewhere more than 9,000 feet above

48:00 out. We're like, oh, it's cloudy. We might not be able to see anything. giant factor in the way human beings look at their relationship with the universe And light bulbs can suppress a hormone that's called melatonin. It's 50% less in terms of its peak. And furthermore, you don't get the same amount of REM sleep. And Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekend,

51:17 you know, two hours earlier. So keep it dark. The third is probably keep it cool. feet. And so that you could exquisitely manipulate the temperature of any part of the body, hands, core of the body, feet, and they get a little bit more deep sleep too. So you should go to sleep with socks and gloves on? that just evacuates from the body, your core body temperature plummets. And that's why you sleep

53:56 temperature that climate temperature starts to drop that's when they start to get drowsy as if means? Middle of the night. And that's what it should be for all of us. But in modernity, the idea of two sleeps. Those tribes will often sleep about six and a half hours, seven hours of sleep at night. Yeah. You can actually just have people fast and sort of, well, fasting for long periods of time actually makes your sleep much worse.

57:02 help you sort of almost combat that lull. I mean, it's hard to sort of really go back. of fascinating stuff came out of that time now when you're um when you're measuring people's health and when you're measuring people's What's fucking shorter if you sleep less? that. Insufficient sleep across the lifespan now seems to be one of the most significant lifestyle factors determining whether or not you'll develop Alzheimer's.

1:00:01 nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen. Whoa. So there are two hormones that control your appetite and your weight. It's the hunger hormone. they go in unfortunately opposite directions. because of the underslept state. Add that up, it's about 70,000 extra calories a year. It's And they stay away from the healthy sort of leafy greens, nuts, proteins, etc.

1:02:42 As sleep time has declined, obesity rates have I know from personal experience, when I'm tired, I always gravitate towards the worst choices. Naps can actually give you benefits. We've done some of these or fourth night. You will sleep longer, but you will only get back maybe just three or four hours And then when you go into famine, you can spend that caloric credit.

1:06:01 starvation. The only way that you can get a species to sleep less, That's fascinating. I did not know that. So fasting is when you're talking about multiple day fasting and not intermittent fasting. And we spoke about how sleep regulates your appetite. So that's where that hormone ghrelin just kicks into high gear. to sort of force you wide awake. to sort of re-engage with, you know, cognitive function with a dose of sleep deprivation that

1:10:09 Drowsy driving, it seems, kills more people on the roads than either alcohol or drugs combined. It looks like they go to sleep during these micro-sleeps. Even those are heavier than that. there's just no braking whatsoever. yeah it works i mean if you're forced to drive for whatever reason you have to you know you have 20 It's strange. There was a great one that was done, I think, in Teton County in Wyoming. They shifted their school start times from 7.35 in the morning to 8.55

1:13:20 So I think if our goal as educators truly is to educate, and we've spoken about learning in time of 7.25 will begin leaving at 5.30 schools, they comply to that same timeframe as well. And it becomes very difficult. And I don't mean to chastise school systems or the bus unions. It's an incredibly difficult logistics problem. Wow. That's gigantic. Yeah. I think it's the school time in correlation with the work time.

1:16:36 our children silent sleep loss epidemic wow now other than than making the room cold and warming up your hands and your feet and things along those lines, what about diet? Or even time that you eat? Is there a specific time before you go to bed that you should eat? How much time should you give yourself to digest your food? So you should eat several hours before

1:18:26 sort of back in time. keep taking it because the placebo effect is the most reliable effect in all of pharmacology. That's where nightly use of melatonin Bring it back online. But what I read was that was bullshit. Right. they found was that the average American adult was sleeping 7.9 hours of sleep a night. Now that number, most recently, they wake up and they feel great?

1:21:49 so your subjective sense of how well you're doing with a lack of sleep I can drive home I'm fine and your response is I know that you, you're at the bar. You've had six or seven shots. I'm fine. I can drive home. And you probably have a couple of espressos or one of these caveman coffees. You're trying to get ahead in this life. challenges that you give them. They also slack off when they're working in groups.

1:23:46 okay, I got it. I got it. I got it. Go to work. Work for it. Yeah. You know, so less sleep does I mean, I know this is not related to sleep, but I've always felt like people work too much. Efficiency, you know, productivity. is supposed to be the engine of, you know, business and ingenuity. But why would you, and it's like they had used being silly and overtired as a strategy almost like

1:26:16 that's one of the first things to go a bit more childlike. And I say that affectionately because the last part of the brain to mature So I'll give you two examples. There was a study where they And all it takes is one hour because there is a global experiment that's performed on 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year. of sleep. Wow. Wow.

1:30:09 So you become immune deficient. car and I did it for years. And I would have to be up at five o'clock every morning. And I never, So you want to go to bed later and wake up later. So I'd have to do multiple trips. Like, what kind of fucking damage did I do to myself over those years? You did. Like six hours is normal. You really should get eight. Well, it's a gene that seems to promote sort of, again, wakefulness chemistry within the brain

1:34:16 statement and their declaration of how little sleep that they would get. Both of them said is called beta amyloid. Beta amyloid is one of the leading causes of underlying the mechanism in terms of deep sleep. Amphetamines. That seems to work through a pathway, at least right now, as we understand it, Boy, I know a lot of people who, I wouldn't say they abuse it,

1:37:20 like I'm driving from San Diego to California or to Los Angeles A lot of Silicon Valley is on this stuff, and they pop it like candy. Yeah. Wow. sort of expected during the day. Because, you know, taking it in the middle of that medication in terms of when sleep should be sort of expected during the day. pills. That's fucking crazy. And I'm desperately appealing for this.

1:41:09 had six hours of sleep or less, you have a 170% increased risk of a major surgical error, such as It's a fascinating story. So there's a chapter here in the book on this too. It's a guy called William Halstead. And he set up the first resident surgical program in the United States at Johns Hopkins University. And he was known for being able to stay awake for these heroic lengths of time, days on end. It was incredible, like superhuman strength.

1:42:54 I like how you said from colleagues. and he structured a program Unbelievable. And so now there's rumors, you know, that he would get his shirts laundered in Paris, you know, in France. Which is like, so critical to be awake and aware and to be sharp. You're cutting people open. a serious medical error due to insufficient sleep. One in 20 medical residents will kill a patient

1:45:36 That's insane. hubris and some degree of hours on the job is going to be able to allow you to sort of, you and he tells a story about during his residency, you're in a deleterious state if you're falling asleep with your trousers around They used to leave bright lights on 24-7. hospital ward, you get this on an international flight travel for free, earplugs, face mask.

1:49:35 That is stunning. How is this being received by doctors? Are they reluctant to listen to you? I undergo anything longer than either a 14 or a 16 And I think I've been someone who's been to blame here. like being in the spotlight but I feel as though there is a mission that whose voice has not been be very interested now in getting to grips with sleep. I'd love to speak to first world governments though. When was the last time

1:53:12 caused by insufficient sleep. Solve the sleepless epidemic, you could almost double the budget for to help you fall asleep, to sort of signal darkness in the summertime when it's really You certainly did mine. Yes. Sleep well. Thank you so much, Matt. I really, really appreciate it. You're very welcome, Joe. Sleep well.