The following is our notes from Andrew Huberman’s Huberman Lab Podcast #2
What is Sleep?
Before we go deeper into how to have a healthier sleep, let us first define what sleep is.
Sleep is a period of our life where we are not conscious, and only in relation to things that are happening within our brain and body. Sleep resets the ability to be focused, alert and emotionally stable in the wakeful period.
2 Forces That Determines Sleep
Chemical Forces
1. Adenosine
Adenosine is a molecule in our nervous system and body that builds up the longer we are awake. When we sleep well for 8-10 hours, levels are low. Awake for 10-15 hours, levels are higher. Adenosine drives sleep hunger. Sleep and wakefulness are the average of different behaviors; how long you’ve been awake is key because of adenosine. You get sleepy because adenosine is getting higher. Caffeine is an adenosine antagonist; it blocks the sleepy signal and increases dopamine levels.
2. Cortisol, Epinephrine & Adrenaline
You wake up in the morning cause of the hormone called cortisol and a pulse of epinephrine, and adrenaline from your adrenal glands and in your brain to feel awake. Alerts your body that it’s time to increase heart rate and tense muscles. Should come early in the day or in your period of wakefulness and should have a normal, healthy rising tide in the beginning of the day. Takes off when you wake up and sets a timer (12-14hrs) in your body and nervous system for when melatonin is released by the pineal gland.
3. Melatonin
Melatonin is a hormone our pineal gland produces that responds to darkness. Melatonin makes us sleepy and lets us fall asleep. Melatonin helps with the timing of your circadian rhythms (24-hour internal clock) and with sleep. Being exposed to light at night can block melatonin production. Melatonin is also known to suppress the onset of puberty.
Circadian Force
Circadian means recurring naturally on a twenty four-hour cycle. Inside us is a clock that exist in our brains that determines when we want to be sleepy or awake. Our sleep and sleepiness are condensed in one block. Block is 6-10 hours and depends on how people want to sleep. That block of sleep and how it falls within 24hrs is governed by light/sunlight.
The Importance of Light Exposure
Light exposure is the key driving force to setting our circadian rhythm & driving the right chemical/hormonal forces at the right times of day. Viewing sunlight early in the day is key for establishing healthy sleep-wake rhythms and for allowing you to fall asleep easily at night. Light is the foundation of proper sleep aka circadian health.
Best Waking Practices for Healthier Sleep
- Get outside upon waking (ideally within 1-2 hours of sunrise) and get light exposure to the eyes & body. (Don’t look at light if it hurts your eyes). Early in the day, your retina is not sensitive which will need a lot of photons coming from sunlight to set clock mechanisms.
- Sunrise light intensity& color temperature (from sun being low in the sky) is ideal to set our circadian and hormonal rhythm.
- Getting outside is ideal because the intensity of outdoor light is so much greater than indoor or screen light.
- Outdoors Sunny day: 100,000 lux
- Outdoors Cloudy Day: 10,000-50,000 lux
- Inside Bright lights: 500 – 1,000 lux
- Time needed in outdoor morning light to set our body clock
- Outside Sunny Day: 30-60 seconds
- Outside Cloudy Day: ~5 minutes
- Important to be outside, viewing sunlight through a window will take 50x as long for your brain to get the necessary light information.
- We want blue light during day, don’t wear blue light blocking glasses during the day.
Best Evening Practices for Better Sleep
- Get outside to see the sunset. Sun is at a low solar angle and close to the horizon, it drives melanopsin which signals the circadian clock that it’s the end of the day.
- Use night mode screen on your device screen. (F.Lux is a great desktop app)
- Dim lights, using warmer color temperature (Philips Hue)
- Make use of candles/fireplace because they won’t signal wakefulness.
- The cells in our eyes that signals the central clock resides mostly in the bottom half of our retina which means it’s viewing our upper visual field. To avoid improper activation of neurons, place light low in your physical environments, on desktop or floor.
You’ll know when you’ve had enough because your rhythm will fall into some degree of normalcy. It normally takes 2-3 days for these systems to align.
You can use light to wake up earlier. If you turn on the lights 45mins before waking up even when your eyelids are closed, after a few days it will increase your total sleep time and shifts forward the time you feel sleepy.
Phase Advances and Phase Delays
If you see light late in the day, your brain and body will think that that’s morning light even if it’s not sunlight and will phase delay your clock which will make you get up later and go to sleep later.
Provide consistent powerful light anchors during the day and avoiding light at night, you get a tremendous number of positive effects on your wellbeing.
Tips to Optimize your Circadian Rhythm
- Get the right light exposure at the right times
- Have dim, low lights at night
- Get the proper sleep surface & pillow for spine alignment (organic natural material)
- Set the right sleep temperature around 65°F (18.3°C)
- Set your exercise timing to a regular period throughout the week, ideally in the morning.
Non-Sleep Deep Rest
Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR) are practices that activate cells in your body that promotes the parasympathetic or calming system. Using the body to control your mind and to explore the mind-body relationship to give you more control. NSDR is a way to reset one’s ability to be awake after you emerge from an NSDR to get more wakefulness and ability to attend emotional stability and to make it better and easier to fall asleep at night. NSDR is powerful because it doesn’t require that your rig yourself in a device, doesn’t take much time out of your day, doesn’t require that you ingest anything, and it has many positive effects right down to the neuromodulator.
Non-Sleep Deep Rest is relaxing so deeply that your body and mind receive some of the restorative benefits of sleep without needing to fall asleep. Great for a mid-day recharge!
1. Yoga Nidra/Yoga Sleep (Andrew Huberman’s Favorite Method to Relax)
Yoga Nidra is a sort of a meditation where you listen to a number of scripts that allows you to consciously bring your entire body and mind into a state of deep relaxation. 10-30-60mins at a time.
Try Dr. Hubermans favorite Yoga Nidra sessions
10 Min Yoga Nidra Script (no cost)
35 Min Yoga Nidra Script (no cost)
2. Meditation
Try some guided meditations:
3. Hypnosis
Dr. Huberman Recommends the Hypnosis Program by David Spiegel at ReveriHealth.com
“People are not good at falling asleep because they aren’t good at calming down” – Dr. Andrew Huberman
Supplemental Sleep Aids
The following is our notes from Dr. Rangan Chatterjee’s How to Improve Your Sleep and Why You Should, Live More Live Better Podcast with Professor Matthew Walker.
It is important to invest in sleep. Sleep is an investment not just in your lifespan but in your health span. It is important to give yourself the right sleep opportunity to get the appropriate duration of sleep. For you to get 7 hours of sleep you have to be in bed for 8 hours and 13 minutes, this will give you healthy and good sleep efficiency. If you are healthy and not sleep deprived your sleep efficiency is at 85-95%. 85% is the cutoff for good sleep.
It is important to give yourself the right sleep opportunity to get the appropriate duration of sleep. Must be close to 8hrs to get the minimum of 7hrs.
Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep is important for your lifespan; for every 5-15 minutes of reduction or loss of REM sleep, there is a 13% relative increase of premature death.
“Sleep is an investment not just in your lifespan, but your health span.” – Matthew Walker
Take Action – Try going to be 15 minutes earlier and change your alarm to 5 minutes later, that’s 20 minutes additional sleep. 20 minutes extra sleep per day is a big contribution to your health and wellbeing.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBTI)
To sleep well, you don’t need to look to medication. If you are struggling with sleep, another method to try is the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia or CBTI. CBTI will help regain confidence that 7-9 hours of sleep is possible. CBTI has the same efficacy as sleep medications in the short term, but much better more effective than medications in the long-term without any of the side effects. With CBTI, you control your sleep and stop insomnia from having a negative impact on your life, even after your course of treatment finishes.
What happens during CBTI sessions?
- The course of treatment usually lasts for between 5 and 20 sessions, with each session lasting 30 to 60 minutes every week or once every two weeks
- During the sessions, you’ll work with your therapist to break down your insomnia into their separate parts, such as your thoughts, physical feelings and actions.
- You and your therapist will analyze these areas to work out if they’re unrealistic or unhelpful, and to determine the effect they have on each other and on you.
- Your therapist will then be able to help you work out how to change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors.
- After working out what you can change, your therapist will ask you to practice these changes in your daily life and you’ll discuss how you got on during the next session.
Ways to deal with “not having enough time to sleep”
1. Practical – How can you help yourself get a little bit more sleep in terms of opportunity time?
- Scheduling – Set a to-bed alarm that will give you 8 hours of sleep opportunity.
- Habits
- Building a bedtime routine that supports your sleep timing and ability to relax – An hour before you are planning to go to bed:
- Change into your bed clothes
- Brush your teeth
- Wash your face
- Do everything you normally do before bed
2. Contextual | Belief |Mental – Think of sleeping at the right time as an investment in one’s productivity tomorrow rather than a cost.
The deeper the electrical brain wave activity, the better the quality of deep sleep. Both delta waves and theta waves occur when you’re asleep, but delta waves are the waves that dominate when you’re in a period of deep, restorative sleep. They measure in the 0.5 and 4 Hz range. Reduction in the quality of sleep on both macrolevel and electrical quality can be as or even more detrimental than a reduction in quantity of sleep. But both quantity and quality are necessary.
“Staying awake for an hour at night and lying in bed for longer than 25 minutes is a bad idea because when you lay in bed awake, your brain will think the bed and bedroom is a place to be awake.“ – Matthew Walker
How COVID has changed the way people are sleeping?
1. The Amount Of Sleep We Are Getting
Report from a sleep tracking company that almost over 60,000 Americans had about 20% increase in the total amount of sleep. An additional 15-30 minutes on the weekday and 24 minutes during the weekend. Some people would be sleeping more and some would be those whose sleep has become worse both in duration and quality.
2. The Timing Of Our Sleep
Since COVID, people are going to bed about 30mins later and waking up later. Then we are able to sleep in closer harmony with our chronotype, are you a MORNING or an EVENING type?
3. How We Are Dreaming
Why are people dreaming more and having COVID dreams? People are sleeping later into the morning. It’s when we get more REM sleep, which is the state in which we dream. People are dreaming about COVID because REM sleep is an emotional first aid. It provides mental health therapy, which takes difficult or traumatic experiences from the day. REM sleep acts like a nocturnal soothing balm and takes the sharp edges off those emotionally difficult concerns so the next day we have processed the emotions and feel better about those concerns.
When it comes to emotional memories, you sleep to forget the emotional charge and you sleep to remember the details of the experience. What happens in sleep is when the brain depotentiates the emotion, REM sleep dreaming divorces the emotion from the memory. So when you wake up, you remember the information but you don’t regurgitate the visceral reaction that you had.
What blocks REM Sleep?
1. Caffeine
Caffeine is the most demonstrated to have an impact on the quality of deep non REM sleep. Caffeine fragments your sleep – you would be waking up more times during the night so you won’t be getting into deep REM sleep.
3 Ways Caffeine Impacts Sleep
- Makes it hard for you to fall asleep – because caffeine is a stimulant
- Makes your sleep more fragile – more susceptible to wake up throughout the night
- Makes you experience shallower sleep – you won’t feel as refreshed in the morning
It’s the timing of taking coffee and not the dose that is the poison because caffeine has a lot of health benefits. Having caffeine before 10AM in mild to moderate doses is fine, but having 3 cups of coffee or more is likely too much. When you have coffee at noon, you still have caffeine in your brain at midnight and you won’t be able to sleep well. The health benefits is not due to the caffeine but due to the antioxidants.
2. Alcohol
Alcohol’s aldehydes and ketones will potently suppress REM sleep. Alcoholics who go through sobriety has a massive rebound of REM sleep. Alcohol is one of the most misunderstood sleep “aids”.
Based on a study, by the end of one night of no sleep, 50% of the participants had escalated their level of anxiety to that would be clinical grade requiring treatment. The longer you go without sleep, the more anxious you become.
Oura Ring
Sleep Tracking Tool that Matthew Walker Uses
Oura combines advanced sensor technology and a minimal design with an easy-to-use mobile app to deliver precise, personalized health insights straight from the most reliable source: your body.
Day and night, Oura helps you realize your potential through three simple scores: Readiness, Sleep, and Activity. While you’re awake, Oura captures data that reflects your activity and movement. When you’re sleeping, Oura captures meaningful data as nighttime is the best opportunity to get an accurate read on your overall health as your body is in a more consistent state.
The 3 Oura Scores
If you want to snack before bed, make it a high fiber and high protein meal, not a high sugar meal, because sugar is highly thermogenic.
Sleep and the Immune System
People who are sleeping less than 7hrs a night are 3x likely to become infected by the common cold relative to those who are getting 8hrs or more. In another study with over 70,000 women, those women who were sleeping 5hrs or less were more than 50% more likely to suffer undeveloped pneumonia which is a critical component of COVID.
Why is sleep important for your immune system?
Sleep restocks the weaponry in your immune arsenal. Sleep stimulates a collection of immune factors like the cytokines which is a protein that helps promote sleep & immune response. Not only do you create more of those immune factors but sensitizes your body to those immune factors.
So, when you wake up the next day, you are a more immune, robust individual. The receptivity of your body to those immune signals also increased. From an immune perspective it is better when you are sleeping.
