GUEST SERIES | Dr. Matt Walker: The Science of Dreams, Nightmares & Lucid Dreaming

30:25But you don't make it all the way to wakefulness. And so you act out these very rote routine reflexive behaviors. You just repeat certain words. You lift a cup to your mouth, go up to the refrigerator. So they are not faithful to the dream because if I were to gently wake you as you're sleep talking and say what was going through your head, you'll say nothing at all. And you don't report a dream. I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens and is designed to be all of your foundational nutritional needs.

31:02By now I'm sure you've all heard me say that I've been taking AG1 since 2012 and indeed that is true. Now of course I do consume regular whole foods every day. I strive to get those foods mostly from unprocess or minimally processed sources. However, I do find it hard to get enough servings of fruits and vegetables each day. So with AG1, I ensure that I get enough of the vitamins, minerals, prebiotic fiber and other things typically found in fruits or vegetables. And of course I still make sure to eat fruits and vegetables. And in that way provide a sort of insurance that I'm getting enough of what I need.

31:34In addition, the adaptogens and other micronutrients in AG1 really help buffer against stress and ensure that the cells and organs and tissues of my body are getting the things they need. People often ask me that if they were going to take just one supplement, what that supplement should be and I always answer AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1 .com slash Huberman to claim a special offer. You'll get 5 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1 .com slash Huberman. Earlier in this series, you described beautiful experiments by Matt Wilson, others at MIT, who explored neural activity within the brain within the hippocampus in particular in area associated with memory formation, in which the neurons in the hippocampus fire in the same sequence as they did during a particular daytime activity that preceded that night's sleep.

32:29But they do so at a much more rapid rate, sometimes they play in reverse, etc. This raises the question of first of all, is that sort of neural replay of events from the prior day? Is that also associated with dreaming or more specifically is that dreaming or is dreaming that? And that's really to raise the larger question, which is what is dreaming for? What is the function of dreaming? So what we know is that Matt Wilson's data during non -repetite moving sleep, the brain was replaying those memories 10 to 20 times faster. So when you go into REM sleep, it's down to 0 .5 times. So listening to this podcast now, when you hit that speed button and you drop it down to 0 .5, that seems to be the replay speed during REM sleep.

33:21We've not yet been able to confirm that in human beings, but if we did, does that mean we can explain the time differences that seem to happen in the dream state, that time is longer in the dream world than it is in the waking world. I think that's fascinating. But you're right, it does point us more towards the question, though, of what are the functions of this state called dreaming. And we can get on to whether or not dreaming is a very faithful recapitulation of our waking experiences, and I'll give you a spoiler now. No. But I'll give you the data in a second. But the functions of dreaming come back to some of the functions of REM sleep that we described in an earlier episode, those two related functions in the episode on learning and memory was that one function of REM sleep seems to be creativity associating memories together so that you can come up with these wonderfully divine solutions to problems you couldn't answer when you were away.

34:29The second came in our last episode about emotional and mental wellness, and we spoke about this theory that we put forward that REM sleep is a form of overnight therapy, and we described the evidence supporting that therapy. So I would say that those are the two leading theories of REM sleep and associated dreaming, but I perhaps didn't give you the full story there. There is a twist in both of those stories. I told you that when you are in REM sleep and you're dreaming, the next day you are better able to assimilate and associate memories and come up with these creative insight solutions. It turns out that sleep is necessary for that and not just sleep, but dream -related sleep REM sleep is necessary for that, but it's not sufficient.

35:20You not only have to be asleep and dreaming to get those benefits, you also have to be dreaming of the very things that you are trying to solve the next day. There is a great study by a scientist called Robert Stichold at Harvard, and he had a whole group of individuals learn a virtual maze, and they were dropped down in different locations of the maze, and they had to try to get out of the maze. And gradually, when you are dropped down in different locations, you do that enough times, you start to build up this mental map of the maze. And then he let one half of those participants take a 90 -minute nap and the other half remained awake, and then some hours later, they tested them on the maze, and they measured how quickly were you able to navigate and get out of the maze, that was the outcome measure.

36:09And sure enough, just as we described, those people who slept versus those who didn't, they were better able to navigate the maze after they had slept versus those who remained awake. But then they went back and they separated those individuals who were napping into two classes, because as they were napping, they were waking them up intimately and getting dream reports from them. And what they found was that those people who slept and still had dream reports, but those dreams were not related to the maze, they didn't show an improvement, but those individuals who slept and who dreamt, but also dreamt of the specific maze elements themselves, they were the only sub -set of people of participants who showed the benefit.

37:02And that's a beautiful demonstration that yes, you need to sleep to get creative benefits, and in fact seemingly have dream sleep, but you also need to be dreaming about specific things. Is that rule true for the second function of REM sleep dreaming, this overnight therapy benefit? Yes, it does seem to be true. There were some great studies by a scientist who was sadly passed away now, Rosalind Cartwright, and she was looking at different patient populations who had undergone really painful, difficult emotional experiences, for example, a very bitter, painful divorce. And she would at the time that those individuals were going through this difficult challenge, she would be recording their sleep, looking at their different stages of sleep, and she was collecting dream reports from them, and then she would track them and their progression clinically over the next year.

38:01And what she found was that some of those participants, about 50 % of them ended up getting clinical remission from their depression that was instigated by the painful experience they'd gone through. The other half did not get clinical remission from their depression, they remained depressed. And then she used those two classes to go back and have a look at the sleep and the dream reports. And what she found was some differences in REM sleep, but more interestingly, were the differences in the dreams. Both of those sets of individuals were dreaming at the time of going through those difficult emotional experiences.

38:43Some of them, however, were dreaming of that challenging experience, others were not. Those who dreamt, but also dreamt of the problematic experience were the ones who went on to get clinical resolution from their depression, those who dreamt, but did not dream of those events, seemed to be the ones who did not get clinical remission from their depression. In other words, here once again is this new rule that when it comes to dreaming, it's not just about sleep, it's not just about dreaming, it's about dreaming of the specific things that you're trying to get the functional benefit from, whether that's creativity and insight, or whether it's emotional resolution and overnight therapy.

39:28Both of them seem to depend very much on the expression of dreaming of specific things itself. And we'll come on to why that's maybe relevant when we speak about lucidity too. What you just said is very reassuring, at least to me, because when I'm going through a challenging phase, which somehow seems to happen periodically in my life at a frequency that, let's just say, keeps me dreaming about things. You're not alone by the way, but I'm sure I'm not, which is no, I didn't mean that I just mean that there are lots of people who can resonate with that, so thank you for being vulnerable and sharing.

40:04Yeah, it's one of these things where I put my head down on the pillow, fall asleep, and on, assuming I can get good sleep, it emits those real life events, which is something that sometimes is the case sometimes is not. I always dream about things related to those events or those events in particular, and I'm a long time practitioner of writing down my dreams when I wake up from them, or as we discussed in an earlier episode, my phone is on airplane mode at night. Typically, I'll grab my phone and I'll hit the voice memo button or function rather, and I'll just, you know, in my groggy state with my eyes closed, so I'm not getting any light in my eyes.

40:48I'll say, you know, I'll describe what I can recall of the dream. Then I'll sometimes go back and listen to those recordings, and they've provided me in sight and in some cases a path to solutions. So I'm 100 % on board the fact that our dreams can help us resolve challenges in our waking day. What's always fascinating to me though is how the dreams are not a one -for -one representation of what happened during the day. I think symbolism is a hallmark feature of dreams. That's something I know we're going to talk about in terms of dream interpretation, and much has been made of this throughout history.

41:26So it seems that when we're asking what are the functions of dreaming, one of them is to resolve challenges from our daytime experience. It's emotional first aid. That's beautifully put. And in an earlier episode on learning memory and creativity, you described how specific sleep stages and perhaps dreams themselves are involved in the consolidation of memories from daytime experiences. Or things that we're trying to learn from daytime experiences. And then in the episode on sleep and emotions, it was made very clear that rapid eye movement sleep is a time in which we get a sort of therapy. That is a disentangling of the emotional load of a given experience from the experience.

42:14So to me it just seems so clear. Like dreams are critical. Sleep is critical. But I think one question that still remains unresolved at least for me is our dream is really there to just be a replay of our waking lives. With some distortion because when the conscious mind is asleep, the unconscious mind can kind of throw things up to the surface in ways that don't seem so obvious. Like symbolism analogy, some of us are more visual than others. You know, are there any rules about the way that dreams convert our waking experiences into dream content? And there are. And the short answer to your question, do we simply go into sleep, start dreaming and then rewind the video tape and replay in a faithful recapitulation, the waking day in our dreaming night.

43:11And the answer is no. And here again, the scientist I mentioned before Robert Stickle with raw Fosse, they looked at this question. And it was a very difficult city to do. They did what we call experience sampling during the day. And they would give you sort of like a little beeper and they would set it to go off multiple times throughout the day. And then you would write down what it is that you were experiencing right in that moment. And again, they were trying to build up this sort of time lapse photography as it were of your waking day experience. And then they would bring people in and they would start to record their dreams at night.

43:51And then they would match those two and ask, what is the degree of overlap? What is the Venn diagram proportional percentage of those two things aligning? And what they found was that there was really only about 2 % of your dreaming life that was a very faithful replay and reiteration of your waking life. However, what they did find was something even more interesting to me which comes back to this idea of overnight therapy. They found that there is something that runs through like a red thread narrative from your waking life into your dreaming life. That is emotional concerns and people of significance.

44:38If there is anything in terms of an algorithm that seems to overlap and predict where those two Venn diagrams sort of collide, it really is in the emotional, personal significance space. Once again pointing us to perhaps a reaffirmation that a key function of dreaming is about dealing with our waking experiences and particularly the things that are salient to us. Okay, so clearly there's a functionality to dreaming. But what should we make of the specific content of our dreams? Really. Should we interpret our dreams or should we allow anyone else to interpret our dreams? There are scores of books out there, websites, programs, there's a long history of this in classic psychoanalysis.

45:30What about this dream interpretation business? I mean it really started you have to give credit in some ways to Freud. Although if you look back at very ancient cultures, so much of their artwork, so much of the sort of left imprint on the world suggests that they were fascinated by dreams and used dreams and gods of dreams. So we've always been thinking about what are these things called dreams and can we interpret them? But it was really Freud who put his seminal works together in 1899 and then published it in 1901 called the interpretation of dreams. And it's probably one of his most famous texts.

46:18And you can unfurly sum it up as if it's not one thing to your mother when it comes to Freud. But in some ways Freud with his interpretation attempt in my mind was 50 % right and 100 % wrong. Because until the moment that Freud came along, we left the interpretation and the instigation of our dreams to things outside of us. Maybe it was there were comments that it was due to our soul or it was from the gods on high that they would descend down these dream manifestos to us. But Freud, full credit, was the first person to put dreams front and center into this thing called the brain, the mind. So in some ways Freud shifted dream science from really more of a sort of spiritual philosophical condition to very much a neuro science.

47:23It was of the mind and therefore of the brain. And earlier he had he would try to describe the neural patterns and he had these beautiful drawings of neuronal circuits that could try to explain what was going on. But neuroscience was so enemic at the time in terms of its knowledge. He had no chance to do what we can do now. So in some ways it's very unfair of me to criticize him as his theory being non scientific. It is also non scientific in the very strict sense of the word when we create a scientific theory just as though he created his interpretation of dreams theory. We allow that theory to be testable, which is to say that a scientific theory is only a scientific theory if it can be falsified or supported.

48:16But Freud's theory was not a scientific theory. It was not something that you could test and therefore it was not able to be falsified or affirmed. And in some ways it was Freud's simultaneous downfall and his utter genius. It's the reason that Freud remains to this day because we can't put him in a way in a box and say we've disproven him but we equally will never be able to prove him. And therefore he's been in some ways let go in hard science as being representative. His theory which we don't need to get into which was called disguised censorship was really a very interesting proposition which was that there was something about our dreams that was veiled and masked.

49:12And Freud believed that he understood the decryption code to our dreams. And if you tell him your dream he has the special filter that he can pull that dream through the filter and magically out on the other side is the true meaning of that dream. There are several problems with that theory. Not least of which I think you know at the time if you look at his writings seemed that Freud was probably doing enough cocaine to kill a small horse at the time but we'll put that aside for a second. The issue there is that it's not very replicable as an analysis method. And there's a fascinating study that was I remember from a conference I should check to see if it's been fully published.

49:59And they did something clever. They took the Freudian method and they took a single dream from one individual. And they had three Freudian psychoanalysts analyze that dream. So it was the same dream with three different analysts. Now in a scientific protocol if it's a scientifically rigorous assessment tool you would get back the very same answer from that measurement technique all three times. Or very similar. So for example carbon dating machine. If I were to take a fossil and put it in a carbon dating machine and then another one and another one for the most part they're probably going to return something that's much more similar than different in terms of the carbon date of that fossil.

50:46Why? Because it's been very well validated and replicated. That's what you want from a scientific method and tool. But when they gave the single dream the fossil as it were to these three different interpreters, the three different carbon dating machines as who are they all came up with completely different interpretations. And so that's not necessarily a reliable valid method. So in that sense we've abandoned and let go of Freud as being relevant or meaningful. However, I personally and I think if you look at the data I don't mean that to suggest that you should not try to think about and quote unquote interpret your dreams.

51:32And the term interpret when it comes to dreams is so loaded so I tend to I would just simply say see if you can really deconstruct some of your dreams. I think dreaming just as we've spoken about is a very solid window into the things that you should be concerned about from your waking life. It's very obvious that whatever it is that we typically dream or the things that our brain is telling us the human being. This is the stuff that's essential. This is the stuff you need to work through this is please pay attention to me. And any amount of journaling or deliberation digestion, cogitation of that specific dream is going to be beneficial to you.

52:21Because in my mind a life unexamined is not a life well lived and that isn't just applicable to your waking life. It's especially applicable to your dreaming life. Now does that mean I suggesting that everyone should race out and start cataloging and interpreting their dreams not necessarily. But I am saying that if you wish to do that, I as a scientist based on the data, I'm not telling you that that's who we in non scientific. I think it's very valid. It's just that some of the Freudian principles. I think we've been able to dislocate ourselves from. I wholeheartedly agree with what you just said.

53:03And I've spoken about dreams and their possible relevance to clinicians, psychiatrists such as Paul Conti and others. Some who have more of a psychoanalytic training than others, but I certainly folks like Paul know a ton of neuroscience. They understand pharmacology. They understand family systems models, dialectical therapy and so many other men is he's extraordinary. He's not extraordinary. He is extraordinary. And in part because he can synthesize across all these different domains of psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, etc. as opposed to just be existing in one silo like psychoanalysis or psychopharmacology.

53:44And there are others, although few as extraordinary as Paul, which is why we hosted him on the series here. And one of the things that has come up in the discussions with Paul and others with similar training about dreams is that dreams seem to present us with emotional states and scenarios for which they are. There's a lot of swapping in and out of identity. So for instance, the notion of symbols within dreams is a longstanding conversation. And I think one of the mistakes as I understand it is to assume that every time there's an animal in your dream that it represents children or that every time it's a particular kind of animal it represents, you know, you know, your boss or something.

54:28Sometimes the cigar is just a cigar. Right. Right. On the other hand, it's very clear that within our dreams, there's rarely a completely linear one -for -one relationship with what happened in the daytime of real experience. So there seems to be a swapping in and out. And there I just sort of zoom out and forgive me for going along here. But I think this would be a good fodder for exploring this a little bit more deeply. You know, one of the best descriptions of brain function that I've ever heard is from the Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist Richard Axel at Columbia, who often talks about the brain creating abstractions of the outside world.

55:05So if I were to take a photo of your face, for instance, and then show you that photograph, you'd say, yeah, that's me. But if I were a painter, I might, you know, swap some of the positions of components of your face and show it to you. And you might say, well, that doesn't look like me. And I'd say, but that's my abstraction of your face. So to me, it makes sense because I understand the rules by which I made those swaps and moves. There's some algorithms or rules that are known to me. So there's a preservation of real world to the abstraction. And that's really what our brain does all the time.

55:34It attempts to faithfully represent the the world around us, but it is indeed an abstraction. And when it comes to the colors of things, the position of objects, it's as one for one as our brain is capable of. But when it comes to ideas, to feelings, to our relationships, to other people, the brain abstracts those in its own little neural symphony of this is the relationship to my dog. This is the relationship to my friend and colleague, Matt Walker. So it makes sense that in dreams, those algorithms could be different. They could be faster or slower. But they could also be entirely different.

56:09I don't think we yet know what the algorithms of transformation of real world experience to dream experience are. And once we do, and I think somebody we will understand those through electrical recordings and MRI type experiments and some of the experiments you talked about earlier point to this. And so I think it's entirely reasonable to assume that we each have our own unique abstraction algorithms so that indeed we can have consistent representation of real world experiences and symbols, but that it's not going to be the same for everybody. Right. Your way of abstracting your real life to your dream life could be entirely unique to you.

56:51And mine could be entirely unique to me, making it very difficult for a third party to come in and say, okay, Matt, here's what your dream means. But you can know what your dream means. If you explore your dreams over time, not just that one dream. Does that make sense? It makes total sense because in some ways, there is no one who knows your own autobiography by definition than you than yourself. Now, I'm not suggesting that having that interpretation guided by someone who also understands the emotional problems that you're having and also sees your blind spots, which is what a really good therapist can do can then help with that interpretation.

57:28But you're right because my representation of information in the brain is going to be very biased by also what I've experienced in the past and how that past experience augments and modulates the current representation of that information and thus the meaning of it for me, the unique individual. And you're also right to say that it's somehow, you know, it's almost as though you're squinting your eyes when you're in dream sleep in terms of the true vision of things, things get a little bit wacky and distorted this bizarre nature. There is some very interesting data and it comes back to what we described earlier than your chemistry of the REM sleep state.

58:15I told you that during REM sleep, levels of noradrenaline are at floor levels. Noradrenaline is shut off. One of the things if you sort of drop noradrenaline onto neural circuits, it will very much increase what we call the signal to noise. And this is why noradrenaline when it's released or if you administer it to an animal, you can become very, you can become almost more directed. You're much more divergent, you're focused in attending and it's really there, you're very blinkered, you're very focused. But when that goes away, the neural circuits become a little bit more loosey goosey. And I also told you that the other chemical, if there is a neurochemical that defines REM sleep dreaming, it's this thing called acetalcoline.

59:03And acetalcoline seems to do the opposite. It seems to inject a little bit more noise relative to the signal. So in other words, your brain circuits are neurochemically modulated when you dream to inject almost what we would think of as fuzzy logic. And this is why I think the analogy that we spoke about in a previous episode holds that when you are awake and you're given some information, you produce the most obvious links and obvious associations because you're very much blinkered and you have noradrenaline on board. But when you go into dream sleep, it's almost like the Google search, when you're awake, go straight to page one and it's very related.

59:48But do that same search when you're in the dream state and you go straight to page 35. And it's an utterly bizarre page. And you think, hang on a second, there's got nothing to do with the search time. When you read it, you think, well, if I squint my eyes, it kinda does. It's very distant, very non -obvious, but that's a very smart connection that as a waking brain, I never would have put together. So I think neurochemically we can start to understand it. But I think this is a very good, important point where you could almost say the very best person to interpret your dreams. It's probably you.

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1:01:33Again, that's join .woop .com slash huberman. Some dreams we'd rather not have. Here I'm specifically referring to nightmares. I've had one nightmare countless times throughout my life. I won't share what it is. It's not a real world experience, or at least it's not a one for one of real world experience, but I've had this nightmare since I was a kid. I have it seldom these days, but every time it starts again, I'm like, oh no, and this is a bit of a lucidity to it. I hear him again. I've been working on this one a while, as you can imagine. But given what we understand about the relationship between real world experiences and dreams, what should we make of the fact that we have nightmares?

1:02:21Let's just start there. The phenomenon of nightmares. Does it represent something that troubled us in the daytime and that we're trying to work out in our sleep? Then maybe we can get into some of the specifics around why, regardless of whether or not the answer to that question is yes or no, that we would have this thing called nightmares, especially given that there's all this machinery to make sure that we don't move in the noradrenaline as low in the brain while we're dreaming. It seems like there's all sorts of mechanisms to try and ensure that our dreams are very pleasant or at least neutral, but nightmares suck.

1:02:57So I'd love to know that they serve some utility. So nightmares, how do we define a nightmare in science clinically? It's a little bit tricky, but usually the way we define it is it's a strongly unpleasant dream that causes some time of daytime displeasure. So in other words, some type of daytime dysfunction or distress. So everyone can have a bad dream, but when you go up into your waking life and about your waking day, it doesn't seem to bother you too much. And maybe we'll just say that's a bad dream. When it really becomes a nightmare is when I almost think of it as though you wake up and that blanket of strong nightmare emotion is still wrapped around you and you can feel it.

1:03:49You can just know there's my emotional state is still heavy and I know exactly where it came from. And it was from that nightmare. And throughout the day, you don't seem to be able to derob yourself from that cloaked affect of the nightmare drenches you almost. That's where it really starts to become unpleasant. And we actually do have a clinical category. It's called nightmare disorder. And the way we typically define that is the same thing, as I said, a very unpleasant dream that causes some type of daytime distress and it's happening at least once a week. At that point, we start to move it into this category of nightmare disorder.

1:04:36What are nightmares doing, if anything at all, there are at least two theories. One is that it's simply the system, sort of failing the system gone wrong and we're not processing. We're not moving through things and therefore nightmares are maladaptive that not warranted. They're not normative. The other is that no, they are adaptive and they are meaningful. And it's us really trying to go to a very specific pain point and we continue to process it over and over. Perhaps the point where we get resolution, but sometimes we just don't, so it keeps cropping up. We don't have good data to disambiguate those two right now.

1:05:24So I think it still remains open at least I don't know of any data that tells me are they functional or are they mal adaptive. Even when we get that answer in some ways, it doesn't change the fact that it still leaves a patient with nightmares, with recurring nightmares. So then what do you do about that? How do we, is there any treatment for people out there if they're under this distress, is the hope? And for a long time, there really wasn't very much hope at all. You just had to go through it. But recently there was a method that was developed and it's very effective and it is called IRT, which stands for image rehearsal therapy.

1:06:13And its basis comes back to something that in fact we, I think hopefully published the first evidence in humans of some years ago now called memory consolidation. So in our episode on learning and memory, we said that there is at least sort of two main steps of memory. First you have to imprint and learn the memory, lay down that memory trace, but then that memory is very fragile and vulnerable to being overwritten by competing information knocked out of place. And for you to hold on to that memory, you have to go through a second step called memory consolidation of very slow process. It's like a very slow pressing of the save button because it's biological, it requires protein synthesis and all of that good stuff.

1:06:58But that always struck me as a strange model because it's the equivalent of opening up a word document. You type out all of the information into it and then you hit the save button. So I've encoded, imprinted the information that I've hit save and saved it and then I close that file. And then the next day I come back or some days later and I double click on that file again because I want to edit it. I either want to add to it or I want to revise it and change it. But according to that model, it's been locked in place and you could never edit that word document. That seems like a profoundly useless way to store information.

1:07:36And what we learned is that every time in subsequent days when you reactivate, which is to say when you recollect the memory that has been consolidated, it opens that memory file back up to once again being plastic and malleable. So you can go in and update the information in that memory store and then the next night you consolidate it again. In other words, you re -consolidate it. So it's memory updating and there is a very clear mechanism in the human brain that allows us to do this memory updating iteratively time and time again. This comes back to nightmare disorders. This therapy image rehearsal therapy or IRT will have you sit down with a therapist and at first you will describe the nightmare that you're going through and you'll write that narrative down.

1:08:33And then working with a therapist, you will agree to think about a more neutral ending to that nightmare. So let's say that I was involved in a very difficult car crash. It's just horrific and every night since I'd say at least once a week, I just continue to have the nightmare of the car crash. I know that I'm traveling towards the junction. I apply the brakes. The brakes have failed. I am just looking around. I'm trying to maneuver, but nothing is going to change this. I go through the red light and someone side swipes me and that's the end. And I relive that time and time again and it's awful.

1:09:20So you with the therapist or I with the therapist would then start to say, well, what about the alternative scenario? I depress the brake and the brakes don't work. But gradually I think, well, I'm just going to reach over to the handbrake. And I'm going to gradually apply the handbrake and that slowly is going to bring the car to a nice safe stop. And then I'm going to call the emergency services. The car is going to get towed. I don't go through the junction. I survive everything's fine. So you rehearse this alternate ending and you keep going through that, rehearsing that. And then you go to sleep the next night and you'll probably have a high chance of that nightmare again.

1:10:04But if you keep doing that, once you've got that alternative ending, essentially what you're trying to do is every time you reactivate the memory of the trauma car crash. And then you rehearse this alternate ending. It's like me going into the word document and editing the section that was really horrific and bad. And replacing it with something that's neutral or even positive. And over time, then I sleep and I will consolidate that memory. I'll come back the next day and I'll do some more editing and more updating and time of the time of the time. Gradually you dissipate the narrative that is fixed inside of the brain and the nightmare frequency decreases in proportion.

1:10:50Now it's not effective for 100 % of patients. If you look at the data on average, it's about two out of every three people. So about 66 % of people will benefit, which if you look at some medical treatments, that's that's a great treatment that's still very effective. There was a very recent study from Sophie Schwarz and her colleagues at the University of Geneva that did an even more ingenious study and they were able to nudge the effectiveness of that treatment from 66 % up to 92%. And they used an additional memory related research tool we've come up with in sleep science. And it's called TMR autocated memory reactivation.

1:11:40And here's how it goes. I'm going to have you learn a set of associations. Have you ever played that card game? I think in America it's called memory, which is very apt. Where you get a deck of cards and it has two of the same item, two houses, two cars, two fire engines, two kettles. And you shuffle the cards and then you put them face down in a big square and a big matrix. And over time you have to turn over one card and it's a kettle. And then I'm just going to randomly pick another card and it's a fire engine. But gradually you start to learn where each one of the powers are located. So what's clever about that is we would do that type of what's called a purd association memory test.

1:12:26You have you learn these purd associates and then we test your affinite of sleep and you're better. However, if for as you're turning those items over, I play a congruent sound. So let's say you turn over the fire engine and then when you turn over the other fire engine, I'm going to start playing a fire engine noise in the background. So I'm bonding the association of the memory card pairs with this tone, with this congruent sound. And then a kettle, I turn over a kettle, I turn over the other kettle and it's whistling. And then when you let people sleep at night, if you start replaying those same tones at a sub awakening threshold, so you're not waking people up.

1:13:15And you bring them back and let's say that you only do those sound queue reactivations for half of the memories that you've done and the other half you leave untouched. So within an individual, you have a unique within individual control. You test them on the things that you didn't reactivate at night and those that you did. It's almost like creating a bespoke playlist at night where you say, look, I learned all of this information during the day or wouldn't this be wonderful. And then here's the stuff that I really think personally to me, I want to remember. Well, it turns out I'd been tagging that with particular music and then at night I replay that music and the next day it turns out that those things I reactivated are much more strongly consolidated by way of sleep than those things I didn't.

1:14:02So that's the basic method of what we call TMR, targeted memory reactivation. What they did was something very clever. They had them go through this process of the image rehearsal therapy. They were rehearsing the alternate ending, but about every 10 seconds they were playing them this very pleasing piano chord in the background. And they were just bonding the association of the new outcome ending to the nightmare with this pleasant piano chord. And then sure enough in the subsequent weeks afterwards, not only was that person day after day doing the diligent therapy practice of rehearsing the memory whilst the piano tone was playing.

1:14:45But then at night they would wait until they went into REM sleep, which is the state we think the emotional therapy begins. And they would start to replay that same piano chord over and over again. And sure enough, those people who had image rehearsal therapy standard, they improved by about 6 % in the nightmare frequency reduction. Those people who did that, plus the memory reactivation at night, it drove it from 66 % all the way up to 92%. So now modern day neuroscience with its techniques is starting to overlap with classical clinical psychology, and we're developing these next forefront of methods that really harness and fine tune the brain's ability to undergo effective therapy.

1:15:37It's incredible. I mean, I think that we've known about classical conditioning for a long time, and the case of Pavlov's dogs is the most known of those. Am I right in recalling that this paired association way of bringing about certain memories or strengthening certain memories in sleep can also be accomplished with odors. That it's not just the playing of tones during specific experiences, but also for instance, if one were to pair a particular odor with a certain novel memory event in the daytime or attempt to learn something new, that if that odor is then infused into the room of the sleeping person later that night, that somehow the memories would be strengthened.

1:16:24Do I have that correct? There's nothing right. So before I say anything, nothing wrong with your memory. That was one of the seminal papers that started this whole movement, and what they did was they had them learn this kind of per dissociative card test, but they were wearing this mask almost looks like a fighter pilot mask, and they were either puffing up in that hour. That was that didn't smell at all, or they were refusing this very pleasant rose scent because smell in particular has a very unique relationship with our memory in part because we emerged, you know, from animals that were principally use smell as their navigational tool.

1:17:05I think everyone has had this experience where you bond a certain cologne or a certain perfume with a particular individual. So they were puffing the rose perfume up the nose of these participants, and then when they went into sleep, they started to reap a fuse that rose odor. Now, what was clever also about the experiment? You could say, well, look, just any time you get something that smells puffed up your nose, your memory is going to be better. Now, the initial experiment had them learning the information when they're awake with the rose scent getting pushed up the nose, and then when they slept, they had the rose odor again.

1:17:43Another group did had learning, but they had no rose smell pushed up their nose to bond with the information at the time of learning when they were awake, and then when they slept, they also had rose odor stuffed up their nose, and they showed no additional benefit. So it's not just enough to have rose odor at night, you need to have made the initial bonded familiar connection with the novel information that you're learning to get the subsequent targeted memory reactivation benefit. And you could then think, well, practical tools, what should I do? Maybe, you know, when I'm learning for studying for a test, I should blaze up my, you know, my most preferred incense, and I'm, I have a particular proclivity to green tea incense.

1:18:29It turns out, and maybe then before I go to bed at night, I get a couple of sticks, and I, you know, blaze them back up, took my head on the pillow, turned the light out. However, do not do that, because it's probably a desperate fire, as it is. So do not listen to me, but you could think about doing something along those lines, perhaps. Anyway, and so that's targeted memory reactivation. Yeah, it's a perfect segue for what I wanted to talk about next, which is lucid dreaming. But before we move to lucid dreaming, I'm wondering whether or not there's an opportunity here to construct an experiment, maybe even a protocol of sorts, to uncouple the negative experience of nightmares to our daily experience.

1:19:17So for instance, we're talking about paired association based on odors or sounds replayed in sleep to sort of nudge or conjure particular daytime memories to the surface in the form of dream sleep. Yeah. But we also know that one can uncouple associations. So for instance, if one experienced something negative, maybe this is being attempted in the realm of trauma therapy. And that experience was paired with a particular odor, I'd be hard to do with visual cues and sleep or sound, could one attempt to introduce a sort of a competing sound, you know, set up a sort of a collision stimulus so that in sleep, the dream would no longer contain the scary content, or it would be less scary.

1:20:14Or is this exactly the wrong approach, because if we believe that the nightmares are serving some functional purpose, allowing us to work through and really don't want to do. Right. Okay, great. Then we answered the question. Well, no, I think it's, I think it's unclear right now, but you're on the right line because there is something that we have in learning and memory called fear extinction. And let's say that I were to sort of classic Pavlovian learning Pavlov's dogs, let's say I show you a specific image on the screen, and then you hear a specific tone, and then you get an electric shock.

1:20:52I show you the stimulus on the screen, you hear the specific tone, and then you get an electrical shock that I don't show you the stimulus on the screen. But you do still hear the tone, and then what happens is that you have a brace response to the electrical shock, and there's all sorts of combinations in between of that. But essentially, I condition you to learn that these things seem to be associated with a negative outcome, the inverse being the Pavlovian dog, which is that you ring a bell, you showed the dog some food and it celebrates you ring the bell, show the dog some food and it celebrates.

1:21:28And then you ring the bell, you don't give it some food and it still celebrates because it knows that the bell precedes the meat being shown, and I actually mixed my order around there in my own experience to begin with. But then there's something different that you can do, you can start to perhaps change the sound or the bonded connection, and then you don't start getting the shock anymore. So that same ringing of the bell now is no longer consistently associated with the food, and gradually you de -condition the dog such that after some time it learns, oh, I started to learn that the bell predicted food, but now it no longer does, and it takes some time to remove that, and that's what we call extinction.

1:22:17You've induced an association, and then you've gradually extinguish it by way of that alternate training method. So the question then became, could we use that type of method, but during sleep, could we train you up on a fear memory, and then just begin the early signs of extinguishing, of de -conditioning you, but then we don't do that very much, we wait until sleep, and we continue the de -conditioning protocol, and sure enough sleep seems to be as if not more effective at extinguishing those fear memories. Then when you enact the protocol during wakefulness, so here is a very good example of where you can use this sleep dependent memory processing tapestry, this opportunity to harness not just to strengthen memories that you wish to keep, but start to extinguish memories, you wish to remove.

1:23:16So I think it's a very exciting, it's right on the cusp of what we're starting to do right now, but I love it because I think some people would like to experience certain dreams and other people would like to not experience certain nightmares, which reminds me of a tool that Rick Rubin taught me. I don't know of any experiments that support this directly, but I've tried this, and it certainly has worked first time in every time, which is Rick said, if you wake up from a dream, and you want to remember your dream, or and or you found it pleasant or interesting, lay there completely still with your eyes closed, and it will come to you.

1:23:56Whereas if you wake up from a nightmare, which many people do, and in a state of anxiety, and you have a hard time kind of shaking the disturbing affect associated with that nightmare, to move your body, get up and move your body, and maybe even flip some lights on something that normally I don't suggest in the middle of the night, but waking up from a nightmare can be quite difficult. It's quite disturbing, and it can be disturbing enough that it makes it difficult to fall back asleep. So, and by the way, he's right. I don't know if he's read the science, or it's just knowing Rick, he's probably just because he's so yodelike, he's probably intuitive.

1:24:33There's supernatural levels of insight. He's tens of thousands of scientific articles, but he's absolutely right. One of the ways, if you really wish to remember your dreams, is not just jump up out of bed and start trying to write them down, don't lie in bed, keep your eyes closed, and gradually rehearse that dream over and over in your mind, almost as though you're scoring it into the etched surface, your memory trace more and more, and gradually when you've re -competulated and piecebacked the jigsaw puzzle, then gradually open your eyes, start to dictate, start to write down, but don't do it immediately, because as soon as you start doing it, it begins to float away, it begins to dissolve in a way that's either sort of, you know, you're running and you're trying to reach out and dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper, start to dig deeper Yeah, yeah.

1:25:26That's why I used the voice memos. Last night I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream and I decided to turn on voice memos, and I remember thinking, I'll remember this in the morning and I remember, you never remember this in the morning. I get it right. There's a perfect segue for lucid dreaming, which is the awareness that we are dreaming well in a dream. Is lucid dreaming real? Can we train ourselves to lucid dream? And what is the value of lucid dreaming? Is it just a fun game we can play? Is there any, is there any reason we should attempt to lucid dream if we don't already or encourage more lucid dreaming or even any reason we shouldn't, perhaps lucid dreaming you beautifully gave the definition, loosely defined lucid dreaming is that you simply know that you're dreaming whilst you are dreaming.

1:26:14So in other words, as the dream is unfolding, you gain a awareness of this is a dream, but I'm still dreaming at that moment by science definition, you are in a state of lucidity, but most people don't really mean that when they say, or I'm a lucid dreamer, they mean yes, I become a word that I'm dreaming as I am dreaming. And then I take over the reins of control and then starting to decide exactly what it is you dream and how you dream. So now I'm on the ground and I'm walking through a park and I decide that I just want to take off and I want to fly over the river or I want to fly out over San Francisco Bay and take a tour.

1:27:02So I decide to start flying. That is what most people think of as lucid dreaming. If you were to think about it, this thing called dreaming as we've described is utterly absurd as a state based on its psychotic kind of nature and characteristics to then start to say it's that idiotic and strange and bizarre, but PS, I can also take control of it and decide what I want to do with it, injects a whole dose of disbelief into a process that's not going to be a good idea. It's already unbelievable by itself. So science for a while just thought, this is Charlotte and type stuff that these people claim that they can control their dreams.

1:27:50How can you ever prove that? Because don't forget when you go into REM sleep and you dream, you are paralyzed. So I can't just wake up and say I was lucid dreaming, that's not proof. I have to in some ways be able to demonstrate that I'm lucid dreaming as I begin to become lucid, but I can't because I can't communicate with you as the scientist. Well, it turns out that you can. One of the things we spoke about in the first episode is that yes, you get these rapid eye movements but think about what that means. I told you that when you dream, your brain paralyzes all of your voluntary muscles so that you can dream and dream safely and you don't act out your dreams with the exception that at least two muscle groups, your extra ocular muscles that move your eyes and your in ear muscles.

1:28:39For some reason, they are spurred from the paralysis so you can still move, otherwise you could never have rapid eye movements. So the eyes all of a sudden because we have electrodes up top and below and left and right sides, we can measure what you're doing with your eyes during sleep. In fact, we have to do this to determine are you awake or are you in REM sleep? The brain activity by itself doesn't tell us that we measure your muscle activity and if you lose muscle activity and your brain is very active and the eye channels that we're recording start to show these darting back and forth signals.

1:29:15We know your in REM sleep that's how we define it. So in that then suggested to us we can use the eye movements to create a form of more code signaling from the participant to the experimenter. And so let's say that with this claimed lucid dreamer who comes to my sleep center will create a very specific greed upon code which is that as you start dreaming, I can see that. And when you become lucid in that dream, firstly give me three left wood flicks of your eyes. We never see that in dreaming. It's a very deliberative act. And then when you say, okay, I've started the lucid dreaming and you've agreed with the experimenter that you're then going to start moving your hands.

1:30:02You're going to start to move your right hand. Well, when you start to move your right hand, give me four flicks to the right and we are moving your left hand in the dream. Give me four flicks to the left. And so there we create this very specific instigational code. But then how does that help us? Well, we can have you sleeping in a brain scanner. And before the brain scanning session when you sleep, I have you just go into the brain scanner awake. And I say move your left hand and your right motor cortex is going to be lighting up. And then I'm going to say move your right hand and your left motor cortex is going to be lighting up.

1:30:46And for you and me, I build up a very unique map of your left hand motor memory representation and your right hand motor memory representation. And if it's the left hand, as I said, it's the right side of the brain. It's the right hand. It's the left side of the brain. So now I've got ground truth as to where your hand representation is on your motor cortex in my brain scanner. And then I'm going to put you back in the brain scanner, let you go into sleep, let you start dreaming. Then you give me three left flicks. Good. This person has now become lucid. And now he's doing four right word flicks, which means he's clasping his right hand over and over again.

1:31:28And then he gives me four left word flicks, which means he switched over. He's now using his left hand in his dream. By the way, I'm looking at the participants inside of the brain scanner through the glass. And of course, they're not moving their hand. Why? Because they're paralyzed. But in the dream, they are claiming based on their eye movements that they are moving their hands. We bring them back out of the brain scanner and we analyze their brain scans during the period when they said, I'm moving my right hand and moving my left hand. What did we see? Sure enough, we saw the same and we being the royal way.

1:32:03So great city by a German group. Sure enough, you see exactly the same pattern. It was scientific ground truth evidence that when a lucid dream acclaims they are doing something in their dream, the brain scans that we received confirmed that indeed that's exactly what was happening. It's just that none of the signal is being sent out to the periphery to the limbs because there's that that cuts off at the spinal cord descending inhibition. Yeah, at the level of the alpha motor neurons if you'll spinal cord. Incredible. So here we are talking about lucid dreaming, which is a kind of mixed level of consciousness dreaming, of course, but also lucidity.

1:32:42That is an awareness that one is dreaming. Now in just about every one of the five episodes leading up to this six episode in this series, you emphasize the key importance of deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. And in many ways, some of the problems that arise from waking up in the middle of the night too many times or being in shallow sleep as opposed to deep sleep. Lucid dreaming, it seems, is a kind of a case of light sleep because of one's awareness or is it? So that's one the first question. And then just very quickly and anecdote when I was a kid, I used to read these like boys life magazines and those kind of things.

1:33:23I forget what they were called, but in the back they would have these these ads for products like x ray glasses or, you know, or see monkeys, which turned out to be Brian shrimp. What a disappointment that was. And I thought there were monkeys on the package. They were little monkeys, but they were Brian shrimp. There was a product advertised that I, in fact, purchased, which was an I mask that had a little blinking red light in one corner. And it said learn to lucid dream. And the idea was that you would put this thing on and look at the red light just prior to going to sleep and then you go to sleep with this thing on and then at some point in your sleep you would see or think that you saw the red light flashing.

1:34:07And the idea was that because you were in the I mask, you were in enough of a dream that you would be able to link the waking state recognition of the light, et cetera. So, okay, people get it. I purchased that product. I used it. I thought perhaps there was an effect, quote unquote, where I could lucid dream. But I wouldn't consider myself an avid lucid dreamer, although sometimes I am aware that I'm dreaming. And usually it's in pleasant dreams, in which case, I'm usually like, yeah, let's keep this going. Things like flying and being, you know, particularly talented in a sport that in my waking life, I have to ask for a minimum.

1:34:44Things like that. Okay, so is lucid dreaming a case of shallow sleep and therefore something to avoid or is lucid dreaming something quite different? And is there any advantage to learning to lucid dream or enhancing one's amount of lucid dreaming. And if so, how should one go about that? So I'll take the question, should you be lucid dreaming? And I think I can argue it both sides right now and we don't have a very clear answer yet. The first side is if you take a step back and ask from an evolutionary perspective, let's assume for want of a better worth that lucid dreaming is helpful. It's meaningful and that we should engage in it.

1:35:29If that's the case that it confers some type of evolutionary benefit, then you would expect that a lot of people would be doing it. But if you look at the statistics somewhere between maybe just 10 to 20 % of the population are natural lucid dreamers. And so from an evolutionary perspective, I could say, well, if it was so powerful, it was so meaningful. Because we know everyone sleeps and for the most part we can say that almost everyone dreams. If that's the case, then those must clearly serve a purpose. But the fact that very few people are lucid dreamers, doesn't that tell us that it isn't necessarily beneficial?

1:36:11So from that perspective, I can play those numbers. There is an inherent flaw in my argument, the however, because that assumes based on the argument, I've just given you that we have stopped evolving. And of course, we have not. And so perhaps that 10 to 10 to 20 % of the population who are natural lucid dreamers are at the forefront of hominid evolution. And they're the next super rate. We shouldn't be worried about AI. We should be worried about the lucid dreamers because they're going to come and take over the world. So I can argue it from that perspective, which is just a philosophical argument.

1:36:54It doesn't have weighted data to it. But there is some data. Some individuals have asked the question, is there any changes to your sleep or even the benefits of sleep when you are a lucid dreamer versus not? And what's interesting is that for some papers that have been published, after nights when people report lucid dreaming, they wake up and they don't feel as restored. They don't feel as refreshed by their sleep in the morning, suggesting just as you sort of hinted at the that the lucid dreaming state is associated with perhaps a less deep or more shallow form of REM sleep or a more active state of REM sleep, perhaps too active so that it's fatiguing and depleting.

1:37:41And upon awakening, you don't get that memory and that body, that brain and body reset. There are however a few papers that have not found that result. So I think right now we don't truly know if the lucid state is associated with unrefreshing sleep and unrestorative sleep. But if that proves true, then I think that that's one argument. The other argument I would put forward against it from that perspective would be think about what we've said regarding the functions of dreaming memory processing, but particularly emotional therapy to gift us mental health. If we then come along and say presumably nature through millions of years of evolution has come up with this blueprint manifesto of exactly what should be served up on the dream menu this evening.

1:38:42That's there's a reason for that and that reason has been sculpted over millions of years to become wonderfully optimal for us and our emotional mental health. And then we come along in the space of a lifetime and perhaps you could argue a little bit humoristically we think I perhaps know a little bit better than a couple of million years of evolution. I'm going to push those things off the rank ordering chart of what gets served up into my dreams and I'm going to supersede that and decide what I would prefer to be dreaming about. And again, I think that there's no good evidence that you could argue that that isn't true, but equally that it is true.

1:39:25We just don't know yet. If that is the case that lucid dreaming does produce unrestaurative sleep in some ways it also begs the question, well, what is happening in your brain during lucid dreaming is the inner thing in your brain that would explain why you don't feel refreshed. And early study is looking at lucid dreamers when we put them inside of a brain scanner. I told you at the start of this episode dreams deep as a unique brain signature memory regions emotion regions, motor regions and visual regions. They're all lighting up. But then there's this one part of your brain that does the opposite, which is the lateral left and right sides of your prefrontal cortex, the logical rational thinking controlling regions of your brain, those go offline.

1:40:16But early studies demonstrated that the activity, including the electrical activity over those frontal regions, would be down as you are in non lucid dreaming. But then when people rise back up and said, now I'm lucid dreaming with those leftward flicks, that activity was brought back online, which makes a lot of mechanistic sense, which is all of a sudden the part of your brain that prevented you from having rational logical control has been reengaged and as a consequence, you yourself can reengage in volitional dictation of the outcome of what you're dreaming. Some studies, however, have not replicated that finding because when they looked at it and they took out some sort of what we call these co -variants or these confounding factors and I can bore you with what that principally is, it removed that result and all of a sudden the prefrontal cortex went back to seemingly being non active.

1:41:22They did find an alternate result, what they found is that the electrical activity of the brain, when you go into a lucid dreaming state, seems to be a bit more frenetic, a bit more active versus non lucid dreaming states of electrical brain activity. And if that's the case, if the cortex, which is already active, is forced to become even more frenetically active when you are in this lucid dream state, is that part of the reason that when you wake up from the lucid dreaming and you go about your day, your brain just doesn't seem to be at the same operating ability because it's been fatigue above and beyond, it's like saying, I do a standard workout and I always go to, you know, one or two reps.

1:42:10Before failure, but now as I'm lucid dreaming, I am constantly going to complete muscle failure. And then the next few days, if you go and do a workout and I've been listening to you and I've been trading workouts, I don't want to do an Andrew human workout. Trust me, you are this man is minor short short and sweet. I'm well, let's we'll work at it some point together, but it's it's almost as though then no big surprise that after you do a leg stay. If I were to wake you up the next day and say you're back doing legs, she's like, I can't do that. I'm toast, I'm host, my legs are done. And that's what we think could perhaps explain why you get that fatigue.

1:42:50Does that make some sense? Makes very good sense. And you know, in the absence of better language to put to it, I've long thought that one of the best things about sleep is that we are not engaging our frontal cortex that much. And as we talked about in an earlier episode, the frontal cortex during waking is responsible for things such as the suppression of reflexes. I mean, it has to do that according to context of a situation. It's a lot of work. And the frontal cortex does a great number of other things as well, but I think one of the most wonderful things about sleep is that we get release and a break from all of that analysis of duration path and outcome.

1:43:34You know, what's how long is something going to take? What path is it? Do I need to take an order together? What's the outcome going to be all that analysis of things past, present, and future? It's work. It's mental, it's mental work. And I think that if you tell me and I think you just did that lucid dreaming involves any kind of encroachment of duration path outcome type of analysis into my sleep, my personal preference is going to be to not lucid dream. I'd rather just have very robust perhaps, you know, dreams of different kinds and try and make sense of them once I wake up. It's so tempting though, isn't it?

1:44:09Because like you, I've had those experience. I remember an amazing dream where I was snowboarding and I'm I am a below average snowboarder. And all of a sudden I was just taking jumps and I was doing all sorts of X game. You're Sean White. I was I was unbelievable. And I felt so and I was so happy in the moment. And I remember waking up and just thinking firstly, I'm sad I'm waking up right and second that was so blind. And all I want to do tomorrow night is go back. And now I'm going to switch my snowboard out for a dirt bike. And I'm going to do the dirt bike X games version of it. I'm going to be doing also to Superman.

1:44:54And I can't get greedy with mother nature. I know I know she bodies. I get it. I know if people out there are, you know, enjoying it or wanting to do that. And by the way, I didn't answer. I'm so sorry. Your red light question, which is if you wanted to do it, how can you do it if you're not doing it already. There are in fact two scientific methods that have been developed. One of them actually has a vague with of relationship to the light device, although that's one of those things where if you know for friends sent it to me or a random person said, Oh, Dr. Graff, I've seen this in the back of a magazine.

1:45:34I do think it works. I would just say, please go and spend your $199 on something that is going to be. Yeah, I think it was about 11 or 12 years old. I think it cost something like 10, 99 or something, which at the time for me was a lot of money. But I had a paper out. I had a paper out back then. I had a little bit of a dispensable income. But it was cool because it was probably one of my first experiments. I've been running experiments. I was a kid, but I think self experimentation can be fun. Oh, it's great. And you can see that. But sorry, coming back to your red light, the two methods, one of them is something called the mild technique, which stands for the mnemonic induction of lucid dreaming M I L D mnemonic, just meaning a memory based technique induction.

1:46:20Obviously what we're trying to induce something and what is it we're trying to induce lucid dreaming. And it's a very simple technique, which is that you consistently rehearse before bed this notion that I will remember my dreams and I will instigate control in my dreams. And you do this. And it sounds just so hokie and non -settip. Sure enough, you do this over and over again. The probability that you will lucid dream increases. I think the better one that maybe the more effective one is called the reality testing method. And it was probably made famous in a brilliant movie. If you haven't seen it, everyone should watch it.

1:47:02It's called Waking Life. And it is an amazing Richard link later, the director. It just for the philosophy alone in it, it will blow your mind. It's exceptional. But it's a beautiful treatise on dreaming and lucid dreaming. And in that they describe a method where during the waking day, you are constantly perhaps you can set an alarm and you're constantly reminded to go over to let's say the wall and flip the light switch on and off. On and off, on and off. And sure enough what happens, the lights go on and off. Why? Because it's the real world. And it complies and it's complicit with the laws of physics.

1:47:46So you do this time and time again and you start to train yourself that at unique moments throughout your waking experience, you always go over and you test some version of reality. And it could just be, I'm going to press my hand into something solid. And this table is resisting my hand right now as I'm pressing it. I just keep doing that. And then at some point it becomes routine enough that you start to do that same thing when you are dreaming. But now when I press my hand against the table or press my hand against the wall, my hand goes straight through the wall. Or I flip the light switch on and off and the lights do nothing.

1:48:24And all of a sudden that's my cue to say, I'm not awake. Am I? I'm dreaming. And therefore at that point I gain lucidity and it increases the probability. So those are the two methods that people have used and statistically scientifically they do seem to have some degree of success. I love it. I love it. I personally am going to opt to not encourage lucidity dreaming because I'm in myself because I'm working on getting my sleep deeper and longer through the night with fewer waking episodes. We will get that we will get there using the tools described in the previous end this episode of the series that we're doing here.

1:49:08My sleep's been excellent at times, pretty good at other times and and lousy at others, which I think makes me well qualified to talk about tools for sleep because I feel like I've come at it from every level of performance. Very much. And by the way, shield and sorting hand them right there by your side, we'll we'll make it happen to. Well, thank you truly. Okay, so sadly we are nearing the end of this six episode series and here we are in the sixth episode. However, last night before leaving the studio, I decided to put out a word on social media on XAK Twitter and on Instagram asking people what questions they have about sleep.

1:49:52And I made it very broad band, you know, I said ask anything you want about sleep. Matt Walker will will do his best to answer. And of course we had thousands and thousands and thousands of questions. And we're great. Let's push on through till dawn, which completely violates every one of the six episode. No benefit will struggle. However, we were able to bin those responses into most frequently asked, most frequently liked, etc. And so while we can't ask every question of you, what I thought would be fun and very informative for the listeners is to ask 10 of the most popular questions. And because I'm buzzers, no conferring.

1:50:34Here we go. And these are questions for which I think they're practical answers. And so we'll do this not in rapid fire Q &A, but in let's just say a bridged format. And then perhaps we have you back another time to answer more of the questions before we get into these questions. I will say that many of the questions that were asked of the by the audience in those comments were in fact answered in the earlier five episodes of this podcast series with Matt Walker, as well as the one that we held today on on dreams and lucid dreaming. So if you don't hear the answer to these to your question here and you have a burning question, chances are your question was answered in a previous episode and all of those episodes are time stamped in a lot of detail so people can navigate quickly to the topics most of interest to them.

1:51:28So without further ado, questions from the audience. First question is about best practices for managing rumination and negative thoughts when trying to fall asleep, meaning if somebody is ruminating and they're having negative thoughts when they're trying to fall asleep, what should they do in order to get past that and fall asleep. Short circuit, you need to short circuit that situation and the way that you can do that is through a variety of methods. There are multiple methods for short circuiting rumination. The first I would recommend and it's something I practice meditation, but really all of these that I'll describe are about getting your mind off itself.

1:52:11That's the biggest problem regarding anxiety and sleep onset in somebody which is what I think this person is describing. So meditation allows you it's either guided and you're speaking about what you should be doing with your breathing or relaxation, guided meditations. All of those stop your mind from being able to play on itself and go through that role at X of anxiety. You can do breathing techniques, you can listen to sleep stories, you can do your own type of body scan. Anything that you can do and something we described which seems to be a quite effective method is taking yourself on a mental walk, close your eyes and a walk that you know intensely well with vivid 4K detail.

1:53:00Replicate that to the letter. I left foot on the first step down the steps, take a right at the driveway up I go, walk up the hill, look to the left, the bay out is out there. It's 5pm, the sun is starting to set that level of detail and usually when you do any one of these things, the next thing that you remember is that you're waking up in the morning because you were able to short circuit. That would be the best advice, terrific and I must say the other night I woke up in the middle of the night and having a little bit of trouble falling back asleep and I use this mental walk approach and it worked very very well.

1:53:39So thank you. The next question is what is the best position to sleep in, best body position? Best body position is probably the absence of the worst, that would be your back and it's ill advised mostly for people who snore. When you are on your back, the likelihood of you snoring and that away collapsing entirely and you having what's called a hypoxic event where you stop breathing entirely is significantly higher than if you sleep on your side or on your front. So I would say that for most people if you know that you don't snore, if your partner says I don't hear you snoring, that's partial confirmation that you do not snore.

1:54:25If you are curious and everyone should be, everyone should be curious as to whether they snore, I would say download an app and we can link to it, I have no affiliation with whatsoever. I pay my money, I think it's like pennies on the dollar, I think it's like $2 a month or something and it is called snore labs or the word snore and then LAB and you download it and it's an app and it is something that you install on your phone and then you say start recording and you place your phone face down and it listens to you all night and it records your breathing. Nothing more, can't know what you're doing or saying, don't worry, there's privacy, but it assesses your breathing and then it will show you a distribution of your snoring throughout the night and it categorizes that snoring from quiet no snoring to mild snoring to moderate to epic.

1:55:22And it literally is like a Richter shock and you will see very clearly if you are snoring or not, worst still an impactful most is that you can go to those spikes when you are snoring and you can replay it and it is quite frightening to hear yourself struggling for breath. If you see a confirmation of snoring by way of that snore lab, go and see your doctor, that is the best advice, 80 % of people who have sleep apnea or snoring or cessation of breathing are undiagnosed right now and it will take years of your life and when you get treated it is transformational patient once told me when I got treated with my sleep app device.

1:56:08I felt like I was 10 years younger, it was almost as though I remember it to the day I die, it was almost as though someone came along and wiped a fog glass clear and I could finally see that was the transformation. So my advice is if you think you are snoring, stay away from back sleeping from sleeping on your back from sleeping on your back and even if you don't suspect you are a snorer just down the step you get a couple of nights for free. Just do it for a couple of nights consistently and then ask also by the way if you take on board alcohol and you have mild snoring, it is very clear I would be highly surprised if on the nights that you drink you don't get a significant increase in your score of snoring.

1:56:51Terrific. The next question is why does my body wake up at 3 .30 am and I'm presuming their mind as well no matter what time I go to sleep. So to that question and we will have spoken about this before my first response is how do you know it's 3 .30 and their response is because I look at the clock that's the first problem take all clock faces away from your site when you are sleeping it is only going to reinforce it. The second is that 3 .30 can sometimes or if it's a consistent time it's not there's no sort of special thing about 3 .30 it's just for this person. People wake up at very specific times quite reliably so part of that is because they're going through very reliably timed sleep cycles and every time we finish a REM sleep period we wake up but it's normally very brief and the reason is because we've been in paralysis and the body needs to move.

1:57:47So we wake up we make a postural shift we move in our bed just slightly and then we go back to sleep it happens to us all for some of us we will wake up and then we will stay awake and that's why it seems to be so religiously timed to certain specific moments in our night. But this is the sort of individual mention no matter what time I go to bed I seem to always wake up there that to me smells of a suggestion of reinforced learning that you've woken up a couple of times you checked the clock and now you have taught your brain very quickly that I always wake up at 3 .30 in the morning and lo and behold what happens is that you start to do that more frequently the more frequently it happens the more times that you can wake up.

1:58:33So you check the stronger that memory association becomes the more likely it is to happen remove the clock face from the bed room. Terrific can we bank sleep or catch up on lost sleep? It's a great question you you can and you cannot bank sleep and it is directional. So what we found is that for certain things such as let's say an immune vaccination or learning and memory if you are sleep deprived let's say the night after learning a specific task and lots of people have done this. So you are deprived the first night after learning and that first night we know is critical for consolidating and saving those memories but then the next day I don't test you in the way I normally do instead I give you a full recovery night of sleep or maybe I give you two full recovery nights of sleep and then I test you do you show any evidence of a memory consolidation consolidation benefit and the answer is no you don't in other words if you don't sleep the first night after learning you lose the chance to consolidate those memories.

1:59:49So their sleep in that sense is an all and I think phenomenon if you don't snooze you lose in that regard and there are other examples of that downstairs in the body. That is what happens when you go into a debt and then you try to pay it back with later credit and it fails you can't seem to do that with sleep so in that sense sleep is not like the bank in that direction you can't accumulate a debt and then let's say at the weekend after short sleeping during the week see if you can pay off that debt at some later point in time it doesn't work like that. So for example if I deprive you Andrew Huberman of sleep tonight let's say it's an eight hour opportunity and then tomorrow I give you all of the recovery sleep that you want and then on a second night third night fourth night do you sleep longer those subsequent nights yes you do.

2:00:38But you only sleep back about 50 % about four extra hours in fact if you look at the data it's usually less it's usually around two so only about 25 % of the eight hours that you lost so you are always running a debt and if that's the case if you can't truly pay back your sleep debt and you're constantly running that short sleep cycle you are it's like compounding interest on the loan it just escalates dramatically and that's why I think we see that short sleep. Really just predict ill health outcomes and more an early mortality the later and later in life that you go. However there is a different form of sleep banking I told you that here you're going into a debt and you're trying to pay it off with credit later what if you had the inverse let's say that you are a doctor or a nurse or you are working in the emergency services and you know that you have two nights where you're on nights and you're going to be probably very busy and you're not going to be sleeping well for the next two nights and that's going to be next Monday and Tuesday and I'm currently on Wednesday in the week prior there is some thing that has been demonstrated called sleep banking which is where I know I'm going to go into debt so I sleep longer and I create credit to begin with and then I spend that credit as I go into the next day and I'm going to go into the next day and I'm going to go into the next day and I'm going to go into the next day and I'm going to go into the next day and I'm going to go into the next day and I'm going to go into the next day and I'm going to go into the next day and I'm going to go into the next day and I'm going to go into the next day and I'm going to go into the next day and I'm going to go into the next day and I'm going to go into the next day and I'm going to go into debt and it seems to lessen the impact of that debt.

2:02:13It doesn't remove the impact entirely but it does lessen it so here it's the inverse. I'm not going into debt and then trying to pay it off later. I build up credit and then I can spend that credit with debt so there is a form of sleep banking that seems to be present but it's not the sleep banking that most people think about. Does that make, I know it's very confusing but I tried to be clear about that. You can buffer some of the sleep loss that you anticipate but there's no there's no retroactive saving of what you lost. That's right. What are some of the best practices for getting back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night?

2:02:55There I would say there are several things. First, don't try too hard because trying to get back to sleep and become frustrated is very much like trying to remember someone's name. Sleep is just like this that the harder you try, the further you push it away and as soon as you stop all of a sudden that name just pops up. It pops back into your head and it's the same way with sleep. Now previously I've said you don't want to spend a lot of time awake in bed because you learn the association that your bed is the place of wakefulness and every time you come in at night you're always wide awake and you don't know why despite having fallen asleep watching television just 20 minutes earlier.

2:03:48The other suggestion however is most people don't want to get out of bed it's dark it's cold I get it I understand it. The other thing to do in this situation is enjoy the concept of rest. So wouldn't it be wonderful if in the middle of your working day someone said look just come away from your desk now and here is a beautiful calm bedroom it smells very nice nice dim light I would let you to lie down. No need to fall asleep don't fall asleep just lie down on the bed or on the couch and just rest for the next 30 or 40 minutes just have a wonderful good old rest. Sounds lovely. And if you are struggling to fall back asleep and you've listened to me and the idiocy of what I've been describing over the past six episodes you could start to get very stressed and say gosh well sleep is doing this and this and this and I'm now and it's been 20 minutes and I can't fall back you just get more and more stressed.

2:04:52Instead take a different approach at that point instead of if you fall the techniques that we've spoken about getting your mind off itself and we list them just now and we've listed them in a previous episode. If none of those are working and you just can't catch it don't worry just say to yourself you know what tonight is not my night and he told me it's okay and it really is it's fine tomorrow night is going to be a better night tonight instead rather than trying to force myself to sleep. I'm just going to lie here maybe with my eyes open I'm just going to rest I'm just going to enjoy and not stress just going to enjoy a good old rest in my bed and once again the next thing that happens is that the sun has emerged it's bright in your room despite the blackout curtains and your alarm is going off because as soon as you relaxed out of the state of trying sleep came back in a resplendent way.

2:05:53Terrific. Someone asks quote I used to be a great sleeper but as I've gotten older and then they mentioned that they're 65 currently I find that I wake up much earlier than I did previously and it's difficult for me to get more than six hours of sleep. What do you think is going on and what are some remedies. The first question I would want to ask is how do you feel on six hours of sleep and we can go from there if you are in part and you're struggling during the day and this person sounds as though they are unhappy with that six hours then we can start to have a conversation what that conversation sound like I want to understand perhaps the reason that you can't get back asleep and we'll begin these techniques that we've spoken about for trying to get back to sleep let's say that you've gone to bed at 10 and you normally would like to wake up at six but you're always working up at four and there's just nothing you can do at that stage you just don't feel asleepiness over you weighing you down and there's no amount of these methods are going to help you you just have to get up.

2:06:54We see this a lot in older adults sleep late in the night is very fragile much greater probability of them waking up in the second half of the night and the last quarter. It's also miserable because most older adults the circadian rhythm shifts earlier I told you that as we go through our teen years our circadian rhythm shifts it gets sort of pushed into the future and we like to go to bed much later and wake up much later and then into older adults sort of into well adulthood it drags back a little bit and we find our sweet spot but then as we get older it starts to regress back to what happened when we were children we want to stay up late but we can't we go to bed and we go to bed and wake up much later and then into older adults sort of into well adulthood it drags back a little bit and we find our sweet spot but then as we get older it starts to regress back to what happened when we were children we want to stay up late but we can't we go to bed and we go to bed and wake up much later and then into older adults sort of into well adulthood it drags back a little bit and we find our sweet spot but then as we get older it starts to regress back to what we want to bed so early and we wake up early some regression happens as we get older by the way it's the reason that there is the quote unquote early bird special in Florida where a lot of people retire it's the early bird special because most people are to bed by 9pm and they want to be eating starting to eat at 4pm so how do you deal with that one way is you can use one of the four methods the four sort of macros of good sleep that we spoke about q q RT quantity quality regularity timing and here I would say see if you can delay your bedtime as best you can if your bedtime is 10 and you would like and you're normally waking up at 6 but you consistently waking up at 4 start trying to go to bed at 11pm push push push as hard as you can until you are so sleepy you sleep and then you will it will take a couple of days to build up that sort of remembering of from your brain and the debt that to begin with you'll go to bed and you will get it.

2:08:34So you're going to bed at 11 and you'll wake up at 4pm and things are even worse but after a while you're building up this pressure to sleep and all of a sudden you're going to bed again at 11 but your brain thinks I have had 4 nights of now just 5 hours of sleep. I'm not doing this anymore I'm going to sleep through until 5pm and you can keep moving your schedule later because when older adults are waking up at 4pm they can't get back it's also miserable because the rest of the world is asleep and the people they want to engage with have a social life you know call the kids speak with their grandkids they can't do any of that so it's a very difficult situation if those things don't work you can also speak to a board certified sleep medicine clinician CBT.

2:09:18I cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia which we've spoken about in this episode is also effective for older adults to help them stay asleep if that doesn't work and you don't like to think about a psychological treatment there are some medications people think I'm probably a bit anti medication because I've been very vocal about classic sleeping pills. But there are some sleeping medications that I think do show promise I'm not anti pharmacology by any means one of them that's been shown to be effective for older adults is something called doxapin and and chasadone to although there is some sort of pushback a little bit by the community against chasadone and there's a new class of drugs that we've spoken about in a previous episode called the doors the jewel or ex in receptor antagonists DOR a small s so I've spoken about 3 .0.

2:10:08Chasadone doxapin the doors by the way I'm a scientist not a medical doctor this is scientifically descriptive not medically prescriptive. Chasadone has perhaps been used more so if anything to help people who struggle to fall asleep doxapin if you look at the data is a medication that's much more helpful for keeping people asleep and including in especially it seems for older adults. And that it's lower doxapin I think if you look at the data 3 milligrams and 6 milligram doses have been effective you can get it in pill form although usually not in those doses and you have to end up cutting pills in half because it comes in 12 milligrams there is a liquid solution that is provided and there I think standard dose starts around half a milliliter so you get a little syringe and it's a 1 millimeter syringe and you suck up that.

2:11:00Half a milliliter and then you just put it in a drink in the last half an hour before bed it's tasteless and it helps you stay asleep so there are a variety of different things you can do just go try for rest and just give yourself the chance push your bed to a later time point you can also try cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia and you can speak with the opposition about some sleep medications. Terrific. There were a good number of people that asked about sleep and menopause. One question was quote since entering menopause I have not gotten a good night sleep in years. I think this question dovetails with the previous question I mean it could be age related right could be directly related to menopause.

2:11:44So are you aware of any specific treatments that you haven't covered in the course of this Q &A that are unique to menopause I think the answer you just gave to you to never ask the question about how to get more sleep better sleep as one has gotten older should probably handle the answer to this question but what of the men and pause specific requirements for getting better sleep it is a huge problem in pre menopausal and perimenopausal women and of course women going through menopause it's principally because of what we call the vasomotor symptoms of menopause which is to say these hot flashes where you just get sort of really for the body at least quite extreme increases in temperature you get so hot and don't forget in our episode two we spoke about how you need to regulate temperature and there's a very beautiful and complex relationship between temperature and sleep and we said you need to stay cool to stay asleep but here is a situation where when you're asleep you're not staying cool you're doing the opposite you're getting warm and that is the adversarial thermal situation for staying asleep and so individuals wake up and then they struggle to get back to sleep I would say and we know the reasons why to some of the other issues with sleep are problematic it has to do with some of the sex hormone changes and I think I've myself have released a podcast on this specific issue and I won't go into the mechanisms as to why I'll speak about the treatments one treatment which is non -medication based is trying to make your bedroom cool but also using these smart mattresses now I've spoken to Mateo the CEO of eight sleep another fantastic product and he has had a huge amount of feedback from menopausal women saying that that calling mattress has been very helpful for their vasomotor symptoms so that's one method you can go down the other is a medication method and here I need to be very careful I'm going to speak about bio identical home methods hormone replacement therapy for menopause now there is a lot of controversy again I don't have a horse in the race I would simply say if you want to think about this you have done a fantastic podcast on female health and female reproductive health I know our friend Petra Teer has got a very clear stance on female hormone replacement therapy and the absence of fear one has to have around the risk of breast cancer and if you listen to him he will excise or at least he has disapused I think many people of the belief that that is a concern but it's a very personal choice it's a woman's choice no one but a woman can decide but I would say that when women have gone into bio bio identical home hormone replacement therapy one of the things that benefits is also sleep because it brings back under control some of these symptoms it re -instigates some of the re -normalization of aspects of the reproductive hormones and those are things that can promote sleep which when they become absent through menopause are causing sleep disruption someone asks what does it mean if I can remember my dreams conversely what does it mean if I cannot remember my dreams does this have any reflection on my sleep quality well some of this was addressed during today's episode but maybe just to give a short recap response how would you respond to this so I would say that just because you remember your dreams or you don't remember your let's see you don't remember your dreams many people will ask me then does that mean that I don't get ready I don't get enough REM sleep no absolutely it doesn't there seems to be no correlation between how much REM sleep that you're getting and whether or not you remember your dreams that's I think point number one point number two is that there doesn't seem to be a strong correlation between you remembering your dreams and the quality of the waking day that ensues as a consequence of that dream remembered sleep from the night before versus dream non -remembered the only time that we've got a little bit of data comes on to what we've spoken about today which is lucidity which is a different sort of one up level of dreaming there may be the some unrestaurative sleep argument but for the most part I would say do not worry if you're not remembering your dreams it doesn't mean that you are not dreaming by the way I've got a wacky theory it doesn't mean that you are also not storing those dreams and being influenced by them there is something called implicit memory and it was long sort of held you know these versions of you go into a movie theater and for very brief milliseconds of periods of time you're shown images of Pepsi cans or Coke cans and then during the intermission you track people's purchasing of soda and sure enough they will buy more Pepsi if they get flashed sort of so we can actually embed implicit information into people and it changes their behavior they have no recollection of the memory but it's clearly there and it's clearly influencing the behavior what does this have to do with the memory of the dreaming I have a theory of dreaming where people and I told you most of us forget most of our dreams and we think when we forget those dreams have gone they have evaporated from our brain what if it's not the case have you ever had that experience where you are waking up and you know you are dreaming and you just cannot capture it and you think it's gone that's it I've forgotten it and then two days later you're in the shower you're looking at the shampoo bottle and the label all of a sudden just unloading the bottle and then you're looking at the shampoo bottle and then you're looking at the shampoo bottle and then you're looking at the shampoo bottle and then you're looking at the shampoo bottle and then you're looking at the shampoo bottle and then you're looking at the shampoo bottle and then you're looking at the shampoo bottle and then you're looking at the shampoo bottle and then you're looking at the shampoo bottle and then you're looking at the shampoo bottle and then you're looking at the shampoo bottle and then you're looking at the shampoo bottle and that blocks the memory of that dream and it comes flooding back as a neuroscientist that tells me an important thing that memory is in existence but previously it was unavailable this is the difference between availability versus accessibility that memory was available but you lost the IP address to go and retrieve it available not accessible Now if most of our dreams are still always quote, unquote implicitly remembered but you lost it and that memory was available never yes only did so many of us wonder if we were to keep pronos the ground if we were to play a game but it doesn't match calling us all in a dateHit to an exam it's becoming an application, we were to take a kilometers let's introduce a gameHit to a gameHit to hear yesterday how I thought about it was a gameHit to hear yesterday how I was able to pull laps why this?

2:18:04Now most of story hoje 17 dianna is the same thing the laboratory that's the 전� Those Descker come together at the beginning very much we are watching with the oldest cats at the world and storage fairly quickly sounds and But we always fail to have accessibility. Those memories, arguably, according to my theory, are always available. They're always in our brains. We just don't have conscious accessibility to them. That doesn't change the fact that our dreams may shape a huge amount of our behaviour implicitly. And to me, that's a wild, crazy theory. And someday, when I retire, I'll do the study and try and disprove it.

2:18:32Anyway. I love it. What are the key supplements for sleep? And I just have to say, that's a huge topic that's an entire episode until it's... Yeah, you and I should probably do. Intellectual jazz on that at some point. Yeah, we should do that. But let's constrain the question a bit for sake of time. What if any supplements do you personally take or recommend to people with the understanding that many people perhaps do not need supplements? All right, we never want to give the impression that that's the first -lined approach to dealing with sleep issues. Get your sunlight, get your darkness, get your QQRT, write all of that.

2:19:13If it's mysterious to you, all of that is in the previous episodes of this podcast series. But assuming that someone wants to explore this supplement space and what do you recommend? What do you take? And please here, I'm going to encourage you to not take into consideration at all what I've ever said about supplements for sleep. No, I think it's actually most useful if people get a tapestry of opinions. Yeah. Please, I'm just going to say that outright. Yeah, maybe you could say a little bit more about those that you would recommend. And I think they're going to probably overlap because I already sort of know some of them.

2:19:51Sure, I recommend, again, I just want to say that never take anything or remove anything from your Regimen without talking to your doctor first. And always always make sure that you're doing all the behaviors correctly first. But and there's so many of them. Don't need too close to bedtime. Get your morning sunlight on and on. But the supplements that I recommend when people ask for supplement recommendations specifically are magnesium 3 and 8. Yep. It's more or less interchangeable with magnesium biscliscinate. It has a slight sedative property. A lot of people are deficient in magnesium anyway.

2:20:32And this is magnesium taken about 30 to 60 minutes before bedtime. The other one is Apigenin, which is essentially a derivative of chamomile. Yep. And then the third is Theanine, which is known to have a mild anti -anxiety component to it. The one caveat is that Theanine can be problematic for people that have very vivid dreams. They can often people say that it makes their dreams even more vivid. And so if you suffer from that or it's waking you up, then I suggest leaving out the Theanine. I actually recommend people start with just one thing and then see how it affects them. And then and then bring more in.

2:21:12I'll put a link in the show note captions to the dosages that were contained within a zero cost newsletter about sleep rather than list off dosages here. And then people can link to that in the show note captions. Those are the main three and then there's one other which and I use those by the way. Most every night before sleep and it has improved my sleep dramatically. The other thing that I sometimes use is 900 milligrams of inocetol, which for whatever reason has I find. Again, this is anic data. It makes it easier for me to fall back asleep when I wake up in the middle of the night, especially if I haven't eaten very many starchy carbohydrates in the days preceding.

2:21:50I try and eat some starches after hard training and things that sort. But sometimes if I'm on a lower carbohydrate regimen, then I find it extra difficult to sleep. So I'll throw in some some inocetol. I will say there have been nights where I forget my supplements and just fall asleep. And so it's tough to say exactly what each of those is doing and in what combinations you always need to think about how much disposable income somebody has. Again, get your behaviors right at the do's and don'ts that Matt described during the course of this podcast series, right? And then consider supplementation.

2:22:25But that's pretty much what I rely on. Yeah, I like what you're saying, both the philosophy of it too, because the things that we've spoken about, the QQRT and all the different methods, they are a log order magnitude greater in terms of how they will cause correct your sleep than probably any supplement effect that I know of. Absolutely. To go back to your Mag -T, Mag -3 and 8, I think there is some evidence, definitely interesting evidence. It was more so in older adults and they were able to show increases in the total amount of deep sleep. I think it was somewhere around about 15 to 20%. Although that's the relative percent difference.

2:23:00If you look, I think it was only about six or seven minutes of total deep sleep. But there is some evidence there. The evidence, by way of you've heard the story of that magnesium is good for sleep, it's principally derived from evidence of people who are magnesium deficient. And when you make the magnesium normative, they start sleeping better. That's a very different question than saying, I am magnesium normative, I am in normal ranges. And then I add to it, how do I expect any greater benefit? That's like me saying, you're at an oxygen saturation of 99 .9. And I'm going to give you pure oxygen.

2:23:36It's not going to move you above 100, you're already at ceiling. Whereas if you are at 85%, and I give you oxygen, you're going to get a lovely benefit from that. But I like Mag -3 and 8, because it is based on the evidence, the only one that does cross the blood brain barrier. People have said, well, then why do I get a benefit from things? The other one that I would speak about is probably slow mag, because it can be tough on some people's tummy. And it's a coated form of magnesium. That doesn't necessarily cross the blood brain barrier. But magnesium, I would say, if one to focus on would maybe be magnesium chloride, that seems, maybe petrature is released to podcast on this too.

2:24:17That seems to be, I think, an effective one for bioavailability. But if it doesn't cross the blood brain barrier, how can it be affecting sleep, because sleep is of the brain by the brain and for the brain? One of the reasons is because of muscle relaxation. So if you're too tense in your body, it feeds signals of stress to your brain. And if you're stressed, as we've spoken about, you're not going to sleep well. So I think there could be indirect effects of forms of magnesium that do not cross the blood brain barrier, again, assuming that you are magnesium deficient. I think Apigenin, Kemal -Mile, has some good evidence.

2:24:52Valerian root, unfortunately, if you look at the state, the data, it doesn't seem to hold up in terms of any sleep benefit whatsoever. Probably two that I would add to that list. The first is glycine. And here we're talking about doses of maybe 1 .5 to 2 grams of glycine. Has quite a reliable robust literature. Now it's not randomized controlled trials of a level of a drug, because these are supplements you don't get those studies. But it does seem to have quite a reliable benefit based on what I've seen in the literature. The final one I would say, which has very good data to support its action, is something called phosphatidyl serine.

2:25:33Phosphatidyl serine. And again, I've got no association with any supplement company whatsoever. But this has been reliably demonstrated to tamp down the cortisol response. Now that date you've got to be careful if you look at it and read the studies which I have, it's principally in athletes. And they use an athletic performance intervention to brute force cortisol to go up. And then they use this medication and it brings it back down. But it is reliable. I bring this up because we spoke about in one of our episodes, in so many of patients as they're trying to fall asleep. Cortisol is coming down just like it is in all healthy people.

2:26:10And it drops low just as we're about to fall asleep. But in so many of patients, it spikes back up again. And then it does in the middle of the night. So here is a medication that one could try to try to tamp down that cortisol specifically as you're going into sleep. And that maybe have helped too. So those are the only two that I would give with the same caveat that get everything else straight. Stop worrying about buying supplements and thinking it's going to be a quick fix. Get the basics in place. And then we can think about fine tuning you for the final couple of percent optimization that you get from supplements.

2:26:45Terrific answer. The final question of this sixth and final episode of this podcast series on sleep with Dr. Matthew Walker. I'm so sad I don't know. He even don't know. Stop speaking about so. We can always do another. I would love to. The literature changes it evolves. We can do another. And another is the following. If you could give just one tip for getting better sleep, what would that be? Regularity. Just keep things regular. If you get regular sleep, a lot of things will start to take care of themselves. And after that, if they don't, we'll have another conversation. We'll go back to the other three keys.

2:27:30The other three of the four macros of sleep, quantity quality, and regularity of the spoken about in timing. And then all of the other protocols that we've mentioned. But start with regularity. Get that straight. And I would also say you're timing to the R and the T of QQRT. Figure out your chronotype. Get good with your chronotype as best you can. And then get regular. If you do those two things, sleep in synchrony with your chronotype rather than against it. And you are being regular weekdays and weekends, you will get a long way to getting better sleep. Fantastic. Well, I'll put one in. If you could give just one tip for getting better sleep, what would it be?

2:28:14I suggest you listen to all six episodes of the Hubertman Lab podcast. Yes, series with Dr. Matthew Walker about sleep and ways to improve sleep. Because episode one covers the biology and the basics of how to get better sleep and what sleep is. Episode two gets into the more advanced tools. Although I think they are tools that everyone I know they are tools that everyone can and should consider. Episode three gets into the power of naps, caffeine, food, and the timing of those. Oh, so powerful. Episode four gets into the role of sleep in learning, memory, and creativity. What's more interesting than that?

2:28:54Episode five, we discussed sleep and its impact on emotional health and mental health. And today we were discussing dreaming and lucid dreaming. And here is where I get to say, Dr. Matthew Walker, thank you so much. Oh, so much for giving us a absolutely world -class grand tour of this incredible aspect of our lives that we call sleep. And in doing so, also making it extremely clear, extremely actionable at every step, and very, very thorough in a way that really honors the interest and intellect and just real sincere interest in this topic on the part of the audience. So I could not think of a single better person for this series than you, a live or dead, fortunately, you're alive.

2:29:53And I just want to say on behalf of myself, everyone else here at the Huberman Lab podcast, and the many, many millions of people listening to or watching this series, thank you ever so much for having me on, for giving me this opportunity. Firstly, thank you, but also for the generosity of your heart, your intellect, and your willing to disseminate knowledge to millions of people. Myself included, it is my privilege to sit next to you across from you, and I've received so much wisdom and knowledge from you, as so many others have, you are an international treasure. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you.

2:30:43I'll try and take that in. Grateful for you. Being a colleague and a friend, and my favorite sign off with people I love is more soon. Take care. Thank you for joining me for today's episode with Dr. Matthew Walker. To learn more about Dr. Walker's research and to learn more about his book and his social media handles, please see the links in our show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five -star review.

2:31:21Please also check out the sponsors at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have any questions for me or comments about the podcasts or topics or guests that you'd like me to feature on the Hubert Minlab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. On many episodes of the Hubert Minlab podcast, we discuss supplements. While supplements aren't necessary for everybody, many people drive tremendous benefit from them for things like improving sleep, for hormone support, and for focus. To learn more about the supplements discussed on the Hubert Minlab podcast, go to livemomentus .com .us.

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