Master Your Sleep to Master Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker EP 306

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

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0:53So if you're ready to learn, heal, and grow alongside other incredible individuals in the greatness community, then you can learn more at lewishouse.com slash summit 2023. Make sure to grab your ticket, invite your friends, and I'll see you there.

1:12Sleep is probably the single most effective thing that you can do to reset both your brain, but also your body health, of course, as well. And I don't say that flippantly against the notions of diet and exercise. Of course, both of those are fundamentally critical. But if I were to take you, Lewis, and I were to deprive you of sleep for 24 hours, deprive you of food for 24 hours, or deprive you of even water or exercise for 24 hours, and then I were to map the brain and body impairment that you would suffer after each one of those four, hands down by a country mile, a lack of sleep will implode your brain and body.

1:52far more significantly. So right now we recommend somewhere between seven to nine hours for the average adult. Once we know that you go below seven hours of sleep, we can start to measure objective impairments in your brain and your body. And in fact, the number of people who can survive on less than six hours of sleep without showing any impairment rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population is zero. A study took a group of perfectly healthy individuals and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week. And then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hour night of sleep.

2:35And there were two critical findings. The first was that a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity caused by that one week of short sleep. What I found most interesting was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity. The other half were decreased. Now, those genes that were suppressed were genes associated with your immune system. So you became immune compromised or immune deficient. Those genes that were increased in their activity or what we call overexpressed were genes associated with the promotion of tumors, genes that were associated with cardiovascular disease and stress, and genes that were associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body.

3:18I make that point just because, you know, many people, I think, have this concern about things such as genetically modified embryos or even genetically modified food. But when we don't get sufficient sleep, we are unwittingly performing a genetic manipulation on ourselves. And if we don't let our kids get the sleep that they need, then we're inflicting a similar genetic engineering experiment on them as well. Why are the majority of people bad at getting good sleep? Is it we're distracted? Is it we think we need to be doing more? Is it we're stressed and worried about the past and the future? Is it what we just want to work harder?

3:56What is the main cause of why we get poor sleep? It's such a fundamental question. And in some ways, it's all of the above plus. So I think the first, and I've thought about this a great deal, why are we suffering this global sleep loss epidemic that we're under right now? I think the first thing is that, unfortunately, sleep has an image problem. We associate sufficient sleep with this concept of being lazy, of being slothful. And that's a terrible disservice to this thing called sleep. And it is very different to things like diet and exercise. You know, I think a lot of people like to virtue signal with, you know, what they eat.

4:34And they certainly are very proud to tell you, you know, I work out five times a week. I'm in the gym at this time of morning and all of which I think are great and to be applauded and supported. But we have the very opposite. Some niches of society have this sleep machismo attitude. You know, this kind of you can sleep when you're dead mentality, which, by the way, based on the evidence is mortally unwise. Yeah, it will lead to both a shorter life and a life that is significantly less healthy. So I think the first thing is we need to change our cultural appreciation of sleep from something that is a waste of time to something that in fact is an incredible investment.

5:14It is probably the very best and the most freely available democratic and painless health insurance policy that I could ever imagine. I think the next thing is the way that we work in society. We are working for longer hours. And before the pandemic, people were commuting increasingly longer amounts of time. What that meant was that people were leaving the house earlier. They were arriving home later and no one wants to shortchange time with family or Netflix or whatever it is your poison. And so the one thing that has become squeezed like vice grips in the middle of the night is this thing called a sufficient bout of slumber.

5:55But then there are plenty of people who give themselves the opportunity to get enough sleep, but they can't obtain it. And that is where things such as insomnia or sleep disorders, things like snoring, come into play. We know that one of the principal roadblocks to getting this thing called a good night of sleep is anxiety. In fact, anxiety and physiological stress is our principal model for the explanation of insomnia right now. It's not the only cause, but it seems to be one of the principal causes. 20 hours of being awake straight, you are as cognitively impaired as you would be if you were legally drunk.

6:34Now, I would never, you know, as a CEO say, I have got this fantastic team of people. They're drunk all the time. But we do say, I've got this fantastic group of people. They just are at it all hours. They are dedicated. They're always working. you know, they spend minimal time sleeping. They're just all out. They love this project. But we've got this strange mentality. You know, even within schools, we've got this incessant model of early school start times. What we found is that when we delay school start times, first academic grades increase, truancy rates decrease, psychological and psychiatric issues decrease.

7:14But then what we also discovered is that the life expectancy of students increased. And you may be thinking, well, hang on a sec, how do you measure that? And the leading cause of death in teenagers 16 to 18 is actually not suicide. That's second. It's road traffic accidents. And here sleep matters enormously. And I'll give you one example. It was in Teton County in Wyoming. They delayed their school start times from 7.30 in the morning to 8.55. And what we've discovered with the road traffic accidents in Tenton County, when they made that shift, the only thing more remarkable than the extra one hour of sleep that those kids reported getting was the reduction in car crashes.

7:59The following year, there was a 70 % drop in vehicle accidents. Wow. And to put that in context, you know, the advent of ABS technology, anti-lock brake systems, that dropped accident rates by 20 to 25 % and it was deemed a revolution. Here is the simple fact of getting enough sleep that will drop accident rates by 70%. So if our goal as educators is to educate and not risk lives in the process, then we are failing our children in the most spectacular manner with this incessant model of early school start times.

8:48Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

9:37Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.