SLEEPING Can Help You Lose Weight! | Dr. Matthew Walker EP 445

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

0:10Can you talk about dreams and the importance of dreams? The belief maybe 20 or 30 years ago was that dreams were just an epiphenomenon. They were just a byproduct. And so the analogy would be, think of the light bulbs that I think I can see behind you and that lovely background. when you create this apparatus called a light bulb to produce this thing called light in the same way that the brain has been created to produce this thing called dream sleep called REM sleep when you create light in that way with the light bulb you also produce this thing called heat it was never the purpose of the light bulb it's just what happens when you create light in that way and the belief was the same thing for dreaming that when you create this thing called REM sleep, which serves lots of different functions.

0:58One of the conscious spinoffs, one of the byproducts is this thing called dreaming. And that never made sense to me for the simple reason, which is this. When we are dreaming, it is more consciously, energetically demanding than not dreaming, is my assumption from a brain-based perspective. And any time mother nature burns the most valuable unit in your body, which is called an ATP molecule, an energy molecule, then it usually has some evolutionary advantage to it. In other words, if dreaming is metabolically more active and you could have REM sleep without dreaming, but she still added dreaming atop of REM sleep, then it must serve some benefit.

1:39And we've now discovered that it serves at least two vital functions. The first is that dream sleep provides a form of almost overnight therapy. That dream sleep is emotional first aid. And it's during dream sleep at night that your brain takes those difficult, emotionally charged experiences, sometimes even traumatic memories, and it acts like a nocturnal soothing balm. And it just takes the sharp edges off those painful, difficult experiences so that you come back the next day and you feel better about those experiences. And in that way, it's not time that heals all wounds. It's time during dream sleep that provides emotional convalescence, as it were.

2:26And it's not just dream sleep. It's also even what you dream about, not just that you dream. In other words, I'm talking about your dream content being important because there was a study done several years ago and they looked at people going through a really tough time, a traumatic experience, which is a really painful and bitter divorce. And at the time when that was happening, they were recording their dreams. And then they tracked those individuals for a year. One year later, about half of them had clinical resolution to their depression, and the other half did not. And then they went back and they separated the dreams of those two different groups.

3:05And what they found is that those people who were dreaming, but not dreaming about the emotional events themselves, they didn't get clinical resolution one year later. Those people who were dreaming, but dreaming of the event, they got the clinical resolution. So in other words, dreaming is necessary, but it's not sufficient. You need to be dreaming of what those events are to process those. How do we influence dreaming what we want to dream? Well, this moves us into the territory of what we call lucid dreaming. Yes. Lucid dreaming from within the scientific field is actually a more simple definition.

3:44It's simply the moment that you become aware that you're dreaming. That you're in the dream. Whilst you're dreaming. Correct. If lucid dreaming was so beneficial to you as a human being, as an organism, then many more people would be natural lucid dreamers than there are now. From the lucid dreaming perspective, I could come back and argue the other side, which is to say, my assumption there, the belief that Mother Nature would have had us all doing it if it was good, makes the wrong conclusion that we've stopped evolving. In other words, what if that 20 % of the hominid population who are lucid dreaming is the next wave of evolution.

4:21They are the superhumans who will come next and succeed people like me who aren't natural lucid dreamers. So I can play both sides of it. Is there a way to train your mind and body in order to lucid dream more? Before you go to bed at night, and it sounds hokey and strange, is just repeat like a mantra to yourself. I am going to try and become conscious in my dream. I'm going to try and become conscious. and then you can do virtual reality testing in the dream and you can do this when you're awake so right now you know i am looking at my laptop and if it's a physical entity and i'm in the real world and i'm awake if i were to tap my screen i can feel it physically and you can go around and keep reminding yourself you know i can go over to the light switch and turn it on turn it off do i have voluntary control of what's going on in my environment because often you don't have in your dreams.

5:12And then by doing that in your waking day, you can try to train yourself to do that during your sleeping, dreaming life. And at that point, when you flick the light switch and it doesn't change anything, or you tap the screen of your laptop and your hand goes completely through it, then you think, oh, hang on a second. This isn't waking. You know, this is clearly a dream. The other thing is just to simply start trying to remember your dreams some more. So in the morning, when you wake up, that's the first step towards a path of lucidity. Don't jump out of bed and sort of just close your eyes and try to remember your dream.

5:46Instead, wake up and then keep your eyes closed and don't try to write the dream down. Don't try to dictate it. Just rehearse the dream because dreams have this funny nature to them where as soon as we wake up, they almost evaporate so quickly from our brain. Wait there and try to crystallize it. Try to set the dream in amber by sort of, you know, going over it and rehearsing it, rehearsing it in your mind. Build that picture, build the memory, ingrain the memory, and then pick up your pad of paper and your pencil next to you on the bedside and write it down. And gradually, as you start to remember more of your dreams, there is some evidence that that can also increase the probability of lucidity.

6:28But in truth, I don't know anyone who's truly an expert in being able to increase the frequency with which you can lucid dream from a scientific perspective. There's lots of people out there who claim, you know, I've got this course that you can do. But the science now has proven without a shadow of a doubt, by the way, that there is a thing called lucid dreaming. One of the fascinating things when we go into dream sleep, well, there are many, but I'll give you just two. The first is that when you go into dream sleep, your brain paralyzes your body. You are utterly incarcerated in physical lockdown.

7:02And the reason is very simple. Your brain paralyzes your body so the mind can dream safely so that you don't act out your dreams. And so what we know is that the mechanisms that control REM sleep and non-REM sleep start deep down within the brain, in fact, in the brain stem. So if you were to take a fruit, like a pear, and you were to turn it upside down, it's that sort of, you know, thin end and the stem of the per, that's your brainstem. It's there where the principal battle for non-REM and REM sleep plays out across the night to create the 90-minute cycle of non-REM to REM sleep in humans. But as it's expressed upstairs into your brain during REM sleep, which activates lots of brain areas, but also deactivates them, there's a separate signal sent south of your neck, right down into your spinal cord, which paralyzes what we call the alpha motor neurons, which is all of your voluntary skeletal muscles.

7:51Now that fortunately means that your involuntary muscles, things like your heart and your inspiration, don't worry, they keep going. Otherwise we would have been popped out the gene pool together very quickly. But your voluntary muscles, those are paralyzed. The second interesting feature coming back to lucid dreaming though, is that many parts of your brain when you dream light up. The visual areas at the back of the brain, the motor strip areas across the top of the brain, the emotional centers, and the memory centers. All of these things light up. And some of them, in fact, are up to 30 % more active when you're in dream sleep than when you're awake.

8:29But the one part of your brain that goes in the opposite direction is something called your prefrontal cortex. It's like the CEO of the brain. It's very good at making high-level, top-down executive control decisions and communication. That part of the brain, as we go into dream sleep, is actively inhibited. So your rational, logical brain is shut down and all of these emotional and memory centers light up. No wonder dreams are bizarre, illogical, hyper-associative, filled with memories, filled with visual aspects, often have kinesthetic aspects to them. But what we've realized is that the difference between dreaming and lucid dreaming is that that prefrontal cortex part of the brain actually comes back online as we become lucid.

9:18In other words, as we gain volitional control over what we dream, the prefrontal cortex seems to be coming back online, gifting you that volition to do what you wish in your dreams.

9:40Thank 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 podcast 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.

10:30Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.