Andrew Huberman on How Nutrition, Exercise, Tech & Sex Affect Your Sleep EP 1455

0:01Calling all conscious achievers who are seeking more community and connection, I've got an invitation for you. Join me at this year's Summit of Greatness this September 7th through 9th in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio to unleash your true greatness. This is the one time a year that I gather the greatness community together in person for a powerful transformative weekend. People come from all over the world and you can expect to hear from inspiring speakers like Inky Johnson, Jospree Singh, Vanessa Van Edwards, Jen Sincero and many more. You'll also be able to dance your heart out to live music, get your body moving with group workouts, and connect with others at our evening socials.

0:44So 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. There are a number of risks to not getting enough sleep. Deficits in learning, deficits in the immune system, reduction in testosterone and estrogen in both men and women, so disruption of hormones, disruption of gut microbiome. Until you are sleeping long enough and deeply enough, 80 % of the nights of your life, you are functioning suboptimal. Welcome to the School of Greatness.

1:25My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome to today's special episode. Over the last 1300 plus episodes, there have been so many impactful interviews that I've been lucky enough to have. And I always like to reflect on some of the most powerful. And this episode was one that resonated with most of you guys in the past, and I'm excited for the value it's going to bring you today as well.

2:04So I hope you enjoy today's episode.

2:10Sleep is something that I feel like when I grew up, I was told, sleep when you're dead. You know, the athlete, the business mentality was like, broke people, you know, sleep a lot. You know, those who are making money are going out and working, burning the midnight oil. But then later in my 30s, I realized how important sleep was for me to recover, to remember, to have emotional regulation throughout the day and not be reactive and defensive. So can we break this down and your thoughts about sleep and how you frame this, some of the research and the science that you've studied around this and what we should be thinking about around sleep?

2:51Sure. So sleep is the fundamental layer of mental and physical health. if there's one thing that we should all be doing is working toward sleeping long enough and deeply enough 80 of the time okay i think that 80 is a good goal yeah because things happen yeah travel it's happened the weekend you're going out whatever yeah yeah until you are sleeping long enough and deeply enough 80 of the nights of your life you are functioning sub-optimally And what's the biggest risk then if we're not getting enough sleep? Okay, so there are a number of risks to not getting enough sleep. Deficits in learning, deficits in the immune system, reduction in testosterone and estrogen in both men and women.

3:39So disruption of hormones, disruption of gut microbiome, increased cancer risk. There are a bunch of things. The severity of those things depends on a lot of other things too. prior health, other health conditions, context, age, occupation. If you're not getting enough sleep and you're a high-rise construction worker, it's different than if you're an office worker. So we need to sleep enough. Now, what's enough sleep? This is an interesting question. Enough sleep has been argued it's six hours. Other people, it's seven hours. Other people, it's eight hours. It's basically waking up without an alarm clock and feeling rested.

4:19Insomnia is actually a medical term nowadays. And insomnia is essentially diagnosed as falling asleep during the middle of the day due to lack of sleep at nighttime. But many people who are having trouble sleeping at night are not falling asleep during the middle of the day. They're dealing with grogginess or crankiness or other effects of having fragmented sleep. What are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep? Is it rumination? Is it traumas that you're holding on to? Is it arguments? Is it self-doubt or insecurities? Is it you nap too much? Is it the foods you ate too late? What would you say are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep?

5:04All of the above. But the primary one is a failure to turn off your thoughts. Okay. And I think that might provide a good anchor point for us to talk about some protocols. Really, an excellent night's sleep begins in the morning. I talked about this on the previous episode, so I won't go into detail, but everyone should get as much bright light in their eyes, ideally from sunlight, first thing in the morning, 10 to 30 minutes outside, depending on how bright it is. Eyeglasses or contact lenses are fine. Don't wear sunglasses if you can do it safely. if you wake up before the sun rises, turn on bright lights, then go outside once the sun rises.

5:45If you have no access to sunlight, use a daytime simulator or similar like a ring light and get that light in your eyes. So that's all of that in a compact form. Caffeine. You can inhibit falling asleep with caffeine. You have to figure out when your threshold is for me, I can drink caffeine up until about three, even four o 'clock in the afternoon and sleep like a baby. And still sleep well yes and matt walker our good friend matt walker would say that my sleep isn't as good as it would be had i cut caffeine out earlier by like 11 or 12 yeah a.m right and and i i want to acknowledge you know matt is the michael jordan of sleep science and so i'm not gonna go the lebron james well no no and i didn't thank you for the the compliment but uh but no i'm not um i know a of the science and the protocols, but that's Matt's wheelhouse.

6:34And so if he says something, it's true. And if I say something and our opinions conflict, it's likely to be something that the data are still emerging or in that case, default to Matt being correct because I just out of due respect for his expertise. So caffeine, for some people, they can have a two o 'clock espresso 2 p.m. espresso some people it's 4 p.m. some people can drink caffeine at 8 p.m. and fall asleep but there I would say it's problematic because you're disrupting the architecture of sleep and the brain waves associated with sleep the chemicals and so forth so get that morning light cut your caffeine off at the time that allows you to fall asleep that morning light also sets a timer on your melatonin rhythm so you have this gland in your brain called the pineal gland that pineal is the source of melatonin melatonin makes you sleepy but it does not keep you asleep.

7:29Melatonin starts to rise in the late evening and continues into the night and then eventually tapers off. This is naturally occurring melatonin release, not supplemented melatonin release. The fastest way to slam melatonin to the pavement and eliminate it in your system is to look at bright light for, I hate to tell you this, even a few seconds. You mean at night? At night is typically when melatonin rises. It's when it's released in the bloodstream and when it has this effect of making us sleepy. It does a number of other things too. You want more melatonin at night, is that right? You do. And if you wake up in the middle of the night or it's 8 o 'clock and you decide you want to go to bed at 9 or it's 9 o 'clock, you want to go to bed at 10 and you go into the bathroom and you flip on the bright lights, your melatonin levels just got crushed down to the sky.

8:16So having lights on is the worst thing you can do. Yes. And it doesn't matter if it's blue light, red light, purple light, green light, bright lights inhibit melatonin very acutely. And therefore, you want to avoid exposure to bright lights at night if your goal is to be asleep. So the simple rule that governs all this stuff is when you want to be alert, get bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight. So that's true in the morning and throughout the day. And when you want to be sleepy or asleep, avoid bright light in your eyes. Now, many home environments don't allow you to have zero lights, and that's not actually necessary.

8:52You can just dim the lights in the evening. Ideally, you also avoid overhead lights because the neurons in the eye that trigger this melatonin suppression and so forth, they reside in an area of the eye that views upper visual space. So you could have desk lamps and just dim those down. If you're going to work on a screen, dim it way down. Will blue blockers help? Yes. But if the light is bright enough, you're still going to inhibit melatonin. So how bad is watching TV at night? If the TV isn't too bright. And if it's farther away. Farther away. Yeah. And maybe you wear blue blockers. Yeah. Or, I mean, some people take this to the extreme.

9:32They wear sunglasses. I think that's a little extreme. Now, candlelight and moonlight, surprisingly, doesn't seem to block melatonin. Now, maybe a really bright moonlit night, full moon, the lunacy associated with the full moon might actually be due to a suppression of melatonin and an increase in alertness. So those are the things as it relates to light. Then there's this issue of people who have trouble staying asleep. So they can fall asleep fine, but they wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I happen to do this. If I go to bed around 10.30, I tend to wake up around 3 and I use the restroom. Yeah, I tend to drink a lot of fluids and I have to use the restroom.

10:12This was true at every age. This is not just some aging related thing. That's fine. I just keep the lights dim and use the bathroom and then you go back to sleep. Fall back to sleep. Very normal, very healthy. One of the best things I ever did for my sleep was to keep my phone out of the room so that when I wake up at 3 in the morning, I just didn't start scrolling the newspapers is typically what I'm reading online. Gotcha. And then you're just waking up your brain, not just by the light, but by the content. and you know you're activating it again as opposed to turn back to sleep exactly and sometimes there's a comment and they're like why is it you know your thinking is not very good in the middle of the night the other thing is you want to keep the room cool so in order to fall asleep your body has to undergo a drop of in temperature of one to three degrees there are a couple ways to accomplish this one is keeping the room cool the other is to um and that's ideal actually because you can put a hand or a foot out we actually lose a lot of our heat through what's called our glabrous skin so the palms of our hands the bottoms of the feet I always put my feet out of the sheets just let them feel the cool air that's right and that's a great way to cool off your core body temperature you're probably doing that unconsciously in your sleep as well if the room were too warm the only way for you to cool off would be for you to put your hand in a bucket of cold water and generally people don't have that accessible and then you're gonna go pee if you're doing that too right exactly and then of course there are all these products nowadays of you know things that cover yeah that cover that cool the the bed.

11:36I'm supposed to try one of these soon. I haven't tried one yet. I tend to just keep the room cool. Cool. Yeah. And what do you keep it at? I keep it around 67, 65. That's a little cooler than what I do. I put it at about 67, 68. Okay. But I tend to wake up hot in the middle of the night, like throw the comforter off and go put some cold water on my face. So don't obsess over waking up too much. And if you do try and stay away from screens or if, you know, some people will read a book dim light again yeah uh and then falling back asleep some people are waking up at two or three because they are going to bed too late their melatonin has run out so imagine that you're that you're naturally somebody who should go to bed early around nine but we all have this ability to push forward and stay awake if we have to much easier to stay awake than to force yourself to go to sleep.

12:32It's very hard to force yourself to go to sleep. So let's say your system, you start releasing melatonin around 9 p.m., but you stay up until 11. Then you get into bed, you fall asleep around 1130. And at three in the morning, you suddenly wake up. Well, that's because your melatonin tapered off and there's a wakefulness that's occurring. And so ideally you would start going to bed earlier. Now, there's a lot of discussion out there about so-called chronotypes so night owls morning people people that follow a more typical schedule typical would be going to sleep somewhere between 10 30 and 11 30 waking up somewhere between 6 30 and 8 then there are the people that like to go to bed at 2 a.m sleep till 10 and then there are people that like to go to bed at 8 and wake up at 4 huge variation out there it tends to change across the lifetime yeah your season of life for years that's right and adolescents and teenagers tend to stay up later and wants to sleep in.

13:26And there's actually some evidence that they can learn better if they are allowed to use that schedule, but most schools won't adhere to that schedule. You've got to wake up at 6 and go to school at 8 or whatever. Once you enter adult life, you're generally somebody who's going to have to learn how to go to bed early and wake up early, or at least wake up early. Now, naps, you should feel comfortable, the data say, naps, you should feel comfortable napping for 90 minutes or less at any point throughout the day, as long as it doesn't interfere with your nighttime sleep. So some people, like me, I love naps, but it doesn't interfere with my nighttime sleep.

14:01It doesn't. It does not. So you can take a 60-minute nap. Generally, 20 to 45 minutes. And then you fully fall asleep, or you're kind of like awake and just resting? I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime. I can fall asleep at a gun range, yeah. What? Can you sleep sitting up, too, like this? Oh, yeah. That's a gift. Playing anywhere. That's a gift. It is, although it could reflect that I'm pushing my system a little too hard. But it is useful at times. Incredible. It is useful. You can fall asleep right on a plane or? Anywhere. Leaning against a subway station and anywhere. If I need sleep, I'm going down.

14:39That's incredible. Yeah. So the other thing is that during sleep, a number of things happen. And we can talk about slow-wave sleep and REM sleep. But one of the most important physiological functions of sleep is to clear out some of the cellular debris that accumulates throughout the day. The cellular debris creates cognitive deficits. It actually may be related to the aggregation of proteins and things that relate to dementia and Alzheimer's. It's the so-called glymphatic system. The lymphatic system is a system of moving through immune cells and clearing out of debris from the body. The glymphatic system is a kind of a equivalent system that exists in the brain that involves so-called glial cells, which are support cells, but also do many things actively.

15:26They're not just doing support. The glymphatic system is like a washout of the brain's debris. And that system seems to function best when feet are slightly elevated above the brain. There's some interesting data from University of South Carolina coming out now that show that if you can get your ankles elevated a little bit higher than your chin, that's great. When you're sleeping? While you're sleeping. What's it do for you? It increases the glymphatic clearance. And there's some data that it can improve function of the brain. The studies that are happening now that I'm aware of, I'm in touch with that group, are mainly geared towards people that have had head injuries, so concussion and TBI of various kinds.

16:05but they also are seeing interesting effects in typical folks that don't have any traumatic brain injury. So I put a pillow underneath my ankles when I fall asleep to get a little bit of that elevation. And then during the day, if ever you can't get a nap or you are going to get a nap, put your ankles up on the couch and lie down on the floor. That itself can get some of the clearance of the glymphatic system. And that helps you sleep better or it helps you just clean out the system? It helps your brain function better when you wake up from sleep. Interesting. That's what the data are starting to show.

16:38That's cool. You know, some of the things I described, like the light viewing, is baked into the neuroscience literature, hundreds of papers, published papers. Some of the things like the glymphatic system is kind of cutting edge. It's on the way. But because the safety margins of raising your ankles are so large, I mean, there's nothing dangerous about that. How long do you need to do it for to get the benefits? Oh, I think these are immediate benefits. Two minutes or ten minutes? Oh, no, you're doing this the whole night that you're asleep. your ankles are elevated if you wake up and you happen to kick the pillow out it's not the end of the world but but the idea is that you don't want to be sleeping with your head above your ankles either there is some evidence that when people travel on planes and they're sleeping in chairs that that's not equivalent to the kind of sleep they'd get when they're lying flat interesting independent of all the other things that are happening and we know this because there are great sleep labs at stanford uh school of medicine at upenn back east and elsewhere where people actually go into a clinic and sleep either you know upright or at different angles and they're looking at all this at the level of data okay so here's one for you what's the best position to sleep on your back on your side on your stomach ah great question and it really truly depends and it probably depends on how hot you run so i tend to run really warm a lot of the cooling of the body occurs from the palms and bottoms of the feet, but also from the upper back and scapulae because we accumulate what's called brown fat there.

18:03It's not the blubbery fat that's under the skin. It's like a furnace. Actually, you can increase the density of brown fat by going into cold water repeatedly for one to three minutes, several times each week. It means your furnace actually burns hotter. It allows you to be in cold temperatures more comfortably. Some really beautiful data just published on this. So I don't like to sleep on my back because I start heating up. Start sweating. That's right. So I tend to sleep on my side. I sleep in that soldier position. But then again, there are some people that have shoulder issues and then they can't do that.

18:35I'm relatively flexible through my shoulders, not super flexible, so I can do that. It really depends. Now, of course, if you're sleeping on your stomach, how do you elevate your ankles? It starts becoming a little bit... We are not just science experiments. And so you have to assume that you're not going to get everything exactly right. But keeping the room cool, keeping the cool being under a warm enough blanket, but then extending a hand or an ankle out so that you could cool off during the middle of the night, that's going to be good. Keep the room dark, although complete pitch black doesn't seem to be as good as having a little bit of light somewhere in the room.

19:12But you don't want a bright blue light or red light anywhere in the room that's going to wake you up. Some people like me have very thin eyelids, exceedingly thin eyelids. Some people have very thick eyelids. So some people are more bothered by a light in the room than others. It really varies. So you have to just tune things to your particular environment. I'm curious about the neuroscience before you go to sleep. How do we set our minds up to, you were saying before about a lot of people, it's hard for them to sleep because they can't shut their mind off. Right. Is there something we should be thinking before we shut it off to set our sleep up for success mentally and then to really build into the next day where we wake up feeling like clear-minded and without this brain fog where we have more motivation, where we have more energy and excitement towards the next day and then doing that in a pattern every night.

20:03Is there any science around that? Is it like listening to a hypnosis? That could be very helpful. Which will help you clean out whatever's going on through the day and get clear and ready for the next day but also fall asleep so you're not thinking about it? Is there anything that can help you have better dreams so that you sleep better? What have you found there in the neuroscience? Yeah, so glad you asked this question. There's some really interesting data from a guy named Chuck Charles Zeissler, who is at Harvard Med, sent beautiful studies on sleep in humans for many decades and a really fantastic physician and researcher.

20:38They observed something interesting, which is that about 90 minutes or so before your natural bedtime, there's a spike in alertness, planning, and almost anxiety that all people undergo, and it's a normal, healthy pattern. The idea, and it's a just-so story because we don't really know, I nor Chuck Zeisler nor anyone else was consulted at the design phase, as we say. But we assume this came about because prior to going to sleep, we need to shore up everything for safety. We need to lock things down, make sure everything's in its place because we are very vulnerable in sleep. Nowadays, this might manifest as you need to go to bed at 10.30 because you have to get up at 6, etc.

21:22And then right around 8.30 or 9, you start finding yourself running around doing various things. Many people worry about that and they think, oh, I'm really stressed because I actually need to go to sleep and here I am wide awake. It tends to subside very quickly. So just the knowledge that that's a normal healthy spike in alertness and activity, I think can help a number of people. I want to make sure I mention that. The other thing is preparing the mind, as you said, turning thoughts off. Turning thoughts off is a skill. We've talked before, gosh, almost a year or more now, ago, about Yoga Nidra.

21:57Yes. Which is, there are many, many Yoga Nidra scripts available on YouTube, free of cost. The ones I particularly like are the ones by Kamini Desai. K-A-M-I-N-I-D-E-S-A-I. Kamini Desai. I just really like her voice. I don't know Kamini, never met her. These are free scripts. They're yoga nidra scripts that last about 20 minutes. They involve some breathing, some meditation type stuff. But they teach you to turn your thoughts off, which is really wonderful. Because a lot of people, they just get stuck in this rumination. Now, is there an ideal protocol prior to sleep? It depends because some people find they have their greatest clarity after the kids are asleep and they're sitting there.

22:43So I wouldn't say don't work or do work. You do want to avoid strong stimuli before sleep. So do you really want to watch a politically charged or a violent movie right before sleep? Well, that depends on how triggered you tend to be by politics or violence. Some people aren't triggered. Other people are. But that aside, you don't want to go to bed either too hungry or too full because that can inhibit your sleep. So for most people, that's going to be finishing your last bite of food about two hours before bedtime. But I confess there are days when I work, work, work and, you know, arrive at a place, a hotel, order some food and just, you know, eat a massive meal and then pass out.

23:28Right. Again, 80-20. Try and get it right 80 % of the time. What's harmful of being too hungry or being too full before you go to bed? You'll have trouble falling asleep and you'll wake up in the middle of the day. Both extremes. Both extremes. And I'm not a nutritionist or nutrition expert, but what I've found works for me personally is I fast until about noon-ish each day. And then my lunch is low carb, so I tend to eat some grass-fed meat, some veggies, maybe some starches if I trained, and a piece of fruit. If I didn't, I don't. And then I also have an afternoon snack. But then in the evening, my meals tend to be relatively low in meat and protein and higher in starches, which activate the tryptophan system and the serotonin system, which makes it easier to fall asleep.

24:14You can repack glycogen during the night so you can do muscular work the next day. Training of any kind, but also thinking. Your brain uses glucose. So at night, I tend to eat pastas and vegetables and rice and risottos and things like that. Not in huge volumes, but I tend to eat less protein. It's not that I don't eat any, but I don't tend to eat mixed steaks right before going to sleep. Again, 80-20, 80 % of the time. So foods, certain foods stimulate the neurotransmitter pathways like serotonin that facilitate the transition to sleep. Now, what could you take? Well, some people will drink chamomile tea.

24:50Chamomile tea is enriched in something called apigenin. Apigenin is, I take it in supplement form, 50 milligrams of apigenin, but it's really just chamomile extract. and it tends to make you a little drowsy. And many people experience excellent sleep when they take Apigenin and normally they struggle with it. Again, with supplements, I don't have a relationship to an Apigenin company or anything like that. I wanna be clear. And also supplements, check with your doctor, of course, all that. But the one thing I don't recommend is that people take melatonin. Don't take melatonin. I am not a fan of melatonin for the following reasons.

25:24First of all, melatonin does many more things besides just cause the transition to sleep. It also is involved in regulating some of the other hormones like testosterone, estrogen, and so on. Most of those studies are animal studies, but some of the data in humans indicate that as well. In kids, melatonin is one of the hormones responsible for suppressing puberty, and then melatonin rhythms change, and then puberty happens. So if your kid has already been taking melatonin, I wouldn't be alarmed, but just be aware. And if you talk to your physician, most physicians aren't really aware of this. I would talk to an endocrinologist, frankly.

25:58Also, Matt Walker would also support this statement because I'm lifting it from him, which is that most melatonin supplements contain anywhere from 15 % of what's listed on the bottle to 300 % of what's listed on the bottle. The regulation of supplements is an issue. Even from a trusted brand, if you were to take, say, 3 milligrams or 6 milligrams of melatonin, it's a pretty standard dose out there, you are taking supra-physiological levels of melatonin. Your system does not see those levels of melatonin. Chamomile tea is okay. Chamomile tea or apigenin, it's a little hard to find, but apigenin is a great, it's chamomile extract essentially.

26:39There are a few other things. Again, margins for safety will depend. Magnesium threonate, which is T-H-R-E-O-N-A-T-E, threonate, you know, 142 milligrams or so of magnesium threonate. Again, you could just shop for cost. I don't want to name brands, even though my podcast is associated with one. I don't want this to become about that. The magnesium threonate, many people take in 30 to 60 minutes before sleep with apigenin. Many people find great benefit. Yes. I am not a fan of taking serotonin or serotonin precursors, 5-HTP, L-tryptophan prior to sleep for the following reason. The architecture of sleep, as Matt probably discussed here, I need to watch that episode, He's so good.

27:28He includes a lot of slow-wave sleep early in the night, repair and recovery of motor circuits in the brain, and muscular tissue and connective tissue that might have been worked with or damaged during the day. And the second half of sleep tends to be enriched in so-called REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, more dreams that are very intense, et cetera. Right. That architecture is exquisitely controlled by levels of serotonin at one point and not having serotonin at others, having acetylcholine release, being very tuned to particular times in the night. When you start messing with the serotonin system, you disrupt that.

28:05So my experience with 5-HTP, I took it to go to sleep or L-tryptophan as I fall asleep like I got clubbed over the head by a grizzly bear, but then I wake up an hour and a half later and I cannot fall asleep for me for two days. Wow. Very intense. Now, I'm pretty sensitive to these things, but that's why I'm not a fan of those. And I rely on magnesium threonate, apigenin, and some people also take theanine. But for the time being, I think magnesium threonate and apigenin or chamomile are great. If people don't want to take supplements, chamomile tea is a terrific mild sedative to just kind of turn off some of that thinking.