How to Fall Asleep Fast | Dr. Matthew Walker | EQ Minds

I’m Chelsea Pottenger and welcome to EQ’s podcast for professionals. It is time to recharge your life. Welcome back to part two with Dr. Matthew Walker and if you liked the first one you’re gonna absolutely love this second one. Dr. Matt Walker is the professor at Berkeley for Neuroscience and Psychology. He’s also the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. In this podcast we’re going to talk about clinically proven strategies to help you get really good sleep.

He’ll 00:38 - discuss everything from core temperature, to blue light, to caffeine, an interesting around the sleep gene, and do you actually have it. It’s an absolute pleasure to welcome Dr. Matt Walker back to the show. Leading up to the next part around you know I think a lot of people use alcohol to take the edge off after work and I see it at work with colleagues that would do the same thing. I used to do the same thing because we would believe that it actually helped you drift off into sleep. What are you thoughts around that? Yeah, it’s very natural to think that and a lot of people will use alcohol as a sleep aid. It’s probably the most misunderstood sleep aid out there.

01:18 - Unfortunately alcohol is a class of drug that we call the sedatives. And sedation is not sleep and many mistake the former for the latter. It’s also problematic because not only does alcohol simply just sedate you and knock out your cortex so you become unconscious rather than go into naturalistic sleep. Alcohol will do two other things throughout the night. Firstly, it will fragment your sleep so that you wake up many more times throughout the night. Often they’re brief and you don’t commit them to memory. Do you have a demonstrable impact on the quality of your sleep. And the final thing is that alcohol is one of the most potent drugs that we know of for blocking your rapid eye movement sleep or your REM sleep and that’s dream sleep and that’s essential for a collection of different functions including EQ or emotional intelligence as well as it providing a form of overnight therapy. Dream sleep is emotional first aid and you will deprive yourself of that by way of drinking too much. Wow! Okay, so if they’re not drinking to get themselves off to sleep, what are you top tips to help busy professionals tonight get some really really good sleep.

Well I think people can probably do 02:30 - five things tonight to start getting better sleep the first is regularity and if there is one piece of advice you take away and try to implement this would be it. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time. As long as that tine period gives you you know at least an eight-hour opportunity. Even if it’s the weekend, don’t be tempted to do that sleep in late and then try to drag yourself back come Sunday night as if you’re trying to fly back and forth you know from one coast to the other. It’s torture on your biology. So weekend, weekday, even if you’ve had a bad night of sleep, still wake up at the same time and then get yourself in to set the next day. Regularity is king in that regard. Number two is darkness.

We are a dark deprived society in this modern era and 03:17 - we need darkness in the evening to release a hormone called melatonin. Melatonin times the healthy onset of our sleep. So in the last hour before bed you don’t need all of the lights blazing in your house. Turn half of them down and you’d be surprised actually at how soporific and sort of sleep inducing that makes you feel. And then of course stay away from screens in the last hour.

03:41 - If you really have to work on screens, install software that takes away the harsh blue light and you can just Google software to diminish and blue LED screen light. Some people were these blue light blocking glasses. There was one study that demonstrated it does seem to help but there’s no good validity on the glasses. That are out there right now that you can buy. But darkness is key. The third thing is temperature. Your brain and your body needs to drop their core temperature by about one degree Celsius to initiate good sleep and that’s the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that is too cold than too hot because the room that’s too cold is at least taking your brain and body in the right temperature direction for good sleep. So probably somewhere around 17 degrees is probably optimal for many people and maybe a little bit less if you can stomach it. It sounds cold, but cold it must be.

The next thing I would say is walk it out and what I mean this 04:40 - is if you’ve been awake in bed and you’ve been awake for maybe 20 or 25 minutes either trying to fall asleep or fall back asleep. Don’t stay in bed because your brain very quickly learns an association which is that your bed is the place of being awake not being asleep. So what you should do is get up go to another room in dim lights just read a book listen to a podcast but don’t check email, don’t eat, because it trains your body to expect those things and then only return to bed when you are very sleepy. There is no time cut off. Only return when you’re sleepy and that way your brain will relearn the association that your bed is the place of sleep and you will feel better. A lot of people tell me you know I’m falling asleep on you know the couch watching television and then I get into bed and I’m wide awake and I don’t know why. It’s because you’ve learned that association.

The final two things which 05:34 - make me deeply unpopular, although I’m genuinely an unpopular person in truth. First thing we’ve spoken about alcohol. You should really forgo alcohol. You know life is to be lived and I don’t mean to sound like a prude but try to really keep it under control if you want good sleep. If you’re going to bed tipsy that’s a really a sign that you’ve drunk too much. Caffeine though is the other one. It’s the culprit. Everyone knows that caffeine can keep you awake. Caffeine is a class of drug that we call a psychoactive stimulants. It’s actually the only psychoactive stimulant that we readily give to our children.

But for adults often people will have a cup of coffee or a tea after 06:11 - dinner. You need to be careful. Firstly some people are affected and they know it and they don’t sort of straight towards caffeine and evening. Some people will tell me I can have a cup of coffee and I could fall asleep fine and stay asleep. Even if that’s true, we did some studies several years back and we gave people one single dose of a standard cup of coffee 200 milligrams of caffeine and what we found is that that cup of coffee blocked the deep sleep or reduced that deep sleep by about 20 percent. So, to put that in context, I would have to age you by about 10 or 15 years to produce that type of a decrease in your deep sleep or you can do it every night by just drinking a cup of coffee after dinner.

I should also note by the way it has a timeline to it that people are 06:56 - probably unaware of. Caffeine has a half-life of about six hours. That simply means that after about six hours half of the caffeine is still in your system but it has a quarter life of twelve hours. So if you have a cup of coffee at noon a quarter of it is still in your brain at midnight so that would be the equivalent of getting into bed at midnight and just before you turn the lights out. You swick a quarter of a cup of Starbucks and you hope for a good night of sleep. It’s probably not going to happen.

So people should just be a bit 07:24 - more aware of caffeine and that was one of the reasons I went into detail in terms of caffeine in the book. If they are gonna have caffeine before noon, last coffee, would you suggest? I would do yup and at that point I would you know try to switch over to decaffeinated forms of those drinks. I used to be a tea drinker in the morning until about noon but now I’ve actually gone completely decaffeinated. It takes a while to get used to. I’m not going to pretend it’s quite the hit that you would like. What studies have found though which is interesting most people say I function better with caffeine. It’s actually not true.

What happens is that you are firstly usually self-medicating your 08:00 - state of chronic sleep deprivation if you need caffeine before noon. You should be but if you’re getting enough sleep you should be able to be perfectly awake and then what people find is that drinking the caffeine does improve their performance but it only improves it to a level that they could achieve normally if they actually cut themselves off from caffeine for a couple of weeks. So it’s not a performance enhancer above and beyond that which you can accomplish by way of sufficient sleep. And by the way even if you say well okay that’s great I’m just gonna sleep my six hours and still keep drinking coffee and get myself back to baseline. Coffee and caffeine is no substitute long term for insufficient sleep and we can speak about all of the death lien disease consequences by way of chronic sleep deprivation. Yeah fantastic.

The very very 08:47 - last question is sort of on that you know people who you say they only need six hours of sleep and they actually have the sleep gene and they don’t need to leave any more than that. I was fascinated by your research in this space so could you just very briefly touch on the reality here. Yeah I can. And so there is actually a rare genetic mutation in a gene that is called Dec. D E C which regulates a wakefulness promoting chemical in the brain and these people seem to be able to survive on somewhere between five to six hours a night without measurable impairment and at that point when I able to give these talks usually people say I’m one of those people. It is a tiny fraction of 1% of the population that appear to have this gene.

You’re much more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime 09:37 - than you are to have this gene by the way. So the number of people that we know who can survive on six hours of sleep or less without showing impairment rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population is actually zero. We know that every major disease that is killing us throughout the developed world has significant to many of them causal links to insufficient sleep. Currently that list includes Alzheimer’s disease and cancer which are the two most feared diseases. But it doesn’t stop there. We know that people who are sleeping less than seven hours of sleep have a significantly higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke, diabetes.

10:15 - They’re much more likely to be overweight, but far more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and they have a considerably higher risk of suicide as well. So there really is no hiding from sleep. I think the take-home here is that sleep unfortunately is not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity. It is a life support system and it is probably mother nature’s best effort yet ad immortality. Absolutely! Matt let’s touch an important topic.

You know that you just literally unpacked so much 10:49 - content and valuable research for the listeners and if anyone out there even if you don’t have any problems of sleep and you feel like you sleep great I think it’s really interesting to understand the effects of burning the midnight oil for work and then a lack of sleep not only on our body but also on our brain. I just like to say thank you so much Matt and where can our corporate professionals here in Australia find you? So I’m all over the internet and social channels. Sleep Diplomat is where people can find me. sleepdiplomat.com I am at sleep diplomat on Twitter. Feel free to reach out and should you want to learn more about sleep you can read the book which is called Why We Sleep. Fantastic! Thank you so much. I’m Chelsea Pottenger and you’ve been listening to EQ’s podcast for professionals. You can follow us on Instagram or Facebook at EQ Minds for more ways to live a calmer life. Thank you for listening. .