Most Replayed Moment: Sleep Expert On The Truth About Melatonin And Magnesium

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/3573507450af4151

Uh
Are you concerned that melatonin is becoming more and more popular as a way to solve problems?
Lifestyle issues.
But have called sleep.
Impairment.
Because I I'm seeing loads of s you know, I'm an investor, so I see lots of companies now pitching me different products that have
melatonin in them as a
sort of day to day sleeping supplement.
I think I'm really torn out.
being on both sides of this argument and
I'm cautious about it for two reasons.
The first is in pediatric populations here in the United States. Pediatric? Yeah. So the
People's use of melatonin in kids.
is increasing. So in pediatric populations it's
increasing exponentially. And in fact, if you go down the sort of the supermarket aisles here in America,
Often if you go into sort of the the health
sort of food section. There's this big purple section, that's the melatonin section. And a large proportion of that is
The dedicated to gummies for your children.
with melatonin.
And
There was a study that was published about three years ago that showed
Here in America
Over the past ten years.
There's been a five hundred and three percent increase.
in poisonous overdose admissions to hospitals of melatonin.
in the past ten years, five hundred and three percent increase.
So firstly we've got to be a bit careful.
The second reason is that
Melatonin is a bioactive hormone.
And it's also involved in reproductive development. And there are studies done back in the nineteen seventies, I think.
where they were looking at juvenile male rats, which is to say, male rats who were going through adolescence.
And they were dosing them with high amounts of melatonin.
And what they found is that that stunted
the development of the testes.
of the testicles, and it caused testicular atrophy. Now, these were very high doses, but we've got to be a little bit careful. We think
We say well melatonin's a natural hormone. So
Anything natural is safe.
Melatonic overall in terms of its safety profile is very safe. It's actually a very good antioxidant.
But you've got to be careful because things like, for example, testosterone supplementation in males, what we know is that if you're injecting
Testosterone.
After a while, after maybe eighteen or so,
the testicles themselves will stop producing
their own testosterone, and even if you stop
the administration of the exogenous testosterone, the injection.
The testes never return.
The function of producing testosterone.
Now we don't have it any evidence yet that that's the case, that if you keep taking melatonin at high dose, your body, the fear would be, shuts down its own natural production of melatonin. I've seen no evidence.
In fact I've seen evidence that
country that even after about six months or even twelve months in certain small cities
When you stop melatonin.
the production starts again naturally. It it seems fine. Problem is
People haven't been taking melatonin for just twelve months.
They've been taking it.
For years.
We've got no idea what happens after.
Yeah.
That was my hesitation when the first time someone offered me melatonin is from doing this podcast and speaking to smart people like yourself.
I've come to learn this sort of principle that
If you start making something for your body in terms of a hormone, if you start sort of
um consuming something externally.
Like testosterone, your body will say, Fine, I don't need to do this. It will try and return to that level of balance
where the quantities in your system are maintained, which means it kinda learns to shut down. And I always think about the case of testosterone.
Because men know that if we start
injecting testosterone and we're gonna have to pretty much do it forever. Yeah. Um if we want the le those levels to be the same.
Yeah, that's the worry is that there are no free lunches in biology, and usually if you fight biology, you typically lose. There's always a trade off. And some of my friends often like talk to me about like these miracle things, or this thing, or take metaphanol and everything will be fine and da.
Okay, but what's the trade off? And I get most concerned when they say there isn't one.
Because then I go shit, we don't know it. Yeah. You've got to be careful because absence of evidence
is not evidence of absence.
Uh

doing that deal with with your physiology.
So to come back to the sort of the three things, the first thing we were mentioning is digital detox.
And don't worry about the blue light.
Worry about light in general. I'll come on to that because that's the second. But Michael Gradazar, as I was saying, what he found is that the blue light doesn't really disrupt your sleep.
It's a combination of first these devices that we use are attention capture devices.
And they are designed.
to fleece you of your attention economy and they do it ruthlessly well.
They've spent
tens of millions of dollars designing these products to do that.
So what happens is that these
devices become hugely activating.
And as a result, they
Essentially will be a mute button on your sleepiness. So you could be there, you get into bed, it's 11 PM, you think, I am so tired. I was falling asleep on the the the couch watching television. And then you get into bed, you start going onto social media, and then you start doom scrolling, and then you get into this what we call bed rotting, where you just sit there.
And now you look at the clock.
And it's no longer eleven PM, it's one AM.
And you've just done sleep procrastination. Now
It turns out that it's
Yes that
But these
are attention grabbing devices that will mute your sleepiness.
But you have to be of a certain personality type, he found. Not all of us are vulnerable.
to this sleep disruption of devices.
You have to be someone who is perhaps neurotic, someone who has high impulsivity, or someone who is perhaps high anxious.
If you're of any of those kinds,
You should be really careful about your use of technology in the bedroom.
Now for me to
you know, sit here and say, look.
It
Put your phone in the car, in the garage, and that way. You know, that's what I would love.
Because
what we've learned to do in this modern era is
The first thing
When you wake up.
What is it?
That you do.
No no comment.
It's just you and I. I grab my phone before my eyes are even open.
And what happens is this sort of small tsunami of anxiety washes over you because as soon as you unlock the phone, it's everyone else's agenda for your day but your own.
And it's a terrible way to wake up. Have you ever had the experience where
You've got to wake up for an early morning flight, and it's a critical flight.
You know that that night
is not going to be a good night of sleep. It's going to be a shallow kind of sleep. It's what we call anticipatory anxiety.
You are
Anticipating an anxious event in the morning.
And
Studies have shown that when we create this anticipatory anxiety
The amount of deep sleep that you have
drops significantly. You don't sleep as well.
And therefore, if we just do this little sort of version, this L I T E version of the morning flight, which is we know that when we go to bed and we put our phone down.
We know that when we wake up every morning
we're just going to open it up to that hit of anxiety every morning.
No wonder our sleep can start to get shallow.
Now I'm not going to sit here and say, Well
Don't take your phone into the bedroom because the genie is out the bottle and no matter what I say.
It's not going back in any time soon. And a friend of mine, Michael Grandner, uh has got this beautiful
Uh framework.
Where he says, You can take your phone into your bedroom, it's fine.
But
You can only use your phone.
Standing up.
What's his name? Michael Grand. And and what happens is that you you're there and you think after about seven or eight minutes, I'm just I'm just gonna have a bit of a sit down here. As soon as that

So
I would say that
Digital detox is the first friend.
That will really help your sleep.

The second is
regularity. And we'll come on to regularity when we speak about
you know, what really makes for good sleep.
If you were to only do one thing.
Not three things, but just one thing.
go to bed and wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend.
Regularity is
T.
Okay, so that's the third pillar.
That's correct. Regularity.
Okay.
When I looked at the science.
For me I
created this framework of the four macros of good sleep. You've heard of the three macros of food, macro nutrients, fat, protein, carbohydrate.
To me, there are four macros of good sleep, and it's Q Q R T. QQRT.
And it stands for
Quantity.
Quality.
Regularity.
And timing.
And think of it less like pillars, but
The four legs of a chair.
And if any one of these becomes unstable, the chair will topple over.
So
I'll probably start with the one that people have had me
bang on about, which is quantity, seven to nine hours. Th this myth of eight hours is nonsense.
It's a wonderful range.
Seven to nine hours.
And what we know is that using that sweet spot of seven to nine hours
When you get less than that.
The shorter your sleep.
The shorter your life.
Fuck.
Short sleep predicts all cause mortality.
Now, we say that there's the minimum of seven hours of sleep, and some people have argued, perhaps correctly, that look, if you look at these mortality curves,
There's not much of a percentage difference between sleeping six hours and
Versus the seven that you're telling me is minimum.
So six hours is just fine. So all of this nonsense and rhetoric is is is silly from you.
And I think they've made a conflation.
Because
Seven hours.
is the minimum amount of sleep that you need.
To survive.
Because the way that we quantify what minimum is
is based on whether you die or you don't.
prematurely.
The amount of sleep that you need
To survive.
is different than the amount of sleep that you need.
To thrive.
And people will conflate the former with the latter.
So you've got to be careful when people are sort of touting on social media saying, Well, no, but look, you there's not much difference between my sort of survival rate on six hours versus seven hours.
Y you may have a just as much of a long life, but the quality of your life
will be very different. So that's quantity seven to nine hours. And is that does it change for parents, by the way?
I I've met so many parents that seem to be functioning better than me and they've got four they're having like four or five hours sleep.
Did evolution not give parents any leeway or anything when they have kids that suddenly their brain changes and now they can survive with less sleep?
The evidence doesn't suggest that once you go through parenthood, you get some magic sort of, you know, immunity shot.
that makes you, you know, resilient and not vulnerable to a lack of sleep.
And in some ways you could argue
Because we used to
you know live as a collective tribe
And we would share duties.
At that point
Yeah.
Mother Nature doesn't really worry too much about you now.
Because you've already
procreated and you've passed on your genetic code. So you are now the the sort of the you know, the not particularly well
you know, curd for individual through evolution, it's your offspring that gets
So it sacrifices you.
In a way. I mean that's what we see in the animal kingdom. Uh did you see that documentary about the octopus? Yeah. I thought it was beautiful documentary, but um
The T L DR for anyone that hasn't seen it is once the octopus and I'm gonna completely butcher this, so please ignore. Um, once the octopus has given birth.
Yeah.
dies, basically it doesn't move out of that hole and it dies? Is that a rough
Well, I don't know if if it dies, but it's level of of
I such a
Does the octopus die after reproduction? And it says yes. Female octopuses die after their eggs hatch.
After laying eggs, a female stops eating and devotes all of her her energy to protecting and oxygenating.
them until they hatch.
Once they do, she dies shortly after.
A process called semiel parity.
Meaning they re r reproduce only once.
This death is triggered by hormone changes.
from the optic gland similar to mammalian protrudy glands.
And males die shortly after mating as well, usually within a few months.
That is wild.
In some ways it's you know it's it's it's tragic and it reminds me, I'm so glad that I'm
Not an octopus. But but coming back to it. So for
Th there doesn't seem to be some, you know, magic cloak of invincibility that you put on when you go through parenthood. Certainly what we
No is that
The number of individuals who can survive on six hours of sleep or less and show no impairment
in either their brain or their body, rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population.
Is zero.
So quantity matters.
But it turns out that we
Got it wrong in thinking that was the only thing.
Because
Then came.
Quality.
Quality is
defined in sleep science as two things.
The first is something that your sleep tracker will measure, which is the continuity of your sleep, meaning do you sleep in one or two nice long bouts throughout the night? That's
Good quality of sleep, nice continuous bouts.
Versus
your sort of sleep is very fragmented by all of these awakenings.
That's very poor quality of sleep. And the way that you can measure it in your sleep tracker is just by looking at the app, and there'll be something call efficiency.
Sleep efficiency is defined as the following.
Of the time that you're in bed.
What percent of that time is spent asleep?
And what we'd like to see is you north of 85% or above. So this is kind of like the user's guide to sleep trackers. What I want to see is.
eighty five percent or more. If you're less than that, we need to have a conversation. That's number one good quality of sleep. The second, which is what sort of what you these trackers can't really do, but I can do in the sleep laboratory when you look like a spaghetti monster because I've put electrodes all over your head.
I can measure the quality of your big, deep, slow brainwaves of deep non-rem sleep.
And that is a second measure, the power of those big slow brainwaves. That's a second measure. And quality
Seems to be as predictive as quantity.
In making a difference not just to your all cause mortality.
But quality even more than quantity.
when it comes to mental health.
has been showing the bigger signal.
So
Again, it's not that quantity doesn't matter. You do have to get sufficient amount of sleep.
But quality.
as much as quantity should be paid attention to.
And I haven't said that enough.
The next is where we came to in our sort of three things that I was saying. The first is digital detox, then the next thing I said is regularity.
This is somewhere where I've also changed my mind on. I've doubled down on regularity.
There's a study that also came out of that same data set that I described. It's called the UK Biobank data. And now they didn't look at 90,000 individuals, but they looked at 60,000 individuals.
And they decided that they were going to compare and split them into quartiles. So the most regular
To the second most regular.
To then sort of the third most regular and then the final quartile was those who were the least regular. And what does regular mean in this context?
Highly regular individuals plus or minus fifteen minutes.
In terms of going to bed and waking up at the same time. In other words, a total wiggle room of thirty minutes. Oh okay, so if I'm always going to bed at nine PM and I do that five days in a row, I'm regular timing really.
So it you're right, it's timing in a way.
But I'll come on to why there is a separate T for timing in just a second, but regularity here.
was okay, plus or minus so let's say you go to bed at eight forty five PM one night and then nine and then nine ten PM and then you're back to eight that's beautiful tight.
timing. I like that. Whereas the those people who were least regular, they were ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes disperate. They were going to bed, let's say at eleven one night, then one
A.m. the next night, then they were going to bed at ten thirty PM, and then they were going to bed at twelve thirty. They were all over the map.
So what they found was that
Those people who were most regular
versus least regular so they compare the extremes of these two.
Those people who were most regular had a forty nine percent
relative decrease in all cause mortality.
So they were forty nine percent less likely to prematurely die than those people who were least likely to die. They had a thirty nine percent cancer mortality.
Risk reduction.
great, they had a fifty-seven percent cardiometabolic.
Disease risk.
reduction.
So that was stunning, that regularity
With
incredibly powerful as a predictive signal of your different forms of mortality.
That wasn't the best part of the paper, though.
They had also measured quantity.
as well as regularity in these same individuals.
So then they decided to say well
I'm going to take our measure of quantity and regularity and we're going to put them both in the same statistical bucket.
and do a Coke Pepsi challenge to see which one wins out in terms of predicting all cause mortality.
We all bet in the sleep field, or at least I did, it was going to be quantity.
I was wrong.
Regularity beat out quantity in predicting
all cause mortality and by quite some margin. Now that doesn't mean that you can now go away and say, I'm gonna start sleeping four hours, but incredibly consistent four hours.
You need both quantity and quality.
But goodness, does regularity seem to carry a massive signal. So
Coming back to those three things, I would say digital detox.
Just go to bed and wake up at the same time.
And the final thing is light. In this modern world, we are a dark, deprived society.
we get what I call junk light at night. So you've heard of junk DNA.
Well we get junk light at night.
We don't need all of this light and it fools our brain into thinking it's still daytime outside. So no wonder as a society, we have some struggles with sleep at night. Now that's due to many reasons. Stress, too much caffeine, alcohol.

But excessive light is one of the easiest things that you can do. So for the next seven days.
Just do me this experiment.
If you can.
Set an alarm one hour before your normal bedtime.
When that alarm goes off.
Turn off and I I do this myself.
Turn off.
Almost all of the lights in your house.
When you say all of the lights, do you mean the little red light on my smoke alarm or No, that's fine.
But you know so.
My wife and I one hour before bed
Almost all the lights. We've got sort of this little set of the this sort of light that goes around the television, the back of the television sort of kinda looks like the television's cool and illuminated.
I will set that down to about five percent.

And all of the rest of the lights out. So you can kind of just still see some illumination. So I'm not sort of, you know, looking desperately uncool and uh in in in front of her when I'm tripping over things'cause it's complete black, you know, then start cooling the house.
or the room as best you can to around about sixty seven, sixty eight degrees.
Fahrenheit or about eighteen degrees Celsius. We can speak about temperature, but just do this experiment for the next seven days, one hour before bed, the alarm goes off.
You switch off all of the lights.
And ask the following question. Do you feel sleepier? Is it soporific? Does it make you feel more sleepy?
As a result.
But don't stop there.
What you've gone
and done is the first positive experiment, which is you've gone from the no intervention
Lig are on.
to then the Matt's intervention, which is now the lights are off for one hour before bed.
Don't just ask is my sleep better.
when the lights were out for one hour before bed.
Once that seven day period has finished.
Go back to doing what you were doing before, which is keep all of the lights on, and ask yourself, did my sleep get better when I did the intervention? And did my sleep go back to being worse when I stopped? Because I'm trying to teach you bi directionality in the experiment. Does that make some sense?
Yeah, so you get to s you get to basically do an A B test. Correct.
You get to see both sides of the equation. And with that, it's more proof positive than just one direction alone,'cause who knows, it could just be a placebo effect.
So
Regularity coming back to it is critical. So we've t spoken about Q Q R quantity quality regularity. On the
Um regularity point.
Why?
What's going on in our brain that's
m making it from a hormonal perspective or other
That's making it important for us to sleep at the same time.
It's a bloody great question.
People don't respond to rules. They respond to reasons, not rules. So let me try and explain the reason behind the sort of the rule. When it comes to regularity, we have something called a circadian rhythm that we've spoken about.
and there's a clock that sits inside of your brain, deep in the middle of the brain. So
We have
It just turns out.
A brain here.
Lovely.
Okay, so
We've got
One of these hemispheres here.

The subcortical sections. So these are the areas that are below the subcortex. So here
is the brain. So this is the front of the brain, the back of the brain, top of the brain, and here's the brain stem.
And it turns out that right in the middle of the brain, right here, there's an area called the hypothalamus.
No.
Here, this structure here, this is the thalamus, this is the sensory gate of your brain. So all of your five senses, sound, touch, taste, smell, they all flood into this gate.
called the thalamus, and then the thalamus will decide whether it sends those sensory signals up to your cortex.
And when it sends the psych signals up to your cortex.
You start processing them and you become consciously aware.
of the external world.
Now, as we're falling asleep, just as an aside, what's interesting is that this gate, the sensory gate, the thalamus,
Once we start to fall asleep, the gate.
Will close shut.
Now your eyes are s technically still seeing, your ears are still hearing.
Your tongue is still tasting.
But because the gate of the thalamus, the sensory gate, closes shut.
those signals that are coming into your brain.
Are no longer sent up to your cortex, so you stop perceiving the outside world.
Which is just simply a different way of saying.
You've fallen asleep.
Now the hypothalamus, you've heard of hypo, sort of hypertension or sort of you know hypothermia.
That means lower.
So
Here's the thalamus. This area here is called the hypertalmus.
And it's a tiny structure, but within that structure contains
A nucleus.
And that group of cells, the nucleus, has a fancy term and it's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
But
The suprachismatic nucleus is your master twenty four hour clock.
Every cell in your body
has a clock inside of it.
But this is the master clock.
It's like Lord of the Rings. Th there's one ring to rule them all. Well, there's one clock to rule them all.
And here
In the suprachismatic nucleus.
you get the twenty four hour rhythm of being awake.
And being asleep, being awake and being asleep.
How does your brain keep quartz like precision
twenty four hour clock time.
How does it do that?
The way it does that
Із да і 6 signals such as light.
And dog. From your eyes. From your eye.
And so when light comes through
The retina.
It tells the hypothalamus it's daytime.
And therefore you should be awake.
And its rhythm starts its awesome sort of upswing.
And temperature can do this and feeding can does all sorts of different things, but for the most part light
is the principal governor
That
Essentially acts like electrical, I should say, photon fingers.
That pops the wristwatch dial out and resets it precisely to 24 hours every single day. Because if you're left in the dark with no signals of light,
Your clock isn't precise.
It drifts to about
twenty four hours and fifteen minutes. So you start going forward a little bit every single day if you go into a cave, and people have done this experiment.
The thing that keeps it precise is light.
So you need light.
To keep a beautiful twenty four hour rhythm.
P one of those things that's under the control of your twenty four hour rhythm is your sleep wake cycle.
What if I'm doing exercise?
Exercise is a wonderful
and trainer of your circadian rhythm as long as you're doing it at the right time.
So if you're starting to exercise at three or four in the morning
That's not good because that's an activity signal that's going to confuse the brain into thinking
It's the active period, which is normally because we're a diurnal species the day.
And it's the same thing coming back to my point of regularity.
Using light.
as the best way to help with that regularity because light
If it's artificial at night.
fools your brain into thinking.
That
It's daytime still outside. I mean is there any such thing as non artificial light?
I mean, I guess with the sun, but I mean, is there a type of light that I could use at night, like candles or something? Yes.
Below thirty lux?
Right. is not going to necessarily do you a disservice. Probably below fifty Lux. Now Lux L U X is just a measure of light intensity. And you can download on the app store a free Lux meter. And if you're an idiot nerd like me, you're going all over the house at night and you're sort of
putting it in different location, you're seeing if any kind of white spots here where, you know, the lux is too high.
But you need to drop that.
that looks. By the way, it's a great way if people want to say, look, my REM sleep is deficient.
How can I get more REM sleep? There's a great study where they did something similar to what I'm telling you now.
Ninety minutes before bed.
They turn down the lights to below thirty looks.
And they pulled out all of the blue light.
And just that trick.
Of dropping the lights down.
Ninety minutes before bed.
Below thirty lux.
Making it warm yellow light.
increase their REM sleep by eighteen percent. Wow.
It's a huge margin, so no need for pharmacology. But to your question,
Why
is regularity.
Important. Well I told you that light is one of the signals that can create regularity. It turns out
That your behavior
Is another thing that will

So meaning.
When you go to bed and wake up at the same time.
It acts like an anchor.
It anchors your circadian rhythm.
And it tells you
Almost like a scene in a movie.
This scene
Is now complete.
A new scene starts.
This scene is complete, a new scene starts. So every time that you're going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time, you are feeding the suprachismatic nucleus, the massive 24 hour clock in your brain. You're feeding it signals of regularity.
And when it feeds on signals of regularity.
It improves the
Quantity
And the
Quality of your sleep.
Your circadian rhythm likes
Consistency. It likes regular signals. When you feed it signals of light, of activity.

You improve the quantity and the quality of your sleep.
That's the reason behind the underlying rule.
So having a T V in your bedroom is a terrible idea then, because if
On that behavioral point, if I'm getting in bed but then I'm staying up for three hours watching Netflix.
My brain is gonna be quite confused about like
The behavioral pattern of what I'm doing in my life.
It's not gonna associate the bed with sleep, it's gonna associate the bed with movies.
That's one of the problems that we call con it's called conditioned arousal, which sounds a lot more salacious than it actually is. It's a term that we use in sleep medicine, which
may explain insomnia. So
With insomnia, let's say that the first time you go to this thing called a dentist and you get in the chair and it's kind of cool, you reclined back and
You know, you think this is fine.
But then after about fourteen or fifteen visits.
When you get into that chair.
you are no longer looking forward to getting into that chair, are you? Why? Because you've learned the association that being in that chair typically leads to a bad outcome.
Now
The same thing is true.
with the bed, if you start associating the bed with
Anything other than sleep and we give you a pass in terms of sex, we have
But
Sleep and sex, anything other than that.
You start to learn that this thing called my bed is this place where
I'm
Awake?
Where I work, where I eat.
Where we have conversations, where I watch television.
And so, you know, if I were to and I'm again I'm stealing Michael Grand's point, but if I were to s say to you, bed sleep, bed sleep, bed sleep, bed sleep, bed
Sleep.
Okay. If I were to say
Bed scroll, bed eat, bed work, bed sleep.
Bed TV bed.
You've confused.
Yeah.
Because there's no predictive signal. You've never bound an association. Now the way this works to your disadvantage is
There
Insomnia is the following.
The insomnia event that begins the insomnia is typically not the thing that maintains the insomnia. So let's say that
I
Um had
I experienced a really difficult bereavement.
And that triggered a form of insomnia.
Where I couldn't sleep because of the bereavement.
Gradually the bereavement
is not the thing that's going to maintain my insomnia.
It's because every time I have been going to bed
Over the past month.
I have not been sleeping.
I've been wide awake in my bed.
So now because your brain is such an incredibly associative device, it learns the association that my bed is the place where I'm always awake.
And what do we then do? We need to break that association in insomnia. So what we do is we say the twenty minute rule, if you've been in bed for about twenty minutes and it's just not happening for you.
Don't worry, don't listen to idiots like me that doom and gloom and disease and sickness and
One bad night is not gonna be a problem. It's just not.
So just say, look, tonight is not my night.
I am not, however, going to s lie in bed.
Awake.
Because very quickly my brain starts to learn the association that my bed is the place where I'm wide awake.
And you need to break that association. So go to a different room in dim light.
Just read a book, listen to a podcast.
Whatever it is.
And the rule of thumb is the following. Only return to bed.
When you are sleepy.
And so there's no time limit.
And that way you gradually relearn the association that my bed is the place
Where I always get consistent sleep.
Because otherwise it's the dentist chair.
You walk into your bedroom.
And you look at your bed and it's your nemesis.
And you convinced yourself even before you get into bed, I'm not going to sleep, because that's the place where I always don't sleep.
And by the way.
If you suffer from the three AM awakenings, my first question is how do you know it's three AM?
And that's your first problem. Looking at the clock.
Does two things.
It makes you more anxious. Yeah.
And second.
Because your brain is such an incredibly associative device.
You start to then
Decide.
That three AM is the time when I need to wake up.
If you keep
Looking at the clock.
You keep reinforcing that it's three or four.
And sleep at three o'clock in the morning is like trying to remember someone's name. The harder you try
The further you push sleep away, sleep is something that happens to you.
It's not something that you make happen.
And so at that moment the best advice if you don't want to get out of bed is
Do any one of the following.
Meditation.
Just do a guided meditation, you can download apps. Next, if that's not your thing, that's okay.
Do box breathing. You know, you can sort of inhale for
Five hold for
six, exhale for seven there's all sorts of different numbers, but you can do breathing exercises. The third, if you don't like that, is a body scan. So close your eyes, start at the top of your head, feel the st you know, do I have tension in my forehead? Do I need to relax it? What about my neck? Do I need to
move through your body and gradually go down. How are my shoulder blades feeling? I just relax down into the bed.
And gradually down into the chest, into the
Move through.
And just relax.
If none of those things feel
Fun.
The next thing you can do is take yourself on a mental walk. There's a great study from my university, uh the University of Berkeley, California.
And we didn't do the study, Alison Harvey did it.
By the way, counting sheep?
Bad idea.
Makes your sleep worse.
It turns out. Why is that? Because well, with every kind of little bleating cotton wool ball with a strange look on its face that leaps over the fence that you're counting, you're reinforcing every minute of sleep that you're not getting, and it seems to make matters worse. But what she found was that there's an alternative.
If you think about
a walk that you know in great vivid detail. So for me, it's going to be walking the dog. So I go over to the shelf, I open the door, is it the red lead or the I'm gonna go with the blue lead today. So I clip the dog in with my right hand, I open the door with my left hand, I take a left down the stairs, I look it's that level of
I want you 4K detail.
In terms of granularity.
And what's common about every method I've just described.
Meditation.
Box breathing.
Yeah.
sort of uh body scan.
Going on a mental walk.
All of these things have in common
That you get your mind.
Of itself.
In that
particular example where she asks you to vividly think about a journey that you know.
What did she find in the study?
What she found is that that increases the speed with which you fall back asleep.
Significantly.
Because as I said, it it's so you know
her work to me demonstrated that it it is so like that name because
The moment I stop trying to remember someone's name.
What happens?
You remember it, yeah.
And so when you do these types of exercises where you're getting the mind off itself.
The next thing that you typically remember
Is your alarm cloing off in the morning?

Is this why
people listen to very vivid sleep stories and why I listen to serial documentaries.
Serial killer documentaries.
True crime documentaries, I should say that's a bit more
Uh nice to palette.
I don't know of them.
My suspicion is that they may be doing your deep sleep a disservice.
Stick up for me in the comments. If you listen to True Crime to fall asleep, please
Write it below in the comment section.
If you find it subjectively.
Wonderfully pacifying.
And call me.
And there is not death.
I know.
Blood.
and limbs being distributed at high velocity all over the scene.
I would say it's great.
But if it looks like a Quentin Tarantino movie or sounds like one
Maybe harm and foul rather than just in my ears. But yes. So
Yeah.
We forget.
The
To the best of my knowledge.
The meditation
company called Calm. Now I have no f affiliation with them. They were doing somewhat well.
But what they realized is that they wanted people to sort of meditate in the morning. And when they used looked at their usage statistics, people were meditating in the morning, but then there was a huge swath of usage right before bed.
People were self medicating their state of insomnia. And then through a stroke of genius they realized
When we were young
We used to love falling asleep to our parents.
Reading as a story.
Why is that any different when we become adults?
So they created sleep stories.
And they went from struggling as a company, I think, to becoming the first or one of the first billion dollar valuation health
companies out there, they became a unicorn.
And now they can the they've got, you know, people like, you know, Matthew McConaughey, they've got Harry Stiles, and then

You know, an unfortunate British sleep scientist um with a bad voice, but you can listen to these sleep stories.
And they are wonderfully soporific. Why? Because they get your mind off itself.
We we talked um earlier on about melatonin and uh th there are other
supplements which people talk a lot about. One of the ones that's become really popular
Is magnesium.
I've heard uh Ashuaganda and I've had magnesium a lot. Yeah. Is there any efficacy to these? Are these are these useful?
The first thing I would say is that if you're suffering from sleep problems and you're looking to supplements
You're stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. Okay.
What you need to do is think about the fundamentals.
Regularity.
What's your caffeine intake?
Make sure you're not drinking too much alcohol.
Get regular.
dim down half of the lights, digital detox, any one of those, but especially all of them combined, are going to get you log orders of better sleep than reaching for the
But
latest supplement bottle of whatever it is.
The second thing to say is think about it from a logical standpoint.
If there were really some supplement that promises to be the Shangrela of all resplendent sleep at night,
The drug companies would have been all over it.
Decades ago.
To put it in context, it took George Lucas, I think, about thirty years to amass something like four billion.
in revenue from the Star Wars franchise. It took Ambient twenty two months.
That's how big a business sleep pharma can.
Is Ambien's what a sleep pill. Ambien is a sleep pill.
Magnesium.
If you dig into it, and I I did a deep dive about three years ago,'cause I I kept hearing it too, this magnesium magnesium. The first thing to note is that most forms of magnesium, magnesium oxy uh oxide, or magnesium citrate.
Most of these forms of magnesium.
Don't cross the blue brain barrier.

And sleep is produced by your brain.
So how can something that

Affect.
A brain process number one. There is one form of magnesium that seems to have some evidence in favor of it. It's called magnesium L308.
But if you look at the literature, where did this story come from?
It turns out that about thirty years ago they started looking at people who had disrupted sleep, and they would assess their blood work, and what they found is that some of those people were magnesium deficient.
and when they supplemented them with magnesium and they became magnesium normative,
The sleep got better.
But that's very different than saying, look, you and I
Where currently magnesium normative
And then dosing myself with high volumes of magnesium.
Am I imagining that that's going to make my sleep better? The the analogy would be, let's say I develop this incredible new oxygen saturation machine.
And you say to me, Well, but Matt, my blood oxygen saturation right now, looking at my device, tells me it's ninety eight point six percent.
It doesn't matter how fancy or good my machine is, I'm not going to get you past 100%. You're already at ceiling level.
And that's the problem with magnesium supplementation. If your magnesium normative
All you're doing is creating probably expensive urine at at at that moment in time.
Now there may be an indirect benefit of magnesium.
in that it does seem to relax muscles.
And when the body is in a state of relaxation
It sends a signal of relaxation back up a branch of nerves called the vagus nerve.
that goes up to the brain and signals to your brain you're starting to relax down and you get this state of quiescent.
And that's very helpful for sleep. So magnesium may still have an indirect benefit on sleep through its relaxation kind of policy that it instantiates in the body.
But overall magnesium
is not really moving the needle if you look at the studies.
Ashwaganda
is different. Ashwaganda and another compound called phosphatidyl serine.
Phosphatidyl serine.
and Ashwaganda, both of these supplements
seem to help do one of two things. They either
Ratchet down the fight or flight branch of your nervous system.
And they can also reduce the amount of cortisol.
that the body is releasing.
That's important because
I see a lot of people coming to the sleep centre where I'm at.
And they have what I call the tired but wired phenomenon.
But they come to me and they say, I am so tired.
I am so so tired, but I'm just so wired emotionally.
And from a nervous perspective, that I can't fall asleep.
And let's say that you've done let's say, you know, um an on stage event.
And it's incredible. You've got that on stage buzz, you come off stage at eleven PM and normally you'll be fast asleep.
But you know you are so wired, it doesn't matter.
You are tired as tired as can be.
But you're so wide you can't fall asleep. That's
the fight or flight branch being switched on and you just can't fall asleep. You need to push it back off.
Phosphatidalcerine and Ashwaganda will both push you back over.
into the more quiescent what we call parasympathetic nervous system branch.
That's good.
However.
They also will reduce cortisol.
and cortisol is a wake promoting hormone.
Cortisol is fine.
We it gets a bad rap.
You need to have your cortisol start to spike a few hours before bed.
And it helps with the waking up process.
It's wonderful. Every day we have a cortisol spike that starts happening before we wake up and
It's one of the things that helps us wake up.
And then it's a
builds us to this beautiful crescendo mid morning.
Where you should be awake and
not needing caffeine. And it drops before bed. And then it starts to peak in the sort of middle early afternoon.
And in fact usually peaks at the late morning hours, I should say, and then it will start its awesome sort of downswing.
And what you see is that right before you go to bed
Cortisol should hit its lowest point, what we call its nadea, its lowest trough.
Mm-hmm.
What's interesting, by the way, just as an aside.
Is that
Insomnia we can classify usually as at least one of
two different types. There's actually multiple, but let's just say there are uh of those multiple, there are two types.
One is called sleep onset insomnia. I can't fall asleep.
The other is sleep maintenance insomnia. I can't stay asleep.
When they've looked at people's cortisol.
on a thirty minute by thirty minute basis on the twenty-four hour clock face, we go through just what we described.
Just before we wake up, we get this rising cortisol, it peaks late morning, and then it drops down and right before bed.
Our cortisol is almost at its lowest point.
With insomnia patients they show exactly the same thing, a beautiful rise
In the late morning hours.
It starts to come down.
But then you see two anomalies.
Right before bed.
It goes back up.
And then in the middle of the night.
even when it's starting to rise, it will have this abnormal spike right in the middle of the night too.
And what we believe is that that may in part explain
Sleep onset insomnia.
Cortisol should be coming down and it should stay low right before we go to bed, but then it jumps back up in insomnia patients.
I can't fall asleep.
And then
It continues to stay low throughout the first half of the night.
But then it also spikes in insomnia patients.
I can't stay asleep.
What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.
Uh