How To Improve Your Sleep | Matthew Walker

hi my name is Matt Walker I am a professor of neuroscience at the University of California Berkeley and I am also the author of the book why we sleep and I'm here to speak about some

tips for getting better sleep and also some of the bad things that happen when you don't get enough sleep so many of the things that people use to

try and help them sleep inadvertently are actually harming and hurting their sleep two good examples are probably

alcohol and marijuana many people will have a little nightcap in the evening and they think that having a drink in the evening helps them fall asleep it's actually not true alcohol is a class of

drugs that we call the sedatives and sedation is not sleep so what you're doing when you drink in the evening is actually just knocking out your cortex

and you're going into this sedation like state and you're not going into natural sleep there are two other problems with alcohol unfortunately and I'm so sorry to be giving you this bad news but and

first the alcohol will actually litter your sleep with many more awakenings throughout the night and so you you won't feel restored when you wake up the next morning by your sleep you won't

feel refreshed the problem and the danger is that many people don't remember waking up so much throughout the night when they've been drinking so they don't realize that it was the alcohol disrupting their sleep they

don't put two and two together the final thing about alcohol is that it's very good at blocking your REM sleep or your dream sleep rapid eye movement sleep and we know that REM

sleep is essential for a variety of functions including emotional and mental health and so alcohol will actually remove that dream sleep or it will

decrease it significantly blocking that essential critical sleep I should also note by the way how essential is that REM sleep well studies done back in the

1980s and really quite shocking studies demonstrated that if you deprive rats of rapid eye movement sleep they will die almost as quickly as they would from total food deprivation that's how

essential that dream sleep is and it's that dream sleep that you block with alcohol what about though marijuana well unfortunately the news isn't so great

there a lot of people will again help will use marijuana to help them relax incitive to take away some of that anxiety that's preventing them from falling asleep and certainly a marijuana

does seem to hasten speed with which you fall asleep but unfortunately marijuana like alcohol but through actually a different biological mechanism will also block your dream

sleep and if you're not getting that critical REM sleep you can actually become more anxious even more depressed the following day therefore people start to seek out more marijuana to sort of

medicate those symptoms that the marijuana is causing because of the sleep disruption so the advice right now is not to think of marijuana as a sleep

aid one of the other common aspects of marijuana is CBD oil which is the the non psychoactive component of marijuana

THC is the sort of psychoactive part of marijuana CBD which is own oil that people use a cannabinoid there those studies have not been really done in a particularly detailed way but for them

from what we can tell from the limited data CBD the non psychoactive form of marijuana actually doesn't seem to impact sleep so probably a little bit too early to make the definitive claim

but at least that seems to be the emerging story for CBD so what happens if you've pulled an all-nighter or you've had a short night

of sleep maybe you went to bed too late and you need to wake up early again can you get back that lost sleep unfortunately this is one of those myths

sleep is not like the bank in the sense that you can't accumulate a debt and then hope to pay it off at a later point in time and let me give you the evidence

that to make that point very clear if I were to take an individual and deprive them a whole night of sleep eight hours of lost sleep and then I give them all of the recovery sleep that they want on

a second night or a third night yes we see that they sleep longer they tried to sleep it off as it were but do they get back all of that eight hours that we that they've lost and the answer is no

even if we keep measuring them they never get back that sleep that they lost so you cannot accumulate a debt and then hope to pay it off at a later point in

time and many of us do this in society were short sleeping during the week and then we binge with our sleep at the weekend it's what we call social jetlag

or what I sometimes describe as sleep bulimia it's this binge purge sort of profile now there was a recent study a very interesting study where they looked at the mortality risk of short sleep and

firstly what they found a quite shocking result those people who are sleeping five hours a night have a 65% higher likelihood of dying at any time increase

of 65 percent in terms of mortality risk however if you get another group of people who are short sleeping maybe just five or six hours a night during the week but then sleep a little longer at

the weekend you can actually reduce some of that mortality risk but there's a danger here we know that that sort of social jetlag binging at the weekend short sleeping during the week is

associated not necessarily with a shorter life but it's associated with a far less healthy life you're far more likely to suffer from diabetes to be

obese to have poor cardiovascular health and have cardiovascular outcomes and if you look at that study even though some people were trying to sleep back at the weekend some of that which

they'd lost during the week they were almost twice as likely to report being in very poor health relative to people who do what we generally recommend which

is consistently get good seven to nine hours of sleep every day both during the week and the weekend so the recommend recommendation right now is to get consistent sleep whether it's the

weekend or the weekday keep doing that consistently unfortunately sleep is not like a credit system not that you would wish for unfortunately should you use a snooze

button well certainly what I've said before is that regularity is critical going to bed at the same time waking up at the same time and certainly using alarms can help you do that

and I use the word plural their alarms what I mean is not to have multiple awakenings in the morning I mean we should all set a tibet alarm you know think about the time that you need to go

to bed to get that 8 hour sleep opportunity and then set the alarm maybe sort of 15 minutes before and that's just the call it sort of like last orders at a bar now is the time to sort

of start preparing to get ready for this sleep event you can also by the way just sort of before sleep in the last hour you can sort of get into your pajamas your sleeping clothes brush your teeth

floss your teeth do all of those things that end up taking away and sort of an additional 15 minutes or 20 minutes get those in ahead of time but what about the snooze button though unfortunately

it's probably not a good idea because there is some data that I discuss in the book where if you look at the cardiovascular response to an alarm it's actually quite a stressful event for

your cardiovascular system we see a spike in heart rate stress chemicals increase now it's fine to use an alarm just that one time in the morning to wake you up but you shouldn't really be

hitting the snooze button because then you are repeatedly assaulting your cardiovascular system and you may think well you know I only hit it maybe sort

of three or four times you know how bad is that well maybe for that one day it's not bad but if you're doing that every single day every week every month every year every decade across

lifetime you can imagine the type of additional cardiovascular strain that that places on people so use the alarm that's fine but try to use it once and then get up and have a good thing