Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
andrew huberman his second time in the
podcast
he's a neuroscientist at stanford a
world-class researcher and educator
and now he has a new podcast on youtube
and all the usual places called
hubermann lab
that i can't recommend highly enough
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as a side note let me say that andrew is
a friend
and a new collaborator we're working on
a paper together
about a topic we're both really
passionate about at the intersection of
neuroscience and machine learning
but that's probably many months away
from being published
still i'm really excited about this work
he's one of the smartest and kindest
people i have the pleasure of talking to
on this podcast
so i hope we'll talk many more times in
the future
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friedman
and now here's my conversation with
andrew huberman
why do humans need sleep let's let's go
with a big
first question okay well the answer i'll
start with
is the one that i always default to when
there's a why
question which is uh i wasn't consulted
at the design
phase so so i wriggle my way out of
giving a
absolute answer right but
there's one mechanism that's very clear
that's super important which is that the
longer we are awake
the more adenosine accumulates
in our brain and adenosine binds to
adenosine receptors no surprise there
and it creates the feeling of sleepiness
independent of time of day or night
so there are two mechanisms one is we
get sleepy
as adenosine accumulates the longer
we've been awake the more adenosine is
accumulated in our system
but how sleepy we get
for a given amount of adenosine depends
on where we are in this so-called
circadian cycle
and the circadian cycle is just this
very very well conserved oscillation
it's a temperature oscillation where you
go from a low point
typically if you're awake during the day
and you're asleep at night you'll
your lowest temperature point will be
like three a.m four a.m and then your
temperature will start to creep
up as you wake up in the morning and
then it'll peak in the late afternoon
and then it'll start to drop again
toward the evening and then you get
sleepy again that
oscillation in temperature takes 24
hours temperature
yeah plus or minus an hour and i
don't even though i wasn't consulted at
the design phase i do not think it's a
coincidence
that it's aligned to the 24-hour spin of
the earth on its axis
and the fact that we tend to be bathed
in sunlight
for a portion of that spin and in
darkness for the other portion that's
been so there are two mechanisms the
adenosine accumulation and the circadian
time point that we happen to be at and
those converge
to create a sense of sleepiness or
wakefulness the simple way
to reveal these two mechanisms to
uncouple them is stay up for 24 hours
and you will find that even though
you've been let's say you stay up
midnight
2 a.m 3 a.m provided you're on a regular
schedule
like that i follow not like the kind
that you follow uh
you get i will get very sleepy around 3
4 a.m
but then around 5 or 6 or 7 a.m which is
my normal wake-up time
i'll start to feel more alert even
though adenosine has been accumulating
further so adenosine is higher for me
the longer i stay up and yet i feel more
alert than i did a few hours ago and
that's because these are
two interacting forces so adenosine
makes you sleepy
and then just how sleepy or how awake
you feel also depends on where you are
in this temperature oscillation that
takes 24 hours okay so that's
fascinating so there's a bunch of
oscillations going on
and then it kind of through the
evolutionary process
have evolved to all be aligned somewhat
and they interplay so it's
you said your your body temperature goes
up and down
there's chemicals in your brain that
uh oscillate and then there's the actual
oscillation
of the the sun in the
in the sky so all of that together
has some impact on each other and
somehow that all
results in us wanting to go to sleep
every night
right so um and we can get right into
the meat of this so i guess we just dove
right in but the
so the the temperature oscillation
is the effector of the circadian clock
so every cell in our body has a 24-hour
rhythm that's dictated by
genes like clock per bee male this is
one of the great successes of biology
they give a nobel prize to the record
i don't know if rapper got it forgive me
but sorry if you got it steve
congratulations if you didn't i'm sorry
i wasn't on the committee um
nonetheless did beautiful work steve
reporter and others
um but mike roshbosh and like other
people worked out these mechanisms in
flies and bacteria and mammals there are
these genes
that create 24-hour oscillations in gene
expression etc in every cell of our body
but what aligns those is a signal from
the master circadian clock which sits
right above the roof of the mouth
called the suprachiasmatic nucleus and
that clock
synchronizes all the clocks of the body
to this
general temperature rhythm by way of
controlling
systemic temperature which makes perfect
sense if you want to create a general
oscillation in all the tissues and
organs in the body
use temperature and so that work on
temperature if people want to explore it
further was joe takahashi who was at
northwestern now at ut
southwestern in dallas and it is
absolutely clear that humans do better
on a diurnal schedule
sorry lex than a nocturnal schedule
because
you could say well provided i sleep and
push adenosine back downhill which is
what happens when we sleep adenosine
is then reduced and provided i am on
more or less a 24 hour schedule why
should it matter that i'm awake when the
sun's out
and um and i'm asleep when the sun is
down but
it turns out that if you look at health
metrics people that are
strictly nocturnal do far worse
on immune function or metabolic function
etc
than people who are diurnal who are
awake during the daytime and animals
that are nocturnal
it's the opposite and animals that are
so-called crepuscular which
tend to be active at dawn and at dusk
this is a beautiful system i won't go
down that rabbit hole but these are
animals whose visual systems
operate best they tend to be predators
like mountain lions
they have optimized their waking times
for the times when the animals they eat
can't see well in those light conditions
but given the rod cone ratios in their
eyes
the the mountain lion is picking off
it's like when you see uh special forces
and they're looking through
night vision goggles and they have a
clear advantage
right they're seeing in the dark that's
basically what it's like to be a
mountain lion
as opposed to a bunny rabbit would you
say that a lot of these
cycles evolved in the predator-prey
relationships of the different
throughout the food chain so it's
basically all somehow has to do with
survival
in the in this complicated web of
predators and prey
almost certainly there had to have been
a time in which humans being
awake and active at night as opposed to
during the day
uh led to high level higher levels of
lethality
and probably particularly in kids you
imagine kids running around in the dark
and getting
that where there are a lot of animals
that can see really well under those
conditions and humans can't
and this would be all pre-electricity
even if you're carrying a torch
i mean the range of illumination on a
torch is nothing
compared to what um a a nighttime
predator like a large cat or something
can can do that i mean they basically
they can see everything they need to in
order to eat us
and not the other way around so one
fascinating thing you said
is uh that blew my mind and we went
right past
it uh which is the temperature is a
really powerful like if you were to
think about the ways that different
parts of the body
different systems the body would
communicate with each other
temperature would be a really good one
and that just i mean maybe it's obvious
but it kind of blew my mind just now
that yeah these systems are all
distributed
right and they have to kind of they're
not actually sending signals but they're
coordinating they need
some sort of universal thing to look at
in order to coordinate and temperature
is a nice one to
to uh to build around and that way
you can control the behavior of all
these different systems by controlling
the temperature right it's attractive to
think of a mechanism where this
master circadian clock secretes a
peptide or something that goes and
locks to receptors in all the cells and
gets it just right but that leaves far
too much room for
variability binding affinities cells in
a lot of
parts of our body are at different
stages of maturation they're turning
over
liver cells and so forth and for
instance our we have a clock in our gut
and in our liver
such that if we were just take out your
liver and put it on a table
and just look at the expression of these
genes it would be in a 24 hour
oscillation on its own it's independent
but something has to entrain them and
keep them all synchronized and so it's
not obvious that it would be temperature
takahashi's great gift to biology was to
show that
all the stuff coming out of this master
circadian clock
at the end of the day that's a weird
statement no pun intended
at the end at the end of the day end the
night at the um
at the end of the story it all boils
down to making sure that the temperature
of tissues
oscillates in the same fashion that's
blowing my mind and thinking
like what other mechanism could possibly
exist
to create that kind of oscillation well
you're
you're russian it's cold in russia for a
lot of the year the hibernation signal
in certain animals is a remarkable
signal there are peptides secreted from
this very same clock
that in animals like ground squirrels or
bears
they go into a kind of a torpor where
everything reproduction
metabolism everything is reduced while
they're in their cave they don't
actually stay asleep
all of winter that's a myth um and they
actually do these very
um dramatic and periodic arousals from
hibernation where they just shake and
shake and shake it looks like a seizure
and then they go back under into the
torpor
that's from a peptide that's released
but that's different because that's
about
shutting down the whole system it's
clear that having these very regular
oscillations every 24 hours is essential
for everything from
metabolism to reproduction is there uh
an optimal temperature for sleep that
i i should mention i think your latest
episode
uh you uh and people should go check out
helixsleep.com huberman to support
andrew uh thanks for the plug
i mean that's the amazing thing about
the stuff that you're creating oh
and yes you have a new podcast that's
amazing and this past month he did a
whole series on sleep
which people should definitely check out
there's some podcasts that come out
that just make me want to be a better
human being
by just the quality uh three blue one
brown grant
sanderson is like that for me just like
wow
this is uh education is best so andrew
uh symbolizes that captures that
brilliantly so go support the sponsor so
he doesn't stop doing the thing
uh so they i think they have a cooling
pad too
so i uh uh eight sleep mattress sponsors
me
uh they've been uh they sent me a
mattress
and it's been i've never listened i used
to sleep
on the floor sleeping where you fall you
sleep for a fall i don't give a shit
it doesn't doesn't really matter but so
like i would have never
bought a nice mattress because it's like
why
i'm fine this is a floor it's fine but
it was a game changer to uh be able to
control temperature like for me it's
cooling
to cool i don't know what the hell it is
well you want the brain and nervous
system
and the rest of the body needs to drop
by about anywhere from two to three
degrees in order to get into your
deepest sleep and transition to sleep
that's really going to help you don't
want to be cold that you're
bothered and can't fall asleep but
that's why some people like it really
cold in the room and under a warm
blanket or with socks on for some people
that can that can be good because this
temperature oscillation
is such that as your temperature is
dropping that correlates with the
generally with the most sleepy phase of
your circadian cycle
so cool is better for falling and
staying asleep and sleeping deeply
and then i i guess like that's what ate
sleep showed they have like an app
is uh it warms back up uh to wake you up
the idea that
i haven't actually used it i'm like this
is stupid uh
people say it works but i just keep it
the same temperature throughout the
night
but uh warming it up i guess wakes you
up which is
it was just fascinating yeah because
you're the wake up signal
is it's interesting to think about it's
not just correlated with an increase in
body temperature the increase in body
temperature
is triggering the release of cortisol
from your adrenals and that's the wake
up signal
do you think it's absolute temperatures
we're talking about is just even
relative
just even just a decrease well
everyone's going to have slightly
different basal temperature the idea
that everybody should be 98.6 i mean
that's a myth
and there are theories that body
temperature overall has been dropping in
the last 50 years or so i i doubt that's
true for somebody who's athletic like
you and is
you know young and healthy but basically
the the coldest period of that 24-hour
cycle
is when you are going to be sleepiest
there's actually a period within that
24-hour cycle
it's a it's a time point called your
temperature minimum and your temperature
minimum tends to be
about two hours before your typical
wake-up time
i'm not talking about the wake-up time
in the middle of the night where you go
use the bathroom or where you set an
alarm to go catch a flight i mean
if you were to just allow yourself to
sleep without a clock for a few days
measure when you typically wake up two
hours before then is your temperature
minimum
and that temperature minimum turns out
to be a very important
landmark in your circadian cycle because
it turns out that if you get bright
light in your eyes
in the hours immediately before your
temperature minimum
so two to four hours or any time within
the two or four hour window before that
temperature minimum
you are going to what's called delay
your circadian clock the next day
that whole oscillation is going to move
forward it will make you want to go to
sleep later
and wake up later whereas if you get
bright light in your eyes in the
hours after that temperature minimum so
let's say for me
typical wake up time is 6 a.m my
temperature minimum somewhere around 4
a.m if i get bright light in my eyes
5 a.m 6 a.m 7 a.m it's going to advance
that oscillation so that i want to go to
bed earlier
and wake up earlier the subsequent
nights so you might say
wait but most nights i go to sleep and
wake up at more or less the same time
why is that
and that's because the same thing is
happening on both sides you are both
advancing your clock a little bit
and assuming that you're looking at
light in the evening you're also
delaying your clock a little bit so you
get kind of captured in between and then
your rhythm more or less oscillates
at the at the same period as we say as
the
spin of the earth unless you're like you
where you're i get text messages from
you sometimes at
odd hours and i'm i if you're on the
east coast then i know that you had to
have been
pulling basically and all night yeah
yeah that's the interesting
uh point about the messiness of
sleep so most people seem to up perform
the best when they have like a regular
sleep schedule
i perhaps am the same
but i don't know that and i tend to
believe that
you can also perform relatively
optimally with
chaos of sleep of uh
like a weird soup of like power naps
and all-nighters and all of that as long
as you're
like happy doing what you love
and maybe you can um
tell me what you think about this i i
tend to for myself
try to minimize stress in life so
what i found for myself with diet
with sleep is that if i obsess about it
being perfect
then i'll actually stress quite a bit
when it's not
like i'll feel shitty
uh when i don't get enough sleep because
i know i should be getting more sleep as
opposed to
the actual physiological effects of not
getting enough sleep
i find if i just accept whatever the
hell happens
happens and smile and just you know take
it all in
like david goggins style like if it
sucks
it's even better or what is it jocko's
like good
or whatever he says right i think there
several things that you said that are
important but i
i agree that one can have a dysregulated
sleep schedule and still
be a happy person and productive in much
of my life i've pulled all-nighters and
slept weird schedules you know i think
many people
can probably relate to going to sleep
waking up four hours later being up for
an hour or two on your computer then
going back to sleep and getting amazing
sleep the next day functioning
i think we've i think it's important
that people have highlighted the
importance
of sleep and getting enough rest i do
think it's gone too far
and now i'm editorializing a little bit
but i think that
we've created this anxiety about sleep
that it's get if we don't sleep enough
we're gonna get dementia if we don't get
sleep then
uh you know the reproductive axis is
gonna you know completely crash
um you know there's a lot of evidence to
the contrary
and as well just based on personal
experience and based on the fact that
sure that it may be that a solid eight
hours with no
in uh interruptions in there or nine or
ten
could do great benefit but you can do
really well
if you do what you say which is you wake
up you don't want to start stressing
about it creating this meta stress about
sleep
being happy it is actually one of the
most powerful
things that you can do not allowing
yourself to go down that rabbit hole of
stress
for the following reason a lot of our
fatigue
is not due just to the build-up of
adenosine or time of day the circadian
thing we were talking about earlier an
additional factor
is that effort is in related to the
release of epinephrine of adrenaline in
our brain and body
at some point those levels get so high
that we get stressed mentally
we get stressed physically and we want
to give up there are good data published
in cell
showing that that signal the epinephrine
signal is eventually accumulates and
there's a quit
point dopamine the molecule of pursuit
and reward and feeling good
resets our ability to be an effort in
fact
a lot of people don't know this but
dopamine is actually what
epinephrine is made from if you look at
the biochemical cascade it starts with
tyrosine which is rich in found in red
meats and things of that sort
and tyrosine is eventually converted
through things like altopa into dopamine
dopamine is made into epinephrine so i
mean this sounds kind of new ag but
happiness joy and pleasure in what
you're doing
creates a chemical milieu that
provides more of the chemicals that
allow for effort
and there's nothing new ag about that
it's in every biochemistry textbook
it's in every decent neuroscience
textbook they just don't talk about the
happiness part they just talk about the
dopamine part
so i think that limiting your stress and
at least recognizing
okay if you're pulling an all-nighter or
you're somehow on messed up sleep
that there is going to be a point in
that 24-hour cycle where your brain is
not
trustworthy where your mental state is
not
worth placing too much weight on because
you are near that temperature minimum
and near that temperature minimum which
is correlates that two hour
about two hours before you would
normally wake up
the brain is is hobbling along
and anything you feel or think at that
time
should not be given too much value but
if you can trick
yourself into thinking that's the
pleasure point you afford yourself a
huge advantage
there's a study done by a colleague of
mine at stanford that showed
that positive anticipation about the
next day events
actually is a powerful metric
for creating quality sleep even if the
sleep is very reduced
and and you'll love this one and i i a
lot of people are gonna
you know might be critical of this so i
just want to make sure that so this was
work done
out of harvard medical it was um
bob stickgold's lab and emily hoagland
did this study that showed
looking at ochem performance on ochem
scores okay so organic chemistry
harvard's pretty tough subject highly
motivated
a number of very good control groups in
this study
what she showed was that consistency of
total sleep duration
was far more important for performance
on these
exams than total sleep duration itself
so it's not that just getting more sleep
allows you to perform better
consistently getting about the same
amount of sleep
is more is better for performance at
least in on okim
yeah than just getting more that's
interesting so that's
referring to more that there should be a
consistent habit
versus the total amount to me like the
entirety of the picture of sleep
is uh it's similar to nutrition in that
it feels like it's
there's so many variables involved and
it's so person specific
so you know a lot of studies i mean this
is the way of science
has to look and aggregate the effects on
sleep
it doesn't focus on high performers and
which are
individuals ultimately like the question
isn't
uh so it's a very important question
it's like what kind of diet
fights obesity reduces obesity
it's another question what kind of diet
allows david goggins to be the best
version of himself so
these high performers in different
avenues and the same thing with sleep
like people that tell me that i should
get eight hours of sleep
it's like it's i i
mean i i get it and they may be right
but they may be very wrong
and there's no evidence that eight is
better than six
that you could very well do better on
six than on eight
there are a few other things that um
turn out to be strong parameters for
success in this domain for instance
your entire life waking or asleep is
broken up into these 90-minute altradian
cycles if you look at ability to attend
or do math problems or do anything
drive drive performance tends to
ramp up slowly within a 90-minute cycle
peak and then come down
at the end of that 90-minute cycle and
in sleep we go through these
stage one two three four rem etc we'll
talk more about that if you like those
on 90-minute ultradian cycles as well
ending your sleep after a 90-minute
cycle at the
at the near the end of a 90-minute cycle
say at the end of six hours
in many cases is better for you than
sleeping an additional hour seven hours
and waking up in the middle of an
altradian cycle
and there are a few apps that can
measure this based on body movements and
things like that that
have you your alarm go off at the end of
an ultraviolet cycle
and if you wake up in the middle of an
altradian cycle sometimes not always you
can be very
groggy for a long period of time i
certainly do better on six hours than i
do on seven
i happen to like an eight hour sleep it
feels great but i
haven't slept an entire eight hours
without waking up in the middle of the
night at some point
in i don't know forever i can't remember
it's probably some point in
infancy but and i function well during
the day i think that
that's a big that's an important
parameter is how do you feel during the
day
almost everybody experiences some sort
of dip in energy in the late afternoon
or what would correlate to their
temperature peak
and that's a good time of day to get
either a 90
90 minute or less nap or if you're not a
napper
or you can't nap feet elevated
has been shown to be good for clear out
of some of this
the glymphatic system is this kind of
like sewer system of the brain you can
clear stuff out
so legs elevated or one thing that i've
um i'm a big proponent of and that my
lab has been studying is what i
i now call nsdr non-sleep deep breast
and this is just lying down there are
some scripts that we're going to put out
there soon as
a free resource there's some hypnosis
scripts that my colleague david spiegel
has put out there as a free resource
but non-sleep deep rest is allowing your
system to drop into states of
of real calm that allow you to get
better at falling asleep later
and they can be very restorative for
cognitive and motor function
there's at least one study out of
denmark that shows that
the basal ganglia which is an area of
the brain that's involved in motor
planning and action
one of these 20-minute non-sleep deep
breast protocols
resets levels of neuromodulators like
dopamine in the basal ganglia to
the same levels that they were right
after a long night's sleep
so i also respectfully
uh or semi-respectfully disagree with
the idea that you can't recover lost
sleep
what does that mean i mean that there's
no irs for sleep
so what does it mean to be in debt for
sleep
if you're falling asleep during the day
and you're sleepy like you're falling
asleep that's
a good sign of insomnia means you're not
sleeping enough at night
if you're fatigued during the day but
you're not falling asleep so you're just
exhausted but you're not finding
yourself falling asleep in meetings and
in conversation
then chances are you're fatiguing your
system through something else
like a long run in the middle of the
night
boston or whatever it is that you're up
to lately at uh 3 a.m
yes there is a magic to the nap and
maybe you could speak to the because you
mentioned these protocols
that don't necessarily so they're
non-sleep
but to me the nap
one or two a day can
almost irrespective of how much sleep i
get the night before
i have a fundamental change in my mood
and my
performance for the better for the
better for the better yeah likewise
so uh i do tend to kind of experiment
with durations
it's it's consistently surprising to me
how like a nap of like 10 minutes i
don't know maybe you can speak to the
perfect duration of a nap
but i find that it's like magic
that a short nap does as much good
and often better than a longer one for
me for me subjective what would be a
longer one
longer than 90 minutes no no like 90
minutes or but longer than 90
like two hours yeah that's dropping you
starting to drop you into rem sleep and
even if it's a tiny amount of rem sleep
people can come out of those naps kind
of disoriented
i mean remember in sleep space and time
are are totally uncoupled and so
they that's an odd state to re-enter the
world in if you're not going to stay
there for a while like for a good
night's sleep
i think a 20-minute nap is pretty
fantastic
would you say that's the op if you were
to recommend to the general and
it's very weird to recommend anything to
the general populace because
obviously it's very person specific but
what's a good one we say to friends is
20 minutes ago
30 minutes 20 or 30 minutes because
you're going unless you're sleep
deprived
you're going to stay out of rem sleep
rapid eye movement sleep if you're sleep
deprived you'll drop right into it if
you've ever traveled and you're really
jet lagged you go to the hotel you lay
down for one second all of a sudden
you're just like
you're you're in a psychedelic dream um
which can be pretty great too but i
think that
uh 20 30 minutes and if you can't sleep
some people have
trouble napping then learning to relax
the body as much as possible like trying
to remove
all expression from your face completely
letting your body kind of float
if people have a hard time relaxing when
they're awake
there's some terrific clinically and
research tested hypnosis protocols
that we could provide links to that are
cost-free and that teach you how to just
completely
release the alertness button and you
just start drifting now the problem is
if you don't have an alarm or something
to go off you
the other day i did one and i'm almost
embarrassed to say this but there's a
component of it where you actually are
supposed to let your hand float up
because it's a
hypnosis script so they it's my
colleague david spiegel in the script he
says
um let your hand float up i woke up an
hour later my hand was still floating
wow yeah and i was and i was completely
relaxed
so hypnosis is hypnosis is just a matter
of going deep relaxation narrowing of
context
and it's all self-imposed a lot of
people think that hypnosis is like the
stage thing with the pendant and the
chicken
you know people fucking like chickens
but real hypnosis
is self-hypnosis you're learning to it
involves
some shifts in the way that you the the
hypnotic induction involves looking up
closing your eyes slowly deep breath and
then imagine yourself floating
and people vary on a scale of about one
to four
for being the most easily hypnotized
there are a few people who it's very
hard for them to allow themselves to to
go into these states but for most people
they just they're gone and it's nice if
if you can have access to those states
because when you come out of it
you feel amazing you feel like you slept
the whole night at least
most people report that so refresh alert
ready to go i mean basically
you're ready yeah i know you have this
um interesting challenge coming up and
i'm curious what you're gonna do to
reset in the hours
it that the frequency of running is um
every four hours it's not going to allow
you to get any more than
a couple hours sleep in between flowers
so we should we should tell to people
i'd be curious
to get your thoughts and advice on it
i'm uh
on march 5th running 48 miles with mr
david goggins
so four miles every four hours and
people should join us
he's uh that madman is going to be live
on instagram
starting at 8 p.m pacific on march 5th
so you're gonna join him in person in
person undisclosed location
undisclosed location and i was i was
trying to clarify like okay so we're
gonna
like there'll be like friendly people
around or something no it's just me and
him friendly people i don't know
like i just feel it's very difficult to
be
with david alone in the room i imagine
his i mean i've done some work with
david his energy is infectious
yeah that's an intense schedule um
and the the periodicity of that those
four hour
every four hours four miles means that
there's no chance of catching an
extended
block of sleep so it's about three hours
that you have
non-exercising every time and of course
it takes time to try to fall asleep and
there's an intensity to the whole thing
i mean it's probably impossible to get
anything more
than uh two hours of sleep if you wanted
to so the optimal thing is probably
from the sound of it i'd be curious to
see what you think
but like it's getting a few 90 90-minute
naps okay well i thought about this a
bit
before we met up today so i think there
are two general approaches
that could work neither one necessarily
better than the other
one would be just to hammer through the
whole thing
just to get your level of alertness and
adrenaline
ramped up so that you don't expect
yourself to sleep
there are certain advantages there one
is a subjective kind of emotional
advantage
which is if you can't sleep you're not
gonna be stressed about that yes
and if you do fall asleep it's a bonus
provided you wake up and you don't look
up and you realize david's been out
running for
half an hour and you're behind right but
chances are that's not the way it'll go
you set an alarm so that's one approach
yeah and and i grabbed that from you
know a
couple friends who were um who are in
the seal teams and they'll say that you
know during buds there's this
infamous hell week and there's this five
hour five days excuse me definitely five
days
of no sleep although there is a
component where they offer a nap at one
particular point
and a lot of people will say that it's
worse to go down for that nap
and then be woken up 20 minutes later
than to just stay up
so so that's one option let's call it
the um full blitz hammer through
option and if you happen to fall asleep
you do bonus yeah the bonus
the other one would be to really anchor
in these ultradian cycles so coming back
from a run
you pr unless you're thoroughly
exhausted you're probably going to have
a few minutes where you're
going to want to stay awake it's going
to be hard to just immediately fall
asleep
and getting as much sleep as you can in
the intervening
periods provided that you guys aren't
posting constantly or doing something
else you also
there's a question whether or not you
want to nourish whether or not you want
to eat or not in that time
anytime we put food in our gut i don't
care if it's meat
or oatmeal or
broccoli or cardboard you're drawing
blood into the gut
and so you are going to divert some
energy towards digestion and it's going
to make you sleepy there's a reason why
the rest and digest the parasympathetic
nervous system is called that
so you could decide that you were only
going to sleep in certain
in between certain blocks that would be
another way to think about that
that because i did this last year
uh i ran very slow some of it was
walking i was listening audiobooks and
one of the biggest mistakes i did is to
overeat during that time right it was uh
made the experience very unpleasant so i
have been considering basically eating
almost nothing
throughout the day being fasted will
increase alertness because
high levels of epinephrine in your
system from fasting you just think about
fasting or being thirsty
before you get exhausted people always
think if i don't eat i'm going to be
tired
no the the energy that you derive from
food is going to be
uh used from glycogen and after a long
storage and conversion process so
the food that you eat is going to
consume energy to digest
and so a lot of people feel better
fasted and
presumably throughout history people
have fasted for long periods of time and
had to stay up for two or three days and
you know god forbid if a family member
is sick you can stay awake in the
hospital
without any trouble so that alertness
system and you know it's all mental
um actually and then there's a third
so you could try and sleep or or take
care in between yes
yeah and then there's a third approach
oh yeah but i didn't come up with it
but david did so i actually texted him
earlier because i had a feeling that i
heard that you were going to do this
challenge
so i asked david um
so these are david goggins words not
mine okay
one okay being organized is super
important
two you want to waste as little time as
possible
three you need to eat sleep and rehab
in as little time as possible so you can
sleep as much as possible oh interesting
by the way this is the first time i'm
reading this
yeah um four meal prep
and gear prep etc are very important
that's um
that's consistent with everything i know
about military they they don't
they don't leave too much to chance five
again these are david's words all that
said he's fucked on most all that
because he'll be interviewing me before
or after i will also be interviewing him
oh shit five long story short the only
thing that might help
is a very special pill this is
interesting
they're called s-i-u pills hard to get
but i believe he can get them s-i-u
stands for suck it up
tell him to grab his balls he'll find
those pills there
that's number six all right and then the
last one yeah stay hard brother
stay hard brother amen i
you know that was one of the other
things that i think makes
this challenging is that it'll be doing
a podcast throughout
so first of all i'll do a long one
before and after but also
i'll have to come up with things to talk
to him about
so like it's a different thing to do
something
privately and then publicly i know it
doesn't
seem that way but like one of the
hardest
the hardest thing i had to do last time
was to turn
on the camera and talk to the camera
because i
uh last time i did it i recorded um
every single time i did a leg
i recorded something i'm grateful for
it's just kind of unrelated i'm not a
fan of like
talking about like how i'm feeling or
how they're on is going
i want to do something totally unrelated
to the run
and with the run as the background you
know sort of something i'm grateful for
just any kind of uh interesting
discussion gratitude
i mean i hate the word hack like oh it's
a dopamine hack or it's a serotonin i i
don't like the word hack because
it's disrespectful to hackers who do a
real thing and
b a hack implies that it's some sort of
trick that you're
you're you're kind of gaming the system
you know what
what works is mechanism right biological
mechanisms
were designed to work and they were
selected for
to work under variable conditions and as
you know and i know and
we have great appreciation for the fact
that the nervous system was designed to
be an adaptive machine
so that you don't have to sleep eight
hours every night
you can do this thing and things like
gratitude allow you to tap into chemical
resources
and that's not a hack the fact that
being grateful for something external to
the event
happens to release serotonin and have a
certain soothing effect or
dopamine and give you more epinephrine
and let you go further
that's not a hack that's actually what
allowed the human machine
to evolve to the point that it is now
every time
you know an inventor eventually created
something that worked and felt great
about it you can imagine that the
the first you know air flight felt
pretty awesome
and motivated those people to go on and
do more they they didn't just go uh you
know yawn and go have a beer
so being able to access the genuine in
internal states of gratitude and reward
works
you can't trick the system you can't
pretend that you're grateful for
something but if you can identify or
attach yourself to some larger
goal or something that's deeply
gratifying to you or place it in service
to
a relative that passed away that you
care a lot about
that's not a hack that's accessing the
deepest components of your nervous
system and um to steal your kind of
lingo you know there's real beauty there
right yeah but for an introvert like
myself and i think david i don't know if
he's an introvert but like
he's not despite the fact that he has
written a great book
and he communicates he puts himself out
there he's not really
a fan of communication he's not i don't
know if he's energized by
speaking his mind i don't know well
enough to know i mean
we've done a little bit of work together
and um you know we're in communication
now and again he's obviously super
impressive
um i don't know it seems that he's a pr
seems like he's a pretty private guy
yeah you know so i don't have access to
that so for me
i'll just speak to myself and i think
david is the same but i'll speak to
myself that
it was a hugely draining thing not
to experience the gratitude experiencing
the gratitude just like you're saying
is really energizing and it's it's a
powerful thing it's a
it's a it can lift up your mood
but to turn on the camera and have to
use words which is very difficult to do
to explain
like what you're feeling and do it in
the way that you know a bunch of people
will be watching
is really draining and one of the things
i'm concerned about
that in this whole process how do i
keep my mind sharp while also
keeping the performance the physical
performance shop and that's a little bit
scary because
talking to david like actual
intellectually sharp like
thinking being charismatic and as much
as i can be
and like being still maintaining a sense
of humor too
because i can be i i become with sleep
deprivation
with exhaustion you start being the
russian bear comes out you start being
such a d like you i become a david
goggins essentially like
oh it makes you irritable sleep
deprivation makes us irritable
yeah there's it's clear so that in the
early part of the night we get a higher
percentage of those old trading cycles
are
occupied by slow wave sleep sometimes
just called non-rem sleep
and those early night sleep bouts
are great for muscular repair and for
certain forms of learning
but rem sleep the rapid eye movement
sleep which it starts to accumulate
and occupy more of those 90-minute
ultradian cycles
toward the late part of a sleep bout so
toward
typically toward morning but toward
after you've been asleep a while
that's when you do the emotional
processing that's when
we recover the ability to feel refreshed
and not irritated by things and
if you deprive people of rem sleep they
become selectively
uh bad at uncoupling the emotion from
things that happened in the previous
days so the little things start to seem
like big things
i always know i'm rem sleep deprived
when um
i'm irritable and when um i look at like
the word
the and it doesn't look like it's
spelled right and i'm kind of pissed off
about it like something's off and
we actually are becoming slightly um
psychotic when we're rem sleep deprived
you're not going to get a lot of rem
sleep in this thing except as you
fatigue more if you do fall asleep
you're going to drop more and more into
rem so that
those 90-minute cycles you won't have to
go through stage one stage two stage
three and then rem
you're just gonna drop right into ram so
you can count on your system to
compensate for you
but i think that just the knowledge that
you tend to get irritable as the time
goes on
just that third personing of yourself
that awareness the observer
that can be very beneficial because
there may be bouts during this event
when you just should probably say
nothing and maybe you just
um i don't know smile and record or not
smile or do
do whatever it is because you're gonna
be conserving energy if it feels like a
grind
that's epinephrine being released that's
epinephrine that you could devote to the
physical
effort but humor is an amazing anecdote
for this because
it resets that it's that dopamine
release
that gives us that fresh perspective and
it's a it's a real chemical thing
it's not a it's not a hack it's not a
it's not a trick
it's not a visualization it's biology in
action
well but i think the act
of uh interviewing of conversation in
these processes
even if you don't want to do it the
right thing to do
even when you're feeling irritable is to
to do the third person view and be able
to express with words that you're
feeling irritable
like express what you're going through
ex you know
use words which i hate doing i honestly
i think my
ultimate thing would be just to never
say a single word to david gagas and
just go through hell
it doesn't matter what we do but to do
it quietly to also express it
that's my ultimate hell and he's
definitely gonna be
if i know david at all he's he's going
to try and find your buttons like he's
gonna
he i mean he even though he knows he can
complete this
and i i believe that he trusts that you
can complete too i
i believe you can you will complete it
you know you will complete it right
there's no question about
that but he's not gonna make it easier
for you he's gonna make it harder
well i'm afraid so i'm like you know
it's very difficult for me so 48 miles
is not
easy i have not been trading that much
so i'm not ramping up
but it's not like going to kill me
we'll see what happens of course for him
he might almost get bored because i
think the 48 miles for him
is easy i think i don't know
that i don't know that ever gets easy i
have a friend
casey corgill who works with david he's
a does some
um physical uh rehab type stuff with him
and he
took casey on a 50 miler and he said
it's like 16 miles into it he was just
like
he had hit his wall yeah but they he
found it they
they find it to get you know you find
that portal
there is one thing i want to mention
there's some very good physiology
that can perhaps support the actual
running effort part these are very new
data
and we have a study going on with david
spiegel at stanford looking at how
different patterns of breathing
can affect heart rate variability heart
rate variability is good
there's this interesting mechanism i
think most people might
not realize but that medical students
learned that your breathing and your
heart rate and your brain are in this
really remarkable interplay it goes like
this
when you inhale this isn't breath work
we're not going to do breath work
but when you inhale the diaphragm moves
down
the heart gets a little bigger because
there's a little more space in the
thoracic cavity
and as a consequence blood flows a
little bit more slowly through that
larger volume
there's a category of neurons the
sinoatrial node
that sees that that recognizes that that
slower
rate through that larger volume sends a
signal to the brain stem and the brain
stem sends a signal back to the heart to
speed the heart up
so every time you inhale you're speeding
the heart up when you exhale
the diaphragm moves up the heart gets a
little smaller the volume is smaller
blood flows more quickly through the
heart a signal sent up to the brain and
the brain sends a signal back
to slow the heart down this is the basis
of heart rate variability
so at any point if you feel like your
heart is racing and you feel like you're
working too hard per unit of effort
focus on making your exhales longer or
more intense than your inhales
if ever you feel like you're truly
flagging you do not have the energy to
get up it's like okay it's time to go
and you're exhausted
you want to draw more oxygen into the
system get your heart rate going faster
now some people when they hear this
probably thinking well this is really
obvious but there's so much out there
about breath work and how to breathe and
all this stuff but no one talks about
how to do it in
real time while you're exerting effort
so this is something like almost like
second by second you can adjust things
to just
in real time based on how you're feeling
but based on the heart rate that's right
the experience of the heart rate
that's right so one thing that could
could be very efficient and we're doing
some work with athletes now
these are unpublished data but if you
while you're running
if you want to get into a nice cadence
of heart rate variability
do double inhales
while you're running what this will do
is when you do the double inhale has the
effect of
of reopening the avioli of the lungs
your lungs are filled with tons of
little sacs
when you they tend to collapse as you
fatigue when you
and carbon dioxide builds up in the
bloodstream and that's when we start
getting stress if you've ever been
sprinting you start getting beat and
you're going as hard as you can what
what you really need to do is double
inhale and reinflate these sacs in the
lungs and then offload a lot of carbon
dioxide
so when you're at a steady cadence and
you're feeling good double inhale
exhale double inhale exhale is a
terrific
way to breathe while you're in ongoing
effort by the way
any recommendations or differences in
nose or mouth breathing so nasal
breathing there's
a lot of excitement now obviously about
nasal breathing because of james
nestor's book breath
um there was also if people are gonna
know about that book that i do feel like
out of respect for my colleagues there
was a book by
sandra um khan and paul ehrlich at
stanford both professors at stanford
with a
forward by um jared diamond and robert
zapalski so
some heavy hitters in this book and the
book is called jaws
a hidden epidemic and it's all about how
nasal breathing is better for
us especially kids than being mouth
breathers under most conditions
for sake of improving immunity it turns
out there's a microbiome in the nose
like all sorts of good stuff about nasal
breathing preferentially
but when we exercise you can
you can do pure nasal breathing but the
problem is once you get up to kind of
third and fourth and fifth gear effort
you can't nasal breathe and be at
maximum capacity unless you've been
training it for a very long time
so i would say double inhale through the
nose offload through the mouth so double
inhale
exhale while you're in steady effort and
then if you really feel like you need to
gas it and you're pushing
the data show that then just use
whatever's there
right just go into kind of default mode
because
bringing too much concentration to
something is also going to spend
epinephrine
the goal is to get into that i don't
like the word but the flow state
where you're not thinking too much
you're just in exertion
so these are so these are things that
can help in the transitions
um but i don't think there's any secret
breathing technique you know anyone
who's been in the seal teams will kind
of
you know they'll tell you like there's
no breathing technique right
there's a there's tools that you can
look to from time to time
and these double inhale exhales can be
great for setting heart rate variability
in
very quickly and getting into a steady
cadence while you're exercising but if
there's a sprint like if suddenly you
guys are sprinting
ditch the ditch the double inhale exhale
and just sprint
one thing you mentioned he's probably
gonna push my buttons
it's a good place to ask a question
about anger so i'll probably get pissed
off at him at some point
i'm guessing and
do you have thoughts from a scientific
perspective
or also just the personal philosophical
perspective about the role of anger and
all of this in
in managing alertness performance
i think about this a lot because there's
so much out there about how important it
is to do things from a place of love
you know i tweet about it all the time
and i think and
love is powerful right