AMA #2: Improve Sleep, Reduce Sugar Cravings, Optimal Protein Intake, Stretching Frequency & More
30:30 Share

Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm ander huberman and i'm a professor neuber logy and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine today isn't ask me anything or A M A episode. Which is part of our premium subscriber content.

Our premium channel was launched in order to race support for the standard huberman and podcast channel, which still comes out once a week every monday and of course, is zero cost of consumer. The premium channel is also designed to support exciting research being done at major universities like stanford and elsewhere, research that done on humans that should lead to protocols for mental health, physical health and performance in the near future. If you'd like to check out the premium channel subscription model, you can go to human brain lab dot com slash premium, and there you can subtribe for ten dollars a month or one hundred dollars year.

We also have lifetime subscribe option for those of you that are already huberman lab podcast premium of subscribers. And you're watching and or hearing this, please go to huberman lab dot com slash premium and download the premium podcast feed. And for those of you that are not already human lab premium podcast subscribers, you will be able to hear the first fifteen minutes or so of this episode, and hopefully that will allow you to design whether or not you would like to become a premium subscriber without further a do.

Let's get to answering your questions. And as always, I will strive to be as accurate as possible, as throw as possible, and yet as conscience as possible. The first question is about how to improve sleep. In particular, how to improve deep sleep, that is sometimes called slow wave sleep. This was a question that was asked by jack perchard, and they got a lot of up votes.

Now we've done multiple fully episodes of the huberman and lab podcast on sleep and tools to improve sleep, including the master your sleep episode and perfect your sleep episode as well as a tool kit that is available completely zero cost at hub room and lapdog comments, a downloadable PDF that list out the behavioral tools and other tools that you can implement to improve your sleep. Now, jack question is specifically about how to improve deep sleep. He asks, I have a sleep analyzer, and I typically observed that I get a lot of R E M.

Sleep, but that is rapid eye movement sleep for him. He says, it's thirty percent of his total sleep is rabbit. I movement sleep. But he asked, my deep sleep is often low, around ten percent. And I would like to know if there are any science back protocols I can use to specifically increase my deep sleep.

okay? So for those of you that may not know what is deep sleep now, deep sleep is sometimes refer to a slow wave sleep, that is, slow wave sleep. And deep sleep are sometimes used interchangeably to describe the same thing.

They aren't necessarily the same thing, but they fall under the same mechanistic umbrella. What is that mechanistic umbrella? Well, when you go to sleep at night, you cycle through a number of different stages of sleep.

And in the early part of the night, to say in the first half of your night or so, most of your sleep is going to be slow wave, deep sleep, but then is your transition into the second half of your night, more of your sleep will be rapid eye vee sleep. Now that's the typical pattern that is observed when you're not disrupting your sleep architecture with things like caffeine and alcohol. Will talk about caffeine and alcohol in a few minutes.

Deep sleep A K slow wave sleep, at least for sake of this conversation, is vitally important, in particular for repair of bodily tissues. During deep sleep, you secrete growth, orman, and in fact, you secrete growth hormone every night when you go to sleep. But most of that growth home on release is restricted to the first half of your sleep night.

The other future of deep sleep is that the dreams that occur during deep sleep tend to be of a less emotional nature, then the sorts of dreams that one experiences in rapid eye movement sleep. So just to give a broad top contour of what deep sleep, A K slow wave sleep is really about, IT tends to occur in the first half of the night. IT also occurs in the second half of the night, but in the first hf of the night, most of your sleep is going to be occupied by deep sleep A K slow wave sleep IT is the time when your bodily tissues are repaired, in part by release of growth hormone, which is involved in metabolite, but also protein.

Syntheses must also repair, repair of all cell types and tissues. Es, and during deep sleep, your dreams tend to be somewhat mundane, sometimes a little bizarre, but typically not very emotionally loaded that can change of dealing with a lot of emotionally late in circumstances in your wakken wife. But in general, to sleep and dreams that occur in the first part of the night is deep, and it's not terribly emotionally written.

Your body also goes through specific patterns of metabolic. This relates to recent findings just this last year in which researchers monitored the output of people's breath and the various metal olic factories present in the breath, as well as through blood draws. So basically doing all this while people are a sleep in abortions ory.

And they observe that that during the first staff of the night, while people are in deep sleep, their body is actually metabolic energy very differently then IT does in the second half of the night. I'll come back to this in a little while, but this turns out to be very important for establishing your metabolic and the way you regulate insulin and blood glucose during the daytime. So all of this is to say that getting sufficient deep sleep, slow wave sleep is vitally important.

And jack asking how he can increase the amount of deep sleep that he's getting, because by his sleep tracking method, he's observing far less deep sleep, then wrapped eyemodule sleep. Now that raises the question of how much deeper sleep ones should be getting overall. In general, the goal should be to baLance the total amount of slow way sleep and rabbit di moving sleep across the night.

However, I would not want people to obsess over getting exactly thirty percent rabbi movement sleep and exactly thirty percent slow wave left. Your body is much more resilient than that. But the close of those two numbers are, to one, the Better overall architecture of your sleep. And he doesn't listen out exactly how he's measuring his sleep.

So I do want to put an astros s on both the question and the answer I provide by stating that a lot of sleep track kers, whether or not they are woop tracking ers or or as or whether not you're using a math ed or mattress cover bed sleep tracking er like eight sleep or other is using heart rate and heart rate variability and body movement to estimate or to kind of predict whether or not you're in slow wave sleep or rapid I move and sleep. And that's because during rapid I move and sleep, you tend to be in what's called a tonia. You tend to be paralyzed.

You can't move and during slow wave sleep, that's not the case. But no matter what the sleep tracking method is, if it's a standard commercial sleep tracking method, woop or A A sleepit sara IT is an estimate or a best. Yes, at what stage of sleeps you're in, we're as when you go into a sleep laboratory, like a sleep laboratory, it's stinker.

D A university of pensylvania or others of the great sleep laboratories that are out there. They're going to use other methods, including eeg and emg. These are just acronyms that refer to ways to record brain waves.

They actually going to try to observe for rapid I movements beneath eyelids at sara. So sleep trackers give you a best guesses as to what stage of sleep you're in. They are not perfectly accurately.

None of the commercially available sleep tracking ers are perfectly accurate. So we do want to highlight that. okay.

So now let's answered jack question directly, which is how to increase the total amount of slow wave sleep. Well, there are a couple ways. First of all are the dots, and they will talk about the dose. Two things that you can do to really disrupt your slow wave sleep are to drink alcohol within eight hours prior to bedtime, or even at all.

Some people will find that even if they have a glass of wine or a beer with lunch, that the amount of slow way sleep, and sometimes even the rapid I move and sleep that they get at night, is reduced, and that their overall sleep architecture is disrupted. This has been shown again and again. Likewise, avoiding caffeine within eight and ideally within twelve hours of bedtime would be preferable.

And if you're not a caffeine drinker, obviously don't have to worry about this at all. But avoiding caffeine intake within that eight to twelve hours a bedtime will greatly assist in you getting more slow wave sleep and higher quality rapid eye move and sleep. This has been shown again and again. And as well, avoiding cannabis use and maybe CBD use within eight to twelve hours of sleep can be very beneficial if your goal is to improve the quality of your sleep. Now I know a lot of people rely on alcohol, cannabis and CBD in order to get into sleep.

However, it's been shown many times in human studies, and this was discussed in the podcast episode that we did with the great matt Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at university, california, berkely, in a world expert in sleep and sleep science at night, discuss the research showing that even though alcohol helps you fall asleep, even though cannabis can help you fall asleep, and even though CBD can help people fall asleep, that IT does disrupt and in many ways reduce the quality of sleep that one gets. So that's disappointing news. I know for a number of the people that rely on canada CBD alco the fall asleep, but I would encourage you to check out the episodes of the human lab podcast that we did about alcohol and about canvas, including some of the health benefits of cannabis in certain situations, but also some of the detrimental effects of both alcohol in cannabis in other situations, in particularly for improving slowly sleep.

So that's actually three major dots. Avoid caffeine, alcohol and cannabis. And let's put under the umbrella of cannabis, T H C N C B D in the eight in ideally within the twelve hours prior to sleep.

If your goal is to improve the total amount of slow wave sleep that you're getting in your overall sleep, architect, in addition, is well known that avoiding food intake in the two hours prior to sleep is going to greatly assist in the amount of growth hormone output that you achieve during the early stages of the night and the depth duration of slow wave sleep. Now I want to place an astrach on that statement by saying, if you go to sleep too hungry, IT can also disrupted sleep. So you're going to have to arrange your eating schedule and you're sleeping schedule such that.

You're not eating too close to bed time, but you're also not going to bed so hungry that you can't fall asleep or that you don't get into deep sleep and stay a sleep. I can personally attest to the fact that if i'm too hungry, I can't fall asleep. Now for me most minutes, i'm going to eat dinner sometime between six P M and eight P M, depending on time of year schedules, what's going on, traffic, sea.

And I tend to go to sleep somewhere between ten P M and eleven P M, plus or minus an hour again, depending on time of year and what else is going on in life. So I Normally have that buffer of two hours or so before going to sleep. However, there are some nights where even if I eat dinner around seven pm, i'm quite hungry at nine pm, and I want to go to sleep.

In that case, eating a small amount of food ought not to disrupt your slow wave sleep too much. But you do want to avoid eating large meals right before going to sleep, unless, okay, unless completely fasting and not eating something late at night will prevent you from getting into any sleep at all. In other words, is Better to make sure that you're getting to sleep.

Then IT is to avoid food just that you get increased growth, Normal output and into slow wave sleep. I hope that's clear. I have had times in my life for i'm working very, very hard and I miss dinner or something comes up.

And I know some people can fall sly quite easily on empty stomach. I've been able to do that in particular hit. I'm very exhausted. I also rely on a handful of supplements to fall asleep each night um although i've not dependent on them, they're been times when I haven't been able to access those supplements and I can still fall asleep. But the point is that you don't want to be so hungry that you can't fall asleep.

And yet, in an ideal circumstance, especially if you're trying to increase the amount of slow wave sleep, you would avoid food in the two hours or so before going to sleep. If you can avoid food for the three or four hours prior to sleep and still fall and stay asleep easily, that's even Better for sake of increasing slow wave sleep and growth hormones. Put now there are are some additional tools for improving slow asleep, in particular the transitions between slow wave sleep in the other sleep stages.

Because even though, as I mentioned earlier, the early part of your night is occupied primarily by slow way sleep all night long, you're transitioning from slow wave sleep into an intermediate stage of sleep, and then into rapid eyes movement sleep. And then back again is just that in the early part of the night, more of that time is going to be occupied by slow wave sleep. The two ways to improve slow wave sleep that are well documented in the literature, and here we can point to some really nice papers that are a reference, in case you want to read further, is the first one is entitled exercise improves the quality of slow wave sleep by increasing slow wave stability.

Slow stability has to do with, as researchers called, the amount of power present in the different aspects of slow wave sleep. So this gets a little bit technical, but this is an instance in which they brought subjects into the laboratory. They measured brain waves by eeg.

They had some other measures as well, including subjective measures of sleep. And they looked at whether not people were doing exercise or not prior to sleep. Now, when I say prior to sleep, mean not within six hours prior to bedtime.

In fact, exercising intensely in the six hours prior to bedtime for many people, not all, but for many people, can disrupt the total amount of slow wave sleep that they get, and can also disrupt rapid, I move and sleep. So the conditions of the study were pretty straight forward. IT was a randomized cross over trial.

Basically, they had people either sleeping and monitoring and their sleeves, or they had people doing an hour of exercise at sixty percent of their so called V O two max. You can look this up for sixty minutes, okay, sixty percent of their vio two max. That was the intensity. Breathing pretty hard, but not extremely hard.

If we were going to map that to the so called zones, zone two, cardio being the kind of cardio, you can do steady state while holding a conversation, this will be somewhere in the probably zone three or zone four, although that's not exactly what sixty percent of V O two max is going to map to every time. Think about relatively chAllenging cardiovascular output for sixty minutes, and they had them do that at least six hours prior to bedtime. And this is an important.

They did have the subjects in the study, in all conditions abstained from caffeine and alcohol. So that's very important. And what they observed was an enhancement of slow wave sleep. So exercise of this sort turns out to be a very potent form of improving slowly sleep.

Now I do not know because the study, as far as I know, has not been done, whether not doing resistance training or some other type of exercise would have had to the same effect. Although have to imagine that if it's moderately intense to intense resistance training, provided it's done far enough away from going to sleep right prior to six hours before sleep, that one ought to see the same effects. All that was not a condition in this study, but it's a very nice study.

They looked everything from changes in core body temperature to coLoring expenditure. They didn't see huge changes in, uh, core body temperature changes. So that couldn't explain the effect. IT really appears that the major effect of improving slow wave sleep was due to something in changing the fine structure of the brain waves that occur during slow wave sleep. In fact, and this is an important point, the subjects in this study did not report subjectively feeling that much Better from their sleep.

So you might say, well, why would I even want to bother? However, is well known that getting sufficient slow wave sleep is important, not just for repair, excuse me, for repair of bodily tissues, but also for repair of bring tissues and repair and wash out a debris in the brain. And that debris is known to lead to things like dementia.

So getting the best quality slow wave sleep is extremely important for body in for brain and getting an hour of exercise that's moderately intense and making sure that you're not doing that exercise within the six hours prior to bedtime and avoiding caffeine and alcohol, certainly within the six hours prior to bed time. But I would say in the eight to twelve hours prior to bedtime would be even Better or not drinking alcohol at all. Or I know there are people out there that don't drink caffeine at all.

I'm not one of those people, but restricting that caffeine and take to the very early part of the day that has been shown to improve the quality and the overall architecture sleep and slow wave sleep in particular. That's really what the study points to. Another tool that can improve the amount and quality of slow way asleep that you achieve at night, this is actually tool that i've started using over the last six state months or so.

As many of you know, I believe in getting behaviors right before embracing changes in supplementation or prescription drugs. Behavioral tools consist of dues and dots, and the dues and don't for sleep are well documented in the master sleeve episode and the perfect or sleep epsom. And the tool kit for sleep include getting morning sunlight light in your eyes, or bright light of other kinds, avoiding bright light from ten P.

M to four etta. All that information is in the tall kit for sleep and those other fulling episode of the human in lab podcast. Now there are supplements that can greatly improve the depth of your sleep and that can short in the latency to fall asleep. And here i'm not referring melatonin.

As many of you perhaps already know, i'm not a fan of melatonin for a variety of reasons, mainly the fact that most military and supplements out there don't actually contain the exact amount of military and that listed on the bottle that contain either much, much more or much, much less. And that melatonin is a potent hormone that has impacts on not just sleep, but on other harmon systems as well. The supplements that i've suggested and that I personally take in order to improve my sleep, or magnesium, three and eight spell T H R E O N A T E.

And interchangeably with that, one could use magnesium basic license. I do consider those interchangeable, because both crossed into cells and across the blood brain berrier in much the same way that makes them Better candidates for improving sleep than some of the other forms of magnesium. So magnesium, three and eight theanine, T H E A N I N E theanine, and something called APP genna, which is essentially what you find in cama mile.

That is the reason why cammilla can make you sleepy. A P I G E N I N epigenome dosages for those etta are described in the tool for sleep and why some people might want to avoid the anine. I ll tell you for those of you that have very intense dreams or that might sleep, walk or have night tears, you might want to avoid the ani because IT can enhance the um kind of emotional in the laboratory ata of dreams, other people like that.

So i'll take my esias three and eight thin I an as a so called sleep stack, about thirty or sixty minutes prior to sleep. I do not take them during the day. There is, however, another supplement that used in combination with the sleep that that I just described or alone, can greatly enhance the quality of your sleep.

And in particular, people who are following a low carbon hydroid diet who have trouble falling and staying asleep seem to benefit from IT. And that is so called in oita. Now in Oscar comes in different forms.

But the form that are referring to here in terms of enhancing slow wafty is milo innocent? All there are enormous number of studies on innocent for sake of mental health and for sake of enhancing various aspects of cellular function and force ag of improving sleep. Like to just highlight one paper title.

This paper will make IT clear what it's about. The title of the paper is the impact of milo and austal supplementation on sleep quality in pregnant women renommist double blinded placeor controlled study. Now, and I just told you, the study was Carried out on pregnant women, but there been other studies of an ospital on other populations. And the major take away from these studies is that innocent all can improve the quality of sleep and can adjust the architecture of sleep in ways that make IT a great candidate for improving the structure, and maybe also the duration of slow wave sleep in particular.

I find that if i'm following a lower carbon hydrate diet, which I do from time to time, I sometimes have trouble following a sleep, or if I eat four to six hours prior to bedtime, and I tend to be pretty hungry around bedtime, and sometimes if i'm exercise zing very hard, or i'm working a lot, even if I eat dinner around seven and I go to sleep around ten pm, I might be a little bit hungry still at ten pm. In that case, I find that taking nine hundred milgram of milo and hospital, in addition to the other sleeps act that I just described, greatly enhanced my ability to fall asleep and to get terrific quality sleep. I do monitor my sleep.

I do that two ways. I do that these days with my eight sleep sleep tracker, and I use a woop sleep tracker when I sleep. The combination of those two taps into different aspects of sleep tracking.

Harry very building movement at sea in the future episode will talk about what are the best devices for monitoring sleep, which have certain advances and others have disadvantages. But I certainly see IT in the objective data, that is, from the sleep track data. And I also observed subjectively that taking one hundred milligrams of an ospital l prior to sleep began thirty to sixty minutes prior to sleep can greatly enhance the ability to fall asleep.

And for me to stay a sleep throughout the night, I also noticed another effect, which is that if I wake up in the mill and I to use the restaurant, which I often do, I find IT much easier to fall back asleep. I don't tend to get into out of looping thought and things that sort in middle of the night that may relate to the fact that my oin official has been studied, in many cases, for its role in controlling anxiety, that is, for reducing anxiety. And that's one of the reasons, in fact, one of many reasons why people take my own official during the daytime there says of my on oita for dealing with anxiety, for sleep, as we're discussing now, and even for improving fertility and things that that in particular in women.

So again, nine hundred milligrams of an ospital can be a useful tool. Sixty minutes of exercise, as describe previously, can be a two. And certainly, avoiding caffeine and alcohol is an excEllent tool for enhancing the total amount of slow wave sleep.

Jack had a second part to his question he asked, is having a high level of rap ee moving sleep, any lower level of deep sleep likely to cause any health issues? And to be honest, it's not really clear that IT would cause any specific health issues. Although if we think about what the specific roles of slow wave sleep versus rabbit I movement sleep are, again, rapid.

I move and sleep, being laden with highly emotional dreams. It's thought to act as a sort of trauma release where people are paralyzed in body. And that's a healthy paralysis. This is so called sleepy ona, but undergoing some pretty emotional stuff at within their dreams.

And there is a lack of ability for the body to secrete a journal during rapid eye movement that's thought to be important for emotional repair, if you will, um during the night. Certainly studies where people have been deprived to wrap and I movement sleep have shown that their ability to manage emotionally during the daytime is reduced urgently. If you have reduced rapid I move sleep for multiple nights, that's going to be the case.

The only copy out to that is that there are certain forms of treating depression that involved s specifically depriving people of rapid eye on sleep. That's a whole other story um that was covered in the podcast episode dr. Nollie Williams. So if you want to learn more is to why that's the case check out that episode.

But because slow wave sleep, which occurs again during the early part the night is when growth hooo nis released, and when there's this period washout of debris within the brain, and to some extent within certain issues of the body, you could imagine that reduce slow wave sleep would lead to reduce the ability to recover from exercise, from injury, maybe even relate to the immune system. However, I am personally not aware of any studies that specifically looked at the ratio of slow wave sleep to rapid eye movement sleep, and that focused, in particular, on reduce slow wave sleep for bodily repaired. Those studies might be out there.

I was not able to find them. If you are able to find them, please put them in the um comment section and I would love to check out those studies. So I don't think that one needs to be overly concerned if you're not getting a baLance of slow wave sleep to rabbi movement sleep.

That's perfect, however, and as I mentioned earlier, IT would be good to strive to try and baLance the amount of slowly sleep in rapid eye movement sleep across the entire night. If you think about IT, that will also tell you whether not you're getting sufficient total sleep. And I don't want to open up another set of questions here as I am about to close out in the answer to this question.

But I do often get asked the question whether not four hours is enough or six hours is enough for eight hours is enough. Well, it's impossible to know exactly how much sleep each individual person needs, and of course, each individual person will need a different amount of total sleep depending on the amount of stress and physical strain and very other things they're dealing with in their daily waking life. However, it's generally the case that kids and people that are undergoing puberty and certainly in early infancy, need more sleep than adults do.

So as you age, you do in fact, need less sleep. One good metric of whether or not you are getting enough sleep is whether not you're sleepy during the daytime or not. If you're following asleep lot in the daytime, you're probably not getting enough sleep at night at sort of a duh.

But it's an important due to pay attention to. And for those of us like myself that need a twenty or thirty minute nap in the afternoon, great. That doesn't necessary mean you're not getting enough sleep at night.

okay. So if you get sleepy enough to want to APP in the afternoon, that's not an indication necessarily that you are not getting enough sleep at night. However, if you're only sleeping four or five hours per night, it's very hard to imagine that you're getting a baLance of slow wave sleep and rapid 的 eye movement sleep。

Once you get into the range of sleeping six to eight hours and certainly eight to ten hours per night, the probability that you're getting a baLance of slow wave sleep in rapid di move and sleep greatly increases. So if I were to throw out a number, I would say for most people, that is, for ninety five percent of people out there, getting at least six hours of sleep per night at least, and ideally more like seven or eight, is going to be the goal. However, i've noticed, for instance, for myself, unless i'm exercising extremely intensely or i'm going through a lot of emotional or physical stress in my daily life, getting six and a half to seven hours of sleep per night allows you me to feel really good and refresh ed throughout the day.

And that's especially the case if I get that twenty or thirty minute nap in the afternoon or use nsd r non sleep deep pressed. So I hope that answers your question, jack. And uh, there, of course.

So I am extending the answer to all others who update ted that question, or who might be interested in improving their slow wave sleep. There are some dues. There are some dots that I just described.

I suggest trying various things one by one, to see what works best for you. So you don't necessary need to leap to doing the sixty months of exercise plus the anoxic al set up. However, I do encourage everyone to avoid alcohol and caffeine within the eight to twelve hours prior to sleep in.

Again, if you're not using either of those, that would be even Better, at least in terms of sleep architecture. Thank you for joining for the beginning of this asked me anything episode to hear the full episode and to hear future episodes of these. Asked me anything sessions plus to receive transcripts of them and transcripts of the human man lab podcast standard channel and premium tools not released anywhere else, please go to huberman lab dot com slash premium.

Just to remind why we launched the huberman lab podcast premium channel. It's really too fold. First of all, it's to raise support for the standard huberman lab podcast channel, which of course, will still be continue to be released every monday in full length.

We are not going to change the format or anything about the standard human and lab podcast and is a fund research, in particular research done on human beings, so not animal models, but on human beings, which I think we all agrees the species that we are most interested in. And we are going to specifically fund research that is aimed toward developing further protocols for mental health, physical health and performance. And those protocols will be distributed through all channels, not just the premium channel, but through all changes you've in the podcast and other media channels.

So the idea here is to give you information to your burning questions in debt and allow you the opportunity to support the kind of research that provides those kinds of answers in the first place. Now in especially exciting feature, the premium channel is that the tiny foundation has generously offered to do a dollar for dollar match on all funds raised for research through the premium channel. This is a terrific way that they are going to amplify whatever funds come in through the premium channel to further support research for science and science related tools for mental health, physical health and performance.

If you like to sign up for the humble lab premium channel, again, there is a cost of ten dollars per month, or you can pay one hundred dollars at front for the entire year that will give you access to all the ams. You can ask questions and get answers to your questions. And you, of course, get answers to all the questions that other people ask as well.

There will also be some premium content, such as transcripts of the am and various transcripts and protocols of huberman la podcast episodes not found elsewhere. And again, you'll be supporting research for mental health, physical health and performance. You can sign up for the premium channel by going to huberman lab dot com slash premium. Again, that huberman lab dot com slash premium. And as always, thank you for your interest in science.