Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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I'm Maiken Scott, and this is a podcast extra from The Pulse. In college, Olivia Walsh was doing a lot of math, not for class, but to come up with a feasible sleep schedule. I was a sleep deprivation cowboy. I was constantly trying to fit more into my schedule and moving sleep around into increasingly smaller gaps. Four hours one night, three hours the next. So I was...
staying up until 2 a.m. working on a problem set. But then I would get up at 5 a.m. to go row on the crew team. And at the time, I felt kind of smug and proud about doing this. I was like, yeah, you guys need to sleep, but me...
I've got it all figured out. On the weekends, Olivia would binge sleep to try to make up for all of the hours of sleep that she had missed. I was always aiming for eight hours on average, and there was no concept of a rhythm and no concept of, hey, actually, the timing of those eight hours really matters. But soon, Olivia couldn't stay awake in class.
What did you notice about your attention, your ability to focus, your ability to remember things?
My attention, my ability to focus were all terrible. I would lose track of the subject in the middle of a conversation with somebody. There was one time I got a voicemail saying like, Olivia, I am here for the meeting and you're not here. So I guess you're not interested. Goodbye. And to this day, I have no idea who that person was or what meeting I had agreed to. But I was so sleep deprived at the time that I would do things. I'd be like, yep, I'll be here at this time. And then it would
instantly leave my brain. Oh my god. So you don't know who you were supposed to meet? I'm haunted. Actually, if you're listening to this person who I was supposed to meet in 2010, I'm really sorry that I forgot that we had an appointment. I didn't recognize your number and I just forgot because I was chronically sleep deprived. What if it was like a dream job? Yeah.
It could have been. It absolutely could have been. But I was so caught up in this idea that college is about fitting everything in, getting every experience. And the irony is there's a lot of stuff I did in college I probably don't remember at all because I had no capacity to make new memories because I was sleeping so little. ♪
In grad school, she had a life-changing experience. She participated in a sleep study where she had to keep a consistent bedtime.
lights out at 11.30 at night, wake up time at 7.30 in the morning. And she had to keep that schedule for three months. I went into it hoping to get out like $35 for being a participant and maybe some vague hopes of, oh yeah, this will be kind of good for my health. I don't know. And the reality was that everything changed, not instantaneously, but around two weeks into it,
I sort of had this moment of clarity where I was like, it's really easy for me to fall asleep now. That wasn't true before. But other things happened too. I had a skin condition that cleared up. I lost weight. My mood improved. And so this is an N of one. So I'm in full speculation mode here. But in my personal life, I came to attribute it to the sleep regularity. And I was suddenly so interested in knowing, okay, I'm
Why? What's the difference? I wasn't actually sleeping that much more if you looked at pure hours per night, but everything just felt better. And that's what led me to really try and figure out more about what was going on with circadian rhythms, my body's clock, and how that tied into not just sleep, but basically every major function in my body. Olivia had finally found her sleep groove, and sleep became the main focus of her research.
She went on to become a research scientist studying circadian rhythms and sleep regularity. She's an investigator in the Department of Neurology at the University of Michigan, and she has a new book out. It's called Sleep Groove, Why Your Body's Clock is So Messed Up and What to Do About It. Before we get into sleep regularity, I wanted to ask you
What does good sleep actually mean to you? You know, we might all have different definitions of that. But from a more, I guess, clinical perspective, what do we want out of good sleep?
My definition of good sleep is sleep where you feel good about it and everyone else in your life feels good about your sleep too. And I add that second part there because people can be so tired that they aren't even aware of how
how tired they are. They've sort of lost the ability to remember what it was like when they were getting sleep. And so having people around you say, yeah, yeah, I think your sleep is pretty good is a critical piece of the puzzle. But for instance, like,
like fraction of deep sleep, amount of REM sleep you get. In my definition of healthy sleep, those really don't function, factor in that much. Instead, I think good sleep is getting enough sleep and getting it at the same time every day, feeling like you've got a sense of momentum going into your sleep and feeling like you've got a groove to it. There's a rhythm to your sleep that washes you into sleep every night and washes you into wake in the morning.
And why is that rhythm so important? What about it? It's because biology having rhythms has enabled us to do all sorts of things that would otherwise be less efficient. So we don't run all systems at the same power all the time. I'm not
at my peak of food metabolism at 3 a.m. because I'm not usually eating then. So it wouldn't really make sense to have all that machinery up and running there. And so this rhythm is baked into how our bodies work. It's
It's as fundamental as the rhythms of breathing and heart rate. You want your heart rate to have a regular consistent rhythm that adapts to what you're trying to do. You want your breathing to have a regular consistent rhythm that adapts to what you're trying to do. But too often we think of the sleep rhythm as something that's not biological. We think about it like a gas tank where it's empty and then you fill it up and then it's full and then you can do stuff and then it's empty again.
We should be thinking of sleep rhythm like the breathing rhythm, where it cycles between empty and full states, but the rhythm is the heart of it. We need that rhythm. But I think a lot of people who are pretty obsessive about their sleep maybe are tracking it and really analyzing it. They think more about the sleep phases. Did I get the deep sleep? Did I get this kind of sleep or that kind of sleep? And not so much about the timing.
Yeah, and what I'm asking people to do is step back from that. I think stages of sleep, which are cool. I like stages of sleep, but they're kind of the trees and you're missing the forest.
You can't really control what stages of sleep you're going to be, at least not through willpower alone. And also your body kind of knows what it's doing when it puts you in different stages of sleep. That's really not under your purview. What you can control, however, is the stuff that sends timing signals to your body's clock. And your body's clock, in turn, will either, if you have really consistent, strong signals...
make this lovely bed for you to sleep in. Or if you have really inconsistent signals, be like, I don't know, sleep now, maybe, I guess, which leads to people feeling crappy during the day and awake at night, feeling unable to sleep at night. So while I get it's fun to hack numbers, it's fun to look at trends and how deep percentage changes from day to day.
In terms of what the evidence supports and also the math, the physics suggests really matters. Sleep regularity and your rhythm are more important than those things. What actually happens in the body when I'm getting sleepy? So what are some of the mechanisms that come into play when I'm starting to feel like, you know, that lovely drowsy feeling when you're about to drift off?
Yeah, so there's two things that conspire to make you feel sleepy. One is your hunger for sleep, which does actually kind of operate like the gas tank analogy, where when you're awake, you build up a hunger, and then when you sleep, you...
You relieve that hunger. You refill your tank. You're ready to go the next day. But the second force is your circadian rhythm, which is kind of shaping the stage. And your circadian clock moves pretty slowly. So from day to day, it's going to shift at most, in general, a couple hours, more likely 30 minutes to an hour, depending on what you do that day. So let's do a couple examples of what could happen.
cause you to feel sleepy. If you pull an all-nighter, you stay up all night, you really build up that hunger for sleep to the point where it could be 8 a.m.,
And you're ready to collapse. You're super tired. You fall asleep then. Your body's hunger for sleep is saying, go to sleep now. But you probably won't sleep that long. And the reason you won't sleep that long is because your circadian clock is going to swing in a few hours later and be like, listen, you really need to be awake right now. It's awake time. How
However, if you're sort of on a normal schedule, you're not doing that stay up all night thing, then what would happen as the day winds down is your body's clock would cue in production of the hormone melatonin. And melatonin is the night darkness hormone. It would rise in your body. And as it's rising, that's when you start to feel yourself shutting down unless you're in bright light. And if you're in bright light,
that melatonin is going to be suppressed. You're not going to have as much of that rising. But in that case, when you're not sleeping against your circadian clock, you're overlapping your sleep period with your melatonin period. Generally, that's when good things tend to happen.
Olivia Walsh is a research scientist. Her new book is called Sleep Groove, Why Your Body's Clock is So Messed Up and What to Do About It. Coming up, why darkness is your friend when it comes to getting good sleep. I usually would dim the lights two hours before bedtime, maybe more like an hour. And I was really regimented in it. That's next.
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This is a podcast extra from The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about how to improve our sleep with research scientist Olivia Walsh. Her new book is called Sleep Groove, Why Your Body's Clock is So Messed Up and What to Do About It.
Let's talk about light because light is, I guess, the main signal for us to know when we're supposed to be awake and when we're supposed to be asleep. So how important is light and how does it factor in in our modern lives? Yeah, light is the number one synchronizer of the clock in your brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
Other things matter too. So when you eat, that's going to affect clocks in your stomach, in your liver, exercise and activity that also has effect on all of these clocks all throughout your body. But light is...
the most important one, which is kind of ironic because it has no mass. It is literally immaterial. So people tend to think of it as, eh, it's not doing that much. Eh, it's just not that important. But you can look at how things like pills. So you can take melatonin in a pill and look at how it affects your circadian clock. And it has way less of an effect than light does.
But people feel like the pill does more than light does because it's tangible and physical. You have an analogy in the book where you talk about a Zumba class you take at the gym and how you get different cues. Talk a bit about that and how you liken that to the impact of light.
So I do Zumba every Saturday at my local rec center, and I am pretty mediocre. So I'm always trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing at any point in time. There's the instructor, and then there's the people who are pretty good, and then there's the...
want to be good some days like me and the rest of us in the back row. We're trying to figure out what we're supposed to be doing at any point in time. And so we're integrating all of these different signals. And the most important one is the Zumba instructor in the front. But I'm also queuing off of the music, the person over there to my right who looks a
like they've done this before. The vibrations on the floor, pulling all of these pieces of information from all these different sources and deciding this is what I need to do now. So I need to do a little spin right now because that's
That's what the signals are telling me. This is how your circadian clock works. And in the analogy, the Zumba instructor is probably light exposure. So your clock sees this light exposure and it's like, great, okay, I'm getting light exposure now. This means that in...
12 hours, I need to produce the hormone melatonin. But the signals can conflict. So probably because I'm not that good at Zumba, I'm throwing people off near me. So the person to my left is watching me and getting totally different signals from me than the Zumba instructor. And she has to integrate those. And if she doesn't know that I'm bad yet,
She will potentially follow me and end up in this state of desynchrony where she's doing things at the wrong time or she's doing them less confidently than she otherwise could. And so this is like if I get light,
in some hours, but then I'm eating at different hours. Like, or I'm eating way after my light period started. You're getting these two different signals. You're trying to integrate them. They're conflicting. And the strength of your rhythm, the confidence you have in your rhythm goes down. You say in the book that light is like a drug. How so?
Photons come in. They hit these opsins in your eyes that trigger a biochemical response. So it's a photic signal that gets turned into a chemical signal. And then these cells called retinoids
retinal ganglion cells send that signal onto your brain electrically. This is the stuff of drugs. Like having this biochemical effect on your body, the only difference is that it's triggered by a photon instead of being triggered by you taking a pill and putting it in your mouth. So light is absolutely a drug, but
it's not an intuitive drug to recognize. You don't usually think of yourself as dosing with light. And I think one of the reasons why it's unintuitive is light is everywhere all the time. If you're a fish, you just don't understand that you're in water. We don't understand that we're constantly dosing ourselves with light.
The other reason I think light is underappreciated as a drug is that it does different things to your body at different times of the day. So light in the morning is going to be interpreted by your circadian clock differently than light at night would or light in the middle of the night would. So you don't necessarily learn, oh, I turn on the light and this happens. There's this
component of it that matters. But in terms of how much of an effect it's having on you, it is absolutely having an effect on you the same way that a pill like melatonin has on people. And that's a billion dollar market. People take melatonin all the time. Maybe they should be thinking about changing their light instead.
Tell me more about how light impacts us differently at different times of the day. So let's say I'm getting up in the morning. I'm, you know, obviously turning on the lights if it's the winter or I see the sunlight coming through my window. How is that different from me sitting in my lit up kitchen at night?
Yeah, so it's going to affect our bodies in a couple different ways. And I'm going to focus just on the circadian ways it affects our body. Your body's always trying to figure out what time it is. And if you turn on the lights in the morning, your body's like, oh, the sun is up.
okay, I need to get the day started. It's basically going to speed things up. It's hustling your machinery along. We say phase advance your circadian clock. If you got more light than usual, so let's say I get myself a spotlight and I put it right next to my bed and I turn it on at 4 a.m., that's going to functionally jet lag me towards a place that's east of me. It's going to earlify me. It's going to make me earlier than I normally am.
If we instead go to 9 p.m., at this point, light's doing something different. So if you're still getting light and your brain is like, well, I thought the sun was supposed to set by now, but clearly the sun is still up, what it's going to do is it's going to slow things down. It's going to say, hey, I think the day hasn't ended yet, so I'm going to keep things going a little longer. It sort of drags things out. It phase delays you. It slows
it latefies you, it makes you more of a night owl. If I, instead of turning on my spotlight at 4am, I turn it on at 11pm, that's going to be like I'm jet lagging myself to the west. So it's going to make me want to wake up later tomorrow. Tell me a bit about the swing analogy you have in the book. So
We are around artificial lighting all the time. We get up in the mornings. We have lights on in our homes. We have lights on in the office. We have lights on at night. So we can't quite escape the light ever. How does that impact us? Yeah. So...
My favorite analogy for how the same thing can do different things to your body at different times is being on a swing. And I just mean classic, you are on a swing and somebody is pushing you from behind. Light exposure is like them pushing you in the going out direction, which is what you want if you are also going forward. But if you imagine you're swinging backwards and you're just...
like getting to the halfway point of your swing and they push you again, that's not a good swing. That's not what you want. You want to get all the way through your backswing and then get pushed again on the
forward swing. And so having a good swing is about both having somebody push you on the way out and then having them clear out of the way when you're swinging backwards. But we don't get that with our light exposure these days. So in modern life, we get kind of weak pushes forward because we don't usually get that much light during the day. And then when we're on the way back, it's not this clear path because we don't really get dark, dark much anymore. We get
darkish dark. So even in my house, which is blackout curtain, no electronic little blue lights, they've all been taped over. I still get light from the street lamp outside through the cracks. And that is brighter than what I'd get if I was in the middle of the woods or in a basement somewhere and
And as a result, even in my pretty darn dark home, I still have something in my way on the backswing. I still have that little push forward that I don't want. And what getting that push forward is going to do is it's going to disrupt your rhythm. It's going to throw off in the swing analogy, having a nice robust swing. And in the circadian analogy, it's going to make it so you don't have this
smooth glide into sleep that you might otherwise have. It's instead going to make your brain think, well, I thought it was night, but there's this light, so now I'm not sure. I don't know. I'm not going to as confidently say that it's night. I'm not as confidently going to produce melatonin. The signals are too conflicting.
How have you adjusted light exposure in your own life? And at what time of the day do you turn the lights down? When I was doing the original study where I had to keep a really regular schedule, I usually would dim the lights two hours before bedtime, maybe more like an hour. And I was really regimented in it. And now I pretty much go completely by feel. But it's
pretty close to two-ish hours before when I'm planning to fall asleep. And the way I've structured my life is that I get a ton of light during the day. My desk is right near a window. I look completely like a vampire because I'm so whited out from the light exposure on half of my Zoom calls. But
I'm doing it for my circadian rhythm, so it's fine. And then at night, like, everything is dim. I frustrate my husband to no end, just turning the lights down while he's trying to still be on his computer. And it's to the point where I have turned down the lights at
other people's houses disease. I was over at somebody's house on New Year's. New Year's is a night where you stay up late and it took all of my power not to go over to their light switch and just be like, let me just, let me just turn this down. But,
I feel it in a way that before I'd been made aware of the science, I just didn't care. And now I'm like, oh, that light's still being on. It's like a high-pitched noise that's very annoying to me. So don't mind me. I'm just going to make this dimmer here as everyone glowers at me in the background. But I'm doing it for their own good. I'm doing it for their circadian clocks.
And how dim is dim? I mean, what are we talking about here? Like stumble around in your bedroom dim or a little bit more light than that? I just had a kid and in his room...
At night, when he wakes up in the middle of the night, I keep it stumble around dark. This is not something I would recommend for most people. I don't want anyone to fall and hurt themselves because they were trying to optimize their circadian health. What I do is turn off overhead lights. I usually use warm side lamps, like table lamps, and bright enough to still be able...
to see things and not injure yourself, but dim enough that, and this is so not technical, the annoying noise that I'm imagining goes away. And I think it's something that as you start to do this in your own life, you might just figure out, okay, this is the darkness level that
feels good to my system. And the reason why it makes sense for it to be personal is that people really vary a lot in their light sensitivity. So some people are 50 times more sensitive to light than others, which means the same light for one person could barely suppress their melatonin, whereas for another person, it could completely crush their melatonin.
So the totally unsatisfying answer I have is that it's a lot by feel. It's a lot by, yep, I feel like this is going to read as darkness to my body's clock. Olivia Walsh is an investigator in the Department of Neurology at the University of Michigan. Her new book is called Sleep Groove, Why Your Body's Clock is So Messed Up and What to Do About It.
Coming up, is not getting sleep as catastrophic as we think? Last century, we did a bunch of experiments where people just didn't sleep for a long period of time. And what you see is people, at least in those studies, they didn't die. That's still to come. This is a podcast extra from The Pulse. We're talking about finding our sleep groove with research scientist Olivia Walsh.
How much of this is individual when it comes to finding the right sleep rhythm? So one way in which it's highly individualized is that people walk around with different amounts of accumulated sleep debt. And it takes different amounts of time for those sleep debts to leave people before they can start to say, oh, OK, now what's my rhythm? But once you're no longer burdened by a massive sack of sleep,
sleep, hunger, you can start to understand the machinery of your circadian clock. And this has led people to this idea of chronotype. So what's your chronotype? Are you a night owl? Are you a morning person? And there people often say, I am this. I am a night owl. And that's it permanently and forever. And my response to that is,
You're acting like the presentation of your sleep habits, like how you wake up and go to sleep has nothing to do with the inputs you feed yourself. But the inputs are hugely important. I am a sort of middle of the bell curve person on the East Coast. But on the West Coast, I would look like an incredible person.
morning person. They'd be like, wow, you're waking up at 4 a.m. And what's different between East Coast and West Coast? Well, okay, social things like who I'm hanging out with, but also light exposure. I'm just getting earlier light exposure, which is why I have adjusted to a schedule that wakes up around 7 on the East Coast. And so when people say, oh, I'm a night owl, they're talking about things that are sort of baked into them and leaving out
All of the other things that matter, like, okay, well, what light exposure did you get today? When I say like, hey, this is how personalized your circadian clock is. The thing that is more important than anything else is what you're feeding your clock, what information you're giving it, this lighting history. And everyone's got a different one. How rigid are you about your own sleep schedule? I am...
horribly rigid. In the following sense, I really do turn the light down every single day, including when I'm at somebody else's house. When I start to have that feeling of, oh, my body's producing melatonin, if I'm in the light right now, it's going to stop that. So I want melatonin, I'm going to turn the lights off. But a
cognitive framing that I often use in my own life is to not actually care that much about the exact moment I fall asleep and the exact moment I wake up, especially since I recently had a kid. I don't have a lot of choice about when I'm falling asleep and waking up. And what I instead base my perception of, oh, was last night good or bad, was did I get a good
uninterrupted dark block? Or did I have to turn on the lights? Was I in the lights later than I wanted to? So instead of a good sleep, I think of it as a good dark. And of course, I feel it if I only get four hours the night before. But what's freeing about thinking of it as did I get a good dark as opposed to did I get a good sleep is I can actually control the dark in a way that I can't control sleep.
Yeah, I guess a lot of times we obsess over these details of our sleep that we really can't control. You know, like some nights it feels like my brain is just so active and I'm having all these crazy dreams, like, you know, the kind of work dreams where you're like, is this real? Is this not real? What's happening? And then you wake up and you're totally stressed out. And other nights I'm like tossing and turning. So yeah.
Those things I cannot control, but there are plenty of things I can control about my sleep. Yeah. And I think the notion of you need to try harder to get to bed at this time, like try to fall asleep at 1030 is doomed to fail.
because not only can you just not do that unless you are so chronically sleep deprived that your sleep hunger is enormous, in which case you have bigger problems. You're also, let's say 1030 is earlier than you normally go to sleep. Your circadian clock, right before it starts producing melatonin to say, hey, this is nighttime. Hey, I'm setting the stage for you to fall asleep. I'm making a nice comfy bed for you to fall asleep. It has this
surge of alertness. So you basically have this second wave of alertness late in the day, which I think of as the, okay, get your act together. The sun's going down pretty soon wave of alertness. And if you're trying to move your sleep earlier and you're moving it into that zone, you're just going to burn yourself out. You're going to say, all right, I need to fall asleep at 1030 because I
I just have to have the willpower to do it. I just got to do it. And then you can't. Your circadian clock is saying, oh, it's time to be awake. It's time to be awake. And you just end up spinning your wheels. Whereas if you instead say, I want to make it so that my body can fall asleep naturally at 1030. And to do that over the next few days, I'm going to shift my light exposure. I'll turn the lights on earlier. I'll dim them earlier. I'll
that is actually in your control. You can do that and there will be way less wheel spinning. What happens when we don't get any sleep at all? There have been a bunch of experiments on that dating back a long time. So how does that impact us? Yeah, I love that question because people tend to assume that not sleeping for five days will be
fatal. And anyone listening to this should not do that. Do not not sleep for five days. But the focus on sleep duration has made it so that people think that, okay, well, sleep duration, the definition of sleep health is sleep duration. Therefore, if you don't have any sleep for five days, it's the end for you, buddy. When in fact, in the
Last century, we did a bunch of experiments where people just didn't sleep for a long period of time. There were both in-lab controlled studies. There were also a lot of radio DJs doing 10 days with no sleep as stunts. And what you see is people, at least in those studies, they didn't die. They got very stupid and paranoid and kind of snippy with each other. They had hallucinations. It was bad. Nobody should...
do this experiment on themselves, but it was also not fatal. And there's sort of two takeaways from this. One is that, okay, if our definition of sleep health is sleep duration, why isn't it worse to acutely lose sleep over the course of five days? There must be something else going on, which has led to this notion of multidimensional sleep. Sleep being not just sleep duration, but other dimensions
quantities related to sleep as well, like regularity. But then the second thing is even in these people who were not sleeping for long periods of time, they would feel bad, but then they would feel better and then they would feel bad again and then they would feel better. And often when they were feeling worse, they
roughly aligned with 3 or 4 a.m. in their local time zone. And that's their body's circadian clock. So that's their circadian clock. Even when they're awake for 200 hours, coming in every day to say, listen, I really think this is the sleep time. I want you to sleep now. Please sleep now. And it's sending that signal. They're ignoring it.
At which point the clock's like, all right, fine. It's day. It's awake time. You didn't listen to me. It's awake time. Here you go. And that's when they start to feel better again. And so when people stop sleeping, at least in these controlled experiments, while they don't die, they're still not good at things. And their circadian clock keeps ticking, which is one
One of the reasons why it makes sense to think about, okay, what signal is that clock sending? What's your take on naps? You know, sometimes during the day, like around 3 p.m., I get very tired. And if I have a little break and I can close my eyes, I boom, I go down.
not for long, but it's really refreshing. Is that, you know, messing me up later on? Or what's your take on that? In general, I am pro naps. There's a lot of evidence about how even a really short nap can help you recover a lot of your ability to perform, your ability to stay awake. Where I start to get
Well, maybe not, is when the nap runs the risk of throwing off your groove. So that 3 p.m. nap you described I think is very unlikely to mess you up later because it's happening in the middle of the day. What it's functionally doing is it's relieving a little bit of that stress
that sleep hunger while minimally affecting your circadian clock. So your circadian clock is still going to send its signal to fall asleep at the time it would have in the absence of your nap. But where a nap starts to run the risk of throwing off your rhythm is, okay, later in the day, you take a nap and it's...
say, 6 p.m. and you wake up at 9 p.m. and your normal bedtime is 11 p.m. Well, in that case, you don't have this hunger for sleep anymore that you would normally have. And so you're not going into 11 p.m. with the same momentum that you would have if you'd built up the hunger for sleep during that time. So then you stay awake and often people keep the lights on when they're awake and that
increases the throwing off of your groove and makes it so that you're more likely to have a hangover the next morning from your circadian clock having been thrown off by getting late at night because you couldn't sleep. So short answer, naps where they're not going to affect your sleep later. I like them. Naps where they run the risk of making it so that your entrance to sleep doesn't have the same force behind it.
less of a fan. What is the main thing you want people to take away from your work and from this book? If they can change one or two things in their lives, what would it be? Two things I would love people to get from this. One is to stop focusing quite as much on things that you can't control, like the exact times you fall asleep and wake up. Don't think it's really productive and it
draws attention away from the things you can control. So you can't control going into REM sleep. You can control light exposure, consistency. I think it's really freeing to no longer beat yourself up for not falling asleep at a certain time when you've got the big meeting tomorrow. You can just say, hey, I know I've got the big meeting tomorrow, but I'm doing everything I can to set the stage for sleep. That's all I can do. I'm doing it right. The second thing is to really...
Move away from the mental framework of sleep as a bank account where you're making deposits and withdrawals or sleep as a gas tank where you're using the gas and then you're filling it up again. And move towards thinking of sleep as just another biological rhythm where the rhythm is important.
intrinsic to the definition of health. So heart rate, that's a rhythm. You would never hear a heart rate that's wildly erratic and think, wow, what a healthy heart rate. You would never listen to somebody breathing really fast and then really slow and think, oh, that person is totally fine. You'd be like, oh, they're in a state of distress. So take that sort of intuitive sense of rhythm equals health and
And apply it to your sleep as well. And start to think of, oh, okay, I maybe got eight hours both nights, but they were at wildly different times. That's a sleep arrhythmia. That's not good.
Olivia Walsh is the author of Sleep Groove, Why Your Body's Clock is So Messed Up and What to Do About It. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland Family and the Commonwealth Fund. This podcast extra was produced by Alan Yu and Lindsay Lazarski. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.
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