YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Walker

lines on the record: 154
first: 2021-08-11
most recent: 2021-08-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You're a brilliant man, and you're doing amazing things. And I feel immensely honored to have met you, to now know you, and to start calling you a friend. Thank you for what you do for the world. For me included”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me personally I think the meaning of life is. To eat, is to sleep, is to fall in love. To Then to die. Oh, and probably race cars in between.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much ink and hundreds of pages inelegantly trying to say the same thing in my book. And he said it in one line. It's beautiful”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's actually a beautiful quote by an American entrepreneur called E. Joseph Kosman, who once said that the best bridge between Despur and Hope is a good night's sleep. And I spilled.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beauty of life that you experience in between. And again, this is just about the trade off. I will say, though, that, and this is not applicable to your circumstance We do know that insufficient sleep is very strongly linked to suicide ideation, suicide attempts, and tragically suicide completion as well. And in fact, in 20 years of studying sleep, we have not been able to discover a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. And I think that that is a profound state. I think it tells us so much about the role of sleep as a potential causal agent in psychiatric conditions. I also think it's a potential sign that we should be using sleep as a tool. The prevention of grave mental illness.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This irony, though, too, which is the fact that when you're well rested and well slept, just as you said, you see enlivens you and sort of gives you a quality of life that's emotionally very different. Contrasting that against the need for not getting enough sleep because of the beautiful things that you want to accomplish in life. And I don't actually see them as You know, sort of completely counterintuitive or paradoxical because I still think that you can strive for all of the brilliant things that you are striving for to have the monumental goals, the Herculean challenges that you wish to take on and solve. They can still enthrall you and excite you and stimulate you. But because of the insufficient sleep that they can or that goal can produce, it will shave off.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most people would think, well, it's the negative that takes the biggest hit when I'm sleep deprived. It's not. By probably a log order magnitude larger is a hit on your positive emotions. In other words, you stop Gaining pleasure from normally pleasurable things. And it's a state that we call Anhedonia. And Anhodonia is the state that we often call depression. So depression to most people's surprise isn't necessarily that you're always feeling negative emotions. It's often more about the fact that you lose the pleasure in the good things in life. That's what we call anhedonia. That's what we see in sleep and insufficient sleep. And it happens quite quickly.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's. Very powerful and strong. So we've done a lot of work in the field of sleep and emotion and sleep and moods. And you can separate your emotions into two main buckets, you know, positive and negative. And what's interesting is that when you are sleep deprived and the more hours that you go into being awake and the fewer hours that you've had to sleep, Your negative mood starts to increase. And we know which individual types of emotions are changing. I've got a wonderful postdoc in my life called Eddie Ben Simon, who's doing some incredible work on trying to understand the emotional individual emotional tapestry of Affective meltdown. You're not getting sufficient sleep. But let's just keep with two dimensions positive and negative.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, sounds very much like a dream, and that's exactly what we see in brain scanners when we've put people inside of them.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of REM sleep, and tell me that it's not REM sleep. Just say, look, based on the pattern of this brain activity, what would you say is going on in this person's mind? I would say, well, they're probably not rational. They're probably not having logical thought because their prefrontal cortex is down. They're probably feeling very emotional because their amygdala is active, which is an emotional center of the brain. They're definitely going to be thinking visually because the back of the brain is lit up, the visual cortex. It's probably going to be filled with past experience and autobiographical memories because their memory centers are lighting up and there's probably going to be movement because their motor cortex is very active.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when you go into REM sleep, it is the only time during the 24 hour period where your brain is devoid of any neuroadrenaline. It is completely shut off. And so the signal-to-noise ratio is very different. It's almost as though we're injecting a greater amount of noise into the neural architecture of the brain during dream sleep, as if it's chemically brute forced into this relaxed associative memory processing state. And then from an anatomical perspective, just as I described, the prefrontal cortex goes down and other regions light up. So it is a state that seems to be very, I mean, if you were to show me a brain scan,”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some ways, we also know it from a chemical perspective, too. When you go into dream sleep, it is a chemical cocktail like no other that we see at the rest of the 24-hour state. There is a chemical called noradrenaline or norepinephrine in the brain. And you know of its sister chemical in the body called adrenaline. But upstairs in the brain nor adrenaline is very good at creating a very hyper-focused attentive narrow, it's sort of very convergent way of thinking to a point sharp focus. That's the only thing. The spotlight of consciousness is very narrow. That's noradren. When you remove noradren, then you go from a high SNR, a high signal-to-noise ratio, where it's just you and I in this moment. I don't even know what. Going on elsewhere. I am with you, nor adrenaline is present.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So your brain from a neural architecture perspective is radically different. Its network feature is not the same as wakefulness. And I think this is an immensely beneficial thing that we have at least two different rational and irrational conscious states that we do information processing in. The rational, the verital, the page one of the Google search is wakefulness. The more irrational, illogical, hyper-associative Google page 20 is the REM sleep. Both I think are critical, both are necessary.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a relaxing of the rigid constraints. You know, I often think of dreaming as from an information processing standpoint, you know, the prison guards are away and the prisoners are running a mock in a delightful way. And part of the reason is because when you go into dream sleep, the rational part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is the part, it's like the CEO of the brain. It's very good at making high level rational top-down decisions and controlled actions. That part of the brain is shut down during REM sleep. But then emotional centers, memory centers, visual centers, motoric centers, all of those centers actually become more active. In fact, some of them are more active than when we're awake. In the dream state”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the eyes. It's been a long standing issue in cognitive science. Cognitive neuroscience, too, is how does the brain create an archetype? How does it create schemas that have general applicability, but yet still obtain specificity? That's a very difficult challenge. And we can do it. We do it. Amazing”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's been a theory that's been put forward, which is that dreaming is a virtual reality test space that is largely consequence free. What an incredible gift to give a conscious mind each and every night”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You create a set of decision weights based on experience and you constantly update those weights based on ongoing learning.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think to me, those are the lines of evidence that tell me dreaming is not epiphenomenal. And it's not just about the act of dreaming. It's about the content of the dreams, not just the fact of a dream itself.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just as much, but not dreaming about the trauma itself did not go on to gain as much clinical resolution to their depression.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they discovered was that those people who then dreamed but dreamed of the maze were the only ones who when they woke up ended up being better at navigating the maze, whereas those people who dreamed but didn't dream about the maze itself, they were no better at navigating the maze. So it's not just that it's sort of necessary but not sufficient. It's necessary that you dream, but it's not sufficient to produce the benefit. You have to be dreaming about certain things itself. And the same is true for mental health. What we've discovered is that people who are going through a very difficult experience, a trauma, for example, a very painful divorce, those people who are dreaming but dreaming of that difficult event itself, they go on to gain resolution to their clinical depression one year later. Whereas people who were dreaming”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dream sleep at night that we take these difficult, painful experiences that we've had during the day, sometimes traumatic. And dream sleep acts almost like a nocturnal soothing balm. And it sort of just takes the sharp edges off those difficult, painful experiences so that you come back the next day and you feel better about them. And so I think in that sense, dreaming, it's not time that heals all wounds. It's time during dream sleep that provides emotional convalescence. So, dreaming is almost a form of emotional windscreen wipers. And I think, and by the way, it's not just that you dream. It's what you dream about that also matters. So, for example, scientists have done studies with learning and memory where they have people learn a virtual maze.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is critical, but when you have REM sleep with a complex brain like ours, you also produce this conscious epiphenomenon called dreaming. Don't believe that for a second, and from a simple perspective, is that I suspect that dreaming is more metabolically costly as a conscious experience than not dreaming. So you could still have REM sleep, but absent the conscious experience of dreaming was probably less metabolically costly. And whenever Mother Nature burns the energy unit called ATP, which is the most valuable thing, there's usually a reason for it. So if it's more energetically demanding, then I suspect that there is a function to it. And we've now since discovered that dreams have a function. The first, as we mentioned, creativity. The second is that dreams provide a form of overnight therapy. Dreaming is a form of emotional first aid. And it's during”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the camps in the sleep field is that dreams are meaningless, that they are an epiphenomenal byproduct of this thing called REM sleep from which dreams come from as a physiological state. So the analogy would be, let's think of a light bulb, that the reason that you create the apparatus of a light bulb is to produce this thing called light in the same way that we've evolved to this thing called REM sleep to serve whatever functions REM sleeps. But it turns out that when you create light in that way, you also produce something called heat. It was never the reason that you designed the light bulb. It's just what happens when you create light in that way. And the belief so too was that dreaming was essentially the heat of the light bulb. That REM sleep.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think, yeah, as we said, With biology. There's a gain, there's often a cost too. We at least understand the biological basis of what you're describing. It's not that you actually don't need less sleep. It's that this chemical is present that forces you more awake. And so subjectively you feel as though I don't need as much sleep because I'm wide awake. And those two things are quite different. It's not as though your sleep need has decreased. It's that your brain has hit the overdrive switch, the overboost switch, to say we need to keep you awake because food is in short supply.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you could easily go to and break the fast. But that's how we understand fasting. And I think, you know, my dear friend Peter Atia has done a lot of work in this area too. I think fasting and David Sinclair's brilliant work, goodness me, what an individual too. Work is pretty clear there that time restricted eating and fasting have wonderful health benefits. Fasting creates this thing called hermesis, just like exercise and low level stress and sauna, heat shock. And Hormesis is a biological process, I think, as David Sinclair has once said. In simple layman's terms, is what doesn't kill you makes you stronger? I think there is certainly good data that fasting and time-restricted eating has many benefits. Is sleep one of them? It doesn't seem to be. It doesn't seem to enhance sleep.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is an extreme evolutionary pressure. And at that point, the brain will forego some. It won't forego all, but it will forego some of its sleep. And the reason is so that it can stay awake for longer because the sign of starvation is saying to the brain, you can't find food in your normal foraging perimeter. You need to stay awake for longer so you can travel outside of your perimeter for a further distance. And maybe you will find food and save the organism. So in other words, when we fast, it's giving our brain this evolutionary signal that you are under conditions of starvation. So the brain responds by saying, oh my goodness, I need to release the chemical that helps the organism stay awake for longer, which is erectin, so that they can forage for more food. Now, of course, your brain from revolutionary perspective doesn't know about this thing called safe.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To erect him when it's in high concentrations, keeps you awake when you lose it. It can put you very much into a state of narcolepsy where you're sleeping a lot of the time in unpredictable sleep. Why on earth, when you are fasting, would the brain release awake promoting chemical? And our answer is right now the following. One of the few times that I mentioned before that we see animals undergoing insufficient sleep or Prolonged sleep deprivation is under conditions of starvation.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sleep. And we know that REM sleep dreaming is essential for emotional first aid, mental health. It's critical for memory, creativity. It's also critical for several hormone functions. It's when there's direct correlations between testosterone, you know, testosterone release peaks just before you go into REM sleep and during REM sleep too. Rem Sleep is So, those are the five changes that we've seen. None of them seem to be that advantageous for sleep. But the fourth point that I mentioned, which was Arexin, which is this wake promoting chemical and a good demonstration or a very sad demonstration of its power is when it becomes very deficient in the brain and it leads to a condition called narcolepsy where you're just unpredictable with your sleep and you so”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The amount of melatonin that was released and when it was released, the amount of melatonin decreased. And when it was released came later. That was the first thing. The second thing was that they ended up finding it harder to fall asleep as quickly as they normally would otherwise. The third thing was that the total amount of sleep that they were getting decreased. The fourth fascinating thing was that awake promoting chemical called axin increased. And this is why a lot of people will say when I'm fasting, it feels like I can stay awake for longer. And I'm more alert. I'm more active. And I'll come back to it from an evolutionary perspective why we understand that to be the case. And then the fourth factor is that fasting didn't decrease the amount of deep sleep that seemed to be unaffected. It did, however, decrease the amount of REM sleep or dream.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rise to sunset And under those conditions, there are probably Probably five distinct changes that we've seen. None of them seem to be particularly good for sleep. The first is that the amount of melatonin that you release, and melatonin is a hormone. It's often called the hormone of darkness or the vampire hormone, not because it makes you look longingly at people's necklines, but it's just because it comes out at night. Melatonin signals to your brain that and your body that it's dark, it's nighttime, and it's time to sleep. Those individuals, when they were undergoing that regimen of fasting,”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think time restricted eating can be a good thing, and there are many benefits of time-restricted eating, is sleep one of them? No, it doesn't seem to be because there are probably at the time that we're recording this three pretty decent studies that I'm aware of. Two out of the three were in obese individuals. One out of the three were in healthy weight individuals. And what they found was that time-restricted eating in all three of those studies didn't have any advantageous benefit to sleep. It didn't necessarily harm sleep, but it didn't seem to improve it. When it comes to fasting, though, which is a different state, we don't have too many studies, experimental studies with long-term fasting. The best data that we have is probably from religious practices and probably the most data we have is during Ramadan, where people will fast for 29 to 30 days from some”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have some data, I would prefer more, but we have data both on time restricted eating. And then we have some data Fasting to a degree On time restricted eating I think that it has some benefits, although the human replication studies have actually not borne out quite the same health benefit extent that the animal studies have there been some disappointing studies won here close to where we are right now at UCSF recently.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Though I would say having, you know, With Joe for some time, I think he is a delightful, sweetheart, independent of children. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be in a ring with him. He would face me five ways till Tuesday, but I think he's a desperately sweet man and a very, very smart individual.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it's this notion of you know life is to be lived to a Degree. But if you do have children, I think one of the other things that then maybe comes into the picture is the fact that now There are other people that you have to live for. Your”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes be at odds with the fact that you can actually get so much more done if you're well slept. And it's this trade-off.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason I bring that point up is because I don't know any company or CEO who would say, I've got this great team, they're drunk all the time. But we often lord the airport warrior who's flown through three different time zones in the past two days is on email at 2 a.m. and then is in the office at 6. And I think there is some aspect, not in all people, but there is sort of some aspect of that slight sleep machismo. And that's not what you are very different. You are driven by a purity of passion and a very authentic, incredibly genuine goal of wanting to do something remarkable with your life. That's not the issue I think I'm speaking about. It's just simply that I think This notion of wanting to be awake for longer to try and get more done.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I just have one quick point on that too. We often think about Sleep as a cost But instead, I think of sleep as an investment. The reason is because your effectiveness and your efficiency when you're well slept. Typically exceeds that when you're not. To me, it's the idea of if I'm going to boil a pot of water. Why would I boil it on medium when I could boil it in half the time on high? And I sometimes worry that when I speak to Fortune 500 companies and there are this mentality of long hours, getting people to rise and grind. First point is that after about 20 hours being awake, a human being is as cognitively as imperred as they would be if they were legally drunk.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we do something different to that, then you start to see some of the pressure, stress fractures in the system. But again, to your point, if that's something that you don't mind, adopting and understanding and Then I think you should keep doing what you're doing.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best evidence that we have to speak to this question is people who are doing rotating shifts. And unfortunately, the news is not good. They usually have a higher instance of many diseases such as depression, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, stroke Again, That's just me communicating the data that we have. And I'm not telling you that you should do anything different. The other thing is that there's nothing in your biology that suggests that that's how your body was designed to sleep. It is a system that Love's habit, you know, if Your circadian clock in your brain is called the supra chiasmatic nucleus since it's in the middle of your brain, had a personality trait, it would be a creature of habit. It loves habit. That's how your biology is designed to work is through very archetypal prototypical expected cycles. And when we”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have to have the bedroom, sorry, the bedtime routine. You bathe the kid, you put them in bed, you read them a story, you have to go through this routine, this wind down routine for them, and then they fall asleep wonderfully. Why do we abandon that as adults? We need that same wind down routine. So that's been the other thing that's been very helpful to me. So don't do anything different if you have a bad night of sleep. doing the same thing manage your anxiety, understand it, rationalize it, then meditation, and then finally having some kind of disengagement wind down routine. Those are the four things that have been very helpful to me.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I found meditation to be helpful. Having a wind down routine is the other thing that's critical for me. I can't just go from, because when my mind is switched on and I think you may be like this too, if I get into bed, that roller decks of thoughts and information and excitement and anxiety and worry is just whirling away. And it's not going to be a good night for me. So I have to find a wind down routine. And that makes sense when you realize what sleep is like. Sleep is not like a light switch. Sleep is much more like trying to land a plane. You know, it takes time to descend down onto the terra firma that we call sound sleep at night. And we have this for kids. I don't have children, but a lot of parents will say,”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They would have people in the morning meditating. And then there's a huge number of people using the meditation app in the evening. What they were doing was self-medicating their insomnia. And they finally, rather than railing against it, they started to see it as a cash cow. Rightly so.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just takes the edge off your sleep hunger, as it were. But that would be, so that's my unconventional second piece of advice regarding insomnia. The third is meditation. I found meditation to be incredibly powerful. I started reading about meditation as I was researching that aspect of the book many years ago. And as a hard-nosed scientist, I thought this sounds very woo-woo. This is sort of We all hold hands and sing come by R and everything's going to be fine with sleep. I read the data and it was compelling. I couldn't ignore it. And I started meditating. And that was six years ago and I haven't stopped. And I found meditation before bed incredibly powerful. The meditation app companies were perplexed at this at first. They want people to meditate during the day. But when they looked at their usage statistics, they found that”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For some people, not all people, but for some people, that can then make it harder for them to fall asleep at night and then stay asleep soundly across the night. So the advice would be if you're struggling with sleep at night, don't nap during the day, but if you are not struggling with sleep and you can nap regularly, naps are just fine and we can play around with optimal durations depending on what you want. Just try not to nap too late into the day because napping latent of the day is like snacking before your main meal”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a terrible night. I'm going to get into bed at 9 p.m. rather than my standard 10. You're just going to be lying in bed awake for that hour. Naps will take our double-edged sword. They can have wonderful benefits. And we've done lots of studies on naps for both the brain and the body. But they are a double-edged sword in the sense that Will just take the edge off your sleepiness. It's a little bit like a valve on a pressure cooker. When you nap during the day, you can take some of that healthy sleepiness that you've been building up during the day”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't wake up any later, don't go to bed any earlier. Don't nap during the day and don't drink any more coffee than you would otherwise. Because if you end up sleeping later into the morning, you're then not going to be tired at your normal time at night. So then you're going to get into bed thinking, well, I had a terrible night of sleep last night. And yes, I slept in this morning to try and compensate. But I'm still going to get to bed at my normal time. But now you get into bed and you haven't been awake for as long as you normally would. So you're not asleep as you normally would be. And so now you sit there lying in bed and it's another bad night. And the same thing is, you know, if you go to bed any earlier, so don't wake up any later. Wake up at the same time. Don't go to bed any earlier because then you're just probably your chronotype, your biological rhythm doesn't want you to be asleep. And you think.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is something very strange about the night that thoughts and anxieties are not the same as they are in the waking day. They are worse, they are bigger. And I at least find that I am far. More likely to catastrophize and ruminate at night about things that when I wake up the next day in the broad light of day, I think it's nowhere near that Batman. What were you doing? It's not that bad at all. So to gain firstly some rational understanding of my emotional state that's causing that insomnia was very helpful. The second thing was to keep regularity just going to bed at the same time, waking up. And here's an unconventional piece of sleep advice. After a bad night of sleep? Do nothing.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, I think I found a number of things effective. The first is that I had to really address what was stressful and try to come up with some degree of meaningful rationality around it. Because I think one of the things that happens, there's something very, talking about conscious states to come all the way back to, gosh, I don't know, I feel like we've only been chatting for like 20 minutes, but you're going to tell me it's been a while. Yeah, it's been a while. Okay, I'm desperately, I feel.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, the best method that we have is something called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia or CBTI for short. And you work with people who don't know what it is. You work with a therapist for maybe six weeks. And you can do it online, by the way. I would recommend probably jumping online. It's just the easiest. And it will change your beliefs, your habits, your behaviors, and your general stress around this thing called sleep. And it is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term. But what's great is that unlike sleeping pills, when you stop working with your therapist, those benefits last for years later, whereas when you stop your sleeping pills, you typically have what's called rebound insomnia, where your sleep not only goes back to being as bad as it was before, it's usually even worse.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sleep in synchrony with it and harmony because normally what we know is that if you fight biology, you'll normally lose. And the way you know you've lost is through disease and sickness.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source