Matt Walker

On Huberman Lab, the guidance is to remove all clock faces. On a tough night, knowing the time is 3:22 in the morning or 4:48 in the morning does not help in the slightest, and the reading only makes matters worse than better.

The sequence is direct. A person is already having a tough night, then learns the exact minute, either 3:22 or 4:48. The information fails to help at all. It pushes the night in the worse direction rather than the better one. The practical step is to try to remove all clock faces, and some people have found the step helpful. The tip is described as slightly unconventional, set apart from the stock fare of five tips for sleep hygiene.

Taking the faces out of the room

Difficulty and anxiety at night in the dark is not the same difficulty and anxiety in the light of day. Thoughts at night come with a magnitude of rumination and catastrophization disproportionate to the description given while awake. Keeping one journal decreased the time it takes to fall asleep by 50 percent, five zero, well on par with any pharmaceutical agent.

The page is for vomiting concerns out and zipping them up before sleep. The host, speaking separately, ties a 3 a.m. waking to writing down things forgotten and still to do, and describes the same list as much more tractable and reasonable after the second half of the night. The journal idea first sounded like hooey, very Berkeley

Seven to nine hours is the sweet spot for sleep and all-cause mortality. Below seven hours, shorter sleep predicts a shorter life. Past nine hours the mortality curve stops going down, and at ten or eleven hours it hooks back up, almost like a J shape tilted over and reversed.

Sleep science has at least two explanations, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is that the illness which took their lives was too much for sleep to deal with. When people get sick, an inflammatory, cytokine-mediated response makes them want to sleep more and curl up in bed. They were calling on sleep, the Swiss Army knife of health, but the illness was too powerful for sleep to overcome. The pattern then

Matt Walker says NASA pioneered short naps back in the 1990s. During the missions, naps of as little as 26 minutes improved mission performance by 34 percent and improved daytime alertness by 50 percent. The finding birthed the NASA nap culture throughout all terrestrial NASA staff during that time period.

Astronauts tried the naps while missions were underway. A nap of 26 minutes improved mission performance by 34 percent. Daytime alertness improved by 50 percent from naps of that short length. Terrestrial NASA staff then carried the NASA nap culture through the rest of that time period.

Walker adds that the benefit of naps has long been known. The 1990s mission data put a size on the gai

Matt Walker says REM sleep is the only time in the 24-hour period when serotonin and noradrenaline, also called norepinephrine, shut off completely. Both must shut down to produce REM sleep. Serotonin is the same chemical as 5-HT. Acetylcholine ramps up to produce REM sleep. The three neuromodulators run a reciprocal push-pull that generates a natural architecture of sleep through the night.

Raising serotonin dramatically at night, and keeping that rise in place while REM sleep should start, could artificially fragment REM sleep. Matt Walker says he does not know the data and does not think anyone has really got good data. If the data arrived in two years, he would look first at disruption

On Huberman Lab, sleeping pills are a short-term solution to certain forms of insomnia and are not recommended for the long term. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, a non-drug psychological approach, is just as effective as sleeping pills and more effective in the long term.

Clinical practice still leaves a possible time and a place for sleeping pills. The long-term record favors cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. A recent study found that after working with a therapist, some of the benefits lasted almost a decade. Stopping sleeping pills usually brings rebound insomnia, and sleep goes back to being just as bad, if not worse.

The split is what happens after the intervention

On Huberman Lab, fifty milligrams of apigenin about thirty minutes before sleep went with a subjectively better night. Apigenin is a derivative of chamomile, taken in supplement form. Sleep was not measured, and the person taking it is not a sleep tracker.

Papers on apigenin include control groups, but they are not published in blue ribbon journals, and the show calls the papers somewhat interesting. Chamomile has long been thought of as a mild sedative. The reply on the show is no to chamomile tea and no to taking apigenin. After a look at the sleep data, the show says the evidence is mostly subjective rather than objective, hard sleep measures, so the result is unclear and is not dismisse

On Huberman Lab, one speaker is concerned about high melatonin because the hormone has effects on the reproductive axis. He sees people take a hundred, ten, five hundred, sometimes even ten thousand times the amount the body normally releases. He does not want anyone, including himself, to take a hormone known to be androgen suppressive, and he says the concern is not nested in any one specific human study.

The other speaker calls the point a good one and says melatonin is pretty safe on lethality. The first speaker answers that you can take a lot before you die. The second speaker rejects survival as the yardstick: health, not whether the pill will kill you, is the decision for taking it.

On the show, melatonin usually starts to rise as dusk approaches, hours before sleep. When the system is working in the correct way, melatonin is already on the march for some hours before sleep itself, and the rising peak usually arrives an hour or two later, around the time of sleep, though timing varies from person to person.

Light through the eyes normally acts like a hard brake pedal that stamps down and prevents the release and production of melatonin. Hunter-gatherer tribes untouched by electricity show the unlit pattern: as dusk approaches, the brake fades, the spigot of melatonin opens, and melatonin starts getting released. The rise continues, and the peak usually lands an hour or

On the show, Dr. Matt Walker refuses to state that CBD is beneficial for sleep, because he says nobody can make that statement now. He still lays out three candidate mechanisms he has been exploring in case CBD ends up potentially beneficial: a thermoregulatory effect, an anxiolytic effect, and a change in adenosine signaling. He calls the mechanisms tentative, says any one of them is viable, and says all three are viable together.

The first is thermoregulatory. In some animal models, CBD created a profile of hypothermia: it cools core body temperature down, and a lower core body temperature is known to be good for sleep. The second is anxiolytic, a reduction in anxiety. He says the anxiety

On Huberman Lab, caffeine latches onto adenosine receptors and blocks them. Caffeine does not activate the receptors. Activating the receptors would dial up sleepiness. Caffeine does the opposite.

Subjective sleepiness usually follows a linear process, or probably sits closer to an exponential. Sampling the brain every couple of minutes and asking how sleepy someone feels has not been done in humans the way animal studies siphon samples. Caffeine comes into the system, competes with adenosine, forces adenosine out of the way, hijacks the receptor by latching onto it, and blocks the receptor. Caffeine does not inactivate the receptor and does not activate the receptor. It functionally inacti

Matt Walker starts workouts around 7:45 or 8 in the morning on a spin bike facing an east window so exercise and daylight arrive together, even though the time he would rather exercise is around 1 in the afternoon. Daylight and exercise are both cues that align the circadian rhythm and reset it each day.

Walker is neither a strong morning type nor a strong evening type. His preference is a workout sometime in the middle of the day, around 1 in the afternoon. He still works out most days at a gym he chose for huge amounts of window exposure facing east, and he starts with cardio on a spin bike facing a window. In California, sunlight usually comes through. On a cloudy day the intensity of th

On Huberman Lab, four hours of sleep leave you impaired the next day even when the quality is brilliant, and eight hours of sleep leave you impaired when the quality is very poor. Quantity and quality both have to be present for a beneficial next day. One without the other fails.

Waking up and spending some time awake is normal and natural. The concern begins when you are consciously aware of waking six, seven, or eight times through the night, so sleep is fragmented, or when an awake stretch runs upwards of 25 minutes. Sleep science in the past five or ten years has established that quantity is important and quality is just as important.

Infrequent, short waking does not call for alarm. F

On Huberman Lab, a face-value reading treats sleep as profoundly detrimental. During sleep a person is not finding a mate, not reproducing, not foraging for food, not caring for the young, and is vulnerable to predation. Dr. Matt Walker says sleep probably should have been selected against on any single one among lost mating, lost reproduction, lost foraging, neglected young, or predation risk. Sleep was not selected against.

Sleep has fought its way through every step along the evolutionary path. Dr. Matt Walker says every sleep stage has also survived, as best he can tell, and states outright that the stages are non-negotiable. He is sure vast evolutionary benefits would have followed if

On Huberman Lab, a night that begins at 3 a.m. rather than at 10:30 p.m. does not follow a fixed program that always opens with the first couple of hours of deep sleep. Sleep mostly moves into rapid eye movement phases and stays significantly deficient in deep sleep.

Some deep sleep still arrives at the start, because a longer time awake creates significantly greater pressure for deep sleep. The same split is an experimental technique. First-half-of-the-night deprivation, then sleep in the second half, leaves a person mostly deep-sleep deprived while they still get mostly all of their rapid eye movement sleep. Restricting sleep to the first four hours yields mostly deep non-rapid eye moveme

On Huberman Lab, involuntary muscles stay unparalyzed during rapid eye movement sleep, which is one reason men have erections and women have vaginal lubrication. The other reason is autonomic activity. Autonomic storms activate the body enough for erections and vaginal discharge, and paralysis continues through them. Only two voluntary muscle groups are spared: the extraocular muscles and the inner ear muscle.

The autonomic nervous system controls automatic behaviors, including aspects of reproductive function. During a storm, heart rate decelerates and drops and blood pressure goes down. Then, utterly at random and with no regular pattern, heart rate accelerates dramatically as the sympath

Matt Walker of the Berkeley Sleep Lab published a book titled “Why We Sleep,” which dives deeply into the nature of sleeping and how important it is to us. A decade ago, we knew very little about sleep; however, today, we are beginning to understand much more about the intricacies of our sleep. Ironically, people tend to be more productive when they spend less time working and more time sleeping because sleep is essential for focus and efficiency, both of which are vital in the business world.

Walker states how easy it is for us to be stuck in patterns. The plan is acknowledge, reflect, and plan. He does not recommend people to do all three in one sitting because it’s better done over time and to work with others so you are held accountable.

Nobody told him that he could still do whatever he wanted to do. He grew up where he had to follow a direction in order to move through the world. The space of creation is limitless.

On Nobody Told Me, with Jan Black and Laura Owens, adventure guide Matthew Walker says he has finished things that look impressive on paper and that he is not proud of, because of the style or the relationships that produced them. The way a person moves through the world matters more than the accomplishment.

You can write a book or build a business and collect the usual praise, and still have done it in a way that does not count. The moments he is proudest of are the ones where he was present. Helping his son through a fit, or through pain, and watching confidence come back, matters more to him than having written Adventure in Everything.