Matthew Walker

1- Regularity is the most important. Go to bed at the same time, and wake up at the same time.

2- Keep your house dark, and start turning lights off early on so you are not artificially forcing your body to stay awake.

3- Keep your house cool, but do keep your hands and feet warm while in bed.

Your sleep can get easily distorted by using screens before bed. In fact, one hour of iPad reading at night can delay your melatonin production by as much as three hours, causing less REM sleep.

Although Edison was a short sleeper, he did take a lot of naps, making sure to always write down all the ideas that occurred to him during those naps.

Anything below 7 hours of sleep shows an objective drop in performance in your body. You should get between 7 to 9 hours every night.

Sleep is the greatest legal performance enhancement drug.

In sports, for example, you can get 20-30% better overnight by just getting enough sleep after a practice. Meanwhile, getting six hours of sleep or less will make your physically exhausted up to 30% faster.

Without good sleep, your lactic acid builds up quicker, and your ability of the lungs to actually expire carbon dioxide and inhale oxygen decreases too.

Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep is when your body dreams the most. In this stage of sleep, your cardiovascular system seems to go through periods of dramatic acceleration and dramatic deceleration, very unpredictably.

During REM sleep, your brain also paralyzes your body so that your mind can dream safely, without worrying about your body doing something that would hurt you. Fascinating!

According to Joe Rogan, marijuana is best used in moderation. One way to maximize the impact is to stay off it for a long while, and then do as much as you can in one go.

One theory is that dreaming is just a byproduct of REM sleep, in the same way as heat is a byproduct of light, produced by a lightbulb.

One theory of dreaming is that when you wake up, your brain is trying to reconstruct the events you dreamed of, into a logical story that makes sense. If it cannot do it fast enough, you forget the dream.

However, the fact that you forget your dreams does not mean you don't remember your dreams. The memory is there, it's available, it just isn't consciously accessible at the time you want to get it.

Matt's theory is that we retain all our dreams and they subconsciously impact everything we do every day, we just don't know that.

When you hallucinate, most parts of your brain become extra active; 30% more active than when you're awake. For example, visual, motor, emotional and memory centers, they all increase in activity. Meanwhile, prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain so to speak, good, rational, logical thinking part, it gets shut off.

That's why you see things, why you have motor kinesthetic activity, why things feel so emotional, but also why things seem illogical and irrational.

Men who sleep 5 to 6 hours a night we'll have a level of testosterone,which is that of someone 10 years their senior. So elective sleep will age you by a decade, in terms of wellness, muscle strength and sexual performance.

Alcohol and marijuana block your "dream sleep," your REM sleep where you are most rested and your body can dream. Once you go sober, the body then tries to catch up on all the good sleep it had missed.

Same happens when you sleep in more on the weekends. The body uses extra sleep time to go deeper, and thus you experience more dreams.

Threat detection. Studies have shown that part of your brain is more alert when sleeping in an unfamiliar place than when you are sleeping at home. In fact, in a new place your brain actively fights going to bed, in order to remain more alert.

Asked for a favorite, Matt of Podcast Notes names Brandon Stanton, founder of Humans of New York, on The Tim Ferriss Show. Stanton was number two on Matt's own top-ten list for 2018, but Matt now calls that story number one and says everyone should hear it. He also singles out Dr. Matthew Walker's first appearance on Joe Rogan, about why sleep matters, as a podcast of the year. He adds Naval Ravikant's Periscope sessions, especially a June talk through the How to Get Rich tweetstorm, and another just before Ravikant started a short podcast series. Matt warns that some of the glow is just recency, because the latest thing you heard feels bigger than it is.

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.

Matthew Walker, author of Adventure in Everything, tells Jan Black and Laura Owens on Nobody Told Me that traditional adventure works as a teacher because it pulls people out of their everyday patterns and drops them into a new environment. Learning happens there, and where habits become obvious.

He gives a coaching client on a rock-climbing trip. Whenever the man felt stuck, he shopped for holds, touching every hold on the wall again and again, looking for a perfect one when several were good enough. Walker recognized the same pattern from the man's business. He researched problems endlessly and did not act. The climb was a small copy of the larger stall.

Matthew Walker, the adventure guide and author of Adventure in Everything, tells Jan Black and Laura Owens that he is trying to take the word adventure back from National Geographic, Red Bull, and Outside. The classic trips are powerful storytelling, and they can catapult people. The moments that actually define a life are adventures too.

He splits adventure into five elements. High endeavor, uncertain outcome, total commitment, tolerance for adversity, and great companionship. High endeavor is the rare overlap of values and action, the engine of a given stretch of life. It might be a company, a child, or a relationship, and it changes.

The devices are good at estimating duration of sleep, but not the stage of sleep. They are good at detecting the two class algorithm-- total sleep time, awake or asleep. They fail at detecting the four class model-- whether someone is awake, in light or deep non-REM sleep, or in REM sleep.

A fake starvation signal is transmitted to your brain. It will think the body is undergoing a starvation condition, but it isn't. Your brain releases an increase of hormones that makes you want to eat more, and your hunger level increases.

Yes. Sleep profoundly helps exercise. Moderate to strong evidence agrees that exercise affects sleep because, you’ll have an increase in core body temperature. Hormones can work against you in terms of sleep. Your ability to sweat and perspire depends on how much sleep you get.