Neuroscientist: "This Is The Holy Grail For Longevity!" - #1 Way To Heal The Body | Matthew Walker

When you get sleep, there is a change in what we call the autonomic nervous system, which is sort of this automatic part of our nervous system. And that automatic nervous system is split into two branches. One that is sort of like the accelerator pedal that gets us revved up, triggers the fight or flight response. The other is the break that sort of calms us down. And when we go into deep sleep, we apply that break to the nervous system. Everything quiets down. Heart rate decreases. Deep sleep is the most wonderful form of natural blood pressure medication that you could ever wish for. But one of the other things is that we see as that nervous system quiets down, levels of things like cortisol drop down, that stress related chemical. And it's during that time that the body goes into an immune stimulation mode. And it's where essentially you're going to restock the armament of your immune army. So that when you wake up the next day, you can battle and fight infection. What's also fascinating, and I love this data, and this tells you just how critical sleep is to, to a fighting for our health. If you look at people who become infected or you actually infect them in the experimental laboratory, let's say with sort of a cold vaccine, you immediately trigger increased sleepiness and increased amounts of deep sleep. And it turns out that the infection indicates to the immune system that you're under attack and the immune system will actually signal to the sleep system within the brain. We need more sleep. Sleep is the best battle force that we have right now to combat this assault. And so that's why when you're sick, all you tend to want to do is just curl up in bed and go to sleep. The reason is because your body is trying to sleep you well. That's an appropriate response to what's going on. Exactly. It's bodies are pretty clever, right? They are remarkably clever. You know, again, mother nature has figured this out. And so she brings up this thing called sleep, which I would argue is probably like the Swiss army knife of health. You know, whatever ailment you are facing, it is more than likely that sleep has a tool in the box to try and help fight it. That's so key. Whatever ailment you're facing. Guys, if you listen to this, whatever you're suffering from, whether it's, you know, a lack of energy on a day-to-day basis, whether it's that you're worried about your risk of developing a chronic disease such as type two diabetes or heart problems as you get older, you know, what Matthew is saying, what Professor Walker is saying is that sleep, improving your quality of sleep is going to help you with all these different facets. It's going to help reduce your risk. It's going to help increase your energy. It's also going to reduce your risk of actually getting disease in the future, which is just absolutely incredible. I mean, we are going to move on to tips because I know many of you will be thinking, okay, this is all great. You know, I'm sort of hearing about all these things that sleep does, but how do I get more? So we're going to, we're going to come to that shortly, but so much I want to talk to you about Matthew. I mean, I think we could easily make this like a full day podcast. I'm that fascinated in this. I'd love to return at some point, should you wish me to. Yeah, well, a hundred percent. But I think, you know, what you said about medical school training, I think, I think it's very important because pretty much everything that I put in here and then the last quarter of the book is on sleep, convinced that any of that came from my medical school training. So that was all self-taught from, you know, spending hours on PubMed, reading research, going to conferences, trying to learn more because I wanted to help my patients more. And I thought, you know, I need to know more about this so I can actually do my patients, you know, give them a better service. So you're saying that, you know, maybe medical students may get maybe two hours or so, and you'd love to sort of try and help that and get, you know, maybe a sleep curriculum into medical schools. And this really, you know, I think one of the reasons we get on so well is there's so much synergy in our viewpoint in terms of how we think this needs to change. So what I've done over the past six months is develop a brand new course with a colleague of mine, Dr. Panja, called Prescribing Lifestyle Medicine, and it's a one-day masterclass to teach healthcare professionals, but primarily doctors, on the basics of, you know, lifestyle medicine, if you will, as a term. You know, so we go into sleep and we teach this framework while they can simply apply these four pillars with their patients to start to actually implement lifestyle medicine. I'd love to, you know, I'd love to maybe collaborate with you and show you the slides. Yeah, I'd love to. And I've got, you know, I teach a whole course at the University of California, Berkeley, the science of sleep. So I've got lots of slides I'd love to just share and do whatever I could to try and help sort of perpetuate that movement that you've got going. It's wonderful. That's exactly what we need. Yeah. And then maybe we can talk about how we get that into medical schools. And, you know. Yeah, I was going to actually ask you, you know, how could we, you know, even collectively, you know, think about trying to, you know, approach sort of medicine here in the United Kingdom and see if we could. Well, we'll talk about it off the air from the podcast, because I think that could be a great collaboration. Okay, Matthew, I know you're short on time. And again, we could just go on for so long. I was going to ask you about sleep and stress, but I think, you know, guys, for those of you listening to this, I cover that in quite a bit of detail, I think with you on my chat that's on my Facebook page, which is facebook.com forward slash Dr. Chatterjee. So, guys, you can actually check it out there. But everything that Matthew and I talk about, including that Lancet paper that he mentioned, is going to be in the show notes, which is going to be at drchatterjee.com forward slash Why We Sleep. There's going to be links there to everything Matthew talks about, some of Matthew's articles, his book, all kinds of things. So, guys, do check that out after the podcast and you can do a bit of further reading on those topics that interest you. So, yeah, where to go to next? I mean, one thing that we do talk about on that course, and I think we've not spoken about this yet, is about sleep and its role in mental health. And, you know, what's interesting, you mentioned bi-directional relationships before and how a lack of sleep can increase our risk of problems, but also sleep can be a treatment as well for various things. I wonder if you could talk about that in relation to mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression, and maybe from there just move briefly on to Alzheimer's, if possible. Yeah. So we've done a lot of work in this area of sleep and mental health. I think the first point to note is that we have not been able to discover a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. Wow. And I think sleep has a profound story to tell in our understanding. In our treatment, maybe even ultimately at some point, our prevention of grave mental illness. And I don't say that flippantly. Firstly, we've done some work where you can take healthy individuals and you can deprive them of sleep for a single night. And then you place them inside an MRI scanner and you look at how their brain has changed. And what we find is that these deep emotional brain centers erupt when you're sleep deprived. You become a lot more emotionally reactive, impulsive. There's a deep brain center called the amygdala, which is one of the centerpiece regions, the generation of strong emotions. That part of the brain is up to 60 percent more reactive when you're sleep deprived relative to when you've had a good, solid night of sleep. And we've also found out- That's a huge amount, right? It's a 60 percent. It's very difficult to usually see that type of a change in the brain without some kind of pathology or drug. And I think- Sleep deprivation will do it. On an intuitive level, most people recognize that when they haven't slept well, they're just a little bit more reactive to things. That email from a boss, from their boss, for example, can be easily misinterpreted. You know, are they annoyed at me? You know, you suddenly start to see things that aren't there. And I've just, I mentioned this before, I've just completed my second book called The Stress Solution, which is going to come out in January. And I cover a little bit of this that you're talking about in that to really try and show people that, you know, lack of sleep is a stress on our body. And 60 percent, that's incredible. Change in the brain, yeah. And I think it really comes, you know, you're absolutely right. Many of us have a sense that, you know, I just snapped, dot, dot, dot. You know, those are the words that usually follow, you know, a bad night of sleep or when you've not got enough sleep. And we know it all the way down sort of the age chain. You know, you think about a parent holding a child, the child is crying and they look at you and they say, well, they just didn't sleep well last night. As if there's some universal knowledge that bad sleep the night before equals bad mood and emotional activity the next day. And it doesn't stop in infancy or childhood or adolescence. It's true when we are adults as well. And we've seen this data. What I think is concerning is that that neurological signature that we discovered in that study is not dissimilar to numerous psychiatric conditions. And in fact, we're now finding significant links between sleep disruption and depression, anxiety, including PTSD, schizophrenia, and most recently and tragically suicide as well. In fact, a short sleep duration is usually predictive of either suicidal ideation, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts and tragically suicide completion. So I think the scope through which sleep is impacting mental health disease, I think, is considerable. We used to think in psychiatry that the psychiatric disease was perhaps causing the sleep disruption. I think now we've been forced to change our minds. It's not as though it's completely in the opposite direction. It's not that every psychiatric condition is a sleep disorder. That's not true either. But is it a two way street? I think that that's probably more tenable. In fact, is the dominant flow of traffic perhaps more in one direction than the other? I think that's also reasonable to assume on the basis of the data right now as well. So I think there's clearly an intimate relationship between our mental health and our sleep health. Matthew, the implications of what you just said, I think, is so profound. We've got to accept in the 21st century, not only do we not prioritise sleep enough, we're a chronically sleep deprived society. We're now going through a mental health epidemic. Mind the charity here in the UK say that about one in four people in the UK now in any given year are going to be diagnosed with a mental health problem. That's incredible. And when you hear about that research, we think chronically sleep deprived society, mental health problems otherwise. Yes, there are other factors. OK, I don't think you or... Both of us agree on that. We're not trying to say it's all to do with sleep. But what we are trying to say is that sleep is a critical part of the equation and one that we can no longer afford to ignore. So I find that research fascinating, you know, and it makes me think as a doctor, you know, you've mentioned already type two diabetes, heart disease, mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety. You know, I know at our previous discussion, again, guys, I'd point you to that Facebook discussion. We won't have time to go into this today, but we will want to get you back on the podcast. On our Facebook discussion, we did go into Alzheimer's and how sleep deprivation you feel may be causative now or or one of the causative factors that causes Alzheimer's disease. I'm thinking, well, you know, I often say this when I'm teaching doctors, you know, why are we not bringing up sleep quality with pretty much every single patient that walks in through our door? If you enjoyed that clip from my podcast, here's another powerful clip that is really going to help you with your health and happiness. Everybody has to learn how to do this. Your whole life gets better. Learning to control your nervous system will change everything. The foundational practice that I truly believe every person should do every day is.