How to optimize your sleep habits for longevity

So Sleep is something you've written about where you take it much more seriously now than maybe you used to in the past So do you want to talk about why you think sleep is such an important component of not only? Lifespan, but also healthspan, you know, I think the data really make the case more compellingly than than I need to There's just you know Again, fortunately short-term sleep deprivation is easy to study and it unequivocally demonstrates a Remarkable negative impact on cognition on physical performance on physical markers of health such as insulin resistance on appetite Everything that can go wrong in the human body goes wrong when you are sleep-deprived And again, what's Nice about this is you don't need to do five-year studies to figure this out, right? You can do two week three week studies where you take people down to four hours a night of sleep and you can Absolutely destroy them in every physiologic measure during the wakeful period of their lives so We can then extrapolate from there that okay well if you're only sleeping five and a half or six hours a night, you're probably not getting as much of the negative effects But when we see and measure other effects that are negative to a lesser extent It seems pretty easy to attribute them to the reduction of sleep. So in other words when you look at a person who's you know, not sleeping as inadequately as People are typically studied in short-term studies geared towards identifying the risks They get many of the same problems, but just not as extreme Suggesting there's a dose effect to sleep reduction and you know truthfully I think that This is something that I think society is far more willing to entertain today than ten years ago I think you know, Matt Walker who's who's also a very close personal friend has had a lot to do with this Ariana Huffington has brought a lot of attention to this So I think there are many people out there that are saying hey This whole idea of I'll sleep when I'm dead, which used to be my mantra Is like yeah, you're gonna be dead quicker if you adopt that mantra so you will indeed sleep when you're dead and you'll be dead sooner than you want to be so Again I think that you know, this this one doesn't require a lot of convincing But how to do it, of course is a little more complicated The good news is there's really a lot of wonderful behavioral tools And ultimately for some people, you know pharmacology or mechanical assistance such as CPAP, you know If a person has apnea there are technologies both pharmacologic and otherwise that can really help here For most people The behavioral tools do the work this is really one of those things where Very few people need to see a physician to help them sleep or to troubleshoot a sleep problem. And when you do Fortunately, there's an entire branch of medicine dedicated to sleep physiology there are actual physicians who specialize in this and We're certainly not afraid to use them when it's necessary There's also a field of behavioral therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia that is an entire discipline that is dedicated towards the cognitive tools that you can use during periods of insomnia, so You know, we always get patients in our practice who just have what can only be described as the most abjectly horrible sleep and I Just of all the problems we face this is the one that I tend to be most optimistic about our ability to help in a relatively short period of time and We have a whole AMA dedicated to sleep along with multiple Matt Walker episodes So I don't think we needed to get into insane detail because we will link it in the show notes But you mentioned a few of the behavioral tools. And so if someone says, okay, I need to take more Awareness in my sleep. I need to do more to get better sleep. What are some of the things that they can look at and evaluate? I would say if you were, you know If we were in an elevator and we had only between the first floor and the 15th floor for me to tell you everything that mattered I would say Try to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time every day give yourself about eight hours to be in bed make the room as dark as possible as cold as possible and Detach yourself from anything stimulating Especially kind of upsetting which is you know work social media that kind of stuff for two hours before bed And if we haven't hit the 15th floor yet I would say try to not eat or drink any alcohol for three hours before bed Those would be like the no risk no regret moves to try to fix your sleep And that's a lot by the way Like I I'm not suggesting that would be easy to do for someone who's doing none of them but if a person if you gave me a hundred people who were complaining of poor sleep and or Objectively had measurements of poor sleep and all 80 of them did that Pardon me all a hundred of them did that I think 80 of them would get better