Transcription
The other thing is that many of the people waking up after four or five hours were supposed to go to bed earlier. Remember, melatonin puts you to sleep but doesn't keep you asleep. So many of these people might be going to bed at 11 o'clock, waking up at three or four a.m. "Here I am again!" when actually they need to go to bed at nine.
It seems common, at least among people that I know, that they can fall asleep like right away, almost instantly, but then four to five hours later, they're wide awake. You sort of mentioned depression. What else is going on there? What goes through your mind in terms of, uh, how to handle that?
Yeah, so a couple of things. One is they might not be getting enough physical activity during the day, or they're getting too much. They're overtrained. Um, you know, there's a, I don't want to get the exercise gurus on my back because they're, they're some of the most, the nutrition and exercise folks online or, you know, they come after you with with pitchforks or whatever, um, with forks. Um, but, you know, you can, if you train too much and too often, uh, you'll find that you can't get enough sleep and you're always tired. If you train too intensely, you'll often find that you, um, you'll, you'll have this, uh, waking up, um, agitated. Now, that's, that's, I wouldn't get too bogged down in that, but it's something to keep an eye out for. People that are doing tons and tons of miles on the road and then they're always exhausted. Well, your body's just not recovering. And likewise with work, if you just work, work, work, you're just burning yourself down.
But I think people who are waking up after, um, four or five, but sorry, I should close that out and say that, but an appropriate amount of physical exercise each day is going to help you get the appropriate amount of sleep. And the rule of thumb from the literature is about 150 to 180 minutes per week of Zone 2 cardio. So this is, um, cardiovascular exercise of any kind where you could have a conversation, but you're a little bit strained. You'd prefer to be quiet to keep it going. Um, Zone 2 cardio, 150 to 180 minutes a week, approximately, um, broken up into various sessions. And then it's very clear that the body and brain and the skeletal system and the muscular system benefit from any, from a minimum of six sets per body part per week just to maintain muscle. I'm not talking about people building muscle. I'm talking about people like my mom, who's in her, you know, late 70s, should be doing six sets a week of quadricep work. Um, and the intensity of that and so forth is a full discussion that we don't have time for. But, you know, people would need to maintain their strength. Um, so six sets would be the minimum. And of course, if people are doing, you know, sets to failure and drop sets and assisted reps and all that, that's a different business, right? Because then, you know, I'm talking about the typical person that that will help sleep. The 150 to 180 minutes of Zone 2 cardio and getting resistance exercise, you know, three or four times a week, you're going to be a much more fuel-efficient, better sleeping, more focused system without question.
There's tons of science to support why that's the case. In fact, there's this really cool study I'll just mention that was done at Stanford recently by my colleague Tony Weiss-Corey, where they take the blood from exercised individuals and they infuse it into non-exercise individuals, and all sorts of aspects of brain function improve. There's actually stuff secreted from the muscles that then go off to the other organs. This makes total sense when you hear about it because you think, well, how could that be? But the rationale is that the other organs of the body don't know what the other organs in the body are doing, so they need to receive signals. So when the muscles are working, the brain says, "Oh, I need to keep the neurons that are responsible for motor function and memory." Assad improvements in memory and Alzheimer's patients in this study, really amazing. So there's that, there's the exercise and effort component. I don't think we were designed to just think and, um, and scroll and text. I think we were designed to move, and that's vitally important, provided we don't do, do it to excess.
The other thing is that many of the people waking up after four or five hours were supposed to go to bed earlier. Remember, melatonin puts you to sleep but doesn't keep you asleep. So many of these people might be going to bed at eleven o'clock, waking up at three or four a.m. "Ah, here I am again!" when actually they need to go to bed at nine. Now, there's this weird asymmetry in the way that our system is built, in that we can push through fatigue, but it's very hard to make ourselves fall asleep. So some people need to discover that they actually were meant to go to bed earlier. I, I know people think about night owls and morning larks and this kind of thing. That's a big, uh, idea in industry, and to some extent, it's true. There are genetic polymorphisms that relate to these things, but for the most part, most people were, you know, evolved under conditions where they went to sleep shortly after the sun went down. So, with age, I'm going to bed earlier and earlier. I realize there's some lifestyle factors too, but I do think that there is something powerful about going to bed a little earlier.
There, I keep asking Matt Walker if there's any science to support this, and he tells me no, but I find, and many people find, that every hour of sleep before midnight recharges them more deeply than the hours after midnight. And I don't know what this is, um, but I find if I go to bed at nine o'clock, and I'll sometimes wake up at midnight, I'm like, "Ah, it's only midnight. What am I gonna do?" But then I fall back asleep. I'll wake up at three or four a.m. and I'm ready to go. And, and that's, that's great. I mean, you can get so much done in the hours between, you know, four and seven a.m. Fewer distractions, your focus can be very high. The problem is most people are going to bed late, they're waking up at four or five hours later, then they're scrolling on their phone because it's a very kind of passive sensory input. They're trying to get themselves back to sleep. It doesn't work, and then throughout the day, they're working at about 75% capacity. So I would encourage those people to start going to bed earlier.
Um, I, I didn't finish up with melatonin earlier. I'm not a fan. Not a fan of melatonin supplementation. Dosages are much too high. It's a hormone that interacts with the other hormone systems of the brain and body. Mostly, the dosages are much too high. What you take in terms of one milligram melatonin, very small dosage, is something like 100 times what you naturally secrete. I get really concerned about this, especially in kids, because melatonin is actually the hormone that suppresses the onset of puberty. Um, I don't have any direct data in myself, but I'm not interested in taking a hormone, uh, exogenous hormone that suppresses the, uh, sex steroid hormones, which are testosterone and estrogen, powerful hormones in men and women. Um, for all sorts of things. And I know that a lot of people just think, "Oh, testosterone, men; estrogen, women." That's not the way it works. They're present in both. And actually, having sufficient levels of estrogen for, for men, provides, not too high, is important for brain longevity and health. It's actually really important for libido. A lot of people that, um, get on hormone replacement, men that get on hormone replacement, will take things like anastrozole and they'll start crushing their estrogen, and they run into serious sexual side effects. So you want these things working naturally, um, hormone therapy or not. And melatonin just, it causes all sorts of problems. So I, I know that the melatonin supplement, uh, manufacturers probably don't like that I say this, but melatonin is s***. I don't think should be just taken the way that people take it like M&Ms. Maybe occasionally for jet lag, but don't rely on this powerful hormone. It disrupts a number of other systems.