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does everyone really need eight hours of sleep what is enough sleep eight hours eight point two hours rich people don't sleep eight hours i get eight hours of sleep five or six five hours if you go without sleep you die two months ago my sleep sucked i was spending a ton of time in bed nine hours but because i woke up seven times here my actual sleep was really just under seven hours i was pretty frustrated that i needed so much sleep just to feel normal you might think i'm this really productive guy with the perfect diet that's not always true especially if i don't sleep well the worse i sleep the more junk i eat the less productive and less patient i am i needed to fix my sleep fast forward to the other day i only spent 7 hours and 40 minutes in bed
but because i only woke up three times my actual sleep was just as long as before just shy of seven hours and i felt great the story starts three years ago i read matthew walker's book why we sleep which documents all the terrible things that happen to you when you don't get enough sleep men who sleep five hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more there's loads of science showing that if you don't sleep long enough you're fatter sicker weaker stupider and more lonely sleep loss will trigger viral loneliness because when sleep deprived people become measurably more anti-social are you going to study saying that you're uglier when lacking sleep since
learning all this my sleep was driving me nuts let's see paul sleep the book mainly recommended to get eight hours in bed but i already knew that sleeping longer was good i needed to know how to sleep better or just sleep faster let's take a look at the conditions our ancestors slept in so we can get some clues on what natural efficient sleep looks like we'll also get into some practical tips you can use to make your sleep better rather than just longer mother nature throughout the course of evolution has never had to face the challenge of this thing called sleep deprivation having a hard time believing that we of course can't look at ancient humans but we can look at populations who have had a
somewhat similar lifestyle the sapanawa are a hunter-gatherer tribe from the amazon rainforest who were completely isolated for a very long time living a more natural lifestyle here's how one sapanowan described their sleep as early humans in almost any region would have had to face predators and the elements they had to have had their share of sleepless nights linguist daniel everett lived with the pitaha tribe of the amazon entitled his book on them don't sleep there are snakes as the tribe used that phrase the same way we would say good night even the idea that only modernized humans would voluntarily sacrifice sleep so they could go clubbing watch netflix or get work done is questionable um often deliberately restrict their sleep
to go hunting losing about two hours and 20 minutes on these nights and then they just catch up on their sleep later which is interesting because walker says that you can't fully make up for lost sleep by sleeping longer the next day we can't catch up on sleep sleep is not like the bank you can't accumulate a debt and then hope to pay it off at a later point in time this one paper even found that you can actually bank extra sleep in advance to reduce the negative effects of under sleeping the next day in fact that semane have pretty wonky sleep schedules all these purple dots are the various times the men went to sleep anywhere from 9 p.m to 2 a.m and they woke up anywhere from 4 a.m to 7 00 am when you under sleep things just sort of implode
so quickly both within the brain and the body yet that somani are doing pretty good they have what researchers are calling uniquely healthy brains and apparently the world's healthiest hearts they have the least amount of plaque ever documented amongst any population seen in the world now on average it's not like they are barely sleeping they average about 7 hours and 41 minutes in bed a night not too far off of matthew walker's 8 hours in bed recommendation don't get me wrong matthew walker's book is great it taught millions of people just how important sleep indeed is however i suspect he got some people a bit too anxious about it the shorter your sleep the shorter your life so that was terrifying
these groups sleep five six seven hours none of them average over eight hours of sleep the study reported today in the journal current biology says we in the industrialized world sleep as much as our ancestors did people that tell me that i should get eight hours of sleep there's no evidence that eight is better than six ending your sleep after a 90-minute cycle say at the end of six hours in many cases is better for you than sleeping an additional hour seven hours and waking up in the middle of an alternating cycle i certainly do better on six hours than i do on seven but let's take a look at why this eight hours recommendation is confusing we all take a bit of time to fall asleep we toss and turn and we get up to pee
during the night my sleep tracking device records all these moments i woke up without realizing it and although both these nights i was in bed eight hours they were very different my actual sleep time was only 6 hours and 31 minutes here but it was 7 hours and 17 minutes here these groups from africa and bolivia jerry siegel mentioned were in bed around seven to eight and a half hours at most but their actual sleep was only a bit more than five and a half to seven hours of sleep a couple weeks ago my friend sent me an article by researcher alexa guze and is quite critical of walker's book guzzi's article had a very puzzling piece of data this is self-reported sleep duration from 35 studies comparing hours slept
with people's overall chance of dying as you can see here for some reason seven hours of sleep is better than eight and nine hours of sleep is somehow worse than five so how could five hours of sleep be just as good as eight i spoke with sleep researcher dr gregory potter to try and see the big picture here all 18 to 64 year old adults who get 79 hours of sleep per night as per the national sleep foundation guidelines is probably misguided so maybe it's not that five hours of sleep is good but that these people are either sleeping really efficiently or are so healthy that they can just get away with it and is it that sleeping nine hours is somehow bad for us or were these people sleeping so long because they were
unhealthy in the first place and had poor quality sleep if you look at those guidelines then they don't actually say that all of those people should get 79 hours per night the recommendations say that some people will need as little as 6 hours per night and other people might need as much as 10 hours per night it's very clear right now that there is a global sleep loss epidemic on the other hand there is actually this data from the uk and the us showing that people are trending towards sleeping a little bit more nowadays this sounds great but we should look at why people are sleeping more it's absolutely incorrect to think that the more you sleep the healthier you're going to be you've probably noticed that if you're
sick or unhealthy you're more tired and sleep longer loads of infectious diseases affect sleep quality and efficiency the cleveland clinic says that over sleeping may be a sign of depression people with heart renal or endocrine diseases also typically experience poor sleep not only that but people who are overweight or gaining weight tend to sleep longer and people losing weight sleep less so unless you're an athlete or a teenager sleeping 10 hours a night doesn't necessarily make you a heroic sleep overachiever maybe you're gaining weight or something could be going on with your health so the reason i brought up our paleo ancestors is because i've been feeling much better ever since i started trying to mimic their sleep by
the way you young kids or teenagers need even more sleep than adults eight to 11 hours so get back to bed unless you want to be shorter fatter and stupider so the first key to sleeping better is timing according to the handbook of sleep research all the peoples living without electricity fall asleep before or right around 10 pm and between 10 pm and 2 am is known as the golden time the most rejuvenating hours of sleep thanks to a big secretion in melatonin and growth hormone personally i feel way better going to bed at 10 and waking up at 6 then i do going to bed at midnight and waking up at 8. but how the hell do you fall asleep at 10 pm that's where the morning sun comes in the sun is a massive circadian anchor if
you want to go to sleep at 10 pm get yourself outside between 6 am and 8 am even if it's cloudy the sun is powerful enough to shift your circadian rhythm back that i've actually put on sunglasses at night in order to avoid getting that bright light exposure give yourself an hour at least before you're going to bed and keep those screens off it's a serious problem for everyone i've seen you check your phone after dark and you did it by sort of pointing your phone away from you right i check it so fast and switch it off so fast this is good advice and there's solid logic behind blue light blockers but to be honest i've been watching tv series right before bed lately and it doesn't seem to affect my sleep that may
be because i get myself outside first thing in the morning it's that contrast between your daytime light exposure and your nighttime light exposure that's most important in setting your body's block and also ensuring that you get high quality sleep at night so this is my room where i stare at screens all day if i take a look at this meter is rating the brightness of this room at about 300 350 lux my phone just a few inches away from the meter gets up to about 5 lux now if i go and step outside you can see that it's about 630 times 100 lux meaning that's 63 000 lux which is almost 200 times the lux of my room going back to sleep researcher dr potter he explains that the eye influences your
circadian rhythm by detecting relative light levels so the effect of the super bright sun overpowers the relatively weaker effects of watching netflix on a puny screen at night while there's been lots of research in recent times looking at the effects of light emitted by devices you can shift your body's calculator but these experiments typically have people stay in very dimly lit rooms during the day time and they then give them the devices for four hours or longer it's no surprise that you're going to see a delay in the body's clock getting plenty of sun is going to be good for you for many reasons but if you can't do that try exposing yourself to a bright light therapy device for a couple hours during the day
evening hours and night time hours it takes very little light in order to wake up your brain and body and to disrupt your circadian clock and disrupt your sleep obviously not looking at screens at night and keeping your room dim kinda like this is ideal but getting plenty of light during the day could be just as if not more important the reason these tribes and the research i mentioned went to bed a couple hours after sundown wasn't entirely because of the dark there's no question that light effects sleep but light may have been connected to sleep largely because of its connection to temperature the tribes also tended to sleep about an hour longer in the winter one researcher took volunteers camping
in the winter and summer and found that they slept two and a half hours longer in the winter personally i sleep much better when i get the room as cold as i can i slept in really hot rooms and i wanted to kill myself according to the sleep foundation 18.3 degrees celsius is the best temperature for sleep a warm bath can also help you fall asleep faster as it forces the body to rapidly cool itself down afterwards everybody likes sushi but what about other japanese foods like skewered chicken skin or this korean pig feet dish i don't like pork skin but i'll try it you don't like to play then you're probably short on glycine a health promoting amino acid found in the collagen rich but icky bits of the animal the chewy skin the tough
connective tissue and crunchy cartilage glycine is anti-inflammatory it boosts immunity and it helps relax muscles and our paleolithic ancestors probably got much more glycine than us modern humans as they wouldn't have shied away from eating all those icky parts of the animals they hunted curtis is a very picky eater he only likes chicken nuggets i really do like chicken nuggets they're good glycine seems to do a lot for sleep too it relaxes the blood vessels lowering your temperature and making it easier to fall asleep this study from 2007 found that insomniacs who took 3 grams of glycine before bed fell asleep faster slept deeper and woke up feeling better interestingly they actually slept less
presumably because their sleep became more efficient most people get about 4.5 to 6 grams of glycine per day however this french research group theorized that a 70 kilogram person would benefit from as much as 10 to 13 grams per day this 2012 study found that after restricting ordinary people's sleep by 25 percent supplementing beforehand with 3 grams of glycine helped preserve their mental function and reaction times the next day and they felt less tired speaking of compounds that seem to buffer sleep deprivation another is creatine greg potter mentioned that it seems to reduce your need for sleep if you know that there's a period coming up in which you're not going to get enough sleep these findings suggest that
taking a relatively high dose of creatine in the days preceding that period will help you perform better during that inevitable sleep loss our hunter-gatherer ancestors also consumed about 600 milligrams of magnesium per day about twice as much as we do now magnesium does lots for sleep if you are deficient and about half of americans are deficient it helps you relax and it allows you to create more of the sleep hormone melatonin this 2021 study showed that older adults fell asleep 17 minutes faster after taking magnesium and slept 60 minutes longer magnesium 3-8 by glycinate and citrate seem to be the most effective forms tart cherry juice is another sleep aid because it contains the plant form of melatonin phytomelatonin
i've basically regressed back into childhood now because i refuse to sleep without my favorite blankie there's something about a weighted blanket that makes laying in bed so much more comfy weighted blankets apply a consistent pressure across the body and research has found that gentle pressure on the skin switches the body from running on the alert sympathetic system to the relaxed parasympathetic system that's probably why we enjoy hugs massages or the feeling of someone cuddling us in bed in eight studies on weighted blankets four found that they reduced anxiety and two found that they improved sleep now honestly one of the first steps towards improving my sleep was probably
moving out of my moldy old apartment this paper found that indoor mold correlated with increased sleep problems like insomnia snoring and daytime drowsiness another study of nearly 5 000 adults found that people who reported mold odors at home had more sleep disturbances so sleep is hugely important but there's a difference between choosing to restrict your sleep and naturally waking up after only six and a half hours feeling great by the way healthy people do indeed experience health benefits from voluntarily sleeping more than usual extra sleep seems to improve people's metabolic health increases their testosterone makes them less hungry and makes them more focused athletes were even found to sprint faster and react faster with extra sleep
but don't assume you can just sleep off an unhealthy lifestyle so if you're a healthy adult waking up without an alarm clock and feeling great maybe you don't need to lose sleep over that magic 8 hour number so a while back me sleeping longer and longer had me realize that i was putting on some weight that's where the sponsor this video myfitnesspal comes in sometimes a quick and satisfying tool to track our exercise weight water intake and especially food intake is all we need to get to a healthier weight the habit of popping open my fitness pals quick tools and logging whatever i ate had me realize that the extra handful of keto cookies here and there was putting me way over my calorie budget
you can even use your phone's camera to quickly log foods by scanning the barcode myfitnesspal recognizes over 14 million different foods so you can quickly understand the nutritional value of the foods you buy i was pretty impressed that it even recognizes most of the barcodes of these japan specific foods with the premium membership you can customize the homescreen dashboard and you can get closer to your goals with customizable tools and expert guidance from registered dietitians to help you improve your personal habits so click on the link below to get one month of myfitnesspal premium for free go to myfitnesspal.app dot link to get that first month of premium for free
