February 8, 2023February 10, 2023 by Tim Ferriss

Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More (#654)

“At the moment when we analyze the data, and I’m sitting there with a student or I’m analyzing data, and we finally run the statistics, at that moment in time, if I’m lucky, I know something that has never been understood in the entirety of human civilization, and I cannot tell you how much of a thrill and a privilege that is. And so is science hard? It’s brutally hard, but just that alone, the hedonic rush that you get from de novo knowledge, gosh, it’s never left me, and I don’t think it ever will.”
— Dr. Matthew Walker

Matthew Walker, PhD (@sleepdiplomat), is professor of neuroscience at the University of California Berkeley and founder and director of the school’s Center for Human Sleep Science. Dr. Walker is the author of the New York Times and international bestseller Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, which was recently listed by Bill Gates as one of his top five books of the year. His TED Talk, “Sleep is Your Superpower,” has garnered more than 17 million views.

He has received numerous funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and is a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2020, Dr. Walker was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Achievements. Dr. Walker’s research examines the impact of sleep on human health and disease. He has been featured on numerous television and radio outlets including 60 Minutes, Nat Geo TV, NOVA Science, NPR, and the BBC. Dr. Walker is also scientific advisor to Oura, a sleep-tracking ring.

Dr. Walker hosts the 5-star-rated podcast The Matt Walker Podcast, which is all about sleep, the brain, and the body.

And one last thing. UC Berkeley has given the rare approval for Matt’s newly opened Sleep Center at the University to be named by an individual donor, or a named company, in perpetuity. If you are interested, please reach out to Matt and note that this opportunity is in the 7-figure range.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.

Brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, Magic Spoon delicious low-carb cereal, and LinkedIn Marketing Solutions marketing platform with 800M+ users.

The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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#654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More

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This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I’ve suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But a few years ago, I started using the Pod Cover, and it has transformed my sleep. Eight Sleep has launched their newest generation of the Pod: Pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates, automatically. With the best temperature performance to date, Pod 4 Ultra ensures you and your partner stay cool in the heat and cozy warm in the cold. Plus, it automatically tracks your sleep time, snoring, sleep stages, and HRV, all with high precision. For example, their heart rate tracking is at an incredible 99% accuracy.

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Want to hear the first time Dr. Matthew Walker was on this podcast? Have a listen to our conversation here, in which we discussed the relationship between sleep and Alzheimer’s disease, why our deep sleep declines as we age, ideal exercise for promoting deep sleep, fainting goats, the psychological value of emergency sleep medicine for insomniacs, how sleep affects food intake and weight fluctuation, perilous polypharmacy, and much more.

#650: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep — How to Improve Sleep, How Sleep Ties Into Alzheimer’s Disease and Weight Gain, and How Medications (Ambien, Trazodone, etc.), Caffeine, THC/CBD, Psychedelics, Exercise, Smart Drugs, Fasting, and More Affect Sleep

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

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SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Dr. Matthew Walker:

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn

SHOW NOTES

[05:43] Sleep and sex.
[23:45] Melatonin misgivings.
[32:47] The suprachiasmatic nucleus.
[36:08] Shrinking balls phenomenon.
[41:47] Minimizing the time it takes you to sleep.
[49:40] The bizarre basics of dreaming.
[55:56] Taking a leap into lucid dreaming.
[1:19:57] Optimizing sleep for learning.
[1:43:14] Can sleep during an illness boost memory retention?
[1:49:08] Massed versus spaced practice.
[1:53:00] Using brain stimulation technology to enhance learning.
[1:56:50] Optimizing memory replay.
[2:02:47] Sleep and time dilation.
[2:11:25] Today’s “charlatan” science that may someday be vindicated.
[2:17:44] Exercise and memory.
[2:25:37] Staying hydrated without having to urinate all night.
[2:29:13] Parting thoughts.

MORE DR. MATTHEW WALKER QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“At the moment when we analyze the data, and I’m sitting there with a student or I’m analyzing data, and we finally run the statistics, at that moment in time, if I’m lucky, I know something that has never been understood in the entirety of human civilization, and I cannot tell you how much of a thrill and a privilege that is. And so is science hard? It’s brutally hard, but just that alone, the hedonic rush that you get from de novo knowledge, gosh, it’s never left me, and I don’t think it ever will.”
— Dr. Matthew Walker

“The goal of education, in my mind, is twofold. The first is to brainwash you into thinking for yourself. The second is for you to gain long-term information.”
— Dr. Matthew Walker

“Life is to be lived. Have a drink, of course. I’m not being puritanical. But if you are, let’s say, a student or you’ve been learning new information for a new job or you’ve been learning a new skill for a new particular sport and you know when you’ve been learning and you know when you probably want to have a night out, restructure those things to implement them in the smartest way possible for optimizing outcomes.”
— Dr. Matthew Walker

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Denise LaFountaine

2 years ago

Hi Tim, I’m trying to reply to your 5-bullet Friday post this week. You mentioned you are reading the book by A. Brooks about the second half of life. I suggest you read the book by Father Richard Rohr called, Falling Upward. When I read it, it felt like redemption. I’ve done the hard work of being squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste. Now, I feel at peace and perhaps, if I may be so bold, have a sense that I may one day be an elder for my “tribe.” Let’s rejoice in the beauty of growth and experience. Let’s be proud of our new depth and wisdom. It is/was hard earned!

Dr. Shawne

2 years ago

Simply exquisite. Great conversation, great ideas to critically think about.. ty.

Hikmet Ağacı

2 years ago

Simply remarkable conversation. What an incredible life and stories. This one tops the charts. Thanks so much Tim for bringing Wade Davis into your podcast.

Becky Callahan

2 years ago

Hi Tim, you asked about tips for lucid dreaming. I was hoping to be able to email you, but I guess this works too. I have been lucid dreaming regularly since I was about six. There’s a lot I could say. Here are my top things I would lead with, we are all body, soul, and spirit, and yet only our bodies do not go with us in our dreams. I believe it is my connection to my spirit and imagination that leads to lucid dreaming. Before going to bed I imagine a place and story (mostly pick one or a few nice safe places). This leads to when I wake up my imagination is reminded I am asleep yet still can move around the dream world freely. This would be my number one tip, I believe it’s a strong imagination that practices walking between the waking and dream world. Secondly, my spirit can sense when I am in a hotel room if there is a demonic presence, this leads to me dreaming of demons. Over the years I have had to learn how to engage my spirit to fight off, overcome, or wake myself up. Your spiritual awareness and connection in the waking world may help you with lucid dreaming, even reading books about angels. Lastly, on a practical side, I sleep better with balanced hormones or in sun a few hours.
Better sleep leads to more lucid dreaming time. I would encourage anyone interested in lucid dreaming to eat healthy for balanced hormones and to stay away from drugs or alcohol. They disrupt your hormones and can keep you from getting quality sleep. Oh, lastly, I do believe lucid dreaming takes away from feeling rested if done for too long in one setting. Hope this helps!
Becky

Ted Gale

2 years ago

Dr. Walker’s comments on the effect of sleep deprivation on memory and the downsides of the all-nighter prompted thoughts about a major difference between my habits as an undergraduate and my habits in law school. In many ways, I was an all too typical college student, unorganized, undisciplined, immature, and distractible. And, yes, the faculty’s habit of loading the course evaluation to near the end of the course (in the form of a final exam), prompted procrastination, which in turn led to too many episodes of cramming, and all-nighters (or near all-nighters). I am sure the resultant sleep deprivation had a profound effect on how I did in the exams (and, more to the point, how well I retained material for the long haul0.

A few years after finishing my bachelor’s degree, I made my way to law school—a bit more mature, and a bit more focused. If anything, law school professors tend to rely on final exams even more than their colleagues who teach undergraduates. But, by then I actually kept up with the reading (good plan), and took copious notes throughout the semester. By the time exams loomed, I had a plan: For each course, I spent a day working through the syllabus, and, using my notes from class and from the readings, created a detailed outline. The process generally lasted about six to eight hours (a full day of work, basically). And then (and this is where it ties to what Walker was saying) I had a decent dinner, relaxed in the evening, and went to bed early enough to have a solid night’s sleep.

[More than once, I had an experience similar to the one Tim described with his exam in Chinese characters, finishing a final in far less time than allotted, and far ahead of anyone else in the room (and I did not even have to get sick to do it)].

Jecca

2 years ago

Tim, Thank you for your excellent podcasts with Dr. Walker.
Here are some notes from research I gathered on 12/16/2020.

Tibetan sleep yoga, bardo, lucid dreams; see Wikipedia for information about bardo, an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth.

During a lucid dream, the dreamer becomes aware they are dreaming and may gain some amount of control over the characters, narrative, and environment. The experience has been recorded since ancient times. Cultivating the dreamer’s ability to be aware that they are dreaming is central to both the ancient Indian Hindu practice of yoga nidra and the Tibetan Buddhist practice of dream yoga. The cultivation of such awareness was a common practice among early Buddhists. Dream yoga can progress to sleep yoga where one maintains lucidity during dreamless sleep.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama writes:
“In order to train in the path that would allow us to transform death, the intermediate state, and rebirth, we have to practice on three occasions: during the waking state, during the sleeping state, and during the death process.
To gain the proper experience during sleep and the waking state, I think it is crucial to become familiar, by means of imagination, with the eightfold process of dying, beginning with the waking conscious state and culminating in the clear light of death.” “It is important to realize that there are many forms of meditation. These issues are not even discussed in the lower three classes of Buddhist tantra, only within Highest Yoga Tantra. Dream yoga is a discipline all unto itself (p. 45, Sleeping Dreaming and Dying, An Exploration of Consciousness with HHDL, edited and narrated by Francisco J. Varela, 1997).

Early references to lucid dreaming are found in ancient Greek writing. Aristotle (384-322 BC) wrote: “often when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream.”

In 1968, Celia Green wrote that lucid dreams were a category of experience distinct from ordinary dreams and they are associated with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

In 1985, Stephen LaBerge at Stanford University performed a pilot study that showed that time perception while counting during a lucid dream is about the same as during waking life. LaBerge’s results were confirmed in 2004.
In 2018, a study was conducted to see if it were possible to attain the ability to lucid dream through the drug galantamine. It was given to 121 patients in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, the only one of its kind. Some participants found as much as a 42% increase in their ability to lucid dream, compared to self-reports from the past 6 months, and 10 people experienced a lucid dream for the first time. It is theorized that galantamine allows acetylcholine to build up, leading to greater recollection and awareness during dreaming.

In 2016, a meta-analytic study by David Saunders and colleagues on 34 lucid dreaming studies, taken from a period of 50 years, demonstrated that 55% of a pooled sample of 24,282 people claimed to have experienced lucid dreams at least once or more in their lifetime. For those that stated they did experience lucid dreams, approximately 23% reported to experience them on a regular basis, as often as once a month or more.

A 2015 study by Julian Mutz and Amir-Homayoun Javadi showed that people who had practiced meditation for a long time tended to have more lucid dreams. The authors claimed that “Lucid dreaming is a hybrid state of consciousness with features of both waking and dreaming” in a review they published in Neuroscience of Consciousness in 2017.

Mutz and Javadi found that during lucid dreaming, there is an increase in activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the bilateral frontopolar prefrontal cortex, the precuneus, the inferior parietal lobules, and the supramarginal gyrus. All are brain functions related to higher cognitive functions including working memory, planning, and self-consciousness. The researchers also found that during a lucid dream, “levels of self-determination” were similar to those that people experienced during states of wakefulness. They also found that lucid dreamers can only control limited aspects of their dream at once.

Erick Mortenson’s

2 years ago

Lucid dreaming – Andrew Holocek is the top current guy. He does podcasts you should invite him!

Eric Bescoby

2 years ago

This 2-part series was absolutely riveting and so rich with information and advice. I’m a big fan of Tim having been a first year reader of The 4 Hour Body, lost 45lbs, completely corrected my high cholesterol and blood pressure, and have given away 30 copies of the book and recommended it to dozens more. I’m a bit of a Coach on the boo.
I was a little surprised that Tim and Dr. Walker didn’t explore the convergence of lucid dreaming and time – “oscillation” – a time speed change in dreams or “when time slows down” – or whatever they called it. I have generally read about the concept of “time travel” or being in 2 places at one time in Carlos Casteneda wrtitings, Spalding’s “The Life and Teachings of the Master of the Far East” and “How to Change Your Mind” regarding the use of psychelics.

Shannon

1 year ago

While I try to practice healthy ways to fall asleep, sometimes taking a sleep aid is what get’s the job done (even if placebo effect). Do you or Dr. Walker have an alternative to Melatonin that you would recommend?

John Meyers

11 months ago

Thank you Tim and Matt for the excellent interview!!

I am lucid dreaming almost every night. Pretty sure it is the gabapentin. The first two nights I took 100 mg I had unbelievably detailed dreams. I am not taking it for that effect but for sleep in general. REM time per Oura ring is around 2 hrs each night.

Other meds I take for sleep that have been hugely beneficial (due to work schedules and chronotype I have had a TERRIBLE relationship with sleep in the past but am now VERY much improved- 2 hrs deep and 2 hrs REM per Oura)

1. Orexin antagonist- I prefer Dayvigo for longest duration

2. Clonidine elicits sedative and anesthetic properties by activating G-proteins in the brainstem, which results in inhibition of norepinephrine release. I take 0.1 mg immediate release for spring initiation and 0.1 mg extended release for sleep maintenance.

3. Magnesium Threonate. Tried glycinate for almost a year. First night with threonate was a totally different experience, much more effective for improving sleep.

Thanks again Tim and Matt!

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

SHOW NOTES

MORE DR. MATTHEW WALKER QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

PEOPLE MENTIONED

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