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The Science of Sleep Revealed: How To Hack Your Sleep with Dr. Daniel Gartenberg

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In this episode we discuss all things sleep. Sleep has been under attack for the last 10+ years and yet it is one of the most powerful things you can do for your performance, your health, your mental well being, and your body. We explore how to improve your sleep, how sleep works, and what you can be doing to sleep better with our guest Dr. Dan Gartenberg. 

Dr. Dan Gartenberg is a researcher and tech inventor. He holds a PhD in cognitive psychology with expertise in sleep, A.I. and preventative health. He is the creator of several apps including the Sonic Sleep app for detecting sleep stages and improving sleep quality using wearable tech. Daniel has three patents, numerous peer reviewed publications, and his technology has been featured on TED.com, the Today Show, Inside Science, and many more outlets!

  • Sleep has been under attack for the last 10+ years in our society

  • Lack of work life balance and constant phone addiction are destroying our society’s sleep 

  • Sleep impacts nearly every single chronic health issue and disease, every organ of the body

  • Sleep is the operating system for how we make sense of the world

  • There’s a problematic “badge of honor” that people wear thinking that not sleeping is good for you

  • The “synaptic homeostasis hypothesis” and why it demonstrates the vital importance of sleep to memory consolidation, personality, and much more. 

  • Sleep cleans out beta amyloid plaques in your brain and reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s

  • Daylight savings time predictably increases heart attack risks because of the 1 hour sleep reduction 

  • Neuroscience and sleep is one of the final frontiers of human exploration. 

  • What are the different phases of sleep?

  • REM sleep vs Non-REM Sleep. REM sleep is “almost magical” for your brain. 

  • In the US there are 4 stages of sleep.. but in Europe there are 5 stages of sleep… this demonstrates that our understanding of sleep is still VERY early stage.

  • “N1 Sleep” - the transition between the conscious and unconscious mind. 

  • You want more REM and you want more DEEP SLEEP and not more light sleep. 

  • Deep sleep is how you prune, REM is how you integrate. 

  • When you are in deep sleep your brain is operating on delta waves.. which are a completely different experience to waking life.

  • Is there a way to get more out of the sleep that you’re getting?

  • How many hours of sleep should you actually be getting?

  • Adults need 7-9 hours of sleep on a regular basis according to the world’s top sleep scientists. 

  • Hours in bed are not the same thing as hours asleep - you need 7.5+ hrs in bed to ensure you get a minimum of 7 hours of sleep. 

  • Sleep until you can’t sleep anymore.

  •  When should you nap? Is napping good for you?

  • Taking a power nap right at your circadian dip is often an optimal performance strategy. 

  • What is your circadian rhythm and how can it shape your sleep schedule and performance?

  • What is “chronobiology” and how it can help us be more productive and effective?

  •  The importance of sunlight in controlling your circadian rhythm.

  • How does intermittent fasting interact with your daily energy levels and circadian rhythms?

  • What are the hacks and strategies for improving your sleep quality and getting more out of your deep sleep?

  • Tip: get rid of noise pollution when you’re sleeping. 

  • Your “Homeostatic sleep need” builds up as you get tired and helps you sleep more effectively

  • “Targeted memory reactivation” in sleep science - smells during a REM sleep will cause memories to process and encode while you are dreaming. 

  • Visualizing and practicing in your dreams or practicing tasks in your dreams can help you improve waking performance

  • Science backs up the concept of lucid dreaming.

  • Homework: Find one thing to do to improve your sleep quality. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we discuss all things sleep. Sleep has been under attack for the last 10 plus years and yet, it is one of the most powerful things you can do for your performance, your health, your mental well-being and your body. We explore how to improve your sleep, how sleep works and what you can be doing to sleep better right now with our guest, Dr. Dan Gartenberg.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we exposed the lie that success makes you happy and discovered the truth about engineering happiness into your life. Can you choose to be happy? If so, what should you do and how should you change your behavior? We also confronted the reality that in today's world, we no longer have the tools to handle real or even perceived threats. We discussed how to build mental toughness and what you can do to build your own mental strength and resilience. All of that and much more with our previous guest, Neil Pasricha. If you want to be happier, listen to our previous episode. Now for our interview with Dr. Dan.

[0:02:09.5] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Dr. Dan Gartenberg. Dr. Dan is a researcher and tech inventor. He holds a PhD in cognitive psychology with an expertise in sleep, AI and preventative health. He's the creator of several apps, including the Sonic Sleep app for detecting sleep stages and improving sleep quality using wearable technology. Dr. Dan has three patents, numerous peer-group publications and his technology has been featured on the TED stage, The Today Show and many more media outlets. Dr. Dan, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:40.2] DG: Hey, thanks for having me, Matt.

[0:02:42.0] MB: Well, we're super excited to have you on the show today. Sleep is such an important topic. I'm so excited to dig into it. Tell me a little bit about the way that we sleep today and why it's not the way that we've always slept?

[0:02:58.6] DG: Yeah. Sleep has been under attack really since the past 10 years, especially with all these chirping devices poking you at all times a day, the work/life balance where now that people have e-mails, they're always expected to be responsive. It’s really created this lack of boundary between when you should be in work mode and when you should be in sleep mode, regenerating your body.

When we start looking into the science of sleep, what we find is that sleep is literally impacts almost every single chronic health disease, it impacts every organ of the body. At this time when we're taking in more information than ever, sleep is actually the operating system for how we make sense of all of that, sometimes meaningful, but often times meaningless snapchats, or tweets, or what have you. At the same time that sleep is under attack with crummy lights from your office space and the lack of work-life balance, it's actually probably more important than ever to help us navigate this barrage of information that we're being attacked by every day.

[0:04:20.6] MB: It's funny, because in our society today, some people treat it as almost a badge of honor to not sleep, or to hustle 24/7 and to constantly be checking their phone and yet, the research is pretty clear that that's pretty devastating path for your health.

[0:04:37.1] DG: Yeah. I mean, this whole badge of honor societal thing, I'm a New Yorker, so it's especially palpable here, this I sleep when I'm dead. People are like, “Oh, I got four hours of sleep last night.” It's similar to when this smug badge of honor around binging Netflix for four hours and stuff. There's really a societal change that needs to be taken place just on how we think about sleep and how we value it. It's funny when people say they sleep-deprive themselves, I think in my mind, it's almost like when people used to brag like, “Oh, I smoke X amount of cigarettes or something like that.” That was more socially acceptable 40 years ago to say something like that. I think that's what in 30 years from now, people are going to look back on our society and they'll have a similar feeling around smoking as we think about sleep.

[0:05:36.1] MB: Yeah, that's a great perspective. It'll be interesting to see how we look back in the future, 40, 50 years in the future and see the way today that we treated sleep and all the things that we didn't understand about how important it is, or did understand and didn't act on.

[0:05:53.7] DG: Yeah. I mean, especially as jobs become more cognitive. I do a lot of – some programming, which I shouldn't do, but I do a lot of heavy-lifting cognitive tasks. Sleep is almost a useful tool in accomplishing those things. There's famous anecdotes about Einstein and Edison using naps to ideate. I think a lot of people can relate to waking up from say, a power nap and being able to solve that problem, because your brain is processing how to solve problems and optimize your survival while you're sleeping.

There's a theory that got me introduced to this when I was an undergrad at University of Wisconsin, one the most famous researchers in this field is a gentleman named Giulio Tononi and he founded something called the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. It's basically this idea that deep sleep in particular functions to down-regulate all of the excitatory connections that you make throughout the day, such that they're relevant things to your survival rise to the top. It used to be like, “Oh, don't go to this part of the jungle. That's where the predators are.” Now it's like, “Oh, what did Mindy say to me at the office holiday dinner or whatever?” Something a lot more innocuous, but it's still relevant to your survival oftentimes.

Then in REM, you basically replay that pertinent information and then integrate it into your long-term memory and your working memory and your personality really, long-term memory and personality. That's one of the main functions of sleep called the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis for why sleep is so important to performance and success.

[0:07:41.9] MB: That's fascinating. Tell me a little bit more about why we sleep and how important it is.

[0:07:50.2] DG: Yes, so there's probably eight reasons why we sleep. Every organism on the planet sleeps for various reasons. Obviously for lower organisms, it’s more around energy conservation, making it so you can get predators at certain times and focus your energy, or get prey at certain times and focus your energy on that. For humans and actually all living organisms, a lot of this is cell recovery and repairing damaged cells in your body.

Something that we focus in our laboratory is in how sleep actually cleans out that beta amyloid plaques that form in your brain, which are associated with things like Alzheimer's disease. Deep sleep in particular, responsible for human growth hormone, doing the cell recovery thing and then these areas involving memory integration and whatnot. Sometimes when I try to scare people, I say stuff like, sleep is related to cardiovascular disease very strongly. If you don't go treated for something like sleep apnea, it takes five years off of your life in one study, they showed.

It also is correlated with cancer, as I mentioned, Alzheimer's disease. Really strong correlations with hypertension. Even one day of sleep deprivation can cause a spike. There's a cool science experiment that every member of society does twice a year, which is daylight savings time. It's looking at population studies. It's really interesting. What they find is when we lose an hour, the rate of heart attacks predictably increases, which again points to how sleep is really so tied to our health and well-being.

[0:09:50.0] MB: It's amazing that sleep, or lack of sleep essentially correlates with all-cause mortality essentially across nearly every negative outcome, increases in probability if you're not sleeping. Every positive outcome, or many positive outcomes increase in probability of you are.

[0:10:06.2] DG: That's right.

[0:10:07.4] MB: Tell me a little bit more about deep sleep and zooming that out slightly, more broadly the sleep phases. What is sleep made of and what are the different components of it?

[0:10:20.1] DG: This is what is so captivating to me. I'm a very curious person and explorer. I also want to help people. The neuroscience and sleep in particular is one of those last frontiers. Right up there, right? The brain is right up there with the universe in my mind. The crazy thing about sleep is we really only discovered this process around 70 years ago, when we made this distinction between REM and non-REM sleep, based on hooking people up to various EEGs. These EEG electrodes, this montage is known as in sleep as polysomnography. It's a 16-channel montage. Usually there's 12 on the scalp at various locations to get the different brain regions. EOGs to measure REM, because when you're in REM sleep, your eyes dart around while you're dreaming and actually, your body's paralyzed.

The first distinction that they made with the stages in the 40s basically was what's known as REM and non-REM. There's really clear physiological signals between those stages. Your body is paralyzed in REM, you lose thermal regulation. When I've looked at people's brainwaves in the lab and when they're in REM, it's almost a magical thing. You see a really noticeable transition on what we use to measure sleep.

Then there's non-REM. This is what points to how complicated this process is and we really still don't understand it, the fact that in the United States, there are four stages of sleep. In Europe, there are five stages of sleep. What this points to is the fact that humans a lot of times like to create these arbitrary categories. It gives you a sense of control. When you look at some of these physiological phenomena, it's not so easy to categorize them. The way that we even define sleep in and of itself is probably going to be archaic in the next – as soon as 10 years, I think.

Some researchers even claim that there are 19 stages of sleep. A lot of this has to do with distinctions in light sleep, or N1, that transition phase between consciousness and the unconscious mind, which is probably much more complicated than we give it credit for and another area that were fascinated in our laboratory. It's very complicated. A simple way of thinking about what you want to get out of your sleep is you want more REM and you want more deep sleep at the expense of light sleep, and you want to make sure that you're sleeping enough.

[0:13:21.1] MB: No, that's super helpful. I want to dig into how we can ultimately capture both more REM and more deep sleep. Before we do, tell me a little bit more about the distinction between each of those and which works for things like memory consolidation and things like that, which is more important for cell regeneration, etc., and what's happening in each of those phases.

[0:13:42.6] DG: Yeah. The thing about REM and deep sleep is that they're very tied together. It's hard to inhibit one without inhibiting the other. I think about it like deep sleep is how we prune and then REM is how we integrate. When you're in REM, your consciousness is very similar to your waking consciousness. It's why we remember our dreams from that perspective of the eye. You have your sense of self when you're in REM.

When you're in deep sleep, your brain is oscillating at these delta waves, which are very different to waking life. You basically don't have this sense of self really when you're in deep sleep. Your whole brain oscillates and these delta wave bursts, which is point 0.80 to 1 Hertz basically. As you get older, what happens is you lose that percentage of time spent in deep sleep usually at the expense of light sleep.

What a lot of researchers now are interested in is since we lose this as we get older, is there a way and they think it's related to aging, memory, all these really things that help you keep you young, is there a way, especially for older people to enhance your deep sleep brainwaves? I've been in this field for a while. I've been making sleep apps for a long time. I gave up for a while when I saw how inaccurate some of the sensors were when I was doing algorithm development work for a Fortune 500 company in grad school.

When the Apple watch came out, what we saw was finally we can get the raw data from the watch augmented with heart rate and actually detect people's sleep stages in real time, for the purpose of delivering an intervention that actually makes their sleep more regenerative. That's the golden goose thing that I'm going to dedicate my life to trying to figure out. Is there a way to get more out of the sleep that you're already getting?

I mean, first and foremost, get enough sleep. After that, how do you get more out of the sleep that you're getting? We study this in a very scientific way in our laboratory, but there's lots of hacks that I can throw at you in order to get you to have a more regenerative amount of sleep through increasing your deep sleep brainwaves and augmenting your REM as well. I'd be happy to dive into that with you.

[0:16:20.9] MB: Yeah, absolutely. No, I want to get into all of the hacks for improving deep sleep, for augmenting REM sleep, for making it more effective. Before we do that, the thing that fascinates me is and I've anecdotally heard this. I'm sure many people have, this idea that your sleep actually gets worse as you get older and it makes sense that this deep sleep phase is the thing that's decreasing.

I'm curious for somebody who's listening, we've probably heard these recommendations, but it always bears repeating, how much sleep should you actually be getting and what are the consequences of saying, “Oh, I can operate just fine on four hours of sleep, or six hours of sleep, or whatever that number is.” Tell me a little bit about that.

[0:17:02.0] DG: Yeah, great. Thanks for bringing that there, because that's really one of the core questions that needs to be understood. Oftentimes, the media is really bad at expressing nuance. There's all these articles like, get eight hours of sleep. I even had an article that I was quoted in eight and a half is the new eight. The thing about something like sleep is it's very individualistic. It's hard to give these generic pieces of advice that are good clickbait. It's not a great headline. Some people need seven hours, other people need eight.

The society of behavioral sleep medicine gave a consensus report amongst all the best sleep researchers in the field that adults need seven to nine hours of sleep on a regular basis. That's a nice lower limit. Something to keep in mind is when they say that they also need seven hours of sleep, not seven hours in bed. Actually, if you spend more than 95% - if you spend a 100% of the time in bed asleep, it actually probably means you're sleep-depriving yourself. A healthy amount would be 90% to 95%. Basically, what that means is adults should be spending at least seven and a half hours in bed.

Now, there's lots of things that can impact how much sleep you need. Not only does it differ between individuals, but it also differs intra-individually. Meaning, last week started up a more intense workout routine and I needed more sleep that next night. Bodybuilders do this all the time. They take these long naps in a day to build up their human growth hormone, so their body can recover and create more muscle.

Also, other situations like if you're sick, if you feel yourself getting sick, you want to get more sleep that day. Not only is it that I can't tell you what you need generally, I can't even tell you what you need exactly. It's going to vary from day-to-day too. There are certain ways that you could figure out your natural sleep need. One of them that my professor mentioned to me, Orfeu Buxton at Penn State; I work with him closely in our research, is basically try to book a relaxing vacation. Go to bed at the same time every day. Of vacation, you don't have a lot of external things pulling you out. How much you sleep without those external pressures is probably how much sleep you need.

One way we like to think about it is sleep to affect. Meaning, you should sleep until you basically can't sleep anymore. There's some nuance to that, but if you're depressed or if you have some thyroid issues, that might not be the case. For generally healthy people, you should just sleep until you can't sleep anymore and you shouldn't feel tired during the day.

[0:20:10.9] MB: Do you remember when you started your small business? It was no small feat. It took a lot of late nights, early mornings and the occasional all-nighter. The bottom line is that you've been insanely busy ever since. Why not make things a little easier? Well, our friends at FreshBooks have the solution.

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[0:21:40.4] MB: Is there a such thing as oversleeping?

[0:21:43.1] DG: I mean, you can oversleep for sure. I'm not a medical doctor by the way, but if you're depressed for something, you might not want to sleep too much. Actually, there's some evidence that if they have some – if you do extreme sleep deprivation, it can actually bounce you out of depression. I'm not recommending doing that. Talk to your doctor.

There is some links to mood and depression and you can actually shift yourself into a manic state in a certain sleep-deprived state. I mean, this is another topic about our society has these very judgmental things about depression and mania. It's also a naturally occurring thing to be able to shift into a manic state when your environment pushes you to do so. If you're being chased by a predator, you better get into a manic state for that.

Sometimes when I'm watching a product or whatnot, I'll get in a manic state a little bit and I’ll actually get less sleep when I'm in that situation. I have a good metacognition on when I'm in a state like that, because I don't have a chemical thing. It's caused by external environmental pressures, basically pushing me into that mindset. A lot of times what I'll do in response and is – I'll have a recovery sleep after that high-performance situation. This is just some personal experiences that I've had, but I think a lot of people can relate.

[0:23:13.2] MB: Is there such a thing as either cashing up on sleep? Or I've heard some people use the concept of a sleep bank, where you sleep a bunch and then don't sleep as much for a couple nights. Does that actually work, or do you need a certain amount every single night to really reap the benefits?

[0:23:29.7] DG: I mean, it works to some degree, but you can't fully catch up. If I were to say what the ideal situation is is get a healthy amount every night. Now obviously, that's not necessarily practical. In the cases where you're not getting enough one night, it's better to catch up the next day than to continue getting not enough. Does that make sense?

[0:23:55.7] MB: Absolutely. Yeah. It's possible, but it's not an ideal scenario.

[0:24:00.6] DG: You can make up some of the sleep debt, but you can't make up all of it. There is actually a strategy for taking – in sleep, there's actually different types of naps. There's something called an appetitive nap that you can do in preparation for your sleep deprivation. The timing of naps, especially for shift work, jetlag is something that's really important to maybe proactively counteracting a situation where you know you'll be sleep-depriving yourself.

[0:24:31.9] MB: I know we're jumping around a little bit, but you're bringing up some topics that I think are really interesting. I want to dig into napping briefly. This is another one that there's a lot of confusion, there's a lot of gray areas. I've heard some people say that naps are amazing, they're super beneficial for you. I've heard other research that napping actually reduces the quality of your sleep, or your ability to fall asleep. If you're super tired, or if you're not, when is napping appropriate? When is napping a beneficial strategy, or should you be napping at all?

[0:25:00.8] DG: Yeah. This is one of those other nuances that it's really hard to give generic feedback on. Really, that's what we're trying to do with sonic sleep is understand uniquely what's going on with the individual, so we can give this relevant feedback. Napping is a perfect example, where you can't give a generic piece of advice to someone. If someone has a problem falling asleep and staying asleep, they have sleep problems, it's recommended that they do not take a nap, because what you want to do if you have problems falling asleep and stay asleep and staying asleep is you want to regulize your sleep and consolidate your sleep.

What naps can do for those people is it makes it – so it's even more difficult to consolidate their sleep, because it throws off their circadian rhythm. You actually want to build homeostatic sleep pressure at specific times if you're having problems falling asleep and staying asleep. One way to doing that is to not take naps and actually to push your bedtime back a little bit in certain situations.

Now if you're someone like me who doesn't really have a sleep problem, I mean, sometimes it's perfectly – almost everyone periodically throughout the year from a stressful situation has problems falling asleep. I don't have chronic problem. I don't have a chronic problem. For someone like me, taking a 20 minute power nap right at your circadian dip is probably the optimum performance. I find that my optimum performance is to probably get seven and a half hours sleep and then do a 20-minute power nap right at my circadian dip.

Now I'm a night person, so that's for me around 3:00, 3:30 in the afternoon, I'll do rest my – even resting your eyes for that period would naturally have this dip in alertness after lunch. After I do that, I come back, I'm able to reprocess what I was doing earlier in the day almost from a new slate, like I just woke up from processing all this information. I’m able to attack the day with more vigor when I do those sorts of power naps.

[0:27:23.1] MB: Very interesting. That's a great distinction between optimal performance and trying to reconcile, or solve some sleep problem and when napping may or may not be appropriate. The other topic that you just touched on that I want to understand a little bit better is the circadian rhythm. You talked about having a power nap right at your circadian dip. What is that and how does that fit into the broader structure of a circadian rhythm and how we can think about shaping our days and our sleep schedules and so forth around that?

[0:27:52.7] MB: Yeah. The story I like to tell around the circadian rhythm is the fact that we evolved from bacteria in the ocean that could differentiate sunlight from darkness. That's what eventually formed the human eye. Every organism on the planet responds to circadian rhythms, it’s a 24-hour cycle for humans, actually a little bit less than that, but close to a 24-hour cycle. 

Basically, what this is is they've done these crazy studies where they'll bring someone in a completely dark environment for X amount of time and days or months even, and you'll fall into a natural cycle of when you're awake and when you're asleep and when you have alertness and when you don't. They actually have these reaction-time tests called psychomotor vigilance task, which we've also implemented and explored in some of our software, where it's basically sensitive to how much alertness you have throughout the day.

A typical circadian rhythm for a human, usually you'll have a peak alertness about two hours after you wake up, you'll have a decline in alertness about two hours after lunch, you'll start getting more alert as you approach dinner. After you eat dinner and some of this correspondents to the glucose spikes after meals. When you're doing intermittent fasting stuff, which I actually do, there's some stuff to be considered of with all of these. Then you gradually get more tired after dinner and you get a peak tiredness at around 3:00 in the morning when you're going to wake up for a flight or something like this.

Knowing where you are in this and we actually have genes that can tell us if we're a morning person or an evening person and there's a field of sleep science called chronobiology, which is a type of understanding of how immediate early genes, like genes that express themselves based on your environment can get activated, to actually be able to shift you to be more of an evening person, or more of a night person.

We have a genetic predisposition to be one of these. It probably has to do with something like the fact that we were – in tribal clusters of a 100 people for a long time, it makes sense for someone to always be awake. There's also this shift that happens as you get older, you shift to be more of a morning lark as they say. I know I'm a night owl. You can actually shift these.

I'm a crazy mad scientist, so I've done some stuff where I've shifted mine based on this German word in sleep science. I get nerdy on some of this stuff. Sorry if I get a little too nerdy, but there's this German word called zeitnehmer, which means timekeeper in German. What that means is there are these environmental cues that you can exploit to entrench your circadian rhythm, actually and make your sleep deeper and shift your rhythm to either be more of a morning person, or a night owl.

The biggest zeitnehmer is actually sunlight and that's why these house – these office and hospital environments that are void of sunlight are so problematic. Other things are timing of meals, timing of exercise, even things like engaging in social interactions late at night where you're exciting yourself at a time when your body usually isn't excited. You can shift your circadian rhythm. By entrenching this rhythm, you want a healthy rhythm. As you get older, it flattens, which is bad. You want to peak alertness and you want a period of decline and that's something that would help people achieve is with timing of meals, getting sunlight and we integrate with smart lights.

I have this whole system in my home that's triggered with Alexa, where I say, “Hey, I'm going to sleep,” and there's this whole chain of events with sounds that relax me and the whole – all the lights turn red. You actually want red light as you get closer to nighttime. These are just some of the hacks that you can use to entrench the circadian rhythm and achieve more alertness and success the next day.

[0:32:12.8] MB: Really quickly, tell me how intermittent fasting interacts one way or another with the circadian rhythm and energy peaks and valleys throughout the day.

[0:32:22.8] DG: Yeah. What happens a lot of times, and so we have clients where I try to troubleshoot this with them. For example, if you're having issues with waking up too early, there's actually something called – there's evening insomnia and morning insomnia. Sometimes, the reason for that is some people fast at night and some people fast in the day. You have two options, right?

For the people that eat right when they wake up, sometimes when they activate that rhythm too early by eating or doing exercise early in the morning, it also confuses their body and it tells their body that they should be awake then, so then they start having problems where they're waking up too early and not being able to fall asleep. The same thing can be said for the other direction.

Another thing to be conscientious of is you don't want to go to bed too hungry, because it's going to negatively impact your sleep quality and stuff. A lot of this is figuring out if you're intermittent fasting and I'm a big proponent, I intermittent fast every day. I'm a big proponent of it. Just be conscientious of where you're lining up here and making sure that it's not negatively impacting your sleep quality.

[0:33:42.4] MB: Very interesting. All right, I want to come back to some of the ways that we can improve our deep sleep, some of the hacks and strategies for getting better deep sleep, for maximizing the deep sleep that we already have and for augmenting and improving our REM sleep as well.

[0:33:58.2] DG: Yeah. That's really the area of focus that I've dedicated my life to, which is this idea that basically, the brain is a set of circuits and associations, okay? What these researchers found in 2013 that reinvigorated my effort to build this technology was that you could actually play a sound at a certain pulse rate that emulates your deep sleep brain waves and it entrenches that neural state. 

They used to do this – there's pretty convincing evidence so you can do this with transcranial direct current stimulation. It's something similar to a Daniel Chao’s thing with halo neuroscience. What they also have shown is that you don't have to pulse electricity, which is a little bit invasive. You can actually get similar effects with sounds that pulse at a similar frequency as the delta wave.

What we did in our laboratory at Penn State is we brought people into a lab, hooked him up to polysomnography for four days, had someone, polysomnography technologists stay up all night and systematically play these sounds to people. What we were able to show is that we could actually increase your delta waves, increase the amount of time that you spend in deep sleep.

What we're trying to do now is map that on to being able to have improved memory performance the next day and actually addressing conversion to Alzheimer's disease by enhancing people's deep sleep, since it's so associated with cleaning out these maladaptive plaques that form in your brain throughout the day. Sleep is how we clean this stuff out and deep sleep in particular. That's how we're attacking getting more deep sleep. There's other low-hanging fruit things that we do with sonic.

Basically, a really easy way to improve your sleep quality is to block out noise pollution, especially in New York. This is something where you're not aware of how much sounds in your environment can adversely impact your sleep quality. I became very aware of this when I looked at people's brains in the lab and literally, I would see the air-conditioning turning on in the laboratory and you get these little brain arousals. People are not conscious of what's happening when they're asleep. Something emblematic of this is if you have sleep apnea, which is a disease where you won't be able to breathe throughout the night, you can have as many as a 100 arousals an hour and have no conscious awareness of this.

This is just pointing to how unconscious we are when we're in this sleep state to things like noise pollution and snoring, which can negatively impact sleep. A simple hack there, which many people have keyed into probably already, it's having like an air-conditioning, fan sound. We have this adaptive pink noise cushion that changes based on what your iPhone is sensing in your environment that's designed specifically to block out these noise pollution sounds.

Other just really quick hacks for your audience to try to understand how to get more deep sleep is actually messing with temperature with these ice baths, or saunas, or things, building up your homeostatic sleep need with exercise throughout the day is something. This is a recommendation I really like to give, but there's some evidence that having an orgasm actually improves your sleep quality. Those are little hacks to try to get more deep sleep. I can get into REM if we have time.

[0:37:50.5] MB: Yeah, I want to dig into the REM strategies as well. Before we do, really quickly I just want to make sure I understand this concept. You mentioned the idea of your homeostatic sleep need and how exercise as an example can build that up. Is that essentially the notion that the more activity, the more certain things you do throughout the day, you build up almost a level of tiredness and then you have better sleep as a result of that?

[0:38:15.6] DG: That's exactly right.

[0:38:17.0] MB: Okay, got it. No, that's really interesting. Yeah, let's dig into REM sleep a little bit. Tell me about some of the ways to improve or augment REM sleep as well.

[0:38:26.9] DG: Yes. This is experimental technology that still needs to be vetted out. In sleep science, there's something called targeted memory reactivation. Basically, what they found is that if you're doing some cognitive task while you're say, getting exposed to a certain smell, like the smell of roses and then you replay that smell when someone is in a REM state through associative priming, Pavlovian response, it actually primes that memory from the day while you're dreaming and it helps you process and encode that information more, such that you perform better the next day.

A lot of this, you can think about – Another way that I think about is how athletes visualize what they're good at and doing it during the night time, actually helps you perform the next day. That finding is a very strong finding. The act of visualizing doing something actually makes you better at doing it. The idea here is that you could prime the ability to visualize tasks that you want to be optimal at by priming yourself through various cues at certain times of your sleep. 

Since we understand the science of how to play sounds, such that your brain responds to it, but it doesn't wake you up, then we can actually do things where people – I do this thing where I focus on my 10-year vision, while I'm listening to a specific sound. Then sonic replays that sound when I'm most likely to be in a REM sleep, because I'm trying to actualize this 10-year vision that I had for myself.

[0:40:20.4] MB: Do you have any memories or experiences of dreams that you've had that the sounds actually created these vivid, or almost lucid dream experiences as a result of that?

[0:40:31.8] DG: Yeah. I mean, I'm still exploring this, honestly. A lot of this is subconscious, so it's a little bit hard to tell if it's working in all honesty. I generally through this practice of gratitude is another thing that I focused on a lot, and visualizing my reality. I am finding that the reality I'm visualizing and surrendering a little bit is coming to fruition. It's more of a general sense of things. I can't cite a specific lucid dream for you right now, unfortunately.

[0:41:09.1] MB: Have you done any research, or dug into it all of the concept of lucid dreaming, or how lucid dreaming works?

[0:41:15.3] DG: I have. This is partly in my college days. What got me so excited about this was this really fun movie Waking Life. Have you ever seen that?

[0:41:26.0] MB: Oh, yeah. That's one of my favorites.

[0:41:28.8] DG: Yeah. Richard Linklater, a brilliant guy. About lucid dreaming and how you can prime in. That really got me interested in this whole thing. There is science that backs it up. Honestly, I've tried to do it a little bit. I'm just starting to tackle it a little bit more, but I'm not great at it right now. People that are good at it, since the only thing you can move when you're in dream state, when you're in REM – and by the way, you dream a little bit in light sleep too. 

When you're in REM, you're having these intense dreams and they train these lucid dreamers to move their eyes in certain patterns when they're having a lucid dream, which pretty much unequivocally shows that people that are good at lucid dreaming can control their dreams. They're literally able to control their eye movements while they're in a dream state, which is some captivating science.

[0:42:21.4] MB: It's so fascinating. Yeah, that's probably a topic for a whole different interview, but it's something that's personally really interesting to me and I've always wanted to dig into a little bit more as well.

[0:42:29.5] DG: Me too. There's going to be some tools in store for you soon, I think.

[0:42:34.3] MB: Very interesting. Well, I'm curious. We've talked about a lot of different strategies, the importance of sleep, some great tools and tips. For listeners who want to concretely implement this, who want to improve their sleep or take action on something that we've talked about today, what would one action item be, or a piece of homework that you would give them to start taking action towards having better sleep?

[0:42:56.6] DG: This is the homework that I like to start people out with; think about your life. There is one thing unique to you that you can do that's going to either help you get more sleep, or improve the timing of your sleep, such that you can improve your sleep quality, whether it's maybe going to bed a little bit earlier, maybe letting yourself sleep in a little bit more on a day where you can. It's going to be different for everybody. Maybe it's talking to your boss about flexible work times, which is something that we're working with some corporate wellness clients to do stuff like this. It's unique to you. Everyone's at a different place, and so just think about what it might be for you and try to implement that thing.

[0:43:43.4] MB: You talked about work schedules and how this plays into it. That made me think of a putting a bow on this in some way, or really encapsulating an important point that we talked about at the beginning of the conversation as well, is this idea that in many ways, especially in America, especially in Western societies, this idea of sleep and getting a lot of sleep and being somebody who sleeps a full eight to nine hours a night or seven to nine hours a night is almost derided or looked down on, or thought of as being lazy, but the reality is that in many ways from a productivity standpoint, from an effectiveness standpoint, it's often much better to be someone who's sleeping enough and sleeping effectively than it is to be somebody who's pulling all-nighters and sleeping four hours a night.

[0:44:26.1] DG: Totally. As an entrepreneur, I would much rather someone that's on my team who has fully slept than someone who is sleep-deprived. You act erratically when you're sleep-deprived. Personally, I'm not a nice person. No one wants to work with that cranky sleep-deprived person. 

Frankly, we’re I think living in a society that has this global pathology when it's coming to not sleeping enough. We're having this global sickness where you're not as empathetic to other people when you're sleep-deprived. For me, I see sleep as a pathway frankly, just for making us a little nicer to each other.

[0:45:10.4] MB: Dr. Dan, for listeners who want to find out more about you, your work and all of the fascinating research and tools that you've created for improving sleep, where can people find you and these resources online?

[0:45:22.5] DG: Yeah, you can check out Sonic Sleep Coach. We have Android and Apple integration. I think we have probably the most accurate Apple watch algorithm for measuring sleep. There's a bunch of enhancement tools and meditations and deep sleep stimulation in that technology.

[0:45:39.9] MB: Well Dr. Dan, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this wisdom, some really insightful takeaways about how sleep works and how we can improve our own sleep.

[0:45:49.8] DG: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Great questions.

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