Joe Rogan - ADHD & Sleep

Are there anything, is there anything you can do in terms of how you eat or supplements you can take that could potentially at least somewhat mitigate the effects of having no sleep? We haven't found any good countermeasures. Have you tried diet pills? So people have tried things like ephedrine. They've... Amphetamines. Amphetamines. You know, caffeine has been used strategically by the military for years, and caffeine can help you get over the basic reduction in your alertness, so basic response times. You can dose with caffeine and still maintain some degree of a fast response under conditions of sleep deprivation. What about pro-vigil or new vigil? Have you studied that at all? Yeah, so modafinil is sort of the underlying chemical there, and debated who actually came up with it, may have been the French military who actually ended up being the generators of that. That seems to work through a pathway, at least right now as we understand it, for a chemical called dopamine. And dopamine is principally known as a pleasure drug. It's the chemical that a lot of drugs of abuse will target to sort of ramp up. But it also is a basic alertness drug that when you get an increase in dopamine, you tend to actually get an increase in your alertness and your wakefulness. Don't you get an increase in happiness as well? You can too, although modafinil tends to come with the alertness component of that equation and less so with the euphoria. That's why it has a lower prevalence of sort of addiction and abuse. Boy, I know a lot of people who, I wouldn't say they abuse it, but they say they have to use it. Like all the doctor says, doctor says I got to use it. I'm always suspicious because they seem pretty normal other than the fact that they're exhausted if they don't take this, what's essentially a stimulant. I've taken it a few times. I've taken it when I have to drive, like long periods of time. I'm driving from San Diego to California or to Los Angeles and maybe I have a gig. My gig's done at like 1130. I know I'm going to be on the road late at night. I might take one. And it's fine, but it gives you this weird feeling. It's a weird state. And I know a lot of tech people, a lot of Silicon Valley is on this stuff and they pop it like candy. So much so that Tim Ferriss, when he was writing his book, The Four Hour Body, he didn't want to include it. He didn't want to include this particular drug because he felt like people were just going to eat it all the time. Yeah. I mean, it's right throughout student populations. Yes. A study drug as well. As Adderall. Yeah. And Adderall, you know, one of the interesting things is that if you look at the profile of what sleep deprivation is cognitively, you know, reduced alertness, impulsivity, lack of ability to concentrate difficulties with learning and memory, difficulties with behavioral problems. If I were to describe those features to a pediatrician and say, what disorder is this? Probably say it's ADHD. But what we now know is that there is some portion of children out there who are diagnosed with ADHD who either one are just under slept or two actually have sleep disordered breathing because of perhaps tonsil problems where they're not getting sufficient sleep. And when you treat the sleep disorder, when you do a sort of, you know, remove the tonsils, they start sleeping normally and the ADHD disappears. So there is an issue here, I think, within that sort of the explosion of ADHD. Not all people are, you know, sort of privy to this sort of sleep problem, simply masquerading as ADHD. Some people are. One of the other problems too, though, is that ADHD kids tend not to sleep very well. And what we end up giving them is a drug that is a stimulant, which will combat sleep and fight back against sleep. So I think we need to have a bit more of a strategic approach as to when we think about at least the dose of that medication in terms of when sleep should be sort of expected during the day. Because, you know, taking it in the middle of the day, in the evening, if it's a stimulant, it's a wake promoting drug, we need to be very careful. Sleep is part of that equation. Well, that's terrifying because I don't know if the people that are prescribing these things have this sort of deep education and sleep and the necessity of it that you do. They don't. And, you know, it's not their fault either. That's crazy. You know, and in fact, I've started to try and lobby doctors to start prescribing sleep. And don't make the mistake that that's me suggesting, you know, prescribing sleeping pills. That's a separate story. And pills are associated with significantly higher risk of death and cancer. And I'm happy to speak about that too.