Joe Rogan - Sleep Expert on Insomnia

What should someone do if they have a hard time sleeping? Like say if you're a person who has insomnia, you have a hard time getting to bed, you have a hard time staying asleep, when you wake up you can't go back to bed. Are there other strategies? There are, I mean, I think for most people there are five things that you can do just out the gate to get better sleep. Regularity is probably the most important thing I can tell you. Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekend, weekday, regularity is key. We've spoken about light, for example, when you in the last hour before bed, try to stay away from screens, but also just switch off half the lights in the house. You'd be surprised at how soporific that is. It really starts to sort of make you feel a bit more drowsy. They've done some great studies where they would take people out into the Rockies, no electric light, no electricity whatsoever. And they started to go to bed two hours earlier than their acclaimed natural bedtime. It wasn't just because they didn't have anything necessarily to do, it was that their melatonin was rising two hours earlier. So keep it dark. The third is probably keep it cool. Your brain actually needs to drop its temperature by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep. And that's the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. I've seen people use cold pads. Have you seen those? You sleep on these cold pads? What do you think of those? Yeah, I mean, the evidence is pretty good that cooling the body actually works. They've, you know, in the book, I write about a series of studies where they had people in, it's almost like a wetsuit, but it has all of these veins running through it. And they could actually perfuse warm or cold water into any part of the body, hands, core of the body, feet. And so that you could exquisitely manipulate the temperature of any part of the body. And what they found is that they could effectively cool the body down and it instantaneously made people fall asleep faster. And it gave them deeper, deep non-rem sleep, that sort of restorative sleep for the body. So, and you can even look at studies where people sleep semi-naked. And that also seems to improve their sleep and they get a little bit more deep sleep too. So cold is better. The paradox here though, is that you need to warm your feet and your hands to kind of charm the blood away from your core out to the surface and radiate that heat. Really? So you should go to sleep with socks and gloves on? Yeah, or better still have a hot bath. Evidence here too, that I discussed where people say, you know, I get out of a hot bath, I feel nice and toasty and relaxed, and that's why I fall asleep. It's the opposite. When you get into a bath, you get vasodilation, all that you sort of get rosy cheeks, red skin, all of the blood rushes to the surface, you get out of the bath, and you have this massive thermal dump of heat that just evacuates from the body, your core body temperature plummets, and that's why you sleep better. So you can hack the system very easily. Wow, so your core body temperature plummets, and that's what makes you sleep easier. Yeah. That sounds so counterintuitive. But it makes sense. And it makes sense because that's how we were designed. If you look at hunter-gatherer tribes, whose way of life has not changed for thousands of years, and you ask how do they sleep, one of the things that seems to dictate their sleep is the rise and fall of temperature. You know, temperature is at its lowest in the nadir of the night, you know, three or four in the morning, and as that temperature, that climate temperature starts to drop, that's when they start to get drowsy, as if temperature is just sort of signaling to the brain, now it's time to sleep. So light as well as temperature are two key triggers to help you get better sleep. If you look at those tribes, by the way, and when they go to sleep and they wake up, you know, they go to sleep probably at two hours after dusk, sort of eight to nine in the evening, wake up about half an hour, even an hour before dawn. It's the rise in temperature rather than light that triggers their awakening. But there's a reason, you know, have you ever thought about what the term midnight actually means? Middle of the night. And that's what it should be for all of us, but in modernity, we've been dislocated from our natural rhythms, and now midnight has become the time when we think, I should check Facebook last time, you know, I should send my last email. That wasn't, that is not how we were, you know, designed to sleep, and in fact, we may also be designed to sleep biphysically too, if you look at those hunter-gatherers, they don't sleep one long bout of eight hours at night. Yeah, I've heard this recently, that people, that you should have two sleeps, the idea of two sleeps. Yeah, it's actually a little different than the idea of two sleeps, so there was a time in sort of the Dickensian era where people would sleep for the first half of the night, maybe sort of four hours or so, then they would wake up, they would socialize, they would eat, they would make love, and then they would go back and have a second sleep. If you look at natural biological rhythms in the brain and the body, that doesn't really seem to be how we were designed. It certainly seems to be something that we did in society, but I think it's more of a societal trend than it was a biological edict. However, we do seem to have two sleep periods the way that we were designed. Those tribes will often sleep about six and a half hours, seven hours of sleep at night, and then especially in the summer, they'll have that siesta-like behavior in the afternoon. And all of us have that, sort of this, what's called the postprandial dip in alertness just means after lunch. And if I measure your brainwave activity with electrodes, I can see a drop in your physiological alertness somewhere between two to four p.m. in the afternoon. But is that dependent on diet? It's not, people think it is, you know, especially after they've had a heavy lunch. You can actually just have people fast in sort of, well, fasting for long periods of time actually makes your sleep much worse, but you can have people abstain from lunch and you still get that drop. So it's independent food. It's a genetically hardwired pre-programmed drop that suggests we should be sleeping biphasically. But is that dependent upon their standard diet? Because if someone is on a carbohydrate-rich diet, a lot of times you do get that spike and then you crash. Crash. But when people are on low-carb and high-fat diets, they don't get that. And they tend to be more even with their energy through the day? Yeah, so yeah, that sort of more constant release of energy can actually help you sort of almost combat that lull. But that lull exists no matter what. Exactly. So even if you don't think it exists, it's there. It's still present, yeah. Interesting. So why did they do that in the Dickens era? Why did they, what, is there a root cause of their double sleep thing? We don't know. I mean, it's hard to sort of really go back. Fascinating. Yeah, it's incredible. That was a trend. Yeah, that it was a movement. They would just wake up and do things. Maybe it's because they didn't have TV. They didn't know what to do with themselves. Yeah. It sounds like they did some pretty interesting things, which were nice. Yeah.