Joe Rogan - The Science of Sleep

So, you know, I'll do three different hotels in a week, because I'll do like a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, like with gigs, and then by the time Sunday rolls around, I'm a mess. In rough shape. Yeah, is that what it is? Yeah, and it's a threat detection thing. Ah. I mean, if you look at other species, they can do this much more impressively than we can. So dolphins or any sort of sea dwelling mammal can actually sleep with half a brain. So one half of that brain goes into deep sleep. The other half is wide awake. That's how people at the DMV do it. Those people that work at the Department of Motor Vehicles, they work half asleep. You ever meet them? I haven't, no. Just teasing you. If you're DMV listening and going, fuck you, man, next time you come in to get your license renewed. There's my next NIH grant, I think, looking at the DMV and sleep. But yeah, we- TSA workers, same thing. Same type of human. That I've come across. Yeah. Them too. Listen, fuckers, relax. So when you're in a hotel room, what is happening that half your brain is not really sleeping? Yeah, so there's different stages of sleep. There are two principal types. One is non-rapid eye movement sleep or non-REM sleep. The other is REM sleep, which is also known as dream sleep. Right. And non-rapid eye movement sleep is further divided into four separate stages, which are unimaginatively called stages one through four. We're a creative bunch of sleep researchers. It is true, but I think it's also our low IQ. But it's the deep stages of sleep, three and four of that non-rapid eye movement. That's where a lot of sort of body replenishment takes place, grief, the cardiovascular system, metabolism, all of those good things. But that's the deep sleep that one half of your brain will resist going into when you're sleeping in a foreign environment. So it stays in this kind of lighter stage, like a threat detection system. Right. And you can imagine why. It's an unusual context. Evolutionarily, it would make a lot of sense to just have that sort of on guard one half of the brain. That makes so much sense. And that really, for me, it fills in the blanks of why, even if I get seven, eight hour sleep on the road, I'm still kind of just out of it. Yeah, and that's in fact probably one of the, I think the most impressive parts of new research on sleep. It's not just about quantity. It's also about quality. And quality can be as detrimental if you don't get it as a reduction in total quality. I mean, both are essential. But I think it speaks exactly to your point. You just don't feel like it's a refreshing sort of deep sleep. Yeah, it feels totally different. It just feels like, I guess I would say, it feels like half asleep. I mean, it's really kind of how it does feel. One of the things that I noticed, I did this thing with my friends called Sober October, where we didn't smoke any pot or do any, no drinking at all, nothing for a month. And when I did it, one of the things I found was that after about, I don't know how many days, but it was noticeable that I would have these incredibly vivid dreams. And then I had read that marijuana does something to suppress heavy REM sleep. Like what is happening there? Yeah, so both of those chemicals, both of which are used as a sleep aid, alcohol and marijuana, are actually very good at blocking your dream sleep, your rapid eye movement sleep. And so what happens is that the brain is quite clever in this regard. It builds up a clock counter of how much dream sleep you should have had, but have not been getting. And it starts to develop this increasing appetite and hunger for dream sleep, so that finally when the alcohol actually gets out of your system, Sober October, that's all of a sudden where you get what's called a REM sleep rebound effect, where you not only get the normal amount of REM sleep that you would normally have, you get that plus the brain tries to get back some of that dream sleep that it's been losing over the past maybe 11 months. So you get this 20 years. I didn't want to make any assumptions. So you get this REM sleep rebound effect and that's where you have these really intense dream sleep situations. It's the same reason that people will say, like I had a bit too much to drink last night. Maybe it was a Friday or Saturday. They sleep in late. They say, I just had these crazy dreams. What happens there is a kind of an acute version where the alcohol is swirling around in your system. And after about six hours, your liver and your kidneys have finally excreted all of the alcohol. And your brain has been deprived of dream sleep for that first six hours. So then it feasts in the last couple of hours and that's why you have these really bizarre dreams after you've been drinking a little bit too much. Oh wow. So what is happening with marijuana though, specifically, do you know? Yeah, so marijuana, it does help people, well help. It puts people to sleep quicker. Although I think the question is whether it's really naturalistic sleep or not that they go into. Certainly with alcohol it's not. That nightcap idea is a misnomer. Alcohol will actually, well it's a form of drugs that we call the sedatives and sedation is not sleep. It's very different, but we often mistake one for the other. Marijuana seems to act in a physiologically very different way. It doesn't target the same receptors in the brain. So it's unclear whether the speed with which you fall asleep after having a session with marijuana is actually natural sleep. Let's assume it is. The problem however, is that it then will start to disrupt REM sleep. It will start to block the process. We think perhaps at the level of the brain stem, which is where these two types of sleep, non-REM and REM sleep, will actually get worked out. That's where marijuana may actually impact dream sleep and shut it down and block it. Have there been any studies on chronic marijuana smokers? Like those dawn to dusk type characters that just are constantly high? And what happens to their brain? Because they must never hit REM sleep. People haven't looked at marijuana. They have looked at alcohol though. Exactly that. So what happens is if you look at alcoholics, they will have something often when they come off alcohol, something called delirium tremors, which is where DT. There what happens is that the alcohol has been blocking dream sleep for so long and the pressure for dream sleep is built up so powerfully in the brain. It actually just spills over into wakefulness. And so the brain just says, look, okay, if I'm not going to get this dream sleep whilst you're asleep, I'm just going to take it whilst you're awake. And so you start to essentially dream while you're awake. It's this sort of collision of two states of consciousness. So you get delirium. Wow. I always thought the DTs were detoxing. Other than when someone said someone's going through the DTs. So it's delirium tremor. Yeah, delirium trams. So what is going on with them when this is happening? So if they are going through this delirium during the day while they're conscious, what's physiologically happening? So it's almost as though the veil of REM sleep gets pulled over the waking brain as it were. So you have this mixed state of consciousness that you can pick up with brainwave recordings. And it just tells me, I mean, in some ways, how necessary sleep must be. If that's the lengths that the brain will go to to get that which it's been missing, just shows you why it took Mother Nature 3.6 million years to put this thing called an eight-hour sleep necessity in place. And we've come along and within the space of 100 years, we've lopped off almost 20% of that if you look at the data. Wow, really? Yeah. And so many people take pride in that too. I don't need eight-hour sleep. I got three. I'm good, ready to go, kick ass and dominate the world. Yeah. It's the sort of like sleep machismo attitude. There is a lot of that, right? Yeah. Not me, baby, I like sleep. Well, I mean, you'd be glad to know that then, men who sleep five to six hours a night will have a level of testosterone, which is that of someone 10 years their senior. So a lack of sleep will age you by a decade in terms of that critical aspect of wellness, virility, muscle strength, sexual performance. 10 years, that's incredible. Wow.