The Neuroscience Behind Fixing Your Sleep Schedule

today we're going to talk about how to fix your sleep [Music] schedule so the biggest mistake that we tend to make when we are trying to fix our sleep schedule is we focus on going to bed right we have all these things like sleep hygiene like make sure you do meditation for 30 minutes and go for a walk and don't eat something super heavy and avoid cell phones because they have blue light and something about the pineal gland and melatonin we focus on all this stuff at night but that's the biggest mistake if you want to fix your sleep schedule what you need to do is fix your waking hours so what is the purpose of sleep right why do human beings sleep if we look at some animals like whales or Dolphins they'll sleep for 5 to 20 minutes several times throughout the day and they're active in between so the human brain sleeps for about 8 hours a night to compensate or complement our waking activity and the biggest problem in the world today is that our waking hours have changed so the biological signals that trigger sleep have now become impaired so as we understand why the brain needs to sleep in the first place we can start to Institute those things during the day and then end up making going to sleep actually incredibly easy and I say this as a psychiatrist who's work with tons of patients about 90% of my patients end up sleeping very very easily after working together for a few months and do so without medication I'll have many patients that come to my office and say Doc I'm having trouble sleeping like can you prescribe something and we can prescribe stuff that's totally okay I'm not against prescriptions for sleep but the goal is that you can take those temporarily but over time we want to build a life where you're engaging your body in all of the right ways so that your sleep signals are at their maximum when you try to go to bed when people hear that we offer coaching at HG their first question is like what on Earth even is that so here's the basic problem when you struggle with something in your life you don't see the problem from the outside you see it from the inside the value of a coach is that they can look at your life from the outside they can understand what's going on and they can help guide you to improve things like motivation accomplish short-term goals and even increase a sense of purpose in life and over the long term we also see improvements in feelings of depression and anxiety and the best part is we've had over 100,000 coaching sessions and we incorporate that feedback to continually improve our program so if yall are interested in actually making a change in your life check out the link in the description below so let's start with the first thing that really confuses a lot of people you have a window to go to sleep and if you miss that window it becomes increasingly difficult to go to sleep some people will say if I wake up by this time then I'm okay but if I sleep too long then I'm groggy or if I wake up too early then I'm groggy most of us have or all of us have this thing called a circadian rhythm which dictates when it is is easiest to wake up and when it is easiest to go to sleep and if we miss that window it becomes increasingly difficult so the first thing is as we are awake throughout the day we accumulate this chemical called adenosine in our brain and this sort of signals to us the degree of fatigue we have and then this sort of makes us want to go to sleep so throughout the day or let this is just simplification but we can say that the fatigue signals in the brain slowly increase over time then what happens is we have this other part of our brain called The frontal lobes so the frontal loes are the parts of our brain that restrain impulses and control our our our Behavior you can kind of think about them as willpower and remember that your frontal loes are getting exhausted throughout the day as well so there is a very specific window where the fatigue signals in the brain are high and your frontal loes have enough willpower there's enough gas in the tank to restrain your impulses so this isn't that the frontal loes have reached complete exhaustion but there's this window where you feel tired and your brain has enough willpower to where it can restrain your impulses like binge eating or hopping on your cell phone or watching something on TV or getting up and doing whatever right so you have to be able to restrain impulses to go to sleep and if we look at people who really struggle with sleep what ends up happening you get into bed and then you're kind of really tired and then you hop on your cell phone right cuz you can't really restrain that and then an hour goes by an hour and a half goes by you feel really sleepy and then you kind of jump to something else or you try to put it away and then you pick it up again 5 minutes later so if we really look at what goes on with people who struggle with sleep they have an impulse control problem they cannot restrain their impulses they cannot just sit in bed and wait to fall asleep right you have to pick something up and technology has something to do with that absolutely but the main issue is that we are missing this window where our brains are fatigued enough to go to bed and not so fatigued that they can't restrain impulses so for most people this window is somewhere between 1 and 2 hours it's this really sweet spot what time of the day it happens we'll kind of get to a little bit later but it probably happens if you wake up around 8:00 it probably happens somewhere between 9:00 p. m. and 10 p.

m. that's your optimal sleep window if you stay up past that window you will not have the willpower Reserve to restrain your impulses and continue procrastinating going to bed now why is this becoming an increasing problem so re researchers have recently discovered that there are two types of sleep procrastination there is procrastination of going to bed okay so this is like I'm not ready to get into bed yet and what they've actually discovered is that there is a second kind of procrastination which is while in bed procrastination this is a completely new thing so if we look at the science of it what we find is that human beings I guess since the dawn of time procrastinated on going to bed and this procrastination was somewhere between 30 and 75 minutes and since the Advent of things like cell phones and easy access to devices what we've discovered is that there is a second level of procrastination so you procrastinate getting into bed by about 30 to 75 minutes that's fair enough but then once you are in bed there is within bed procrastination which is another 30 to 75 minutes and the key thing about adding this second layer of procrastination is it puts us outside of that fatigue and impulse control window that really nice sweet spot which then means that we can't really control what we're doing and we stay up way too long so the first thing to do if you want to fix your sleep schedule is really try to Target that window and recognize that if you pick up your cell phone you shouldn't take your cell phone to bed that's a very practical tip which we'll get to at the end but if you miss that window it's not just I'm going to stay on the phone for an additional 15 minutes or 30 minutes it's not 15 or 30 minutes it's actually going to cost you way more it's kind of like missing your flight right like you don't want to delay if you delay a little bit too long and you miss your flight you miss the window and then you're in a lot of trouble this is the first principle that I teach my patients that really really helps them develop a solid sleep schedule over time the second thing that we're going to talk about is emotional flooding so if we look at the overall effect of technology there is one uniform thing that basically all technological devices do this can be social media this can be browsing Reddit this can be watching things on YouTube watching things on Tik Tok shorts whatever it doesn't matter they all do one thing they share one thing in common which is that they suppress our negative emotional circuitry right so if you're feeling bad it doesn't matter what you can do you can binge watch a show you can play a video game you can watch some porn you can browse some social media look at some Twitter trolls like whatever all of these things have one shared effect which is that they suppress your negative emotional C circuitry now a lot of times people think okay if I'm suppressing my negative social emotional circuitry does that mean that the emotions go away no this is suppression right it is not elimination of emotions it is suppression of emotions so there's a very common thing that I'm beginning to see now and I experienced this when I was struggling with video game addiction where you suppress these negative emotional circuits throughout the day and so the moment that you put your devices away there's this experience of emotional flooding the moment that you put your device away right because you're like supposed to not watch your device in bed stay away from your device so you put it away in what happens a flood of thoughts tend to come forward you start to have anxieties you start to have regrets you start to be depressed about tomorrow you beat yourself up right so even if we look at the emotional experience of trying to go to bed you're frustrated with yourself why do I keep on doing this this is such a waste of time what is that that's emotional energy and so basically what's going on is throughout the day what human beings used to do is process their emotions if if you look at the situations in which our brains evolved they tended to involve a lot of rot mechanical tasks we're doing stuff like churning butter or like plowing a field with an oxen and when you're sitting on a cart and you're like kind of whipping the ox and you're not whipping it too hard it's kind of just trundling along the road like what's your mind doing your mind is just processing all these emotions like human beings used to be so bored and so when the mind has idle time when that mind is not occupied by something what it does is it starts cleaning out the trash right it the mind is on empty it's not focusing on anything now what's going on in our society is that we have so much sensory stimulus our mind is so engaged in laughing at this or looking at a cat video or getting pissed off by political beliefs that we don't like whatever the situation is we don't have time to process our minor emotional things throughout the day and so then when we go to bed our mind finally has empty time and what does it have to do process all of these emotions that have built up so this is the experience of emotional flooding so then what happens is people get so overwhelmed or activated by this emotional flooding that they have to distract themselves from it right you feel overwhelmed and what's your solution pick up a device because that quiets all the emotions down so then we get stuck in this pingpong between overwhelming emotions and distracting oursel from our emotions because the overwhelming emotions aren't going to let us sleep right and you really need to go to sleep and the more you stress yourself out the harder it is to sleep so you ping pong between these two things until you reach the point of absolute exhaustion so now it's super late and the fatigue signals in your brain are so powerful that you finally pass out but this is not how you fix your sleep schedule right this is what destroys your sleep schedule so what do we do about emotional flooding give yourself time during the day to be bored and let your mind take out the trash so I recommend an hourlong walk don't listen to anything no music no podcasts anything like that in your mind all these things will start to come up you can absolutely do things like meditation and particularly like parasympathetic meditations are very good we explain this stuff in DrK's guide to meditation and and things like that we've explained that all over the place you can absolutely meditate but all you really have to do is give your mind space okay as you give your mind space you will process some of those emotions automatically you can also do things like journaling meditation Etc you can do focused emotional practices or you can just give yourself some time and the more that you manage these emotions the less flooding will happen and the more calm your mind will be when you go to bed if your mind is calm then you can pick a time and the mind will naturally sleep the third thing that we're going to talk about is how you spend your waking hours in particular what we want to do is try to work ideally early in the morning so the more work we get done during the day the easier it will be to sleep so let's understand why this is so the first thing is what is the biological need for sleep sleep is to compensate for work right so as if you look at like mammals why do mammals sleep because mammals are generally speaking engaged in some degree of work throughout several hours of the day and so we have such an evolved brain that we keep track of this so I want youall to really pay attention to this I know it's going to be kind of a stretch but it's really important to understand so our brain keeps track of all of the work that we have to do this is how our brain reminds you right so let's say you spend a couple hours like watching Netflix or whatever and then when it's over your brain sends you a signal hey we have a test to study for or we need oh I forgot I need to stop by the grocery store so if you think about this very simple concept of how does the brain remember to remind you that you need to do things well very simple in order for that to be done it must keep track of all of the things that you have to do and since it's keeping track of all of the things that you have to do this creates a very big problem for sleep so we're going to explain this a little bit further so let's take the example of procrastinating for an exam so you've got two weeks to study for an exam and you kind of procrastinate up until the point of about like 3 days but the question is why three days why not 5 days why not two days why not a day and a half how is it that your brain decides to really induce that last minute Panic so that you start studying 3 days before an exam right and it's if you pay attention it's quite precise it's like we can procrastinate today tomorrow the next day one week a week and a half and then once three days rolls around once some amount of time rolls around suddenly our brain is like no more procrastination we're done last minute Panic let's go so think about that for a second how is how does the brain know how to do that and if you start procr if you start studying like a a Madman 3 days before a test you'll get like a B minus or a c you'll pass the exam right so what that means is our brain actually keeps track of all of the tasks that we need to do and when we start to move forward in our tasks our brain keeps track of that as well and if we have procrastinated all day long and we have not done enough work our brain does not let us sleep because our brain basically allots a certain amount of work that we have to get done every day you have all of these different tasks that need to be done and so your brain knows okay like we need to do at least this amount to not fall further behind it keeps track of all of the stuff so what we really want to do to be able to sleep at night is if we procrastinated if we haven't done enough work our brain will say we have not done our allotted work for the day this is actually not sufficient and then it will actually keep us awake stress signals which we'll get to in more detail will start to activate so these are hormones like cortisol and literally what cortisol does is it goes to the part of your brain that lets you you fall asleep and it says hey we're not done with our work for the day and you know this right because if your sleep schedule is messed up when you try to go to bed your brain will remind you of all of the things that you should have done this is the literal experience of 90% of my patients and so how do we fix this it is very simple we have to remove that cortisol signal we have to remove the cortisol signal by doing some kind of work the more work you do the more it tells your brain your brain is keeping track of it and it's not about whether it's enough or it's good enough or anything like that you just need to do some kind of work and we'll talk about why that is as well but basically the more work that you do the better off you will be at going to sleep because now your brain doesn't release that cortisol it says okay I got a lot done today I feel good about this and so it's okay there may be a part of your brain that says it's not enough but that part of your brain is independent from the part of your brain that keeps track that you've done something and once again what is the biological purpose for sleep it is to help us rest and recover from work so if you do some amount of work during the day it will help you sleep at night now some people may say but DrK even if I do some work like let's say I take out the trash and I do this or that that doesn't really solve my problems and this is the beautiful thing the architecture that helps you sleep does not relate to actually solving your problems it can involve even doing things that are complete completely meaningless as long as they involve some kind of work now this may sound super confusing but I'll give you all an example you can even do meaning meaningless work you don't have to progress towards your goals it's crazy you just need to do some kind of work so let's understand how this works so if you look at patients who have cancer one thing that happens is their family members will bring them lots of food now this is in a sense kind of silly because first of all they're getting IV nutrition they're on chemotherapy the intestinal lining is sloughing off they can't even eat anything they feel nauseous all the time and family brings food family brings food family brings food this also happens after someone passes away right so I'm kind of making light of this but this is kind of silly so sorry about that I I don't mean to be mean but if you look at a funeral the one thing that there is no shortage of at a funeral is lots of food everyone's bringing food everyone's bringing food everyone's bringing food look the person is dead right they're not going to need to eat anything and the family's not feeling very hungry it's beautiful that you want to bring some food and it's great I'm not saying it's a bad thing but let's understand the psychology of it why does someone bring food to a funeral it's because they feel like they want to do something so if we look at the human brain what we find is that taking meaningless action is sufficient at reducing our cortisol level so this is a concept that we go into in a lot more detail when we talk about overcoming Anxiety by engaging in more active challenges so there studies that show that if you are feeling overwhelmed in life in order to feel less overwhelmed you can actually take on more work so if you take on three additional tasks now you have 13 total things to do and a lot of people may think if I have 13 things then I will feel more overwhelmed because 13 is more than 10 but the science shows us that feeling overwhelmed is not about the total number of tasks that you you do it is about the number of tasks that you choose compared to the number of tasks that you have to deal with so the ratio of things that you want to work on versus things that you have to work on is literally what leads to feeling overwhelmed the more that we take on the less overwhelmed we feel and we see this principle once again in sleep because as you are feeling stressed out if you work on anything our brain is keeping track of this and sort of says okay we've done some stuff today so now we can go to sleep so another goal in sleep is anabolism so anabolism is building your tissues so if we look at kids kids grow during sleep if we look at things like muscle repair muscle repair happens during sleep our body builds tissue when we sleep so on the converse side the other way we can look at it is that if we need to build tissues then we will sleep more so children who are going through growth spurts need to sleep more when you start working out in exercising you need to sleep more so let's think about what's going on there so as you exercise and as you create small tears in your muscle fibers literally these muscle fibers will send signals inflammatory signals to your your brain growth factors will start to activate within your brain these are things like um uh you know insulin derived growth factor insulin light growth factor so all of these kinds of growth factors will start to send signals to your brain that will then make you feel sleepy so one of the best things that you can do to fall asleep is actually exercise now this is not to get your Beach bought or anything like that this is about physiologically creating the signals that will travel to your brain and help you sleep so we absolutely want to exercise and ideally weightlifting because weightlifting sends signals to your bones and to your muscles you'll get some muscle tear so you really want to feel that burn in a healthy way we don't want to create you know ATT tendon tear or anything like that and all of these things will send sleep signals to your brain make it easy for you to sleep at night the second thing that we're going to talk about is learning new stuff so the other thing that our brain does when we sleep is consolidates memory so we we take our short-term memory which lives in the hippocampus and it kind of gets Consolidated into other parts of the hippocampus in into long-term memory so the more that you are learning the more sleep signals your brain will be receiving so as you store a bunch of stuff in your short-term memory our brain says holy crap we have to encode all of this stuff from our Ram into our hard drive and that requires sleep so what you will find is people who are engaged in cognitively intensive tasks where they are learning like learning new things learning new languages it will be easier for them to sleep because the brain is sending signals sending signals to your reticular activating system hey we need sleep hey we need sleep hey we need sleep so this is different from just spending cognitive energy so if I'm playing the same [ __ ] video game over and over and over again I'm not learning anything I'm not rising in rank right I'm not watching replays I'm not like focused on learning something then I'm not going to be able to sleep it is specifically learning that triggers things like brain derived neurotrophic factor which will also help us sleep so we want to send all of these kind of signals to our brain to help us sleep next thing that we're going to talk about is diet so a big problem that people have when it comes to sleep is what they actually eat so this is where what we really want to do is be careful about what we eat so here's one pattern that's a huge problem that interferes with sleep I wake up I have a cup of coffee coffee is an appetite suppressant so I don't eat a whole lot and then 300 p. m.

rolls around I have one big meal and then dinner time rolls around and I don't feel very hungry so I don't eat very much and then even though I had one big meal and it was kind of unhealthy now my body and brain are kind of confused because I may actually be at a caloric deficit or a nutrient deficit for the day which means that my brain and my body are not satisfied I can't actually go to sleep because I have a caloric deficit or nutrient deficit both of these things will keep me awake and lead to nighttime snacking because some measurement capability in our brain our brain is keeping track of the number of meals we've had the number of calories we've had the number of nutrients we've had and if we're deficient in some way it won't let us sleep and it'll keep us awake until we eat something again instead what we really want to do is make sure you eat throughout the day as much as possible so we want to have two to three meals a day and this is the last thing is that before you go to bed our dinner should actually be quite heavy and can have a fair load of carbohydrates so what we really want is a carb heavy meal but that also has protein and fiber and there's a couple reasons for this why do we want a carb heavy meal so we want a carb heavy meal because this stimulates stimulates insulin and Insulin makes us sleepy we want to induce a food coma at night now if we eat a highly processed meal before bed we will get a big insulin Spike followed by a blood sugar crash and so even if you eat a ton of calories with no fiber so you can eat like a 2,000 calorie meal and you will still actually Fe feel hungry within a few hours if there is insufficient protein and insufficient fiber the reason that we want to add fiber and protein to our heavy carb meal is it slows down the release of carbohydrate into our system because our body has to digest all this other stuff it dilutes out the carbohydrate as we dilute out the carbohydrate we slowly absorb carbohydrate which slowly keeps our insulin levels High which keeps us sleepy for a sustained period of time which allows us to actually fall asleep so if you want to have a big bowl of pasta with a salad in some kind of grilled chicken or fish or something like that that is a ideal meal before you go to sleep you can also do something like have a burrito we don't want to go too carb heavy on the burrito make sure there's plenty of protein in there plenty of vegetables you can eat all kinds of good stuff plenty of salsa and you're totally golden lettuce tomato whatever you want in there is totally good so we actually want to eat a heavy meal before we go to bed that will help us induce sleep the last thing that we want to consider is that stress in and of itself will keep us awake now this is a huge problem today because our society is so full of stress so used to be that stresses were acute things right so I'm like hunting in the jungle and I see a tiger so I'm stressed out once a week when I run into a tiger now we have all of these chronic stressors so grades at the end of the semester mortgage at the end of the month I have to I'm worried about dating and I'm worried about my ex should I break up should I not break up I don't really know what to do my family is stressing out so we have all of these chronic stressors and as we saw we saw that cortisol actually travels to the reticular activating system which is where our sleep signals come from and actually inhibits us from falling asleep so as we see a rise in chronic stress we are seeing chronic sleeplessness okay because the the brain is not able to fall asleep because our brain thinks we're in danger so it's not going to let us fall asleep or get restful sleep so this is where we need to manage our stress and I know that in and of itself is a huge task but this is kind of what my point is about sleep is if you want to fix your sleep schedule everyone thinks that F fixing your sleep schedule is where you start right everyone thinks oh my God like I need to fix my sleep schedule because I'm going to bed at a crazy time I'm waking up at a crazy time nothing is consistent so I can't fix my relationships I can't study I can't work I can't do anything I can't exercise because my sleep schedule is screwed up everyone thinks things start with the sleep schedule but things don't start with the sleep schedule sleep schedule is the final thing so this is what's really crazy and this is what I've seen with most of my patients everyone tries to tackle sleep first but you can't tackle sleep first sleep is the last thing that you actually tackle because what we need to do is fix all of these signals we need to fix all of the circumstances all of the biological and neurochemical signals that induc sleep once we do all of those things then sleep will come very easily and this is exactly why it's so hard to fix because we're trying to do the last thing first you can't you don't start at the Finish Line right you have to run the whole race before you get to the finish line so this is something that's very important to understand we must manage our stress so we've talked about some of the things that we've already kind of given you all the answers to do that right so if you start doing a little bit more work during the day if you start meditating if you start walking and and and managing your emotions if you start journaling if you start exercising if you start eating healthy in the right way your stress will naturally come down we've covered stress relief in so many other places across the channel so definitely check that stuff out but as long as you stressed out it will be difficult to sleep so let's end with one final thing so one last tip that I would give yall is waking up when you're tired is easier neuroscientifically than going to bed when you're not so the biggest mistake that a lot of people make is that sleep is not about going to bed on time it is about waking up on time or even waking up very early so the the last tip that I'm going to give yall is that you should wake up sometime between 4:00 a. m. and 7: a.

m. 7:00 a. m.

is the late end of when you should wake up now why is this the first is that we have something called a circadian rhythm which is our body's biological clock and we actually have a very high level of cortisol early in the morning so medically when we're trying to test whether someone has a cortisol deficiency or a cortisol tumor or something like that we will actually have to do this this lab test we have to do it at 700 a. m. why is that it's because we know that there is a biological peak of cortisol early in the morning so why do we want to wake up around that time so the first thing is if we wake up around that time our ability to work will be easier because we naturally have a high level of cortisol which means we will be activated our body will be in a stressful state it doesn't feel stressful because it's first thing in the morning that's the beautiful thing but it it allows us to focus and and really complete tasks so what we really want to do is wake up around 5:30 in the morning okay you're going to be groggy that's okay don't drink coffee right away but you can have coffee or tea or whatever do whatever you need to to wake up early and then we want to get to work right away the first 4 hours of the day wake up at 5:00 a.

m. and work until 9:00 if you do this so many things will get better your brain will be like okay we've gotten all of the work that we need to do in the day like you'll be crazy it's crazy how productive you will be in the morning now some people will say but I'm not a morning person I'm a night owl so in my experience a lot of night owls aren't actually night owls they are very early morning people right so they their Windows of work that start around midnight or whatever like that's actually okay you can wake up at 2: a. m.

no big deal a lot of monasteries and asham will have people wake up around midnight so if you look at matens which I think is a Catholic Ceremony they actually wake up at midnight they go to bed at like 6:00 p. m. 5:00 p.

m. and they actually wake up at midnight that's actually totally fine you want to wake up super early and get some stuff done you're going to have this cortisol Peak which will help you do the work if you want to caffeinate go ahead and caffeinate have a really solid breakfast around 9: and then here's where the really important thing comes in when you're feeling tired you don't go to sleep right so then you have to stay up until whatever your natural bedtime is 6:00 p. m.

7: p. m. 8:00 p.

m. I don't care you can fall asleep at any time between 6:00 and 10: p. m.

don't stay up past your inhibition window right so if we get that that frontal lobe fatigue then you're going to be in trouble try to avoid caffeine afternoon ideally avoid caffeine after 10: a. m.