Why You're Always Tired - 7 Myths Ruining Your Sleep

if you're feeling like you're always tired you're not alone surveys have shown that on average adults in the US feel tired for 3 days of the week and 30 to 48% of adults have trouble sleeping but for a lot of us the problem isn't how much sleep we're getting it's actually the anxiety around our sleep caused by believing various myths which is what we're going to debunk in this video now I've been looking into the science behind sleep for quite a while but even as someone with the medical background things can get super confusing and

generally when I talk to people in this area it's hard to figure out what's actually good advice to follow and what is bad advice to ignore like for example Matthew Walker's book why we sleep is very good but there was this whole craze around oh my God I need to get my eight hours otherwise if I don't get my 8 hours I'm going to develop Alzheimer's disease and all the cardiovascular problems and all of this feeds into this thing called Sleep anxiety which is the feeling of being scared or worried or concerned about your sleep

which paradoxically actually further contributes to you being unable to sleep and this creates this kind of vicious cycle which is not very good anyway recently I interviewed Professor Russell Foster on my podcast Deep dive he is a sleep expert who runs his own Lab at the University of Oxford now if you want you can check out the long form interview completely for free on any podcast app that you like including iTunes and Spotify and apple podcast all that kind of fun stuff but in this video I want to talk about the seven sleep myths that

the interview with Professor Foster debunked and so if you like me have fallen into believing some of these myths then hopefully this video should hopefully help you out and help you get a better night's sleep let's get started myth number one it doesn't matter when you sleep as long as you sleep enough but it turns out that when we sleep is actually super important as well and that's all because of this thing called the Circadian rhythm circadian rhythms underpin almost every aspect of our health and well-being and that was the bit I wanted to get

across within lifetime so the Cadian rhythm is essentially your body's internal clock that signals to your body what you need at a given time in the 1990s Russell and his research group discovered that there's a bunch of cells in our eyes that are only responsible for detecting light rather than helping us to see images this light detection mechanism in our eyes tells our brain what time of the date is and helps regulate our internal clock now since our internal clocks are sensitive to light it means that generally we want to be awake when it's bright

outside and we want to be asleep when it's dark outside and actually for the last few years Russell and his research group have been working on what happens when the Cadian rhythm is affected I.E when you sleep at weird times for example if you've got jet lag or for example if you're working night shifts and they found that in these sorts of people that have this disruption to their Cadian Rhythm you get an increase in stress hormones you get an increase in the risk of heart disease and these people get sick way more often and

they're also more prone to emotional and cognitive problems 97% of night shift workers do not adapt to the demands of work working at night so they're working against an entire biology which is saying you should be asleep now it's important to realize that even though we all have an internal clock ticking away inside of ourselves not all of our internal clocks are set in exactly the same way and so when you hear people saying I'm a morning person or I'm a night owl that relates to something called your chronotype based on a natural inclination to

sleep at a certain time scientists can bucket us into something called chronotypes for example someone who naturally gets up early and finds the morning to be their most productive hours of the day probably has a morning chronotype and there's a questionnaire in the book and on Russell's website we'll link that down below where you can answer a few questions and it it'll help you figure out what your own chronotype is but once you figure this out then you might want to try as best as you can to organize your activities around kind of fitting around

your chronotype for example if you're more of a morning person you might find that it's better to put your creative or your kind of highest Focus related activities in the morning whereas if you're a Nel that's totally fine if you can control your schedule it's generally worth trying to tweak things around so that you're doing Focus stuff at night for example I've personally tried really hard to become a morning person I I tempted to wake up at 6:00 in the morning and go straight to the gym but I always found like I had this like

uh it's like absolute Nightmare and so I wake up at a reasonable hour I wake up around 7:00 7:30 I think I'm a fairly middle of the day kind of guy and generally I try and get my book writing stuff done in the morning and then do more chill things in the evening myth number two everyone needs 8 hours of sleep now the reality is that there's actually loads of variation across like how much sleep people actually need one of the sort of slight frustrations that that's emerged is that an average value is taken as

the optimum value for all of us and of course it isn't healthy sleep can range from 6 hours maybe slightly less than that um out to 10 or 11 hours yes there is an average but actually there's so much individual variation so rather than overly worrying about the number of hours of sleep that you got and then looking your thinking oh I only got 7 hours of sleep tonight I'm going to have a terrible day for the rest of the day there's a few other things that you can think about to optimize your sleep firstly

you might like to ask yourself did you wake up naturally in the morning or did you need an alarm to wake you up generally if you wake up naturally you've got a pretty reasonable amount of sleep you might ask yourself did it take you a long time to wake up and did you feel the need for caffeinated drinks when you woke up to help you become more awake that might be a sign that actually you didn't necessarily get enough sleep and you can even check out your behavior like if you find yourself doing like stupid

things or being mean or unempathetic or just being a bit annoying to people around you it might actually be because you didn't get enough sleep the night before myth number three we should wake up at the same time every day now this isn't entirely a myth but what Russell said in the interview is that yes it's generally good to wake up at the same time each day but you don't really need to be overly pedantic about it it reinforces all of the sort of signals that regulate the Cadian system so eating at the same time

getting light exposure at the same time that all acts to stabilize however having said that you know there's going to be an occasion where you have a party you're going to get up late you know and sleep is is is very Dynamic and the other thing to keep in mind is that our circadian rhythms can change over the course of our life cycle so it's really common for teenagers for example to have more of an evening chronotype which is why teenagers really struggle to wake up in the morning and then as we age we sort

of move to a more morning chronotype the time we're in our late 50s uh early 60s we're getting up and going to bed at about the time we got up and went to bed when we were 10 myth number four you should avoid blue light before sleep so where does this come from well blue light is light that has a short wavelength and short wavelengths of light generally have more energy and so scientists have hypothesized that hey blue light reacts to the eye in some way and makes it harder to fall asleep for example these

glasses that I have have a blue light filter to them because the optician that I went to said hey do you want to pay an extra100 for a blue light filter it's better for your sleep and I was like all right then why not U but apparently that's a bit of a myth so the Harvard group got people to look at a Kindle on its brightest intensity for 4 hours just before bedtime on five consecutive nights and it just statistically delayed sleep onet by 10 minutes well it may be statistically significant but it's biologically meaningless

which was pretty nice for me to hear because now I can read on my Kindle with a backl on my Kindle and not worry too much about like I'm getting too much blue light into my eyes by the way if you're enjoying these myths so far I would love it if you can hit the like button for the YouTube algorithm apparently it really helps myth number five sleep apps help you sleep better now I got into this whole sleep tracking thing at one point I got the houra ring I currently use an eight Sleep mattress

which is admittedly quite good and I used to kind of keep track of all of my kind of sleep data but what I would find is that I wake up in the morning i' be like oh my sleep Readiness score is 54% I was like oh but I was feeling reasonable I guess I'm not actually feeling reasonable I guess my sleep score is 54% so I guess I should be having a bad day and it's like I ended up sort of weirdly Placebo affecting myself in a negative way because of what these various sleep tracking

apps were telling me about the quality of my sleep but as Russell said in the interview we should take a lot of this sleep app data with a bit of a pinch of salt worth bearing in mind that at the moment No Sleep apps are endorsed by any of the sleep federations or or FDA approved and of course you know when you look at the validation of many of these these apps you'll go into the paper and you'll see it work perfectly for eight undergraduates you know or in California and that's about it but of

course the point I've just made is that sleep changes as we um age and between individuals and so one algorithm is also not appropriate for telling us what good sleep is and so the bottom line that I took away from this is yes it's nice to see what your sleep score is if you're one of those people that loves to optimize every little thing about your life but actually the biological and psychological signals that your body is giving you like how it felt when you were W when you woke up did you feel well rested

did you need to wake up with it with an alarm or without how are you feeling the rest of the day those signals are way more important than an app telling you exactly what your sleep Fitness score might be myth number six melatonin helps us sleep better so you might have heard of melatonin it's a supplement that a bunch of people take it's really popular in the US apparently a bunch of people take it to kind of combat jet lag but also people have started taking melatonin just to help with their sleep if they have

bad sleep the best studies ever undertaken taking melatonin before you go to bed can reduce the time it takes to get to sleep by 30 minutes now I stress that's the best study ever undertaken many studies showed no effects whatsoever now this best study that Russell is referring to is a study that was done in 2007 on autistic children and they found that the children who were taking regular small doses of melatonin every day for 3 months eventually ended up being able to fall asleep 30 minutes sooner but a few years later in 2013 there

was a metaanalysis about whether melatonin really helps your sleep and the researchers who did that study found that on average melatonin reduces your time to fall asleep to by about 7 minutes which is not particularly impressive and if you're looking for something even more recent than that this book lifetime it's really good I listened to an audible came out in 2022 I even have a nice little signed copy right here uh but this talks about kind of the most upto-date stuff around melatonin and it's basically what Professor Foster says cuz he wrote the book and

is a sleep Professor that it doesn't actually make that much difference maybe it might help with jet lag but not generally in day-to-day life oh and by the way if you've gotten to this point in the video you're probably interested in sleep and so I'd love to hear in the comment section below what is something that you've tried to improve your sleep and did it work or didn't it work like it would be cool to crowdsource some different tips that people have for improving their sleep myth number seven polyphasic sleep is good for your productivity

now polyphasic sleep schedules were a big thing like I think like 10 years ago in sort of the biohacking community they've started to kind of have a bit of a Resurgence basically the idea is that you sleep at multiple times throughout the day like maybe you'll sleep for 4 hours and then you'll get up a bit and do some stuff and then you'll sleep another 4 hours is like this is more than one kind of period of sleeping you you have these various patents whereby there's a total of uh something like four or 6 hours

of sleep it maybe 2 hours at night with with various fragmented sleep during the day and all of the data suggests that this is a really bad idea so even though polyphasic sleep in theory gives us more waking hours in which we can be productive actually what Professor Foster says is that the quality of work that we can produce in those hours it's is generally lower because we tend to be more exhausted and therefore less productive and less creative during those hours and there's even been a couple of studies that show that students who are

on a polyphasic sleep schedule do worse in exams compared to the students who are in a normal monophasic sleep schedule so overall the evidence does seem to suggest at least according to the experts that actually splitting your sleep up into polyphasic blocks doesn't actually help your productivity as much as blogs like life hacker might like to run stories uh and pretend that it might anyway if you enjoyed this video you might like to check out the full interview that I did with Professor Foster you can check out over there or in any podcast app thank

you so much for watching and see you later bye-bye