With the caveat that, to a man with a hammer everything, everything looks like a nail, I cannot recommend enough episodes 47, 48, and 49 from the Peter Attia, MD podcast. This three-part series with Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley, emphasizes the importance of sleep for health and longevity. I do not listen to this podcast on a regular basis, so I cannot recommend it generally or vouch for Dr. Attia. But this series was a massive wake-up call to me on the (short and, importantly, long-term!) ill effects of sleep deprivation. Here’s the link to the first episode:

#47 – Matthew Walker, Ph.D., on sleep – Part I of III: Dangers of poor sleep, Alzheimer’s risk, mental health, memory consolidation, and more

During my time in the Marine Corps I developed a very unhealthy relationship with sleep. In fact, there were a handful of times I’d be so sleep-deprived that I would, and I mean this, hallucinate. Sitting in some Humvee or looking over some map, I would start tasting a specific pizza from Minnesota that I particularly like. “Power Through It” became my motto. And I’ve never really dropped that motto. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is something I’ve said many times in my life to many different people. If I had to guess, I’d say that I now average about 6:15 per night during the work week.

This series opened my eyes not to the short-term problems associated with lack of sleep that we all know so well but rather long-term health crises like heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, Type 2 Diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.

I really appreciated Dr. Attia’s humility in relating how his “Power Through It” mentality in his medical residency resulted in his “weight gain, insulin resistance, hypergonadism” despite no “lack of exercise” during his residency. And this follow-up from Mr. Walker was astounding to me: “[Sleep deprivation] essentially takes healthy individuals who show no signs of diabetes [and] limiting them to an anemic diet of sleep . . . for one week . . . and you can get them into a state . . . where you’d argue they were in a pre-diabetic state.”

No wonder that, after a late night working and early trip to the gym, the exit to the McDonalds for a breakfast looks so enticing on my way into work. After listening to this series, I realize that while I’ve been keen on the limiting-electronics-at-night idea, I need to better prioritize limiting bright lights after dinner generally.

A few quick-hitters for people who won’t listen to, really, a life-changing series (at least to me):

• Your bed should be for sleeping and intimacy. Watching TV, reading under bright lights, cell phone use, resting without the intent to sleep, and anything else in bed that is not sleeping and intimacy will destroy your brain’s ability to associate your bed with sleep.
• If you are someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, do not just sit there. Go read a book under dim lighting in another room until you’re tired. Often “insomniacs” aren’t that at all and simply need to reinforce to their brain that the bed is for sleeping and intimacy, not for anxieties, stewing on stressful items, and anger at lack of sleep.
• Cell phones before bed are devastating to sleep and stress levels in ways we cannot fathom.
• It’s important to go to bed at the same time every night.
• Everyone needs at least eight hours of sleep — especially while you’re younger (teens and early 20s actually need more than that).
• Going to bed and waking up at different times all throughout a week puts your body in basically a permanent, shifting jet lag state.
• Caffeine has a half-life such that a cup of coffee at noon affects you in the same way at bedtime as if you slammed a quarter cup of coffee as you turned the lights off. So for someone like me (“I can have a cup of coffee and fall right asleep,” I’ve said often), I may fall asleep with caffeine coursing through my veins, but that caffeine is still diminishing the quality of my sleep.
• Our bodies have evolved to have a unique ability to store excess calories as fat for lean times when it can feast off fat stores and delay starvation. Our bodies — pay attention here — have no such mechanism for sleep because until very, very, very recently on the timeline of humanity, there was no reason to undersleep. Humans simply slept as much as needed each night then woke up. Humans cannot store sleep, so even one night’s poor sleep can ruin a week of a person’s life. Every single night of sleep matters.
• Even though both are eight hours-long, sleeping from midnight to 8 a.m. is not as helpful as sleeping 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. The closer the sleep is to dinner/sunset, the more restorative (it’s actually different stages/brain activity).
• REM sleep is most powerful at the end of the night, so shortchanging two hours out of eight technically “only” diminishes your total sleep by 25%, but in reality the diminished portion of sleep is that portion that would have been the most restorative.

I’ll leave you with this from Mr. Walker:

“It took mother nature 3.6 million years to put this eight-hour thing called ‘a night of sleep’ in place, and within the space of 70 years . . . we’ve lopped off almost 20-25% of that. Imagine coming along ans saying, “in the next 100 years . . . for the entirety of human society, I’m going to reduce their oxygen saturation by about 20-25%. Do you think that’s a good idea?” I’m thinking I should probably take this more seriously in my life, especially as I age.