- Hey guys, I've had issues to sleep for years.
A really bad habit from childhood to stay till late
in combination with other things such as caffeine,
late sugar intake, or simply some stress.
Problem solved, and in this video I'll tell you how.
First of all I want to say
that I've done multiple experiments around mindfulness,
no caffeine, workouts and reading.
All of them contributed to my improvements
but there was one wake up call that changed the game.
In fact, this call was a book by Matthew Walker.
Why We Sleep?
If you come from a technical background, don't worry,
as every chapter is backed up with scientific evidence.
Let's go straight to the point.
This book gave me four lessons that fixed my problem.
Number one, the backstage system
Caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours.
For example, if you have a cup of coffee after dinner
around 7:30 PM, then by 1:30 AM, 50% of that caffeine
will be active circulating throughout our brain.
And you might think right, but I only do decaf.
But this doesn't mean non-caffeinated.
So if we're trying to stay awake till late and we use coffee
then we need to get ready for nasty consequences,
when our liver removes the caffeine from our system.
Now I'm talking to you, I'm awake.
I can see the camera.
I know you're on the other side.
If I go for a walk, I'll be looking around,
learning and experiencing things around me.
Getting raw ingredients.
This is called the reception state,
but there are two key states that happen when we sleep,
REM and non REM.
Non REM is all about reflection,
because we store and develop those raw ingredients
of new staff that we learn.
REM is all about the integration,
because we connect both raw ingredients
and build a more accurate model of how the world works.
Question for you,
have you ever thought of drinking alcohol to sleep better?
Well, alcohol is one of the most powerful killers
of REM sleep.
Meaning, less time to interconnect those raw ingredients,
less time to come up with innovative ideas
and of course less time for problem solving skills.
Oh yes, I know it's bad news.
Number two, why should we sleep?
Only 70 years ago when non REM and REM sleep concepts
were discovered, this was the beginning
of understanding more about how sleep helps
to solidify new memories.
The maturity of our deep non REM sleep
is early in the night.
Whereas our biggest REM sleep is late in the night.
Okay, let's make it simple and say
there are four sleep stages.
Stage number one,
this is the transition period between wakefulness and sleep,
taking five to 10 minutes.
Stage number two, the body temperature drops
and the heart rate begins to slow down.
And our brain starts to produce sleep activity or waves.
This takes around 20 minutes.
And then we go to stage three, when our muscles relax,
blood pressure and breathing rate drop
and we enter deep sleep.
All those three stages are part of the non REM sleep.
But the last stage is REM sleep where our dreams take place.
So in this station, number four,
our brain becomes more active,
our body more relaxed and static
and we dream and our eyes move rapidly.
That's why the name REM, rapid eye movement.
For me seeing these four stages is like, all right,
makes sense, but how is this really relevant to me?
Well, for every 30 seconds I'm talking
there has been a car accident somewhere
caused by people that didn't have a proper sleep.
So sleepy driving is actually much bigger
than alcohol and drugs driving.
I think you guys will laugh about this
but sleeping too little or having bad quality sleep
reduces our sperm count and also adds more deformities.
I don't say this, that's scientific evidence
shared by Matt Walker in this book.
Oh, one last thing before I forget,
that it's mentioned and supported with scientific evidence
linking sleep disruption and cancer.
So, I don't really want to ignore sleeping anymore.
Number three, why we dream?
The short answer is that dreams come from REM sleep
and they give us an overnight therapy.
These help us fight overnight the painful or emotional day.
In fact, it offers us some sort of solution
when waking up the following morning.
Freud believed that dreams came from unconscious wishes
that we didn't fulfill in real life.
He thought that there was some sort of filter
or a sensor within the mind.
In fact, he was certain he understood how the filter worked
so he could understand the dream by decrypting
and doing some reverse engineering to reveal it.
This is quite interesting because in the book
we can see the lack of any clear predictions
from Freud's theory and why the science didn't back it up.
Number four, how we can fix this?
The good news is that there's hope here.
I know there are thousands of tips on the internet
around this, but I'm a simple person.
So I've implemented five real rituals to improve my sleep.
The first one is a cool bedroom.
It's always easier to sleep when it's colder than hotter,
at this will drag our brain and body
in the correct temperature direction of sleep.
No lights will also help if you're one of those guys.
The second one is the alarm clock.
I used to have this snooze function and it was crazy.
It was like having shocks every five minutes till I woke up.
So I turned off that and now I got up only once
to minimize the repeated shock to my heart.
The next one is to reduce caffeine and alcohol intake.
To be honest, my issue was the coffee, not the alcohol.
So I set some rules to myself
such as my last coffee after lunch and no more.
The next one is no LED devices.
This one is insane, because I used to watch videos
and read on my phone all the time in bed.
I was suppressing melatonin release
which is the hormone that regulates the sleep wake cycle.
So I bought the Kindle instead
and no more infinite scrolling in bed.
And the final one is the rule of 20.
If after 20 minutes I cannot sleep,
then I go and do something else until I feel sleepy.
If you like this video you may also want to check
this video over here.
Called how one lesson changed my life,
which is about one technique I learned
in a special seminar with Tony Robbins based on NLP.
Thanks for watching and see you next time.