- You've heard your whole life
that you should get eight hours of sleep every single night.
It's advice so common
that even your grandma has probably told you that
at least three times.
But that advice has always annoyed me somewhat
because it's like, yeah,
obviously I should get eight hours of sleep
every single night, but how realistic is that?
I'm sure there are plenty of successful people in the world,
in fact, I've heard of some successful people
in the world who sleep less than eight hours a night
and they seem to be doing just fine.
Besides in my own life, I've had plenty of great days
on six hours of sleep, six and a half hours of sleep,
and I've probably had a bunch of really bad days
on eight or nine hours of sleep.
So how important is getting eight hours of sleep really?
Does it matter that much?
So in this video, we're gonna get to the bottom of it.
I partnered up with this company called Sleep Number
that makes these super advanced smart beds
that track every aspect of your sleep.
And they agreed to send me one
and use it for this experiment
as long as I give them a shout out, et cetera, et cetera.
So over the past three weeks,
I've been sleeping in this bed exclusively
and it's been tracking every aspect of my sleep in detail,
how much restful sleep I got,
how many times I exited the bed,
how many times I wet the...
No, I'm just kidding.
And while all of this tracking
was going on in the background, I was just living my life,
and every single day I was vlogging how I felt.
You know, how's my energy levels?
How is my general productivity and mental clarity?
And it wasn't until the very end of the experiment
that I actually went back, reviewed the footage,
and paired the footage up with my actual sleep data
to see if there was any correlation
between my energy levels, my overall will to live,
and the amount that I slept.
And the results blew my mind
and it completely changed the way I view sleep in general,
and I'm sure you'll find it extremely fascinating as well.
Let me show you what I'm talking about.
- So I basically just woke up.
I don't feel that good.
Yeah, if I were to guess,
I had six and a half hours (buzzer buzzes) of sleep,
which isn't terrible, right, by any means.
I'll have a good day today.
We did not have a good day today.
I just felt brain dead.
Okay, so brain dead was the common theme today.
I probably slept very poorly
or my sleep quality wasn't very good.
73.
It took me an hour and 50 minutes to fall asleep.
I was only restful for five hours and 49 minutes.
Restless for 40 minutes, sub six hours of sleep.
This is what I look like
and this is how I operate on sub six hours.
Today, it's 3:44 PM, I feel pretty good.
Not fantastic.
I wouldn't say I'm teaming with energy
like a hive full of caffeinated bees.
I've had worse days.
Yeah, so I'm going to assume I didn't sleep fantastically,
like probably sub seven hours amount of sleep.
Let's see.
Yeah, see look, I got an 83 SleepIQ score
and I think the thing that's propping up my SleepIQ score
is that I had absolutely no bed exits
or restless sleep until the very end.
But still look at that,
six hours and 37 minutes of sleep,
it's still sub seven hours.
So you know, I'm not feeling great.
I'm also quite alarmed by the time it took
for me to fall asleep, two hours and 10 minutes.
I was probably on my phone for a long time.
I was exposed to a lot of blue light.
Let's keep going.
What's up?
I slept with my contacts in last night.
Oh my.
I look awful.
I look like, like awful.
Like my...
(laughs) I'm the same person.
It's a slower day.
I'm gonna play some video game.
I also was trying my blue blockers last night
so there wasn't a lot of blue light getting...
Yeah, I look so bad.
Like look at me.
This is like degenerate me.
So we can learn a lot from this.
I look bad.
So was it the sleep, was it the quality of sleep,
or was it the fact that I slept with my contacts in?
77.
I got six and a half hours of sleep again.
Well, I went to bed at 3:30 AM, like that's just not okay,
and I woke up at 11.
This is not the face of somebody who is teaming with energy,
who's excited about life, and who has drive and charisma.
Like look at that.
So I ate a bunch of pizza last night.
It was a terrible idea and I slept awfully.
I look 45 years old today.
I look 45 years old every day.
And I'm gonna see how productive I can be.
I'm in a rut.
I'm glad we have this as a control.
You can see the difference
between like how I am operating and like how I look
and how I'm talking in this versus like right now.
11:02 PM, so this is later that day.
I don't know what happened to me
and now it is 11:00 PM and I'm absolutely bagged
and I'm looking forward to...
just being a good person.
(laughs) That's so sad.
Clearly, I was wiped.
68.
Once again, man, I'm loving these six and a half,
six hour 45 minutes of sleep.
So apparently, I was restless for an hour and a half.
And that's what happens to me when I eat pizza, dude.
When I eat pizza before bed, gobble, gobble, gobble,
I always have to like wake up later in the night
to like burp myself as if I'm an infant.
Six and a half hours of sleep
is not enough for me to feel snappy,
even though I feel like it is.
Every single morning I'm like,
"Oh, I got six and a half hours."
But as the day goes on,
it's proving to be like not a great day.
Okay, today, I feel good.
I actually feel like I got sleep finally.
Like it feels like I got high quality sleep
and I notice a world of difference.
I don't know if you guys are noticing,
words are coming to my mouth faster.
I don't look so out of it,
even though this is not a great frame to pause on.
My brain feels clearer
and I'm just more motivated to do difficult things.
Yeah, we'll see how it plays out.
Update, I just did A-roll.
Holy shit, did I have energy.
Speaking, like words were just coming to me.
I had energy to say what I meant and mean what I say.
It was a great experience.
You can tell.
Like I can tell anyways.
I still, once again, don't look great,
but my brain power is so much better.
Holy smokes, what a good night sleep.
Seven hours and 55 minutes of sleep.
So I basically got eight hours, a 95 sleep score.
My mind is kind of blown right now
because you don't think that the difference
between six and a half hours of sleep
and eight hours of sleep is that vast,
but clearly we can see that I'm like two different people.
This is way cooler than I thought it'd be, honestly.
What did we get the next day?
Hello there.
I feel really good today.
Right now, I feel like alert.
I feel awake, I feel stable.
I like this feeling.
This is probably like the best
or second best that I've felt.
I probably got like 89, 90 in this one.
Let's see.
96! It was my best one.
That's crazy.
7:59, so I got eight hours of sleep again.
That's the difference. Holy smokes.
The two times that I've felt really good
and I'm like, "I feel good, I can do it today,"
both times it's 'cause I got eight hours of sleep.
It's no joke.
Let's see how I continue to do as the days go on.
I feel a little too good.
I think a lot of that has to do
with the fact that I've been,
I've been being productive.
Yeah, like mental clarity is just insane right now.
Hmm.
Did I just get like insane sleep last night?
I feel really good.
I had energy for days today.
I had energy to spare.
I had energy.
Yeah, I was super productive.
Hi, welcome to Chili's.
My energy levels are still fantastic
and I'm going to bed now, 12:00 PM...
No, 12:00 AM.
That's how time works.
But now I'm gonna go to sleep
and hopefully it's a good sleep again.
All right, the reveal.
Tun-ta-da-da, drum roll please.
85.
This sleep score isn't as good as the day before,
but this is the first time ever
that I had two good nights in a row.
So I think that's the difference here.
Hey, I played hockey last...
Hold, why did my skin look so bad?
I played hockey last night, didn't go so well.
I just look bad.
Don't I look bad today?
68.
I wasn't expecting the correlation to be this tight.
The correlation is tight.
So let's see what the next day was like.
I just wanna say today was an absolute disaster.
I feel like I barely had any sleep.
I basically didn't do anything today.
Like it was wild.
I was brain dead.
60, four and a half hours of sleep.
It makes sense. Yeah.
So if this is how you want to live your life, Joey,
get bad sleep.
Hey guys, I feel really good today.
Yesterday was an absolute disaster. I didn't do anything.
Today, it feels completely different.
It feels like I actually have energy, I have mental clarity,
and I'm making good headway on my projects.
I would be shocked if I didn't sleep well the night before.
90.
Guys, I don't know what to say
at this point anymore. (laughs)
Just stop the video.
What else do I need to say?
My entire energy, my enthusiasm about life,
my ability to get things done,
the confidence in myself to be able to get things done,
it skyrockets when I sleep better.
And all throughout my life I've had this understanding
that like, oh, as long as I get six hours of sleep,
I'm functional.
But what that really means is like, I am barely surviving.
And on six hours of sleep, my willpower goes down,
I make worse decisions and not take care of myself
and play more video games,
which results in worse sleep,
which results in perpetuating
that type of suboptimal lifestyle.
If you can find a way to sleep better,
then all of a sudden you have
a different aura about yourself
and you're able to make better decisions
that will influence better sleep going forward.
So I think it's becoming far too clear
that having a lot of good quality sleep,
you know, optimizing your sleep is crucial to feeling good.
But if I just ended the video here
and just said getting good sleep is good for you,
it would be kind of a useless video.
It'd still be kind of interesting
to see how important it is,
but I don't want you to walk away from this video
just being like, "Man, I just gotta get better sleep,
but I have no idea how."
So here are some tips that I learned through this experiment
that will help you
get as much high quality sleep as possible
so that you can go and transform your life.
Tip number one is that you need to get off your phone
while you're in bed.
I noticed that there was a huge correlation
between the amount of time I was spending on my phone,
blasting my brain with blue light,
and the quality of sleep I got because of it.
Being on your phone while you're trying to go to sleep
ruins your sleep for two reasons.
Number one is that it stops you from actually falling asleep
and it cuts into the potential time window
that you should be sleeping,
and instead, you're replacing that with being on your phone.
And as we learned, there's a gigantic difference
between six and a half and seven and a half hours of sleep.
So while you're in bed,
the best use of your time is to be asleep.
Now, this might be obvious, but you also might be thinking,
"Well, I can't really go to sleep right away
and being on my phone kind of helps me burn some time
so that when I feel that wave of sleep,
I can ride it into la-la land."
Which I understand totally,
but it's a little bit silly if you think about it.
'Cause the blue light from your phone
messes with your circadian rhythm.
It tells your brain subconsciously that it's daytime.
So the likelihood that you'll actually
feel this wave of sleep is reduced.
And so many of us get trapped in this cycle
of just like waiting for this wave of sleep
that never comes.
So if you're looking for something to do
while you're waiting for that wave of sleep,
then I highly recommend reading a book.
Doesn't have to be super exciting.
In fact, if it's kind of boring, it's probably better.
You will be shocked as to how quickly it's just lights out
when you start reading.
The second biggest tip I can give
is to not drink caffeine past lunchtime.
And there's a very specific reason for this.
I've talked about it in previous videos.
It's that the half life of caffeine
is between five and seven hours.
And what that means is not that the caffeine
goes away from your system in five to seven hours,
it means that half of the caffeine is still there
after five to seven hours,
and then it takes another five to seven hours
for half of that amount of caffeine to leave your system.
So if we average that time out to six hours
and you stop drinking caffeine at lunchtime,
then by midnight, you'll have about quarter of the caffeine
still in your system, which should be plenty of time
for a lot of that caffeine to be flushed away,
helping you feel drowsy when you're actually
supposed to put your head on your pillow
and get some high quality sleep.
The third tip I have is to make your room colder.
One thing that I noticed very clearly
throughout this experiment was that when my room was hot
and I was inclined to take off covers
instead of put them on, I had way worse sleep.
And I don't really know the science behind this,
but you've probably noticed as well,
when you have nightmares, you usually wake up in a sweat.
And it gets me thinking,
did you wake up in a sweat because of your nightmares
or were you having nightmares in the first place
because you were sweating and you were super hot?
Another thing that I noticed
is that when my room is super cold,
I really wanna just bundle up and get warm.
It's sort of the singular focus of my brain
and it almost has a meditation effect.
It brings your consciousness away
from this cerebral cortex anxiety,
what did I do wrong earlier today?
And it brings your consciousness
almost to this localized concern.
It's like, "Oh, I need to get cozy.
Oh, it's nice to be cozy.
I think I'll fall asleep."
You know, it kind of simplifies your brain
into getting warm and falling asleep.
It's perfect. So make your room colder.
Another tip I have is don't eat
a bunch of pizza right before you go to bed.
There wasn't much difference
between eating a light snack and eating nothing before bed,
but there was a huge difference between that
and eating a ton before bed.
So if I had a bunch of fried chicken or pizza
right before bed, it ruined my quality of sleep.
It was really hard to get into deep sleep
and I had to keep on waking up multiple times
to like burp myself.
It's just not a fun time.
So the bottom line is, if you have to sleep anyways,
if it's a non-negotiable, unavoidable part
of being a human being,
then why not find a way to make that better somehow
so that the entire experience of living improves.
Because it's one-to-one.
The better the sleep, the better you'll feel.
Hopefully, this video made you think about
why you should get better sleep
and how you should get better sleep
using some of the things that I learned
through this sleep experiment.
So I hope that by using this information
that you're able to find a good night's sleep tonight
because I feel like you deserve it.
A big thank you to Sleep Number
for making this video possible,
for providing me with this super high tech smart bed
because without this tool,
this experiment would not be possible.
The sheer detail of the sleep tracking technology
present in this smart bed is second to none.
It was so incredibly easy to figure out
and problem solve why I wasn't sleeping properly.
Not only that,
but the smart bed also makes it extremely easy
to make modifications to help you get better sleep.
For instance, I found that I'm just a lot more comfortable
and more likely to get into deep sleep
when my head is slightly elevated.
And I also prefer the bed
to be just a little bit on the firmer side
which is easily adjustable in the app as well.
And I remember there were two nights in particular
where my feet were super cold, they were like ice bricks,
and for some reason they just couldn't get warm.
But thankfully, I remembered
that there's also built-in foot warmers.
Basically, this smart bed does all the heavy lifting for you
so you can just focus on getting a good night's sleep
so that you can tackle the next day with energy.
So if you're interested in checking out the smart bed
that I used for this experiment,
use my link in the description below.
Check out the Sleep Number 360 Smart Bed
and thanks again to Sleep Number for sponsoring this video.
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Thank you so much for watching
and we'll catch you in the next video.