Transcriber: Ola Królikowska Reviewer: Ido Dekkers
Thank you so much for this warm introduction.
I'm standing at a train track somewhere in the landscape.
With tears running down my face.
Just about to jump in front of the next train.
That’s not even 100 metres away.
My heart is hammering like crazy in my chest.
My body pumped with adrenaline.
This piercing sound of the train brakes is going into my ears.
A train comes closer like 60 meters, 40, 20, 10 meters,
and all of a sudden,
everything around me appears like in slow motion.
I could even see the train driver in his eyes and see his panic.
Thirteen months earlier, I had made
a bad decision to cut down my sleep to two hours per night to work more
on my just founded startup.
That was a bad idea. It almost killed me.
But I was lucky because my labrador Carly, literally in the very last second,
stopped me from doing this final step.
I had many great experts by my side who helped me to get rid of
my darkest demons.
But one problem always remained.
I was tired, very tired, always.
Do you know this feeling when you sleep seven plus hours
and you’re still tired in the morning?
We’re not alone.
But now, 10 years later, I can tell you there is a solution to this.
It's not sleeping longer. The solution is called deep sleep densification.
Deep sleep densification is a sleep strategy that concentrates
the most rejuvenated part of sleep,
which is deep sleep into the first hours of the night
and thereby optimizing recovery.
It helps you really to wake up fully energized in the morning,
but without sleeping a single minute longer.
It's kind of like high intensity training applied to sleep.
And this sleep strategy not only helped me,
but really thousands of people all around the globe and one of them is my client,
Tom.
Tom is a senior executive in a tech company.
36 years old, a father of two kids,
and he approached me about two years ago because he's tired all the time.
He feels like a zombie, exhausted, groggy every single day.
He already went to some doctors, took sleeping pills,
but nothing really changed his problem.
First of all, we started to track Tom's sleep.
In this case with a ring that gives us all
the recovery sleep and recovery data.
And to start with a result his sleep data was a complete disaster,
even though he slept seven to eight hours on most of the days.
How is this even possible?
On the one hand, he’s sleeping enough, but on the other hand,
he’s tired all the time.
And to make you understand how this is possible,
let me introduce you into the latest science of sleep.
What we can see here is something that we call a hypnogram.
A hypnogram shows us how we sleep, and it’s pretty easy to remember.
Sleep is just like football, a game of 90 minutes. What do I mean by that?
During the course of the night,
we go through different sleep stages that each lasts about 90 minutes.
And if we get five of these cycles we sleep seven and a half hours.
That’s why most people would argue that seven and a half hours
is a good number to sleep.
Here’s my first brain tip for you.
Please always sleep in these multiples of 90 minutes,
like six point zero hours, seven point five or nine point zero.
But not in between because if you do,
your alarm will wake you up in the middle of an unfinished sleep cycle.
And the result is something that we call sleep inertia.
That’s a state of impaired cognitive performance
that for some people only lasts 15 to 20 minutes.
Others suffer from it the whole day,
and we can avoid it if we always wake up at the end of a finished sleep cycle.
Now let’s zoom in a little deeper into one of these cycles,
and then we see three different sleep stages.
REM sleep, rapid eye movement, the stage in which we dream.
Then we have light sleep and then we have deep sleep.
And let's zoom in even deeper into this deep sleep stage,
because that's where our physical recovery is happening.
And we could talk for hours and even days just about deep sleep,
because it’s such a fascinating sleep stage.
But for this talk now, I picked out two very essential processes for you.
The first one that happens in deep sleep is that we grow. What do I mean by that?
In deep sleep our body releases
a hormone that’s called human growth hormone, or HGH.
This human growth hormone is kind of like an elixir to live a great life,
because if you have enough of it, you have high energy levels.
You perform better physically and mentally.
You are fitter, leaner, stronger and you're even younger
because this hormone slows down your natural aging process,
which could all be the difference between feeling like this, this or that.
All right. The second thing that happens in deep sleep is brain detox.
A few years ago, some scientists identified
a pretty fascinating brain system that we didn’t know until then.
It’s called the glymphatic system.
We all know the lymphatic system,
which is responsible to wash out toxins from our body.
But the lymphatic system cannot enter our brain
because our brain is protected by a brain blood barrier.
And what these scientists found out
is that our brain has its own lymphatic system,
called the glymphatic system named after these glial cells that it’s made of.
So this glymphatic system has one key function,
which is to wash out toxic proteins from our brains.
These toxic proteins build up in all of our brains in this very moment.
It's a byproduct from using our brain.
So you could imagine this glymphatic system is kind of like
the waste removal of our brain.
If this runs on a regular basis, we have a clean brain.
But if this doesn't run on a regular basis,
a.k.a. that you don't get regular enough deep sleep,
we have a problem because
if this glymphatic system doesn’t wash them through our brain,
these toxic proteins build up these plaque structures.
We call them beta amyloids and they are one of the key risk factors
for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
So there's so much more going on,
our immune system kicks really into high gear
and produces way more natural killer cells.
We overhaul our cardiovascular system.
We consolidate and save new memories in our brain and so much more going on.
The key question is how much deep sleep do we need to let all this magic happen?
How much deep sleep do we need to have a clean brain,
strong immune system and enough growth hormone?
When I learned the answer to this question for the first time,
this was really a life changing moment because it's not that long.
It is just 1.5 hours, after 1.5 hours of deep sleep,
all physical recovery processes are finished.
Most people really ask themselves, How long do I need to sleep?
Is it six hours or seven, maybe eight or nine on the weekends?
Let me introduce you to another question,
which is how long do I have to sleep to get 1.5 hours of deep sleep?
To answer this question for yourself,
let me introduce you to another phenomenon from the sleep science.
A few minutes ago, I told you that these sleep cycles last 90 minutes.
What we can see here now is the share of deep sleep per cycle.
And what we can see here is that in the first cycle,
we have a large chunk of 40 minutes of deep sleep,
in the second already a little less and less and less.
So the share of deep sleep decreases over the course of the night.
That’s the ideal case, the theory.
The reality, especially for people with high levels of stress,
looks a little different.
We call this junk sleep.
It means that you’re caught up in light sleep stages.
So even though you get, like in this example, eight hours of sleep,
you only get a fraction of the deep sleep you need.
And the result is you're still tired.
All right. So now we understand the mechanics of sleep.
Let’s get back to my client, Tom,
because I want to share with you the raw data that sleep tracking gave us.
This was a representative night total sleep seven hours and 14 minutes.
Deep sleep is just two minutes.
We need 90 minutes of deep sleep, but this guy has only two minutes.
Let me be honest with you, he didn’t believe the numbers.
He said that this tracking doesn’t work. This couldn’t be possible.
We needed to step up our game a little bit.
We applied a medical grade tool and electrocardiogram.
The results from this tracking were even worse.
Take this.
Total sleep is 7 hours 39 minutes, deep sleep less than one single minute.
Tom was shocked.
I was not shocked because I see this kind of data every single day.
But he was. Here’s the thing with just two minutes of deep sleep.
None of the things that happen in this precious sleep stage
can be performed by our bodies.
Now Tom starts to understand why he’s tired all the time.
Why he never gets rid of the cold in winter,
why he looks 10 years older than he actually is.
All of these things become transparent.
If you understand that you hardly have any deep sleep for the last weeks, months,
years or maybe even decades.
So when you don’t get sufficient deep sleep, you are a low energy,
low performing, bad health and faster aging shadow of yourself.
What’s the solution? Well, it’s not sleeping longer like we just learned.
With junk sleep patterns like Tom’s,
he would have to sleep 29 days to get 90 minutes of deep sleep.
The solution to this problem is deep sleep densification.
What we do here, it’s a step by step approach to pull down
the lighter sleep stages down to the bottom where they belong to,
especially in the first half of the night.
And we have many levers to do that. We will lower your resting heart rate.
We will work on your racing mind. We will eliminate deep sleep roadblocks.
We will upgrade your hormonal setup and many more things.
So this is not magic. That’s pure physiology.
We don’t have time to go through this whole system here
but let me share with you three very simple
yet powerful quick wins to get you started.
Number one, please try to get 10 minutes in the morning
and in the evening sunlight into your eyes.
This will activate intelligence cells in our retina.
We call them melanopsin cells and they can detect the special mix
of blue, yellow and red light rays
and give a timestamp into your brain and your internal body clock.
This will anchor and re-sync your sleep rhythm.
That’s number one.
The second quick win I want to share with you is this.
Please eat one gram of high quality protein per day
per kilogram of your own body weight.
Protein is not only for people who want to gain muscle.
Protein is equally essential for people who want to upgrade the deep sleep.
High quality proteins are the essential building blocks
for building and creating the neurotransmitters
and the hormones like serotonin, like human growth hormone, like melatonin.
We need to generate great deep sleep.
The third quick win I want to share with you is this.
Before you go to bed, switch off your stress mode.
In stress mode, it’s very hard, almost impossible to get into deep sleep.
And the easiest and fastest way to do this is the so-called physiological side.
The physiological side is a very deeply ingrained reflex that we have
that humans also use in claustrophobic environments,
when we come down from crying,
but we also can do it intentionally. And the protocol is this one here.
It’s a double inhale where the first inhale is a little longer
than the second followed by an extended long exhale. It goes like this.
That's it. This by sneaking in additional oxygen with the second inhale,
we reinflate the millions of little facts on the surface of our lungs that are,
when we’re stressed, typically collapsed.
By this, we can offload way more oxygen than we typically do.
And when we then exhale very extended,
we really lower our autonomic arousal very fast.
This works in real time, so it’s nothing that you need to practice or train.
It’s deeply ingrained.
It’s a neural circuit that we all have from the minute of our birth.
All right. That’s really quick. Three quick wins.
These were the exact three quick wins that Tom started with.
These were the quick wins
that many people started their deep sleep densification journey.
Now the question is what about you?
How much deep sleep did you get last night, last week, last year?
Just imagine how you would feel if you would have 90 minutes of deep sleep
every single morning.
How you could rise and shine fully energized every single day.
And if it wasn’t just you but your family,
your friends, your loved ones, your colleagues,
I believe that every human being deserves 90 minutes of deep sleep.
But it doesn’t happen by itself.
Mahatma Gandhi once said: “Be the change you wish to see in this world.”
So let's take action. Let's create a world with less red eyes
and more sparkling eyes. Together now.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)