Transcript: What if you Don't need 8 Hours of Sleep?

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• this one paper even found that you can actually bank extra sleep in advance to reduce the negative effects of under sleeping the next day

• Article by researcher alexa guze and is quite critical of walker's book guzzi's article had a very puzzling piece of data this is self-reported sleep duration from 35 studies comparing hours slept with people's overall chance of dying as you can see here for some reason seven hours of sleep is better than eight and nine hours of sleep is somehow worse than five

• it's absolutely incorrect to think that the more you sleep the healthier you're going to be

• Research all the peoples living without electricity fall asleep before or right around 10 pm and between 10 pm and 2 am is known as the golden time the most rejuvenating hours of sleep thanks to a big secretion in melatonin and growth hormone

• if you want to go to sleep at 10 pm get yourself outside between 6 am and 8 am

• Between your daytime light exposure and your nighttime light exposure that's most important in setting your body's block and also ensuring that you get high quality sleep at night

• sleep researcher dr potter he explains that the eye influences your circadian rhythm by detecting relative light levels so the effect of the super bright sun overpowers the relatively weaker effects of watching netflix on a puny screen at night

• not looking at screens at night and keeping your room dim kinda like this is ideal but getting plenty of light during the day could be just as if not more important

• there's no question that light effects sleep but light may have been connected to sleep largely because of its connection to temperature

• according to the sleep foundation 18.3 degrees celsius is the best temperature for sleep a warm bath can also help you fall asleep faster as it forces the body to rapidly cool itself down afterwards

• glycine is anti-inflammatory it boosts immunity and it helps relax muscles and our paleolithic ancestors probably Got much more glycine than us modern humans as they wouldn't have shied away from eating all those icky parts of the animals they hunted

• this study from 2007 found that Insomniacs who took 3 grams of glycine before bed fell asleep faster slept deeper and woke up feeling better interestingly they actually slept less presumably because their sleep became more efficient most people get about 4.5 to 6 grams of glycine per day however this french research group theorized that a 70 kilogram person would benefit from as much as 10 to 13 grams per day this 2012 study found that after restricting ordinary people's sleep by 25 percent supplementing beforehand with 3 grams of glycine helped preserve their mental function and reaction times the next day and they felt less tired

• speaking of compounds that seem to buffer sleep deprivation another is creatine greg potter mentioned that it seems to reduce your need for sleep

• magnesium does lots for sleep if you are deficient and about half of americans are deficient it helps you relax and it allows you to create more of the sleep Hormone melatonin

• tart cherry juice is another sleep aid because it contains the plant form of melatonin phytomelatonin

• gentle pressure on the skin switches the body from running on the alert sympathetic system to the relaxed parasympathetic system

• one of the first steps towards improving my sleep was probably moving out of my moldy old apartment this paper found that indoor mold correlated with increased sleep problems like insomnia snoring and daytime drowsiness another study of nearly 5 000 adults found that people who reported mold odors at home had more sleep disturbances