Welcome to Joy Lab!: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Henry: Hello, I'm Henry Emmons and welcome to Joy Lab
Aimee: And I'm
Henry: Lab
Aimee: Aimee Prasek here at Joy Lab. We infuse science with soul to help you build your resilience and uncover your joy. And today we're talking about short sleepers. So there is no shortage on optimization strategies, biohacking, all sorts of stuff teaching us how we can cut down on sleep and get more done. And I think it's a vicious cycle. So that's part of what we're talking about today. In the majority of cases, [00:01:00] it is a bad idea to cut down on your sleep. Henry, I am always struck by your conversations on sleep problems and the onset of mental health issues in late teens and twenties.
So do you want to talk about that? I think it's a good intro to this conversation.
Henry: Sure, sure. So on, on one hand, it kind of surprises me that this is still a conversation folks are having, about how to how to get by and get more done with less sleep. But on the other hand, I kind of get it because that's how I thought of it for much of my own life, for myself. And I didn't really change my tune until I started researching for a book I wrote about taking care of your brain as you age called Staying Sharp. And the research I found on sleep is just so compelling that I, since then, I [00:02:00] have done a 180 and I see sleep as the linchpin both for good cognitive health, keeping your brain working well, but also good mental health. Absolutely the linchpin. And so you're right, I do talk a lot these days about how sleep impacts mental health, especially in that age range you mentioned sometime in the late teens through the, probably through the whole 20s, but especially the mid 20s.
And those are the years, probably from about age 17 to 25 or so, those are the years when many of the most severe mental health conditions first show up. And those are also the years when taking a few pretty simple preventive measures might make a huge difference in the long term outcome, even if someone does have one of these more severe illnesses.
For [00:03:00] many years, actually for most of my career, I worked part time in college mental health. And at one time I was consulting to seven colleges at once. So I learned by seeing this happen over and over again, that almost every time that somebody had their first episode of something like major depression or even bipolar illness or panic disorder, it was almost always preceded by a significant disruption in their sleep.
Now, it's a little complex because not sleeping is also a symptom of many of these conditions, but I am convinced it is also a trigger for them. And at that age in the late teens and twenties, the problem is usually it's not that they can't sleep, but they have insomnia like a lot of us do later in life.
Their problem is usually that they choose not to sleep [00:04:00] or that their sleep pattern gets so terribly disrupted. So one of the things I really noticed with the college students is that oftentimes people would have a mental health crisis while they were traveling. Traveling is stressful, but I was very aware that it also involved the change in time zones.
So, really significant disruption in sleep pattern. Or it might be simply from pulling all nighters, you know, to study or to party. And then just getting so out of sync with their normal biorhythms that their body gets confused and it just doesn't function properly. The connection with too little sleep or sleeping at the wrong times is so striking, that I have come to believe that for many folks, if they simply learn to take really, really good care of their sleep, they may never have another episode, even for more of those severe illnesses. It's just that important.
Aimee: Yeah, it is, it is [00:05:00] important and it's hard to do. I think there are a lot of reasons why we may not get enough sleep. It might not be any conscious choice of some biohacking trying to do more. Sometimes it just feels worth it. For me, for example, as an introvert, I love the quiet, peaceful solitude that comes into our house when everybody else is asleep.
Just kind of brings you in, in the evening hours and you forget about how you might feel the next day. So we get that and we have resources to support you to make some changes there. And I know as well, some folks are thinking, I sleep okay. I can get by with less sleep, a little extra caffeine or a lot of extra caffeine. Let's dig into that. There is some research to say that there may be a small percentage of folks who need or who can get by with six and a half hours or less of sleep. And this is a genetic variant [00:06:00] at cause here. And when I say a small amount of folks, the research here is lacking.
It's difficult research to do, but they formally identified less than a hundred families who have this gene variation or these gene variations that enable them to get by with less than six hours of sleep and without noticeable side effects. So it's extremely likely that none of us listening right now are in that group. And those are technically or they're called the short sleepers. So it's like a group of people, the short sleepers, probably less than 100 of us out there. I'm not one of them. So, here's the deal with cutting your sleep under about seven hours for the vast majority of us. I want to pull from a study from Van Dongen and colleagues.
Henry: I'll put it in the show notes. It's a good one. So in this study, they had three groups of folks or three sleep doses that folks followed for 14 days in a row. So [00:07:00] either four hours of time in bed per night. That's what the term they use. So they obviously can't force people to sleep. so they have four hours of time in bed per night, six hours or eight hours. And they compared those groups to folks who did three days of zero sleep. So I hate to be in any of those groups, I think. The eight hour would be fine. But they did find that folks who had those sleep periods of either four or six hours per night for 14 days had significant negative impacts in their cognitive performance. And those folks, the ones who had four or six hours, performed as bad as the folks who did not sleep for two full nights. on those cognitive tasks. So this wasn't, you know, they weren't looking at mental health outcomes or measures. This is really focused on cognitive tasks. But we can see how these things relate, [00:08:00] certainly. And the subjective, I think this is really important, the subjective reports of those restricted sleepers, so the four and six hour groups, they were not aware of their cognitive losses. So they didn't really notice how bad they were doing. And they were, again, doing as bad as the folks who hadn't slept for two days in a row. Wild. Yeah. Wow. Well, that reminds me of some of the research I came across that I don't think this is any surprise to anyone who's experienced this, that one night, just one night of poor sleep, let's, you know, it doesn't, have to get anywhere close to zero sleep, but one night of poor sleep affects most people's cognitive abilities, memory, sharpness, and their mood really significantly.
And then, conversely, one night of really good sleep can just reverse all of that, just [00:09:00] kind of undo it almost magically.
Aimee: Yeah.
Henry: So as somebody who has lived for many years on six to six and a half hours of sleep, I can tell you that I feel and function a whole lot better now that I am very careful to get between seven and eight hours.
I used to see myself perhaps as being something of an exception without realizing there were, there's only a hundred families, known families in the,
Aimee: all do that. That's the
Henry: I know, but I exactly, but I don't anymore. I believe what the science is telling us, and that nearly everyone really does need between seven and nine hours of sleep per night.
Less than seven or more than nine will leave most of us feeling worse physically, mentally, emotionally, every which way.
Aimee: It's wild though. I think you just described the issue there too. [00:10:00] Now you can tell how better you function, but when you were in it, when you were only sleeping six hours per night, could you see it? Did you feel like you were not as sharp?
Henry: No.
No, yes.
Aimee: Yeah, so there is there is this interesting phenomenon that this study described, as I said, and that you just explained as well, Henry, that we just don't see it.
So then when we get into good sleep patterns, then it's like, holy smokes, I feel so much better. So we want you to all sleep really well. We want you to function at your best and feel like you're functioning at your best as well. So we have our sleep workshop for you available in our Community. That's fantastic. Head over there. If you are sleeping six hours or less per night, head over there. We also have our sleep section in our Podcourse that offers some support. I'll pop those links in the show notes. So to close [00:11:00] this, I do want to share some wisdom from the Dalai Lama, some very concise wisdom that I think we can all follow. Here it is. "Sleep is the best meditation."
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