#283 How to Recover From Bad Sleep and Prepare for Short Night Sleep - Greg Potter PhD

Greg Potter (0:00)

Provided that you're happy with your sleep, don't worry about napping. Carrier napping is perfectly healthy behavior. That type of biphasic pattern can be just fine for many people.

It's just that in the case of insomnia, doing away with midday nap is generally very helpful.

Siim Land (0:15)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and today our guest is Greg Potter. Greg has a PhD in the Leeds University of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine. His research focuses on circadian rhythms and light-dark cycles.

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Siim Land (1:15)

Greg, welcome back to the show.

Greg Potter (1:16)

Hey Seem, thanks very much. Nice to be back.

Siim Land (1:20)

Yeah, it's been a long time since we actually saw each other face to face.

I think it was like in 2019 in the Biohacker Summit that we before the pandemic actually when we last saw. So what's been up since like that time?

Greg Potter (1:33)

Yeah, quite a lot. I have moved house many a time since then.

And I've also co founded a company named Resilient Nutrition.

And our goal was to make products that make feeling and performing better, easier and tastier. We launched our first products last July, and we have a new product that's coming out shortly too. So that's been keeping me very busy.

Siim Land (2:00)

Yeah, sounds really busy. In essence that you didn't like slow down with the pandemic and still was able to kind of work and get your things done.

Greg Potter (2:12)

Yeah, I'm guessing that if anything, things have sped up for both of us.

Siim Land (2:16)

Yeah, that's for sure. But did you change like your research, like your scientific research during this time in any way or what did your like focus shift mostly from just like the company?

Greg Potter (2:30)

No, not really. But I'm not really a researcher anymore. I finished my PhD in 2018

And since I last saw you, I published one paper which was about shift work and the ways in which I anticipate the future of shift work might pan out and ways that we can better understand how to help shift workers, how we can better design environments for those people and so on.

But I'm not actively involved in any research right now. And related to sleep, I do help various people with their sleep. And a lot of the work I've been doing recently, which relates to my work at Resilient Nutrition, is on helping certain types of athletes perform better and obviously sleep is part of that. But at Resilient Nutrition, we have several ambassadors and athletes, many of whom are ultra endurance athletes specifically, and they're a really interesting population because for those people, it's often the case that getting less sleep during an event relates to better performance. And so they need to be at their best when they're very short on sleep. And there are certain strategies that they can use to ensure that's the case.

Siim Land (3:50)

Wow, I didn't expect that, you should say the opposite of the way around.

Greg Potter (3:54)

Yeah, but if you just think about an ultra marathon, for example, and somebody's trying to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, and let's say that the race is 300 kilometers long, they want to spend as little time as possible sleeping so they can spend more time moving towards the finish line.

So it's not that sleep deprivation directly benefits performance. It's just that the total amount of sleep that someone gets tends to inversely relate to their performance.

Siim Land (4:26)

Yeah, that's right. You have to kind of just make the kind of best of it that you have with the short sleep.

Greg Potter (4:31)

Yeah, and learn to cope with it, but also prepare your body such that it copes as well as possible with that sleep loss.

Siim Land (4:40)

And that will also like similar strategies would also be useful for the shift work. But if you know that you're going to be with like this in this misaligned circadian rhythm and they're not getting maybe the optimal amount of sleep, then there are like some ways to kind of buffer against that.