#370 Full Guide How to Sleep Better and Fix Bad Sleeping Patterns - Greg Potter PhD

Greg Potter (0:00)

Daytime eating in people-ungoing simulator nightshifts improved their metabolic control, but interestingly, it also improved some measures of anxiety and depression too. All of these improvements seem to be related to improved circadian alignment.

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 focus is on the circadian rhythms and light-dark cycles. In this episode, we're going to talk about sleep. How do you improve your sleep? How do you fix bad sleeping patterns? And what's the most optimal way to sleep in alignment with the circadian rhythms? This episode is brought to you by Alitura Naturals.

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Greg Potter (1:14)

Thanks, Siim. Yeah, nice to be here. It's been a while.

Siim Land (1:18)

Yeah, you've been on the podcast several times, maybe like two or three times already.

And we've always, you know, talked about circadian rhythms and sleep and time-restricted eating and those things. And I think it's worthwhile to, you know, update or, you know, talk about the newest updates to these fields of research and, you know, health optimization. So yeah, I think you're one of the best people to talk about it with, because yeah, like, I think you were one of the first people I started to see online who did talk about a lot more of the, you know, circadian rhythms and the concept of time-restricted eating. And you obviously have a PhD in that. So yeah, I think you're the best person to discuss these topics with. So yeah, you can maybe briefly summarize, like, what is, you know, why is such a fuss about the circadian rhythms in the first place, and how does it relate to things like your sleep, your health, and longevity overall?

Greg Potter (2:19)

Absolutely. I'll frame my answer in the context of evolution, because I think that's helpful. And if we think about the course of evolution, then organisms obviously evolved on a planet in which there are predictable cycles in light and dark. And in response to that, things like food availability, fluctuations in temperature, risk of predation, and so on. And we can think of this as being a kind of environmental clock. In response to that, organisms evolved their own biological clocks. And these produce rhythmic changes in their biology and hence behavior across different time scales to optimize their bodies according to time of day.

So some examples of these that are particularly relevant would be things like the sleep-wake cycle, obviously. And we are diurnal organisms with daytime active. So our bodies are best set for wakefulness, physical activity, eating and digesting food during the daytime when the sun is up. And then at night, our bodies are suited to resting and fasting and various different restorative processes.

And when you think about this, it will be very hard for our bodies and energetically inefficient to try and do everything all at once. And so these biological clocks, they separate the timing of processes that aren't really compatible with each other. That might be building new structures, such as new proteins and skeletal muscles. It might be breaking down and recycling structures. It might be clearing metabolites that have accumulated during weightfulness. And we see this in the brain, for example. The brain has its own immune system called the glymphatic system that's more active during the nighttime when we sleep.

And that's one of the reasons why sleep is very important to brain health and very relevant to risk of things like neurodegenerative diseases too. And a simple way that we can bring all of this together is that optimizes our bodies for weightfulness because it's during weightfulness that we have the ability to pass on our genes. And there's an analogy that I really like that I came across recently by a chronobiologist named Til Ronenberg, who's best known for his work on social jet lag, I'd suggest, he came up with that as a construct.

And he says that wake is a bit like the race in a Formula One race, for instance. And then sleep is like the pit stop. And again, just going back to evolution, distant organisms that were early in the history of life were probably quite simple.