400mg Before Bed Improves Deep Sleep by 1700%

Dave Asprey (0:00)

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You get home late. You're hungry. Now you have to figure out what's for dinner. That's when healthy eating gets hard. But having quality protein ready to cook changes that. ButcherBox delivers 100% grass-fed beef, organic chicken and wild-caught seafood and more. And they put a lot of work into their sourcing, which is why I like it. You get clear information about where your meat comes from and how they source it. I love the convenience of always knowing I have a grass-fed steak that I could just throw in the grill. And I know it came from a good place. You choose the cuts and the proteins you want, then ButcherBox delivers them straight to your door. So when dinner rolls around, you already have something you feel good about cooking. So to get the best meat on your table easily, give ButcherBox a try. Go to butcherbox.com/humanupgrade and they'll give you $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ribeye, New York strip or filet in every box for a year with free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com/humanupgrade. Be sure to use the link so they know we sent you and you get the discount. Why are we all so goddamn tired?

I'm not being sarcastic here. Researchers tracked deep sleep in 149 men from age 16 to 83

In their 20s, deep sleep was 19% of the night. By their 40s, it was 3%.

And their conclusion was that by 45, most men have almost entirely lost the ability to generate deep sleep at all. This used to be me too. I slept eight hours a night, but my tracker said five minutes of deep sleep. I thought you've got to be kidding me. But it all changed when I started taking 400 mg of one molecule before bed.

Hey, I'm Dave Asprey, the father of biohacking. And today I'm going to show you exactly what this molecule is. It all begins with a simple flower. In 1995, a group of researchers pulled apart chamomile in a lab. People had been drinking this stuff before bed for about 4000 years. So they wanted to see if there was anything to it. What they found was a compound called Apigenin. And Apigenin was binding to the central benzodiazepine receptor the same site Valium works on. That is your brain's GABA system. Think of GABA as the volume down button on your brain. Everything up there is either firing or being told to shut up. GABA is what tells it to shut up. And that is why you cannot force yourself to sleep. Sleep is not something you do.

It is what happens when the noise finally drops. GABA is what drops it. The most drugged receptor in all of medicine. Alcohol works here, Valium works here, Ambien works here. The difference is that every one of those grabs the knob and yanks it. The Apigenin turns it gently, but does it work? When researchers gave Apigenin to mice, it calmed them down at doses comparable to actual benzodiazepines, but it did not sedate them. They had to give 10 times the dose before any sedation showed up at all.

So Apigenin effectively gives you calm without sedation, which sleeping pills cannot do. So unlike when you take Ambien, sleep 9 hours and wake up feeling worse than when you went to bed, on Apigenin you get a much weaker and smoother binding, contributing to smoother and gentler sleep. So how much should you take? Apigenin comes in supplement form.

If you read the title, you already know. 400 mg about 45 minutes before bed does the trick. Most products sell 50, which is obviously not enough. This 50 mg number, by the way, did not come from a dose response study. It came from capsule sizing, and then a podcast repeated it, and now it is the industry standard. I also recommend taking it away from your evening meal. Apigenin absorbs slowly, and food competes with it. That is the single biggest reason people try this once, feel nothing, and quit. And if you take a blood thinner, phenytoin or NSAIDs regularly, check with your doctor. Apigenin inhibits one of the liver enzymes that clears those drugs, so check with your doc, and don't be stupid. So Apigenin is great, but is it 1700% better? No.