Matthew Walker, Ph.D.: Sleep and immune function, chronotypes, hygiene tips, and addressing questions about his book

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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I guess this week is Matthew Walker. Many of you are probably familiar with Matthew as back in, I think April of 2019 or so, we released a three-part series on sleep and then did a two-part follow-up of AMAs in June and October of that year. So if you're a listener of this podcast, you've spent a lot of time listening to Matthew Walker. That said, the demand to have Matthew back on has been overwhelming, and there's always a lot of stuff to talk about with Matthew. He's such an eloquent speaker on the topic of sleep. We just continue to get a lot of questions on this, and so we figured there was no better time and place to do this than here and now. So the interview was actually set up to be only an AMA, but one, we went very long, and also after the fact, Matthew and I felt that some of this topic really ought to be put out there for a more general audience. So what you're about to hear is the obviously, the regular episode for all listeners, and it's going to be followed by an AMA for subscribers only. So in this episode, we talk about sleep, in particular in the age of COVID. What have we learned about sleep through the lens of this pandemic? We also talk about the sleep foundations and the tips that we can use to trigger better sleep. We dive a lot deeper into the sleep chronotypes and even discuss a test that allows you to identify yours.
We talk a little brief discussion about children and nightmares and night terrors and things like that. And then we end the discussion talking about something that I think a lot of people have been asking about, which are some of the errors that readers have pointed out in Matthew's book, Why We Sleep. So as a quick refresher on Matthew, for those of you who might not know, he's a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, and he's the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He's earned his degree in neuroscience from Nottingham University in the UK, and his PhD in neurophysiology, also in the UK for Medical Research Council. He's the author, as I said, of the international bestseller, Why We Sleep.
And he's just an overall awesome guy that I could talk to about sleep and race cars equally. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Matthew Walker.
Well, Matt, it's awesome to have you back back.

**Matthew Walker** (3:04)
It's a delight to be here.

**Peter Attia** (3:06)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we talk so often that to put some structure to a discussion in this context will be fun, but there's always so much that we're talking about. At least 50% of it involves sleep.
The other 50% seems to involve our other favorite mutual discussion, which we'll try to not talk about today.

**Matthew Walker** (3:23)
But can we talk about motorsport to begin with? No, I'm just kidding you.
Sleep it will be exclusively.

**Peter Attia** (3:29)
Sleep it shall be. Although I do love the book in the background behind you there. Don't think I can't see that. Since we last spoke, which was almost a year ago, obviously the elephant in the room here is COVID.
And I'm just wondering if you have seen or have any understanding of the impact that anything to do with COVID has had on sleep. In other words, has the world in which you pay all of your attention, has it been impacted by this?

**Matthew Walker** (4:02)
It does seem to have been impacted, and we actually have some decent data.
The way it's been impacted is probably at three levels. The amount that people are sleeping, the timing of their sleep, and then finally dreaming.
Firstly, in terms of amount, probably one of the earliest reports that I saw was from a sleep tracking company that released data of I think about 68,000 individuals here in the United States. And what they reported was that total sleep time had increased across the entire country by 20%, they said, which I struggled with a little bit, but furthermore, they broke it down on the basis of each state. And what they said was that there was no single state that hadn't increased its total sleep time by 10%.