No.1 Sleep Expert: Magnesium Isn’t Helping You Sleep! This Sleep Habit Increases Heart Disease 57%

**Dr. Matthew Walker** (0:00)
Here's the problem with magnesium supplementation when it comes to sleep. The first thing to note is that most forms of magnesium don't cross the brain barrier, and sleep is produced by your brain. So how can something that doesn't get into your brain affect brain process? All you're doing is creating probably expensive urine. However, there is one form of magnesium that seems to have some evidence in favor of it, which we can speak about, but it doesn't stop there. There's so much new evidence that we have, including this myth of eight hours, my fear about giving the melatonin to kids, why you keep waking up in the middle of the night, and the invention of the first new class of sleeping medication that I actually favor, and most people are not aware of it.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:41)
Okay, let me write this down.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:42)
Matthew Walker is back, and the world-renowned sleep expert and neuroscience professor is sharing brand new research to combat the sleep loss epidemic and help you get the perfect night's sleep.

**Dr. Matthew Walker** (0:53)
As a society, we have struggles with sleep at night due to many reasons, but no one teaches us this stuff. And it's things like, say, you go to bed at 11 one night, 1 a.m. the next night, then 10:30 p.m. the next night, and it's remarkable how many people do this. But studies have shown that you are statistically 49% more likely to prematurely die versus those people who were most regular in terms of going to bed and waking up at the same time. And worse, they had a 57% cardiometabolic disease risk increase.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:23)
What the?

**Dr. Matthew Walker** (1:23)
Science really teaches us that there are four pillars of good sleep. And then there's this incredible new study looking at sleep banking. And this is remarkable for people who are facing a sprint at work or a medical doctor about to go on a call for the next 40 hours, a new parent, and we can go through all of that. But if you were to push me to say the three most impactful things that you can start doing tonight to start sleeping better, it would be...

**Steven Bartlett** (1:49)
Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning in to the show week after week. Means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
Here in front of me, I have these cards, which I'm going to reveal a bit later, but these kind of hold what you consider to be the four pillars of great sleep. But you also spend much of your professional career just studying the brain generally to understand human performance and how we can change our lifestyles and also introduce some of these new treatments to improve how our brain performs. And I want to talk about all of that as well. But to start, for anyone that is unfamiliar with you and has been hiding under a rock, how do you summarize who you are professionally, the sort of academic references you're drawing on, and the experiences and research you've done, so that the viewer listening at home understands the full world that you operate in, study and have experienced?

**Dr. Matthew Walker** (3:21)
I am in your scientist by trade, but my specialty is sleep, the effects of sleep on the brain and the body. And I've probably spent about the past two decades trying to understand exactly why do we sleep? Because 50 years ago, the crass answer to the question, why do you sleep, was the following. You sleep to cure sleepiness, which is the factuous equivalent of saying, well, you eat to cure hunger. No, you don't eat to cure hunger, you eat to support all sorts of physiological and biological benefits. But now, and this is not due to my research, it's all of the incredible colleagues whose shoulders that I stand on, we've now had to upend the question. We now have to ask, is there any major physiological system in your body, or is there any operation of your mind that isn't wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it, or demonstrably impaired when you don't get enough? And the answer now seems to be, no, there is no such system, even down to the level of your DNA. Your sleep and how you are sleeping or not sleeping will change the very DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative. And we can see it all the way up to society. Sleep can change the fabric of society, can change how we interact with other people, it can change our belief systems, it can change how lonely or sort of hyper social we are. So to your question, I'm a sleep scientist by trade, and I suppose my mission has been trying to reunite humanity with the sleep that it seems to be so bereft of.