Understanding sleep and how to improve it

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
Welcome to another episode of The Drive. As we've released so many episodes over the past four years, we realized we've covered a lot of topics in detail. Sometimes it can be hard to kind of keep up and try to piece it together. We also realized that there are listeners today who weren't exactly listeners a year ago, or three years ago, or four years ago. So we did a test of this idea back in May of 2022, where we did an episode that pulled a variety of clips from previous podcasts, but all on one topic, which was exercise. The feedback we received from that episode was overwhelmingly positive, and people asked for more. So this week, we're going to do it again. And of course, we're gonna pick a different topic. This topic is going to be sleep, probably something we get just as many questions on as frankly anything else. We put these clips in the order of what we think is the best way to listen from top to bottom, but in between some of the clips, I'm gonna provide a little bit of commentary to set the stage. Our hope is that this will not only allow you to understand the topic of sleep better, but also help identify some of the previous episodes in case you actually want to go back and listen to those in more detail.
In each of these clips, I'm gonna be joined by sleep expert, Matt Walker. Matt has been on the podcast several times, including three AMAs.
One thing to note is that some of these clips are from AMAs. So if you're not a subscriber, you'll actually get a sense of what we cover during those episodes. This is still a new concept and this is only our second time doing this. So we really do want the feedback. If you like this, tell us, we'll keep doing it. If you don't, we'll scrap it. So without further delay, I hope you'll enjoy this special episode of The Drive.

**Matthew Walker** (2:19)
Firstly, it took mother nature 3.6 million years to put this eight hour thing called A Night of Sleep in Place.
And within the space of 70 years, if you look at the data, we've lopped off almost 20 to 25% of that. Imagine coming along and saying, in the next 100 years, I think what I'm going to do is for the entirety of human society, I'm going to reduce their oxygen saturation by about 20 to 25%. Do you think that's a good idea? And the answer is no.

**Peter Attia** (2:51)
No, it's such a great example. I'll pause for a moment just to tell a funny story that you and I have talked about off mic, which is up until about 2012, I was in the I'll sleep when I'm dead camp. And I know what led to that. It wasn't that there was a very deliberate decision at the end of medical school when a good friend of mine with all the best intentions, who was a year ahead of me. So he was now in at the end of his internship as I was about to begin mine.
He said, and this is in the days when we didn't have the 80 hour work week requirement in residency. So we averaged, I think about 114 hours a week in the hospital. So he said to me, look, Peter, you're signing up for whatever five, seven years of this thing.
If you spent every moment outside of the hospital sleeping, you would still be tired. The only difference is you wouldn't have any fun. So make sure you live every moment that you're not in the hospital to the fullest. And so for me, that basically meant if I wasn't in the hospital, I was swimming, I was going out with my friends, I was trying to meet girls, like I was doing anything, everything.
Such that during that period of my life, I just know, because I was pretty adamant about recording how much time, like I was very wed to this idea there's 168 hours in a week, if I'm spending 114 of them here, and I spend this many driving, and I spend this many getting groceries, and I spend this many swimming, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think I was about 28 hours a week of sleep. So it wasn't four every night, because you'd have none, and then six, and then three, and then eight. Like you could binge sleep from time to time. But it was pretty much 28 a week. I'll come back to some of the implications of that. But fast forward a few years, I'm talking to a good friend of mine who's a physician, who like you is adamant about the importance of sleep. And we're having dinner one night, and he says, he's challenging me on this, and he says, so let me get this straight. You've just decided that you're gonna sleep half of what is evolutionarily programmed. And I said, yeah. Because does it strike you as odd that evolution would have designed us to spend a third of our life not mating, not watching out for predators, not hunting for food, but doing this thing for some other purpose? Do you think that thing must have been important? And it was such an obvious argument, but it really overnight changed the way I thought about this, which was evolution went to great lengths to do this, and superficially at great cost to us, right? I mean, you could argue, well, imagine you didn't need to sleep, and you could spend 24 hours a day foraging for food or a mate or some other thing, but it didn't.