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Optimizing your sleep

To optimize your sleep, you can try the following strategies:

Nap strategically: Keep your naps to 90 minutes or less, and consider shorter 20 minute naps if you don't have trouble falling asleep at night .
Establish a wind-down routine: Create a relaxing routine before bed, such as stretching, meditating, or reading. Avoid watching TV in bed, as the bright light can be stimulating .
Be mindful of your caffeine intake: Limit your consumption of caffeine, especially in the middle of the day, as it can interfere with sleep .
Maintain consistent sleep and wake times: Try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, even on weekends. This can improve the quality and depth of your sleep .
Keep your sleeping environment cool: Lower the temperature in your bedroom by a few degrees, and use blankets as needed to stay comfortable .
Minimize alcohol and caffeine close to bedtime: Avoid consuming alcohol and caffeine within 8-12 hours of going to bed, as they can disrupt sleep .
Consider supplements: Supplements like magnesium threonate, apigenin, and theanine may enhance sleep quality and help you fall asleep faster .
Use light strategically: Expose yourself to bright natural or artificial light within 30-60 minutes of waking up to help regulate your cortisol levels and enhance focus .
Practice nose breathing during sleep: Breathe through your nose during sleep to improve sleep quality and overall health .

Keep in mind that these are general strategies, and what works best for you may vary. It's important to experiment and find what techniques and habits support your optimal sleep .

Maximizing Productivity, Physical & Mental Health with Daily Tools

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Andrew Huberman: Here are the rules around napping according to the sleep science. Stanford has an excellent sleep clinic. I consulted with Jamie Zeitzer, my colleague in the Stanford Sleep Laboratory, as well as Matt Walker out at Berkeley, whose name I'm sure most of you are familiar with, wrote this wonderful book, Why We Sleep. Naps should be 90 minutes or less and 20 minute naps are fine, but not longer than 90 minutes. And there are essentially two varieties of people, people for whom napping interferes with falling asleep later that night and staying asleep and people for whom the nap does not interfere. You have to decide who you are and if you're somebody who can nap and not have any trouble falling asleep and staying asleep later that night, well, by all means, nap. Just make it 90 minutes or less. Again, these 90-minute cycles are really a vital constraint that we should all obey. If it's 91 minutes, don't worry, you won't dissolve into a puddle of tears, but if you're starting to sleep for an hour or more in the afternoon, that can be problematic. If you're somebody who can nap for 10, 20 minutes, that's probably better than getting a full 90 minute cycle unless you didn't get enough sleep the night before. But you really have to figure out what's right for you. There's a lot of variety there, but that's essentially what the science says.

Dr. Matthew Walker: The Science & Practice of Perfecting Your Sleep

Huberman Lab

(someone): I think the second tip I would offer in terms of unconventional is have a wind down routine. Many of us think of sleep as if it's like a light switch, that we just jump into bed and when we turn the light out, sleep should arrive in that same way. just the binary, you know, it's on or it's off. Sleep is a physiological process. It's much more like landing a plane. It takes time to gradually descend down onto the terra firma of what we call good solid sleep at night. Find out whatever works for you. And it could be light stretching. I usually meditate for about 10 or 15 minutes before bed. Some people like reading. Try not to watch television in bed. That's usually advised against. Too much light, too activating. You know, you can listen to a relaxing podcast, although we can speak about technology in the bedroom too, but have some kind of a wind down routine. You know, it's almost like, you know, you wouldn't race into your garage and come to a screeching halt from 60 miles an hour. You typically downshift your gears and you slow down as you come into the garage. This is the same thing with sleep too. So that's the second thing. Have some kind of a wind down routine. Find what works for you. Maybe it's taking a hot bath or a warm shower. and then stick to it. We do this with kids all the time.

Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: So really there are three critical periods throughout each 24 hour cycle. And during each of those critical periods, you're going to want to do as many specific things as you can to optimize your wakefulness and focus and mood throughout the day and your sleep at night. The first critical period is the one that we've been talking about up until now. Things like morning sunlight, viewing caffeine, 90 to 120 minutes after waking, exercise, and so on. We can call that critical period one. And it really encompasses the time from which you wake up until about three hours after waking. Although I should just mention, because there are always those people that say, wait, I wake up at 4 a.m. and the sun isn't out until 8 a.m. Okay, so it might be four hours, but really it's those early morning hours of your day once you're awake. The second critical period is the time throughout the day and afternoon leading into evening. So you may ask, what are the things that you can do throughout the day, the middle of your day and into the afternoon and evening hours that are really going to set you up for the best possible sleep later that night? Well, there are a few do's and there are a few don'ts. First of all, be careful about ingesting too much caffeine throughout the middle of the day. That's kind of an obvious one for the reasons that we talked about earlier.

Dr. Matthew Walker: The Science & Practice of Perfecting Your Sleep

Huberman Lab

(someone): Yeah, so these Uberman-like schedules, and there's lots of different forms of that, they tried to essentially pie chart the 24-hour period into short bouts of sleep with some shorter, or no, well, slightly longer periods of wakefulness than short bouts of sleep than wakefulness. I sort of made it, I think, a quip, it's almost like you're sleeping like a baby. Because that's the way that babies will sleep, that they will have these brief naps, then they're awake, then they're asleep, then they're awake. And to the chagrin of parents, across the night, it's basically the same. They're awake, they're asleep, they're awake, they're asleep. And that's more the schedule that these types of protocols have suggested. And there was a really great comprehensive review that found not only that they weren't necessarily helpful, but they were actually really quite detrimental. And on almost every performance metric, whether it be task performance, whether it be physiological outcome measures, whether it even be the quality of the sleep that they were having when they were trying to get it, all of those were in a downward direction. And it's not surprising. If you look at the way that your physiology is programmed, if you look at the way your circadian rhythm is programmed, none of that screams to us that we should be sleeping in that way.

(someone): Well, I'm chuckling because we always hear sleep like a baby. This is how babies sleep. And I would say, don't sleep like a baby, sleep like an adult.

(someone): Get your solid eight hours. It's Billy Crystal's line, who's a longstanding suffering insomniac.

Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: Most people, I believe, wake up sometime between 6.30 a.m. and 8.30 a.m. But regardless of when you wake up in the morning, one of the first things that happens is that your body temperature is increasing, and that's just going to happen naturally. Some of it is going to be the consequence of your moving around a bit, but really the increase in body temperature is one of the main triggers for why you woke up in the first place. That increase in body temperature in turn causes an increase in the release of a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is often discussed as a stress hormone, but it's not just associated with stress. It also enhances your immune system provided cortisol is elevated at the right times. And the right time for cortisol to be elevated is when you first wake up in the morning. That increase in cortisol is also going to increase metabolism. It's also going to increase your ability to focus mentally and for you to move your body. So again, cortisol is often demonized and considered this bad thing. And indeed you don't want cortisol to be chronically or consistently elevated throughout the day or night, but you do want cortisol to reach its peak early in the day, right about the time you wake up. One way that you can ensure that that cortisol peak occurs early in the day, right about the time that you wake up is to view bright light, ideally from sunlight within the first 30 to 60 minutes after waking. That's right, view bright sunlight within the first 30 to 60 minutes after waking.

Dr. Matthew Walker: The Science & Practice of Perfecting Your Sleep

Huberman Lab

(someone): Resist and resist and go to bed at your normal time. What I want to try and do is prevent you from thinking, well, I had such a bad night last night and I normally go to bed at 10.30, I'm just gonna get into bed at nine o'clock because last night was just so bad. But that's not your natural bedtime and it's not aligned with your natural chronotype because presumably, kind of know something about that or a morning type, evening type, you're trying to sleep in harmony, which is usually how you get best quality sleep. But you go to bed at nine and my body is not ready to sleep at nine o'clock. but I'm worried because I had a bad night of sleep last night. So I get into bed and now I'm tossing and turning for the first hour and a half because it's not my natural sleep window, but I just thought it was a good idea. And if I didn't know anything about sleep, I would think all of these same things too. So I'm not finger wagging, but after, if I have a bad night of sleep and I am not immune, just because I know a little bit about sleep, doesn't mean I don't have my bad nights, I do, doesn't mean I haven't had bouts of insomnia in my life, I have. But after a bad night of sleep, I do nothing. I don't do any of those four things. I think the second tip I would offer in terms of unconventional is have a wind down routine. Many of us think of sleep as if it's like a light switch, that we just jump into bed and when we turn the light out, sleep should arrive in that same way.

Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: But the reason I only add Glycine and GABA every third or fourth night is that if I take it too often, I find that the entire sleep stack doesn't work quite as effectively. I don't know exactly why this is the case, but in any event, that's what I do. And more recently, I've also started using inositol, in particular, myoinositol. Every other night, I'll take 900 milligrams of myoinositol in addition to MAG3 and A, apigenin and theanine, and not on the nights when I take glycine and GABA. So I'm adding 900 milligrams of inositol to the standard sleep stack of mag three and eight theanine and apigenin. And what I find is not only does it greatly enhance my ability to fall asleep quickly, but if I wake up in the middle of the night, which I often do to use the bathroom, I find it very, very easy to fall back asleep. Whereas when I don't take inositol every other night or so, I find that if I wake up in the middle of the night, it's a bit more of a challenge to fall back asleep. So inositol has a number of different uses that have been discussed in terms of mental health and in terms of adjusting anxiety. for its daytime use. What I'm talking about is taking 900 milligrams of myo-inositol also 30 to 60 minutes before sleep along with a standard sleep stack. And I found that to be immensely beneficial.

The Science of Making & Breaking Habits

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Andrew Huberman: The body has to drop by about one to three degrees in order to get into sleep and to stay asleep. So low light, low temperature environment, you can always pile on blankets, of course, if you don't want to be cold at night, you want to be warm enough, but you want your environment to be cold. Typically people aren't eating in the middle of the night. Although one thing that can be useful is to make sure that you're at least well-fed enough when you head into this third phase of every 24 hour day, that you're not awake because you're hungry. Now, a lot of people recommend putting a gap between your final bite of food. And when you go to sleep at night, some people will say that gap should be four hours. Other people say two hours. If you're me, I generally have something, I don't know, two hours or 90 minutes of going to sleep, but it's not a big meal, but that's just me. And I fall asleep and stay asleep fine with that. You have to experiment for yourself. I've talked about supplements that can support sleep in previous episodes of the podcast, things like magnesium threonate or magnesium bisglycinate, things like theanine, apigenin. If you'd like to read more about those, we actually have a newsletter that I'll just quickly refer you to. This is the Huberman Lab Neural Network Newsletter. You can sign up for it by going to hubermanlab.com. It's very easy to find, but

AMA #2: Improve Sleep, Reduce Sugar Cravings, Optimal Protein Intake, Stretching Frequency & More

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: Although I'm not dependent on them. There've been times when I haven't been able to access those supplements and I can still fall asleep. But the point is that you don't want to be so hungry that you can't fall asleep. And yet in an ideal circumstance, especially if you're trying to increase the amount of slow wave sleep, you would avoid food in the two hours or so before going to sleep. If you can avoid food for the three or four hours prior to sleep and still fall and stay asleep easily, that's even better for sake of increasing slow-wave sleep and growth hormone output. Now, there are some additional tools for improving slow-wave sleep in particular, the transitions between slow-wave sleep and the other sleep stages. Because even though, as I mentioned earlier, the early part of your night is occupied primarily by slow-wave sleep, all night long, you're transitioning from slow-wave sleep into an intermediate stage of sleep and then into rapid eye movement sleep and then back again. It's just that in the early part of the night, more of that time is going to be occupied by slow-wave sleep. The two ways to improve slow-wave sleep that are well-documented in the literature, and here we can point to some really nice papers that I'll reference in case you want to read further, is the first one is entitled, Exercise Improves the Quality of Slow-Wave Sleep by Increasing Slow-Wave Stability. Slow-wave stability has to do with as researchers call it, the amount of power present in the different aspects of slow-wave sleep.

Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: And then even in that groggy state, get some exercise, get some sunlight viewing. If the sun's not out, turn on those bright artificial lights, have some breakfast, even if you're not hungry. In fact, for those of you that engage in shift work because you have to or travel and you're jet lagged, one of the quickest ways to shift your circadian clock and get onto the local schedule is to eat on the local schedule. So what all these tools do is they really set up a cascade. Think of it as kind of a wave front of wakefulness and focus throughout the day. It'll take you through the middle of the day in the afternoon stages we'll talk about in a few minutes, but really they take you to this period that is about 5 p.m. until your bedtime. I realize some people are going to bed very early, like 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., which to me seems very early, but very few people go to sleep at 5 p.m., right? Unless you're doing that for shift work or other reasons, but from 5 p.m. until bedtime, is really a critical period in which you need to leverage particular tools in order to get and stay asleep optimally and to be able to sleep through the night. So really there are three critical periods throughout each 24 hour cycle. And during each of those critical periods, you're going to want to do as many specific things as you can to optimize your wakefulness and focus and mood throughout the day and your sleep at night.

Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: And of course, in doing so the quality of your daytime alertness and your ability to focus will improve tremendously. Again, sleep is the absolute foundation of your mental health, your physical health and your performance in all endeavors. So if there's one area of your life to really focus on and try and optimize, if your goal is to be happier and more productive and just to have a better life overall, I can confidently say that sleep is really the thing to optimize. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. We also now have a Clips channel, it's Huberman Lab Clips. Please subscribe to our Clips channel for short outtakes from podcast episodes. Please also subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. If you have questions about the content of these podcasts, or you have suggestions about topics you'd like us to cover, or guests you'd like us to invite on the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put all that in the comment section on YouTube. We do read all those comments. In addition, please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning of today's podcast. That's the best way to support this podcast. During today's podcast and on many previous episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast, we talked about supplements.

AMA #2: Improve Sleep, Reduce Sugar Cravings, Optimal Protein Intake, Stretching Frequency & More

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: They actually are going to try and observe for rapid eye movements beneath the eyelids, et cetera. So sleep trackers give you a best guess as to what stage of sleep you're in. They are not perfectly accurate. At least none of the commercially available sleep trackers are perfectly accurate. So we do want to highlight that. Okay, so now let's answer Jack's question directly, which is how to increase the total amount of slow wave sleep. Well, there are a couple of ways. First of all are the don'ts, and then we'll talk about the dos. Two things that you can do to really disrupt your slow wave sleep are to drink alcohol within eight hours prior to bedtime or even at all. Some people will find that even if they have a glass of wine or a beer with lunch, that the amount of slow wave sleep and sometimes even the rapid eye movement sleep that they get at night is reduced and that their overall sleep architecture is disrupted. This has been shown again and again. Likewise, avoiding caffeine within eight and ideally within 12 hours of bedtime would be preferable. And if you're not a caffeine drinker, obviously you don't have to worry about this at all, but avoiding caffeine intake within that eight to 12 hours of bedtime will greatly assist in you getting more slow wave sleep and higher quality rapid eye movement sleep. This has been shown again and again, and as well avoiding cannabis use.

Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: Yes, that's obvious. Caffeine especially disrupts sleep. If you take it too late in the day, that's very obvious as to why that would be the case, but caffeine especially disrupts what's called compensatory sleep. So if you start changing your waking time and your to sleep time, and you start using additional caffeine to offset the sleepiness that you're experiencing because of those late nights out, Well, that's when you really start to disrupt, not just your nighttime sleep, but your daytime compensatory sleep. So those naps, you also are disrupting the total architecture of sleep in the early morning hours. There's a lot of great science that's been put to this, or that's emerged from this, I should say. So try and keep those sleep-wake times relatively constant, plus or minus an hour, and try to as much as you can to delay that caffeine intake 90 to 120 minutes after waking every day, but especially on days where you wake up and you feel you haven't gotten enough sleep. In that case, I highly recommend you just use NSDR or the Reverie app or some other form of deep relaxation to try and compensate for the lack of sleep. knowing of course, that there's no complete compensation for lack of sleep. There are just things that we can do to partially offset lack of sleep. Now, a couple of final points and additional tools that I think are going to be useful to everybody, in particular, people who have young children or following a shift work schedule, or who are experiencing jet lag. Keep in mind, jet lag can be due to travel,

Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: So if you're somebody that enjoys hot baths, hot showers, or hot tubs, evening and nighttime is going to be the best time to do that if your goal is to facilitate sleep. Similarly, you should try and make your sleeping environment pretty cool, if not cold. Now that doesn't mean you need to be cold while you're asleep. You can get under as many blankets as you need, but it's a good idea to make your sleeping environment cool. In fact, drop the temperature in that sleeping environment by at least three degrees. and you'll be happy that you did. Now, some people rely on things like eight sleep that I use that one of these controllable temperature mattress covers. Other people would simply do this by putting a fan in the room or opening a window. Again, depends on time of year, depends on technology, depends on budgets, et cetera. But you're going to want to sleep in a relatively cool or cold sleeping environment and then layer on the blankets as needed to stay asleep. And I say as needed, because one of the things that you're going to do in your sleep, or if you happen to wake up is if you're too warm, you're going to put a foot or a hand out from under those blankets. And the reason for doing that is very logical. Once you understand the mechanism, you have special portals.

AMA #2: Improve Sleep, Reduce Sugar Cravings, Optimal Protein Intake, Stretching Frequency & More

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: Or I know there are people out there that don't drink caffeine at all. I'm not one of those people, but restricting that caffeine intake to the very early part of the day, that has been shown to improve the quality and the overall architecture of sleep and slow wave sleep in particular. That's really what this study points to. There's another tool that can improve the amount and quality of slow wave sleep that you achieve at night. This is actually a tool that I've started using over the last six to eight months or so. As many of you know, I believe in getting behaviors right before embracing changes in supplementation or prescription drugs. Behavioral tools consist of do's and don'ts, and the do's and don'ts for sleep are well-documented in the master sleep episode and the perfect your sleep episode and the toolkit for sleep. They include getting morning sunlight in your eyes or bright light of other kinds, avoiding bright light from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., et cetera, et cetera. All that information is in the toolkit for sleep and those other full-length episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast. Now, there are supplements that can greatly improve the depth of your sleep and that can shorten the latency to fall asleep. And here I'm not referring to melatonin, as many of you perhaps already know, I'm not a fan of melatonin for a variety of reasons, mainly

GUEST SERIES | Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimal Nutrition & Supplementation for Fitness

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Andrew Huberman: I'm sure some people are like, negative ionization. But listen, the Terman lab is a serious laboratory focused on circadian biology for many decades now. Negative ion concentrations are higher near coastal locations. So if you've ever gone to the sea or gone on vacation, and you sleep better near a body of water, that's actually a real thing. And there are negative ionization machines. But there are also some things that one can do in order to increase the negative ion concentration in their sleeping environment that are nearly zero cost, if not zero cost. You can look those up online and we probably will do an entire episode about this in the future. But I think what you described for absolute rest really highlights a more general set of themes that I think are really important, which is your sleep environment is an environment. It's got a lot going on in it and it's worth running through the checklist that you described and asking, you know, where are things, you know, maybe not optimized, but where am I really getting in my own way in terms of sleep? All of this again being related to the fact that getting excellent sleep consistently will completely transform everything that you do and not getting excellent sleep consistently, which is a challenge for so, so many people, will also transform everything that you do and think and feel, but in the negative direction.

(someone): Yeah, I can also offer a few tips on sleep based on things we find most consistently for those that can't go through the whole protocol. One quick little actually app called Time Shifter is really cool for anyone that's dealing with consistent travel and jet lag.

Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: 8Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Huberman to save $150 at checkout. Let's talk about sleep and tools to optimize your sleep. I want you to conceptualize yourself as contained within a room that has only very few windows or very few entry points. What do I mean by this? Well, Your brain and your nervous system control whether or not you move or don't move. They control whether or not you're digesting food or you're not digesting food. They control whether or not you're stressed or not stressed, happy or sad, et cetera. All of that stuff that controls all that stuff is housed inside your skin and skull, et cetera. And that might seem pretty obvious, but what that means is that for your brain and body to feel alert and focused, ready to move and exercise or do some work, or if your brain and body are going to lie down and go to sleep, well, That brain and body needs cues. It needs inputs to determine when to do those different things. And those cues and inputs arrive through a defined set of what I'll call stimuli, but you can also think of these as levers or tools.

Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: But for those of you that are waking up in the middle of the night, breathing on your back, or your partner is telling you that, or other people are telling you that, or that person on the plane with your mouth hanging open and drooling and your mouth breathing. Terrible, terrible, terrible for health reasons and other reasons. Put some medical take over your mouth, learn to be a nose breather during sleep. Your sleep will improve and your daytime feelings of wakefulness and focus will improve. Your cardiovascular health will improve and on and on and on. So now we've largely covered the tools that one could use to get and stay asleep. And we talked about exercise, we talked about temperature, we talked about supplements, and we talked about, of course, keeping the sleeping environment both cool and as dark as possible. I do want to mention a couple of broad contour tools that will impact your ability to sleep really well on a consistent basis. And the one that impacts the most number of people is weekends. Turns out that most everybody feels the impulse to sleep in on the weekend, especially if they've been out late the night before. However, the data show that keeping relatively consistent sleep and wake times is really going to enhance the quality and depth of your sleep. So if you stay out late one night, Sure, you might allow yourself to sleep in an extra hour or so, but you should really try to avoid sleeping in longer than an hour beyond your normal wake-up time. That's right.

Dr. Matthew Walker: The Science & Practice of Perfecting Your Sleep

Huberman Lab

(someone): So I started looking back into the literature and I've best traced it, at least as far as I can tell, to early studies showing that those who were deficient in magnesium also had sleep problems. They had other problems too, of course, but sleep problems were one of that set of sequelae that came from having lower magnesium. And when they supplemented with magnesium and tried to restore those levels, some of those sleep problems dissipated. And then that seems to have gotten lost in sort of some game of sort of like whispers around the room. And it's become translated into people who don't have sleep problems, who are healthy sleepers and who are healthy in general, and who have healthy normal levels of magnesium. If they take more magnesium, they will sleep better. And the data really there is not good. Once again, the only study that I've seen where magnesium did have some efficacy was in a study with older adults. I think they were 60 to 80 years old. It may have been exclusively women. Now I think about it. And they also had insomnia. And in that population, you did see some benefits. And my guess is that because it's an older community as well, they were probably deficient in magnesium. So they fit the former category of simply when you're deficient and you restore, you can help sleep sort of return to normal. But if you are not deficient and you're healthy and you're not old and you don't have insomnia, and you're supplementing, thinking that it provides sleep,

Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: And waking up, it also turns out, is related to body temperature. Every time you wake up in the morning, your body is warming up in order to wake you up. And this has an enormous number of hormonal and metabolic and other cascades that are vitally important, not just to what happens while you sleep, but your health and your energy and focus throughout the day. EightSleep is an incredible device. It's one that I've been using for six months or so, and it's completely transformed my sleep. And I already thought I was sleeping pretty well. The way it works is that you can cool or heat your mattress according to different times throughout the night. So for instance, you can cool your mattress if you tend to run warm, and that will help you fall and stay deeply asleep. And then toward morning, you can have the mattress programmed or that I should say the mattress cover program so that you warm up your sleeping environment and you wake up when you want to wake up. If you've been sleeping pretty well, but waking up in the middle of the night, you might also find that by cooling your mattress even further toward the middle of your sleep bout, well, you'll stay in deep sleep much longer. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.com slash Huberman to check out the pod pro cover and save $150 at checkout. 8Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Huberman to save $150 at checkout.

AMA #2: Improve Sleep, Reduce Sugar Cravings, Optimal Protein Intake, Stretching Frequency & More

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: So if you get sleepy enough to want to nap in the afternoon, that's not an indication necessarily that you are not getting enough sleep at night. However, if you're only sleeping four or five hours per night, it's very hard to imagine that you're getting a balance of slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. Once you get into the range of sleeping six to eight hours and certainly eight to 10 hours per night, the probability that you're getting a balance of slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep greatly increases. So if I were to, throw out a number, I would say for most people, that is for 95% of people out there, getting at least six hours of sleep per night, at least, and ideally more like seven or eight is going to be the goal. However, I've noticed, for instance, for myself, unless I'm exercising extremely intensely, or I'm going through a lot of emotional or physical stress in my daily life, getting six and a half to seven hours of sleep per night allows me to feel really good and refreshed throughout the day. And that's especially the case if I get that 20 or 30 minute nap in the afternoon or use NSDR, non-sleep deep rest. So I hope that answers your question, Jack. And there, of course, I'm extending the answer to all others who upvoted that question or who might be interested in improving their slow wave sleep. There are some do's, there are some don'ts that I just described. I suggest trying various things one by one to see what works best for you.

Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: And in fact, can enhance the depth and quality of sleep architecture. Okay, so you've done everything correctly up until now, you got your morning routine from critical period one, you got your afternoon routine, you saw some sunlight in the afternoon, you avoided caffeine in the eight hours or 10 hours before bedtime, you're not drinking alcohol, you've cooled down the room, you're doing all these things right, you dim the lights, et cetera, et cetera. What else can we do in order to optimize our sleep? Well, I always say, behavioral tools first, then look to nutrition, then if necessary, look to supplementation. And then if still necessary, look to prescription drugs, obviously prescribed by a board certified physician. Well, we've talked a lot about the behavioral tools for critical period three. We have not talked a lot about the supplementation-based tools. There are supplements that for most people will greatly improve their ability to fall and stay asleep. And the three main supplements in that category or that kit of sleep supplements, and I've talked about these before, are magnesium threonate, so T-H-R-E-O-N-A-T-E, Apigenin, A-P-I-G-E-N-I-N, apigenin, and theanine, T-H-E-A-N-I-N-E, theanine. Now, some important things to point out about MAG3 and 8 as it's called, apigenin and theanine.

AMA #2: Improve Sleep, Reduce Sugar Cravings, Optimal Protein Intake, Stretching Frequency & More

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman: Without further ado, let's get to answering your questions. And as always, I will strive to be as accurate as possible, as thorough as possible, and yet as concise as possible. The first question is about how to improve sleep in particular, how to improve deep sleep. That is sometimes called slow wave sleep. This was a question that was asked by Jack Pritchard and they got a lot of upvotes. Now we've done multiple full length episodes of the Huberman lab podcast on sleep and tools to improve sleep. including the master your sleep episode and perfect your sleep episode, as well as a toolkit that is available completely zero cost at hubermanlab.com. It's a downloadable PDF that lists out the behavioral tools and other tools that you can implement to improve your sleep. Now, Jack's question is specifically about how to improve deep sleep. He asks, I have a sleep analyzer and I typically observe that I get a lot of REM sleep, that is rapid eye movement sleep. For him, he says it's 30% of his total sleep is rapid eye movement sleep. But he asks, my deep sleep is often low, around 10%. And I would like to know if there are any science-backed protocols I can use to specifically increase my deep sleep. Okay, so for those of you that may not know, what is deep sleep? Now, deep sleep is sometimes referred to as slow-wave sleep.