0085 - Sleep Your Way to Better Decisions, How Rest is Becoming the New Hustle ft Sara Mednick

In this conversation, Dr. Sara Mednick, world-renowned scientist, author of the influential book Take a Nap, Change Your Life, and professor directing the Sleep and Cognition Lab at UC Irvine, shares eye-opening insights about the profound link between rest, sleep, longevity, and your overall quality of life.

Ever wondered why stress at work drains your energy or why cutting corners on sleep today might sabotage your health decades later? Dr. Mednick breaks down exactly how your daily rest rhythms directly impact everything from emotional resilience and cognitive clarity to your long-term health, immunity, and even susceptibility to Alzheimer’s and dementia.

She challenges society’s obsession with constant productivity, explores why "I'll sleep when I'm old" is a dangerous myth, and reveals the surprising consequences of relying on caffeine and alcohol to "take the edge off."

Get a copy of The Power of the Downstate by Sara Mednick.

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Transcript

Sara Mednick

What happens is that as we get, you know, past our youthful time, where we sleep really, really well is people stop sleeping as well. People stop taking time to rest. And what happens is in the very short term, across just days of not sleeping well and not being well rested, you see these particles start to form little plaques and tang as you get older and you increase this kind of, you know, day to day lack of rest. These become the plaques and tangles they can associated with Alzheimer's and dementia. So that's where you have to really think about oh, it's not just that I can, you know, put sleep in the bank and save it up and then spend it all on a vacation or rest in general. Right. This is a 24 hour job. Like you have to really be focusing every day on having, you know, the equal and opposite upstates. Right. That kind of, that mishmash of the, of the. Isaac Newton's idea is to say whenever there is an action, you need to have a downstate that follows it and it has to be on a day to day basis. The idea that we can just sleep when we're old, you know, it's the, this is why there's studies that show that people that how you sleep in your 50s and 60s, 40s, 50s and 60s can predict your onset of Alzheimer's in your 70s and 80s. Because it happens while you think you don't need it, it's already happen.

Ben Owden

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Mambo this is Ben Oden, the leadership Mr. Miyagi. My hope is that this conversation will help you find the clarity and conviction you need to lead a more meaningful and impactful life. I have curated some of the best thinker practitioners from all over the world to help you get to your leadership nirvana. So sit tight and let's go on this journey together. 

Greetings to you. I hope you're at peace and are having a meaningful day. Welcome to another episode of the WhyLead Podcast. I am your host, Ben Owden. Have you ever felt like you're constantly running on empty, facing the challenges of life without any opportunity to recharge your physical and mental resources? Have you ever thought about the impact of chronic stress on your aging process, both on the inside and the outside? Have you ever considered the connection between long term stress and its effects on your immune system and susceptibility to diseases? Have you ever wondered why stress, whether from work or your daily life, can lead to cognitive decline and memory problems? Most of us live our lives as the human equivalent of smartphones, running on 10% battery power. At any given moment, we're just an hour or so away from shutting off. We feel drained, stressed out. But the truth is we have the battery charges everywhere. And in today's episode, we'll be exploring the world of rhythmic balance between upstate and downstate. To have this conversation, I am joined by professor of Psychology at the University of California, Irvine where she directs the Sleep and Cognition Lab. Her first book, Take a Nap, Change youe Life, put forth the scientific basis for napping to improve productivity, cognition, mood and health. A world renowned scientist, she has been featured by every major magazine and newspaper including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, BBC and Good Morning America, among others. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Sara Mednick. Dr. Sara, you're most welcome.

Sara Mednick

It's so nice to be here. Thank you.

Ben Owden

I think. After publishing your first book, Take a Nap, what did you feel was missing in the literature, so to speak, that led you to write the second book? And what sort of realizations one made you pursue the world of downstair and share the findings with the world?

Sara Mednick

Thanks. That's a great question. The first book, Take a Nap, Change youe Life, I wrote when I was just finishing my PhD and it was really just a sort of a summary of the work I had done in my PhD, which was the first work to use napping as the experimental tool for which I could look at how the brain during sleep processes information. Because we all know that when we go to sleep we've had a rough day, something happened, or we had a lot of learning that day. You know, maybe we're in school or we're taking Courses or we're just having, you know, a jam packed day. The next day when you wake up the next morning after having a long sleep, you feel different about your, about all those experiences that you had before and you feel maybe even that you've gotten new ideas and that you sort of can look at things differently, that you actually have better memory for the things that you were studying or whatever the information is. Things change across sleep. And so we knew that there was something sort of magical, amazing happening during nighttime sleep. But there was no studies that looked at napping. Even though there's so many people who when they take naps, they wake up and they feel amazing. And it looked as though, well, the studies at nighttime sleep, they say, well, you need to sleep at least six to eight hours at night to show any benefits from sleep. They didn't make sense in terms of, well then how can say a 15 minute nap help people? How can a 30 minute or a 60 minute or a 90 minute nap help people? And so that was really what I decided to study for my PhD. We found a bunch of really interesting things that napping was in some cases as powerful as a whole night of sleep. To improve memory, to improve emotional function or emotion regulation, to improve our perceptual processes. All the results that you would see for nighttime sleep we could also find for a nap. And so I thought, okay, there was so much press that came out just for each study. I thought, well, people must be really hungry for this kind of mini sleep in the middle of the day, right? This little kind of rest. And then I put that book together and continue with my research. And as I was doing my research, I started having this very strong sense that this idea of rest is very important and it's ignored by our society like that we sort of push the on button as the main sort of view of our success, right? It's like, how much are we, how much caffeine are we drinking, right? How many hours are we working, how hard? How much sacrifices are we making for our jobs as kind of, well, that's really somebody who's working hard and who's achieving a lot. But we didn't really look at this other side, which I was seeing was just as important, which was this time off and this sort of, this time to recuperate time, to restore all of the resources that we used when we were awake or when we were busy, right? And I started seeing like actually that what I started calling a downstate versus this upstate, which is when we're on and we're go, go going. That downstate was just as important. And nature in its evolutionary wisdom has set up many options and many times many ways for us to achieve this kind of rest. Sometimes it can be during waking, sometimes it can be during sleep. And so, you know, several years later, after doing a whole lot of research on the brain and the body, the, you know, the central nervous system and the autonomic nervous system, and looking at napping and waking and looking across lifespan, how people across the lifespan sort of start to deteriorate over time, and maybe trying to understand why that happens. I came up with this idea of like, oh, it's because we don't prioritize rest and we don't prioritize this downstate. And so the point was to sort of show first that we really need to prioritize the downstate, that it's just as important as the upstate, and also then to give a lot of options for how we can achieve more time in the upstate, in the downstate.

Ben Owden

And I think if we go back to take a nap, I think when you tell somebody to take a nap in the middle of the day, they'll probably think you don't really wish them well. Because like you said, in this hustle culture where the person working 100 hours a week, or maybe 70 hours a week is seen as the more productive, ambitious and driven person, the idea of taking a nap in the middle of the day just doesn't sound as a description of someone who is productive. We're more receptive to the idea of dozens cups of coffees, or maybe if you're more evolved as a person, maybe even breathing meditation. But you say that naps are more effective at reversing the effects of fatigue. So how do we come to a point where we maybe unlearn some of these ideas that society and culture generally has made us believe that this is the way to be and this is the way to operate.

Sara Mednick

Yeah, I think it's a really good question because as I asked you before, what is the podcast? What is the real emphasis? And you're saying it's is sort of that it starts with yourself, right? So the idea of leadership, the idea of how to be effective in the world, the idea of how to be a good leader in any kind of process, it does start with yourself, right? So there's things that society tells us that are probably pretty good, right? Sort of, you know, the nutritional information that we need to get exercise. But one of the things that we really ignore, and now we're sort of starting to change that. But, but really ignore sleep. And for the, you know, for a long period of history, sleep was just as important as anything else. And that, you know, it was, it was sort of, you know, napping was okay and it was especially in places where they had siestas. That was just part of culture, right? When it was hot and you know, you'd wake up early, you'd do a lot of work and then you take a nap. And like all the children were supposed to also do that, right? And in some countries, people still do. In China, naps are mandatory for children all throughout college, you know, through elementary school, high school, college. But in some other countries, some cultures, I will say the idea of sleep was sort of considered a waste of time. You know, it's sort of anti capitalist. It's like, you know, anti and tie the hustle, right, Is, is that if you are sleeping, you're somehow not making money for yourself or somebody else. Like a boss, right. So I think that that had created a sense of self denial, you know, denying your own personal needs for whatever the job that was that you had. Or maybe it's the family that needs you or you know, just this general sense that it looks bad to be doing something like taking a nap. So the question is, a good one is like, how do you take your own personal advice when it's in exactly opposite from what the culture would give you? And I have some thoughts around it, but I think it's a personal journey, right? You have to decide on like, well, how do I prioritize my own health so that I can be there for other people as well. Right. I mean, it does help you be there more for other people if you're not exhausted. But you have to really get that idea of how important it is that you yourself is functioning well.

Ben Owden

And I think part of that is probably, you know, lies on how we judge, I guess, whatever version of good or acceptable that we, you know, have developed, whatever metric that we have as society. Because I think if the metric is the quality of presence versus the duration of presence, then it's important for you to, if you're judged by the quality of your presence, then I have to fully be there and be fully engaged. And maybe to do that, maybe I have to rest, maybe I have to say no to a lot of opportunities so that I reserve my availability for things that truly matter and I can be there fully engaged. But I think to some degree we're not really judged that way. People appreciate impressions more than impact. We want you to be Here physically, whether or not you're here, engaged cognitively and emotionally with work or anything else. And maybe so I think sometimes, maybe it's about changing how we incentivize just general behavior with people. And I think if quality is emphasized and it's rewarded, then slowly we will start to adapt. But there's something interesting that you say as well, I think in your book where you quote Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the right to rest and leisure. Why do we think we deny ourselves this human right? In fact, I think a lot of people don't even think of this as human right, that I have a right to rest. Because I think once you conceptualize something as you're right, you'll probably fight to have it, even on a micro level in your own personal life. You set the right boundaries to make sure that you have space to exercise this right that you have. But why do you feel, if going back to this idea of self denial, why do we feel like it's so easy for us to deny ourselves an essential right like rest or leisure?

Sara Mednick

Yeah, I love your question. I think that whole doctrine of the inalienable rights of being a human are. They're very. It's an interesting concept that took me a second to really get right. It was, it's not, oh, this is the stuff that these are the kind of things that the government should provide for people. That's not the point. The point is these are the things that are, is that you were born with, right? That you were born with a right to freedom to, you know, walk around unless without, you know, without feeling danger with, you know, freedom to have the kind of job that you want, freedom to enjoy yourselves and have rest and leisure. These are part of what it means to be, to be a human being. And so the government and society must build a society around these, these basic human rights so that you can flourish. Right? Because any kind of society that's built that doesn't provide you with those rights means that the humans within that society will not flourish. Right? So I think it's a really interesting concept. And for some reason, as you say, this particular article 24 is the one that everyone says, well, we should just take that out because for whatever reason, it doesn't seem like, you know, we do not believe that the time that we're resting is. The time is just as important as the time that we are awake and doing things. And I really, it's. I don't, you know, I mean, I can say a lot of Things about sort of, you know, history of sort of time management has become kind of a capitalist thing and, you know, as a capitalist measurement. So I think it comes from there. But I find it, I mean, I think that that is also why we have shut down so much discussion around sleep and also exercise and also any of these kind of important restorative processes for so long is because it seems like just like, you know, this article, 24 people just completely ignore it as a basic human right.

Ben Owden

I mean, I agree and it's something that I've been investigating, rather questioning in my own personal life in the last maybe year or so around what is the right conceptualization of time. And one book particularly that really helped me is 4,000 weeks by Oliver Berkman where basically, I think challenges the idea of time. Sometimes it's easy to think of time as a tool that you can use to advance your own agenda, your own ambitions. And sometimes you can be the tool that time is using, right? Where you're a means to whatever timeline and the goals behind that timeline that we have to work towards. But how can you take a step back and actually decide for yourself the kind of life you want to live, the quality of life that you want to live? And what is the right conceptualization of time? And how can I build the right systems around it and be okay with the trade offs? Because I think there's a cost attached to any life, right? The person who's just go, go, go, go. There's a lot that you sacrifice with that. But also if you build a more holistic and probably healthy life around the things that matter to you, that also comes with a cost attached to it as well. And how do you make peace with the trade offs with whatever choice you make? Now, when you talk about, I think the downstate, there are two things that keep coming up throughout your book, right? The rev and the restore systems as two branches of our autonomic nervous system. And so maybe if you can explain what they are, but also how do we replenish these two systems, especially the resource system.

Sara Mednick

Yeah, so thanks for the question. I just want to tell you I love this idea. The statement that you made, the quality of your presence, I just think that that's such an important concept is not just the physical presence of you, but also the quality of your presence. And I think that is really what my whole research area is kind of about, is how trying to understand what are the tools or what are the mechanisms of the brain and the body that increase the quality of your presence. I Could say that that's the theme of my life. So I really love that. So the rev and restore system, those are words I'm using because I think that they really very nicely represent the two systems of the autonomic nervous system. The first is the sympathetic nervous system. So we have this central nervous system, which is really controlling the brain. And then we have the autonomic nervous system, which is kind of controlling the body. And these two systems are in constant communication. And most research focuses on the central nervous system, the neurons, and different brain areas and how these all communicate. And what is actually not as well understood is how the autonomic nervous system is also contributing to how we behave, what we feel, how we learn things, who we are as we grow up, from children to adults and then to aging. And so my research started really trying to say, well, we know so much about the brain. Let's focus also on what we know about the autonomic nervous system. There's two branches of the autonomic nervous system. One is what I call the rev system, because it revs you up. It's the sympathetic nervous system, also called the fight or flight system, where it's your stress response, it's your ability to. Something happens in the world and you can very quickly react to it. You can very quickly. If there is some sort of danger, you can run from that danger. If you realize, oh, that's not really a tiger, it's just like a domesticated cat on the street, I can suddenly say, don't be silly, calm down and reduce your heart rate, slow down your breathing.

Ben Owden

So the amygdala sits on the system.

Sara Mednick

The amygdala is more in the central nervous system. And that is one of the focuses that we've always had, which is this fear area of the brain called the amygdala. And so a lot of research looks at how much your amygdala is firing when you're in a state of emotion. But what the amygdala is connected to, very importantly, is the autonomic nervous system. And that's the one that is actually activating your body to. If you need to run fast, it increases the amount of blood flow to your muscles and it gets you running. It increases your heart rate to move that blood to where it's needed in your muscles to get you going. And it increases your breathing, right? It's your immediate response to stress. And then what happens afterwards, because that response to stress is very energy consuming, right? So it can. It will just really make you tired. Runs down all Your resources. So you can only stay in that period for a very short amount of time before you need to slow it down. And what slows it down is the restore system. So you have this revved up system and immediately after you want to restore yourself. And that's also called the parasympathetic system. These words to me are always, they were always like, what the hell does sympathetic and parasympathetic mean? Let's use words that are more meaningful. So that's where the rev and restore came from. And that's also called the rest and digest, right? That's the system that kind of calms you down, reduces your heart rate, slows your breathing, gets you back into a sort of a baseline state. And what happens when we are awake is we have the rev system in charge, right? Because we want that. We want to always be able to. If somebody, you know, if you're driving, you want to be able to quickly respond to push down the brake if somebody jumps in front of you, if there's a person there or a bicycle that shows up, right? So you want to have a quick revved up response to anything that happens. But what can also happen is that with this kind of chronic stress that we hear about, where people are constantly in this state of feeling like they're not doing enough, like they're, you know, that they have too many things to do, they can't manage their time, they're not spending enough time in the rest mode is that they get kind of stuck in this high revved up state. And then when they get to sleep, they're expecting sleep to basically do everything is like to push them down into a restore state, but they're so revved up that they can't get into a restore state. That's what we see now in terms of chronic stress in the world is that people across their days become more and more and more, or even just at a steady high level of stress. And it gives them this underlying tension that never gets really answered by having a deeply restored moment where you can just shut everything down and calm yourself down and get back to this baseline. So I think that is one of the big things that a lot of books talk about, right, Is this problem of chronic stress that we see that then over time leads to chronic disease. And we know that a lot of diseases now, diabetes, heart conditions, even some cancers, look like they could be driven by a state of chronic stress.

Ben Owden

And I think there's another statement that you talk about as well. You say to every, and I love the Play on words here. To every upstate action, there is an equal and opposite downstate replenishment. And so how does this look like on a micro scale? Right, Because I think we're very good at doing this. Maybe on a macro scale I'll work 49 weeks a year and then I'll take three weeks off and I'll probably go to some destination and completely switch off my phone emails and I will just rest. But you've been overworking your system for 49 weeks because there's a promise of ah, there's a downstate, you know, 40 weeks from now that I'll get to in the future. So one, what is the impact of such a mentality, which it's very common to see that these days where as long as I have my end of year vacation, maybe I have my summer vacation, then I'll just push myself completely. And as a person who's done that before, you go on holiday and your holiday is over and you're still exhausted. It's like I didn't have work, but I'm still tired. Like you're saying, is it that maybe there's an internal system that's broken? Is it that underlying fatigue stress that never gets resolved? And so you sleep many hours, but sleep doesn't quite do what it's supposed to do. You don't work, but then that just lying around isn't doing what it's supposed to do. So what are the consequences of that line of thinking that I'll just push, push, push, push, push. But at the end of the day, at the end of the year, at the end of the quarter, at the end of the six months, I'll take time off and that's okay.

Sara Mednick

Yeah, great. There's this statement that many people say is asleep when I'm old, you know, it's the same idea of like, of you push the rest till like whatever, you know, you say three weeks. A lot of people only have two weeks of vacation in America. It's like terrible. And people don't really even take that much. And, and the problem with that I can get really physiological, physiological with this is that when we are awake, as I said, the waking time spends a lot of our resources and when we are using these resources we get lots of little bits of sort of detritus and leftovers of all these kind of neural communication leaves a bunch of little leftovers in the brain. And what we know from neuroscience research is that during sleep and rest in general, not just sleep, but also just the restorative time we get a sweeping out of all that little detritus, those little leftover particles that are sort of, that can become toxic if they're not left over and they can build up over time. With good sleep every day, you're able to wash those toxic particles out of your brain and they don't form these kind of plaques and tangles and little crusties throughout your brain canal. But what happens is that as we get past our youthful time, where we sleep really, really well, is people stop sleeping as well. People stop taking time to rest. And what happens is in the very short term, across just days of not sleeping well and not being well rested, you see these particles start to form little plaques and tangles. And as you get older and you increase this kind of, you know, in day to day lack of rest, these become the plaques and tangles they can associated with Alzheimer's and dementia. So that's where you have to really think about, oh, it's not just that I can put sleep in the bank and save it up and then spend it all on a vacation or rest in general. This is a 24 hour job. You have to really be focusing every day on having the equal and opposite upstates. Right. That kind of, that mishmash of Isaac Newton's idea is to say whenever there is an action, you need to have a downstate that follows it. And it has to be on a day to day basis. The idea that we can just sleep when we're old. This is why there are studies that show that people that how you sleep in your 50s and 60s, 40s, 50s and 60s can predict your onset of Alzheimer's in your 70s and 80s. Because it happens while you think you don't need it. It's already happening.

Ben Owden

Wow. And something else that you talk about and you've mentioned it already in this conversation and something that when I first came across it really made me think, because you share an example of a woman who came home every night to her partner exhausted and spent so much time activating downstate restore to heal from their microaggressions and insensitive remarks from work, which was very interesting. This is not outright bullying, it's this microaggression. Insensitive remarks from work, which sometimes can be seen as passive. But the impact of such a toxic workplace environment delayed her restore system so that she would go home, she would try to rest and sleep, but she wouldn't get the replenishment needed for a new cycle the following day. So should I guess how important is the role of a workplace Culture to pair with this idea of work life balance? Because I think sometimes when we think about work life balance, we just think, I'm not going to bother you on your weekend, I'll make sure that at five everybody goes home. And that's the extent of how we think about it. Maybe we have mental health support if people need it in the workplace. But how important is this idea of having a very healthy workplace culture, especially in our interactions with each other to such a degree that when we, it's not so we think beyond just sending people home, but it's like, okay, do we send them home with any sort of baggage that could be interfering with your ability to actually rest and replenish over time? How is important is this idea of expanding how we think about work life balance, how we think about giving people their personal time and the quality of their personal time.

Sara Mednick

Yeah, I love this question. So much of what we talk about is this kind of almost like a generic way of that. It's just you have to sort of decide for yourself what is the right way that you want to get down state and then achieve that by, by making time in your day and then setting yourself up to having a good night's sleep. And then we don't talk about the disparities in how much stress different people have depending on who they are and what kind of culture they're living in. So I think that this is a real conversation that is now actually saying that not everybody experiences the same type of upstate arousals. You know, not everybody walks down the street and has, you know, feels safe or feels that when they're at work they are not being discriminated against. When they're in the grocery store, they're not being discriminated against. Like there is a general sense of actually there are some people with an, with an increased burden of day to day stress. And this is due to racism, sexism, maybe homophobia, you know, or just being in a culture where whoever, you know, maybe your religious beliefs are in a different, you know, are minority to another group's religious beliefs. Whatever it is, we are living in a world of, you know, we're tribalist culture and it means that there are some groups of individuals who are experiencing an over an outsized burden of day to day cultural attacks. And I love that way of saying that racism is like death by a thousand tiny cuts. It's this idea of like it's not just in the very obvious, I'm not going to give you a home loan, but it's also in just The. The slight ways that you're treated when you walk into a room or being interacted with. So I think that consideration of saying that when you get to the end of your day, everybody has their own level of upstate stress that they have to counter with some sort of downstate restorative system. And particularly with my friend, one of the things that she really felt was that there was so much processing that she would have to do at the end of the day of all the experiences that she'd had that made her feel bad about herself, that made her feel like she wasn't being respected and that she didn't have enough time. She was spending her down state recovering just to get to a baseline. But then by then, she didn't have enough time to do the extra stuff. Right. Because it's only when you're at this sort of full baseline of all of your downstate needs, really filled to some sort of a nice baseline that you can then do the other work, which is the imagining, the creativity, the aspirational thinking. And so I think that that's one of the things that, to me, is really important to think about is we're not just these machines that are trying to balance out upstate downstate just so we can keep going like a machine. It's not like a car that just needs gas. Even though I use that metaphor a lot and other people use that metaphor a lot. You need to, like, have gas in order to make the car go. And that's the same as you. We actually want more out of our lives. Right. We want to actually spend time thinking about things in a deep way and making decisions in a really creative and novel. And coming up with solutions to problems that no one else has come up with. Right. And so I think that, you know, getting back to your question, it is very important to think in terms of the individual. How does this individual experience their day at work? Because it's going to mean, you know, I hate to bring it back to the kind of the. The bottom line, but it's going to mean that they are going to allow them. They're going to have more time to really be higher quality of, you know, their quality of presence is going to be much higher the next day if they're given. If the workplace sets them up to have a less of that kind of a upstate burden. And so that when they get home, they're not having to, like, you know, go through all the things that they experience and then try to calm themselves down from that. They're already at a good baseline and then they can achieve more right the next day, they can even be better.

Ben Owden

That's, that's well put. And I really hope companies do more of that because I think that whole, that famous line culture, its strategy for breakfast, I think this is another reminder of why that statement is true. Because like you're saying, if I work so hard just to be on the baseline and in this rapidly changing world where I'm expected to be innovative and creative and enterprising, my faculties that allow me to do those things are not replenished. So I'm just doing the bare minimum. I'm just surviving, so to speak. And so it's a lose, lose on both ends. And so this is, you know, very important stuff. Now something else that you talk about and this was one of the most challenging parts for me because I, I love coffee. I think when I stopped drinking years ago, I switched to coffee and it's become my obsession, so to speak. And in my mind I'm like, it's probably a little bit more healthier than alcohol. So when I read some of the research that you quote and some of the advice around coffee drinking, it was very challenging for me. But I think I've already started to implement some improvement as a result of some of the advice like time of day that I choose to drink coffee. So I would like to talk about this because I know this is especially for the working class. Coffee has become an essential part of our daily consumption. So you talk about two things that I would like to highlight, right. One is this idea that in healthy adults, executive functions including working memory and attention, gives premium performance between sunrise and noon. So we are most alert between the time we wake up and noon. Yet a lot of our coffee drinking habit is centered around that same window of time. Some people, the first thing they do when they wake up is make a cup of coffee before they do anything else. Some people, they do that first day when they arrive at work, whenever work starts, be it seven, eight or nine. And I should say we are most alert in the morning. Yet at the same time later during the day is maybe not the best idea because the caffeine stays in our system for a long period of time. And so when it's time to kick in the restore system and you have all this rev energy going up in your mind, it's not the best situation to be in. So when is a good time to drink coffee and how much coffee is to much coffee?

Sara Mednick

Oh, Ben, that's a hard one because as you say, it's like you know, people. This is the one thing that people like, don't take my coffee from me. You know, it's. It's a hard one, you know, So, I mean, the basic concept is you've just slept all night, you should be at your most well rested. This is the time where you should be at your most well rested. Why do we. The first thing people do is reach for caffeine. And I, you know, like, even though I stopped drinking coffee, I still drink tea. And it's also just like the ritual around having a fresh cup of tea, you know, like a hot, warm cup of tea in the morning is, to me, is so much a part of my waking up. So I can't necessarily tell people this, you shouldn't be doing this. But I think it's important just to be mindful of. Just think about it. Like, think about. Okay, that's very interesting. Right. So the, so the, the time where we should be at our most well rested is the time where we are putting something, you know, a drug into our system to wake us up. And of course, you could say, well, I didn't sleep well that night, and that's fine. But that's usually not, you know, the, the symptoms that people express from in the morning are usually of caffeine withdrawal are feeling groggy, having a headache. It's exactly the opposite. As in any drug, the withdrawal symptoms from the drug are exactly the opposite of what the drug usually provides. You, like heroin, you get very anxious and you get shaky as opposed to being really relaxed. Right. And so with caffeine, it's the same thing. So that, so if you are addicted to caffeine, you're going to feel really tired and groggy, unable to think, probably have headaches. Right. And so there is the possibility that actually that feeling of needing coffee in the morning is, is just a withdrawal response from not having had caffeine for, say, 12 hours, 15 hours, however long it was. So that's, number one just to think about. The second thing to think about is that caffeine stays in your blood system, you know, in your blood and in your brain for, you know, four to six hours of keeping you awake. That's its job, is to keep you awake. It actually disguises itself as these molecules that build up when we're sleepy, and it blocks the receptors to tell us that we're sleepy so that we stay awake. If that's happening for four to six hours, then you also need to really be mindful of what time you're drinking coffee or Any of these kind of energy drinks that are. Now, there's caffeine in chewing gum, it's in water, it's in every, you know, it's everywhere. Because then that will actually make you not go to sleep at night if you, if you're taking it too late in the afternoon. So, like, those afternoon coffees can be really damaging for your ability to get to sleep. And then we're in this vicious cycle, right, that we're sleep deprived and then we're, we're addicted and so we keep needing caffeine. So, you know, I mean, where in that time frame might it be best to drink coffee? You know, it could be that if you really wanted to not have that sort of addictive cycle is, is to try to not drink coffee right when you wake up in the morning, maybe have it sometime later in the day when you've naturally woken up and had your natural systems of alertness turn on so that you're not using coffee to make yourself the thing that keeps you awake, that you're naturally just. And when you really let go of a caffeine addiction, you can wake up and not feel like crap. It's just, you know, you're just naturally waking up. But then you also want to be careful not to drink coffee too late. So like, I don't drink any caffeine until afternoon. So maybe sometime within the 10 to noon time might be a good time for caffeine if that was something that you definitely needed to do. But again, this is very, very difficult to do. Right? It's very, you know, getting off coffee can take like weeks of headaches. Right. It really can have a major effect when people just say, oh, I'm not addicted. And then they try to not do it and then they feel terrible.

Ben Owden

Thank you. Because I think, I mean, I still sometimes drink coffee around 2pm But I try to make sure that by noon I've had, or I am having my cup of coffee. And it was a result of learning from your book that, okay, I have to. Because I had realized that the quality of my sleep was not there. Like I would not. It almost felt like I'd never got to deep sleep. Because any small thing, I'm awake and when I'm awake, it's hard to fall back asleep. So, you know, so I've already started to implement that. And thank you for sharing that. Something else that you talk about is, and I love the sentence because you say, over the past century or so, a shockingly large percentage of the population has decided to give the middle finger to the sun and the moon. And so we live in this circadian misalignment, so to speak. And people have found excuses for that. You know, I'm a night owl and I work better at night. And now with the rise of remote work and this hybrid model of working and the flexibility around work people, there's that sense of, if I don't finish this now, you know, I can go have lunch with a friend, I'll work at night, and then maybe I'll work up until 1 or 2am and then I'll go to bed and then I'll make up to sleep the next day. So that circadian rhythm is just not there. And we don't really follow that natural rhythm of how things should work. And so how do we, in the world where there's a lot of room and flexibility, how do we stay faithful to this natural rhythm of life that has been in operation for a really long time?

Sara Mednick

Yeah, I. Yeah, I mean, I think that that's one of the parts of sort of Western, not Western, but modern industrial age, right? Is that there's. And we can know that by looking at cultures that don't have light, that don't have any access to electricity, is that their sleep is pretty uniform across their group, right. Their community. They usually go to sleep about two hours after the sun goes down. And there aren't a lot of people who are night owls in these communities. And then once these. Once people who've been raised in a world with no electricity and no light, when they leave those communities and they go to places that are electrified with light, they suddenly become night owls. Right. And that is truly like, you know, it's. It's. For me, that's the most beautiful kind of answer to this kind of question is, are there night owls? Well, yes, but it's created by our society, right? It's created by light and it's created by individuals who decide they want to stay up at night. So a lot of people who think that they are night owls are kind of forcing themselves to stay up longer than maybe their bodies want them to. And what happens when you are pushing yourself to stay up later is that you're missing a type of sleep that is highly restorative. We have. Even though people think, well, I just go to sleep at 2 and then I'll get all the sleep I need from two and I'll sleep late. I'll sleep till like nine and I'll have a good seven hours, six hours of sleep, it'll be fine. But what they don't understand is that we have specific times of day where we get different types of sleep. And the most restorative sleep actually happens between around 10, 11 till midnight or 1. Then we get pushed into this other stage of sleep that's called rapid eye movement sleep. That first restorative sleep is called slow wave sleep, or there's lots of different words for it, but slow wave sleep or non REM sleep. And then we have REM sleep which is happening in the morning. So when you're going to sleep at, say one or two, you're most likely having a chronic deficit in that really deeply restorative. The most kind of down state of our sleep is happening during that early period. And then you're getting a lot of REM sleep. And REM sleep is great, but it really, it doesn't work as well without its kind of sister stage, which happens in the first part of the night.

Ben Owden

And I think you, I mean, that's amazing because in modern life I would like to believe, and I don't have any data for this, but it's an assumption based on my world and, you know, people that I know in my world, it's very normal to have people, especially people who maybe don't have young children, go to bed around 11 or midnight sometimes, especially these days. Oh, I'm trying to catch up on this Netflix show and I've been working all day and so now I'm catching up with family and oh, I'm in bed, but I'm texting and I'm watching something, I'm doing something. And it's interesting that if someone sleeps closer to midnight, basically, you're highly likely to have missed your window for slow wave sleep, which is where a lot of the restoration takes place. And so if that's the habit on a daily basis, I can imagine the type of consequences long term. And I think you say that we spend about 60% of our sleep in this stage two of sleeping. But I think something that I find more fascinating is that you say the better you sleep, the more you're able to handle catastrophic events. And you say that research has shown that REM sleep plays a protective role in helping people adjust to emotional events by helping move the processing of the event from your amygdala, which we talked about earlier, to your central command's rational brain. And it's interesting because one of the more fascinating things that I had learned was that Winston Churchill would sleep in the middle of the day during the World War. And, you know, and he Made a lot of good decisions. And I think we celebrate him as an iconic leader today. But he's someone who really was very, very serious about his sleep. And in a very volatile situation where things are changing in real time, he was able to make decisions that led to victory, so to speak, in something as catastrophic and as consequential as a world war. And so this idea that the better you sleep, the better, the more you can handle catastrophic events, the more you're able to respond to situations that are sometimes emotional is very, very interesting to me. And so I hear it on a cognitive level. I'm like, I understand it, but it's like implementing it in my own life is not so easy. But I think the more the awareness grows around. Wait a minute. So if I am sacrificing my sleep, I am basically becoming more fragile in my ability to respond to things that could be catastrophic in my life or the lives of those I am responsible for. Right. I think that realization is. Yeah, it's humbling, too, to know that those are the stakes, so to speak, if I am playing around with my sleep. Any thoughts on that?

Sara Mednick

I mean, you just said it so perfectly. Thank you so much for it. Like, that was such a beautiful summary of that whole part of the book. This is part of what we studied in my laboratory, is trying to understand how do emotional experiences that happen to us in the day change, right? Like, how do they change across time? How do they change across sleep? What is happening in the brain and the body? And I can only add to what you're saying is just one of the recent studies that we had was showing that there's that feeling of like you have something terrible happen to you. Even small things, like, we don't have to be catastrophic, but say you broke up with a partner, or you maybe, you know, a student failed in an exam, or maybe, you know, you didn't get a promotion, whatever it was that happened to you that day. And you feel incredibly bad in the short term, right? In that, you know, every time you think about it, you get super angry, you get super sad, whatever it is. And then across time, what you find is eventually you can start talking about the episode without crying or without getting angry. You can even start sort of really, you know, using kind of cognitive processes to sort of reframe what happened. Say, well, maybe she wasn't right for me. Or maybe, you know, that job would have just been so taking away time from my family, and. And maybe I really didn't actually want that job anyway, you know, and or it's like, oh, maybe I actually was the jerk and I really, you know, I should apologize. And so you start to have this non emotional attachment to whatever emotional thing happened. And you can use your brain, that, what I call the central command, right, that kind of executive at the front who's sort of saying, well, you know, this is how we're going to move forward, right, In a kind of productive, rational way that identity in your brain can sort of take over. And we know that that happens with sleep, that something happens during sleep that allows that amygdala to calm down and that frontal cortex to sort of take over. And it happens across many days, many nights. And one of the discoveries that we recently had is that it also happens with dreaming. So during REM sleep we have most of these really fanciful, emotional, kind of irrational dreams. And we had a study that found that the more people report having dreams, the more they had that transformation of their emotional experiences from being super negative to less negative across the day, from having a really big emotional reaction to having less emotional reaction across like the whole 24 hours. So it looks as though, you know, it's not just go to sleep, it's actually, you know, that there are specific things that happen in our dreams that allow us to process these emotions. And so it's, it's, you know, even though it's hard to even say, you know, it would be great if you just dreamed because it's really hard to have people do that. But you know that whatever is happening during your sleep is really doing something very specific. And so, you know, to know that as much as you want to like go to the gym and, you know, get your muscles strong or eat right, you also want to do this or go to therapy, right? Like people do a lot of therapy or they go life coaches or whatever it is that they do to improve themselves, that actually those things also happen during sleep.

Ben Owden

Something else. And I'm sure some people will not necessarily be very happy about this, but you talk about how alcohol has become sort of like the ultimate downstate for a lot of people. And you say for many of us, alcohol has become a replacement for the downstate. We work ourselves to the limit of our daily resources until there is nothing left. Yet we still have hours of service at home before we can fall into the void of sleep. And that void isn't even guaranteed. This doesn't work. We can't produce energy we don't have. And this makes us feel bad, inadequate and overextended. So we search for a Buffer to put between us and our bad feelings, us and the noise, us and the demands. A way to cut ourselves off from the intimacy of the moment, the immediacy of human relationship. Alcohol is one answer. Taking the edge off the sharp stings of need. And I think most pubs have happy hour. They know people are off work now and come and experience some downstate, the habit of maybe drinking wine in the evening before going to sleep, or when you really want to enjoy and relax and experience. I guess downstate alcohol has become the answer for a lot of people, and sometimes it's marketed as the downstate by companies that actually sell the product. So what are the risks with holding onto this view that alcohol is the ultimate downstate?

Sara Mednick

Yeah, it's such a. It's so funny because no one ever wants to talk about that because it's. It's the same as caffeine. It's like, no, don't take away my drinks, whatever it is. Right. So thank you for bringing it up. You know, I mean, I. I completely see even in myself how much, you know, when you've had a hard day, you just want to have a drink when work is over and you can have, you know, something that just takes the edge off. And it's alcohol, it's marijuana. It's. You know, it's. At this point, it's so many different options that people have. Alcohol is just one of many of the ways that. And a lot of the time people are looking for downers, you know, because those are. They're. They're suppressing our emotions, they're suppressing our thinking, they're suppressing our intimacy. Right. Our ability to emotionally connect with people around us and our desire to emotionally connect with people around us. But also it can suppress our ability to have sex. Right. You know, it's just totally shutting us down. So in no way am I saying that these things don't have a place, because I think that there is. We do have these chemicals and access to these chemicals, we've had them for our entire time of being human. People have created ways to, you know, you can say enhance or to kind of lessen the burden, you know, and so I. And sometimes that was also just because alcohol was cleaner than the water that was available. Culturally speaking, we've always had these supplements. It's just a question of. It's the same with caffeine. Can we be mindful? Can we really know, why am I drinking? My wife doesn't drink alcohol. And being with somebody who doesn't drink alcohol, it just Puts this extra edge of like, why am I wanting this drink right now? And why am I going for this? Is there something I'm trying to avoid? Or is there something. Am I going. Am I trying to just reach some oblivion where I don't have to feel anything? And so it helps me really think about why I take whatever drink I'm taking and whether I really need it. And a lot of times I'm like, whatever. I don't really actually need that. So there's this aspect, right, that it takes you out of the. It takes you out of the social game in a way and it puts you in another social game which is, you know, a lot of people are getting, you know, drugged together and that can be super fun. But it is also, if you're the sober person in a group of people having a lot of fun with alcohol, you realize that it's not because they're being smarter. They're usually getting a little less intelligent, I will say. But then the other thing is it actually also reduces your sleep. So it can really be. It can be difficult for you to. If you've been drinking alcohol regularly, it's difficult to. It can help you in the immediate moment of getting to sleep, but then you wake up very early because it completely takes away your ability to get to REM sleep. So that also has that kind of long term or even short term issue around reducing other downstate abilities for you to have.

Ben Owden

I guess just for clarity's sake there. So if you start with slow wave sleep, transitioning to sort of REM sleep from slow wave allows you to really stay in REM versus missing that window and just trying to go straight. Is that, Is that what.

Sara Mednick

Yeah. So if you are staying. So first of all, you. Alcohol can increase your ability to get to sleep and that would increase your ability to get to that slow wave sleep part. But what alcohol also does is it decreases your REM sleep. So you're going to have much shorter nights of sleep because you're not going to have the whole second half of the night, which is where REM sleep happens. I think a lot of people use alcohol for that initial getting to sleep. Right. They just want to, you know, have whatever it is that just crash them out. Exactly. But what usually happens then is that they wake up very, very, very early and then they can't sleep for the rest of the night.

Ben Owden

And as we're, you know, winding down in our conversation, there's a question that we ask all of our guests. It's the 111. What is the one book that you've read at some point in your life that you wish. You know, if there was a time machine and you could go back, you would like to sort of read this book earlier in your life. So it could be a book that you read this year, it could be a book that you read 10 years ago or 15 years ago. But you say, if I had a time machine and I could go back to an earlier time in my life, I would have loved to have read this book then. And then what is the one habit that you started doing at some point in your life? Started practicing that you wish you had started earlier as well? And then what is the one personal value that you will not compromise no matter the cost? So one book, one habit and one personal value. So I'll sort of bring this up after the next question that I'm going to ask around food. And I think one thing that you talk about as well in terms of making sure that our resource system works well is the choices of food, food that we eat. And you talk about this idea of sticking and remaining in mother nature's wheelhouse and avoiding things like overeating, maybe eating ultra processed food, food with a lot of sugar, refined flour. And I think when we think about some of our habits around food, especially habits that are active in the evening, you find that sometimes people would buy instant microwavable food that are pre processed. You just throw it in the microwave, you warm it up for a few minutes and it's ready to eat. And usually these are ultra processed foods, There's a lot of sugar in it, and maybe even habits like having dessert. And dessert is high in sugar for the most part. And sometimes these habits happen in the night at a time when we're supposed to shut down, we're supposed to slow things down, but then this is when we're actually allowing ourselves to do this. And then of course, some of the eating habits are highly emotional, meaning that we eat based on our mood. Sometimes when you're sad, you want your comfort food. And so if we go back to the initial thing that we talked about, you know, you've had a bad day at work, a lot of microaggression, and you know you want comfort food. And so you pass by your favorite pastry shop and you buy a few donuts or maybe a cake. And so all of these things affect the choices we make, sometimes late during the day. And that could interfere with this rhythm of rev and restore as well. So how do we develop sort of the right habits, especially around the end of the day with how we eat so that it doesn't get in the way of the ideal restore rhythm that we can have in our life.

Sara Mednick

Yeah, great. I mean, I think that that's something that I tried to really emphasize is that the rev restore system is. It's a part of nature, right? So this is not specific to humans, but every animal, every plant has an active period and sort of the upstate period and the downstate period. And that also means that whatever that you're doing, whether it's exercise or eating or working, having high mental processes, you want to do that in a time where your body is most equipped to handle whatever it is you're asking it to do. So, you know, if it's. If it's thinking, you know, sitting there writing and working, or, you know, calculating or whatever it is that your job is, you want to do that at a time where your brain is most equipped to help you and serve you. And it's the same thing with your metabolism, right when you're eating. So the best time for us to be eating is during the day, from the moment we wake up to when the sun sets. And that's the time where our bodies are best programmed to be able to process food as we go into. And that's, you know, because you've been sleep all day, all night, you wake up in the morning and you have all your insulin levels are topped off. And all of these processes that help you digest food are at their peak. And then across the day, these things just decline. So that by the time you're in this kind of typical downstate period, your insulin levels are very low. And insulin is what your body uses to shuttle energy into your cells so you can use this energy from your food. And that means that when you are trying to eat later and later in the evening, you're eating at the least optimal time for your body to process this food. And that's why this food, like these late night eating periods, this is why it makes people gain the most amount of weight. And they get into this kind of. This idea that also during this time, your brain is also in a down state, right? So that executive central command at the front office, the front of your brain is actually also needing sleep. So its ability to tell you, don't eat, that this is actually not the right time for you to be eating. It's also shut down. And so the emotional parts of your brain take over is like, this is going to make me feel good. And so you want to have high fat, high sugar foods you want to do that kind of stuff that you know that you probably shouldn't be doing. So not only, you know, it's like kind of a perfect storm, this kind of late night eating. And I think it's really what is probably like, why when you get this, you know, time restricted eating. Everybody's doing time restricted eating now. It's not just. It doesn't come out of nowhere. It comes out of this idea that during the day before the sun sets is really when your body is at its peak time to process food. And during the night, you want to have a long period of not eating to give yourself a full down state to replenish your resources.

Ben Owden

I mean, that's. I agree with what you just said there because I've experienced that myself. So I've been practicing intermittent fasting for a couple of years now. And I'm completely okay resisting the temptation. During the day, I would see something that I want and I desire and I'd be like, no, it's fine. But when I sleep late, even my wife knows it. Now. It's just like you're saying, it's the perfect storm. I open the fridge every couple of minutes and I'm looking for the next sweet thing, right? So if we happen to have cake, I would eat a lot of it. And it's a different version of me. I can't control myself. It's suddenly. But if I sleep early, then I never get to meet that version of Ben. So I agree there. It's almost like the office is shut down and whoever's running that office is gone.

Sara Mednick

Children are running.

Ben Owden

Yeah. Right. Right now there's this child who's just once everything they want, you know, and there's no one to tell them no. So I agree with that. And I think sleeping early definitely helps to curb some of those bad habits. And so as we've come to the end of our conversation, we'll try to bring back the 111. Hopefully a few things have come to the surface. So the 1, 1, 1. The one book that you maybe read at some point that you wish you had read earlier, the one habit that you picked up along the way that you maybe say, maybe it would have been good to start earlier with this habit and then one personal value that you will fight to protect.

Sara Mednick

So the book thing is hard for me because I feel like I always get books at the right time. Like, books come to me like, oh, this is such a great thing. Right? But I guess one of the books that really helped me understand life and Death and Cycles was the Tibetan book of living and dying. And I really. My mother. My mother died and then my father died. And then getting that. I don't know even. I don't know if it was given to me or how it came into my possession. But right when my mother died, I started reading that book and. And talk about upstate downstate, you know, talk about rhythms like this. This really is sort of a view into Buddhism philosophy around that this is just life, you know, that like death happens and this is. Of course there's some terrible, tragic deaths that happen outside of a natural cycle. But for the most part, the idea of that you can't accept life without also accepting death. To me, that has always been very. You know, an important lesson for me to learn is that you can't accept the upstate without accepting the down state. And that this is part of our cycles. So that's number one. Then the habit. I think it is actually really focusing on my rhythms. You know, having morning exercise, giving my time in this morning to do my writing, to pushing the things that are more downstate y kind of like. Or mindless into a later time in the day when my brain is turning off. So really thinking about my own personal rhythm has been really helpful. And then the value I would fight to the death. Well, I guess I'm doing it, you know, I guess my life is about sleep. I think that there is a part, I think that that is like somebody said the other day, like you're so obsessed with sleep. But I do think that there is something about that where I can, I can. It's like my only sword really is like to help people. You know, human rights levels and individual prosperity levels is that I think that sleep is just as key in all these different levels of analysis. So I guess I would say rest in general.

Ben Owden

That's beautiful. And I think to the first thing the book that you talked about actually recently I shared with. I was doing a mind dump and sometimes I do that on social media. And I just write things that I think about. And I was talking about what you just said. Right. This idea of accepting death as a part of life. It's not this unwanted guest, but as a core part of life. I think there's an epicurious quote where it says living to live well is to die well. Right. It's not this good and bad. It's just a part of this experience. And I think with rhythms. I think this is something that I wanted to talk about, but we don't really have time. But I love this quote in your book where you said every cell in the organ has a clock that is looking for a consistent schedule to sync up to. And the importance of having routines and rhythms so that your body anticipates and expects for you to behave that way. So, Sara, thank you so much for making the time to have this conversation. This was amazing and I've been looking forward to having this conversation for a while. So I'm glad that we managed to finally have the conversation. And I would highly encourage everyone else to read your books taken up in downstate as well. And we'll put the links to your books and your work on the description of this conversation so people can always have access to learn more about what you do. And yeah, and I guess if there are ways for people to get in touch as well, we'll share all of that information on the description. So as we're ending our conversation, any sort of last thoughts that you would like to share with the audience?

Sara Mednick

Oh, I just feel so grateful. Thank you so much. I'm so excited that we got to talk and I'm very grateful for your close read of my book. It really is and it's so gratifying that it was meaningful to you. So I really appreciate that.