is brought to you by PeakNutritionLabs.com A team of international researchers working on the development nutritional suppliments for improving health and longevity.

PeakNutritionLabs.com And by Swiss International Airlines.

Flying to over 70 worldwide locations.

Truly Swiss made.

Swiss International Airlines.

And by the BMW European Delivery Program, a way to experience the roads BMW was made to drive.

BMW European Delivery Program.

(stirring music) Travels and Traditions with Burt Wolf is a classic travel journal, a record of Burt's search for information about our world and how we fit into it.

Burt travels to the source of each story, trying to find the connections between our history and what is happening today.

What he discovers can improve our lives and our understanding of the world around us.

♪ I'm so tired ♪ I haven't slept a wink ♪ I'm so tired ♪ My mind is on the blink ♪ I wonder, should I get up ♪ And fix myself a drink ♪ No, no, no ♪ I'm so tired ♪ I don't know what to do - People have been fascinated with sleep since ancient times.

The Greeks thought that sleep was the result of a lack of circulation in the brain, but they also worshiped the gods associated with sleep.

Aristotle thought sleep was caused by a shift in the activity of your heart.

He also thought that in some ways, it was related to digestion.

My mother thought that in my case, sleep was an instantaneous reaction to reading a list of the homework that was due the next day.

Along with oxygen, water, and food, sleep is essential for survival, and that's true for all animals, including humans, but it also challenges our safety.

Why would you want to lose consciousness with your environment for hours and hours at a time?

An animal that is awake is in a better position to defend itself than one that is asleep.

So something is going on with sleep that makes it so important that we give up our consciousness.

In fact, sleep affects every major system in our body, and most importantly, it repairs the systems that are damaged when we're awake.

A while ago, my doctor told me that in order to maintain your health and wellbeing, you needed a minimum of 7 hours of sleep during every 24-hour period, and if you're a teenager, you need a minimum of 8 to 10 hours.

He listed the dangers of not getting a sufficient amount of sleep.

Okay, I got the point.

We all need the recommended amount of sleep, and we need to understand the subject.

I soon realized that if I was gonna make a television show about sleep, the guy I had to talk to was Professor Matt Walker.

Matt Walker is a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at UC Berkeley in California, and a Director of its Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab.

He also authored one of the great books on the subject, titled "Why We Sleep".

- Let me start with the brain and the functions of learning and memory, because what we've discovered over the past 10 or so years is that you need sleep after learning to essentially hit the save button on those new memories so that you don't forget.

But recently, we discovered that you also need sleep before learning, and now, to actually prepare your brain, almost like a dry sponge ready to initially soak up new information, and without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain essentially become waterlogged, as it were, and you can't absorb new memories.

(energetic music) - So Matt, why do we sleep?

- Well, 50 years ago, the crass and very unhelpful answer to that question was that we sleep to cure sleepiness (chuckles), which is the the unhelpful equivalent of saying we eat to cure hunger.

That tells you nothing about the physiological benefits of food, and the same was true for sleep.

But now, 50 years later, based on hundreds of thousands of different new findings, we've come up with a much more helpful response.

There is no major process of the body and there is no operation of the mind that isn't wonderfully enhanced when you get sleep, or demonstrably impaired when you don't get enough.

So I think, simply said, sleep is the single most effective thing that you can do each and every day to reset the health of your brain and your body.

- What's the relationship between sleep and creativity?

- We've learned that sleep is far more intelligent than we ever imagined, because sleep will gather together all of the new information that you've learnt during the day, and in this incredible act of almost informational alchemy, sleep will take those freshly-minted memories and it will start interconnecting them with all of your back catalog of previously-stored information, so that you wake up the next day with a revised, mind-wide web of associations.

In other words, sleep helps inspire creativity, so you can come up with solutions to previously impenetrable problems.

And I don't think it's a coincidence, that you've probably never been told in your lifetime you should stay awake on a problem, and the answer is, of course, no, you should sleep on a problem.

- How is sleep related to your mental health?

- There is a very tight relationship between your sleep health and your mental health.

I think the first point to make is that in the past 20 years of investigating this topic, we have not been able to discover a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal.

- Hmm, very interesting.

- And I think that has a profound story to tell in both our understanding, our treatment, and maybe, ultimately, our prevention of grave mental illness.

And we now have significant links between sleep disruption and conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, and PTSD, and most recently, and tragically, suicide as well.

So at a clinical level, there is a very tight relationship there.

But then we've performed series of experiments that really help us understand exactly why it is that we become so emotionally irrational, so emotionally pendulum-like in our reactivity, when we're not getting sufficient sleep.

And I often think about that young parent who is holding a child, and the child is crying, and they look at you, and they say, "They just didn't sleep well last night," as if there's some universal parental knowledge that bad sleep the night before equals bad mood and emotion reactivity the next day.

And we conducted a study where we placed people inside of a brain scanner, and we gave them a full night of sleep, or we took sleep away from them for a single night, and what we discovered is that the deep emotional brain centers, particularly a structure called the amygdala, which is one of the centerpiece regions for the generation of strong, impulsive, negative reactions, that part of the brain was 60% more emotionally reactive under conditions of a lack of sleep.

And so it's almost as though without sleep we become all emotional accelerator pedal and too little regulatory control brake, as it were.

So I think that's the bad that can happen when sleep is taken away from us in terms of our mood and our emotions.

But then we can ask, what is the good that happens when we give sleep back?

And what we've found, remarkably, in the past few years here at the Sleep Center is that sleep, and particularly rapid eye movement sleep, or dream sleep, provides a form of overnight therapy, it's actually emotional first aid, that it's during sleep that REM sleep, in particular, will take those difficult, painful experiences that we've been having during the day, even sometimes trauma experiences, and dream sleep will act almost like a nocturnal soothing balm, and it will just take the sharp edges off those difficult, painful experiences so that we come back the next day, and they don't feel as painful anymore, they don't feel as challenging.

And so in that sense, I don't think it's time that heals all wounds, I think it's time in sleep, and particularly dream sleep, that provides that kind of emotional convalescence, as it were.

And there's a beautiful quote by an American entrepreneur, his name was E. Joseph Cossman, and he said that "the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night of sleep," and that's exactly what the research is finding.

- What's sleep's relationship to our overall health?

- So every system in the body, every major physiological system we know, it seems to be overhauled and refreshed by sufficient sleep.

So firstly, we know that your immune system is critically dependent on your sleep health.

For example, if I limit you to just four hours of sleep for one single night, there is a 70% drop in critical anticancer-fighting immune cells called natural killer cells.

Second, we also know that your hormonal systems are intimately tied to your sleep health.

If you take a group of healthy males and limit them to four or five hours of sleep for one week, they will have a level of testosterone which is that of someone 10 years their senior.

So in other words, a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade in terms of that critical aspect of wellness.

- What are your thoughts on daylight saving time?

- There's a global experiment performed on 1.6 billion people across 75 countries, twice a year, and it's called daylight savings time.

Now, in the spring, when we lose one hour of sleep opportunity, we see a 24% relative increase in heart attacks that following day.

And then in the autumn, in the fall, when we gain an hour of sleep, there is a 21% reduction in heart attacks.

Isn't that incredible?

And you see exactly the same profile for things such as road traffic accidents on our streets, suicide rates, even the sentencing from judges.

What we've found is that federal judges here in the United States will dole out a much harsher sentence during daylight savings time shift, when they've lost that one hour of sleep, presumably because they are in a worse mood, and they're also making worse decision compassion-based actions.

- How about a few general tips on how to get a good night's sleep?

- The first rule is regularity.

Try to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend, or even if you've had a bad night of sleep, regularity is king, and it will anchor your sleep and improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep, and the reason is because sitting deep within the middle of your brain is a master 24-hour clock, and it expects regularity, and it thrives best under conditions of regularity, and when you gift it those regular signals of to bed time and to wake time, consistently, that's what will improve your sleep.

So don't just set an alarm, by the way, to wake up, think about using a to bed alarm, as well.

You know, most of us don't think about that as a cue for us to get to bed.

The second tip is darkness.

We are a dark-deprived society in this modern era, and we need darkness at night to trigger the release of a hormone called melatonin, and melatonin will help regulate the healthy timing of your sleep.

So perhaps a good, useful tip here is that in the last hour before bed, firstly, try to disengage from those screens and those computers, not just because they emit the blue light which can be harmful to your melatonin, but they're cognitively activating, and emotionally activating, and you need to actually deescalate your levels of emotion to be able to fall asleep, but also, dim down half of the lights in your house in the last hour before bed.

You will be surprised at how sleepy that can make you feel.

The third tip is keep it cool, and what I mean by this is, your brain and your body need to drop their core temperature by somewhere around about one degree Celsius, or two to three degrees Fahrenheit, in order for you to fall asleep, and then stay asleep soundly across the night.

And this is the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot, because the room that's too cold is at least taking you in the right temperature direction for good sleep.

So aim for a bedroom temperature of somewhere around about 65 degrees Fahrenheit, or maybe 18, 18.5 degrees Celsius.

I know that that sounds cold, and you can take a hot water bottle to bed, or you can wear thick socks if you like, that's completely fine, but the ambient temperature needs to be cold.

The fourth tip is walk it out.

In other words, don't lie in bed for long periods of time, awake.

And the general rule of thumb here is that after about 25 minutes or so, if you haven't been able to fall asleep, or you can't fall back asleep, don't worry.

Even after everything that I've said here in this interview, and I know, by the way, that I want to be sensitive to people who are struggling with sleep, particularly those with insomnia, listening to me tell you about the deleterious impact of sleep is probably only going to make you more anxious, and I don't want to necessarily do that.

Insomnia is a solvable problem, and just because you've been having bad sleep, it doesn't mean that you can't recover your sleep.

It's never too late to start sleeping better, you can get better, firstly, but coming back to this idea of walking it out, if you lie in bed for long periods of time, you should just... Firstly, know that everyone has a bad night of sleep.

I am not immune to periods of insomnia or bad nights of sleep.

But if you lie in bed awake for too long, your brain starts to learn the association that this thing called your bedroom is this time of being awake, and it becomes a learned habit, and so every time you get into bed... You're falling asleep watching television, and then you get into your bed, and you're wide awake, and you don't know why, and the reason is because your brain has learned the association that this thing called the bed is the trigger of you being awake rather than being asleep, and we need to break that association.

So the suggestion would be, after 25 minutes or so, don't worry, just get out of bed, go to another room, and in dim light, just read a book, or listen to a podcast, or something relaxing, meditate, and only return to bed when you are sleepy.

And there's no time limit for that.

And that way, your brain will relearn the association that it once had that your bed is this place of sleepiness.

And I think the analogy here, Burt, would be, we would never sit at the dinner table waiting to get hungry, so why would we lie in bed waiting to get sleepy?

And the answer is, we shouldn't.

Just get out of bed.

The fifth tip is something that we've already spoken about, alcohol and caffeine, just keep an eye out on those two things.

Life with some degree of moderation will help that.

The other unconventional sleep tip that I would have concerns when you are having a bad night of sleep or coming off a bad night of sleep.

After a bad night of sleep, the best advice I have for you is this: do nothing.

Don't wake up any later, don't go to bed any earlier, don't nap during the day, and don't drink excessive caffeine to overcome that bad night of sleep, because firstly, if you wake up later that following day, if you try to sleep in to get some of the sleep back that you've lost, when it comes to your normal bedtime that following evening, you're not going to be as tired because you woke up so late, and that will cause a bad night of sleep the next night, as well.

Similarly, if you try to go to bed too early than your body naturally normally wants to go to bed, you're just going to lie in bed for that hour earlier that you tried to get into bed to compensate, and then you're back to the same problem of feeling like you're tossing and turning.

- What are else should we know?

- Sleep, unfortunately, is not an optional lifestyle luxury, it's a non-negotiable biological necessity, and sleep you can think of as your life support system.

It is the elixir of life, and it is Mother Nature's best effort yet at immortality.

- Thank you, Matt, that was great stuff, and very important for people to know.

(chiming music) The next thing I needed to know was what was going on with my own sleep.

There are a number of devices to tell you just that, but I wanted to make sure that I found the one that was best for me, so I consulted a site called Wirecutter.

Wirecutter is a website owned by the New York Times company.

The staff tests various products and recommends those that do a good job.

(crowd cheering) The first thing I learned was that the NBA offered something called an Oura ring to its players.

It's a titanium ring that fits on your finger and tracks various data about your body.

The league made the ring available because it had the ability to measure temperature, heart, and respiratory rates, as well as sleep patterns and a few other things that would help with the health of their players.

The ring shines infrared light beams through your skin and records changes in how that light is reflected.

It transfers the information to your mobile phone, and uses it to track down how many breaths you take per minute, your heart rate, and variations in your heart rate.

It detects movement, tracks your sleep and your activity, and it measures your skin temperature.

Then it gives you specific suggestions for improving your sleep, based on that data.

This morning, the ring told me I had an excellent night's sleep, and my readiness was optimal.

Working with Professor Walker and the experts at Oura has changed my approach to sleep, and that's true for my family and the members of our television production team.

I thought it would be helpful if I recap the techniques that were most effective for us.

In addition to setting a time to wake up, I now have a set time to go to bed.

My ideal bedtime is between 8:30 and 9:30, and my wake-up time is 6:00 a.m. That gives me eight hours of sleep every night, and I try to keep to that schedule every night.

I keep my bedroom temperature at about 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

It feels a little cold to me, but Professor Walker said it will help me sleep better, and it looks like it does.

And besides, I'm under the covers, so the actual room temperature is less significant.

I keep the bedroom as dark as possible, and I make sure that all my electronic devices, cell phone, computer, iPad, headphones are in another room.

During the hour before I head to bed, I avoid any screen time.

If I wanna read, I read a book, ink printed on paper.

Remember those?

They're particularly ideal for books with lots of pictures.

If I'm in bed and I can't fall asleep for about 20 minutes, I get up and read.

Professor Walker had a great line: You don't sit at a table waiting to get hungry, why would you lie in bed waiting to get sleepy?

In the three hours before your bedtime, avoid alcohol and caffeinated beverages.

The idea of a glass of brandy or port as a nightcap sounds good, and it may help you fall asleep, but after a few hours, the alcohol or caffeine will wake up you up.

It's also helpful to avoid exercise in the two or three hours before you go to bed.

On a personal note, on the hours before I go to bed, I also try to avoid talking about any subject that would upset me; no politics, no negative discussions about the behavior of family members.

- Was there trouble?

- A small altercation (audience laughs) - No comments about the dismal performance of the New York Knicks, and no watching of the evening news.

Years ago, I worked at the ABC station in New York City.

There was a sign on the door of the news director's office that read, "If it bleeds, it leads."

It was a reminder to all reporters that the opening story of the program should be about something terrible that happened to somebody.

Why would we wanna try and go to bed after that?

Though in a partial defense of the media, I should point out that we are historically disposed to pay attention to things that are scary or dangerous.

Millions of years ago, it became apparent that if our ancestors were walking through the forest, and on one side of the path was a bunch of berries and the other side was a lion getting ready to jump you, you should pay attention to the lion and not the berries.

Paying attention to bad news is a survival technique.

The newsroom sign that said, "If it bleeds, it leads," is just taking advantage of our natural tendencies.

In the morning, I check the information on my cell phone that was sent to it by my ring.

I can see how I did during the night and adjust my plan for the day accordingly.

Of course, it didn't tell me what I should be ready for, but considering all things, it decided that I was in sufficiently good shape to make this program, and so I did, and I thank you for watching, and I hope you will join us for our future programs right here on your local public broadcasting station.

If you'd like to see this program again, or any of the hundreds of programs we've made for our public broadcasting stations, visit BurtWolf.com, or the Burt Wolf YouTube channel.

(perky music) - [Narrator] Travels and Traditions with Burt Wolf is brought to you by PeakNutritionLabs.com A team of international researchers working on the development nutritional suppliments for improving health and longevity.

PeakNutritionLabs.com And by Swiss International Airlines.

Flying to over 70 worldwide locations.

Truly Swiss made.

Swiss International Airlines.

And by the BMW European Delivery Program, a way to experience the roads BMW was made to drive.

BMW European Delivery Program.

(music chimes)