as i

said in the book i'm not discounting you know thousands of years of chinese medicine because i do believe there's some really amazing stuff in chinese medicine but so what happens is um you know if you've got your sleeps architecture you've got 90 minute cycles and you've got four stages you up you know awake and then you go right down into deep slow wave sleep So you get predominantly more deep, slow-wave sleep at the start of the night, and then REM sleep starts to kick in around 2 a.m., depending on when you go to sleep.

And so REM sleep is when you are consolidating your memories, you're making sense of the day.

There's also a forgetting function, and there's also fear processing.

So I like to use the analogy of the midnight librarian.

So you've got these...

A librarian with a bench and all of the folders come in throughout the day of, you know, what happened in memories.

is the science saying about that?

So could you explain that to us?

Yeah.

So I know that some people really don't like trackers, and they think that it's maybe a waste of money.

But honestly, if you have a serious mental, physical health issue or feel like you're not coping with life, I, I strongly recommend just getting a wearable even for six months because if you don't know what's going on during that really imperative part of your daily sleep, uh, architecture, you just don't know.

You don't, you don't know how to change it or, or even if you should change it.

And so when you think about, um, the sleep cycles, all of them are equally as important, and they do different things.

So you start o- off with- Light sleep, so that's that really nice, you know, when you're drifting in between consciousness and, uh, and awareness where your alpha brainwaves sort of, they start to change and, you know, you can have insights at this time, which is q- quite lovely, and I think a lot of people historically have used this time for, um, you know, creative insights.

And if you have any examples of how you've used it.

I remember reading a 2019 paper by Dutch researchers who blocked REM sleep in both animals and then followed it up with humans and found that it induced anxiety-like behaviors within a week, right?

Yeah, so yeah, this is so interesting.

So what it does, it trains your brain for its fear conditioning.

And so if you're like a lot of people will cut off their REM if they drink and or if they've got early alarms and they're getting up to play sport or something.

So, you know, REM is predominantly characterizing the later part of your sleep architecture.

So around 2 a.m. on.

It's often why people wake up.

What about the other stages of sleep? Like, what are they? Are they useful or are they just kind of around the edges? Yeah, I think we're finding out

So where do you start? If you're chatting to someone, they're having a period where sleep's been a bit rough, where do you kind of start to reverse that?

I think you say it's very normal.

About 30% to 50% of people wake up at 3 a.m. in the morning and can't get back to sleep.

I think there's normalizing it, but then you have to say a good night's sleep starts the minute you wake up.

It's not something that you jump into bed and then all of a sudden you can fall to sleep.

It's like landing a hot air balloon, but that hot air balloon had to take off in the morning.

If you really do want a good night's sleep, get sunlight into your eyeballs.

Do you think that's kind of part of the reason why, why so many of us are having those middle of the night wake ups?