Master Your Sleep to Master Your Life | Dr. Matthew Walker

The Daily Motivation

Lewis Howes

Education, Self-improvement

4.8 • 893 Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Leave an Amazon Rating or Review for my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Check out the full episode: https://greatness.lnk.to/1155 Sleep expert and neuroscientist Dr. Matthew Walker unravels the crucial connection between quality sleep and overall life mastery. With his extensive research and expertise, Dr. Walker sheds light on the profound impact of sleep on various aspects of our lives, including physical health, mental well-being, and cognitive performance. Sign up for the Greatness newsletter: http://www.greatness.com/newsletter

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.
0:11.0	Sleep is probably the single most effective thing that you can do to reset both your brain,
0:16.6	but also your body health, of course, as well. And I don't say that flippantly against the notions of diet and exercise.
0:24.4	Of course, both of those are fundamentally critical.
0:26.8	But if I were to take you, Lewis, and I were to deprive you of sleep for 24 hours,
0:32.6	deprive you of food for 24 hours, or deprive you of even water or exercise for 24 hours.
0:39.3	And then I were to map the brain and body impairment that you would suffer after each one
0:44.3	of those four.
0:45.3	Hands down by a country mile, a lack of sleep will implode your brain and body far more significantly.
0:52.3	So right now we recommend somewhere between seven to nine
0:55.8	hours for the average adult. Once we know that you go below seven hours of sleep, we can start to measure
1:02.7	objective impairments in your brain and your body. And in fact, the number of people who can
1:08.0	survive on less than six hours of sleep without showing
1:12.0	any imperman rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population is zero.
1:19.0	A study took a group of perfectly healthy individuals, and they limited them to six hours of sleep
1:24.6	a night for one week. And then they measured the change in their gene
1:28.5	activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight-hour night
1:33.8	of sleep. And there were two critical findings. The first was that a sizable and significant
1:38.2	711 genes were distorted in their activity caused by that one week of short sleep. What I found most interesting was that about half of those genes were distorted in their activity caused by that one week of short sleep. What I found most
1:45.6	interesting was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity. The other
1:50.7	half were decreased. Now, those genes that were suppressed were genes associated with your immune
1:56.0	system. So you became immune compromised or immune deficient. Those genes that were increased in their activity, or what we call overexpressed, were genes
	...

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