Sleep Experts: Melatonin, Sex, and their impact on Sleep w/ Arianna Huffington & Matt Walker | #168

Sex is great for sleep. Yeah, you’re welcome. One of the principal reasons that we have insomnia is because of biological and psychological anxiety and stress. “I am just so tired, but I’m so wired. I can’t fall asleep or stay asleep.”

The truth is that we are living in tumultuous times. Learning how to move into the eye of the hurricane is absolutely critical for good sleep and for health generally.

I don’t care how much you sleep. I truly don’t. What I care about is the consequences of your lack of sleep, not the lack of sleep itself.

When you wake up in the morning, are you looking forward to your day? Are you experiencing joy in what you’re doing? How reactive am I to challenges? Are you empathetic? Are you creative? All these more intangible measures of our life are also things you should not forget to be aware of. It’s not just the numbers; it’s also how we are experiencing our life.

Now that’s a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Time for your questions. All right, John, kick us off. This is for Arianna.

What a lovely woman you are in person. I’m just amazed. I wanted to ask: Why aren’t these items taught in schools rather than waiting until somebody is an adult? And secondly, how may I help?

Oh, fantastic. I love that you want to help. There are so many ways. As Peter said earlier, you’re all in touch with people who may not have the resources that people in this room have. It could be people at schools, employees, or nonprofits you work with. Let us know. We have a foundation, and we do a lot of nonprofit work.

We have 2 little slogans. One is, “Health is what happens between doctor visits.” When people realize that they are empowered, they take control of what they’re doing. The other is very simple: “Behavior change is a miracle drug, and we’re in control of it.” Peter called it being the CEO of your own health.

One of the things I love about Matt is that you are such a wordsmith. You’re so eloquent. A lot of scientists have a hard time communicating and reaching people, and Matt has been able to bridge the science with an incredible communication gift. We can do all that. We would love to work with you and anyone here who wants to reach millions of people who are suffering.

Thank you. So important, Tom.

Thank you, Peter. Matt, thank you. I’ve read some of your stuff. I love the drug idea, but I come from the world of nutrition and supplements. There’s controversy about supplements, but are there any supplements that you’ve found that add to the drug and could help with all these sleep analytics?

Yeah, it’s a very good question. At first, one could cynically say that if there were some Shangri-La of a supplement for good sleep that promised you the royal sort of night, the drug companies would have been all over it 20 years ago and making billions of dollars from it. The fact that there aren’t perhaps tells us something.

I would say, though, that right now one of the principal reasons that we have insomnia is because of biological and psychological anxiety and stress. It is what I would call the tired-but-wired phenomenon: “I am just so tired, but I’m so wired. I can’t fall asleep or stay asleep.”

There is evidence for 2 compounds: phosphatidylserine and ashwagandha. Both of those seem to have the ability to tamp down the fight-or-flight branch of the nervous system and also, respectively, lower the amount of cortisol. They haven’t been tested in the context of sleep, but they have been tested outside of the context of sleep for both of those indications.

Normally, working with clients, we will often try to get them on something like that—around about 3 to 400 milligrams—together with 2 to 3 grams of glycine. That seems to help with circadian-rhythm realignment. Other than that, I would say combine it with behavioral interventions. Anything that helps distract the mind, together with getting the physiology straight with those 2 supplements, is probably not a bad first step.

Thank you. Amazing. By the way, when you go home and receive your transcript of the entire summit, you can put it into your favorite LLM and say, “Summarize what Matt said I should do for sleep,” and you’ll get an answer. Can’t wait for that. All right, Larry.

Thank you, Peter. This is for Matt. Do you encounter, or have you encountered, patients who bring up the issue of restless legs syndrome and/or neuropathy as it interrupts their sleep?

Restless legs syndrome—we see that quite frequently. Restless legs syndrome, for those who want to know, usually gives you this creepy-crawly feeling in your legs. You have to massage them. It’s horrific. Some people get it in the triceps, too.

It is one of the most undiagnosed sleep disorders out there, or at least I should say misdiagnosed. You can progressively walk up the medication pathway. You typically start with things like gabapentin or pregabalin. Pregabalin is a bit harder because it will typically make you a bit groggier the next morning.

At the next level, you can go up to something like pramipexole, which actually helps tamp down or modulate some of the dopamine circuits. The problem is that you’ve got to be a bit careful, because too much can lead you to become reward-sensitive and risk-taking. You’ve got to be really careful with managing the patient.

The final step up, because you can become resistant to that over time, is certain opioid-like medications. Of course, people are nervous about those. But those are the 3 tiers that we typically progress through to try to pharmacologically help with restless legs syndrome.

Hey everybody, I hope you’re enjoying this episode. You know, earlier this year, I was joined on stage at the 2025 Abundance Summit by a rockstar group of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors focused on the vision and future for AGI, humanoid robotics, longevity, blockchain, basically the next trillion dollar opportunities. If you weren’t at the Abundance Summit, it’s not too late. You can watch the entire Abundance Summit online by going to exponentialmastery.com. That’s exponentialmastery.com.

I’m from Greece. I’m doing very well, I would say, with most of the steps about sleeping, movement, and connections. But I’m struggling a little bit this year, maybe with the unrest between countries. To put it simply, lightly, and neutrally, it’s been a bit hectic these last few months, and I wonder how you would help us navigate that during these months—how to be a bit less stressed, and what can happen between markets, between countries, and with stress around geopolitics.

You know, that is such an interesting question. I’m so glad you asked it, because the truth is that we are living in tumultuous times. There is so much happening that is unnerving, and learning how to move into the eye of the hurricane is absolutely critical for good sleep and for health generally.

So, how can we deal with all these problems? There’s so much we can’t control. There’s so much we can’t control. There are 2 things that we highly recommend, and Matt, I would love to know what you think. One is no doomscrolling at night. No doomscrolling.

Yes.

Pick a time that you stop reading the news. Trust me, I stopped reading the news, period.

No. You could not pay me enough to watch the evening news or pick up a newspaper, with all apologies to the Huffington Post here. I mean, having someone you know—my neural net—I don’t want it trained by that. My mom will tell me if there’s something going on in the world that I need to know about.

Absolutely. But this is key: Also turn off all notifications that don’t come from people you know.

Not just people you know—you love.

Yes. You only want notifications from people you love. You don’t want notifications from the Huffington Post or CNN that are called “breaking news.” Trust me, 99.9% are not breaking news. That helps you get into the eye of the hurricane.

Andrew, great question. Let’s go to Bert on mic 5.

Matt, what are you doing when you’re traveling across time zones? Peter, you’re hopping to Saudi Arabia, and 2 days later you’re back. What are the best tips for jet-lag adjustment and all of that? Matt, you’ve been developing a new product around that, I think.

Yeah. We are actually creating a compound that is going to be designed to protect you against the insufficient sleep that you will face. A lot of companies out there are trying to develop either supplements or drugs that help you sleep more. In truth, I don’t care how much you sleep. I truly don’t. What I care about is the consequences of your lack of sleep, not the lack of sleep itself.

We’ve just raised a round of funding, and we are about to start the clinical trial with a new pharmacological suite of compounds that will protect you. But to your question, what can you do now? There’s a 2-step approach: things you do during the flight and things you do after the flight.

During the flight, it’s the following: As soon as you get on the flight, set all clock faces to the time in the new time zone. At that point, act accordingly. If people in the new time zone are awake, you need to be awake. If they’re asleep, you need to try to be asleep. Alcohol and caffeine are not your friends, so try to abstain.

The next is to try to wake up, at least to create 10 to 12 hours of sustained wakefulness the following day when you arrive, based on the time you expect to go to sleep. In other words, create enough sleepiness to try to override the lack of sleep drive that you will have when you are in the new time zone.

The other thing I would say is, when you arrive in the new time zone—let’s say I fly from San Francisco to London, 8 hours ahead—I get on the flight at 8:00 p.m.

I look at my watch. It’s not 8:00 p.m.; it’s 4:00 a.m. London’s 8 hours ahead. I should be asleep. The next thing I’m going to do is be awake when everyone else is asleep and asleep when everyone else is awake.

Finally, if I really need to, upon touchdown in London, I will nap for 15 minutes and cut myself off. I can’t nap after 1:00 p.m. I can have 1 coffee strategically. Then, every day I’m in the new time zone, first thing, I can use caffeine in the morning. I need to get 20 minutes of daylight within the first 2 hours. Exercise before midday. Eat when everyone else is eating in the new time zone. 1 hour before sleep, I need to take a hot bath or a shower. 45 minutes before, 3 milligrams of melatonin, no less. Lights out, mask, and I’m gone.

Okay. Amazing. What a dissertation. One more thing: Do you really need to go? You know, guys, it’s amazing. It’s like we need to ask ourselves these questions. God bless you. That’s the idea: We always think that because we’re invited to go to that or go to that, we’ve got to go. No. And if you want to live long and live healthy, say no more. That was a great demonstration of knowledge versus wisdom and knowing the difference between the two. Amazing. Amazing. That’s why God created Zoom. All right.

Uh, real quick. I’ve been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called One Skin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a synolytic that kills scenile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin and I think it’s one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. Uh if you’re interested, check out the show notes. I’ve asked my team to link to it below. All right, let’s get back to the episode.

Natalie, I love this panel, but I want to ask you, Matt.

I’m a nutritionist and naturopath. I use cortisol panels for stress. I use inositol for sleep, magnesium glycinate, ashwagandha, and phosphatidylserine. What about using regular melatonin for inflammation and breast cancer prevention every night?

Yeah, I think melatonin has an interesting story, with a caveat. Firstly, most people take too much. They’re taking 5, 10, or 20 milligrams. That’s what we call a supraphysiological dose. The worry there is, like testosterone replacement therapy for males, after you’ve consistently dosed for maybe a year, a year and a half, the testes will shut down their own natural production, and it may never return. The worry is the same with melatonin.

The second problem is: How much should you take? So, really, you’re aiming for between 1 to 3 milligrams.

Am I right?

That’s right. So that’s what we call a normative physiological dose. There was a study published where they looked at 20 different vendors. Based on what it said on the bottle, what you were swallowing actually ranged from 83% less to 464% more than what was stated on the bottle. So it’s a bit of a Wild West.

I would say that melatonin is largely inert as a compound, for the most part. My worry also is in a pediatric setting; it’s now increasingly used. Melatonin is a bioactive hormone. It’s critical for gonadal development. They did a study in juvenile male rats—teenage male rats—and dosed them with high amounts of melatonin. It stunted testicular growth and caused testicular atrophy.

If I go into a parent-teacher association meeting one evening and say, “Stand up on stage. I’d like you to start dosing your children with a bioactive hormone. In fact, I’d like you to dose them with something that’s maybe 2 or 3 times the natural amount. So, no sleep aid for kids, right? It will stunt their developmental growth, and start doing it every night. Who’s with me?” So that said, I think there’s a cluster of people for whom melatonin does work, but largely melatonin does not help with the generation of sleep. It helps with the timing of sleep, and that’s why it’s never really been prescribed for insomnia.

Amazing. Let’s go to Jason on Zoom. Jason, I’d love to get your take on modafinil.

I take it a few times a week and want to know what kind of negative impact it might have on my sleep. Peter Diamandis

Something I use when I go overseas and have to go on stage.

That’s a fantastic question. Modafinil is a wake-promoting chemical as well. Right now, we haven’t necessarily seen long-term studies that have systematically evaluated what taking modafinil would mean in terms of brain or body physiology at weekly doses. Most people I know, and that we work with, take it strategically only under break-glass-in-case-of-emergency conditions, 4 or 5 times a year.

I think right now we don’t have any evidence that it has marked deleterious effects other than its addictive potential. I would say, though, that when you fight biology, you normally lose. The way you know you’ve lost is disease and sickness. That would be my only worry in terms of free lunches. Typically, in biology, there aren’t any.

Love it, Jason. This question is for Matt.

So, Matt, I haven’t gone to sleep before midnight probably in the last 5 years. I live on airplanes. I travel a lot, which has been very disruptive. I ran an experiment on myself to try and understand sleep because everyone said, “How do you survive? How do you get through it?” I was really trying to understand a bit of an argument from you in terms of timing. I found that consistency was more important than the timing.

Yes.

That was the first thing. The second thing was, obviously, darkness. You needed to create the darkness. Alcohol and sugar were actually the biggest influences. So it didn’t matter if I had that consistency, but I spiked sugar, and it messed up my sleep. Alcohol messed up my sleep. And then I could have a coffee 30 minutes before bed. As for the coffee metabolism issue, it doesn’t bother me at all. I can sleep straight after that.

With the data—measuring it through Oura, Ultrahuman, glucose monitors, and so on—the data showed that my stress was low. My heart rate was 44 to 45, or 48, let’s say, in rest mode. Even last night, for example, I traveled from Dubai, so it was a 16-hour flight. I put the headset on. I thought maybe the data was incorrect from my previous results. I slept from midnight to 6:00 a.m., with 1½ hours of deep sleep. So what’s going on with me that’s different from what the data typically says?

Yeah. I don’t know if there’s anything different going on. I think these measures of things like stress are a decent first proxy, but they don’t go into the cell and they don’t go into the organ systems of the body. So if I were you, I would be doing, let’s say, blood panels, and I would really want to know: Can I convince myself that the schedule I’ve just described comes without deleterious effects on my biology?

At that point, then I would say that’s fantastic. You would want to do a within-subject design where you are stable and sleeping. Try to find, for you, maybe a 2-week period where you’re stable. Do blood panel work after those 2 weeks of good, solid sleep. Use that as your reference, and repeat when you’re in intense travel. Ask yourself the hard biological question: Do I see any detriments? If not, then I would say you may be one of those people who has incredible resilience.

All I know is, based on the data—and this is no slight—the number of people who can survive on less than 7 hours of sleep without showing any impairment on all of our measures, rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percentage of the population, is 0.

Interesting. I like the biological. I think it’s good. You have something to add.

Yeah. I just want to add: You mentioned the proxy for stress. I don’t think we should minimize the fact that a great proxy is joy. When you wake up in the morning, are you looking forward to your day? Are you experiencing joy in what you’re doing? Are you reactive? My barometers are not just my Oura ring. Trust me, I track all that. But it’s also: How reactive am I to challenges?

We all have challenges every day. How am I handling them? Sometimes, when I’ve had a really good night’s sleep, I know that I can say, “Bring it on. I’ll handle that.” Are you empathetic? Are you creative? All these more intangible measures of our life are also things you should not forget to be aware of. It’s not just the numbers; it’s also how we are experiencing our life.

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How does sexual activity positively or negatively impact sleep quality and routine?

Sex is great for sleep. Sex, as long as it accomplishes orgasm, results in about a 70% to 73% improvement in subjective sleep quality. If you don't have a partner, all is not lost. It turns out that self-stimulation can get you about 50% of the way there.

In terms of sleep debt, some have argued that you're making money hand over fist there. No, both are—look, if you're going to play some music, I'm going to go that direction.

I would also note that, by the way, for every 1 hour of sleep that a woman gets in addition to her norm, her interest in being physically intimate with her partner increases by 14%. Now, the libido drugs out there, things like Viagra, can increase libido by about 24%. But you can get more than 50% of the way there with just an extra hour of sleep.

If you enjoyed this episode, I’m going to be releasing all of the talks, all the keynotes from the Abundance Summit exclusively on exponentialmastery.com. You can get on demand access there. Go to exponentialmastery.com.