Dr. Gina Poe: Use Sleep to Enhance Learning, Memory & Emotional State | Huberman Lab Podcast
Full Podcast notes: Dr. Gina Poe: Use Sleep to Enhance Learning, Memory & Emotional State | Huberman Lab Podcast
Podcast Summary
Dr. Huberman and Dr. Poe discuss her research exploring how sleep impacts learning, memory, hormones and emotions. Dr. Poe discusses tools to enhance your quality of sleep, increase deep sleep, rapid eye movement sleep and growth hormone release– a key hormone for health, immune function and vitality. Dr. Poe also explains how a specific brain area, the locus coeruleus, facilitates the processing of emotions, helps relieve traumas and how to maximize locus coeruleus function. She also explains sleep’s vital role in opiate addiction recovery and how anyone can determine their optimal sleep timing and duration. This podcast episode is rich with basic science information and zero-cost tools to enhance quality and effectiveness of sleep for sake of mental health, physical health and performance.
Key Takeaways
Getting to sleep at relatively the same time each night ensures that you get adequate growth hormone release in the first hours of sleep
The more nights you have with sleep deprivation, the more cognitive deficit you have.
Growth hormone release happens all the time, but the deep slow sleep that you get during the very first sleep cycle is when you get a big boost of growth hormone release
One of the best markers of good neurological health when we get older is consistent bedtimes.
If we deprive ourselves of sleep, we can miss a developmental window
Alcohol is a REM sleep suppressant, and it even suppresses some of the stage two transition to REM
Antidepressants are often noradrenergic or serotonergic reuptake inhibitors. They leave norepinephrine out there in the synapses, which inhibits REM sleep.
Avoid anything exciting or stressful prior to bed. Try and enter sleep with as much calm as you can, so maybe deep breathing exercises.
Yoga nidra does seem enhance people's ability to fall asleep more quickly and fall back asleep if they wake up in the middle of the night.