Neuroscientist Explains: Why You're Always Tired (and How to Fix It)

0:00 I'm Dr. Sahar Yousef. [music] I'm a cognitive neuroscientist at UC Berkeley and I study human performance. Today, we're going to look at the real reason why you are constantly tired and the exact daily habits that are draining your energy without you even realizing it. You can sleep a full 8 hours and still wake up completely drained. So, let's dive into why. One of the reasons that's right on your nightstand and it's probably in your hand right now. It's your phone and specifically what you're doing on it right before you try to close your eyes. Most of us use social media at night to unwind, but the problem is these modern platforms are just a processed overstimulating form of entertainment that forces your mind to keep background processing information when it actually needs to be shutting

0:46 down. So, your brain actually relies on clear environmental signals and cues to actually figure out what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior in any particular situation. What is expected or what's unexpected to do in any situation. When you look at your bed, your brain should only see two options. In the sleep science world, we call these the two S's: sleep or sex. But when you lie down with your phone and you're checking your email, you're scrolling, you're looking at your calendar, what are you doing tomorrow, what's happening next week, all of this is introducing a third S and it's quite [music] sinister. And that is strategy. This muddles the cognitive associations that you have in your brain. Now, when your brain sees a bed, it thinks that

1:34 strategizing is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Your brain's patterns of activation quite literally are getting confused. And if you keep doing this over and over and over again, meaning you allow yourself to ruminate, daydream, worry, strategize, you will have genuine trouble sleeping 3 to 5 years from now because your brain will completely lose the ability to recognize your bed as a place for rest. And over time, that lost sleep and lower quality sleep directly increases your long-term risk of developing dementia or even Alzheimer's. But changing where you put your phone when you sleep is only half the problem because your own DNA might be fighting

2:20 your sleep before you even turn the lights off. Back in 2017, the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to three researchers who figured out that humans do not share one circadian rhythm. We all have our own unique biological chronotypes. That is just a really fancy term for being a morning bird, a night owl, or biphasic, which comes from the Latin two phases, and it means your energy hits two distinct peaks throughout the day. Most people in the human population are actually biphasic. But the worst advice on the internet I see comes from these hustle culture influencers here on this platform. And they tell you things like you should be waking up at 5:00 in the morning if you want to be the most successful version of yourself and

3:06 immediately get light and do a cold plunge. And then after the cold plunge, you drink a tall glass of lemon water. And then do bulletproof coffee. And then after that, do your gratitude journaling while you're meditating on your head up in a box with a fox. Okay, I'm kidding. Listen. If you are genetically extremely AM shifted and you're going to bed at 9:00 p.m., awesome. Go for it. Have at it. Take advantage of the early morning quiet hours before the world wakes up and bothers you with their But if you are not, all you are doing is sleep depriving yourself and pretending to be a Navy SEAL at the crack ass of dawn and showing up useless to the rest of your life and work by 10:00 a.m. Do not fight your biology. You will lose

3:52 every single time. Now, if you are a natural night owl, anthropologically, we believe your ancestors were the ones who stayed up and kept the fire going and were essentially the night's watch while the rest of the tribe safely slept. So, if you are a tired, coffee-addicted night owl, you can say, "You're welcome." to everybody else around you who questions your habits. If you want to know your chronotype, you can now take the official assessment at www.mychronotype.com. I have been told the W's are important, and use the code Dr. Sabar to bypass the paywall so you can take it for free. You will get a PDF emailed to you with all of your results and a playbook on how to actually strategically design your day

4:38 based on your chronotype. But, simply knowing your chronotype and changing when you go to bed and when you do your hardest work isn't enough to fix the fatigue. The best sleep neuroimaging labs right now are looking at a hidden performance framework that changes how we look at night time exhaustion completely. World-renowned sleep scientist Dr. Els van der Helm, who's also a very dear friend of mine from graduate school, just published her book Sleep Intelligence and researches what deep sleep actually does for your brain and what happens when you consistently miss it. Her work found that deep sleep is when your brain processes the emotional load of your entire day. When you cut that window short, everyday frustrations start to feel completely

5:23 overwhelming. And this is exactly why you cannot fix severe exhaustion with sheer willpower or by forcing your body to follow some ridiculous generic morning routine made by some influencer. You need to actually allow your brain to heal itself through its own natural methods while you sleep. True recovery starts with identifying your own internal clock. It will tell you the ideal times you should be sleeping and also your peak performance hours, which is a specific two to three hour window every single day where your brain and body are naturally at its highest focus and energy levels. When you intentionally protect those two to three hours for your heaviest, most demanding mental tasks, you will get up to five

6:08 times more done according to research from McKinsey compared to any other hour of the day. Next, we focus on building a highly specific, low friction routine to shift your brain completely out of work mode before your head hits the pillow. You have to establish a definitive ramp down routine that clearly marks the boundary between work mode and wind down mode. This could be as simple as a specific song or a wind down playlist that you listen to only when it's time to unplug, which works as a biological trigger. So, it's setting up a new cognitive association so that when you hear that music, your brain goes, "Ah, [sighs] I know what I'm doing now. It's not work anymore. It's not strategizing. It's winding down. Your only job now is

6:55 to wind down." Without that signal, your brain will continue to loop through unfinished tasks in the background all night, which keeps your stress levels high and prevents you from actually being able to fall asleep or it leads to middle of the night awakenings or premature awakenings, as we call them, which nobody likes. Next, you should set up a physical boundary by setting up a physical phone drop-off station. This could literally be a bowl from the kitchen or a basket, something designated with a post-it note ideally too, just so it's labeled, so that it's a nice gentle reminder for you as you're walking by it. Drop your phone off into the basket before you start your evening routine, and I promise you it will create such a clean behavioral ritual and trigger, and it will completely

7:42 remove the device from your line of sight, so you're actually less likely to think about it, and obviously less likely to reach for it since you literally cannot see it. And finally, protect the mattress from strategizing. The moment you catch yourself thinking and ruminating in bed, physically get up and leave. Go brain dump those thoughts onto a piece of paper, go sit on the couch in the living room, get yourself a cup of herbal tea, meditate or stretch, listen to that wind down music playlist again, or read a book, just anything to get your mind away from all the strategizing. After you've dumped it out, I don't want you to just pat it down. I want you to get it out of your head onto a piece of paper, and then redirect your energy and your mind back to the winding down bit. And once you

8:28 are tired, extremely tired, and actually sleepy, then and only then, go back to bed so that your brain actually starts to retrain those neural networks and rebuild the association about what is allowed and expected behavior in your bed. Stop letting generic internet advice peddled by non-scientists dictate your morning routine. And stop letting your phone cheat you out of your deep recovery window at night. You deserve better. Your brain deserves a real cognitive maintenance. Here's my challenge for you. Set up a physical phone basket outside of your bedroom. Drop your phone into it before you actually enter the bedroom, and notice what amazing results will follow.

9:14 Come back and let me know in the comments how your morning energy changes, and if you want to keep learning how to work with your biology instead of fighting it, hit subscribe and I'll see you in the next one.