Part 2: Sleep Hunger

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Welcome to the second part of our Master Your Sleep series.

In this segment, we delve into the concept of "Sleep Hunger."

Join us as we uncover the forces that determine how well we sleep and the quality of our wakefulness, with insights from neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. Let's continue to unlock the secrets to better sleep together!

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Prefer reading? Check out the transcript below:

So what determines how well we sleep and the quality of our wakeful state?

Turns out that's governed by two forces. The first force is a chemical force, it's called adenosine. Adenosine is a molecule in our nervous system and body that builds up the longer we are awake. So if you've just slept for 8, or 9, or 10 really deep, restful hours, adenosine is going to be very low in your brain and body. If, however, you've been awake for 10, 15, or more hours, adenosine levels are going to be much higher.

Adenosine creates a sort of sleep drive or a sleep hunger, and actually, hunger is the appropriate word here because for most of what we're going to discuss today, we can think of it in an analogous way to nutrition. Your nutrition and how well you feel after you eat certain foods, your overall level of fitness and your cellular health and your heart health isn't governed by any one food item that you might eat or not eat, it's governed by a number of different factors: how often you eat, how much you eat, which items you eat, et cetera, and what works best for you. In the same way, your sleep and your wakefulness are the product of kind of the average of a number of different behaviors. How long you've been awake is a key one because of this molecule, adenosine.

So the reason you get sleepy when you've been up for a while is because adenosine is creeping up steadily the longer you've been awake, and a good way to remember this and think about adenosine is to think about caffeine. Caffeine, for most people, except a very small percentage of people, wakes them up, it makes them feel more alert. In fact, some people are so sensitive to caffeine that they feel jittery if they drink it even in small amounts. Other people can drink large amounts of caffeine and not feel jittery at all.

Caffeine acts as an adenosine antagonist. What that means is that when you ingest caffeine, whether or not it's coffee or soda or tea, or in any other form, it binds to the adenosine receptor. It sort of parks there just like a car would park in a given parking slot, and therefore, adenosine can't park in that slot. Now, when caffeine parks in the adenosine receptor slot, nothing really happens downstream of that receptor; the receptor can't engage the normal cellular functions of making that cell and you feel sleepy. So the reason caffeine wakes you up is because it blocks the sleepiness receptor, it blocks the sleepy signal, and this is why when that caffeine wears off, adenosine will bind to that receptor, sometimes with even greater affinity, and you feel the crash, you feel especially tired.

(Stay tuned for tomorrow's Part 3 of our Sleep Series!)

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