How Poor Sleep Makes You Sick | Dr. Max Krummel & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Sleep & Immune Function

00:00Why is it at a mechanistic level that if you miss a night or two of sleep that your immune system seems so less effective in fighting off off infections? Do we know what's happening? Is it like you've got so much adenosine which is the sleepy molecule and and uh like that that adenosine inhibits te- cell function or something?

00:17Do we actually know? Because I think all of us are familiar with the fact that if we we don't sleep well or enough for a couple of nights, we're much more susceptible to getting sick. Yeah. Is there a mechanistic understanding of why that's so?

00:28I think there are bits and pieces of it. I think um some some really nice work shows that at night a few wacky thing when you're sleep a few what you might have thought would be wacky things happen and and one of them is that a lot of your immune cells clear back to the bone marrow um and and your tissues become populated with a bunch of neutrfils that come out of the bone marrow and and seem to be you know depositing collagen around your body and and so there's a lot of things that I think are reparative about sleep.

Why We Need Sleep

00:58I've thought about this a lot in my own life as probably you have with sleep is to one of the questions of course is why do we bother to have sleep and and I guess I can only imagine this because our you know we've created these these bodies of ours are so capable and they're so energetically and you know you know um consumptive and they make all these byproducts during the day that that at some point you just need a cleanup phase and that's that's one interpretation of sleep you just need to reset so the immune system is definitely resetting and and you know there's as I

01:26said there's evidence that a lot of the cells go kind quiescent into the tissues and they they may leave you alone for those reparative processes and actually allow those. You know, in terms of the data on there, there's there's a lot of studies that are being done and and I can't say that I've come to a a conclusion about that.

01:42This is this comes in the question of like is it known or do I do I not know it or is it does nobody know it? And I'd say this is might be one of these areas where about 10 factions of people know it but they don't agree, you know. So there's variations on things, but I think the data, for example, that immune cells dive into the bone marrow at night is is pretty solid.

02:01That makes sense. What they're doing and why that's important in the long sense of like what you're talking about everything from well, but I think it's, you know, things that happen overnight, you you're definitely your cognition improves.

02:10Is that immune or is that neuronal or both?

Lymphatic Clearance & Physical Appearance

02:14I think it's both. Something in the lymph plumbing immune system. One thing that's just striking like that is undeniable is probably the best way to put it is um everybody has bags under their eyes and looks like when they are sleepd deprived.

02:25They sleep for a night or two and it goes away. That's clearly accumulation of lymph. We we actually know that. That's just lymph fluid that's not being cleared. And it might not even be the brain's uh lymphatic clearance system. It's just there's a bunch of lymph pooling under your eyes.

02:41That's why you look like Yeah. And then you sleep for two nights well and you look better again. And the eyes get glassy. We know that the eyes get glassy when we're sleepd deprived. That's also a a lymphatic clearance issue. This is well established.

02:55Like so there's some things that are just like plumbing works better when we sleep and get up again. There's something literally about lying down and getting up. But that to me can't explain the the immune thing entirely because like the lymphatic system is like among other things, you know, immune surveillance.

03:15But I mean, one night lousy sleep and the person coughing across the room gets you sick often. But when you're well rested, you actually feel this robustness like n like okay, I might wash my hands or just kind of avoid them and you're good.

03:30Yeah. So it's it's I mean it's an incredible effect one way or the other.

Car Windshield Analogy

03:34Again I don't know the degree to which we can nail down you know which which part of things that are happening is which. I always like the story that that the um there's macrofasages immune cells in your eye that are basically clearing the clearing the lens.

03:46Mhm. You know, so there's there's all these like places where it's doing little clean up that you can imagine that if the the thing it's trying to get rid of is granularity that that you need to have sleep where you just aren't making more granularity so that it can you know sort of like when you wash your car windshield you do it completely at that point and but you can't be driving with flies hitting you right.

04:10That's a great analogy you know. So, I think there's certain elements of some of these cleanup processes that happen best when you're not getting things, you know, you know, dirty or again, I think a lot of what we're talking about is byproducts of our energetics that leave, you know, some damage behind it.

04:24And I I think we just use a lot of ATP and we do a lot of stuff as our bodies in and the sleep is time where you can not be, you know, producing more of that and get ahead of the curve on cleaning things up a bit. Um, like pulling into a gas station, cleaning off your windshield.