Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever. Dave Asprey
supply, as you’d imagine. So I became one of the first purchasers of an expensive headband that tracked my sleep and told me exactly how well I did every night. The data was enlightening and helped inform many of my early biohacking practices. Unfortunately, Victoria’s Secret definitely did not approve of these early tracking devices (and neither did my wife). Thankfully, there has been quite an evolution in the quality and attractiveness of sleep trackers since then.
Seven years later, I became the chief technology officer for a wristband sleep and exercise tracking company called Basis (which Intel has since acquired). Before most people were wearing wrist trackers, I was able to track my sleep, make strategic changes, and get more out of the time I spent with my eyes closed. In fact, I’ve purchased and tried just about every sleep tracker on the market. A sleep tracker is an anti-aging device with one of the highest ROIs. I promise that you have no idea what your brain is doing while you sleep. Before we get to what technology to use, ranging from free to a few hundred dollars, it’s important to know what you are looking for when you track your sleep.
SLEEP BASICS
Of course you want to know exactly what time you fell asleep, what time you woke up, and how this information varies over time. Did it take you a long time to fall asleep after you went to bed? Did you wake up several times during the night even if you don’t remember them? Are you wasting your night with light sleep? These are all important factors in determining the quality of your sleep. When I did the crazy “zero carbs for nineteen days” experiment, my unattractive headband sleep tracker showed me I was waking up eight to twelve times every night, yet I had no recollection of waking at all. I did feel like a zombie in the morning, though. It was my sleep data that eventually made me quit that experiment!
It’s also worth paying attention to snoring when tracking your sleep for all the reasons mentioned above, particularly because snoring is a sign of inflammation. I used to snore terribly because the back of my throat was inflamed and partially blocked my airway. Now I don’t normally snore more than a couple of minutes a night, and I am usually able to connect it to something I ate the day before that caused inflammation. I also get a handy recording of my snoring so I can’t deny that it’s happening! This is incredibly valuable information because food that inflames your throat also causes aging inflammation throughout your body.
REM/SLOW-WAVE SLEEP
When you’re sleeping, you cycle through two types of sleep each night—rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is when you dream, and non-REM (NREM) sleep. NREM sleep comes in three flavors: crappy (stage 1 useless light sleep), decent (stage 2 middle sleep that is still considered light sleep), and awesome (stage 3 deep delta sleep). To age or perform like a Super Human, it’s your job to spend as much time as possible in deep or slow-wave delta sleep. This is when your breathing and heart rate drop to their lowest levels and your brain waves slow down and get wider (as measured by a test called an electroencephalogram, or EEG). These slow waves are known as delta waves, and your brain produces them at a frequency of 1 to 4 hertz, a unit of measurement that is equal to one per second. To put that into context, gamma waves, the fastest brain waves, have an average frequency of above 40 hertz.
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