Year after year, more of us are quietly asking the Internet, why am
I so tired searching for answers to something we
all feel but don't really understand? Every morning, we're waking
up feeling a little bit more worn out than we were the day before.
Our afternoon slumps are a little slumpier,
so much so that companies make fun of us for this.
What's going on? It's a 03:00 p.m. slump, selling us meat or cheese
or coffee or human grade jet fuel to somehow cure our
afternoon energy energy deficit. Now, listen, this isn't a video where I'm
gonna tell you to just get more sleep or to stop looking at your phone
before bed, which all of those things you should do. But I want to approach
this question a little differently. I want to look at the bigger reasons why we're
all so tired. A lot of those reasons have to do with what's happening right
now. During the day. Like, right now, while I'm filming this, things are happening in
my brain and your brain that will make us more tired later on today and
tomorrow. It'll affect how long and how well you sleep and whether or
not you feel refreshed in the morning.
In order to understand why you're so tired, I'm gonna take you back in time
to 300,000 years ago.
Meet Johnny Caveman. Johnny Caveman kind of has a
similar body to ours today. He's a human.
His body's a little different. His hips and his head are shaped a little differently.
He's got this wider, flatter nose. He's got this big, strong brow,
but up where it counts. His brain is very similar to our
brain today, and yet how he uses his brain is
very different. Similar brains, totally different worlds.
To show this, let me show you Johnny Caveman's morning routine.
As Johnny Caveman begins his day, let's keep an eye on this part of his
brain. This is the prefrontal cortex. When you make decisions,
this part of your brain is doing most of the work. This morning, Johnny Caveman
has a few decisions to make. He has to decide where to get his water
today. Should he go out and hunt with his group, or should he spend time
picking berries? He just found some mushrooms. Are these
mushrooms safe? Should he eat them? Johnny Caveman will likely spend
a big chunk of his day just sitting here around this campsite,
eating and chatting with his band of other humans. He might go out and gather
sticks to build a campfire later. I mean, look at his brain.
There's some decisions being made here, but it isn't pinging
very much. There's not a ton of action up here in the prefrontal cortex.
His day is routine with not a ton of choices.
Fairly simple decisions. Okay, but lets transport forward in time.
Now, I wonder what would happen if we put this same Johnny
Caveman in the 20th century. Same brain, same body,
different world.
Ah, yawn. The sun is still waking Johnny
Caveman up. And now hes got a few decisions to make. He decides
to shave before he goes to work. What's for breakfast?
Apples again? I think I'll have a peach. Now off
to work. The world's gone through the industrial revolution,
so he spends his day at a factory where he's repeating
tasks over and over. He's definitely making more decisions
than Johnny Caveman was. But the prefrontal cortex isn't
pinging a ton. It's not a lot of action up here.
Okay, how does Johnny Caveman do in 2024?
Did I get enough sleep last night? Where's my phone? Is my kids concert today
or tomorrow? Ugh. I need new socks. These don't match.
What should I eat for lunch later? Should I cancel with my coworker? Did I
have a burrito yesterday? I need to remember to send the receipts to the insurance
company. I need to file that expense report. When am I gonna change this fish?
How much gas is should I get our oil change this weekend? So,
sketch, should I be upgrading to a different ship? It's 830
in the morning, and I've already made a ton of decisions, way more
than Johnny Caveman or the Johnny from the 20th century.
These decisions are complex, they are abstract, they are high
stakes. My prefrontal cortex is going bananas.
One estimate I read said that modern humans make 35,000
decisions every day. We make more than 200 decisions about
food alone. Okay, okay, I get it. Modern life is full of
a lot of decisions. But, like, I'm not running from tigers anymore.
Like, I don't have to, like, scavenge and hunt for my food. Shouldn't I be
less tired? I'm using my brain instead of my body, and I'm doing way
less physical work. I mean, we've got washing machines and dishwashers
and automatic head massagers and at home spas. And dammit,
we even have la Z boys. Shouldn't I feel more rested
because of all of this? Okay, and here's where we come to the answer
to the question, which is we gotta look at that prefrontal cortex again and
see what's actually going on when you make all of these decisions.
It's a part of a war that is happening between you
and the modern world. This war is being fought on two different battlefields,
daytime and nighttime. Day man,
aha. Fighter of the night men
aha. Champion of the sun.
So we're in this daytime battlefield, and you're making a
bunch of decisions. We've talked about that. Let's see what's happening here in
the brain when you're making decisions, there's an electronic
signal, like a pulse, that is traveling between regions of
the brain along these wires called neurons.
You've got, like, almost 100 billion of these things, and they all
are forming this giant network, tons of connections, and they all send signals to each
other. That is what decisions and actions are. But in order
to send these signals between the different parts of the brain,
you need a very important chemical called glutamate.
Glutamate makes all of this happen. It's a neurotransmitter.
It helps everything talk to each other. But look,
after you make the decision, the glutamate kind of sticks
around. And as you make more and more decisions,
glutamate starts to build up, and it starts to clog the
system, which new research suggests makes
decisions harder because the whole system is clogged, which makes you
feel fatigued. Make a bunch of decisions you feel
tired of, even if you didn't lift a finger. It's like as if your brain
were a big city. All of these roads are the neurons
and synapses that you use to make decisions. It's all functioning
nicely. Everyone can flow. But the more decisions you make,
the more trash you produce, and the trash starts to pile up. Trash collectors
will eventually move this trash out. But if you're producing a ton of trash,
it starts to pile up, and it eventually starts to block the streets,
making it much harder for the cars to move along, meaning for your brain
activity to do what it's supposed to do for you to make decisions. This is
what it looks like when you're really tired. It's 11:30 a.m.
here at my desk, and I've made so many decisions, I haven't done
any strenuous work, but I'm drowning in glutamate and
feeling tired. By the way, this is like brand new research
from the Paris Brain Institute, and it is still being
worked out how this works or exactly what it looks like. You can check my
sources to fact check everything I say in this video, but look
at this paper specifically. It's pretty interesting. So I'm gonna jot this down
on my list of why we're so tired. I'll be making this list and the
solutions on what we can do about it. A lot of cultures have a solve
for this. It's called biphasic sleep, which is just a
cool sounding name for a nap in the afternoon. People usually around, like the
Mediterranean take naps from the hours of, like, two to
five. They rest, they reset. Research found that people who take
siestas have increased brain functioning and are 37%
less likely to die of heart disease. But here in the United States,
we pledge to not sleep on the job. We will never
take naps like those failing socialist countries in the Mediterranean.
No, the hustle never stops here in America.
Sorry. I recently watched Top Gun, and I'm just feeling really patriotic right now.
That's right, I am dangerous.
So our brains, which are the same as Johnny Caveman's brains,
aren't totally set up to make all of these decisions without
feeling very tired. I mean, it kind of makes sense. We've got these
caveman brains living in 2024. This is called evolutionary
mismatch. Our brains haven't caught up with our lifestyle,
with our world, and all of the decisions that we are required
to make to just be normal, modern humans. So what do we do
about this? Well, you can take siestas,
which is like, it's not something I can do in my life. I'm just not
set up for it here. Sorry, guys, but that would be a way
to clear out some glutamate and reset. But the biggest takeaway
for me is just limit how many decisions
I have to make every day, which is not easy, but there definitely
are ways to do it. I've started choosing the outfits that I'm
going to wear for the week on Sunday, so that in the morning when
I wake up, I'm just like, oh, the outfit's already chosen. Or you could go
full Steve Jobs Mark Zuckerberg style and just wear one thing so
that you can have a closet that looks like this.
Which meal planning? That's another one.
On a Sunday. We've started, like, writing down every meal
we're going to have during the week, and that makes life way easier when
you're at the end of a day of work and you are feeling tired.
A big theme in today's video is information. How much information
our brains are met with these days. And even as a journalist, it's my job,
and I get stressed out by the amount of information out there. One of the
tools we use to sift through all of this is actually the sponsor of today's
video. Ground News is a website and an app that takes news stories
from all around the world and aggregates them into one place and then gives
you a ton of information about that story and its sources.
Instead of an algorithm, you are in control with ground news.
This tool allows you to see what political bias exists
in the different articles, how reliable each source is, who owns these different
publications, a whole other level of transparency that allows you to feel confident
in the news you're reading. One of my favorite parts about ground news is it
helps you keep an eye on your own reading habits. It gives you this dashboard
where it shows you some insights, like the top sources that you
rely on and how reliable they are. And my favorite of these insights the
blind spot feed when you're navigating so much information, it's hard to
remember that sometimes you are in a very different news bubble than
everyone else. The blind spot feed helps you see this by giving you
articles that you wouldn't naturally click on or be exposed to,
helping you fill in your perspective, challenge your biases. I value
this kind of thing so much as a critical thinker and as someone
who is worried about echo chambers and biased in today's
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and sensational headlines decide what you click, ground news might be
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With that, let's dive back in to why we are so tired. There's one more
chemical we have to talk about for this daytime battle, and it's called adenosine.
It is this very clever evolutionary feature of our brain that's
basically like a signal to our brainstor that tells
us when it's time to rest. As you go throughout your day thinking
and doing things, this adenosine builds up
and it kind of signals to your brain that you're tired. It signals that
you should feel sleepy and hopefully makes you go to sleep. But being
industrious, humans focused on progress. We found
a substance that will block the buildup of adenosine
it's called caffeine, making caffeine the most popular
drug in the world. It blocks adenosine, this natural signal
of you should be tired and sleep and allows us to keep operating
as if the adenosine doesn't exist. But guess what? The caffeine
doesn't last forever. It eventually wears out. And all of this adenosine that had
built up comes flooding into your brain like a megaphone,
saying, hey, you're really tired. And we're finally able
to tell you, this is called the afternoon crashed.
My solution to this is, like the greatest thing in the world, and it's called
a coffee nap. When you nap, your body gets rid
of the adenosine. It's like the adenosine clearing hour.
And if you drink caffeine, then you get this, like, multiplier effect where
all the adenosine is gone and the caffeine just comes in. It doesn't have to
block any adenosine. It's just ready to, like, hype you up, drink a
quick coffee, lay down for just 15 minutes. It's amazing.
Coffee naps. Add it to the list. The other
option is to drink your coffee a little bit, like, later than you would like.
Don't drink it right as you wake up. Drink it between the hours of nine
and 11:00 a.m. so that it lasts until you're
done with work. And then you can have your coffee. Crash. Okay, so that
is our daytime battle. Glutamate builds up because we make so many
decisions. Adenosine builds up because we don't let it clear
out. And we block the signals because of caffeine. And our modern world doesn't like
us naturally clearing these things out. So we feel really tired.
Now let's get to the nighttime battle.
Everyone says we should get seven or 8 hours of sleep. But when you go
to bed and when I go to bed is probably different. Back in the Johnny
caveman days, groups of humans couldn't leave their
camp unattended at night. So we evolved to
have different sleep times so that some of us could stay awake and
guard the camp and others could sleep and then we could switch off. Today,
what that looks like is that I go to bed at 1030 and
I wake up at 630. You may be a night owl, and you want to
go to bed at one in the morning, or you may want to go to
bed at 09:00 a.m. these are called chronotypes, and there are roughly four
of them. Everyone has a slightly different interpretation of what it
means. But the fact is, we're not all the same when it comes to when
we go to bed. And yet we all live in a society that wants
us to be the same. Our standard work day, nine to five, was constructed
for, like, the average person. But you may not be that person.
You have a job that requires you to be there at 09:00 a.m. and you're
a night owl who wants to sleep until 1030. Too bad.
Capitalism says no. Researchers say that our chronotype
is in our genes. Like this is like, we are naturally coded
to have an optimal time when we are sleeping,
and that may not work with your life. Evolutionary mismatch once again.
So I'm going to write chronotypes down on my list. What's the solution here?
Find out what your chronotype is. You probably already know what it is. Take this
test online. I'll give you a QR code here. You can scan this. Take a
test. Maybe aligning your lifestyle with your chronotype could help you
get sleep during the time when your sleep is most optimal,
which will help make you feel less tired.
Okay, finally, in a video that you clicked on about why you're so
tired, finally, we're talking about sleep. Sleep definitely
matters. And I think there's actually a lot of great videos and literature,
books, whatever, on sleep and how to optimize sleep.
Our brains catalog all these memories. All the sensory input and memories
from the day get cataloged. Our muscles and our circulatory
system, they all get to relax and take a break, which is
super vital. And as we talked about earlier, we clear out a lot of,
like, the byproducts from living life, the glutamate, the adenosine,
all of the kind of toxins and byproducts that we accumulate from a day.
This is all super important. But not all sleep is created equal. And what we
do in the hours leading up to bed can make a big difference. So let's
see what this looks like using an example. As we're following along, let's track
my chemical levels. I get home around 08:00 p.m. i whip
up some of my famous macaroni and cheese before sitting down to my desk because
I've got a little more work to do now. My chronotype is the lion,
which means I kind of want to go to bed, like at ten. I'm getting
kind of tired, so I pour myself a cup of coffee to fight off
all the adenosine that has been building up in my brain. Okay. I finish up
my work. It's 2 hours past when I normally go to bed,
but I need some time to wind down. Here I am making more
decisions on Netflix. And look, even though it's nighttime outside,
this giant tv screen is emitting light. My brain
thinks this is the sun. It thinks it's daytime, so it
blocks the release of melatonin. Melatonin is a chemical that we need
to shift our brain from wakefulness to sleep. Finally,
after some Netflix, I feel like I've wound down, and I'm gonna go to bed.
It's 02:00 a.m. i turn off the tv, and I get a little bit of
melatonin, but not nearly enough to feel tired. I've got a ton of adenosine
in my brain, but it's not registering. I should be feeling tired,
but all of this adenosine is blocked by the caffeine I had earlier.
One more look at my phone to set my alarm. Gotta check Instagram really quick.
Eventually, the caffeine wears off, the adenosine comes flooding in,
and I fall right asleep. But it's now 03:00 a.m.
my body goes through the important process of clearing out all these
chemicals. It's a slow process. I need time to
do this. My body's making great progress. And then
it's been 5 hours, which is just not enough time for
our bodies to take out all the trash. My brain still kind of looks like
this. I'm gonna start my day with all of the residual
glutamate chemicals swirling around in my brain as
I start to make new decisions and accumulate more glutamate, more adenosine
that I'm gonna block with caffeine. So I guess I'm gonna add the obvious one
to my list. Get enough sleep and
wind down without caffeine or alcohol.
The things that kind of kill your ability to get good sleep.
Now, let me just say there's a lot more to say on sleep. It's very
well documented. There's a lot of, like, pop science books about sleep.
I didn't want to go into those now because I feel like they're easily accessible.
But you should definitely check out my sources if you want to learn more
about preparing for good sleep and having good sleep and why it matters.
So, this is my list. Here it is why we're so
tired and what we can do about it.
It's not exhaustive, but it
includes the lesser covered aspects of fatigue
that I have found very compelling and that have affected how
I approach my day to day life. In short, it's not just
because we look at our phones before bed that we're so tired. There's a lot
more going on, and a lot of it has to do with life,
modern life, and these brains that we have that were
evolved for a very different time. There's a lot of upside to the fact
that we don't live in caves next to campfires hunting for
our food. But one of the downsides is that we feel
this very specific kind of fatigue.
It's often mental fatigue. And now I understand
why. I'm not going to dramatically change my life because of these findings.
But I now at least have a list of a few things that I can
tweak to maybe feel a little less tired.
Hey, everyone. Thanks for watching. I had
a question for anyone still watching. Would you be interested in buying some
of my old maps? I've got, like, hundreds of
maps that I've collected over the years, and I am thinking about
opening a map store. I could scan them and sell prints on really nice
paper, or I could sell you the originals, or I could do both.
Let me know what you think. This is, like, an early idea, and I'm just
curious. I want to hear from you all. Most people have left
by now, and so it's just a few of you. So just, like, leave a
comment if you have heard this and let me know. I also wanted
to make sure that everyone knows about our new channel called
search party. Not so new. It's about a year old now, but it is started
by my old colleague Sam Ellis. It is a focus on geopolitics
and global sports. It's a fantastic channel. Very concise,
beautiful videos that I learn a lot from.
And you should go check it out. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you
in the next one.