YouTube Deep Summary

- 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. (bright music) (elevator dings) - What's going on? - It's a 3:00 PM slump. - Selling us meat or cheese or coffee or human grade jet fuel to somehow cure our afternoon 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 wanna approach this question a little differently. I wanna 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. (soft music) In order to understand why you're so tired, I'm gonna take you back in time to 300,000 years ago. (clock ticking) 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. (bright music) 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 let's 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. (bright music) Ah, yawn. The sun is still waking Johnny Caveman up and now he's 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? - [Brain] Did I get enough sleep last night? Where's my phone? Is my kid's concert today or tomorrow? Oh, 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. What am I gonna change to this fish? How much gas is in my car? Should I get a oil change this week? Should I be upgrading to a different? It's 8:30 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're 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 damn it, 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 man ♪ ♪ 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 a hundred 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 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 AM 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 this 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. 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? (pensive music) 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 gonna 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 gonna 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. (pensive music) A big theme in today's video is information. How much information our brain 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 Blindspot 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 BlinsSpot 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 bias in today's news landscape. So if you are tired of letting social media companies and sensational headlines decide what you click, Ground News might be for you. It's a great way to sharpen your critical thinking skills and to stay informed while doing it. If you wanna try this out, you can get a big discount if you click the link in my description, it's ground.news/johnnyharris. You can also use this QR code on screen if that's more convenient. This will allow you to get 40% off the Vantage Plan, which is all of these tools I've talked about today. So thank you Ground News for sponsoring today's video. 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. It's basically like a signal to our brains. It 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 crash. 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 and 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 AM 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. (soft music) Everyone says we should get seven or eight 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 10:30 and I wake up at 6:30. 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 9:00 AM. These are called the 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 workday, 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 9:00 AM and you are a night owl who wants to sleep until 10:30? 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 gonna 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. (soft music) 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 8:00 PM. 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 10. 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 two hours past when I'd 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's 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 2:00 AM. 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 3:00 AM. 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. (alarm rings) It's been five hours, which is just not enough time for our bodies to take out all the trash. My brain still kinda 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. (bright music) So this is my list. Here it is. Why we're so tired and what we can do about it. It's not exhaustive. (bell dinging) 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 learned a lot from, and you should go check it out. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one. (upbeat music)