Hacking Your Way To Better Sleep & Life
Greg Potter
My PhD at the University of Leeds focused on sleep, diet, and metabolism. This work has been featured by the BBC World Service, TIME magazine, Reuters, and more. BSc and MSc degrees in exercise physiology from Loughborough University. Qualified personal trainer and sports massage therapist. Worked for four years as a sprints coach at Loughborough, coaching an athlete to four gold medals at the European Championships in his category. Previously worked in the sports medicine department at the RFU. At humanos.me, we help people improve their health and performance.
Greg Potter explores cutting-edge and novel strategies to optimize sleep beyond basic hygiene.
If sleep doesn't serve absolutely vital functions, then it's surely the greatest mistake that evolution ever made.
Summary
- Sleep restriction severely impacts health, increasing risks for pre-diabetes and weight gain, while even one hour less than seven hours nightly significantly raises mortality risk. - Sleep is regulated by the interaction between the light-sensitive circadian system and the homeostatic buildup of adenosine, a byproduct of the brain's energy expenditure. - Deep sleep (N3) is characterized by slow brain waves that facilitate the transfer of memories from short-term to long-term storage while also helping regulate blood sugar levels. - Improving sleep can be achieved through temperature regulation, such as taking a warm shower or using L-glycine to promote peripheral vasodilation and cool the core body temperature. - Emerging methods to enhance sleep quality include using lavender oil to increase slow-wave activity, pink noise to improve memory, and rhythmic rocking to stimulate the vestibular system.
Article
Hacking Your Way To Better Sleep & Life
At Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm, Greg Potter Made A Compelling Case That Sleep Was Not A Lifestyle Luxury But A Biological Imperative
In a room full of people primed to optimize everything from cognition to metabolism, Greg Potter chose the most universal target of all at Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm: sleep.
His presentation, *Hacking Your Way To Better Sleep & Life*, delivered on Friday, 18 May 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden, did not linger on the usual catechism of sleep hygiene. Potter, whose PhD at the University of Leeds focused on sleep, diet and metabolism, went further, tracing the machinery of sleep through circadian biology, brain chemistry, thermal regulation and sensory stimulation. The message was both stark and oddly hopeful. Poor sleep damaged nearly every system in the body. Better sleep, even over short periods, could begin to reverse the harm.
“Each one-hour decrease in sleep duration below seven hours a night is associated with a six percent increase in death from any cause,” Potter said. It was the kind of line that silenced the room, not because it was theatrical, but because it was so clinically plain.
Sleep As Evolution’s Necessary Contradiction
Potter began with sleep’s fundamental paradox. Sleep leaves animals vulnerable. It removes them, temporarily, from feeding, mating, defending and competing. By the ruthless logic of evolution, it should have been selected against. Yet every species studied exhibited sleep-like behavior, and humans spent roughly a third of life in that state.
If sleep persisted despite such obvious costs, Potter argued, then it must serve functions so essential that biology could not dispense with it.
Modern life, however, had turned this necessity into something negotiable. Workday sleep duration had fallen. Insomnia had become widespread across Europe. Humans, Potter noted, remained the only species to deliberately deprive themselves of sleep. The consequences were not abstract. “No aspect of human biology evades the negative consequences of poor sleep,” he said.
The Body Under Siege From Too Little Sleep
The most striking portion of the talk concerned metabolism. Potter pointed to controlled laboratory studies showing that just five nights of sleep restriction to four hours per night were enough to push healthy people into a temporary pre-diabetic state. That finding alone would have been alarming. But he paired it with a more encouraging counterpoint: when habitual short sleepers extended their sleep, insulin sensitivity improved dramatically.
In one experiment he cited, young men given ten hours in bed, rather than six, achieved roughly three more hours of sleep. Their insulin sensitivity rose by 45 percent.
The body, in other words, responded quickly in both directions. Restrict sleep and physiology deteriorated. Restore it and the system began to recover.
Appetite was no exception. Sleep restriction, Potter said, reliably increased energy intake. Across the literature, the average rise was modest on paper, roughly the calories contained in four apples per day. But over a year, those increments compounded into a meaningful metabolic burden. Conversely, extending sleep in habitual short sleepers reduced added sugar intake and appeared to improve decisions around carbohydrates and fats.
Sleep, in Potter’s account, was not merely rest. It was governance. It shaped what the body did with glucose, how the brain evaluated reward, and whether cravings tightened their grip.
The Cognitive Toll And The Promise Of Recovery
The lecture widened from metabolism to the mind. Potter described classic sleep restriction studies in which participants allowed only four or six hours in bed over two weeks accumulated worsening deficits in cognitive performance. These were dose-dependent declines, meaning the less sleep people had, the more their faculties suffered.
Yet here, too, improvement appeared possible. In obese adults who were habitual short sleepers, extending sleep over a longer period was associated with gains in cognition, attention and memory.
Potter’s framing was notable for avoiding melodrama. He did not depict sleep deprivation as a moral failing or sleep extension as miracle cure. Instead, he described a biological system responding predictably to pressure and relief. “Improving sleep quality in people with poor sleep seems to quickly reverse many of the negative consequences of sleep deprivation,” he said.
Circadian Rhythms, Adenosine, And The Architecture Of Fatigue
To explain how sleep could be manipulated, Potter turned to the widely accepted two-process model of sleep regulation. One process was circadian, governed by the body clock and heavily influenced by light. The other was homeostatic, driven by sleep pressure that accumulated through waking hours.
Light, he explained, served as the chief regulator of the circadian system. Exposure to bright blue light early in the day could shift the clock earlier, making it easier for people with fixed work schedules to fall asleep sooner and wake more naturally. Wearable light therapy glasses, he suggested, represented one practical intervention.
The second process revolved around adenosine, the sleep-promoting chemical that built up as the brain expended energy. The longer one stayed awake, the greater the pressure to sleep. A full night’s rest paid off that debt. A curtailed night left residue behind, the biological equivalent of unpaid interest, often answered in the morning with caffeine.
This dual model gave Potter’s broader argument its coherence. Sleep was not a mystery of willpower. It was a system with levers.
Why Deep Sleep Matters So Much
Among sleep’s various stages, Potter gave particular importance to N3, or deep sleep. This phase, marked by high-amplitude slow waves, played a central role in memory consolidation and metabolic regulation.
During deep sleep, memories encoded during the day were replayed in the hippocampus and transferred toward longer-term storage in the neocortex. Potter described the process with unusual clarity: slow waves coordinated the transfer, while sleep spindles helped stabilize it. The result was not only better memory, but better cognitive organization.
Deep sleep also mattered for blood sugar regulation and executive function, including the ability to plan, initiate and monitor behavior. If sleep restriction helped produce metabolic chaos, then N3 appeared to be part of the repair machinery.
REM sleep, too, received attention. Potter called it vital to creativity and emotional regulation, noting that humans spent more time in REM than any other primate. “REM sleep is vital to creativity and emotion regulation and has likely been pivotal in the evolution of our intelligence and complex social structures,” he said.
A New Frontier Of Biohacks, From Warm Showers To Lavender
If the first half of the talk established the stakes, the second half explored interventions. Some were familiar, others speculative, all rooted in mechanism.
Temperature was one of the most practical targets. Potter explained that sleep onset depended on the cooling of the brain and core body. Counterintuitively, one way to facilitate that cooling was to briefly warm the skin before bed. A warm shower, around ten minutes at approximately 40 degrees Celsius within an hour of sleep, could help create the thermal gradient needed to shed heat more efficiently.
He also highlighted L-glycine, which had shown promise in improving sleep, likely by promoting peripheral vasodilation and allowing the body to lose heat more effectively.
Aromatherapy, often dismissed as wellness ornament, was presented more seriously. Lavender oil by the bedside had been shown to increase slow-wave activity and sleep spindles, improving sleep quality, prolonging sleep duration and even enhancing memory. Jasmine and other scents also appeared to reduce wakefulness during attempted sleep.
The larger point was that the sleeping brain was not sealed off from the world. Even as the thalamus filtered incoming sensory stimuli, carefully chosen signals could still shape sleep architecture.
Noise, Rocking, And Electrical Stimulation
Some of Potter’s most intriguing examples came from the edge of consumer neurotechnology. Non-invasive brain stimulation, particularly over the frontal lobes, had been shown to increase slow-wave activity and improve memory. By raising local neuronal energy expenditure, such stimulation appeared to deepen recovery in region-specific ways.
He also discussed pink noise, delivered in sync with particular phases of slow waves, as a tool to strengthen memory processing during sleep. In laboratory settings, the results had been consistent. Commercial devices existed, though Potter noted that their timing was not always precise enough to replicate research outcomes.
Then there was rocking. Adults, like infants, appeared to fall asleep faster when moved gently from side to side at a slow rhythm. The mechanism likely involved the vestibular system, which helped synchronize brainwaves, increasing sleep spindles and slow-wave activity. It sounded quaint, almost archaic, but Potter treated it as a legitimate physiological intervention.
Nutrition, Inflammation, And Speculation At The Borders Of Evidence
Not every strategy Potter mentioned was fully validated. Some sat in the category of plausible but untested. Yet he was careful to frame them as such.
Arachidonic acid, found abundantly in beef and chicken, was described as a precursor to several sleep-promoting molecules, including inflammatory cytokines and prostaglandin D2. Nitrate-rich foods such as spinach and beetroot might, he suggested, raise nitric oxide in the brain, which in turn could increase adenosine and support deep sleep.
He also touched on prebiotics and probiotics, noting the role of the gut microbiota in stress and inflammation, two forces with obvious implications for sleep quality. Exercise and sex, through effects on growth hormone and prolactin, may also deepen sleep. Capsaicinoids and early-day cold exposure, by increasing brown fat thermogenesis, were floated as possible ways to enhance later sleep pressure, though Potter warned that temperature extremes close to bedtime could be too alerting.
This willingness to distinguish established evidence from informed hypothesis gave the talk credibility. Potter was not selling magic. He was mapping a frontier.
The Quiet Radicalism Of Taking Sleep Seriously
What lingered after *Hacking Your Way To Better Sleep & Life* was not any single gadget, supplement or protocol. It was the insistence that sleep deserved to be understood as foundational rather than optional.
At Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm, Greg Potter made a case that cut through the culture of heroic exhaustion. Sleep loss was not proof of discipline. It was a physiological insult. Deep sleep was not passive downtime. It was active repair, memory transfer, metabolic regulation and emotional recalibration.
For an audience drawn to optimization, that may have been the most radical argument of all: the most advanced intervention was not always doing more, but sleeping better.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm