Name: How to Reverse Sleep Deprivation with Exercise | Dr. Rhonda Patrick & Dr. Andrew Huberman
Uploaded: 2026-03-29T21:35:15.000Z
Duration: 4 min 56 s
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You've described that if you are slightly sleep-deprived, so not 4 hours per night or an all-nighter, but

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if you've only slept 5, or let's say you're getting an hour or two less than your normal ration of sleep, there's some pretty significant inflammation that occurs, that's not good.

But I've heard you cover that exercising can actually offset some of that inflammation.

This answers an important and common question, which is, if I have to pick between sleep and exercise, what do I do?

And it sounds like if it's one night, poor sleep, exercise,

I mean, so this data, a lot of it actually comes from you can cause even acute insulin resistance after a night of sleep deprivation, certainly after two to three nights of sleep deprivation.

And again, a lot of that's coming down to some of the things we've already talked about.

But exercise can help basically negate a lot of that.

And I learned that firsthand through experience when I was wearing a continuous glucose monitor and when I was a new parent.

Of course, you're not getting enough sleep.

And so I learned it before I actually dove into the science about it.

I learned about it through my own data, where I wasn't exercising as much,

and particularly in the first month, really, you're kind of in a cave as a new mom.

You're not really exercising much at all.

I mean, childbirth is a very traumatic process on the body.

And so I noticed that my glucose response was like it was prediabetic,

and I was like, "What is going on?" And that's when I started looking into the literature,

and it happened to be around the same time when I was then starting up my at the time, I was doing spin classes.

It was like, "I do these high-intensity interval training classes even just twice a week." And it was almost completely negating what I had seen previously of my fasting glucose being really high and also my postprandial glucose being higher than usual.

And so I looked into the studies, and you can find many studies out there.

And I mean, obviously, exercise is one of the best things you can do to improve insulin sensitivity and to also bring glucose into your cells, right?

And so that's part of what you were talking about with, "Oh, you're more insulin sensitive during the morning, at least during the evening." And I also mentioned that.

There's levers you can pull that change the equation.

If you're exercising, you're becoming more insulin sensitive.

You're increasing more glucose transporters on your muscle that's causing glucose to go in easier, right?

So there's lots of ways around some of these rules that we hear about.

But with the sleep loss, it's interesting because people, when they don't get sleep, the last thing they want to do is work out.

And obviously, you don't want to do the hardest thing, especially if you're really sleep-deprived a lot.

But it really does help negate the inflammation and the insulin insensitivity that can happen after even just a single night of sleep.

And there's studies out there showing that.

And then there's also these longitudinal studies that have been done looking at people.

So obviously, poor sleep is a problem in the United States.

I mean, a lot of people are sleeping fewer than seven hours a night.

But there's studies out there that have looked at people that sleep either shorter, so fewer than seven hours a night, or they're sleeping more than 10, right?

So you don't want to be on either end of the spectrum.

And usually, sleeping long, there's other disease states associated with it, right?

So people that are sleeping, not getting enough sleep, they have a higher all-cause mortality than people that are getting at least seven to nine hours of sleep.

They have a higher all-cause mortality than people getting between seven and nine.

But if people exercise, if they're meeting the physical activity guidelines right now, which is 75 minutes of vigorous intensity exercise and 150 minutes a week of moderate intensity exercise.

Well, because the guidelines are helpful,

but they're just guidelines because, I mean, doing the sort of workout that you're doing, working up to doubles and triples and singles on compound lifts and then doing cardio, getting your heart rate elevated,

then your hiking, I mean, I think the guidelines are a good jumping-off place for people to think about.

Well, we can talk about that because there's a new study that kind of throws that on the head.

But the point is that if people were exercising within the guideline range, that they basically, if they weren't getting enough sleep, if they were getting fewer than seven hours of sleep per night, that they basically had the same mortality rate as people that were getting enough sleep.

So it's offsetting some of that unhealthy stuff, the insulin resistance, the inflammation that we know can lead to diseases and early mortality.