Hi, TED Talks Daily listeners. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Today you're about to hear something a little different. This week, we're doing a live interview series called TED Connects, Community and Hope. They are timely conversations with TED speakers around the pandemic we're all struggling through right now.

Today's conversation features sleep scientist, professor, and author Matt Walker.

He's in conversation with head of Ted, Chris Anderson.

Their back and forth is great. It gets at all kinds of interesting nuggets like the link between sleep and your immunity, how poor sleep triggers stress eating, guilty, and hacks if you've

had a rough night. Speaking of you, we want to hear your input, so let us know what you think

by leaving a review or emailing us at podcasts at ted.com. Hi, the mat. How are you? I'm good, Chris,

and how are you doing? And thank you so much for having me on.

Well, thank you. It's very good to have you here. I mean, I guess that's going to be the first question on top of people's minds is, you know, is there a case that sleep matters now more than ever?

I think, firstly, it's important for me to not necessarily feed into people's anxiety

regarding sleep.

I know, as you mentioned, that sleep is difficult for some people when anxiety is high,

and of course, that's never more so present.

So what I would say is that if anything that we're talking about feels as though it's a

trigger, feel free just to come back at a time that feels better in terms of that anxiety level.

In terms of sleep and COVID-19, right now we don't necessarily have any evidence to suggest that

there is some kind of a link between those two. but certainly what we know is that there is a very

intimate relationship between your sleep health and your immune health. There was a study some

years ago that demonstrated that individuals who reported getting less than seven hours of sleep

had almost a threefold increased likelihood of becoming infected by the rhinovirus,

a common cold relative to those who were getting eight hours of sleep or more.

But I think perhaps one of the most striking results in this relationship was a study where

they demonstrated if you're not getting sufficient sleep in the week before you get your flu shot, you produce less than

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