The episode examines the importance of sleep and how it impacts on wellbeing. With contributions from sleep experts, Tom Bivins and Dr Omar Kowlessar, the podcast explores all aspects of sleep, how technology distracts us, its impact on our mental health and provides tips on how to prepare for a restful nights sleep.
As we wander through the landscape of slumber, we uncover the mysterious ways our modern habits, like that sneaky cup of coffee after dinner or the glow of our smartphones, play havoc with our nightly rest. Get ready to revolutionize your understanding of nocturnal habits and embrace strategies for restful nights and energized days.
The episode examines the importance of sleep and how it impacts on wellbeing. With contributions from sleep experts, Tom Bivins and Dr Omar Kowlessar, the podcast explores all aspects of sleep, how technology distracts us, its impact on our mental health and provides tips on how to prepare for a restful nights sleep.
As we wander through the landscape of slumber, we uncover the mysterious ways our modern habits, like that sneaky cup of coffee after dinner or the glow of our smartphones, play havoc with our nightly rest. Get ready to revolutionize your understanding of nocturnal habits and embrace strategies for restful nights and energized days.
Enjoy a moment of relaxing calm with the Vita Health Group well-being series of podcasts to make you feel good, keep you healthy, help you make changes to your life. Vita Health Group is an award-winning market leader and has been at the forefront of healthcare for the past 30 years. Vita Health Group making people better.
Speaker 2:Yes, and welcome along to another of the Vita Health Group podcasts. I'm Glenn Thompson, and in this series we explore the challenges of everyday life, with a special focus on mental and physical health and well-being. We do that by chatting to experts about a range of topics, from depression, stress, injury and recovery and a whole lot more, but today we're going to talk about sleep, one of my favourite subjects. To do that, I'm joined on the podcast today by Dr Omar Kallessa. Omar is a clinical psychologist, and also Tom Bivens, who is a head of ergonomics and well-being at Vita. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? Very well, glenn, excellent, thank you, excellent. Let's get a bit of background on both of you before we kick off, then, properly on the podcast today, omar, we'll start with you, a clinical psychologist. What exactly does that mean?
Speaker 3:I'm essentially a psychological therapist, so I help people overcome mental health difficulties by applying psychological therapy approaches to helping them improve their mental well-being and functioning. So it's another way of saying therapist. Okay, really.
Speaker 2:You're a therapist and you work mostly at home at the moment, or do you work around the country? How does it work for you?
Speaker 3:I am actually home-based within Vita, but my responsibilities are more regional, so I have certain regions, certain services around the country which I oversee.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's come to Tom, then. Tom Bivens, who's a head of ergonomics and well-being at Vita. That's quite a title. Tom, tell us what you do, hello Welcome.
Speaker 4:Thank you very much. I'm very much a jack of all trades. I've done various different jobs. I've been at Vita for 13 years in this stint, pre-registered to that. I've worked as a sports scientist, so part of that was working with athletes to help improve their sleep to ultimately optimize performance. I'm a physiotherapist by trade and also an ergonomist, so as my role within Vita ultimately is to identify what we can do to support organizations to prevent their employees developing either musculoskeletal or mental health conditions, it's either through training, through face-to-face workshops or webinars. I also do quite a bit of consultancy with our customers as well.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, we also want to point out today that if you're listening closely to this podcast with a pair of headphones on or in ear earphones and you can hear birds in the background, tom isn't in an a fury, he's in his garden office with the door open. And, yeah, birds on the roof of the shed. There Sounds wonderful, tom. So today's subject, then, is all about sleep. Let's come to you first of all, tom. What is sleep? And tell us some of its origins. I mean, you know we all go to sleep, and sleep sort of washes the mind and the brain, doesn't it. But what is your sleep exactly? How do you define?
Speaker 4:sleep. It's a really interesting question actually, and there's so much research that's been done in this field and we still don't really know exactly why we sleep. If you take a famous quote by this chap called Alan Retton Shaffer and he's a noted pioneer in the field of sleep he wouldn't said that you know what you know. If sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital function, it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made. It's constantly researched what we do know that it's absolutely universal. So if you look at sleep studies done across all sorts of different animals, not just mammals, fish, birds they're even now starting to research bacteria. Every type of living thing does it. So you probably didn't know that worm sleep, you know. So these have been around since the Cambrian period, which means that sleep itself is more than 500 million years old.
Speaker 4:I really like some of the interesting research around fish and birds.
Speaker 4:You know these creatures, unlike ourselves, they've got this amazing ability where they can actually switch off half of their brain because we know it's so essential.
Speaker 4:But obviously, you know, a fish can't just stop swimming to go to sleep because it would obviously drown. So it can switch off half of its brain and allow the other half to sleep while one half is actually keeping their eye open and looking for predators and things like that. And if you've got any, or an orthologist or any people, any people that like to watch birds, if you ever given a chance to look at a line of birds on a telegraph wire? Birds can sleep with what we call two eyes full sleep or half their brain, one eye closed. Whether I open sleep and the birds in the middle will go to sleep properly to, I should sleep. The ones on the either end of that line of birds often have one eye shut, so half their brain sleep, the other ones awake and then halfway through their sleep they swap around and face the direction which allows the other half of their brain to actually go back to sleep. So it's absolutely essential but, frustratingly, something that as human beings, certainly since the industrialized age, we're not getting enough of.
Speaker 2:It's absolutely critical that we do so. Tom, what about people who catnap? You heard this phrase very often catnapping, you know going to get five or 10 minutes shut eye. Does that work? Is that effective?
Speaker 4:Does it work in the short term? Yes, so catnaps or power naps? As a mammalian species, we are what we call monophasic sleepers, so we should go to sleep once and have one full bout of sleep. Other mammalian species are polyphasic, so they go to sleep regularly at different times throughout the day. Now the thing is with power naps they can be beneficial if you're, if you're, sleep deprived. But the problem is if you sleep for more than 20 to 30 minutes, you start to talk through more about this. When we get onto the types of sleep cycle, you start going into a deeper phase of sleep, so normally stage three sleep, so before you start dreaming, and then, if you're a woke control in that period you feel incredibly groggy and it's really difficult to come around from, but also it makes it difficult to go to sleep later on at night. So power naps, yes, can be beneficial in the short term, but as a long term solution they're not beneficial.
Speaker 2:You hear of the length of sleep that we need and again we might mention this a bit later when we come into the different types of sleep. But people say eight hours is good. Mrs Thatcher, the former prime minister from many years ago, used to survive on. I think it was about three or four hours of sleep at night and she would perform perfectly well the next day. And they say the older you get as well, the less sleep you need.
Speaker 4:Is that true? I challenged both of those points, almost three of your points, because you said some interesting things. Then you said you know Maggie Thatcher said she survived on three or four hours sleep. She probably did survive on that. She certainly didn't thrive on a politician, but that might be reflective of some of her decisions.
Speaker 4:We need between seven and nine hours sleep. So there's a little bit of variance. With the literature. Departments for health say you should need between seven and nine. A lot of the academic literatures you need a minimum of eight. So roughly speaking, a third of our time should be spent sleeping. We can function on less.
Speaker 4:So, like you said, people say they've survived. Every you know they've survived at five hours every night for years. But the problem is they're not working at their optimal level. The problem with that, with that sort of lack of sleep you slowly become acclimatised to that impaired performance, that lowered level of alertness, that reduced level of energy and that lower level of exhaustion actually becomes their new baseline. So the problem is you don't know you're sleep deprived when you're sleep deprived and it can mean that you've got years of your life where you're actually working in this suboptimal state. So absolutely between seven and nine hours. And older people. Again, people say they need less sleep. That Smith as well. They still do need between seven and nine hours. Children, on the other hand, do need slightly more because they're developing, but adults and the elderly population it's between seven and nine.
Speaker 2:Let's bring Omar in here because, omar, we talk about sleep deprivation and we touched on this before we started the recording. Today You're getting a bit of sleep deprivation because you've got young children, or you've got a young child now. I mean, how are you coping?
Speaker 3:Well, I think many parents can empathise with what it feels like to have sleep or have enough sleep, and then your life gets thrown into a position where you're not getting enough sleep or quality sleep. So I do have a young family and I do still remember how it was and how I felt when I was woken up regularly in the night to attend to them and the impact it had on my kind of general well-being and my function in the following day. So, as we've spoken about and as Tom's articulated already, sleep is a vitally important process or behaviour that we engage in for our well-being. It's sometimes undervalued in terms of its importance in our functioning, but I think most of us will appreciate what it feels like and the impact it has when we don't get enough sleep.
Speaker 3:So, in terms of the kind of, I suppose, the consequences of being sleep deprived, one of the things that I noticed was that my attention and concentration was was affected. I couldn't really like Tom was talking about kind of functioning suboptimally and I think that's exactly where where I was, you know, I was kind of getting through the day but not at my optimum performance. So my kind of attention and concentration was was affected. I certainly found that I was more irritable and my mood was affected. So it is one of those areas that is crucially important to our general well-being but, unfortunately, can be overlooked as well. I don't think we give it the kind of requisite level of importance when it comes to looking after ourselves, I liken the sleep deprivation I remember vividly when my two boys were small.
Speaker 2:I likened it to permanent jet lag. It was just like this constant feeling of being like a zombie. Is that fair, tom?
Speaker 4:Absolutely. Yeah, it closely mimics that. But also if you look at some of the research around sleep deprivation, historically there's been countries that have used sleep deprivation as a form of torture, so we know that the ramifications are absolutely huge.
Speaker 2:And what if somebody can't sleep well? I mean, what's the answer? You can get all these various things, can't you? These aromatherapy oils that help you, supposedly, get to sleep better at night? I mean, how do you get a good night's sleep? I guess it depends on so many factors. It depends on diet, lifestyle. You do drink a lot, don't you drink at all? I mean, there's so many factors that affect sleep, isn't there?
Speaker 4:A huge amount of factors influence this. We can talk about sleep hygiene in a second and some specific tips around the environmental setup, but I think the key thing for sleeping well is trying to keep that regular sleep schedule, and that's something that is Omar and yourself talked about when you had young kids. That's really, really tricky because it constantly gets upset, so you try to keep those regular hours, tries to keep that sleep system in some form of harmony. I think the other key thing is understanding the impact that light has. We'll maybe talk about the process and what we call this circadian rhythm a bit later on, but we're hardwired to wake up and go to sleep at certain times that it's directly linked to sunshine. So making sure when you go into bed, you go into bed somewhere that's dark, that's quiet, that's an appropriate temperature really, really important.
Speaker 4:But, like I say, some of the things that you do in your lifestyle do you drink alcohol? Alcohol is a sedative. It makes people think that they're getting a better night's sleep, but actually almost it's almost like they're being anethatised. It significantly impacts on the quality of sleep. So alcohol is an absolute no-no. Caffeine is another one. It inhibits our ability to get to sleep and it's such a powerful drug. We should be abstaining from caffeine probably eight to 10 hours before we go to bed. People don't realise the impact that that has.
Speaker 2:Some people have a coffee before they get a bed, don't they? Or a cup of tea before they get a bed.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I am one of those people that I can have a double espresso. If I'm out at a restaurant with a family, can have a double espresso after the meal, still go to sleep, but the quality of sleep that I have will be impacted by that.
Speaker 2:You really can notice that, can you? Yeah, absolutely Fascinating.
Speaker 3:So that's what Tom said. Another thing to help improve sleep generally is, I know in today's day and age we live in an always online culture, so kind of screen time during the day and at night is quite prevalent in most of our lives now. So we're either on our phones or iPads or watching TV, and one of the other things which we know impacts on sleep is the amount of time we spend on our devices and the amount of stimulus we receive from said devices. Like if you're on your phone in bed, you might feel like you are actually relaxing, but you're providing a lot of stimulus to your brain which is actually keeping your brain quite alert. And I've got personal experience of doing this.
Speaker 3:When I was younger. I used to play computer games a lot, certainly during my university days, and I would sometimes look at the clock and think, oh gosh, I should go to bed now, and I would just switch off my computer or console and jump straight into bed, close my eyes. What could I see? I can see the graphics or the screen that I was just playing playing out in my mind's eyes. So it would take me longer to start to unwind and to relax into a sleep.
Speaker 3:So some of the tips that that's Tom's mentioned around kind of eating and drinking, also applies to giving ourselves breaks from devices as well, in order to allow the mind and body to kind of sink into a relaxed state in order to allow sleep to happen. Some listeners may empathize with the experience of feeling very tired. So the body feels very tired, so you go to bed but your mind can be very active, and vice versa. Sometimes you can feel mentally exhausted and then you go to bed, but it's almost like there's that kind of nervous energy in your body that's keeping you awake. So it's it's not just about the routine, but it's also about preparing for sleep as well, and the mind and body have to be ready to allow that to happen.
Speaker 2:My son. He's married now he's got a young child and he has recently moved bedrooms. For a couple of nights they had TV on the wall in the bedroom, so every night they go to bed and watch television. They moved to another room, you know shifting around because the baby's coming on. The baby's got his own little room now and everything. So they were shifting rooms around and for three nights he said we went without television and he said he had a far better night's sleep.
Speaker 4:I think the point about what you're doing. You know, if you're playing games, if you're watching TV, that's obviously a massive stimulant. But equally there's been quite a bit of research around the fact that the impact that the types of like, particularly blue light, has on what we call melatonin production, so melatonin induces sleep. The most recent research I read actually found that if you're reading text on a screen, so if you're reading on an iPad, on a phone, compared to reading a book, your melatonin production is reduced by about 50% on a blue screen, so on a phone or tablet, compared to reading a newspaper or a book.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So reading a book is okay, but not necessarily reading off of an iPad or a phone or whatever tablet, if you are going to do that.
Speaker 4:If you have to do it. There are a lot of settings on devices that allow that blue screen to be reduced. It almost puts a bit of an orange glow around it, yeah that's something I can personally attest to.
Speaker 3:So reading for me at nighttime is like for me taking a sleeping tablet it just knocks me out. After a few pages I'm asleep. But if I'm, if I'm reading something on my iPad at night, it has the opposite effects. I'm more alert.
Speaker 2:I can never get past two or three pages. It's like oh my, you're absolutely swore on yeah, Just focus in oh my, if we can on the impacts of sleep deprivation on things like productivity. If you've got a job the next day, an important meeting to go to, or whatever, whatever job you're doing, the lack of sleep is going to affect it, isn't it?
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. People may notice that their ability to problem solve or to think through solutions effectively and to use those critical thinking processes become impaired. So you may be faced with a particular challenge or issue at home or at work that has a potentially five or six solutions that you can explore, but when you're sleep deprived you may not see those solutions and you may actually just see one or two, which may not be the wisest options to take. So it can impact on our decision making processes. Your ability to attend and to pay attention is also impacted. Memory recall as well. Memory recording and recall is impacted Generally. Your interactions with others when you are sleep deprived and sometimes not be there the nicest person to be around especially if you've got to interact with people and listen and pay attention. So yes, it is one of those things that can. It kind of spreads into various aspects of our lives and functioning when we don't get it quite right.
Speaker 2:Tom, what about things like anxiety? You know, at the moment we're going through some pretty awful times in the world and other people are worrying subconsciously about what is going on. Is that going to affect sleep patterns?
Speaker 4:It does have an impact on it, and it's a bit of a double-edged sword, because if you're sleeping badly, that's going to impact how you think, how you feel, which that worry can then ultimately make it more difficult next time you want to then try and go to sleep. There's also quite a bit of research. When you look at the types of dreams people have, or nightmares, part of that can reflect what you're processing the day before, so it can make not only getting sleep more challenging but equally can make the quality of sleep that you have worse. So things like.
Speaker 4:CBT therapy or some mindfulness practice have been shown to help that, specifically around anxiety.
Speaker 2:I'd love to know what the various dreams that people have mean. I mean things like the falling dream you're falling or you're being chased. I'd love to know and delve deeper into all of that, wouldn't you Omar?
Speaker 3:It is interesting and I would say that there's a lot of literature about the interpretations of dreams and I think there's a lot of cultural diversity as well when it comes to that. Different cultures will interpret different dreams differently as well. So, yes, it is a fascinating area. But just to kind of follow on from what Tom has mentioned about anxiety, we're talking about sleep and isolation and the impact that sleep has and the importance of it. But it is also quite heavily featured in a lot of our common mental health problems that we work with in treats.
Speaker 3:So low mood depression, as an example. Poor sleep is characteristic of being affected in these conditions. So when it comes to the treatment of low mood depression, there's often a focus on improving sleep as part of the overall treatment, because when someone is depressed, their sleep is also affected, which then kind of impacts on their mood. So it's like it's kind of a downward spiral where you're not feeling great and you're not sleeping well, so therefore you're not feeling great and then you just you can get trapped in a bit of a vicious cycle. So sleep is also specifically targeted in psychological therapy treatments for a lot of common mental health disorders.
Speaker 2:And I'm guessing we've seen an upturn in sleep deprivation and people. Obviously, you know the whole mental health issue has escalated, hasn't it since the start of COVID, for example? That must have been something you've seen quite commonly now, to be honest.
Speaker 4:I don't work within a within a clinical setting, so it's probably something Oman and his team may have seen more of. What's interesting, though, is we know that has been an increase in people struggling with sleep, whether it's due to COVID-19 or the recent Ukraine crisis. It's thinking about the bigger picture and thinking, well, yeah, that's going to have an impact on my mental health, but equally, the link between that and other chronic diseases. You know, with the NHS is really under a lot of pressure at the moment, but we know for well there's been a huge amount of research on the fact that if you're sleep deprived, yes, you're going to significantly increase the risk of things like heart disease. When you're, when you're sleeping badly, what we call the sympathetic nervous system, so the almost your stress response is fired up. So we know that things like heart rate, blood pressure, arthroesclerosis and the pharyngeal of those arteries increases. So heart disease is increased, type two diabetes significantly increased because of lack of sleep, obesity and weight gain.
Speaker 4:We are what we call an obesogenic nation, as is every developed country in the world. It makes it harder for people to maintain a healthy weight. It changes how we feel, how we behave. Lack of sleep inhibits the feeling of us to feel full, so we eat more. But equally the choices we make when we're stressed because of the of what's going on the world anxiety, maybe depression as well we tend to reach first comfort food as well. So obesity is a massive issue as our cancers, so not all cancers. There's a fair amount of research at the moment say things like lung cancer, ovarian cancer, thyroid and blood cancer overall more likely to happen if you are chronically sleep deprived.
Speaker 2:Okay, fascinating. Omar, I know you'd like to go back and focus on dreams again. We touched on it earlier in the podcast, but the impact on your sleeping pattern that dreams have.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you mentioned that. It's fascinating the whole kind of process of dreaming and what dreams actually mean. But, and one of the things I wanted to talk about is, even though we know very little about what dreams actually mean, we know it's vitally important to our, our health and well being. So there have been studies and research that have shown the importance of dreaming. So, where participants in sleep studies have been woken just before they go into a dream sleep state because of the brainwave changes, and when this is repeatedly done, what was noticed is that the physical health and the mental health of the participants was adversely affected by preventing them going into a dream state.
Speaker 4:When you think about people being impacted by getting to that dream state. I think it's probably worth flagging. You know, in the different phases of sleep you've got the N-REM, what we call the non-rapid eye movement, and the REM rapid eye movement sleep. So most of the time we spend dreaming is during REM sleep rapid eye movement sleep and it has different benefits. So you tend to get, as you sleep, you go through various cycles of sleep. You have more REM sleep near the end of your night sleep, and it serves a really useful purpose. It's incredibly useful for your immune system. It's incredibly useful for protein generation.
Speaker 4:So people, from a physical point of view, that are doing manual labor, people that are exercising regularly, people that are unwell, they need those proteins to heal, to recover. From a psychological point of view, though, rem dreaming, we know, blunts emotional pain from memories. So when you're REM dreaming, the brain somehow seems to process those upsetting memories and those emotional themes and it can retain the useful lessons while also blunt that visceral emotional pain. So this is why we sometimes believe that you can look back at emotional memories without feeling that full emotional intensity. It also increases our understanding of other people's emotions. So it helps us interact with people far better.
Speaker 4:So if you look again at the sleep research, when you're sleep deprived you're far less able to interpret subtle facial expressions. Interestingly, sleep deprived people tend to more often interpret faces as being hostile or aggressive. That's interesting. But on the flip side, if you're sleep deprived because you're gonna be stressed and a little bit cranky, you're then perceived as being more hostile and aggressive itself. I guess the final point on this one. We know that dreaming so part of this REM sleep, the benefits it increased that creativity. So it allows those neurons to make novel associations and connections, to solve problems, to create novel ideas. So it's really important for our level of productivity, our communication. So dreaming if it's disturbed you're not gonna get that protein formation, you're more likely to come on well, you're far more likely to be unproductive. So it's an absolutely vital part.
Speaker 2:Fascinating, fascinating, you know, when you see your partner asleep and then suddenly the eyes are moving really radically. They're sort of darting around, or is that part?
Speaker 4:of the REM sleep pattern. It absolutely is. I've got an interesting story about this. So a few years ago, when I was starting to get quite heavily involved in researching sleep, I remember I was doing the thing I shouldn't be doing.
Speaker 4:I was lying in bed, reading my phone around the anatomical structure of REM versus non-REM sleep and I was thinking you know what? I've never actually seen REM sleep. I've never peered into someone's eyes because, yes, your eyeballs do rapidly go from left to right during rapid eye movement sleep. So I thought you know what? I wanna check on the wife's. So I rolled over and I didn't wanna shine the phone directly into her face because she's probably gonna wake up. So I put it just, angled it to the side slightly and towered over and just watched for a while, because obviously she's gotta go through the non-REM sleep before you get to the REM sleep. But from personal experience, that's a really bad idea, because if someone wakes up while you've got a 20 stone gorilla towering over you looking into your eye, it gets you into a lot of hot water. But to answer your question, yes, it does. Your eyes do go from left to right.
Speaker 2:How soon does that REM kick in then, Tom, after you initially go to sleep? Well, does it vary from person to person.
Speaker 4:You tend to follow a pretty stable process, almost like a routine of sleeping. So you start off and you have non-REM sleep. So you go through three stages of non-REM sleep. The first one lasts quite short, you know, relatively few minutes, less than 10. During that stage, your heart rate, your breathing rate tends to slow down. Your muscles relax. You get the occasional twitch. As you go through stage two non-REM sleep, stage three non-REM sleep you get more and more and more relaxed. And then in stage four this is when you hit that REM sleep Each cycle.
Speaker 4:So you have to go through the three stages of non-REM sleep before you get to REM sleep. Each cycle lasts for about 90 minutes. You have to experience, and this is the key thing that Omar mentioned to everyone. You've got to experience all four stages of sleep in order to wake up feeling rested, and you tend to go through four or five cycles per night. The ratio of time you spend in each one of those, whether it's non-REM or REM, does change. So the first half of the night you tend to spend more time in non-REM sleep and you get progressively more as you go through the night.
Speaker 2:You've read my mind for the next question then, omar, you know. Is this why then sometimes I wake up in the morning feeling absolutely zonked and I just want to go back to bed. I feel like I've done a whole day's work before I even get up. I mean, is that because I've not completed those cycles of sleep?
Speaker 3:That's exactly it and that's something that I can attest to as well. So we all know those of us who get enough sleep and we know what we can function on adequately. We all know what our kind of optimum sleep times are and I've certainly experienced it where I've slept longer than I perhaps normally do and I don't feel more rested for sleeping the extra time, and that will be because I've not spent adequate, I've not gone through the adequate stages of sleep. The sleep program, if you like, has run and I've woken up midway through a particular cycle. So yeah, there can be times where you kind of baffle because you've spent more time in bed.
Speaker 3:And you think I've been sleeping for longer. But actually it's not necessarily about the amount of time you spend in bed, but the quality of the sleep as well and the cycles that you've gone through. Hence the reason why catnapping can be useful, and when you wake up from a 20, 30 minute catnap, you can feel refreshed and energized. But if it goes on for longer than that, where you're entering into a new cycle and therefore you wake up feeling worse or more groggy, Okay, gentlemen, that leads us nicely into tips for improving our sleep.
Speaker 2:Then I mean, how can we do that? Apart from having maybe a hot bath the night before, the evening before you go to bed, having a nice warm bedroom or a cool bedroom, what sort of tips have you got that will guarantee you a good night's sleep Making?
Speaker 4:sure that the room is dark. If you struggle, making sure you've got blackout blinds or if you can't do that, wearing a face mask, is really, really important Making sure that it's quiet. But temperature, you know, we live in a modern age where people have thermostats and they crank them all the way up, especially in the winter. What is interesting is, as human beings, the things that dictate our sleep cycle. We talked about the circadian rhythm, but you also. Our body temperature will fluctuate throughout the day, and our body temperature, or core temperature, tends to drop as we approach the time we should be going to sleep. So our bedroom should be around 18 degrees Celsius, and that's actually quite a bit cooler than what a lot of people think is acceptable.
Speaker 2:You have to tell my wife, is there any question? Yeah, she likes a hot room and I'm saying no, I always have the window open. You know, the coldest night with snow outside I'll have the window open, not wide, but there's a bit of a gap there.
Speaker 4:I like to fit a fresh air in, absolutely, and that's one of the challenges we face. So it's working collaboratively with our partners. So if you like it really really hot, we'll maybe keep the window open, but you can have a really heavy, thick blanket. I might buy you some nice gym jams or something to keep you warm, but I'm going to sleep with next to nothing on and I'm going to keep cool. It's about meeting in the middle somewhere.
Speaker 4:You mentioned hot baths. Everyone that that's interesting. People think it's the heat. Actually, when you are having that hot bath that causes your blood vessel to vasodilate, that actually, when you get out of the bath, that cools you down rapidly and that's what tricks the brain in thinking oh, body temperature dropped, it's time to go to sleep. We really are creatures of habit. So I guess another tip that's just closely linked into habit is thinking about what you're doing in bed. So I will say you know, try to limit the amount of activities you're doing in your bed to one or two things. So really, your bedroom should be used for sleep and sex. Ok if you're using your bed for watching TV. It's where you eat your dinner, it's where you let your dog come and sleep with you at night, things like that. When you get into that, your brain's going right. Well, I've walked into the bedroom. It's this time at night. What are we going to do? There's loads of things to choose from. If it's limited to one of those two options, you've almost got that habit formed.
Speaker 3:Other things to mention is what you do in preparation for or what your bedtime routine actually looks like. So the environment, as we've discussed, is really important. The kind of association that your brain makes to the bed is really important. But it's actually how do you prepare for sleep? What does your sleep routine actually look like? So are you very busy in the evening, running around doing stuff, and then all of a sudden you decide right bedtime, it's 10 o'clock, go to bed and do you give yourself enough of a wind down time.
Speaker 3:So the bath is an interesting one. So Tom's kind of highlighted the kind of physiological impact it has on helping us helping us to sleep. But I also see it as an activity which can be soothing in itself. So having 20, 30 minutes in the bath alone, relaxing, can actually be very, very conducive to helping you to get into that kind of sleep routine. So it's about being mindful about how we prepare ourselves for sleep. So if you're drinking caffeinated drinks or you're eating, you're snacking late at night and then you're wanting to go to bed, that's not necessarily going to be a recipe for a good night's sleep. Like me, I've learnt the hard way If you're watching TV or playing computer games late at night and then you decide to go to bed. That's not necessarily going to be useful either. So it's about giving yourself, thinking about how you prepare yourself for sleep and giving yourself those activities which are conducive to relaxation as well.
Speaker 2:And don't go watching horror movies. Before you go to sleep. Don't go watching horror movies.
Speaker 4:I think, just building on what you said there, amado, I think people give enough credit to what people do in preparation or even during the day that's going to help them sleep. So things like, if I'm talking to people that struggle with sleep, asking them things like do you exercise? You know, if you exercise regularly and that's keeping you fit, that really does help you get to sleep because you're physically tired, you tend to find with people that just start exercise, it doesn't have an immediate effect but it's almost a long-term win of exercise regularly. It has a beneficial effect. The problem is, if you exercise just before bed it can have an opposite effect because you do get those endorphins and the stimulants and you get a bit pumped up.
Speaker 4:So try not to exercise for the last two hours before you go to bed. But I guess, coming back onto the lighting as well, trying to get your brain thinking right, it's as part of this routine it's time to go to sleep. So for the last few hours before you go to bed, can you start to maybe dim some of the lights in the rooms that you're spending time in, because that again it will help induce those sleep-inducing hormones. Obviously you don't use caffeine or nicotine and if you can't sleep, get up. A lot of people almost force themselves to toss and turn and it has a really detrimental effect.
Speaker 2:What about, you know, if you wake up in the middle of the night and you, you know, pop to the loo or something and you just can't get back to sleep? That more often happens. What did you do? Lay in bed and toss and turn and try to get back to sleep, or just get up and do something.
Speaker 4:So there's quite a few techniques that you can do, your basic relaxation techniques, whether it's just deep breathing exercises, you might want to try mindfulness, progressive muscle relaxation techniques when you're, you know, like contract release exercises. That can help Again if you have got up, gone to the bathroom or something and you've gone back to bed and you're really struggling.
Speaker 4:get up, you know, try and do something that's quite relaxed, something that isn't going to stimulate you, and then try again. But again, the key, if you have worked up, is really thinking why have I worked up at the first place? Did I go to bed after eating a heavy meal or even a spicy meal? Spicy meals can increase that core body temperature, which makes it harder to sleep and then more likely to wake up. Have you drank too much water? Is that why you go into the bathroom more frequently? So thinking about those root causes is a key thing I think it's worth flagging. If you're finding that sleep is challenging, if you're waking up frequently all the time, we know that that is going to have a significant impact on your health, both physical and mental. So I guess it's worth saying at this point if you're struggling and it's not just a one-off reach out, go on and speak to GP, get sent to a sleep specialist so they can start to understand some of those root causes.
Speaker 2:Gentlemen, a fascinating area of conversation Sleep and what it means and how to get to sleep and how to have a good night's sleep. If anyone is having issues, Omar, where's a good place to go to for advice?
Speaker 3:The first thought of call could be speaking to your GP. If you're struggling with sleep and this has been an ongoing issue for you, If sleep problems are part of a bigger picture in terms of your general mental health, like you're struggling with your mood as well as struggling with your sleep, you can go onto the Vita Health website where there are some information on there. There's some free videos and sleep information, and you can also self-refer for any psychological support, should you want to. Tom's going to talk a little bit about some other websites and services that are available to people as well.
Speaker 4:There's three key places that I'd always signpost people to. These are all for free. So the first one if you just Google Sleep Foundation or Sleep Council, both of those are evidence-based and I've got a whole plethora of information. And don't forget about the NHS website. So if you just go to nhsuk slash Livewell, there's a whole host of information on there that can really help you get sleep. So it talks about there's a lot of information around sleep hygiene hints and tips, and there's also guidance on there on how you can refer yourself should you need to.
Speaker 2:So Sleep Foundation, Sleep Council and the NHS website as well. Absolutely Brilliant advice. It's been absolutely fascinating. And I've got to say, Omar I don't know if you agree with me, but I'm feeling very relaxed anyway because of Tom's pigeons and his birds sitting on his roof of his garden shed there. Absolutely wonderful, I feel like I'm there with you in the garden. It's been great. Dr Omar Cowles, a clinical psychologist, and also Tom Bivens, head of ergonomics and well-being at Vita, Thanks so much for joining us on the discussion on sleep today on the Vita Health Group podcast series. Absolutely fascinating Gentlemen. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to this Making People Better podcast, part of the well-being series from Vita Health Group. Improving your lives, physically and mentally, drives everything we do, and getting you back to doing what you love is our priority. Vita Health Group Making People Better wwwVitaHealthGroupcouk.