The Chief Psychology Officer

Ep68 Essential Sleep Strategies for Emotional Balance

• Dr Amanda Potter CPsychol • Season 3 • Episode 68

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Unlock the secrets to optimal sleep with Dr. Amanda Potter, a distinguished Psychologist and CEO of Zircon BeTalent, as she guides us through the intricate dance of our nightly rest. Discover how seven to nine hours of uninterrupted sleep can revolutionize your emotional well-being and sharpen your cognitive edge, enhancing creativity, problem-solving, and memory retention. Dr. Potter also sheds light on the substantial economic toll of sleep-related fatigue, underscoring the importance of regular sleep patterns and the power daylight holds over our natural rhythms.

Journey through the enigmatic stages of REM and non-REM sleep, where dreams intertwine with memory consolidation and learning is fortified. You'll find out how neurotransmitters like GABA, alongside melatonin and adenosine, orchestrate this nightly symphony. Dr. Potter emphasizes how morning light resets our biological clocks, and why feelings of contentment can be a catalyst for better sleep. Our conversation also covers the profound effects of outdoor activities and exercise on reducing cortisol levels and naturally boosting melatonin.

Arm yourself with practical strategies to master sleep hygiene and establish empowering routines. Learn how caffeine affects your alertness and sleep patterns, and grasp the importance of consistent sleep and wake times. We explore the benefits of using dim, yellow lights in the evening while embracing natural sunlight in the morning. Discover tips for maintaining an ideal bedroom environment, timing meals and naps wisely, and using breathing techniques to ease into relaxation, equipping you to reclaim your nights and boost your overall well-being.

Episodes are available here https://www.thecpo.co.uk/

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For more information about the BeTalent suite of tools and platform please contact: TheCPO@zircon-mc.co.uk

Speaker 1:

In this episode, we dive into the fascinating world of sleep, exploring the neuroscience behind it, uncovering its profound impact on our well-being, and sharing science-backed strategies to help you wake up truly refreshed. Welcome to the Chief Psychology Officer. With Dr Amanda Potter, chartered Psychologist and CEO of Zircon, I'm Angela Malik.

Speaker 2:

Hi Amanda, Hi Angela, Good to see you today. This podcast is one that I've wanted to research for a while because, for me, sleep I'm pretty good with my sleep, but not consistently, so I'd like to understand some of the tricks and some of the neuroscience behind why certain nights are really good and certain nights are not so good for me. So I'm hoping by the end of this I'll be a perfect sleeper from now on.

Speaker 1:

Well, I am terrible with my sleep, so this is definitely the episode for me. People talk about sleep more these days, don't they? I mean, we spend approximately a third of our lives asleep and it's such a vital aspect to our physical and mental health.

Speaker 2:

I know it's amazing, isn't it? I remember as a child I thought sleep was such a waste of time. I now love my sleep and it's amazing that we're supposed to get seven to nine hours unbroken sleep, but very few of us get that. Most nights, Some of us struggle to get to sleep, some struggle to stay asleep. So I'm really keen to understand the techniques the experts, the neuroscientists, the psychologists recommend to help improve our sleep and our sleep hygiene.

Speaker 1:

Speaking of quality of sleep, what about it?

Speaker 2:

So the quality bit is about the unbroken sleep. If we can have continuity, then that's a really good thing. So we don't want to keep waking up in the middle of the night and we want to have a good number of hours. Some people can function on fewer hours, but most of us need those seven to nine hours.

Speaker 1:

My dad is a superhuman. He functions on like four hours of sleep a night, every night. Is he not grumpy? No he's. He's a total night owl. I'm a bit of a night owl too, but I can't do it on four hours. That's extreme.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, me too. I was going to ask you, angela. You said you're not great with your sleep. Do you, in the morning, feel refreshed and restored when you wake up?

Speaker 1:

It depends, Usually not. I'm not much of a morning person. Some days I will wake up and feel really refreshed. Most of the time no.

Speaker 2:

And what about your alarm alarm? Do you sleep beyond your alarm? Do you tap it?

Speaker 1:

no, most days.

Speaker 2:

I press snooze oh, do you and so then, do you wish that when you touch your alarm, do you wish that you could just have a few more hours and just could go back to sleep?

Speaker 1:

I don't know if I'm thinking about a few more hours. Usually I'm just thinking five more minutes would do me five more minutes, just five, five more minutes. But I do that for 20 minutes.

Speaker 2:

Okay, got it. So that's the key actually is if we wake up feeling refreshed and restored, and if we wake up just in time for our alarm, then that's a good sign that we might have had the right amount of sleep.

Speaker 1:

So seven to nine hours. That said, even though I do wish I could sleep longer in the morning, once I'm up and moving around, it doesn't take me long to feel really ready for the day. It's amazing isn't it?

Speaker 2:

Because actually I can really be varied Some mornings I feel absolutely fabulous and others not so good. And what's so interesting from doing this research is that sleep, of course, is so vital for so many of our functions our emotions, our problem solving, our creativity and our general cognition and our memory.

Speaker 1:

So why is sleep?

Speaker 2:

important. So sleep has a range of functions and it helps us with coping with the day's stresses, so it helps us with our emotional regulation. It helps us with our thinking capacity and our cognition, so our problem solving and our creativity, and also it helps with memory, because our minds are like a computer, of course, and we have to sort and sift everything when we go to sleep.

Speaker 1:

So when we don't get enough sleep, that obviously will prove costly to employers. I read that sleep-related fatigue is estimated to cost around £1,500 per employee per year in lost productivity and sick days. That's a big impact.

Speaker 2:

I would have thought it would be more, actually, than that. It doesn't seem like enough. It's surprising, isn't it? Because if you think about people who are in their teens, late teens or early 20s, who are out clubbing during the week and trying to burn the candle at both ends I know my ex-husband. He used to go clubbing three or four nights a week during the week, as well as weekends, and have so little sleep and managed to get up and get through the next day. I'm surprised. It's as little as that, actually, although as we get older, that definitely changes?

Speaker 2:

Oh my gosh, absolutely. If I have one night out in the week, I'm like.

Speaker 1:

I'm rocking Me too. So we know that lack of sleep can impact our productivity, but what about vice versa? Can work-related factors impact our sleep?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. It's going to be the things that you would expect, so it would be around working hours, working weekends, irregular hours, working night shifts. They're the sorts of things that are going to have the greatest impact, because the shift patterns can disrupt our circadian rhythm, and the circadian rhythm, of course, is that rhythm around our 24 hour clock. So our sleep pattern is clearly linked to how we access light in the morning and to our natural circadian rhythm.

Speaker 1:

So is it just about having a consistent pattern, or do we need the daylight?

Speaker 2:

The daylight does help because it kicks everything off. When we access daylight, what we're doing is we're activating the adenosine cycle and the circadian rhythm cycle. That's really important because that will signal to ourselves that 12 hours later that we should start to feel sleepy. So the point that we get daylight is actually telling us the time we should start thinking about going to sleep again so we can naturally fortify and naturally rest. But consistency is key. To answer your question, that if our pattern is a late one so my partner works generally 2pm to 10pm and doesn't then get home to midnight bed till two o'clock it's pretty horrendous for me to even think about doing those sorts of hours, but he's been doing them for 30 years and he's got into a cycle, so his circadian rhythm has shifted.

Speaker 2:

What's really interesting about that point is that when we are consistently working within a single pattern or a single set of hours, it doesn't create stress. However, when we have irregular work patterns or irregular shifts, it creates a stress in our bodies and we know that stress is related to cortisol. And we also know from the research that cortisol can disrupt the release of melatonin. Now melatonin is a hormone that helps to induce sleep. So to combat this. It's really important that we look after our general well-being at work and we reduce our cortisol levels by making sure we don't work too late at night. But we can talk about the different things to how to help our sleep hygiene later. But we also create some regularity every day, some consistency as much as possible. Makes me think about Christian's wife, his new wife, who works for an airline. She has very irregular sleep patterns and work patterns and he said that when he talked to her about it, that she mentioned that it took her years to get used to the fact that her patterns changed all over the place.

Speaker 1:

I'm not surprised by that. Jet lag is horrendous. I'm definitely less clear headed when I've had a poor night's sleep. I'm a lot more likely to be absent minded. What's the link between sleep and memory?

Speaker 2:

So sleep helps with multiple stages of memory. It helps us with the acquisition of memory, the recall of our memories, and then the consolidation, so the sorting and storing of that memory. So all of us truly need a good night's sleep to stop being quite, as you said, absent-minded.

Speaker 1:

That might explain baby brain, because I swear my memory is not as good now that I have a little one. I'm just constantly sleep deprived.

Speaker 2:

I bet, Is she sleeping through now?

Speaker 1:

She sleeps through but well, it varies, doesn't it? Some nights not so much, but mostly she sleeps through she's so cute though she is. There is evidence to suggest that the effects of memory on sleep are selective, so when we attach a strong emotion to a memory, or we think it's particularly important, then we're more likely to be able to recall it after sleep.

Speaker 2:

That's really interesting about the fact that the area of the brain that's linked to memory is the hippocampus, which is mostly short-term memory, and the neocortex is linked to long-term memory, and the amygdala, which we know is the emotion center and we've talked about many times. It's the amygdala that attaches emotion to memory.

Speaker 1:

So I think a lot of us when we think about sleep. We've heard about REM sleep. Can you explain what that is, amanda?

Speaker 2:

Of course. So REM sleep is rapid eye movement sleep. So if you've heard of REM, you would have probably heard of NREM, which is non-rapid eye movement sleep, and, very simply, there are a number of deep sleep stages that we go through when we're sleeping, and it starts with the non-REM and then it goes into the REM. So the idea is basically that whilst we're getting to sleep and we're in that kind of wakeful to light sleep, and then we're moving into the deeper sleep, what's happening is that all of that period is that non-rapid eye movement sleep, and it's that final stage, which is REM sleep which is stage five actually, which is about 90 minutes after the sleep onset that we have that much deeper sleep where we're dreaming, we have rapid eye movement and there's almost a complete paralysis of the body. So that's when we're really in that lovely, really deep, deep sleep.

Speaker 2:

And what's so interesting is we'll go through this cycle, because this cycle might be about anything up to two hours. We'll go through that cycle multiple times throughout the night, and I believe that when we wake up part way through the cycle, that's when we feel groggy, that's the brain fog in the morning, indeed, and so that's what's happening, and so I know that when we have a snooze so I love a nap not that I manage to take them very often, but maybe if it's over the Christmas holidays and I've had a glass of champagne which would be delightful, I might like a snooze. And so they say don't snooze for more than an hour because actually what's happening is you're going in towards that REM sleep. So therefore, if you wake up and you've set an alarm for yourself, you're going to start feeling uncomfortable, groggy when you wake up.

Speaker 1:

I rarely, rarely nap. But when I have napped I've found that if I sleep for longer than 20 minutes I get that brain fog and I just hate it so much I can't seem to shake it off in the middle of the day.

Speaker 2:

Crazy, isn't it? Because REM sleep actually makes up about 25% of our total sleep time, so it's quite likely that we will wake up in that REM sleep. If we have too much sleep, make the nap short, and then it's likely to be more refreshing.

Speaker 1:

So there's evidence to suggest that non-REM primes the brain for learning the following day, and lack of non-REM sleep reduces our capacity for learning by up to 40%.

Speaker 2:

Amazing, isn't it? And actually that's what I need. I need lots of NREM so I can be super bright and super attentive. And it's all to do with neurotransmitters. It always is, and that's because we released something called GABA, and this is an inhibitory neurotransmitter, and basically what it does is it protects memories from being interfered with and make sure that they're stable, so that they're embedded, if you like. So what happens is, when we have the non-rapid eye movement sleep, it's actually removing all of the interference that might interact with those memories and blur the memories, if you like.

Speaker 1:

That's really interesting. I've never heard of GABA no.

Speaker 2:

I hadn't until I did this research. I'm learning so much by this podcast. It's fab, isn't it To?

Speaker 1:

get this clear then then non-REM effectively does the sorting and the organizing, and REM helps stabilize, store and protect memories. That's perfect.

Speaker 2:

What I'd love to also share is about the transmitters and chemicals that make a difference too, because that's always the bit that really I find fascinating, because I know we've heard of melatonin, which is the hormone produced by the pineal gland, which helps you to get to sleep, but it won't keep you asleep. The other one is the molecule adenosine. So adenosine is a molecule in the nervous system and the body and it helps to promote that sleep drive or sleep hunger. That also helps to promote deep sleep. So the reason why you get sleepy is due to adenosine, and having done some research for this podcast, what I found is that is actually activated by the circadian rhythm, and the circadian rhythm is activated by the light that we see in the morning. So getting up and seeing the light early in the morning is really important.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing and it really brings us back to our sort of caveman roots, doesn't it? Everything is connected to daylight and sort of the natural rhythm of life, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

One of the things, angela, I found while I was doing the research for this.

Speaker 2:

I thought it was pretty cool that melatonin is synthesized and converted from serotonin and, whilst there's a really complex chain of events to make this happen that I truly didn't completely understand, because it was a little bit above my station I thought how cool that if we create serotonin, we are more likely to produce melatonin that makes us want to go to sleep melatonin we are more likely to produce melatonin that makes us want to go to sleep.

Speaker 2:

And serotonin is very much about us feeling that sense of comfort, a sense of belief, a sense of belonging. We get it from being hugged, for example. So how face valid that is that if we feel content with the people around us and we feel loved, for example I know it's not oxytocin, so it's not the love hormone that we're talking about, but if we feel a sense of contentment, then we're more likely to produce melatonin, which means that we feel content and happy and ready to go to sleep. So, in other words, if we spend time with the people who matter in our lives and we go outside and get the sunlight and we do things like exercise, then we're more likely to naturally produce melatonin.

Speaker 1:

That's really interesting, and that absolutely has to be why they always suggest exercising or getting outside, for I think it's half an hour a day or an hour a day, and then you'll sleep so much better at night, it's true.

Speaker 2:

And also because it's going to be about depleting cortisol, because we know that if we're outside and active then we're going to then manage our amount of cortisol, because cortisol, as we know, doesn't coexist well with melatonin. They kind of jockey for position.

Speaker 1:

So is it just cortisol that wakes us up in the morning?

Speaker 2:

So we've already talked about the circadian rhythm, the 24-hour cycle, and it's linked to sunlight. So when we see light in the morning it's activating that circadian rhythm and what's happening is at that point of the day we have really low levels of that molecule, adenosine that I've already mentioned because we've been asleep and actually that low level of adenosine is the signal to wake up. So then melatonin is signaled to be released 10 to 12 hours after the cortisol has been released, to wake up and actually tell us to start calming and to get sleepy and to rest and to fortify.

Speaker 1:

So then, amanda, what are your thoughts on melatonin supplements?

Speaker 2:

Well, it's a big no for Andrew Huberman. He talks about the fact that many melatonin supplements are not actually consistent with the levels that they report on the bottles. They're massively more in the bottles than we actually need in terms of how much melatonin we create versus how much we can actually access through the tablet form. And the big issue, of course, is it gets you to sleep but doesn't keep you asleep, so it results in that broken night. So if we can look at the ways to improve our sleep hygiene without going for a supplement, that would be better. But, amanda, what if we actually want to stay awake?

Speaker 2:

Is an adenosine antagonist because it blocks the adenosine receptors, which keeps us awake and stops us from feeling sleepy. And so I know. Today, for example, I grabbed a caffeine cup of tea for my afternoon rather than my decaf, because we were recording this podcast and I'm usually better in the morning than I am in the afternoon. But what can happen if you do that and you have too many cups of tea or too many cups of coffee, is that, after the caffeine depletes, we have a real sense of crash. We have that real feeling of oh, I feel now feel exhausted, and that's because the depletion of the caffeine then seems to heighten the impact of the adenosine on how we feel after the caffeine's passed. So we have a much bigger impact of adenosine after the caffeine has been depleted from the system.

Speaker 1:

I think they're engineering all these new types of coffee now that you can have in the afternoon that don't give you the crash.

Speaker 2:

Interesting. What's also interesting is caffeine helps to release dopamine, from which adrenaline is produced, and that makes sense too, doesn't it? Well, because people who have a lot of caffeine end up getting those kind of hyper feelings. That's all from the adrenaline as well.

Speaker 1:

And the addiction as well. I'm addicted. I can't get through a day without coffee really Can't you, mm-mm, do.

Speaker 2:

I get a bit of a headache without a cup of tea, so I do get it.

Speaker 1:

So we've talked about the importance of sleep.

Speaker 2:

What happens if we don't get enough sleep? Other than the obvious fatigue and concentration issues, the ones that we might not think about is our stress, tolerance and our memory, and it might also have just more general impact on our ability to perform at work. So actually, that it's predominantly cognitive, but there are some also for me definitely, and I know for others, emotional too.

Speaker 1:

I think also chronically. It's associated with heart disease and other sorts of issues like that too, isn't it?

Speaker 2:

It is, it is, yeah, so sleep's so so important. We could do a number of things to start actually improving our sleep hygiene, which are quite simple, actually, on the basis of all the neuroscience that we've been talking about today science that we've been talking about today.

Speaker 1:

We love that you're listening to this. It means a lot to me and the whole team, who put such a lot of hours into the podcast. Each week, we release this show for free to help people improve their working lives by sharing the science of psychology and neuroscience. In return, please help us with our mission. If you know someone who would benefit from listening to this episode, send them a link and if you haven't already hit, follow. Wherever you're listening right now, please do. Thank you and on with the show. So, amanda, how can we improve our sleep?

Speaker 2:

The first one is consistency. We've mentioned it already, so let's aim for consistent bedtimes and wake times within maybe 30 minutes or an hour, giving our margin for error, or maybe for a weekend and weekday, because that's really the first one that's so important is a consistent time to wake and to sleep each day.

Speaker 1:

I'm super bad at being consistent. I try to have a rule that I need to be upstairs in bed by 10, 10.30. And then to take the pressure off of actually sleeping, I have the rule that you don't have to be asleep, you just have to be in bed.

Speaker 2:

I get that actually. That's a really good thing to do. Do you stick to it, though?

Speaker 1:

Oh, it varies. I'm really bad about going to bed. I don't feel tired usually until I'm way past the point of tired. I have a feeling I'm a bit like my dad, I just don't have it as extreme as him. So sleep consistency, that's one. What's next?

Speaker 2:

The next one is to moderate light. We want light at the beginning of the day, but what we don't want it is daylight or too much light in the room at the end of the day, because dimming the lights in your home and your room signals to your mind and your body that it's time to wind down. So if you can use low positioned lights rather than overhead, and yellow lights rather than the bright white lights, then they're less stimulating. And if you can have blackout curtains some people wear eye masks, I'm just not someone who loves that then that would be good too, because what we want to do is activate melatonin that makes you feel sleepy towards the end of the day.

Speaker 1:

So you've mentioned yellow light and no white light, and I assume that also applies to the dreaded blue light that we always hear about from our screens.

Speaker 2:

We really want to minimize that blue light as much as possible. So minimizing screen time at the end of the day, and if you do have your screen time, dim it if you can.

Speaker 1:

So you mentioned blackout blinds, Amanda, but the way I understand it, we actually need the light in the morning to help us wake up.

Speaker 2:

We do so as soon as we're decided we need to wake up. Or the alarm's gone off or we wake up. We should open the blinds and that's when we need the sunlight, because the sunlight helps to activate the circadian rhythm, helps to activate the adenosine cycle, and that will be signaling to the system to therefore release the melatonin 10 to 12 hours later to create that sleepiness, to help us go back to sleep.

Speaker 1:

That's really interesting too, because essentially, what you're saying is that we're opening the curtains, yes, to help us wake up for the day, but actually it's to help us have a better night's sleep in the next night. Totally.

Speaker 2:

And, if you can, you need to be looking outside without glass. So without glasses on or outside of a car window or even a house window, because that's even stronger for us, and I read that it's 500 times more effective if we don't have glass between the sunlight and our eyes, eyeglasses, even Even eyeglasses, and you don't want to look directly into the sun, of course, because it's not good for your eyes, but you need to be in the sunlight.

Speaker 1:

Is that true even when there's cloud cover?

Speaker 2:

I understand it's the same. It was so interesting about glasses because I stood outside recently and literally took my glasses off because I wanted to kind of have the activation of the sunlight in the morning and I want to have that natural adenosine cycle and I want the natural melatonin cycle and I want to reset my circadian rhythm so that I sleep well at night.

Speaker 1:

That's my main takeaway from these five tips. So just to summarize what you've said consistency is key. Make sure you're going to bed at a consistent time, moderate the light, minimize screen time at night and then, when you wake up, make sure that you seek sunlight and take off your eyeglasses or get outside, have direct contact with the light. And I think that last one, for me, is really interesting. I hadn't really thought like open your curtains, not for now, but actually to sleep better tonight. I'm going to try that.

Speaker 2:

Glad you've taken something away. The other one which works for me actually is temperature. That makes a big difference to me, and we've had a big debate about this, sarah and I, because we always both agreed that you should have your room a couple of degrees cooler than you would normally have your house to sleep well at night, and so it's good then you're under your duvet, but the actual bedroom should be quite cool. But I always have a bath before I go to bed. I have done since I was a young child. Every night I have a bath.

Speaker 2:

I'm sorry about the water everybody but I do. I just always do a shower in the morning, bath at night, very clean person and that helps me to go to sleep. And Sarah read some research that actually if you're too warm you won't be able to sleep but the key is to have a warm bath in a cold room because actually your body temperature being warm and then cooling helps you go to sleep.

Speaker 1:

I had heard that before. Definitely might be one of the main reasons why I have a bath in my child's bedtime routine.

Speaker 2:

That girl needs to sleep. That girl does, and how interesting that bath time is such a big thing in parents as well, isn't it? With children, right Bath time, as well as the fact that children get very grubby.

Speaker 1:

Yes, they do. They need it, especially after nursery. What about food? I'm sure food affects how we sleep at night.

Speaker 2:

Well, I hate going to bed hungry. That's one of my big hates, in fact. I just don't like being hungry. I get very hangry. But timing of our food is important. We don't want to eat too late, nor do we want to be too hungry, so timing our meals is important, particularly if we're someone who's prone to reflux or heartburn or something nasty like that. So trying not to eat too much before we go to bed and the obvious one that connects to that is don't drink too many caffeine drinks too late in the day For some people it's midday, some people can drink it till two o'clock.

Speaker 2:

Other people are crazy and they can drink it all day or night and have it, but most of us have to stop our caffeine about lunchtime.

Speaker 1:

And so if timing is important, is there sort of a recommended amount of time that we should have between our last meal or the last thing we eat and bedtime, so two hours for food and actually about eight to 10 hours for caffeine.

Speaker 2:

So it is suggesting caffeine is in the morning and food maybe don't eat after eight o'clock at night. If we can help it.

Speaker 1:

The caffeine thing is definitely a rule I try to live by.

Speaker 2:

I don't have coffee after sort of two o'clock in the afternoon, nice, I think two o'clock was the watershed for me too. There's a nice link there to alcohol too, actually, because I like to have a drink every now and then. But I do find if I drink too late that does interrupt my sleep. But if I I'm not saying I'm a day drinker, it makes you sound like I drink all day at work or something. But if I was out for lunch and I had a few drinks during the day, I probably would sleep better than if I was drinking in the evening, because actually we need to have about a three hour gap for alcohol. So it's two for food, eight to 10 for caffeine and three for alcohol.

Speaker 1:

It makes sense because you're metabolizing it before you even get into the bed, so your body's not having to work through all that extra stuff at night.

Speaker 2:

And then finally, the last thing to do is kind of have a bit of a wind down routine. That really helps as well. So kind of shift your focus and your work. So stop working. If you can, don't work until the moment you have to go to sleep. If you can just take some time, do some breathing, maybe some meditation, if you have the time.

Speaker 1:

Other relaxing activities could be listening to music or reading a book Reading a book is great, especially like a proper paper book, not looking at a screen. What if you wake up in the night and you have trouble getting back to sleep?

Speaker 2:

There's a lot of people talk about this, because it is the most awful thing, isn't it, when you wake up in the middle of the night and you can't get back to sleep. So the research says, if you take longer than 25 minutes to get back to sleep, then you need to get up and you need to go somewhere else. So don't just lay there hoping and praying that you're going to go to sleep counting sheep, for example, because actually what you need to do is prevent having an association with wakefulness and being in bed. So you actually need to go away and do something monotonous and routine and something that will probably help you to wind back down again, and only when you feel really sleepy do you then go back to bed that's interesting.

Speaker 1:

That makes a lot of sense, although one tip that I've found has worked for me I don't often wake up in the middle of the night and then can't go back to sleep. It takes me a long time to go to sleep when I actually lay down initially, but then I can sleep through. But when I have woken up, I have found that there's sort of pressure associated there, like, oh, if I don't get back to sleep now, then I'll only have X amount of time and then I'll have to be awake again and I need to be going to sleep now. I'm not getting enough sleep, and I found that actually just by reminding myself that resting is refreshing too. It's not necessarily sleep, sleep, sleep, just rest, and then that helps me relax enough to fall asleep. But I don't think I lay there for 40 minutes thinking that either.

Speaker 2:

So and I think that's the first stage of that non-REM sleep. Actually there's that period between wakefulness and then going into that very light sleep.

Speaker 1:

So I agree, I think when we're first dozing I do think that's helpful and I suppose if you have had a poor night's sleep, you still have to be thinking about the next night and setting yourself up for a good night, so you want to avoid having an extra cup of coffee just because you're extra tired, or that sort of thing.

Speaker 2:

Very true. Or sleeping beyond your alarm and not opening the curtains and having a slow start. Actually you've still got to go through that sleep hygiene, but I've just remembered. There's one other thing I do when I can't sleep in the middle of the night and that's the mental walk. Oh, someone recommended this to me and it really does help actually. But if you think about a walk that you've been on or a walk that you do, what you do is you take yourself mentally on that walk, but very slowly, and you activate your breathing in a really slow pattern. So you go out for two and in for two and you walk at that pace in your mind and you basically trace your steps of that walk. I usually do a countryside walk that I know I do with a dog and I'll basically visualize myself taking that really familiar route, but I'll really slowly do it, and then I'll find myself asleep. I actually really familiar route, but I'll really slowly do it.

Speaker 2:

And then, I'll find myself asleep. I actually don't fall asleep while I'm walking one day but anyway, yeah, could you imagine like snoozing in the middle of a ditch? I've tried counting sheep. It doesn't work for me.

Speaker 1:

That's a really interesting technique. I've never heard of that. I might try that. One thing that I do is I try to imagine a good dream, because I think when I was younger, when I was a kid or something, I thought you never remember the good dreams. You always fall asleep before the dreams get really, really good, but you do always wake up and remember if you've had a nightmare or something. So one of the techniques I use is to try and dream a good dream, and I will inevitably fall asleep before I get to the end of it. That's sweet.

Speaker 1:

So, amanda, any final tips for sleep hygiene?

Speaker 2:

I think the last one we mentioned napping is to try not to nap too late in the day. So if you are a napper, try and get a nap in before two o'clock. If you have it too late mid-afternoon, late afternoon, for example, it can really impact your sleep cycle because what it does is it interrupts that activation of the adenosine and the melatonin which we need to feel sleepy and to get us to sleep. And I think there was one other one, which was breathing, that I forgot too. So if we're really struggling to kind of feel sleepy, you can actually do some really deep, long breaths and, just as I mentioned, count out and in as you're breathing and just take your time. That can really help to really activate the calming system and help you to feel sleepy.

Speaker 1:

Well, Amanda, these were amazing tips. I've definitely taken away some techniques. I'm going to try, and I hope that our listeners have as well. If this episode has helped any of our listeners, please consider sharing with a friend. It could be just the wake-up call they need.

Speaker 2:

Haha, very funny. Thank you everybody for listening. I really appreciate it and I hope you all have a wonderful and successful day.

People on this episode

Contributor

Dr Amanda Potter

Host
Contributor

Tim Hepworth

Host
Contributor

Caitlin Cooper

Co-host