Delve into the science of sleep, as Klaudia and Dr Sophie Bostock- The founder of The Sleep Scientist, discuss practical tips and expert insights to enhance your nightly rest.

Join them for engaging discussions on sleep hygiene, circadian rhythms, and the impact of sleep technologies.

Tune in and discover how to optimize your sleep for a healthier, more energized, and happier life.

Klaudia Mitura: Hello, happiness seekers, welcome to the happiness challenge podcast. I'm Klaudia Mitura, and I'm on a mission to explore the best happiness habits that science has to offer. Like so many others, the pandemic cut me off from my family and work. So I decided to use my training as a psychologist to discover what science can tell us about the art of happiness.

What I found set me on the path to joy. And now I'm ready to share my journey with you. Each month I'm publishing three linked episodes where I'm speaking to a leading expert, putting their tips to the test, and sharing my findings and feelings. From mindfulness to exercise and random acts of kindness, I'll be shining a light on the simple happiness habits that can bring more joy to our lives.

So join me as I embark on my challenge and together we can become more successful, resilient, and happy.

Hello, happiness seekers. Welcome to this month's happiness challenge, where I'll be exploring how to sleep better. And helping me with this topic is the founder of The Sleep Scientist, Dr. Sophie Bostock. Sophie is going to share with us the latest sleep science so that we can become our own experts in our sleep so join us to learn how to optimize your sleep, to stay happier and healthier. Welcome, Sophie.

Sophie Bostock: Thank you very much for having me. It's a great privilege to be here.

Klaudia Mitura: Sophie, I think we all spend so much time complaining that we are not getting enough sleep. It's absolutely unbelievable. And I think it is a very common knowledge that sleep is so important to our health and well being.

But actually, what is the science? Why sleep is so crucial.

Sophie Bostock: It's a big topic and I could probably spend 30 minutes just telling you about that. But I think if we think about it fundamentally, if we Didn't need sleep, we wouldn't do it. I mean, it's the most vulnerable state that we can be in and yet we have evolved so that we need seven to eight hours sleep to function at our best.

So when we disrupt that cycle, it puts stress on the body and it puts stress on every single system, on our emotions, on our physical health, on our cognitive function. So it doesn't matter what aspect of health, happiness or performance you look at, sleep deprivation is going to have an impact.

Klaudia Mitura: So really important through, as you're saying, everything from that regrowth, everything from that regeneration. You mentioned that seven to eight hours. Is that actually the healthy amount of sleep? Is it that some of us maybe need less sleep or more sleep. I'm just asking because, you know, I have friends who claim that they can function of very little amount of sleep.

And you're almost thinking, Oh my God, that's almost sounds amazing because I can fill the other hours with the fun or productivity or whatever I want to do. What is that amount that we actually need to keep that regeneration?

Sophie Bostock: I'm so glad you asked that because it's quite careless of me to sort of say seven to eight hours because really that is an average and when scientists reviewed thousands of studies looking at how the amount of sleep that we get then correlates to things like performance and health, they concluded that the average that a healthy adult needs is between seven and nine hours, but they absolutely acknowledge that it's like a bell shaped curve.

So most people need seven to nine, but there are a minority who can thrive on a little bit less than seven and a minority that actually might well need more than nine. So the best metric for how much sleep you need, whether you're getting enough is really how you feel and how you function during the day.

So a couple of clues that you can use, you know, if you rely on an alarm clock to get out of bed in the morning, that's a kind of a sign that maybe you're not quite getting enough sleep. Similarly, if you're catching up on sleep at weekends, you know, you're feeling like you need more. That is a surefire sign that you need more.

If you're relying on caffeine or sugar to keep you going through the day, if you get irritable perhaps forgetful for no real reason, these signs might indicate that a little bit more sleep might help you. If you find yourself falling asleep in long podcasts or meetings, you know, this is a sign that maybe you would benefit from a little bit more sleep.

Klaudia Mitura: No, fantastic clues. And I think it's really interesting with that alarm clock, if I had a really hectic day, I definitely need the alarm clock next day to wake me up. But if I had a quite calm week, I can wake up naturally. My body knows that, you know, it is a time to get up. So really, really interesting.

And of course we, on one hand, we have this fantastic technology around us that can track our sleep, measure our sleep and think about quality of sleep, help us to go to sleep, you name it, but on the other hand, they are some blockers I would, I definitely experienced those in terms of natural sleep patterns with technology, actually being one of them. So what are these and how can we maybe optimize those?

Sophie Bostock: That is again, it's a great question. It's a big question. And I think very often there's too much of an obsession on sleep duration, the amount of sleep that we get and not enough focus on the quality of that sleep and also the timing of that sleep.

And I think technology is one of the key things which can interfere with both of those. So we do know that people who typically go on their phones or on screens before bed. The damage to their sleep quality is not just light exposure, which is one of the influences on the timing of our sleep. So we know that bright light interferes with the production of the hormone melatonin, which is one of the signals that the body uses to prepare for sleep, But actually screens emit relatively little light. It's not about the light. It's about the fact that being on that very absorbing piece of technology can steal time from us. It can displace sleep time, but it can also be very alerting. So we know that the natural, almost default rest state for the brain is a kind of delightful daydream. And whenever we are really absorbed in something, it takes a lot of attention. And attention is a very energy consuming activity. I sometimes speak to parents who kind of say, well, you know, is it so bad if my son, my daughter goes on their tablet before bed? Cause it seems to wind them down, they're so quiet.

But just because they're quiet, it doesn't mean that they're winding down. In fact, this bombardment of new information is very activating for the brain. And often that actually can produce a little bit more of those stress hormones of adrenaline, of cortisol, that excitement of learning new things and having all the stimuli to deal with.

So better recommendation for winding down is actually to switch off those screens, to do stuff that doesn't promote a lot of cognitive activity. In fact, familiar, predictable bedtime routines, that classic of kind of a bath and brushing your teeth and reading a book before bed are gentle, predictable activities, which our brain can learn to associate with sleep.

So when you do the same things in the same order before bed, it just eases you into that state of rest and relaxation, which can help promote a better quality sleep.

Klaudia Mitura: Thank you. So important, as you said, that bedtime routine, that is predictable. And yeah, it may be boring, but that's the point, isn't it? We don't want to have too much excitement.

So yeah, fantastic. So maybe boring, but we, we want to kind of start winding down.

Sophie Bostock: And actually, I'm gonna just briefly interrupt you there. Sorry about excitement. You know, it doesn't mean that life has to be boring. I think, you know, we often tell ourselves that, you know, we need to be able to relax, which is absolutely true.

We've got to be able to switch off. That doesn't mean our lives have to be dull and predictable. And I think the thing about stresses and adventures and doing things that stretch us is they are brilliant. We want to be bombarded with new information. It helps us to learn, but it has to be interspersed with opportunities for recovery.

So there was no opportunity to get lost in Instagram and so on. And so I was in the natural world. And what I experienced was quite honestly, a lot of stress. There were a lot of mosquitoes. We had to traipse through ice cold water. It's not that our modern environment has necessarily given us loads more stresses.

We used to be able to cope with an awful lot, but what's happened, I think in our modern world is that the stresses are not interspersed with recovery. Whereas when you spend a lot of time in a natural environment, you naturally pause, you look at this incredible natural environment that we're in, you hear the birds, you sort of see the water running by, and I feel like that's a much more natural way that we evolved was to experience stress and to experience recovery and the more that we can bring in those moments in our day of pausing, giving ourselves a chance to just breathe, just calm things down a little bit. I think the easier we will find it to sleep at night rather than this more modern approach to life, which is quite frankly, you wake up, you check your phone and it's go, go, go, go time.

And the first time that you get to pause very often is when you're in bed and your brain is still processing all these things that have happened during the day. So yeah, just build in these little opportunities. This little pauses for recovery.

Klaudia Mitura: Yeah, I agree. I think so important. I often cannot fall asleep if my brain hasn't processed something that has happened.

So having the time to unwind, relax, process it, bedtime routine, it definitely helps to fall asleep so much quicker and then sleep better, as you're saying.

What about waking up in the middle of the night? Sometimes it happens that we wake up for whatever reason. Might be internal anxiety, might be a nightmare, might be someone somewhere making noise.

I live in central London. Sometimes I wake up because someone is having a great party somewhere nearby. Great for them, but I'm sleeping. Not so good for me. What would be your advice about how can we get back to sleep if our sleep gets interrupted?

Sophie Bostock: Okay, so, first thing is that waking up during the night can be a very natural part of sleep.

And sometimes when we're having a period of poor sleep, we start to get quite anxious about it. We're like, well, you know, why have I woken up? What's wrong with me? Maybe we get frustrated with those neighbours who keep waking us up. And the way that we respond to waking up is actually really important because if we're pretty relaxed and we tell ourselves, huh, this is a normal part of sleep, maybe there was a noise, maybe I was too hot, maybe I just needed the toilet.

You make yourself comfortable, you know, ease, whatever it is that might have woken you up. If you're too hot, remove the covers. If you need the toilet, go to the toilet. But then when you come back to bed, just allow yourself to sort of say, that was a natural gap between sleep cycles, so we typically sleep in cycles of, say, 110 to 70 minutes a night.

And there's a period of lighter sleep between every sleep cycle. So waking up itself does not mean that your sleep has been ruined. You know, you should be able to hopefully go back into another sleep cycle. The second thing to do then is make sure that you're kind of nice and relaxed. So, if you don't immediately fall back to sleep, maybe try a little breathing exercise.

So breath work is one of the ways that we can very consciously calm ourselves down. Because if we are worked up, if we're very stressed, our breath tends to respond by either getting faster, like sort of panting for breath, or freezing as we kind of go, gasp in that sort of sudden element of fear.

So if we take control of our breath and slow it down and just take a few slow breaths; in through the nose, out through the nose. Every out breath perhaps being a little bit longer than the in breath. So I use a technique called one two breathing. So I breathe in for one and out for two and just do a few cycles of that.

It can send this signal to your brain that you are safe and in control. And that's what you need. You need your brain to be feeling like I'm in control. I'm safe, secure, calm. And then if you're tired, hopefully that will allow sleep to take over. But as we all know, trying harder to sleep does not work. So the moment that you get into a state of frustration, of anger, of impatience, those emotions themselves can evoke more of that fight or flight stress response.

So we get tense, we get hot, we get kind of pumped up and it becomes much harder to sleep. So If you are awake for more than 15 or 20 minutes and you're starting to get frustrated that you can't sleep, my advice would be to get out of bed. Stop trying to sleep. If you are lucky enough to have other rooms that you can go into, go into another room, sit in dim light, read a book, do some crossword puzzles, do the ironing under relatively dim light, just something that's gently distracting.

Until you start to feel your eyelids getting heavy, you're getting tired, and that's your signal to get back into bed. If you only have a one bedroom flat, you can still get out of bed, go and sit in a chair. It's okay to watch a movie perhaps, I wouldn't necessarily recommend something very vigorous and alerting.

Don't do any work but just something that's gently distracting until you can allow yourself to feel sleepier again. So you're trying to build a really positive connection between your bed and sleep. So we take frustration out of bed and just take sleepiness into bed.

Klaudia Mitura: Yeah, brilliant advice, Sophie, because I definitely been there that if I don't, if I wake up and then sometimes I go instantly back to sleep.

Fantastic. But I definitely had nights when I would wake up and get frustrated because I would be thinking, Oh my God, as you saying, my day is ruined. I'll be sleepy. I have this challenging presentation. I won't be my a hundred percent because I'm not sleeping. I start worrying rather than actually, As you're saying, it is natural part of the rhythm and now I just need to breathe and let's go to sleep.

Yeah. Love that advice.

Sophie Bostock: And you know, I, I'm a sleep scientist. I know how important sleep is, but I have exactly the same thing before a big presentation and I have to just tell myself, do you know what? You've coped with a bit of sleep loss before, you will cope again. And if you can take that worry and anxiety away, I think very often the number one thing that stops us sleeping is fear of not sleeping.

So if we can remind ourselves that we can cope with this, it's not such a big deal. Kind of, I have a little chuckle to myself and go, Oh, it's so ironic, but you know, I think sleep is so important and yet I'm having problems and the moment that I can kind of laugh about it rather than worry about it is the moment that I can relax and fall asleep.

Klaudia Mitura: Fantastic. But I guess we definitely also have situations when we cannot get enough sleep. So our body might be wanting to go to sleep, but we cannot. So it could be working shifts. Parenting, travel, health issues. How can you deal with those situations when you need it, but you cannot have enough of it?

Sophie Bostock: Yeah, that's the the modern dilemma and you're absolutely right. There are circumstances where through no fault of our own, we just haven't got the capacity. We don't have the number of hours in the day. And I think under those circumstances, it's really, really important to be kind to ourselves, because what we do know is that when we're sleep deprived, the parts of your brain which control emotions are a bit dysregulated. We are not only more irritable but we do get more anxious and we tend to become more impulsive as well. We have less self control, less sort of rational thinking. We tend to give in to our cravings. We don't tend to do the things we know are good for us.

So I think Reaching out to others and admitting that, you know, we're a bit tired and seeking their support. I think a great example is the fact that when we are sleep deprived, we're actually less likely to get the right amount of sleep because our self control goes to pot. So we're more likely to do that sleep procrastination thing where we while away time on our phones.

But if you have a partner or a member of family goes, you know, you asked me to remind you to go to bed when you actually can. So, yeah, be kind to yourselves. Use caffeine sometimes. You know, caffeine is a stimulant. It does block sleep pressure, which is one of the influences on our sleep. It's also a stimulant, so if you're stressed and you consume caffeine, you actually may well feel more stressed.

So it's one of these things to very much use cautiously. But if you're very sleep deprived you know, having an instant cup of coffee, it's going to take 20 or 30 minutes to start to kick in. But actually can help to keep you awake for the subsequent three or four hours. I'd say the exception is actually if you do have an opportunity to sleep. So napping can be a really good tactical maneuver to get you through again, the next sort of three or four hours. So a short nap of 20 to 30 minutes can improve mood, can improve alertness. If you're incredibly sleep deprived, like you've only got three or four hours sleep during the night, then perhaps you might want to look at even a two hour sleep during the mid afternoon.

So that might give you the opportunity to go through a full sleep cycle, something like sort of 90 minutes to two hours. Just be very aware that if you have a long nap of more than 30 minutes, there's a danger that you might be woken from Deep sleep, which means that you may well suffer from this kind of grogginess called sleep inertia, where it can actually take you a full hour to fully wake up again afterwards.

It doesn't mean that it's made you worse, you know, it's just a temporary thing, this sleep inertia. But just watch out for that if you're having long naps.

Klaudia Mitura: Really interesting stuff because that's exactly what I wanted to ask next. What is your opinion about naps? Because I feel that the world is again very much divided.

Some people say absolutely no, because then you are not sleeping well at night. Other people think, well, it very much depends. Some people like quick, there is a possibility to nap within 10 minutes and that's supposed to give you that boost. So again, you advising that the naps are positive, but again, depending on the circumstances.

Sophie Bostock: Yeah, I think it depends on timing. It depends on duration. So we all have this natural lull in our energy levels, typically after lunch. And it depends a little bit on our body clocks, what time we woke up, what time we go to sleep. But for most people between about one and 3 PM, there is this natural dip in our energy levels.

And if you are quite sleep deprived and you literally can't keep your eyes open. One of the best, most restorative things that you can do is to nap. And there's a lot of evidence that short naps improve cognitive function, no matter how much sleep you've had during the night. You know, if you feel sleepy, then probably the best thing to do is to nap.

Particularly from a safety perspective. You know, if you've got to go and drive a car, operate heavy machinery, if you can't keep your eyes open a nap is the best thing that you can do. The exception, I guess, is where you're getting into the habit of daily napping for a long time and maybe replacing nighttime sleep.

All the evidence is that you cannot replace night time sleep with daytime sleep. It's lower quality. Now, if you're a shift worker, you'll be well aware of that cause it's really hard to get such restorative sleep during the day. And that's because of that disruption to your circadian rhythms, your body clocks.

So night shift workers very often just have to grab as much sleep as they can. They might well have quite broken sleep during the day. It's quite difficult to sleep in sort of a seven hour bucket during the day because our body clocks just don't want us to do that. So just get as much sleep as you can if you're a night shift worker.

But for daytime normal sleepers, the downside of napping during the day might be if you have very long naps or naps that are after, say, four o'clock. What happens is that you ease the sleep pressure that builds up during the day. So there's a risk that you might not sleep quite so well during the night.

This is an issue very often for parents who might be putting their kids to bed at sort of six or seven o'clock at night, and they just, you know, put their heads down as their kids are going to sleep and might have a bit of a doze, and then they wake up at eight o'clock at night and then find when they normally go to bed at ten o'clock they're actually not tired.

So that's the exception, you know, naps in the evening are probably are going to be a little bit disruptive to night time sleep.

Klaudia Mitura: Thank you. Thank you for clarifying, because definitely that is always a kind of a heat point, I think, around the napping. Sophie, what would be the final practical tips that you could prescribe me and the listeners to try to optimize our sleep.

Sophie Bostock: Okay, well, I've talked a little bit about body clocks. I think one of the simplest, but often most neglected ways of improving sleep quality is consistency. And again, it sounds kind of boring, but it works magic. And that is to get out of bed at the same time every day. And if you are struggling to get enough sleep, that can be really hard come the weekend.

It's not that I want you to be sleep deprived seven days a week, it's that I want you to find the amount of sleep that you need that means that you can wake up at a similar time each day. Because what happens if you do that is that all your internal body clocks become synchronized. Everything starts to work very efficiently.

Your body can actually anticipate waking with this lovely burst of energizing cortisol. Cortisol is often given a bad name as a stress hormone, but actually if we have a good burst of it first thing in the morning, it gets us up feeling energized and ready to start the day. And then sort of 16 or so hours later, the body is going to be ready for sleep.

You're going to start to produce melatonin an hour and a half before you normally go to bed. So you'll start to feel natural. You'll also have benefits like feeling hungry at mealtimes, feeling energized when you normally kind of go to the gym. There is something very restorative and powerful about a consistent day to day routine.

Klaudia Mitura: So important. And as you say, so neglected, isn't it? Depending where the week takes us. I guess that's how much sleep we can get. That's what we following, but consistency. Love that. Sophie as you know, this is a podcast about happiness and I always, always love to ask my guests, what makes you happy?

Sophie Bostock: Well, as we discussed when I turned up a few minutes late one of my favorite things is getting outside into the natural environment and doing something physically active. So for me today, it was rowing. I absolutely love to get out on the water. But I think, Moving your body is one of these, it's probably the best sort of shortcut to happiness, but it's also great for your sleep and, you know, physical activity and sleep and positive moods.

They're just like this triad of joy that one feeds the other. So when we're well rested, we feel more like exercising that increases our mood, which also helps us sleep. But likewise, it can become a negative cycle when we're very sedentary during the day, we find it harder to sleep at night and our mood kind of goes to pot.

So because these things are all interrelated, you can almost choose, you know, what do you start with? Do you have some kind of intervention that makes you happy or you start exercising and you'll start sleeping better? You can start that positive cycle with any of those things. So I leave you with one more which is gratitude, which I'm sure you've talked about before in terms of the effects on happiness, but actually there's also good evidence that finishing your day by thinking about the things that you're grateful for can also improve sleep.

Because it's very difficult to be stressed and grateful at the same time. So I often used to give the advice to people to think, you know, of those three things that you're grateful for before going to sleep. And I actually mentioned this to a sleep scientist colleague recently, and he said that he'd experimented with actually getting people to write down 10 things that they were grateful for before bed. And this had actually been very helpful because 10 is quite difficult, but what it means is if you do this every day for 30 days, you're starting to train the brain to look for things during the day that you're going to be grateful for that evening, and that actually is really good for generating these kind of positive thought patterns.

So there's a little challenge for people. If they want to try and do, you know, 10 things that they're grateful for before they go to sleep and see what impact that has on their mood, happiness, and, and sleep quality as well.

Klaudia Mitura: Yeah, fantastic. Love it. Thank you so much, Sophie. It was an absolute pleasure to talk to you about optimizing our sleep.

And, well, I wish you a very restful sleep tonight, I guess.

Sophie Bostock: Thank you very much. It was lovely to talk to you.