The unconventional wisdom about sleep | Nick Littlehales | TEDxNewcastle

I been in the sleep industry for most of my life I've always found that people just take it for granted it's not a performance criteria who cares about it right and I got really sort of disillusioned about that whole process I work for a big company my office was in old Manchester I sort of had a bit of a midlife crisis study talking to a local football club seeing if they did anything about recovery and stuff like that I won't mention the name of that come that Club it just happened to be down the road and while I was sort of in dialog with him in all sorts of various ways and suddenly I woke up one morning and read the papers in those days and suddenly this club had got a sleep coach and looking after pampered footballers tucking them in and reading bedtime stories no doubt and so that's how I became a sleep coach in sports over their 22 years I've been in it I work with all different athletes of all different age groups and genders across the globe and always been fascinated by a lot of the myths and misconceptions there is no problem with the importance of sleep but these things about eight hours a day and just getting it at night always fascinated me so during my road through working with elite athletes I've been able to cross some challenges of how can we deal with that problem how could we improve that how could improve that and it was just basically looking back at some of the things that we did we've done before is passed as human beings to imply that into the word sleep so the first thing you want to do is to get the word sleep and let's think about mental and physical recovery periods the second thing I want you to do is in this room there are Crona types and Crona types basically identify your sleep characteristic of whether you're a morning or a nighttime person those are you old enough like me will have heard the terms of like owls and larks right now this is a little genetic twist it's not something you create now if you're an AML like me you will wake up and always switch your alarm off it never wakes you up I'm always up ready to go I'm starving I just want to get on with my day you're a PMO you like the evenings and nighttime and if you lived about thirty minutes away from sage then you were still in bed this morning at 27 minutes past 8:00 hitting the snooze button just trying to grab every single minute so I want to think in this room which Crona side would you be I am NOT going to to stick with some of the more conventional things around sleep because as you can see from the title it's unconventional so one of the really important things as human beings is to understand the circadian rhythms of the day so just tap it in your browser take a look at some images and get a better relationship with it because that process of the Sun going around our planet and us as human beings with brains has not changed but the world certainly has your relationship with that is quite key to recovery just a little bit of Education up until the electric light bulb was invented humans slept in a polyphasic way and what that means is a multiphasic way biphasic triphasic shorter periods more often it was only when we invented electric light that we started to sleep monophasic Li which is just at night so it's kind of when you start looking with athletes and their schedules and everything else you're trying to look at how you can get through the day and it's certainly I don't I don't think I've ever met anybody who gets eight hours a day at night 365 days a year never mind when you look at the occupations and the 24/7 world we live in so we certainly need to take a note there because we're moving further away from that natural circadian rhythm the second one is daylight saving time and that was when in certain countries we adopted certain countries never have certain countries adopted it and then went back to normal schedules and also in different parts of the world you have different relationships with light and dark particularly in the northern hemisphere so when you're looking at this whole relationship of how we get from A to B these things can be really important if you look at sleep in a slightly different way this is an urgent need graph you've got 48 hours there so the black it is night and the blue bit is day and it's a bit like a mountain to climb when the Sun comes around and triggers you to wake it's not that you're getting more awake as the day goes on is actually you're just getting closer and closer to your next opportunity to take sleep and you'll see there there's a little moment which is around between 1:00 and 3:00 which is the next human natural sleep period maybe a siesta in certain parts of the world this is a moment when you should be going into some natural recovery period if we hadn't invented life there's another one around evening between 5:00 and 7:00 which is another place where you're actually designed to have some recovery like sleep and this is this Paulo phasing approach and when you look back to even the Victorians they would go to sleep between 10:00 and 12:00 for a couple of hours will be 12 and 2 and then be awakened guns to the neighbors and all of these sort of things and and when we're working with like single-handed around the world sailors there's lots of things that we have to do you know what's the polyphasic manner so this sort of approach needs to be taken on board if you don't get it right then you're completely out of sync in so many ways and so there's a real relationship between light and dark and all that really is is rather than being in bright lights or daylight I'm just in diminish like like just over there just operating throughout a day that I'd probably rather have a 12 hour exposure to light rather than this crazy shift which is about to happen at the end of this month when we go from 16 hours in the summer down to 8 and we go into the dark seasonal affective disorder month the consequences of these things also bring you back to an addictive behavior and that is supplements and caffeine and energy drinks sleeping tablets all of these types of things we start to do to try and get through the day and they can become addictive and it's quite serious in the in the UK population and around the world as we're using these things just try and get through it what we tend to do is look at some very simple things some of the things I'd be engaged in with professional cycling for example is these are seven little key recovery indicators if you just touch base with these seven areas you can add those up to a much more greater aggregated overall gain in your overall approach recovery some would say paradigm shift in your approach there's two things there one the krona type 'button cycles if you're in a clinical environment tracking brainwave patterns most academics will look at a 90-minute period and then benchmark that against another 90-minute period and it's all the phases and stages of sleep now five 90-minute cycles equals seven point five hours so I use that as a way to encourage somebody to stop thinking about sleeping in hours and sleeping in cycles so 90-minute cycles and shorter 30-minute cycles or less during the course of the day and the way you can all do this tonight just grab a piece of paper and a pencil get old school constant weight tone that's the most important thing apart from this circadian rhythms in our world is that you have your most consistent wait time now mine can't be eight o'clock because I'm an ami it's always got to be early and if I've got a consistent wait time then what I can do is chop my day up into 90-minute cycles and it gives me some subconscious timings of when I can go to sleep maybe at 11:00 or 9:30 or 12:30 to am into 6:30 that's mine their 6:30 constant wait time at the bottom if I want to get up earlier I go for 5 o'clock or 3:30 if I want a duvet day I'll go back into another cycle between eight and nine thirty if I want to boost my cycle period I'll go for something like thirty minutes 20 minutes and don't tell me you can't nap because I can find the way you could Natalie I can sit right there in front of you all and do it and you won't even know you can take these little moments and for an AMA what's brilliant about this is when the summer comes along I do not want to be going to bed at 9:30 so what I do is have a short appear between 12:30 and 6:30 which is four cycles in six hours I put a little 30-minute one early evening late and that means I like enjoying the evening and most people get up in the morning get through all the wait until there's only so many hours left and try to sleep your recovery program starts from the minute you and it's little moments every 90 minutes to take the pressure off the nocturnal sleep and build it in a different way so let's get back to school hands up if you're a p.m. ah whoa hands up if you're a Emma well okay partners offices buildings teams if you spot that the coach is an A Emma strangely enough everything he's scheduled around an am as well if there's a lot of PMS in the office try and get them to do things differently what you can do with this Cronus I please really learn how to minimize the outside influences are gonna affect you take advantage of your chronotype and also be able to manage it better because it will have an effect on you it's a bit like being it's a simple graph this but you know things are all about communication there's a 90 minute cycle between 11:00 and 12:30 let's think of it it's like going downstairs at the bottom of the stairs is where the good restorative stuff the REM deep sleepers now that means when you're down there is where you get the good stuff it's only 20 to 25% of the time so the problem is is that you get to the point of going into sleep and you start wandering down the stairs then it's tossing and turning you're already just continue to digesting food filling the bother thinking about things partners noises and everything else and there's a great danger you'll just go halfway down and go back up again and then have another go because going down to the bottom is where you're in your most vulnerable state so anything can trigger you out of it you might lose it so you could spend many hours sucking light sleep stages and you don't get all the full benefits you can if you're overtired and they've got really bad schedules you'll get dumped at the bottom of the stairs now I did work for a very serious manufacturer of bedding products and beds and I always found this fascinating is that when you want around the world we can sleep on anything anywhere anytime I speak people falling asleep in this conference room in front of me I see people falling asleep on trains planes cars sofas everywhere right so this whole relationship with what you sleep on is something I'd like to investigate with it and you certainly can't coach professional Mountaineers to take their big fat mattresses and their whole bedroom environments up on the side of a cliff the one thing you're going to do is I'm going fast now is one of the most ideal positions to sleep in his fetal right now is bent arms shoulders nicely folded with bent arms right we want a nice posture lines right the way through here but sickly because we're looking at devices all the time so thinking mental and physical recovery if I take that position in that fetal position so you can see me I'll go on the floor hopefully you'll be able to see it but if I adopt that position on the floor in a fetal position you see this dirty great gap now I'm on my left side because it's on the opposite side to my dominant side the right that means I can protect myself which is good for the brain there's that big gap where you put pillows as soon as you start to move out of that position because the pressure builds up with this nice orthopedic matters is our long take the pillow away my head's twisted to one side and raised so then I go to this position and push the pleura way again still twisted and raised I don't like that so I'll go to my back and I'll lie on my back hunt for the pillow shove it under my head block off the Airways start both dreams and then I'll go back over here and grab the pillow now all of that stuff is a complete waste of time right if this is just something to give you an example in there is a bed that is an elite athlete sleep I just want to show you I am a mesomorph profile which I'm 183 and about 80 kilograms right there is some little layers there is no go faster mattress in here right but if I just get on that in a fetal position where are you gonna put that pillar musically aligned everything's released underneath me there's no place for a pillow so it doesn't matter what position I get into I'm always nicely balanced and just like I said before is if you want to go to the bottom of those stairs you really need to think about ticking boxes now the one thing that's always fascinated me is are we actually designed to sleep with other people because I don't know if you sleep on your own opposite side to your dominant side you can sleep anywhere on the mattress curled up left side right side you have a single space as a children single mattresses and then when you get a regular sleeping partner you end up in a double which is only 2 foot 3 each not three foot or 90 centimeters maybe a king-size that sounds good that's only two foot six each so you were actually sleeping together in less space than you had as a kid it's not surprising that when you get a regular sleeping partner is that you end up with this situation it doesn't know how madly in love you are you will turn away from each other into your own little space so if you're both right-handed one of you is turning onto the wrong side so with your partners maybe we haven't got to this particular point we're tracking technology we're doing lots of things be careful of tracking your sleep data because if you're not in a super king mattress you're into smaller bed that's going to affect how you sleep if you've got a partner that's right-handed like you one used on the wrong side right if you're all of these little factors if you don't know about circadian rhythms if you don't know all about these facts then really tracking your sleep is irrelevant I don't know how much an elite athlete I won't mention any names but let's talk top elite athletes how much REM sleep have they ever got in their lives we don't know how long have they slept for we don't know because we've never tracked it so a lot of this information can be misguided there's nothing wrong with it but be careful get some of the basics right I don't know whether we've reached a point where I would be in the bar find somebody attractive go over and use the do you come here often could I buy you a drink and then I'd certainly spot mmm there left-handed I'm right-handed a match and then I go do you like breakfast and go yeah and I go oh because I want to pee Emma because the mornings are for me I want to get up I want to smash everything in the house and I'll give them a smoothie or a cup of tea and then they start their day in the evenings they look after me if you got to Emma's nothing happens in the evening if you got to pee Emma's painting the earth so I don't think we're gonna get to that point where you actually choose a partner but I tell you what as life goes on if you're not thinking about these things then they start to have more of an impact not only on your mental health and well-being but your own personal performance and everything else that you do see if you want to eat well you want to exercise well don't forget the third pillar which has never been explored really that well called sleep thanks for listening [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 57,111

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Body, Education, Sports

Id: kvo5vF1g20E

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 12 2018