Dig It with Jo Whiley and Zoe Ball - SLEEP SPECIAL: Rethink Your Sleep With Dr Lindsay Browning

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Before Jo's sad news last week, we recorded a special episode of Dig In. We were joined by sleep expert Dr Lindsay Browning - a chartered psychologist, neuroscientist and author. She also holds a doctorate in insomnia from the University of Oxford, so it's fair to say she knows her stuff. Dr Lindsay shares her unparalleled knowledge and advice to help you get a better night's sleep – covering everything from sleep and hormones, how our sleep changes with age and whether nighttime scrolling is really as bad as we think.Follow Dr Lindsay Browning on Instagram @drbrowningsleephttps://www.instagram.com/drbrowningsleep/?hl=en-gbHer website: https://troublesleeping.co.uk/GET IN TOUCH📧 Email us: [e-mail]📱 Text or Voice Note: 07477 038795💬 Or tap here to send a voice note or message on WhatsApp:⁠ ⁠https://wa.me/447477038795SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORSThis episode is brought to you by Panda London and Costa Coffee.🐼 Panda London — Make hot nights more comfortable with Panda London’s beautifully soft, breathable and thermoregulating bamboo bedding. Head to pandalondon.com and spend over £50 to receive a free Bamboo Eye Mask with your order using code DIGIT.☕ Costa Coffee at Home — Start your morning with the same great Costa taste you know and love, now in your own mug at home. Costa's new Everyday Instant Coffee is inspired by their iconic Mocha Italia blend and comes in three varieties: Smooth, Intense and Decaf. Available in selected large format supermarkets across the UK, subject to availability.CREDITSExec Producer: Jonathan O’SullivanProducer: Samantha Psyk & Harriet ThurleyAssistant Producer: Eve JonesTechnical Producer: Oliver GeraghtyVideo Editors: Cameron Laird and Jack Whiteside Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Coming up on Digit. Nobody should have a clock that they can see from their bed because when you wake up in the middle of the night, if you're awake enough to realise you're awake, we don't need to know what the time is. God, you are so good at what you're saying and you're making so much sense and this will be incredibly reassuring.

So it's about accepting what's going on and then just adapting to what suits you and what will help you. Screens have been promoted as the enemy of sleep because they are stimulating before bed and the light from them. But the situation, science, is a little bit more complex than that. All of that right after this.

Today's guest is an expert in all things sleep. Dr. Lindsay Browning is a chartered psychologist, neuroscientist and author, and holds a doctorate in insomnia from the University of Oxford, UK. It's fair to say she really knows her stuff. She joins us with her unparalleled knowledge and advice to help you get a better night's sleep, covering everything from sleep and hormones, sleep changes with age and whether scrolling at night is really as bad as we think. Welcome,

Dr Lindsay Browning. So Lindsay, I'm fascinated to know why did you study sleep or the lack of it? Sure. Well, I did a degree in psychology, a degree in neuroscience and a doctorate specifically studying and treating insomnia. And I didn't go into it because I had a particular difficulty with sleep. But when I was studying insomnia, I met so many people who massively struggled with their sleep and I realized what a huge issue it is. And then that was 20 years ago and I've just been working in the world of sleep helping people ever since just because it's such an important issue. Do we worry too much about sleep, do you think, as a nation, as people? So 20 years ago, sleep wasn't something people worried about. Sleep was something that people kind of boasted about

how little they got. And over the last five to 10 years especially, people have really embraced how important sleep is, which from my point of view is fantastic because sleep is, Matt, is very, so massively important. But along with that has come kind of the other side, which is almost an obsession with sleep and a worry about sleep. And the more information we learn about how important sleep is, the more that some people can get suddenly really stressed and concerned and thinking, oh my goodness, my sleep isn't good enough. If I don't sleep well, I'm going to get, you know, dementia, diabetes, heart disease, all this stuff, that then they're so stressed about their sleep that paradoxically they start having insomnia and not sleeping because they're

put such pressure on themselves. So it's a real balancing act. Yes, we want to explain to people that sleep is fantastic and that you should care about it, but not to worry them so much that it sends them off into a spiral that makes them start not sleeping because they're so worried about it. Lindsay, why is sleep important? And is there an ideal amount of sleep for people? So it's really important, I think, that people understand that sleep is really individual because eight hours gets banded a lot. I read that in loads of magazines, newspapers. Now, for, according to science, and loads of research happens that for a working age adult, to someone 18 to 64, the Goldiloxone is somewhere between seven to nine hours. So that means people who sleep somewhere from

seven to nine hours tend to be the healthiest. They tend to have the best longevity. They tend to be happier. So sort of that's the kind of the window we want to kind of aim for. That doesn't mean it's a strict limit. And there are people who will need a little bit less than that. Some people who might need a little bit more than that. But as long as you're in that, range and you're feeling good and you're making it through the day without fatigue and needing to have naps, then that's probably enough for you, whether that's nearer seven hours or whether that's near a nine. There isn't one number that's right for everyone. So for those people who are struggling with sleep, tell us how you get a good night's sleep. That's what people will be

wanting to know right now. Yeah. So a good night sleep starts during the day. And primarily, I would say that the first thing you want to do every single day is leave your house. Because getting natural daylight is so vitally important. And this is something that years ago, we didn't have to talk about because everyone left the house. But post-COVID especially, people working from home, so many of us, I mean, if you're listening to the podcast, like think about have you actually left your house today? Because we can easily get food delivered in, we can get shopping, we can do our worker home. If you don't leave the house, you're not getting natural daylight. And that is so important for helping our circadian rhythm,

which is our sort of internal 24 hour clock, help us to know the difference between night and day. And if we go outside, then that helps to suppress melatonin, helps us to be more awake during the day and sleep better at night. And that's just one of many things that we do during the day that can really benefit our sleep at night. As well as daylight, there are lots of other things. And we want to be calm because basically when we're stressed or anxious,

sleep is much more difficult. And we'll all have experienced that if you've got an exam the next day or you're going through a difficult time in your life, sleep is harder. So what we can do during the day and before bed at nighttime to help us be as calm and relax as possible will also help us to sleep. And the things that we've all heard about, like, you know, we don't want to have lots of caffeine right before bed. We don't want to have lots of alcohol.

That really affects our sleep quality. So keeping ourselves comfortable, not stressed and doing the right things during the day, you know, getting outside, keeping active, they'll all help to give us the better chance of having a decent night's sleep. We talk to lots of our diggers are going through are either pre, Perry or menopausal or post. A lot of our gang. I'm looking forward to being post. Don't think I'm quite there yet. But that really does seem to be a time for people to struggle with sleep. Insomnia is one of the biggest symptoms, isn't it? Of menopause. What advice, Lindsay, do you try to give to menopausal pre-menopausal women.

So I get loads of clients and people contact me when they're going through that time because their sleep is so disrupted. And to be fair, as a woman, we have it hard really because during times of getting our periods, so monthly menstruation, our hormone levels change.

And there's lots of difficulty with sleeping, lots people have difficulty sleeping around the time of their period. When we get pregnant, again, hormone levels are changing. People can struggle to sleep. sleep when they stop being pregnant and then during menopause, yeah, perimenopause, menopause and postmenopause. When those hormones are fluctuating, it can have a really massive impact on our

sleep. But not only that, specifically menopause, when we're having those physical symptoms like the hot flushes at night, the night sweats, the palpitations, the anxiety surges, all of these things can really directly impact our sleep. Because of course, if you wake up in the middle of the night and you are literally covered in sweat, you can't just roll over and go, oh, well, I'll go back to sleep again, because you physically have to do something to get yourself more able to go back to sleep again. So often menopause around that time is when sleep suddenly becomes quite fragmented because we're being woken up by these night sweats or hot flashes or palpitations, all of these things. And especially if you haven't struggled with fragmented

sleep before, if you've been someone who was a great sleeper, you know, oh, I can fall to sleep, half 10, wake up at 7, not wake up, then that's a huge change. And people can start to really worry about that. And they can worry, oh my goodness, my sleep now is suddenly really terrible quality. What can I do? So a couple of things I would say. First of all, that kind of disruption is natural. It's going to happen. If you are covered in sweat, of course you're going to wake up. And all you have to do is, you know, change your pajamas, maybe if you're sleeping on a towel just to help soak up that just whip the towel off, accept that you're going to have a bit of fragmented sleep. Yeah.

Try to do things that can reduce the symptoms. So I'm not saying that everyone should have HRT, but if that's suitable for you and it helps you to reduce those symptoms, then your sleep as a knock on effect will reduce. Keep yourself cool. You do the practical things at night. Like I said, sleep on a towel, perhaps, because then it makes it easier if you do wake up, covered and sweat, your bed isn't now unusable because you can just replace that. Have a change of clothes nearby.

have a misting water spray, maybe sleep with a fan, these kinds of things that are practically going to make it easier for you to fall back to sleep again. But secondly, it's really important to not freak out about it, because like I said, it's natural. And also, this is really, really fundamental. We have these things called sleep cycles. So everyone throughout the night, we don't sleep, sleep isn't like an on-off switch. We don't just go awake, sleep, and then we're like dead to the world for seven, eight, nine hours.

we have these things called sleep cycles. And what that means is our body goes through different parts of sleep, that non-REM, REM sleep, light sleep, deep sleep you might have heard of. We kind of cycle through these different parts of sleep, which all have different benefits to us. And approximately every 90 minutes, 100 minutes, 110 minutes or so, we'll go through a full sleep cycle. And then most of us will have an awareness and awakening between these sleep cycles.

Now, the point is, when we were 21, these brief arousals between these sleep cycles typically we're so short that we don't realise we're having them. But then when we go through something stressful, we go through the menopause and we are now awake, we're aware of this awakening because we've woken up on we're really hot. We think, oh, now my sleep now is fragmented or poor quality because I'm waking up. But we don't realize that we're always waking up. Like, the point is there is no such thing as a solid night's sleep of unbroken sleep. these natural awakenings between sleep cycles have always been happening whether you're aware of them or not. And when we're going through menopause, we just become aware of something that was always happening.

It's just now happening for maybe five to ten minutes instead of a couple of minutes. And that means that, you know, you can be rest assured your sleep quality hasn't really changed very much. You're just aware of something that you weren't previously aware of. And that knowledge can often really, really help because now when you wake up, you can think, oh, this is normal. It's not the end of the world. I will not stress about it. I'll just go back to sleep again. Rather than waking up and going, ah, beating yourself up because you think your sleep's poor quality. God, you are so good at what you're saying and you're making so much sense and this will be incredibly reassuring. So it's about accepting what's going on and then

just adapting to what suits you and what will help you. So whether it's listening to a podcast or whether it's putting the radio on or the TV on, for me, it's really important to have the right paraphernalia around me. So like the sheets are really important to me. The pillows are really important to me. And it's just kind of researching trying things out. I've got like my mum really struggles with sleep, but that's because she's in a lot of pain. And I get a lot of backache because I've got scoliosis. And I think everybody has, you know, dodgy shoulders, legs, hips, so. And it's about just trying out different things, surely to help you be comfortable and to get a deeper night's sleep. Are there any, is there any advice practically like that that you can give us?

Again, lots of people struggle with sleep when they're in pain. If you wake up enough to realise you're awake, you'll be aware of your body and you'll be aware of that pain. So just as you said, it's so important to make sure that your bed is as comfortable as it can be. Because if your mattress isn't supportive enough for your sleeping style, then you're more likely to wake up in the wrong position with some kind of pressure points and in pain. So think about your bed, your pillows, how old is your mattress? Have you replaced it if you've gained a lot of weight or lost a lot of weight? And maybe the mattress that you had before isn't suitable for you anymore. Maybe you used to have a bed partner and now you don't.

Or maybe it's just beyond its life cycle. And pillows as well, they don't last forever. You know, and how many of us are guilty of, oh, that pillow, that's fine. And you've realized you've had it for 15 years. We really should be buying things. Not by I'm saying we should waste money, but they have a lifespan. And, you know, your sleep is important. So if a new pillow that's actually going to support you is going to help you feel comfortable and less likely to wake up in pain, then that's going to help.

But of course, if you do wake up in pain because you have scoliosis, because you have rheumatism, whatever it is, then just accept, okay, yeah, I've woken up because of the pain and then we just get up out of bed perhaps and go and move a little bit. Sometimes just a bit of movement can help to relax that pain. Don't feel that you have to stay in bed lying still because you must force yourself to go. back to sleep again because actually just having a break, getting about a bed, going and having a little camomile tea, a little movement, maybe hot water, whatever you need to get yourself into less pain again, maybe pain medication if that's suitable for you, and then get back into bed again. Like I said, don't beat yourself up about it. Just do what you need to do to help you stay calm, feel a bit more comfortable and then know that when you get back into bed again,

you'll fall back to sleep and that's all we need to do. We don't need to fight the reality of what's happening to us. There are all kinds of sleep aids, aren't there? I don't know, Zoe, I bet you're the same and I bet all that diggers are the same, but I have so many different pillows. I've got a small pillow, I've got a big pillow, but I have them between my legs. I have one to cuddle, help my shoulder. I have one in my back and then my mum does. They're all like, they're all wedges that you can put in certain parts of your body to support your body to help you have a better night's sleep as well. So I'm such a firm believer in having like a round pillow, a squidgy pillow or a triangle in my back and things just to support your body to get you comfortable.

Yeah, and you get through them a little bit because sometimes you'd see an advent and think, well, this is going to be the answer, this pillow that apparently, because I bought one of those really rigid ones that your head goes between that supports your shoulders, you can put your arm under it and that didn't work for me. So if anyone needs one of those, I feel like we should have a pillow exchange where you can try. This is the difficult things with mattresses and pillows. Sometimes you need to try and then you need to take them back and say, this doesn't work. I don't think you can do that with bedding. It's a shame. I think you can.

Can you? I think you can return stuff. Yeah, like mattresses and pillows. Because everybody's different. Steve is always on those shopping websites and he's got exactly that thing where you just stick your head there and then you've got supports. I cannot get that to work for me, but he swears by it. So everybody, everyone's different.

I think you can try and buy and try. Like you say, a little selection of different ones and wedgies for underneath your knee and then around your hip and stuff like that. I mean, when there's two of you with. ailments in the bed. It is quite funny, isn't it? It was almost like a wall. Hang on a minute. Got to get this wedge. It's not sexy. You have to throw them all out if you want to bit of activity later. And then you can put them all back, of course. But I would say, you know, it's not all about having to buy something, you know, because again, there is so much in the

sleep world about people wanting to sell things. And actually, you do you absolutely try and get the right pillow for you, but you don't need to try a hundred different pillows. You know, sometimes just getting out of bed and just moving is just just, just. as good as buying 20 different pillows. Is it true that it's better not to have, you know, screen time for a bit or not to go on our phones because we're terrible. I always tell my kids, I'm like, put your phone down, put your phone down, and what am I doing for a little, for all to sleep? You know, oh, I'm checking the football result or, oh, I'm seeing if my orders coming in or what I'm doing in the week on my diary. So I'm as bad at doing that.

And also, Lindsay, wanted to ask you about things like you mentioned Cammartie. magnesium, certain magnesiums, do they help? Elthianine I've heard is pretty good for sleep. But, you know, again, we sort of sold a lot of this stuff and sometimes I think, yeah, is that actually a doctor told me that this is what I should do. So these are two sort of separate issues. So we start with the screens. Now, over the last five, ten years, screens have been, you know, promoted as the enemy of sleep for a few reasons because they are stimulating before bed and the light from them. But the situation, the science, is a little bit more complex than that. Now, we don't want bright light before bed. We really don't because bright light during the day helps us to be awake. And if we

have bright light right before bed, that can sort of fool our brains. But the reality is, the light coming from your screen or your television is fractional compared to the light outside in the real natural daylight and sunshine. So it's the idea that screens before bed are categorically bad isn't really strictly as easy as that because how many of us have fallen asleep whilst watching TV or whilst scrolling through your phone. So the point is, if the phone before bed you're using it to do something relaxing, maybe you're using it to listen to a meditation or you're watching a calming show, a happy show, listening to a nice podcast that makes you feel calm and relaxed, that might well help you to sleep. And the light that you're getting from that screen, although it's not

amazing, it's not helpful for your sleep, it may not be as strictly damaging, especially, and this is important, lots of recent research has shown that getting lots of bright light earlier in the day can help to offset the getting a bit of light before bed. But the real problem with screens, this is the real problem, is that we use them and we forget to go to bed, because we are scrolling and we meant to go to bed at our bedtime of 10.30, but before we know, we've been scrolling for another hour, two hours, either, you know, TikTok or just watching the next episode of your favorite show. And that's where using screens before bed,

especially in like my kids, younger people, can be really damaging because they use them as a sleep displacement. They use them instead of going to sleep. And that's why it's about you. Think about it. It's all individual. Are you someone who can use screens, your screen before bed, to do something calming and make you happy.

So you put it down, great. It's time for me to go to sleep, have a lovely sleep. Or are you someone who's going to be drawn into that addictive nature of social media and before you know it you meant to go to bed two hours ago but you're still gaming or whatever so if you're someone like that then maybe sleeping with your phone downstairs or in another room is really important

rather than being just solely fixated on the light from screens because that's just one part of the problem but I watch TV before I go to bed and I really enjoy it but I think I don't watch much TV any other time but I find it really important and all those you know my mind is absolutely buzzing there's so many little mind bubbles going on about what I've got to do and what I've got to worry about, then to suddenly put on an episode of Gardner's World or Location, Location, I find it incredibly soothing. And I'll be asleep

within about 10 minutes. So it's nice to know that I'm not breaking all the rules and I'm not doing a terrible thing. But I am the, on the other hand, last night, it was 20 past 12 when I looked at it. It's like, you've just spent an hour scrolling and not using that. But then what I do do, when I do want to go to sleep, I put on newscasts and Laura Coonsberg and Paddy and Chris Mason and Adam Fleming on my bedtime story, as I tell them, and they're great, heavy political news,

because I find them really calming because I'm on my own quite a lot as well. And that is my, and also that's, I guess my brain now knows when I hear newscast, that's my time to have a listen and calm down and eventually go to sleep. Yeah,

but you can get caught up in the sleep rules and not accept and realise, well, this actually works for me. And if it works for you, then you don't have to beat yourself up about it. As a nation, as a people, we all want a quick fix. And we all want to watch that video and,

ah, buy this product or take the supplement or this will help your sleep. And things like magnesium are everywhere. Now, the science isn't saying that magnesium supplements are a go-to, beneficial for your sleep, that they're not. But what they do show is that if you have a magnesium deficiency, if you don't have enough magnesium, then taking supplements is going to get you to the correct levels and your sleep will likely be better because we do,

yeah, magnesium is helpful for sleep. but there's no point taking extra if you already produce enough. So if people are not sleeping well, it very much, magnesium's going to help you if you had a deficiency. But if you didn't, because people say, oh, magnesium doesn't help me. And other people say, oh, it helps me.

Well, probably it's helping the people because they didn't have enough magnesium to start with. And taking magnesium, it isn't without risks because certain people, people with kidney issues, it can cause a bit of diarrhea. So you do want to be aware that it's, It's not just a blanket, more is more situation. And the science, no one says in the sort of the medical world that everyone should take magnesium

for sleep because it's more complex than that. So it might be a good thing to go and see your GP to get some advice. If you're struggling with your sleep, then typically, you know, a doctor may well look at a full blood count because things like there might be a thyroid issue that's affecting your sleep. There might be iron or ferritin deficiencies, especially with restless leg syndrome, which is very common in people for menopausal and that's often a sign of an iron issue

again magnesium levels vitamin D levels basically if we have a deficiency in something it's likely to affect our energy levels during the day and it might affect our sleep as well but that's not the same thing as saying that we should all have X supplements because like I said the evidence just isn't there to prove that it's something that everyone should be taking thank you because you're so right Lindsay we are

I mean we are a vulnerable society aren't we we're all looking at you like you say we're all looking for a quick fix we're all believing the hype around a lot of stuff that we're sent and you only have one friend tell you while i've taken this and it's really helped and then you try and think oh is this helped i think my magnesium's helping me but i also take progesterone tablets and i may could be helping me yeah it could be the camomalty and it could be that i'm absolutely shattered but then other times i do really struggle and i do that um it's back it's really annoyed me because i had TMJ for a while and I think it was just

tense and worrying about certain things and then it went away and it's just come back Do you have a mouth guard? I don't have a mouth guard I would say get a mouth guard yeah because a mouth guard we're talking about it's like clenching your jaw during the night and a mouth guard

which you can get from a pharmacy or you can get fitted by your dentist and I would recommend that and it will just help to cushion the clenching it can be really helpful yeah and of course it's all often related to stress, so maybe looking at ways that you can reduce stress in your life

would help that as well probably. Are there any herbal supplements that are good that you recommend because I bet loads of diggers will be taking stuff? According to the sort of the medical world, there aren't any herbal supplements that are proven to help sleep. If someone was to come to see a doctor or see myself with insomnia, I wouldn't go, oh, well, you should have caramel tea. But the point is I always have a cup of sleepy tea before bed, but religiously. But it's not because there's anything in that sleepy tea that is beneficial for sleep. It's because it's part of my pre-sleep routine. And basically anything that you do to help you be more calm and relaxed before bed and doing the same things before bed. So we talked about your listening to those same

podcasts before bed than use because that's part of your brain knowing, ah, these sounds mean sleep soon. Just like with our, when we have kids, we give our baby. bath milk story bed. We're doing the same things in the same order using the same words. So the baby knows, ah, bedtime soon, because this happens before bed. So if you do the same things before sleep, it can help you psychologically to associate that with bedtime. So things like Cammerty, they can be great because there's no caffeine in them. It's a nice warm drink. It can be, you know, make you feel happy. Personally, I detest the taste of cammer. So not something that I have. The sleepy tea I have is not camemile based. But it's just lovely.

part of my routine. Lavent a pillow spray, for example. Again, I use one of those religiously because for me, it makes the bed smell nice. And when I travel, because I travel a lot for work, I take the pillow spray with me so that wherever I'm sleeping, whichever hotel, I spray it and it feels familiar. It feels like... There's that association. Yeah. But it's not that the lavender is proven to help your sleep. And yeah, sleep masks can be fantastic because we don't sleep well when there's lots of bright light or if there's, you know, our phones have notifications and things that can disturb our sleep. So having a sleep mask can help to block that out, but also so can disabling notifications and having curtains. So we don't need a sleep mask. But if your curtains, maybe you're

renting somewhere and your curtains aren't very good or they're not very thick, or you're camping or you're traveling and you want to make sure that you're going to be able to block out that light, then sleep masks can be fantastic. But they're not something that everyone needs. They're just fixing a potential problem if there's too much light in your bedroom. If you're not sleeping well and lots of people have a lot of things on their minds, some people don't sleep as much as other people, you know, if you're awake early, is there any benefit to just getting up and going and reading a book and not beating yourself up about the fact that you're not sleeping, which also seems to be counterintuitive to sleeping?

100 million billion trillion percent. That's exactly what I would recommend someone does. So I'm very impressed. Yes, because often when people wake up in the night, they'll just lie there and they'll just think, oh, no, I have to stay here because I have to sleep. And it's so important that I sleep and I have an important day tomorrow. So I'll have to just try harder to sleep. But the more you're staying in bed trying to force sleep, the more frustrated you're getting,

the more annoyed you're getting that you're not sleeping. And again, stress and frustration and anxiety make it harder to sleep. So it's a much better idea to, if you've been struggling to sleep, if you're feeling anxious in bed and you're like, oh, I'm so annoyed I can't sleep, get up, go and read a book, go and have a cup of decaffeinated tea, whatever it is, go and do something else, go and do a jigsaw, go and paint a picture, go and do something for a little while to sort of reset, and then when you come back to bed again, you kind of, okay, I can go back to sleep again. But of course, before you've got to that point, in bed, if you wake up, you can always try some relaxation exercises, maybe some slow deep breathing, maybe some maybe some imagery, cognitive shuffling is a, I don't know if you've heard of that one is a really good technique. What is that? Yeah, so cognitive shuffling is where, so when you wake up in the middle of the night, what we want to do is to do something that sort of helps us just to calm down and make it more easily that we can just drift back into the next sleep cycle. So cognitive shuffling is where you think of a word, like literally you're lying in bed, you think of any word. So the word I use in the example that I teach is the word cake.

So cake. So think of the first letter of the word cake. C. And then I want you to think about all the words you can think of that start with the letter C. So cabbages, cauliflower, just keep going until you exhaust that list and then move to the next letter A, Apple, Ardvarca, Armadillo and so on, and then to exhaust A words, then move on to K, then move on to E. Now, why this is helpful is because these words, they're not a coherent worry, they're not you thinking, oh my goodness, I haven't paid the gas bill, I've got that important meeting tomorrow, they're just random words. So they're helping.

you to stay calm, keep your mind occupied on something that's low effort. And the idea is hopefully that by doing that, you'll just drift off to sleep because if we're in bed and it's dark and it's nighttime, we're calm, we're more likely to sleep. And if at the end of that you haven't been able to fall asleep, okay, fine, maybe, you know, get up and go and do something else for a little while and come back to bed again and don't beat yourself up about it. But yeah, cognitive shuffling can be really good. I have been cognitive shuffling my whole life as a kid. Because I really love words and letters and spelling. And I've always done that thing. Like with cake, when you started talking about that, I just played this game where I'll get the word cake and then I'll go through

the alphabet so it'll be is acre word bake, cake, bake, fake. And I just count how many different words I can make up. And I've done that all my life until I've gone off to sleep. I've just done that naturally. So now, now I'm happy to know that of incognitive shuffling. And I've taught my kids to do it as well. It's just some way of just kind of distracting yourself. How bizarre. You need to go on eight out of ten cats does countdown, Joe. Yeah. You'd be great on that. I wish. There we go. Cognitive shuffling.

That's so good. Yeah, that's great. Our diggers have got in touch, Lindsay. So a question for you. I have had sleep issues since childhood, which have worsened over the last few years due to stress. PTSD and COVID, which I never got. I don't eat late. I eat a very healthy diet and rarely touch alcohol or coffee.

I meditate daily and exercise. size five to six days a week. I've recently been taking magnesium before bed. I turn my light off about 10.30, but my biggest problem is that I wake at three or four a.m. and struggle to get back to sleep. Any advice on this is welcome. And there's no name attached to this. So thank you very much for sending that in Anonymous Digger. I mean, we've covered some of the bits there. Lindsay, what do you say? So a lot of times when people come to see me, they're really struggling with their sleep. They will say, I have done everything. And it sounds like that digger has done everything.

You know, they've followed all the rules. They're avoiding caffeine. They're avoiding alcohol. They don't eat too late. They're exercising. They're doing all the things. And sometimes those good sleep hygiene rules actually aren't enough. Because if you're really struggling with your sleep, then it's not really about doing all the things right.

That's a problem. Because, again, think about a time in your life. when you were sleeping well, you probably weren't doing all the things right. You know, lots of people do all the wrong things, but they still sleep. Often it's stress and anxiety about sleep itself that causes the problem. So I suspect that by trying harder and harder to fix the poor sleep by, well, okay, I'm not sleeping well, so I'll stop taking caffeine, I'll stop alcohol, I'll stop this. You're trying so hard. You're adding on more and more and controls and doing more and more and more, but you're actually creating a lot of stress about

sleep itself. Again, wake up in the night, like we've covered, it is normal, but of course, if you're not sleeping well, when you wake up, the first thing you do is you look at the clock, oh, it's 3am, oh, it's 4 a.m. This is so frustrating. Again, you're triggering yourself, you're making yourself more anxious about it. So what I would say is a couple of things. First thing, please do not. Nobody should have a clock that they can see from their bed, like no one should, because when you wake up in the middle of the night, if you're awake enough to realize you're awake, we don't need to know what the time is.

Knowing the time is only going to lead to us doing mental calculations about how much sleep we've had, how much time until morning, and make us frustrated. So turn the clock away. You have an alarm set for the morning, but you don't need to know what time it is. If it's not sounding, it's not morning. So don't have a time,

because that will help you hopefully to go back to sleep again without the frustration and anxiety about it's what time is it. And secondly, if someone's really struggling with their sleep, which I suspect this person is, because it sounds like they're trying so hard, then there is a treatment for insomnia called Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, CBTI. And it is the nice guideline, NHS World Health Organization recommended primary treatment for sleeping problems. And it helps you by helping you to learn how to not be so stressed about sleep and change some of the things that may not be actually helping you. So a lot of times the good sleep hygiene rules can add a lot of stress and anxiety,

like I said, gives you a lot of pressure and to-dos and a must-do's before bed, but it's just actually mean that when you go to bed, you're more stressed out than you were because you've been doing all these things to force sleep. So I would suggest that the listener contacts their healthcare professional and looks into having CBTI, which often is available. Either there are apps that you can do it with or are. talking therapies or privately. But CBTI, I said, I think, would be, it would help almost, you know, would really, really help their sleep and give them a way to fix their poor sleep without self trying to do it, which obviously isn't working. Okay. So if you're absolutely desperate, then it's CBTI and you'd go to

your GP and you'd talk to them and you'd say help. Yeah, and it's non-pharmacological. It's no drugs. It's a talking therapy. Something I'm interested in. Do men or women need, more sleep than each other or is that just like a myth? Well, according to the science, I believe, I may be wrong, but it's something like 10 or 11 minutes that women, strictly speaking, need more than men. But it's, I'll tell me a little bit. But strictly speaking, women do tend to need a little bit more sleep than men, but women do disproportionately tend to have difficulty with their sleep than men.

And that could be for a lot of reasons, the hormonal changes that we already talked about, maybe a disproportionate amount of childcare and elderly relative kind of that sandwich generation responsibility that women often tend to take on more than their male partners. So lots of reasons why women may actually have more difficulty with their sleep despite the fact that they might actually probably need a little bit more sleep than men. But it's not huge. I mean, 11 minutes isn't a huge amount, is it? Yeah. It's so different, is it, at different times in your life? Yeah, I guess it's true. It is, you know, like if you're young and you've got young kids, then you're knackered and sometimes you fall asleep

the night. If you're a working person, you've got lots of job responsibilities, it's just, you know, different points in your life demand different amounts of sleep. When we're a new parent or we're juggling a job and childcare, we don't have enough time to get as much sleep as we need. And we don't need to beat us up about that as well. There are different sort of phases in our life where we are able to, like, you know, if you're a new parent, you're probably not eating as well as you did before and you're probably not exercising. as well as you did before. So again, it's like understand that this is a transitory thing. When you are able to put yourself first or at least prioritize yourself a bit more, then I want you to prioritize nutrition, prioritize movement and prioritise getting, you know, allowing yourself to have enough opportunity to sleep. But if you can't, it's not the end of the world. Do you sleep well, Lindsay? I do actually. I'm a generally I'm a really good sleeper. I tend to need quite a lot of sleep, which is maybe frustrating. Like I mentioned before, we need somewhere between

seven to nine hours, I'm nearer the nine bracket, which actually is a bit annoying because I would get a lot more done if I only seven hours. But that doesn't mean that I'm a perfect sleeper. And if I had some major event the next day, then I probably wouldn't sleep that well the night before because I'd be stressed and that's normal. And it's just about accepting that, okay, I'm generally sleep well, a night or two of poor sleep isn't the end of the world. It's okay. You've been amazing. Thank you so much for this invaluable advice that you've given everybody. Thank you. Yeah, really good.

And I really hope this has encouraged everybody, just listening to this, that, you know, maybe we just rethink slightly how we feel about our sleep and some of the patterns of the things we're doing. I think our diggers will love this episode, Dr Lindsay. So thank you so, so much. Digit is a Persephonica production.