Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - How To Make The Most Of Your Mornings

Episode Date: February 20, 2020

It’s getting lighter in the mornings - news that will either make you want to leap out of bed and do a few laps of the park or remain as committed to your duvet as ever. Mornings are...Marmite. But consciously making the most of them is a goal that even the most dedicated of night owls can strive for. This week, we’ve recruited the help of two women for whom mornings are a matter of professional importance to help you get more out of yours, whatever that might look like. Joining Senior Editor Editor Roisín Dervish-O’Kane this week are sleep scientist Dr Sophie Bostock (https://www.thesleepscientist.com) and Adrienne Herbert, PT, and host of the Power Hour podcast (https://adriennelondon.com) Join Women’s Health on Instagram: @womenshealthuk Join Roisín Dervish-O’Kane on Instagram: @roisin.dervishokane Join Dr Sophie Bostock on Instagram: @drsophiebostock Join Adrienne Herbert on Instagram: @adrienne_ldn Have a goal in mind that you want us to put to the experts? Find us on Instagram @womenshealthuk and drop a voice note into our inbox, telling us your name and your goal, and it could be the subject of a future episode.  Topics:  What’s social jet lag and why is it so damaging? What’s a chronotype and how do you find out yours?  Can a night owl ever become a lark?  What’s the healthiest way to wake up? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Paramount Plus. Hello and welcome back to Going for Goal, the new women's health podcast that's here to help you achieve the health and life goals that really matter to you. Now, I want to ask you a question. How is your morning? How did it go? Did you haul yourself out of bed on the third snooze of your tinny smartphone alarm? Drag yourself into the shower and basically reenact the opening lines of Dolly Parton's 9 to 5? Or did you get up just before or with your alarm, feeling rested and with a window of time ahead of you in which you're able to do. do something for you. Be it yoga, or walk around the local park, a sweaty gym workout, or simply just having a sit-down breakfast. The fact that so many of us fall into the first camp goes some way to explaining why mornings are such a subject of fascination within the health and

wellness world. Just this week, we received emails from two listeners who are struggling to make the most of their mornings in the midst of this bleak British midwinter. And it's something that so many of us can relate to. From the outside looking in, people who love mornings are akin to members of some super exclusive club in which the rest of us are emphatically NFI. But does it have to be this way? Not so. According to the latest science of sleep, morning lark or night owl,

we all have a lot more power to make the most of our mornings than has been previously thought. As to how we do it, today's guests have ideas in abundance. Dr Sophie Bostock is a sleep scientist who has worked with the NHS and currently advises big-time companies as well as athletes about how things like rest and circadian rhythms can affect energy and output. Welcome, Sophie. Thank you very much. Great to be here. And when it came to thinking of someone who might be able to inspire even the most stubbornly mourning of us into exploring the possibilities of those pre-9am hours,

there was only one choice. Adrian Herbert is a PT model, Adidas ambassador, and hosted the Power Hour podcast in which she interviews seriously impressive people about how they maximize their mornings. Hello, hi. Great to have you both with us. First off, quick question to both of you. What do people stand to gain by learning how to make the most of their mornings? Well, as you said, on my podcast The Power Hour, I've interviewed a host of different people around their morning routines, what gets them out of bed, what time they wake up, what they do first thing and why and what they've cultivated in the first hour of their day. And the reason that I became fascinated with this morning routine was because essentially I started my own about two years ago, when I was training for a marathon for the first time. I have a young son and he was five years old at the time. And I basically thought, right, I need more time. As most people do, I thought I need more hours in the day. I've got so much to do.

Now I've said, I'll train for this race. I've got work to do, blog post to write, school run to do. I had so much going on as we all do, especially as women. And I thought, you know what? The only way I'm going to carve out more space in my schedule is if I roll my alarm clock back, give myself one extra hour and that hour before the rest of the world needs you, your attention before there's WhatsApp, emails, kids. I basically realized, wow, this magic time in the morning I'm getting so much done. I'm so much more productive. There's less distractions. And so I thought,

wow, I can't be the only person in the world who is utilising this morning. So yeah, that's basically why I started to figure out and ask people what they do. And it honestly, honestly has changed my life. And how get ready to win to everyone? How early does the, did you roll the clock back till? Well, I've rolled my clock back now to 520, which I know people win. It was 545 before. I'm basically just getting more and more into it. So I'm like getting earlier and earlier. But yeah, initially it was 545 because it gave me that one hour before my son would typically wake up around quarter to seven. So I'd get one hour before mommy. And then, you know, your time is then. Before you're everyone else's. Exactly. Yeah. Wonderful. And Sophie, what do you think listeners have to gain from making the most of their mornings? Well, I think the greatest benefit that you've got from a regular routine, whether that morning starts at 520 or for some of us a little bit later,

is about having your own internal body clock in sync with the environment, with the kind of the sun's clock, if you like. So if you are active during daylight hours and you are inactive and resting when it's dark outside, then everything in your body has a good chance of being. being in sync with each other. All of your biological processes are working really well together. Whereas if you have very haphazard routines and actually you're sleeping in for a long time for much of the day and missing out on the kind of energizing power of daylight, there's really good evidence that you're at increased risks of various illnesses, including depression, anxiety. So there's a huge amount to be gained from having a regular routine. That's really interesting. So even if it is starting and finishing slightly differently. It's that regularity. Yeah. What we want to avoid is

what's been coined social jet lag, where you have a big gap between what actually happens during the week and the weekend. And I can see Adrienne nodding. And I'm wondering, does your 520 persist into the weekend? Well, actually, I was nodding because I know that a lot of people do that. I was actually thinking of a specific friend. Mentoring no names. No, no names. AJ. She basically doesn't sleep as much at all in the week, but she's like, it's fine. I have a line at the weekend. So I was thinking of her, actually. But I don't get up at 520 at the weekend, but I'm still up early. I don't, I can't sleep in. I'm not like a let me sleep until, you know, eight, nine. For me, that I think

I'd feel ill if I was in bed till that long. You know what I mean? You basically get jet lag. Yeah. So if you have a transition that's more than an hour from day to day, then you start to actually feel the effects, because some parts of your bodily processes, your gut, will kind of transition at a different speed to your kind of sleep wake cycle. So you're going to feel sluggish. You're going to feel unwell if your body clock is out of sync. That's so interesting. So you're not just out of sync with the rest of society or the when people in your office or when other people in your house are doing things. You're out of sync with your organs and other parts of yourself. So if you have a regular routine five days a week and then actually

come the weekend, you decide to go out late for dinner, let's say. And you can't quite understand. Well, you're actually getting indigestion. You haven't eaten much today, but you've gone out for dinner at 9 o'clock at night to go to that awesome restaurant that you couldn't get a seat to during the week. So you're there eating late, but unbeknownst to you, your guts actually slowed down because 10 hours after it started working, it starts to kind of slow down. And you start to feel actually a little bit unworthily. 10 hours is a long time to work.

We'd all be slowing down after that point. Absolutely. And your digestion will really thank you if you have a decent gap at night. So actually stopping eating two hours before you go to bed, that's going to put your body in the best sort of relaxed state for a relaxed night of sleep. Interesting. Don't you think, though, that the world is kind of working against us now because this is the thing that comes up for me.

Because I get up at 520, obviously the first thing people say is, well, what time do you go to bed, you know, aren't you really tired? And I do go to bed, you know, early. But I think the whole having a social life and wanting to actually, you know, go to events, go out for dinner, you know, just maybe watch TV. I guess people do that. It's that thing of going, well, the whole world is kind of aimed more towards staying up late, getting up late. And it's kind of, I think, it's really, really difficult, I think, to be disciplined with bedtime.

I actually say to people, it's easier to get up early for me than it is to go to bed early. That's where the ninja discipline comes in. I can totally relate to that. Like the, yeah, you can get up early and kind of feel miserable. But it takes real, as you say, real discipline to turn Netflix off. And to go to bed. And to go to bed. So many things. There's always one more thing you could do.

Or, you know, like that you said, not looking at your phone or not, there's always something that you could faf with for an extra 20 minutes. And so I have to be so strict now that it's like, I'm like a child. It's like it's 9.30. Everything's going off. By 945, you're in that bed. And by 10 a. 10 p.m., you're asleep. Yeah. Treat yourself like a baby. So would you both of you two kind of identify as morning people naturally? I'd say yes, but probably to a lesser extent than Adrian. But what's interesting is she, incredibly disciplined. I am potentially less well disciplined because what the research shows is that, yes, some of us have a predisposition to be early birds or night owls, but actually probably the genetics controlling this tendency probably accounts for less than 50% of our actual kind of what we call chronotype, whether or not we're an early bird or a night owl. So if genetics accounts for less than 50%, then all the other environmental influences, whether or not you switch off your phone, whether or not you're those to bright light during the day and dim light before you go to sleep, these are incredibly important in controlling that chronotype.

So this is all about the science of chronobiology. What controls your internal rhythms? You have the same genetic code throughout your life. Your genome is set when you're born. But actually there are lots of changes that happen throughout your life, which we kind of call epigenetics, which are influenced by the environment. And just as an example, our chronotype absolutely changes as we age. So most of us are aware that little kids, well, in fact, when we're born, we have no body clock whatsoever.

And one of the reasons that parents suffer so much is because their beloved offspring have no recognition for when is day, when is night, and they simply wake up and they're hungry. Fortunately, after about five months or so, the body clock kind of kicks in and we start to kind of recognise these regular sleep weight patterns. But then as we're young kids, tend to be kind of very much early birds. as we transition to teenagers, there's a real shift. And those teens who are sulky in the mornings cannot get out of bed. This often persists for many years, by the way, not just teenagers, would recognise that they are night owls. But then typically in middle age, depending on when you define that,

we tend to revert more to early birds. So there are these changes that happen naturally for humans throughout our lives. And that tells us that there's something here which is variable. there's something here that we can change. And for most of us, if you have ever been on a camping trip, you will actually find that the tendency that you might think you have to be a night owl will probably change. Because if you're exposed to natural light all day long and you're not exposed to bright electric light before you go to bed, what we tend to see is that actually people's body clocks shift forward,

even if they self-identify as a natural light owl. Interesting is it always like it goes back to factory settings. Absolutely, that's exactly right. And I know we were chatting early. You said there was a study that was done pretty much on that exact thing. Can you tell us a bit more about it? So this was sort of challenging the idea of night owls being unable to function in the morning. And what they did is they simply studied people for a week in their normal everyday settings.

They probably had caffeine after lunch, these kind of things that sleep experts had advise you not to do. And I'm sure they used their phones before they went to bed. And then after a week, they actually took these volunteers out into the wilderness, into Boulder, Colorado. I'm sure it was lovely. But they made sure that they weren't exposed to any electricity. And even after two days, their body clocks had shifted. And to measure that, they actually tested the level of melatonin, the sleep hormone, which kind of signals that your body is ready for sleep. And in their natural kind of home environment, their melatonin was kicking in at about 10 p.m.

So they were going to sleep at about 12. So typically, as soon as melatonin sort of switches on, we tend to sleep about two hours later. Okay. But once they got out into the desert, their melatonin onset actually shifted forward so that it followed sunset. So by 7 or 8 p.m., all of these night owls were already producing melatonin. So there were real biological changes after just two days. That's fascinating. So if you maintain that pattern for, say, 12 weeks, there's lots of evidence that actually you start to change your genetics, your epigenetics, will

alter and your chronotype will start to shift. And you're saying there's been a shift in understanding. So is it true that the research has shifted in a way to that now we think they're much more flexible? We are definitely understanding an awful lot more about how to influence these patterns. And there was one study that came out last year where volunteers who were extreme night owls and didn't wake up until kind of afternoon were actually given a kind of recipe to stick to for three weeks. and they were asked to get up two to three hours earlier than normal,

get plenty of outdoor light in the morning, to eat breakfast as soon as they woke up, to only exercise in the morning, to eat lunch at the same time, to eat nothing after 7pm, to avoid caffeine after 3pm, and not to nap after 4pm, and to go to bed a little bit earlier

and avoid light in the evenings. And they were told to stick to this pattern seven days a week. And within three weeks, They were less depressed in the morning. They had more energy and their reaction time had actually improved in the morning. So real kind of physical changes. So I think the lesson there is that yes, many of us can change. It will take a bit of time though.

And I think, you know, people might kind of go, right, okay, tomorrow morning, 520, this is it. And it's going to be really, really hard for that first couple of days. Interesting. I think the environment thing definitely influences us a lot because what some people might not know about me now that I am this morning lark is that actually for a long time of my life when I was a professional dancer I was performing in the West End in London and you're on stage until 10.30 at night, every night

and you're full of adrenaline and cortisol and you're dancing and singing. I was in a musical called We Will Rock You, which is the Queen Musical, which was at Tottenborough Road. Very intense. Yes, it's like a rock concert till half ten every single night, eight shows a week. and essentially I would probably get home around 12 and I'd get in the shower and I'd still be singing and I was fully wide awake at midnight and I used to go to bed and sleep so probably around maybe I want to say like 8 or 9 a.m. because I was literally getting into bed maybe

yeah half 12.1 so I mean for a couple of years of my life I definitely you know had that shift obviously due to environment due to work but then I think you know shifting it the other way and becoming a parent, you know, as you said, you know, the first few months of motherhood, you know, your sleep's all over. And I think actually changing things in my environment, now it's like, oh yeah, you're naturally a morning person. But I don't, I'm not sure really which one I am, to be honest. I think it's my environment now that dictates that I feel good in the morning. Yeah. And part of that by necessity. Yeah. Of becoming a mother as well. Interesting. Adrian, what would be your advice for even card carrying morning haters? People who, yeah,

dragged themselves out of bed and stumbled to the kids. kitchen to build their own power hour. Like, where do they start? Okay, a couple of things. So firstly, as Sophie said, not focusing on, oh, it's got to be 520 or 530 or even six, but actually like micro steps. So wherever your alarm currently is set, I encourage people to take that back by 20 minutes and try that for a week and then maybe try another 20 minutes. And so slowly taking it back until you get that extra hour, doesn't have to start off with an hour. So that's the first thing. A second thing which people don't want to hear I'm very sorry to just spill the tea

caffeine. I do not drink coffee very often. I probably drink coffee once a week and if I do drink it is early and I think that often people are saying to me oh yeah but coffee doesn't affect me Adrian I drink coffee every day. Coffee's cool, doesn't affect me but then when they wake up exhausted as Sophie I'm sure will back me up here.

I'm loving this. Yeah, she's going to back me up. It's not necessarily that the coffee bothers you and you can't go to sleep you will fall asleep because you're probably exhausted but the level of sleep and the kind of quality of your sleep isn't as good. So when you wake up, you still feel tired. And then, so yeah, I'd say, I'm just cheering in the background.

Yes. Yeah. And everyone else is like, boo, give me my coffee. No, we don't want to hear it. I know. Coffee is such a, I mean, I guess it's such a cultural thing and it's like fun and it's like, let's meet for coffee and all that. But if you want a power hour, get rid of the coffee.

And yeah, 20 minutes, microsteps. And the third thing I would say is, oh my gosh, there's so much. any things I want to say. But the third thing I would say is, again, not a popular thing. In the last hour before you go to bed, try to get rid of screens and do things on audible. So basically, I now, in the last hour, if I want to listen to something, I'll listen to a book. If I want to, you know, in my room, I put on a candle. I even have, for example, the landing light on and then not the light on of the room I'm in. So just trying to basically make it dark and not look at a screen. So, yeah, again, it sounds like so boring. It's like, oh,

I've got to give up coffee, I've got to stop watching Love Island, and I've got to get up early. Like, who wants that? But what I'd say to you is try it, please, because honestly, once you try it and you see the benefit, it's honestly the testimonies that I get from people every single day saying, oh my goodness, now that I get up early in the morning, I have more time for myself before my kids wake up. I have started going to yoga three mornings a week and I'm loving that. Or I've actually, for ages, I've said, you know, I really want to start writing. I've got all these ideas.

I want to write this script, but I never have time. Now I get up in the morning, I sit with my chite or whatever, and I write and I've written so much. And people are just like, oh my gosh, what have I been doing? You know, I've got this amazing time. I've got so much time. And essentially, you know, I'm obsessed with this. I feel like time is the most valuable thing we all have. You cannot buy it.

If you could, it would be sold out. You never get it back. And, you know, cultivating time for yourself is so valuable. And you should. You deserve that. As I said, for the rest of the day, the world is so busy. and it demands your time. It's going to take your time.

Someone, your work, your boss, your kids, your emails is going to take your time from you. So reclaim one hour, first thing in the day, dedicate it to yourself, do something for yourself. And yeah, you might have to sacrifice a latte, but it's worth it. Yeah. You know what's better than the one big thing? Two big things. Exactly. The new iPhone 17 Pro on TELUS's five-year rate plan price lock.

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I was thinking it's almost like the mornings need a rebrand. Yes. The times when we're obligated to do things for everyone else to actually thinking of it as being an opportunity for creating stuff. for yourself, right? And it doesn't, because I think when also, because we're in the wellness world and articles on our website do so well when it's like what five successful women do, how they are able to hit the gym at 6 a.m.

We always think it kind of needs to be either about work, productivity or fitness, but actually, Sophie, is there benefit in, I don't know, just, I don't know, I feel quite impressed when I read things about people taking time to, like, journal or even just like chill or read in the morning. Is there a benefit in that kind of stuff too? I think there's a huge benefit in listening to your body. You know, if you are genetically more predisposed to being an early bird, you probably do wake up with a little bit more energy,

and you might well be the person that goes to the gym. Actually, if maybe there's a slight kind of difference in your biology that means you can wake up with these kind of alerting signals of light and gentle movement, but actually your time might be best spent doing that kind of creative work. I think a lot of us have lost touch with our natural biological rhythms. And part of that is caffeine. I have to say I'm a big coffee fan. I drink a lot of coffee, but I drink decaf, really good decath.

But these things like caffeine, they mask your biological rhythms. And light actually does the same thing. And it sounds a bit kind of extreme to go off and live in the desert for a week. But just trying to get back in tune with the natural. way of living. I mean, if you think if you kind of take yourself back a couple of hundreds of thousands of years, then we were out on the savannah, we were hunting for our food, we were probably not eating late at night because actually it was dark and it wasn't safe. We're probably then returning to our kind of community. Maybe we were sitting around the campfire. The campfire

has red or orange wavelength light, which is not as alerting as that blue or stark white light that you get from kind of electric lights and also from blue screens. So it is about kind of just taking it back and being more intuitive. And everything that Adrienne has said has makes total sense. But that hour, please, whatever you do, don't take it away from sleep. You know, this hour that you're gaining, I would like to think, is an hour that you're taking from the end of a day when you were tired and not really doing a whole lot. Maybe you were watching TV. I would just veged, mindlessly. Milderliskepting out on the sofa. that's the hour that you can lose.

You know, the moment that your eyelids start to feel heavy, you're yawning, you're starting to feel tired. Hey, that's your chance to get into bed when you're naturally tired. Don't nap on the sofa, you know, just call it, call it a day and then wake up with more energy the next day. It's so interesting how we all avoid early nights, right? I feel like we're apparently the only species on the planet that choose to deprive ourselves of sleep. And I know that it's like the FOMO thing, right? You think you're going to miss out. It's like, let me just stay up for 30 more minutes.

It's like we avoid this going to bed. And I think I used to do it myself. You know, you just said in the evenings, I wasn't doing anything productive. I wasn't doing anything particularly enjoyable. Because don't get me wrong. I am not saying that every hour of every day has to be maximised, productive, you know, monetise. You can do things just for fun and relax and chill out. But I find it.

Actively encouraged. Yes. But I find that honestly, with this whole thing of giving yourself an hour, I find that when people put things to the end of the day, it's almost like a prioritisation list. So what you do at the start of the day is the most important and what you do at the end is the least. So if that 30 minutes of meditation or yoga class

or reading a new book is at the end of your day, it almost feels to a lot of people like it's the end of their to-do list and that's the thing that goes, oh, you know what, I can't be bothered now, I'm too tired. Whereas if it's at the start of the day, you're prioritising that thing. You're prioritising yourself by putting it at the start of your day. So, yeah, that's the thing with the evenings is,

A, go to bed because you're not missing anything. And secondly, don't leave the thing that you want to do to be the last thing. Interesting. So from what both of you are saying, it seems although we're thinking about mornings and we love mornings because that's where there's the scope for opportunity, it's not really just about what you do in the morning. Is it? Like, it seems like you were talking about not drinking caffeine in the afternoon.

It's not staying up late with Netflix. It's all, you can't really isolate it. Having a good morning, you can't isolate. This is all part of your 24-hour cycle. We, every human being has literally 37 trillion clocks within us. Every cell within your body has this internal rhythm. And it operates beautifully. Everything is in sync when we're active during the day and we sleep at night.

And as soon as you kind of mess around with that, then things start to break and you're more likely to kind of get ill. And some people unfortunately have to kind of deal with this on a daily basis. If you're a shift worker, you are more than kind of familiar with this kind of extra pressure on the body. You're more likely to get sick. You're more likely to feel low. And you've got to be really kind of self-protective about sleep. And actually most night shift workers I know really do a great job of trying to protect their sleep, you know, making sure that their bedrooms are as dark as possible,

that they're not going to be disturbed by noise. and they're probably the ones who are least likely to be kind of scrolling through their phones mindlessly because they know that actually sleep is so important. It's harder to get good quality sleep during the day than it is at night. And what, Adrienne, what advice do you have for maybe people who have extra demands on their time in the morning, so for like working mothers in terms of, because I often find it hard to carve out an hour for myself, and that's ridiculous because I have no dependence or any real responsibilities, and it's tricky enough. what advice you have for those people who feel like there is no wiggle room within their schedule to prioritise themselves?

Sure, I'd say my advice would be firstly, you must prioritise yourself because you, you know, when you're giving yourself the time, giving yourself the energy, you can give more to others, you can give more to your kids, you know, you can be more patient with them, there's less rushing in the morning. And secondly, I'd say, with all the will in the world, it's never going to be perfect every single day. so, you know, have some things that make your life easier for a start. So, whether that's, you know, the boring stuff, like packing bags the night before, making food, you know, any food prep that you can do the night before so that the mornings are a little bit more streamlined. Also, I think giving your kids, if they're old enough to, giving them almost like a bit of a plan that they can follow every day

so that they know there's a routine and there's a structure as well. So, yeah, I think knowing that it's not going to be perfect every day, but have some kind of structure that we're all trying to fit around. We're all working towards this. and on the days when it goes well great everybody's you know the hair's done everyone's got their snack in their bag you're out the door on time there's less as I said rushing and this kind of mania and chaos and I think often if you start your day like that

where do you go from there you know where's your energy at when you're saying to them oh my gosh get your you know get your shoes on get your bag and this and that we've going to be late and get in the car and I mean we've all done it but I don't want to start every day like that so if anything having that extra time in the morning for myself then means that when Jude you know wakes up and we're doing things together, there's more time. It's less rushed and it's more enjoyable for me, more enjoyable for him. So as I said, sometimes we have those days, of course, but when you have those days, just let it go. Don't get too stressed. It doesn't have to be perfect every day.

Try again tomorrow. I guess that's really good advice for everyone listening as well while they try this because I think there's a real, and again, there's a real thing within wellness culture that there's this perfectionism, isn't it? You want to do so, you're doing something new and you want to do it really, really, really well. But how as important is it between both of you, actually, that people allow themselves a bit of flexibility? The biggest enemy, certainly to sleep, is stress. So if you are worrying so much about whether you're going to get stuff done in the morning, the chances are these thoughts are going to whir around in your head. And of course, you won't get a good night's sleep. And they'll wake up ratty and wonder why on earth you've kind of tried this in

the first place. So I think certainly making it as easy as possible, as Adrian said, you know, 20 minutes earlier tomorrow, that's doable. An hour or two hours earlier, probably not. There are a few kind of sneaky tips you can use as well to actually just make that initial getting out of bed a little bit easier. Oh yeah, go for it. But it's an incredibly simple. But, you know, putting your alarm clock the other side of the room

so that you have to get up and moving to go and switch it off. It's so obvious. But actually, that signal that you've got out of bed, a psychologically you're out of bed, but also your body is starting to move. The moment that it starts to move, that message to your body clock is, oh, it's time to wake up. And the other thing is you can use light alarm clocks. So these kind of naturally come on gradually 30 minutes before your wake up time.

And I have one and I've actually set it to a flashing light at the time that I want to get up. So I don't get woken up by a loud noise, but a flashing light. And that flashing light is a really strong stimulus to the kind of receptors on the back of your eye that it's time to wake up. Right. Okay. And so we're talking earlier about making. this habit. So if someone say is now giving themselves there's time in the morning and they're trying to wake up earlier and be a bit brighter, how long roughly can they expect to see effects

and what advice do you have on making this a habit that sticks? I think some of the studies suggest that that study that actually took people out in camping in the wilderness. Within two days, would love to willingly be a participant in that one. That's the research I like. But literally within two days, they were seeing changes in their melatonin onset. So that's a biological change. But let's remember they changed their environment really quite profoundly. So there is a massive difference in terms of the light exposure that you would get out in the wilderness versus actually working inside an office. There's a, you know, a order of difference of hundreds of thousands of lux, which is the measure of light intensity.

So for most of us, actually, if we're kind of quite an enclosed environment during the day, we're not going to feel as energized naturally and it can be harder to make sort of shifts. But certainly the study which took night owls and tried to teach them to become early birds, that saw really significant changes within three weeks. So, I mean, Adrian's experience, I think everybody's different. Yeah, I would say that. I think everyone, obviously, yeah, everyone's different. And I'd say that depending on your personality type, often that plays a big part.

So some people are all or nothing. They're like, I'm doing this now. It has to be like this. I'm going to do it an hour and everything's going to change. And they can stick with it because they need that jolt. They need that kind of extreme shift to go, this is a new start, this is a new change, new me. Other people don't like the all or nothing approach to things in life. They like the step by step, bit by bit, slowly, slowly.

So you have to figure out which personality type works for you, what works for you, and then kind of go with that. Okay, I think we're almost out of time. But before we go, if our listeners could take away one thing from this conversation, what would you want it to be? Adrian, let's start with you. Oh, one thing you're putting me on the start. The spot. Sorry. There's so many things, but I guess the listening to your body and the nature versus the world, if that makes sense. So the world is working against us, unfortunately, with technology, with our blue light, with our late dinners and Netflix and all of those things.

But ultimately, a lot of the things that benefit us the most in life that are choices do require some discipline. It might not be easy at first, but that's when we get the most reward from things. So even if it is challenging, even if it is, you know, you have to. to cultivate discipline, you will benefit from trying this, even if you just try it for two weeks. So that would be what I'd try and say is like, yes, the world is working against you, but you can do hard things, give it a try, give it all you've got, and let me know if you are doing the power hour. Yes, and we'll put a link to Adrian's podcast in the show notes. Sophie, what about you? I'm boringly going to go for the science approach, which kind of says

the same thing, but more gently, which is just simply that science says your chronotype is not fixed. You can choose to become a morning person. So it's very, very unlikely that your genetics are going to work against you here. You're actually probably doing something which you're more kind of predisposed to do. But society is making it harder. But this is your choice. This is not something which is determined. So we've actually, we've got a lot more power over how we feel than we're taught to think. Got the power, Rochene. Got the power. Right. On that note. Thank you, everyone. Thank you both of you for coming on.

You've both been brilliant. And thanks to everyone for listening. If you've enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast as it really helps other people discover the show. I'll be back next week with all the expert insight you need to hit a whole new goal. If you want help with one of your own,

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