The Wellness Scoop - Bite-Sized: Why Sleep Is So Important to Your Health

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

We’re joined by Guy Meadows, physiologist, and leading sleep expert, to discuss why sleep is such an integral element of our health. Here’s a quick recap: Why sleep is so key for supporting and improving our mental health How long we should be sleeping for How sleep supports our immunity, and the health of our heart and brain Sleep cycles The 2 drivers of sleep The importance of regularity How sleep is the bedrock for all aspects of our health Guy Meadows: ‘The Sleep Book: How to Sleep Well Every Night’ https://www.sleepschool.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, I'm Ella Mills, the founder of Deliciously Ella, and this is our podcast, Delicious Ways to Feel Better. This year we've launched a new format with these short 10 to 15 minute bite-sized episodes which will hopefully give you everything you need to know in a really digestible practical format and each month we're going to be having a resident expert join us to delve deeper into one topic and the topic for February is sleep. So during February we're going

to be joined by Dr Guy Meadows, a physiologist who is a leading expert in the space of sleep. Guy founded the Sleep School which is a team of global sleep experts with over 10 years of experience. They use evidence-based and clinically proven education and tools to help everyone with chronic sleep issues to sleep better every day. Guy is also a published author and in his book, The Sleep Book, How to Sleep Well Every Night, he shares his method, blending mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to help readers sleep better naturally. So it's absolute pleasure to be joined by Guy. And today we're going to delve in by looking at why sleep is just so important for our health. So welcome, Guy. And could you sum that up in a nutshell for us?

Well, I always like to say that sleep is the single most powerful, performance enhancing, health providing behaviour known to humankind, whereby it affects our mental, emotional and physical health. So it's not what sleep does for us. It's what it doesn't do for us is in a nutshell, it's affecting every biological process. And so if we kind of separate that out from the physical, the mental, the emotional health, what's it doing for our mental health? So when it comes to our mental health, sleep is helping us to effectively wake up happy. So we've all heard of that phrase getting out of bed on the wrong side. And we all know what it feels like if you have a poor night, you're sort of grumpy, you're irritable, you're

sort of you might be short tempered, etc. And that's because when you are sleep deprived, the sleep deprivation knocks out your prefrontal cortex, which is the sort of almost like the head office part of your brain, which helps to regulate your emotions. And what happens is it pushes you into your amygdala, your kind of threat detecting part, which means that we tend to view the world around us and view ourselves more negatively. So we're more likely to experience those sort of negative emotions. And that's in the short term. But in the long term, sleep is really important for our long term mental health because it's helping to diffuse the stresses that we've experienced during the day, helping us to

sort of reset our emotional balance the next day. And if we're not getting that on a regular basis, so if we're regularly experiencing poor sleep, then we can see that that will increase our risk of, say, poor mental health. So we know that if you regularly experience, if you're experiencing insomnia, for example, your risk of depression is 10 times greater and your risk of anxiety is 17 times greater. And there was actually a fantastic research paper that came out last September, which did a meta-analysis of 72 papers, which looked at improving sleep for our mental health.

And the overall outcome was that just any improvement in our sleep will help to improve our mental health. And that it's a dose relationship. So the more you improve your sleep, the better your mental health is. It's extraordinary, isn't it? Because I always think sleep feels really feels really passive you know it's like you switch off for a minute but actually it's extraordinary it's a very active process really it's just that it's sort of all going on below the surface and when you said poor sleep there go what what constitutes poor sleep how much should we actually be having yeah that's a really good question because i mean if we think about what how much sleep do we need so the average person needs around seven to eight Yeah, that's a really good question. Because I mean, if we think about what, how much sleep do we need? So the average person needs around seven to eight hours. And that's the

how much sleep you need is what we call your biological sleep need. It's determined by your genetics. So the vast majority of us, about 80% of us need that seven to eight hours. But around 97% of us need somewhere between six and nine hours. So you know, if you're getting somewhere between that amount, and the crucial sort of decider is if you are then waking up and feeling refreshed, able to go about the day, your emotions are relatively stable, you know, you're happy, you're able to cope, then that's probably the right amount for you. And that's really important to understand, because a lot of the time we can hear in the press that, oh, I'm meant to be getting eight hours, but actually, you might be one of those individuals who just needs a little bit less

so it's just you know use that as a measure do I wake up feeling refreshed. That's really nice and so we talked a bit about the mental and emotional side of sleep and what about from our physical health? Sleep is absolutely incredible for our physical health and so if we just run through some of the typical ones, a good place to start would be our immune system. Obviously, we're going through a global pandemic and sleep is fundamental to helping us boost our immunity. And so it's helping to produce antibodies which protect us against invading pathogens

and viruses, et cetera. And so getting a good night's sleep is going to sort of help us to ward off coughs and colds. We know there was research which showed that if people were getting less than six hours a night, then their chance of catching the common cold was increased by four and a half times. So we can see that sleep is really important for our immunity. But it also helps with things like it helps to improve the health of our heart, helps to lower our blood pressure. It helps to even wash our brains of toxins every night. And this is absolutely beautiful research, which came out probably about a decade ago now, where they

discovered this glymphatic system in our brain, whereby these small channels increase in diameter during the night by about 60% flushing out all of the neurotoxins, sort of chemicals that have built up during the day as a product of sort of doing what we're doing now, sort of just thinking, you know, sort of being creative, etc. And that flushing out helps to, in the long term, they believe, to lower our risk of dementia and Alzheimer's. So what's happening when we sleep to allow all these processes to happen? So I think touching on what you said a moment ago about, you know, when we look at sleep from an external perspective, it is just this sort of relatively inactive, you know, boring kind

of activity. And it does need a little bit of a PR sort of promotion, because it is, you know, sort of boring kind of activity. And it does need a little bit of a, you know, a PR sort of promotion, because it is, you know, inside we are experiencing various, you know, sleep stages. We've obviously got different types of sleep. We've got light, deep sleep, deep sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, and we have different cycles. So we cycle repeatedly through these different stages throughout the night. And what's happening with each one of those different sleep stages, they have different functions, whether that be for the more what we call slow wave or non-rapid eye movement sleep, they play a big role in growth and repair. So at the beginning of the night, we'll get this big increase in a growth hormone, which helps to grow and repair our bones, for example. That's why in children, they obviously have a big surge in it because they've

got so much of that happening. But in the second part of the night where we've got much more REM sleep, for example, that's where we're getting a lot of the psychological and emotional repair. So we're getting a lot of the memory processing. Memories are getting sorted from sort of short-term to long-term memory. We're getting the stresses that we've experienced are getting diffused as well. So it's what we ultimately want to do. When we talk about good quality sleep, we're talking about getting complete cycles of light, deep REM, light, deep REM. So all of these incredible biological processes can occur to enable us to ready

ourselves to be brilliant the next day. And do we need regularity in that, as in to go to bed and wake up at a similar time every day. Absolutely. So there are two key drivers of sleep. And one of them is our internal body clock. And that's what you're talking about there. So we've got this incredible piece of biological machinery. It's 20,000 clock cells located in a part of our brain called our suprachiasmatic nucleus. And this is responsible for keeping every biological process on time. So for example, it regulates our appetite hormones. It also regulates our blood pressure and our heart rate. And it also regulates sleep and wake. So it's telling the brain when to sleep and when to wake. Now, the interesting thing about your internal body clock is that it's kept on time by external

factors, such as when you go to bed and when you get up, but also the rise and fall of the sun. And so what you can see here is if you keep a regular sleep-wake cycle, go to bed and when you get up, but also the rise and fall of the sun. And so what you can see here is if you keep a regular sleep-wake cycle, go to bed and get up at the same time, you know, sort of seven days a week if you can, then that is possibly one of the simplest but most powerful health-providing, not just sleep-benefiting behaviours that you can do, because it helps to anchor that relationship between your body clock and all the hormones and everything else which is happening to create good sleep and then to create, you know, sort of great alertness and wakefulness in the morning. So yeah, regularity is brilliant. And do you feel, I think you just

said that it's such a simple but incredibly powerful tool. Do you feel that sleep's one of actually the most underrated tools that we have for ourbeing. It is the most underrated. Yeah. I'm really pleased that in recent years, we've certainly seen more and more people becoming aware of sleep and its importance. And, you know, we're now sitting on the back of two decades of incredible research where we're now really understanding it. But as far as I'm concerned, as far as the sort of the pillars of health, so obviously we've got nutrition, we've got our mental health, we've got movement, and we've got sleep. I would say, well, actually, I would say sleep is the bedrock to all of those. If you want to improve your eating habits or manage your weight, etc. If you want to sort of improve your mental health,

if you want to improve your exercise, make sure you've got that bedrock of good sleep, because so much is happening during that night time, which is going to facilitate the process of the others. Everything I've come across has said exactly that. And I think it's so interesting. And am I right in saying that research is showing that that if you're having that really poor sleep, that sort of sub six hours, that you are going to crave less healthy foods, that you are going to find it difficult to find that motivation. So I think we're so quick to kind of turn it on ourselves and say, well, I don't have the willpower to follow through on these things that are good for my health and my wellbeing. But actually, a lot of it's actually biological. And if you don't have that foundation, in the long run, it's basically going to be really up against you to implement the other things you need for

wellbeing. Absolutely. And I like that up against you. It's kind of like, you know, if you're starting the day feeling absolutely shattered, then it's just this huge sort of uphill struggle. It's an obstacle. And, you know, I'm always getting asked, well, you know, should you go to the gym early, for example, because should you cut your sleep short and go to the gym early? And I go, it's always contextual to the individual, because if that individual is in a really great, well-rested state, and they've got great nutrition and lots of healthy habits, then actually doing that every once in a while isn't going to be a problem at all. But if they're already in a sort of a sleep deprived, nutrient deficient, you know,

stress state, that's just going to cause extra sort of stress on the system, inflammation, etc. so it's about you know making sure that sleep is there so you then can move forwards thank you so much for that guy it's it's actually just incredibly inspiring to know that something that feels simple like sleep is such a building block for our well-being and that there's actually lots of simple things we can do to to sleep better every day and to know why that may really, really change how we feel and our vitality. And if that has been helpful, we also have some brilliant, brilliant sleep content on our app, Feel Better, alongside our mindfulness,

our exercise and our recipe content. So you'll find all four pillars of health there. It's called Feel Better by Delicious Cielo. If you don't have it at the moment and you'll find all four pillars of health there it's called feel better by delicious cielo if you don't have it at the moment and you'll find it on the app store on google play or you can just sign up on our website delicious cielo.com and we will see you back here next wednesday for another bite-sized episode have a lovely day everyone Thank you. Ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com.