The Wellness Scoop - Bite-Sized: Why You Can’t Sleep When You’re Stressed

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

We’re joined by Guy Meadows, physiologist and leading sleep expert, to discuss how stress impacts our sleep and the small practical tools we can implement to manage stress and sleep better.   Here���s a brief recap: Why stress impacts our ability to fall and stay asleep The nervous system and sleep How to manage everyday stress to sleep better Chronic stress and sleep How sleep helps us to manage stress Small, daily habits for better quality sleep The power of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for sleep   Guy Meadows: ‘The Sleep Book: How to Sleep Well Every Night’ https://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, so far this month with our bite-sized episodes, we've looked at why sleep is such an important foundation for our health. The links between what we eat, in particular things like caffeine and alcohol, and the times of which we eat and our sleep. And this week I wanted to look a little bit more at the mental side and really, really delving into stress.

And Guy, I wondered if we could kick off with what the links are between our stress levels and our sleep. I think the easiest way of explaining it is most of us will understand that when we feel stressed, we are pushed into a state of fight or flight. So we have increased alertness levels, we have increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, you know, all of those factors. And if we think about the purpose of our fight or flight response, it's ultimately to protect us from danger. So I've got this phrase, which is, you know, you never see anyone fall asleep running away from a bear. The point behind that, obviously, is it didn't make survival sense. And so, you know, if you're in that sort of fight or flight state, well, then you're the complete opposite end of the spectrum than when it comes to sort of trying to achieve sleep. And so if we bring it back to what every, you know, we all experience, if you've had a stressful day at work, we might have the physical symptoms of stress. So we might have that increased heart rate. We might be overwhelmed with stressful feelings.

We might feel anxious or, you know, other strong emotions. But then we also have the mental side of it, that psychological side. We can have, it might just be a busy mind. You know, we're just busily thinking about everything we've got to do. But more often than not, we've got a worrisome mind. You know, we're worrying about that conversation we had earlier with a work colleague, or we're projecting forward thinking about, sort of what's going to happen tomorrow when I've got to speak to that client or whatever it may be and we actually know that you know a busy racing mind is one of the biggest obstacles that stops people from sleeping and stress can not only delay our sleep onset but it also wakes us up it causes us to experience

lighter unrefreshing sleep etc so yeah it's a it's it's not good for sleep and is the fundamental thing there that you're for one better word in the wrong state of your nervous system and you need to switch from that sympathetic back to the parasympathetic because otherwise your body just as you said it thinks it's running away from a bear it doesn't understand that actually it is okay to sleep yeah absolutely it is. It is that sort of simple. We're in a state of sympathetic dominance and we need to shift into that sort of more parasympathetic dominant state where we are resting and relaxing. We're digesting. We are growing and repairing, you know, sort of it's helping to boost our immunity. And I was liking those two systems. Like if you're a car you know the sympathetic system is the accelerator the parasympathetic system is the

brake you can't put both at the same time you know they work only in isolation so you have to switch off your sympathetic in order to allow your parasympathetic to go forward and now if you've had a really stressful day you've probably been much more in that stress response much more in your sympathetic nervous system and then you get home and you're still feeling pretty stressed and it gets to nine o'clock and you do say a meditation and you really try and switch on that parasympathetic nervous system that's that sense of calm is that enough to then help you go to sleep and sleep well? Or does the effect of stress all day continue into the night in the way that coffee has a half-life and a quarter-life, for example? Yeah, so if we look at what's the major hormone driving a stress response, well, that's cortisol.

But we do know that cortisol can take one to two hours to leave the body. So, you know, if it's 9pm and you're beginning to run through a great wind down routine and you've got all of that sort of prepped, whether it be you do some stretching, you do some gratitudes, you do some meditation, you've got a good bedtime routine, you've got the bedroom environment, everything's sort of moving you towards being able to activate that parasympathetic nervous system, then there's no reason why you can't sort of calm yourself down into a state which is going to allow sleep to arrive. It becomes a little bit more complicated if you're suffering from chronic stress, whereby the hormone release of cortisol has just kind of just become stuck. So rather than it sort of going

up and then going down, it's kind of just gone up and stayed up. Or if you're suffering from chronic insomnia as well. So those factors make it a little bit more challenging. That's where having really good habits. And this is what we do at the Sleep School is we teach people to retrain their brain how to sleep over time. It's about the implementation of healthy sleep habits over a period of time. We have a 30-day chronic insomnia course, for example, and a 30-day sleep essentials course. By establishing small little habits over time, you're going to retrain it over a long period of time. Good sleep doesn't just happen overnight. It's nice knowing though that if you've just had a stressful day as opposed to being in a constant state of stress, that actually

if you can start say two hours before bed by switching off work or whatever it was that was causing the stress that actually you can get your body into a state where you're able to sleep and that and that cortisol and that stress doesn't have such an effect but is it also right in saying a little bit like what we're talking about with diet that it's a bit of a catch-22 though which is that if your cortisol is really high and you're not sleeping well that then when you don't sleep well you actually end up making more cortisol and it all becomes harder and harder. Yeah, fortunately, sleep is incredible for helping us to manage our levels of stress and it helps us to wake up more resilient to stress and it preserves our prefrontal cortex. So we're able to sort of manage stressful situations that

come along the day. If we get caught up in that unhelpful situation whereby we're experiencing poor sleep, then it will just sort of underpin that everyday resilience that we want to be able to manage stress. And then that can come around. But I can't suggest enough the power of just activating small daily healthy sleep habits. Because often what people will do is they'll get caught up in the sort of the, overwhelmed quite rightly by the stress of the situation. And, you know, this isn't going to help. But actually it's amazing if you can just, you know, make one small healthy habit,

which could be, I'm just going to, you know, do a simple breath-based meditation. Or I'm going to darken down my room before bed. Or I'm going to do some gentle stretching. And if you repeat it every single day, often what happen is your your brain will learn okay we're doing that thing again and that thing helps us to have better sleep and so it's almost like you you build up all of these great tiny little habits which lead to better sleep and I think if you view it in that way rather than just trying to do one big transformational change, it's going to be easier. And does it become easier over time to switch from the stressful dominance to a calmer

parasympathetic nervous system? Like if you keep practicing the meditations or the breath work, or the stretching or whatever practice it is that resonates with you to try at the end of the day to wind down and lower that cortisol, those stress hormones. Does it become easier over time? Does your body get better at it? Absolutely. That's one of the really exciting things about where we are at the moment that we've got incredible neuroscience, for example. So what we know is if someone sort of decided, okay, I'm going to do a little bit of meditation. So what we do at Sleep School is within our app, we have lots of guided meditations, which they're not designed to listen to this and fall asleep. It's about teaching people how to respond effectively

to the stress that's showing up and to have that really positive relationship with being awake rather than forcing themselves to sleep. But what we know is if they regularly do that type of meditation, then that alters the complete structure of the brain. They get an increase in their prefrontal cortex and they get an increase in the volume of it, but also in the neural dominance that it has over areas such as your default mode network, which is that sort of monkey mind, that mental chatter area. So we can absolutely see that, you know,

regular practice will be able to affect you at a neuronal level, but also on a physiological level as well. Your sympathetic nervous system will be less reactive so you'll end up producing you know sort of less cortisol in response to stress. So for anyone who is struggling a little bit with their stress levels or with anxiety low mood actually really looking at sleep as a foundation here is is incredibly important. Absolutely when it comes to what tools do I need to help me manage stress better during the day, focusing on getting good sleep is absolutely crucial. And I think as

we spoke about before, it's not about trying to get an instant change. But if you can just factor in, okay, I'm going to go to bed and get up at the same time. In the long term, that's going to have a big impact. If it's going to be, I'm going to get 30 minutes extra sleep. We know that that has a big impact. So you can do these really small behavioral changes. You know, I'm going to, instead of being on Instagram before going to bed, I'm going to read off a print book with a dimmed side lamp, you know simple things all of them add them together and that will begin to come through and promote better quality sleep that's brilliant so as a final question looking at stress and sleep for anyone listening who is really struggling with

that at the moment and they're going to bed every night with that racing mind with that overwhelming sense of stress is there something that they could start doing from now that might help them absolutely so what we have done at sleep school is we've pioneered use of a behavioral therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy which is a newer form of of cbt cognitive behavior therapy and the biggest challenge you know if we take a sort of a racing mind we get get into bed, our mind is racing. The natural response is we want to sort of suppress, block, avoid, you know, and you've probably been there. We've all been there. What happens is the opposite.

Your thoughts come back in stronger, bigger. They invite their friends in with them as well. And suddenly you're even more awake. And that's even more frustrating. And what ACT does, which is very unique, is it recognises that actually it's often our struggle to get rid of the thoughts which actually sort of cultivates them and so it teaches us to increase our present moment awareness and openness and willingness to experience them as they're occurring so if we were to take you know that typical scenario you're lying in bed sort of your mind is racing all over the place a simple way to start is to notice the sense of physical contact between your body and the bed. So we talk about this as getting out of your head and into

your bed. So you might just notice, okay, where can I feel the body touching my bed? I can feel the duvet, you know, sort of on my toes. I can feel the mattress on my back. I can feel the pillow on my face. And that's just helping people to ground their attention in the moment, you know, and thoughts might be coming in. Yeah, but if I don't sleep, tomorrow is going to be a disaster or whatever it is. And it's about sort of going, okay, well, thanks, mind for that. But I'm just going to allow you to pass. And you might then sort of choose to connect with another present moment anchor, such as your breath. And again, we're not doing this. And this is a really crucial part about what ACT prescribes is that we're not doing this to control sleep. So we know that sleep is a natural biological process that we can't

control. And the more we try to control it, the more awake we become. So what we're doing is we're just doing it to be here, you know, in the moment, open to what's showing up. So again, we might notice our breath. And we're hopefully using that as an anchor for our attention, whilst also getting used to sort of watching these thoughts come and go and go okay yeah there's a work thought you know there's a family thought there's a finance thought there's a health thought and we're sort of allowing them to pass and actually what I was just doing there was that labeling that's also a really sort of powerful tool is that we can begin to label those those thoughts so if our thoughts are very much around work rather than sort of getting caught in the thought as soon as we notice it we can say I'm noticing my mind telling me the work thoughts again and that's

really powerful because the moment you say I'm noticing my mind you've shifted your perspective you're looking at it well that's really powerful because it means that it's not you it's your mind which is telling you it so there's that sort of mental separation and then I've heard you speak a lot about kindness and compassion. And, you know, often actually just you might want to add on to there. So I'm noticing my mind telling me the work thoughts. Thanks, mind. And adding a little thank you in there is a sort of a it's almost like a compassionate note to say, I understand that you're just doing what you're designed to do. My thinking mind has evolved to look out for danger. And, you know,

we've got these absolutely incredible 24-7, you know, worrying machines in our heads. And so when we can sort of say, thanks, mind, we're kind of acknowledging that it's just doing its job. But actually, just in this moment, I'm going to come back to now, and I'm just going to rest in bed. And we're doing that to achieve what we call a state of quiet restful wakefulness which ultimately it's the stage preceding sleep and it's the complete opposite than you know so if you're lying in bed struggling and you know switching on your phone and scrolling through getting up and running around the house all of that pushes you into active wakefulness it's absolutely fascinating this and i think it's partly because over the last sort of decade or so working in this space it's been so interesting to see you know what types of different mindfulness meditation these

practices that allow you to be more present were kind of once sidelined as a bit woo-woo a bit alternative and now all this amazing science is being established about how important you know even just sleep is for us and how powerful these practices are for that and sleep underpins almost our kind of entire foundation of health and it's really exciting to see and and so appreciate you sharing that because I think it's also a very practical and helpful tool which I'm sure some of our listeners will probably be implementing tonight and that's exactly what I want to talk to you about next week five clear tips for better sleep those simple sleep hygiene habits that we can implement to improve our sleep every day.

Well, thank you guys so much for listening. And thank you so much, Guy. And we will be back again next Wednesday. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts, offering host endorsements, or run a pre-produced 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

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