Sleep and mental health

So we're going to talk about sleep. We have a normal circadian rhythm so we have a normal sleep-wake cycle and this sleep-wake cycle can affect other hormones in our body and so it's really important that we stick with a good sleep-wake cycle as much as we possibly can. Research has shown that people with a really poor sleep pattern, so they've done research and they've taken a bunch of people and they've looked at their sleep habits and those that have poorer sleep habits are more likely to develop poor mental health a year or two down the track. So sleep is so important for resilience and we all know if you have a terrible night's sleep you're less resilient, you don't cope as well, but it goes much deeper than that and actually it increases inflammation in your body if you're not sleeping well, your cortisol levels, your stress hormones increase if you don't sleep very well. You want good cortisol levels in the morning but they should decrease as the day goes on so that when it's time for you to go to sleep your body's relaxed and you can actually get off to sleep. So sleep is incredibly important for good mental health and I really want to emphasise that it's one of the core things that we know impacts how we feel. So often when we're not feeling very energetic and we just want to lie in bed and watch Netflix and we stay up quite late or we stay up till two o'clock in the morning because it's, I don't know, it's what we do and we want to avoid doing things or we don't want to think about it, we can't sleep so we watch telly or whatever, but actually it's very disruptive to our brain state and to the hormone state as well.