How to get your best nights sleep What in the World podcast BBC World Service

Hey guys! How did you sleep last night? Were you out like a light as soon as your head hit the pillow or was it a bit more tossing and turning with those racing thoughts? We've all been there. Well experts have been looking into the different stages of sleep for a really long time and it turns out there actually might be more stages of sleep than we originally thought. That's what we're getting into in today's episode. We're finding out what happens to our bodies when we go to sleep, why some people find it harder than others to get to sleep and some advice on how to get a better night's sleep as well. I'm Mikra Farooq and this is What's in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm here with Caroline Steele who has been looking into all of the science behind the sleep. She's the gal who's in the know. First off Caroline, how did you sleep last night? Not very well. It maybe took me like an hour and a half to fall asleep and then I woke up hot so I opened the window and then I got woken up by birds and then the bins being collected. So not a disaster but I'm not feeling my best. Oh no, sorry to hear that. Well how do you normally sleep? What kind of sleeper are you? I take a long time to fall asleep and then if I wake up I take a long time to fall back asleep. So I'd say in general I'm a bad sleeper and I kind of feel I'm constantly on a quest to work out how to fall asleep better but I'm not very good at it. I feel like I can pretty much lie my head down anywhere and I'll get to sleep. It's a bit of a skill, I don't mean to brag. I'm so jealous. And you fall asleep on a train, that's what I'm always really jealous of, people who put their head in their hands. Kind of embarrassing sometimes as well. Okay so you're the opposite of me. If I want to fall asleep I have to have this eye mask, I have to have ear plugs as well. I take these with me everywhere I go and I use a lamp to wake me up in the morning that sort of mimics sunrise and I feel like that maybe helps. Why is there such a difference sometimes then? Some people finding it much harder than others to get to sleep. There's lots of different reasons. It's partly a genetic lottery. So there are thousands of different genes which influence how easily we do or don't fall asleep. So it's partly kind of the hand you're dealt when you're born. It's also down to feeling safe. So if you don't feel safe in that moment it's really hard to fall asleep. So if you imagine trying to fall asleep with your front door wide open that would be hard right? But it's also down to how safe you felt as a child. Some research shows that if you felt unsafe or were neglected as a child you can become wired to be super alert which is a really useful adaptation if you're growing up in an unsafe environment. But when you're older, you're safe, you're tired and you just want to sleep well it's not so helpful. And it's also down to our mental health you know if you're more anxious, if you've got sort of more racing thoughts that's also been shown to keep you up at night. There is a lot of different factors affecting the quality of the sleep. I wanted to talk a little bit about the science behind all of this and what actually happens to our bodies when we go to sleep. What do we know about that? Yeah so it's quite hard to study sleep. We don't know everything but we do know that there is a collection of brain cells, a collection of neurons in the hypothalamus which is part of the brain that's sort of responsible for regulating our body function and they're synchronised with the outside world. So they're synchronised with when it's light and dark outside and during the day when it's light they're more active and they do things like increasing your heart rate, increasing your body temperature and then at night they calm down a bit, they become less active, your heart rate decreases, your body temperature decreases, all sort of in preparation for you falling asleep. And then there's also this really interesting chemical called adenosine which basically builds up in your brain as you're awake, as your brain cells are hard at work they make adenosine and adenosine sort of gives you this pressure and need to fall asleep and luckily once you do fall asleep your brain sort of clears it and you wake up the next day feeling refreshed. But yeah it's down to the build-up of adenosine and these incredible cells in your brain that are synchronised with the outside world. All right well we've been finding out what happens to the body when we don't get enough sleep. Jonathan Tam is a sleep doctor, an expert, he sent us this, let's have a listen. You don't sleep during the night, you can't process the things you've done during the day, you can't lay down the memories of the new things that you've done and you may be more affected by any traumatic experiences that have happened. We know sleep is important for our immune system so if you don't get it you may not be able to throw off those pesky colds as easily and you may not respond to vaccines as well. During the day toxins can build up in our brain, these are removed during sleep and there's some evidence to suggest that if they're not we may be more at risk for conditions like Alzheimer's disease later in life. Quite apart from all of this your brain knows just how important sleep is and if you don't get it one night then the next day it will make you feel exhausted to encourage you to get more. I know that you recently went to a sleep lab right, what happened there, what what did you go through? So I went to a sleep lab in Cardiff in Wales which was really really interesting, they sort of have all these rooms which are sort of designed for a perfect night's sleep, they've got no windows so there's no light to wake you up, they're at the perfect temperature so everything's sort of in favour of you falling asleep apart from the fact that they put electrodes on your scalp which isn't super comfortable so I sort of had a cap with electrodes attached to the skin on my scalp to monitor my brain as I was falling asleep and so they're sort of looking for two things in particular, they're looking for alpha waves which are a sign that you're conscious and aware so when your alpha waves sort of disappear it shows that you're falling asleep and they're also looking for signs of rapid eye movement which is one of the stages of sleep so it can sort of tell you at what stage of sleep you are. Unfortunately I didn't fall asleep. Oh no, I was going to say you must have fallen asleep, you're in a sleep lab. I didn't fall asleep which was yeah really frustrating, I think the added pressure of being like I'm in a sleep lab, I want to learn about my brain when I'm asleep, I must fall asleep, I just sort of lay there really frustrated but I got to see my sort of brain graph afterwards which was really interesting, I could see the alpha waves becoming more spaced out and sort of less frequent as I was sort of drifting off but then I'd suddenly jolt back awake and the alpha waves would be back so yeah it was a very frustrating experience. Yeah oh my gosh but we heard about those sleep stages there with the REM stage as well, I wondered if you could talk me through that a little bit more because there could be more sleep stages than we thought right? Yeah so it's sort of generally accepted that there are four stages of sleep, there's light sleep, deeper sleep, the deepest sleep and then REM sleep, that's the rapid eye movement sleep which is what happens when you're sort of dreaming and your eyes are darting all over the place and we sort of cycle through those stages about once every 90 minutes but I interviewed a scientist from the University of Oxford who's looked at people asleep in MRI scanners and he thinks there could be as many as 19 different stages of sleep, yeah which is really interesting and he thinks we don't sort of necessarily go through them one after the other so we don't go one, two, three, four, five, six, we could go stage four, stage nine, stage 12, stage two and that there's sort of many different routes into sleep but for now sort of more research needed. And what if you enter a different stage at just a much later time than you normally would like for example probably lots of listeners can relate coming back from a night out at 3am, do we know what happens to the body then, does it go into a certain stage or what happens? Well you'll still, if we're talking about the four stages of sleep you'll still sort of progress through the different stages but if you have to wake up at a certain time it might be that you end up sort of getting yanked out of sleep at say a really deep stage of sleep when you weren't really ready to wake up so as well as getting enough sleep it's great if you can wake up at the right point in your sleep cycle so you don't sort of feel that you know when your alarm goes off and it feels really jarring that can be avoided if you can sync up with your sleep cycle and I know you're not an expert but you've been through the journeys, you're still going through the journey, do you have any advice for getting a good night's sleep? What's helped you? Oh there's so many different things you can do I guess it's kind of it's worth working out what it is that's so it could be your environment which is great if you can change it so you want to be in a dark room so if you're not in a dark room get an eye mask like me you want to be in a quiet space if it's not quiet I would recommend using earplugs you want it to be a good temperature so about 19 degrees which I know is really hard if you're somewhere where it's hot and it's summer I'm struggling with that at the moment so I'm using a fan and leaving my window open but with that comes extra noise so it's difficult if you're someone who's kept up by anxiety and racing thoughts it's a good idea to try and do something before bed that will distract you from those so the sort of research shows that you know doing things like reading a book that takes you into another world or chatting to a friend or something like that could really help and then not doing things like drinking caffeine that can make a huge difference so caffeine is incredible it blocks the which is the chemical I mentioned before that sort of builds up and makes us feel tired so it can really help if you're feeling sort of symptoms of sleepiness but then it can stop you falling asleep later so avoiding things like caffeine avoiding alcohol which also disrupts your duration and quality of sleep as well okay well let's bring in the expert on this we've got some sleep tips for you all you heard from Jonathan Tam the sleep doctor a little bit earlier let's bring him back and see what his tips are we can help sleep by trying to help our body clock you can do that by getting up at roughly the same time every day and seeking light when you do but avoiding it later into the evenings you can also get into trouble if you spend a lot of time in bed awake at which point you might start to associate your bed bedroom even the act of trying to sleep with wakefulness so if you are having trouble with your sleep it's important only to go to bed when you start feeling sleepy to not have a rigid bedtime and if you do find yourself lying in bed awake for long periods then simply get up go somewhere else and do something else until you feel sleepy if you're choosing to do other things in the bedroom like reading watching television even working try and take those things somewhere else and save the bedroom for sleep and intimacy with partners but through all of this it's important to recognize that sleep isn't something you can try to do it's something that comes to you and if it doesn't well sometimes you just have to give yourself a bit of slack and let it come to you now a couple of bad nights here and there are part of life but if you find yourself sleeping badly for more than three months it's definitely time to see a doctor so i know you know you went on this personal mission for this documentary has your sleep improved since then have you discovered more about your sleep i've definitely discovered more about my sleep and my sleep has improved but not for probably the reason you'd think it it would so i every morning i wake up i have a coffee and then sort of throughout the day i'll have a couple of decaf coffees i normally have a decaf coffee before bed as well um and i went to replace my coffee pods a couple of weeks ago and i realized that my decaf pod was sat box of pods was sat where my caffeinated pods should be and my caffeinated pods sat where my decaf pods should be so for the last three months and while making this program and while going to the sleep lab i've been waking up having a decaf coffee wondering why i still felt awful and then just before bed drinking caffeine so i'd say really pay attention to to what what coffee you're drinking so yeah since i fixed that i'm sleeping much better but not for any reason other than you know realizing i made a really stupid mistake before oh well at least you got there in the end got there in the end but yeah three months of bad sleep just due to accidentally putting my caffeinated pods in the wrong place oh my gosh caroline thank you so much for coming on chatting all things sleep i learned a lot and i hope you get some good sleep as well thank you i'll try i don't know about you guys but i'm taking notes of all of those sleep tips it's been so useful what's helped you guys get a better night's sleep in the past comment below we're gonna read all of them like and subscribe to you've been watching what in the world from the bbc world service i'm at chrysbrooke and we'll see you guys next time night