How Better Sleep Is Transforming My Life | Dan’s Journey Back to Health and Fitness (Pt. 5)

In this episode, I'm going to be talking about the importance of sleep for well-being and longevity, how we can improve it, what positively and negatively impacts sleep, what the four stages of sleep are, whether we all need a similar amount, and if you can actually have too much sleep. Hopefully, it'll be interesting enough to keep you awake. I'll also give you an update on my journey to health and fitness. Yes, I do always go to bed in a GCN t-shirt with jeans on. Not that long ago, it used to be a badge of honor to get by on minimal sleep. Since many of the publicly known examples of that were incredibly successful people, often world leaders, it sent out a message that sleep was for wimps. Thankfully, that attitude has changed for the most part, largely due to a heap of research that has shown the importance of sleep and the dire consequences of not getting enough. However, as a species, we are sleeping less now than ever before. To kick things off, I'm going to explain what happens when you sleep. There are four stages of sleep that on a good night, you cycle through four or five times. Stages one and two are the lightest. It's in the second of those that your body temperature starts to fall, as well as your heart rate, breathing rate, brain activity, and blood pressure. The third stage of sleep is much deeper. This is where your body releases growth hormone, which is vital for our bones and muscles to repair and grow tissue. That's important for everyone, of course, but particularly if you're an active person, because this is where you repair the damage that you've done through exercise, hopefully then leading to improvements in strength and fitness. During the third stage, it's very difficult for you to be woken. If you are, you're going to feel quite groggy. That is why it's recommended that you keep any daytime naps to half an hour or less, so you don't reach that deep phase of sleep. The fourth and final stage of sleep is REM, or rapid eye movement. There's a good reason for that name. In this stage of your sleep, our eyes dart back and forth and our brain is actually really active. It's in this part of sleep that we have the most dreams, but the reason that we tend not to act out those dreams is because our body is rendered temporarily immobile during REM. It's basically paralyzed. Now, this part of sleep is the most essential for the brain, helping functions like memory and learning. New findings over the last couple of decades have shown that it's here where we effectively hit the save button on anything that we've learned during that day. Most REM sleep occurs in the second half of the night. It's during that stage of sleep that your breathing becomes more erratic and your heart rate and blood pressure levels are very similar to when you're awake. During sleep, your glymphatic system clears the brain of waste products that have built up during the day. It's kind of like your brain's own deep clean. How does it do it? During the non-REM stage of sleep, the gaps between your brain cells get larger, which then allows fluid to travel between them and flush out any rubbish. It's incredibly clever if you allow it to be. If you fail to get enough sleep, you're going to miss out on some of these very important functions. In adults, a lack of sleep has been associated with a wide range of negative health consequences, including cardiovascular problems, higher risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes, impaired thinking and memory, and mental health problems like depression and anxiety. Poor sleep can also increase your risk of strokes and Alzheimer's. Men who sleep four to five hours per night have far lower levels of testosterone than men who sleep seven to nine hours. When you hear the potential consequences, it's generally enough to persuade you to start prioritizing your sleep. If you want more, I've got it for you now. A 2014 US study looked at the effects of the clocks going forward in spring and the clocks going back in the autumn or fall on rates of heart attacks. Over three years, there were an average of 24% more heart attacks on the Monday after the clocks go forward and we get an hour less sleep, but 21% fewer heart attacks on the Monday after the clocks go back and we get an hour more sleep. Other studies have shown that the clocks going back led to increased incidence of strokes, road traffic accidents, and even suicides. I'll move on now to tell you all of the benefits of sleep. Sleep affects every aspect of our physical, emotional, and cognitive abilities. There's almost nothing that sleep doesn't influence. If we get it right, enhance. It promotes growth, it helps weight management, it keeps your immune system strong, helps heart health, attention span, memory, and it can even reduce your risk of injury. It promotes learning both by helping you save the things that you've learned the day before, but also by preparing your brain to soak up anything you're about to learn the following day. The next question is, how much sleep do we need to get these benefits? This is another of those, it depends question. It depends on your age, genetics, levels of exercise, and even your environment. As a basic guideline, it's recommended that children five and younger get 10 to 16 hours of sleep per day, 12 hours if you're between six and 12, and 10 hours if you're a teenager. Most adults require between seven and nine hours of sleep per night, but there are exceptions. Some need 10, whilst others only need six to get all the benefits of sleep and none of the consequences of not getting enough. We all know the difference between how we feel after a good or a bad night's sleep though, so trial and error over the years should be enough to give you a good indication of what is ideal for you. Can you sleep too much? According to some studies, yes. A little surprisingly, the consequences of sleeping too much are quite similar to those of not getting enough, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease amongst them. That said, there are some nuances to those findings, and most sleep experts would say it's unusual for anybody of healthy mind and body to be oversleeping. Now, before I get on to how you can improve your sleep, I really think it's important to acknowledge that not everybody is in a position to get great sleep every single night. That's just the reality of life. Some things just get in the way. Parenthood is obviously a big one. Night shift workers, they're going to struggle to be as consistent as other people. You might be on regular long-haul flights, or you might live in a noisy area. There are just a lot of limiting factors that can be out of our control during certain periods of our lives. With that in mind, I'll go through a few things that we can try to do to try and improve our sleep. Firstly, make it a priority. If you don't care about your sleep, you're not going to be very good at it. If you want to get good at cycling, for example, you'll focus on going out riding and getting better at it. It's the same with anything, and that includes sleep. If you really want to get better at it, you probably will. One of the biggest ways to improve your sleep is to have consistent bedtimes and wake times. Again, not possible for everyone, but I was certainly in the camp of changing at the weekends, staying up a bit later in the evenings, then having a lie-in. I'm finding that's a hard habit to change, if I'm honest. However, there is clear evidence that consistent sleep and wake times lead to better results. When I say consistent, I mean a range of around an hour. What you do or don't do ahead of sleep also has a large bearing on its quality. Ideally, you want to allow your brain to wind down ahead of going to bed, so less stimulation of the brain with emails, social media, horror movies, etc. Again, that's something I need to make improvements on, although I don't tend to watch much horror movies. It is also beneficial to most people to avoid heavy meals close to bedtime. Most sleep experts will recommend having around three hours between your last big meal and your bedtime, but at the same time, you might find that being hungry prevents you from falling asleep. This is something that we need to experiment with for ourselves to find the sweet spot again. Beyond emails and social media, we also want to avoid other stimulants such as caffeine or alcohol. Alcohol has a massively detrimental effect on my sleep quality. I'll show you an example later on with some data. With caffeine, there does appear to be a case-by-case basis. Some people can have a post-dinner double espresso and have no problems at all falling asleep, but for most, it's best to stop caffeine intake at around midday. Again, this is something we can all experiment with to see what works for us. It's also recommended that we avoid caffeine for an hour or so after we've woken up. One of the biggest ways to improve sleep is to plan your light exposure. That doesn't just mean at night, but also in the morning. Your circadian rhythm or body clock responds to light. At the end of the day, when the exposure starts to decrease to light, the brain begins producing more melatonin, which is a hormone that helps with sleep. Once it sees light again, that production of melatonin stops. Whilst it might not be obvious, getting out in the daylight within 30 to 60 minutes of waking, even if it's an overcast day, can really improve how you sleep many hours later at night. If it's sunny, you can get out there for five minutes, but you can double that if it's overcast. Yes, it does need to be outside rather than looking at the light through a window. No, you can't just stand outside looking down at your phone. At the other end of the day, ideally, you want to start dimming the lights in your house for an hour or so before you head to bed. Once you do go to bed, it's best to sleep in a pitch black room. Again, I know that's not possible for everybody. We don't have curtains in our bedroom at home. I use an eye mask, which is apparently almost as good and definitely a lot less expensive than blinds. On the subject of smartphones, more recent research has shown that the blue light they emit is probably not enough to seriously affect your sleep. Rather, it's the stimulation of what you're watching or what you're reading that is more likely to have a negative impact on your sleep, so it's still a consideration. Something else that you can do with light is stand outside for a few minutes as the sun is setting later in the day. That basically helps signal to your body that it's near the end of the day and also protects you a little bit against the negative effect of artificial light before you go to bed. The temperature of your room could be another consideration. Again, that's something that not all of us can control as much as we would like, but the ideal temperature for most people is just over 18 degrees Celsius or 65 degrees Fahrenheit. There are certain sleep aids in the form of mattress covers that can regulate things for you, but they are quite expensive and they're not something that I've ever personally tried. In terms of exercise, it is best to get exercise done earlier in the day if that's possible. The later in the day you exercise, the more revved up your body and brain is going to be before bed. That is a minor point though, as I know many of you will only get time to exercise in the evenings, and we all know how important exercise is to longevity. Finally, supplements. The general consensus is that you should steer clear of sleeping pills unless your doctors advise you to take them, but there are a few natural substances that have been shown to aid sleep. Magnesium L-3 and 8 is one of those, around 500 milligrams half an hour before bed. Another is an amino acid which is called glycine, where around two grams is suggested at the same time. Just lastly, you might be wondering whether to invest in a sleep tracker. Again, it depends question. The massive benefit of tracking your sleep is that you can see which habits have a positive effect and which have a negative effect. If you decide to experiment with anything that I've just talked about in this video, it's a brilliant way to measure whether or not those changes are having the desired effect. Personally, I love data. I like to see how good or bad my sleep was. I also like to experiment with things to see if I can make it better. On the other hand, if you're the sort of person who's going to get anxious thinking about whether or not you're going to have a good or a bad sleep, it might be something to steer clear of because anxiety is going to hinder sleep. I will finish with a personal update on my own journey to health and fitness. I'll start with that example of what alcohol consumption does to my sleep. This woof measures how much deep sleep I've had, how much was REM, how much was light sleep, and how long I wasn't actually sleeping at all, even if I wasn't consciously awake. I already gave an example of that in my last episode, but here's another one from last weekend. We had friends staying down, so I stayed up a bit later than normal and had a few beers, probably seven or eight beers in total. I had seven and a half hours in bed, which is already less than normal, but for two whole hours, I wasn't in any of the useful stages of sleep. My heart rate was significantly higher than normal in the 60s or high 50s for the most part versus the 40s or low 50s I'd normally have. My breathing rate was 15 per minute versus the 12.5 to 13 it would be on an alcohol-free night. As such, my recovery score was very low. I've certainly had worse sleeps, and actually, my REM and deep sleep scores weren't too bad, but it's not something I should be doing too often. It left me in sleep debt ahead of the start of the working week, so I was feeling pretty tired on Monday. Now, it's not been that long since my last episode, so I haven't got a huge amount to update in terms of how things are going, but I went on holiday for a week, so things have slipped a little bit. I did go to the gym a few times. I did a couple of runs, but I was less consistent than I have been for the most part since I started this journey. I drank most days of that week and slipped back into using those nicotine pouches every single day, but we all need a holiday to relax and to switch off. At least, that's what I'm telling myself. The thing was, I actually looked forward to getting back to work, not necessarily for the work aspect, don't tell my bosses, but to get back into a good routine of exercise and sleep and dog walks, et cetera, around my working day. I've also got a slight shoulder injury at the moment and tennis elbow, so I've had a week or so away from the gym to try and allow them to heal, but that's the great thing about this new goal I've got. It's not specific to an event or to a date. If I'm injured from the gym, I can do some running or riding. If I've got a twinge from running, I can just focus more on the gym. What I'll do if I have an injury from both is a different matter, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Anyway, you can follow everything I'm doing over on my Strava account, just search for Daniel Lloyd. I hope you found this episode informative. Sleep is not the most exciting of subjects, but it's certainly one of the most important aspects of our lives to get right if we want to perform at our best. If you've got any advice or tips for me, let me know in the comments below. As ever, if you think there's anything in this video that would help someone you know, please share this with them. I'll be back soon with another episode, possibly a deep dive on the effects of alcohol. You never know, I might frighten myself enough to cut it out altogether. See you then.