Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Hello, I'm John Ryden and you're very welcome to our fourth Work Healthy podcast. Today I'm joined by sleep expert Dr. Els van der Helm to discuss rest and recovery. She explains why she believes the key to a successful life is low sleep debt coupled with high sleep quality, which will allow you deal effectively with all the stresses in your life.
Els explains why just 16 minutes more sleep a night will significantly improve your performance.
I kicked off by asking Els why sleep is so crucial to the human body.
[00:00:45] Speaker C: So I think it's good to start with the fact that sleep is incredibly fundamental to everything.
And I think because it's so fundamental, you see that it just is impact so many other things downstream.
So you can, you know, it kind of ranges from physical health to our mental health and thus also our physical and mental performance, whether it's on the tennis court or how productive you'll be today.
And it's not just about the short term because we also know that good sleep is associated with better long term outcomes. So whether it's your chance of developing dementia, cardiovascular disease or, or even cancer, and of course, don't worry, I'm not talking about your one bad night last night here.
But we do know when people are chronically sleep deprived, they have an increased chance.
I often really compare it to smoking where no, we don't have the experimental results yet because we don't sleep deprive people chronically for research and we can't.
But there's now such an overwhelming amount of data with these correlations that, and kind of supported by experimental work where we do look at healthy individuals and we sleep deprive them and we can look at the mechanisms that are at play that I think it is safe to say, yes, when you are chronically sleep deprived, you are more likely to develop all of these different diseases.
We just don't know which one.
So if you kind of think back again of smoking, we now know that it's associated with a handful of different cancers.
And that's enough reason, right, for everybody to be up in arms about smoking and for governments to really try to discourage smoking. But if you look at sleep deprivation, it's so much more, and it's so much more likely that you will get smoked something from it. So it might be Alzheimer's disease for one individual, while it might be being overweight and type 2 diabetes for another individual, and so on and so on. So I think that's what's so frightening to me. If you think about how chronically sleep Deprived our society is that it's not just a handful of cancers that we're going to have to deal with down the line, but that probably everybody has a weakness and therefore will see the result of that if they don't get good sleep.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: Just to understand what physically is happening in the body when I become unconscious.
[00:03:29] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: What makes so restorative?
[00:03:33] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So if you look at the brain, for instance, and also why it's so fundamental to everything happening in our brain the next day, is that you see that the. And we've only known this since 2013, that one of the main functions of sleep is to clean our brain. So when we are awake during the day, our neurons, they use up or they need to produce energy.
And in this process of producing energy, they have different byproducts. And it turns out that some of these byproducts are toxic in that we can have them in our brain, but we actually need to get rid of them asap.
We used to think that our brain recycled these toxins, but now we know that it's not recycling them, it's actually moving them from our brain to our lymphatic system.
It's a very complicated plumbing system, but it is really like plumbing when we're sleeping.
Our brains, areas that are filled with fluid become larger.
Our neurons almost get squished a bit because of course you have the skull. It's not like the whole brain can just become a bit bigger during sleep. Our neurons become a little bit squished, then these fluid filled areas fill. But also the cells in between our neurons, which are called glia cells, play a really important role in moving and accelerating these.
Trying to think of the right word, the liquids.
So that these liquids basically flush out these toxins. And in our brain, it's called the glymphatic system because it's these glia cells that move it to our lymphatic system.
And we recently discovered that this takes place basically most efficiently during deep sleep. So not just during sleep, but specifically during deep sleep, we have these slow waves. When we look at the electrical activity in deep sleep, which means that all of our neurons are basically synced and they're firing together at the same time. So they fire together and they're silent at the same time, creating these big waves on the eeg.
It turns out that that pulsation is what's helping this cleaning process.
Why this is so fundamental to brain functioning is that when these toxic byproducts are building up, the neurons can't communicate as well. And they can't function as well.
We see that these toxins build up across the day and then go down during a night of sleep in a healthy individual. They build up, it get cleaned up, they build up again, it gets cleaned up again.
This is actually also for the first time that we realize why sleep deprivation might be linked to Alzheimer's disease, because one of these toxic byproduct is also the main culprit in Alzheimer's disease. So that could now for the first time, be a mechanistic explanation as to why chronic sleep deprivation might lead to Alzheimer's disease, for instance. Right. That's just one example of the chronic diseases, but all like this. This cleaning is really everywhere in the brain. So. So it also explains why so many different functionalities deteriorate when we don't get good sleep. And we see this in both IQ and eq. Whether it's our ability to plan and organize, to recognize patterns and kind of a sea of information, whether it's thinking creatively, but also on the EQ side, sleep plays a really important role in our ability to manage our own emotions, our ability to recognize emotions in others, whether it's in their face or in their tone of voice, our ability to show empathy or to trust other people.
So it has all these downstream effects because it's basically impacting every cell in your body.
So that was just the brain. And then you see that too much for this short interview. You see similar processes happening in the body.
Right. When you think about sleep deprivation leads to cardiovascular risk or diseases. Why is that? Well, you already see that after one night of sleep deprivation, our blood pressure goes up. And normally sleep is actually a recovery phase for our cardiovascular system. Which doesn't mean that our heart rate is down the entire night. No, actually it goes up and it becomes much more variable during REM sleep.
But it's really this period of recovery and we see that when we don't get that recovery in all of these different systems, that it goes haywire. That somehow in evolution, we haven't developed a good coping for sleep deprivation.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: That's interesting because, I mean, one of the things I always remember from listening to you previously is that it's not just about quantity, but it's also about quality. And I'd always kind of was. Was thinking about just banging in the hours basically, you know, trying to get desperately get to seven hours and go, hey, I got there. Whereas that's another set of challenges now.
[00:08:53] Speaker C: I know. And. And there's no shortcut. Right. Because of course, all my Clients ask, how can I make do with just five hours of sleep? How am I going to get everything out of those five hours of sleep and really make it high quality? And your brain does this a little bit. So, so when you are sleep deprived, it will make your sleep a bit more efficient, meaning it's gonna cut out a little bit of the light sleep and it's gonna, you know, make sure that prioritizes the deep sleep first.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: It cuts to the chase, does it?
[00:09:23] Speaker C: It cuts to the chase, but nowhere, like nowhere near enough to really help us cope with this long term. Right. So we have a little bit of a short term system that is activated, but it's not something that you can, you know, kind of use multiple days in a row.
So that's, that's, I think, quite interesting that we do that a little bit, but not enough.
So that means that you really need both, you need both the quantity and the quality.
And the quality. There's kind of different, you know, definitions of good sleep quality. You have the definition that we associate with insomnia, meaning you don't have insomnia or you don't have a sleep disorder in that sense. If you can fall asleep within 30 minutes, if when you wake up during the night it's max five minutes, or when you're over 65, it's 10 minutes and don't look at the clock to go and check it, but a rough indication and that you don't wake up too early and that you don't feel tired during the day. So that's, that's kind of a very simplified definition of sleep quality. But.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: Do you think it's good enough to kind of judge the sleep quality based on if I wake up in the morning and I haven't had those struggles during the night and I feel kind of rested, or do I need to be measuring it with some sort of technology to really sort of figure out was that night's sleep or not? Am I a good judge basically?
[00:10:58] Speaker C: Right? No, I think you yourself can be a really good judge. And I think there's something. Criteria. That's the criteria I just said. Then there is the criteria of being able to wake up naturally without an alarm clock and needing the alarm clock is basically a signal that you're not getting enough sleep. And the other one is indeed, not only how do you feel upon awakening, because evening types can take a longer time to kind of feel at their best in the morning, but then also how do you feel during the day? And do you notice that you're basically Grabbing for the hallmark coping tools, which is caffeine, stress. You know, stress doesn't sound like a good coping tool, but it can really help in staying awake and feeling, you know, excited and, you know, not really getting that opportunity to dip down and feel tired, moving, getting light, using your phone for a quick stimulation when you're getting tired.
So I think if you have all that, you don't need an extra tool.
But if you have all that, you probably aren't even interested in improving your sleep because you're sleeping well and you feel fine during the day.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: I'm just interested. You say 30 minutes to go sleep at night. Would you be worried about somebody who goes to sleep within 20 seconds of their head hitting the pillow?
Is that problematic?
[00:12:27] Speaker C: Yeah, it is probably. Well, it's problematic in the sense that maybe you'll still have an amazing night of sleep, but you are more likely to then need an alarm to wake up with if it took you that short to fall asleep.
And what I'd rather have you do is go to bed earlier.
Because if you fall asleep that fast, it's very clear you could have gone to sleep earlier.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:12:52] Speaker C: And gotten more minutes early in the night versus later in the night. And we really don't want to miss our kind of ideal sleep time. Right. So of course you can stay up past your bedtime and then fall asleep within a couple of seconds, but you're not going to get as good sleep as going to bed at your typical time. So, for instance, for me, I have a really good night of sleep if I'm asleep by 10pm, but it probably takes me a bit longer to fall asleep when I go to bed at 9:30 than when I go to bed at 11:00pm but the night of sleep that I'm going to have in terms of quality and how I feel when I wake up is much, much better with hitting sleep at 10:00pm versus 5.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: Okay. It's so interesting, isn't it?
[00:13:43] Speaker C: This is really about timing. I think this is an important point to make that sleep is about a couple of elements. One is how long, Two is sleep quality.
Three is the timing, meaning you need to sleep at the times that work for you, and I need to sleep at the times that work for me. Which means within organizations, you need an understanding of the fact that we're not all the same and that I might be fine with an 8am call, but you might be horrible with an 8am Call because that doesn't fit your biorhythm. And then four is you really need this Consistency because if you're all over the place with your sleep times, your biological clock also can't optimize your sleep. So I just wanted to add that it's kind of the full picture of what's good sleep.
[00:14:32] Speaker A: So moving then to the organizational context of this, obviously, let's say you get data from the organization and it tells you that lots of people aren't getting enough sleep. They're not recovering and they're not energized and coming to work every day bursting with energy.
What's the solution to that?
[00:14:49] Speaker C: Yeah, so a couple of things and that's really, I think as you said earlier too, right? It's really about a transformation within the culture. This is not just about all these individuals behaving differently, but really the organization supporting and carrying that and allowing people to get good sleep.
For that you need a couple of things. First of all, you really need the leaders on board.
It's important to have the leaders on board because they will later role model the right behaviors. If people see other role models doing what they're supposed to do, they're of course much more likely to follow through.
They need awareness and they need knowledge around why, why should I even care about sleep? How does this impact me? What can I get out of it if I do indeed improve my slee?
But then they also need the tools to be able to improve their sleep. And I'm not talking about a nice sleep tracker, but with tools here. I mean indeed the kind of not just oh, what are top five sleep tips? But how am I going to apply this to myself? How am I going to personalize this for myself and then be able to implement it.
Finally within the organization you need policies to back this up and that can have a really wide range whether it's indeed about the scheduled work hours. For those who really have scheduled work hours to be tailored to their individual biorhythm so that they can really perform and sleep at their best.
But it's also here about leaders actually having incentives to boost the well being of their team. And not just oh, you know, it's something we really do. But then when all the deadlines hit, it is going to be more important that you know, the result is being met versus also managing the well being of the team. Because you know, I think there's often this perceived tension between well being and the organization performing. And I call it perceived because, you know, it's not actually there, but you really need, yeah, you really need everything to be consistent so that indeed a manager that just Burns through their team members has consequences versus the leader that is really boosting the well being of their team.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: Yeah, you know something, I was talking to a number of people, particularly females over the COVID period and many really missed travel because for them traveling internationally was an opportunity to sleep on the plane and sleep in a bed in a hotel where they weren't getting bothered by people or the like.
I hadn't actually considered that that was for many of them it was a break that they actually missed because international travel for me, you know, it's a pain for many.
They use that you have to have.
[00:17:54] Speaker C: Them fix their home situation.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But I'm just interested because with those leaders, you're obviously dealing with so many leaders and you kind of get to see the ones that do get us and behaviorally change and the ones that kind of don't. So what's the difference there, do you find?
[00:18:11] Speaker C: Yeah, I think the difference is, you know, not just the belief that well being indeed is critical. Right. You can explain that you can show all of the data how better well being leads to better performance, etc. But them really having experienced it themselves.
And that's why of course it's important with these programs to start with the leaders, not to tell them that it works this way, but for them to experience that it works that way.
Because I think for a long time the culture in many companies has been almost against this. Right. So that everybody who reached the top wasn't necessarily someone who was all about well being and showing that and role modeling it, but maybe almost being hush hush about that and not role modeling, actually bragging about everything else.
There's been some really interesting research. I don't know if you saw an article in the HBR by Rasmus Hogart and Christine Carter from the potential project.
They did a really big. Or they, I think they already had the database, but they looked at their database of I think 35,000 leaders, all of different levels, different organizations, and they found that this myth of the leader that only gets four hours of sleep is really wrong. And that actually the more senior people slept more than the more junior people, which of course means that, well, maybe you just get to outsource everything by the time you reach that level and then you can get good sleep or is it that you've always slept better and that's how you reach the top. So then they did follow up interviews with over 250 of those leaders and they really found that the ones higher up had always prioritized their sleep. So this Is, you know, as Arianna Hoffington said, you can literally sleep your way to the top.
And I think that's so important to show this data because this idea of this leader, that's the idea of, how do I get to the top? Oh, I work at all odd hours of the day. That's so, so, so wrong. And I think this is more and more the case as our days get way more intense.
It's very different than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
There's just many, many more stimuli.
And for that, you really need to build in rest and recovery. So the people who know how to do that will just be much more successful at sustainably being a high performer versus, oh, I'm going to perform well this week, and then I'm a train wreck next week.
[00:21:01] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. The sustainability piece is the key. And I think thinking about sleep more as energy management and a recovery system is a really smart way to do it. I mean, you've done a lot of work with some top organizations.
Could you kind of just give us a little bit of an insight into what that actually looks like? Because obviously, the key thing about Healthy Place to Work is trying to help organizations strategically manage the health of their workforce, but also the health of their workplace and the system within that. So trying to systematically make changes which make a huge difference to the performance. So tell us a little bit about those things.
[00:21:37] Speaker C: Yes. So we often, as I said, start to try with the leaders, and we often start with an assessment so that we know, okay, what's the baseline here? But also, what are people saying that they're struggling with? And at the same time, in this analysis, we can see what are the top performers doing that makes it more sustainable for them? Because within every organization, even the ones that are struggling to, you'll see that there's always those people who just know how to do it, of low stress levels, low sleep debt, and high sleep quality.
So that with that assessment, we both see where is this organization now, but also what are the top performers doing to make this work and what is the rest kind of complaining about that's not working.
And then we tailor a program first for the leaders to make them aware to why is sleep important to know? What are the different levers that I can pull to improve my sleep and what specifically should I be doing now? Because that personalization is really key in sleep, because we're all so different.
Then they go through this program and this is at least a month so that they can really experience what improved sleep does for them.
And then we roll it out either to the next level of leaders or wider within the organ.
And there to make it scalable, we again run the assessment. But then we have different tracks that are tailored to people's assessment results.
And here we really tackle not just the individual, but also how can we embed this in the ways of working?
So what can leaders do to, you know, specifically within this organization to improve the sleep of the people in their team? And that's really different from organization to organization. So whether it's, you know, in the old days we used to fly out Friday morning, kind of the first flight that there is to change that culture towards. No, why should it be the first flight? You know, if you take the very first flight and you're stressed about that all Sunday night, then you arrive sleep deprived at the client, you're, you know, you're starting from behind for the whole week versus other organizations where this is much more about people working from home and being able to incorporate healthy habits during their day. But then how do you deal with that as a manager? How do you remind that, how do you role model your own habits?
And then at the end we always repeat the assessment to measure, well, what's the impact that we've had? What can we learn from this when.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: We continue and what are the main organizational outcomes, the benefits that organizations see through something like this?
[00:24:25] Speaker C: Yeah, so we look at sleep itself because that's kind of the starting point.
So we see that people sleep more, but also that they see improved sleep quality and that that is associated with the self perceived levels of stress.
And so we usually see this direct correlation between how much improvements they've seen in their sleep is related to how much improvement they see in their stress levels and also self perceived productivity, their ability to learn new things. But even things like my leadership is supportive of my personal life or I find my lifestyle sustainable this way. Those are all elements that people then will rate higher when they've tackled sleep. And I think this is really about having the sense that you are empowered to really manage your own 24 hours so that you get good sleep and that you can then perform well instead of, oh, this is rigid kind of system that I need to fit in and I need to clock in and kind of work that way.
[00:25:42] Speaker A: It should be really taught in schools, shouldn't it?
Because I mean it's so, so important.
[00:25:49] Speaker C: I know, I know. And we actually do the oppos because we completely sleep deprive teenagers who have a later biological clock by making them Go to school so early, way too early for their own biological clock that I think, you know, instead of teaching the importance of sleep, we do quite the opposite.
[00:26:07] Speaker A: Could you just keep your voice down there a bit? I've got two of them in the house here. They love what you're saying.
I'll never get them out of bed.
And like, what would you see if looking across, across a workforce, the data you get back, what are the areas that people are doing more of or less of? You know what I mean, in terms of the bulb has just gone on and they're going, okay, this has really worked for me and it's made a difference. So what are the top kind of things?
[00:26:35] Speaker C: I think one of the top levers that people will start to use when we work with them is their different ways of coping with stress.
To be much more aware of the impact that stress has on their sleep and the impact that sleep has on their stress and their ability to deal with stress.
And then this insight that this isn't just about what you do in the hour before you go to bed, but this is actually about what you do the entire day.
So if you have a crazy back to back day, you're just building up your stress hormones and it's really hard to get them down in the evening and to then have a good night of quality sleep. So this is very much around building in recovery moments during the day. And I think that's a really big mindset shift that you can't just rely on that little bit of time, you know, before you go to sleep to just make sure that you have a good night of sleep. But this is very much around building in this recovery already during the day. So having very short moments where you can take a deep breath and relax, where you have some time to do something just for you to maybe go out for a walk, really build in these moments and they're going to be different for everyone.
So you really need to think about what works for you on every single day. But I think that's a really important one. And then the second one that we see is about the evening. But to make this a really conscious wind down routine. So, so to be much more mindful about how do I spend the last two hours before I go to bed and how do I close off my day in such a way that I really give my brain the signal that this is now time to sleep, that I'm safe, that I'm done with everything I was supposed to do today and I can really unplug so that you can really recharge during the night.
So that's, I think, very much around managing stress during the day and then making sure you're giving your body all the right signals for sleep in the evening and the hours before you go to bed. Another really big element is around light.
And this is again, kind of twofold. It's about getting really bright light during the day and the importance of that, as well as actually avoiding light in the evening.
And this is, you know, it's really about going back almost to, you know, historical times, the kind of the camping life.
We function best and our sleep functions best, and specifically our circadian rhythm when we get a lot of bright light during the day, but then we really avoid it in the evening.
And that has not just an impact on our sleep, but actually also on, you know, our metabolism, our cardiovascular health. I would call it almost chronic chronotherapy, that you do the right things at the right time of the day. So getting this light is a really important aspect of it. And with that also comes, for instance, the timing of when you eat to make sure that's also personalized to your own rhythm so that you don't have this really big heavy meal within three hours before going to bed. So stimulants, well, not all stimulants, actually.
Caffeine, nicotine, and then the sedative alcohol. So those three, I think a lot of people know, yeah, okay, that's probably not going to help my sleep.
But I don't think they're quite aware as to how it works with the timing and exactly how it impacts your sleep. So to give you one example, people will often kind of measure whether or not caffeine has an impact on their sleep by how long it takes them to fall asleep.
So if you could still fall asleep, fine, you've had caffeine, then your sleep must be fine, or the other way around. But that's not really the case. So you can fall asleep while still having caffeine in your system, particularly when you're sleep deprived. And of course, the sleep deprived are particularly more prone to use the caffeine in the first place, but then it can still really impact the quality of your sleep, even if it's not really waking you up in the middle of the night, but that way you wake up less refreshed, wanting even more caffeine the next day. So there's really these, you know, these effects of nicotine, caffeine and alcohol that I think are really underappreciated and can really benefit A lot of people when it comes to their sleep and most insomniacs will have paid enough attention to that.
But I think that the kind of the generally healthy sleeper has so much room for improvement when it comes to boosting what they get out of their night and hence how they function during the day by considering those. Which is not to say you can never have alcohol again or caffeine and so on, but to be much more educated and aware of the trade offs.
[00:31:45] Speaker A: Yeah, and I like that. Trade offs, that's what they all are, isn't it? It's not about living perfect life now. I just, I mean all of this to me feeds into mental health and that been so important. People would kill me now if I didn't ask you a couple just before we go snoring, age related waking up early, too early, and then the effect menopause has obviously on sleep patterns and the like.
[00:32:14] Speaker C: Yes.
Where do you want to start?
[00:32:18] Speaker A: Let's go for snoring. Will we?
[00:32:20] Speaker C: Okay.
So snoring in and by itself doesn't mean you're going to get worse sleep.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: Does it not know.
[00:32:32] Speaker C: However, it is a significant risk factor to have worse sleep and specifically significant risk factor to have sleep apnea.
So that's when you stop breathing in the middle of the night, which often people are not aware of that they are doing that. And for that reason it's also called the silent killer in that people are not aware that they're suffering from it.
But it has a big impact on everything because it impacts your sleep quality because you wake up a bunch of times during the night to literally gasp for breath, but you don't remember because you'll very quickly fall asleep and you have no idea you even woke up.
But you never get good quality sleep. So these people can sleep eight hours or even more and then wake up still feeling tired. But this happens quite insidiously. So it's not from one day to the next. It's kind of the slow thing where the sleep is just kind of getting a bit worse and they're getting a bit more tired during the day.
But snoring is a risk factor. It doesn't mean that you need to snore to have sleep apnea. But it is such a risk factor that I would say if you do snore, it might be good to get a sleep recording done in a lab or through some other means, depending on your healthcare system, to just rule out sleep apnea because it's such literally a killer in terms of your cardiovascular health, your metabolic Health.
And it's so common, you know, it's one of the most common sleep disorders, but often goes undiagnosed.
[00:34:11] Speaker A: And is there any solution to snoring that you'd recommend? Because you know that lots of online there's all these ads for different things and for some reason I seem to be getting a lot of those ads presented.
I don't know why, but are there any that actually kind of work?
[00:34:27] Speaker C: Right. And so it depends on the, on the cause of the snoring. So very similar to sleep apnea.
It's all about the air going through the airway. And the airway, of course, isn't just one spot. Right. It goes through your mouth, goes through your nose, all the way down. And you can have an issue at different spots there depending on your anatomy, basically what you're born with, but also your physical health at that very moment.
Substances. So we know that alcohol will lead more to snoring, being overweight. Right. But also losing muscle tension.
Sleep position can have an impact. So for one person it might be about their tongue kind of, you know, falling back and they just need a mouth guard, whereas for someone else it might be an allergy that is, you know, causing more swelling and more snoring, whereas for someone else it might be more. The alcohol. Also, sleep deprivation itself can cause more snoring. So then actually the solution is, you know, to go to bed earlier and sleep more. So.
Or with position, it might be that you need position training. So there's actually a nifty device from the Netherlands called Night Balance that was bought by Philips that trains you to not sleep on your back. Because for some people, this is specifically for snoring, but specifically for sleep apnea.
They only have sleep apnea when they lie on their back. So if you can just teach them to not sleep on their back, problem is solved and they don't need surgery, etc. And final. Yeah, sometimes they need surgery to improve. So that is really something that you go with to the ear, nose and throat doctor to have that checked out. Yeah.
[00:36:17] Speaker A: Cool. The age one, you know, the older people get, sometimes they wake up really early, like at 4 o' clock and just start thinking and can't get back to sleep.
[00:36:28] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, this can happen at any age, but it is more common as we age. And that's because slowly our biological clock is shifting. So when we're kids, we're really strong morning types. Then teenagers become super evening types and then we slowly all become more morning type again. And women seem to make this transition a bit earlier than men. But this is of course all generalizations, right? At any age you can still find extreme evening types.
And at young age, or like teenagers can also still have some extreme morning types. But in general, you see this happening. We don't know why, but it seems that that's how our biological clinical clock is kind of shifting.
So there's kind of two things that you can do.
Either you shift all your activities with that meaning that, yeah, you actually just get up earlier, use the day, but also then go to bed earlier.
Right. So that is the easiest for your own health. But of course, in some cases it's just not practical because of, you know, maybe things that are happening in the evening.
The other thing is really using light to shift your rhythm. So light is the most important sight gaver, as we call it. So a time giver to our biological clock.
And it can help shift your rhythm, because even though you're set to a certain rhythm, doesn't mean you can't push it a bit another way. So for someone waking up super early, they would actually need to get brighter light in the early evening so that they suppress their melatonin and then actually their melatonin will be released a bit later and they also go to bed a bit later. And then you can slowly shift this rhythm a bit.
[00:38:21] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:38:22] Speaker C: And I should say that you can also have early morning awakenings in depression. So it is important to rule out that maybe that's going on or when there's a lot of stress. So when we have a lot of stress, that can also lead specifically to early morning awakenings. And then of course, the solution is more around reducing stress than it is around changing everything else in your life.
[00:38:46] Speaker A: The symbiotic relationship between those two things is interesting. And then the last one I was mentioning was menopause. Obviously that plays havoc with people's.
[00:38:57] Speaker C: And you also really see insomnia rates go up in women as soon as they start to go through menopause. And a really big factor in that is our core body temperature.
So for everybody, our core body temperature isn't stable. We really have the sinus wave in our core body temperature where it goes up during the day and it peaks in the late afternoon, and then it goes down during the night and it dips basically in the middle of the night, and then it goes up again.
And this rhythm is really important because we need this decrease in the core body temperature in order to become sleepy and to fall asleep. That's why it's so hard to become sleepy and fall asleep when it's really hot in your room.
But this increase in our core body temperature is also what helps us wake up in the morning.
So it's a really delicate relationship, this core body temperature with sleep. And we need to release our heat through our hands and our feet when we go to sleep.
And then you see the temperature basically going down during the night and then going up.
What we see in menopause is that you really see these fluctuations, of course, in core body temperature. And women with more hot flashes during the night also report more insomnia, which, yeah, makes complete sense because this core body temperature is so linked to sleep that it easily becomes harder.
There's no easy solution, unfortunately. It is a bit like dealing with hot flashes during the day where you want to be able.
Where normally during the day you wear lots of layers. It's a bit the same in the bed. That should be easy to deal with the heat. So to give you an example, our bedroom is actually quite warm at night in this house.
So we've taken the duvet out of the sheet so that we can sleep with just the sheet, or when it then gets a bit too cold, just kind of grab the duvet and have that as well so that you kind of have these options.
And similarly, this can happen or this can help with, with women and for the insomnia itself, and then, you know, your mind will start racing, et cetera. There we do see that. Cbti. So cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia also helps. So kind of regardless of the cause of your insomnia, whether it's menopause or, you know, something else that started it, DBTI is still always the recommended treatment when you really feel like the lack of stuff, sleep at night is impacting you during the day. So even though the cause is very physical, the solution can still be in how you think about it, how you know what your behavior is. Because of course, you also want to make sure that you don't fall into all the bad habits, like, I don't know, checking your phone in the middle of the night or getting something to eat and being really frustrated about it, which I would totally understand.
But of course it's not going to help in dealing with this challenge to sleep and further improving it.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: Wow, there's so much. There's so much in it. And you speak so brilliantly about it and knowledgeably about it.
Just in conclusion, I'm just wondering, for leaders of organizations, how would you kind of inspire them to sort of say this is something that really affects the performance of your organization and you should take a very proactive approach to it.
[00:42:40] Speaker C: Well, he triggered me with the word inspire.
So very interesting work by Christopher Barnes from the University of Washington.
That's the Foster School of Business.
He has done a lot of work on leadership and sleep.
And, you know, I myself have done a bit on how can you become a more effective leader if you get good sleep and how does that impact the organization. But his work has, for instance, also looked at how sleep impacts how the people below you. So in your teams, how inspiring they find you.
And I think we all secretly want to become, you know, this inspiring leader, but it's really hard. You know, how do you become a more inspiring leader? What is it that you need?
And his research has shown that this is actually very much dependent on the sleep that you had the night before, how you come across to your team the next day.
Secondly, which I also love about his work, is that he showed not only that well rested leaders are more inspiring, but he also showed that teams that are well rested are easier to inspire.
So here again is a direct incentive to make sure that your team gets good sleep. Because when you have a tired team, it's going to be really hard to inspire them to do more, et cetera, or to be more engaged and to be more in it.
So I think that's kind of this hidden little fact that might bring your leaders to say, oh, yeah, maybe I should use it for that.
[00:44:23] Speaker A: I love it. I love it. I think that's a brilliant note to finish on. Els you, thank you very much for your time today. I really, really appreciate it and hopefully people will get a lot out of that. Thank.
[00:44:36] Speaker C: You.
