Horizon (1964–…): Season 59, Episode 1 - How to Sleep Well with Michael Mosley - full transcript
A third of the population regularly struggle with our sleep, which rose to one in two during the pandemic - the highest it's ever been. However, as more and more people seek help, an explosion in sleep science is enabling the stud...
We're in the middle
of a sleep crisis.
A third of us regularly
struggle with our sleep,
which rose to one in
two during the pandemic.
The highest it's ever been.
I'm Michael Mosley,
and I have suffered from sleep
problems for many years.
The good news is as more
and more of us seek help,
new advances are revolutionising
our understanding of sleep.
We are now able to capture
brain waves of people
while they're asleep
in their own home.
Unlocking the secrets
of the sleeping brain,
which could help solve our nightly
struggles with insomnia.
I slept for ten hours - ten hours!
Seriously, that never happens.
Sleeping better can also transform
our health, from staving off
life-threatening diseases...
Amyloid is a protein that's
implicated in Alzheimer's disease.
When you're asleep, amyloid
is removed from the brain
at very high rates.
..to reducing the sugar cravings
caused by missing out on sleep...
On average, people consume
385 calories more per day.
Oh, wow, wow.
..and even improving
our mental health...
REM sleep is where most
of our vivid dreams occur,
and it's important for
our emotional regulation.
I'll find out if my poor sleep
is impacting my health...
It's bad for you because, if
it's extensive, that could lead
to cell death.
..and I'll see if
brand-new tech can help.
So instead of relying on drugs,
you're using technology to try and
improve the quality of your sleep.
I'm hoping the latest science
can help me, and millions like me,
learn how to sleep well.
Didn't really think this one
through before I did it.
A good night's sleep
is a wonderful thing.
I just wish I had more of them.
For years, I've struggled
with insomnia,
waking up in the middle of the night
and finding it hard
to get back to sleep.
How did you sleep?
I slept like a log.
Lucky old you...
I only woke up when you were
marching around the bedroom.
When I'm awake at 3am, I'm normally
thinking, "Well, here we go again."
I don't think I've slept
through the night for probably
a decade, maybe longer.
To explore the extent of the current
sleep crisis, I've teamed up
with the University of Oxford
to launch a landmark census
of the nation's sleeping habits.
Right, let's give it a go.
OK, so, "How satisfied are you
with your current sleep pattern?"
Not terribly!
"How often do you use alcohol
or prescription medicines
"to help go to sleep?"
Filling in the census provides
instant feedback on the quality
of your sleep -
rated from one to ten.
Anything below five
is a sign of poor sleep.
"Thank you. Your score is 2.8."
That's not great, is it?
I hope there aren't too many
others doing as badly as me.
BELL RINGS
I'm in Oxford,
City of Dreaming Spires,
and home to one of the world's
leading sleep research centres.
It's here that all the data
from our census is being analysed.
Leading the team are Professor
Colin Espie and Dr Rachel Sharman.
What can you tell me?
What did we find?
We're sat at 207,000 people...
Woohoo! Wow!
..which is fantastic.
It just shows how
popular the topic was.
What were the most
interesting findings
as far as you were concerned?
The average sleep in
the UK in 207,000 people
is six hours, 48 minutes.
Wow, that's shorter
than I was expecting.
Shorter than I would like.
The recommended sleep for an adult
is somewhere between
seven and nine hours,
but to average lower than
seven hours is a bit of a worry.
Some people not getting enough
sleep because they're not giving
themselves enough
opportunity to sleep,
but there's other people
in there who would desperately
want to sleep, and they can't
cos they've got insomnia.
As well as all those struggling
to get the recommended
seven to nine hours,
there's a second,
alarming pattern in the data.
When it came to sleep quality,
almost half reported
having poor sleep.
About 44% were showing signs
of having poor quality sleep,
which I think is slightly
more than what we'd expect. Yeah.
And what we mean by poor quality
of sleep is maybe a struggle to get
to sleep or a struggle to get back
to sleep, feeling unrefreshed,
feeling it's affecting
your day time.
And it is higher
than we would expect.
I may complain, but I don't actually
think my sleep is that poor quality.
Even though I wake up
in the middle of the night,
I try to make sure I get enough.
I usually manage to get at least
seven hours' sleep a night,
but I almost never sleep throughout
the night, so I'm very keen to find
out more about what goes
on when I'm sleeping.
To find out what's really going on
in my brain when I'm asleep,
Rachel, from the Oxford team,
has brought along an impressive
new piece of sleep science kit.
This is a really exciting
time for sleep science.
We are now able to
move out of the lab
and actually capture
brain waves of people
while they're asleep
in their own home.
I'm impressed.
This home sleep test is a
miniaturised, portable EEG machine,
designed to record the brain's
electrical activity during sleep.
But not all sleep is the same.
In fact,
it involves four distinct stages,
and scientists are learning
more than ever before
about how they are crucial for our
mental and physical health.
Each stage of sleep can be
identified by its pattern
of brain waves.
I obviously spend an awful lot
of time watching people sleep
and analysing sleep,
and I'm still in absolute awe
of what our brain does.
When we're awake,
our brain waves are short and fast.
As we drift off into the first
stage of sleep,
they begin to slow down.
In this first stage, we're
transitioning from the chaotic,
fast activity to this drifting
activity where the eyes are rolling
and the head is nodding.
Next is stage two, which looks
very similar to stage one,
except for little
bursts of activity.
This is preparing the brain
for learning and memory that occurs
in the later stages of sleep.
The third stage is deep sleep,
where we see a more
spaced out pattern
of taller waves known as slow waves.
It's this deep stage of sleep
that is really important
for our physiological repair,
and it's also really
important for our memory.
Getting plenty of this deep, slow
wave sleep also helps improve
the immune system and our
ability to fight infections.
Everything is kind of
coordinating, is it? Exactly.
It's beautiful. It's almost
like the brain is pulsing.
Finally, we enter stage four, REM,
where our brain waves return
to a shorter and faster pattern,
similar to when we're awake.
Our bodies are paralysed,
but our eyes move
rapidly while we dream.
REM sleep is where most of our vivid
dreams occur, and it's important
for our emotional regulation.
It's really important to not only
just get enough sleep in terms
of duration, but getting enough
of these individual stages.
Rachel has a chart called
a hypnogram to show me how,
in a typical eight-hour sleep,
the four stages are
repeated several times
in what are known as sleep cycles.
We have yellow, which is stage one,
green, which is stage two.
and this blue colour,
which is stage three.
And then we have red up here,
which is our REM sleep.
So it's making sure that
we've got enough of each stage
of sleep of optimal functioning.
OK, so this is the bit of kit
you want me to use? Yes, please.
Right, OK. Good look?
Do we like that?
Definitely.
MICHAEL LAUGHS
I feel deeply honoured
because I'm the first person to use
this device outside the Oxford lab.
Rachel would use the data to map
out not just how much sleep I get,
but crucially, how much
of each stage of sleep.
I'm especially curious to know
how I score on deep sleep.
Hi, Rachel.
Hi, Michael. Good to see you.
Results time.
Results time, exactly.
Here is your hypnogram,
which is the first time
we've recorded this in
the wild, in your home.
Yay! So I'm number one, am I?
Participant One!
By bringing the Sleep Lab
into the home environment,
these devices are going
to revolutionise our field.
Before we get onto my deep sleep,
the device has revealed
something alarming.
I didn't just wake up once,
but multiple times in the night.
You were in bed for
eight hours and 21 minutes,
but actually, when we add
up all of these awakenings
that you've had, you're only
spending 75% of the time
in bed asleep.
That means a quarter of the time
I'm in bed, I'm awake. Exactly.
Anything over about 30 minutes
awake in the night is problematic,
and you're up here
at one hour and 43.
I can actually show you...
The tablet was actually picking
up audio during the night.
So one of the reasons I think
you were coming in and out
is because you were snoring.
LOW RUMBLE
That's me snoring, isn't it?
That is you snoring.
Some of them were right up
there at 45 decibels.
So, that would be
enough to wake me up
or possibly Claire nudging me
and going, "You're snoring."
All too often, these awakenings
are preventing me from reaching
the stage of deep sleep.
We need our deep sleep
to detoxify the brain.
It is our brain's laundry system.
It flushes out all those
toxins that have built up.
You want to have about 20%
of your lights off to lights on
in that deep sleep.
Over those eight hours,
you only had about 12%. Right.
Is this kind of typical
for a 64 or bad for a 64?
It's not great for a 64-year-old.
Rachel is certainly not
mincing her words.
You're not sleeping enough,
and if we're not sleeping enough,
we're putting ourselves at higher
risk of all sorts of nasty things
like cardiovascular disease,
metabolic dysfunction,
and even cancer.
It's very clear
that I have insomnia.
I'm not getting enough sleep,
particularly of that sort
of beautiful, slow wave sleep.
To find out in more
detail how poor sleep
is impacting our underlying health,
I'm taking part in
ground-breaking research
at the University of Surrey.
I'm about to do a remarkable new
test which looks at genetic markers
in my blood and which,
apparently, can tell the impact
that lack of sleep has
on things like stress,
my immunity, and my risk of disease.
Unfortunately, it also means
I have to have blood taken before
and after a completely
sleepless night.
Right, so, Claire, my wife,
is taking my blood.
Fortunately, she's a GP,
so this is not just amateur hour.
Playing at home. Just playing at
home, exactly. Playing doctors.
As well as blood tests,
which will measure genetic markers,
I'm going to find out how well
I cope with the immediate aftermath
of lost sleep.
I think I'm pretty
good at getting by,
but what's the reality?
OK, done.
DOORBELL RINGS
It's bright and early,
and I've got a lovely delivery here,
which is full of goodies.
To see how well I really cope,
Rachel's sent me a
selection of tests.
I'll be tackling puzzles
that measure my reaction times
and mental clarity,
and others that will
assess my concentration
and ability to perform
physical tasks,
while monitoring
the number of mistakes I make.
LOUD BUZZER
Ah!
And, finally, with the help
of my daughter Kate, I will find out
what a lack of sleep does
to my pain threshold.
The idea is I have to try and keep
my hand in there for as long
as possible,
and you have to time it.
Three, two, one, go!
Right, oh, that was cold.
That is cold.
That is really very painful indeed.
OK, that was it.
That was it?!
That was as much as I could do.
He only made it 32 seconds,
but from the sounds of it,
it was very painful,
so I'm curious how he's going
to do when he's sleep-deprived.
It's now time for a sleepless night.
Uh, and yeah, everyone else
is going to head off to bed
and I'm going to
stay here with Terry.
I think Terry's already
keeled over for the night.
My in-built 24 hour body clock
is telling me that
it's time for sleep...
..but by pulling an all nighter,
I'm messing with my
body's natural rhythms.
One of the immediate
effects is that I'm hungry
at an unusual time.
One of the worst things
about being wake in the middle
of the night is the munchies.
I've been having a bit of a wander
around looking for something to eat.
By staying up all night, I'm missing
out on all the benefits that come
with the four stages of sleep.
Finally, my long,
sleepless night is over.
There's something very primal
about having survived a night
and being out here in the dawn.
But how will missing all those
crucial stages of sleep affect me?
How am I feeling?
I'm sort of feeling relieved.
I didn't really think this
one through before I did it.
It's now 9am
and I actually feel like my usual
coping mechanisms are working well.
Research suggests it's possible
to experience brief feelings
of euphoria when sleep deprived,
although we don't really know
what's happening in the brain
that causes this.
What's interesting to me
is at the moment I'm beginning
to go gabble, gabble, gabble.
An area of the brain that's
particularly sensitive to lack
of sleep is the prefrontal cortex,
the part that does a lot of
planning and decision-making.
BUZZER
I think I need to slow down
and be a bit more careful.
Ah! Oo!
Research also shows
our perception of pain is heightened
when we miss out on deep sleep,
something I'm
definitely experiencing.
Ah!
That was bad.
Blimey! Must be wrong.
According to this, I only
lasted 18 seconds this time,
which is truly pathetic.
By mid-afternoon,
I'm suffering from brain fog
and feeling irritated by the tests.
Right...
Our sleep centres also
linked our poor sleepers
with lower mood scores...
..which isn't surprising,
as by staying awake all night,
I missed out on the crucial
REM stage of sleep,
which plays an important
role in regulating mood.
How did you find it?
I was conscious
that I felt grumpier,
but I thought that I was actually
doing quite well in these tests,
and clearly, some of them, I wasn't.
This is the buzz wire,
and this is where you had to move
the little loop through the wire.
The number of mistakes I made
more than doubled when
I'd missed out on sleep.
I was rushing the buzz wire test,
being more careless.
And on the reaction time test,
I was much slower.
Rachel's got a
surprising explanation...
I was having tiny micro
sleeps without even noticing.
This is your lapses,
so this is how many times
you stopped paying attention.
What we can see here,
in the green,
is you're getting
worse overnight.
Both during the night and during
some of the tests in the morning,
my brain was desperately trying
to force me to nod off
to initiate the sleep cycle.
You're getting tiny bits of sleep
coming in as your head nods
and you wake back up,
and these are sort of micro sleeps.
These are 500 milliseconds,
so they're not long at all,
but it was enough for you to miss
the signal that we presented.
What's important is you didn't even
know you were having those lapses
in attention. It's quite scary,
absolutely. Mm-hm.
Being awake after sleep deprivation
is similar in terms of performance
to having a blood alcohol level
of about two or three pints.
You wouldn't drink and drive.
No.
So, what about drowsy driving?
Alarmingly, as many as one in three
of us admit to having experienced
micro sleeps while driving.
It's clear that being sleep deprived
has a much bigger impact
on my mental and physical
performance than I realised.
But what will the blood
tests I did earlier reveal?
Hi, Michael Mosley.
Just push the door. Thank you.
Professor Simon Archer,
who pioneered this new test,
has been looking at
thousands of my genes...
..and, remarkably enough,
just by looking at which
genes were switched on
and which were switched off,
he was able to tell
which blood sample was taken
after my sleepless night.
We knew that we had two pairs
of samples - A, B, C, D.
We were very confident
from the beginning that sample D
was the sample taken
after you'd missed a night of sleep.
What this is telling us,
this big difference with sample D,
is that you staying up all night
has had a big effect on the gene
expression within your blood cells.
Yeah. Big enough that
we can clearly see it.
Most of the effects of the sleep
deprivation are causing genes
to be switched on
that wouldn't normally be.
We have genes that we
know respond to stress.
Yeah.
OK.
And these have all been upregulated
in your blood. Right.
Essentially switched on?
Yep.
So, I'm more stressed.
Losing sleep for just one night
prompted my immune system
to move into overdrive.
If your immune system is
in overdrive when it shouldn't be,
that's not a good thing.
It's bad for you because
you haven't got pathogens
that you need to respond to.
Simon also noticed that the
energy-producing parts of my cells,
the mitochondria, were not
functioning as they should,
which is a potential red flag
for Alzheimer's.
The brain is a very active organ,
it uses up most of your oxygen,
and it needs a lot of energy,
and the mitochondria
provide that energy.
So, this downregulation will mean
there will be a lack of energy
within those neurons.
Right.
And this downregulation
in mitochondria is similar
to the mitochondrial dysfunction
that's associated with Alzheimer's.
If it's extensive,
that could lead to cell death.
The problem comes when people
are frequently missing sleep
and the accumulation
of those negative effects
and how that associates
with health problems.
Very impressive - the fact
that he could look at a sample
of my blood and tell whether
I had been sleep deprived or not.
And, on a personal level,
I did find it very, very striking
because, obviously, you hear
all the stuff about lack of sleep
and what it might do to you,
but knowing what it
actually has done to me
was very shocking,
genuinely shocking.
The fact that it's increased
my stress levels, had a bad effect
on my immune system, and quite
possibly increased my risk
of Alzheimer's,
albeit by a small amount.
All of that is something which
really I find quite disturbing.
So, it's given me a
lot to think about.
I'm now 64,
and my dad died prematurely
at the age of 74,
and before he died,
he was showing signs of early
sort of cognitive decline,
memory loss and things like that.
So, that's something I'll fear,
that that's what's going
to happen to me, as well.
It's not just brain degeneration
like Alzheimer's that's a concern.
Lack of sleep really does affect
almost every system in your body.
In our sleep census, almost two
thirds of those who are classed
as poor sleepers
reported at least one mental
or physical health problem.
And there is one sleep disorder
which, if left untreated,
can be life-threatening
and which millions of people
suffer from without realising.
It's called sleep apnoea.
At the Royal Free Hospital
in London,
security supervisor Kevin
is seeing Dr Swapna Mandal
to confirm whether or
not he has sleep apnoea.
I think sleep apnoea is
more common than we realise
and definitely underdiagnosed.
In the UK alone,
1.5 million individuals
may have obstructive sleep apnoea
and only 20% of those
have been diagnosed.
I have occasions
where I'll wake up and...
..sometimes you just
find it hard to breathe.
LOUD SNORING
It's like you have no
air going through you.
You wake up and there's the taste of
vomit in the back of your throat,
and it's hard to get rid of.
SNORING
Kevin's repeated waking
results in broken sleep cycles
throughout the night.
If this is sleep apnoea,
it could put him at
increased risk of heart disease,
hypertension and stroke.
My wife nudges me
if I stop breathing.
I don't notice it.
It's just something
that she noticed,
and that's how it all came about,
after being given an ultimatum -
doctors or divorce.
She's happy about it,
the fact that it is the first stage
of hopefully getting something done.
GUTTURAL SNORING
The awakenings are usually
so brief that the sleeper
doesn't notice them happening.
Patient goes to sleep and often
the muscles in the upper part
of the airway relax and cause
narrowing of the airway
and sometimes complete closure.
And that means the patient
has a pause in their breathing,
which can lead to a drop
in their oxygen levels.
But more importantly, it means
that they often go from a deeper
stage of sleep to a
lighter stage of sleep,
and so have disrupted
sleep throughout the night.
Why don't you tell me a little bit
about the symptoms you've had?
Last week it happened.
I woke up, literally gagging
for breath - could not breathe.
We need to do a sleep study.
It's this little device here that
sits at the bottom of the neck.
Keep it on the whole night
and then we'll have the results.
When I first started,
patients would have belts
around the chest and tummy,
tubing up the nose, a finger probe
to measure their oxygen saturations,
and then we would have to review
all of that data overnight.
Now, newer devices can give
you an automatic diagnosis.
As Kevin sleeps,
the device will capture sounds
from his breathing
and his heart activity.
LOUD SNORING
During the test,
Kevin's breathing stopped on
average 51 times every hour,
confirming he's got sleep apnoea
and it's severe.
So, to help with his breathing and
reduce his risk of serious health
consequences, Kevin will try
sleeping wearing a piece of kit
known as a continuous positive
airway pressure machine.
A patient wears a mask overnight
that's attached to some tubing,
and it blows some gentle air
pressure into the airway
to keep the airway open.
I now have this little baby.
It sends all the
information via the Wi-Fi.
It's interesting
to know that someone else
is sort of watching
and keeping an eye
on how you're doing.
Kevin will wear the device
for the next few weeks
to see if it radically improves
his and his wife's nights.
As we're learning, a lack of
sleep can impact us in ways
we are not even aware of.
For example, not getting enough
can significantly
increase how much we eat.
And I don't just mean the odd
attack of the midnight munchies.
Our census found that around 60%
of poor sleepers had a BMI
that was in the obese
or overweight category.
Dr Wendy Hall
is a nutritional scientist
from King's College London,
who has been studying
whether improving sleep
can also improve our diet.
Hello.
Hello.
Good parky day.
Yes!
What's the link between sleep
and weight gain?
We know that short sleep
can affect what we eat.
There's a part of the brain
called the hypothalamus
that's very important for regulating
lots of things in the body,
but one of them is appetite.
So, there are hormones
that are produced in the body
that then send signals that act
on the hypothalamus to tell the body
how hungry or full
they should be feeling.
One of these is called leptin,
and leptin is a hormone produced
by fat cells in the body.
So, when you get more
fat stores in the body,
leptin levels go up,
and it's telling the brain
that fat stores are sufficient.
But there's some evidence to show
that people who are short sleepers
have lower levels of leptin.
There's another hormone
that's important as well,
and this is more of a hunger
hormone and it's called ghrelin.
It will go up when you're hungry,
if you've not eaten for a while,
and there's some evidence
that ghrelin levels are higher
in people who are short sleepers,
so they may be getting
a constant hunger signal.
I certainly find that when I'm
sleep deprived, what I crave madly
is sugary, fatty things
like biscuits or croissants.
I think a lot of people
would recognise that feeling.
So how much more do we eat
after a bad night's sleep?
We did a study that pulled
lots of other studies that had got
people in a metabolic unit
and deprived them of sleep.
And, on average, they consumed
385 calories more per day.
Oh, wow. Wow.
It's about 20% of the average
woman's energy requirements,
so that is a considerable amount,
and it would lead to weight gain,
if that was continued over time.
These findings prompted Wendy
and her team to try and help
short sleepers improve their
sleep and, in turn, their health.
Sian, a nursing lecturer,
is classed as a short sleeper.
On average, she gets less
than six hours a night.
I've got into bad habits
with sleeping,
and so I'm awake till 1:00, 1:30,
just doing nothing
of any consequence.
And I know that when I'm staying
up late at night, I'm snacking late
at night and eating things
before I go to bed.
We have a long family history
of type two diabetes.
My mother had type two diabetes,
my father did, my sister does.
It can reduce your life expectancy.
You know, and I have
a lovely daughter,
I want to be fit and healthy
for her as long as I can.
The team want to see if they can
help her increase her sleep.
To do this,
they've asked her to make
some fairly simple changes.
She'll try to improve her sleep
routine by decluttering her room
and avoiding screen
use late at night.
She'll keep up with good habits,
like getting out into
the morning light,
which can help reset the body clock,
as part of establishing
a healthier sleeping pattern.
The hope is this will not
only help Sian sleep well,
but also reduce her calorie intake.
If you could just step on for me
with your heels right at the back.
Thank you.
I think this will probably
give me the push that I need,
whether it helps me lose a bit
of weight, whether I feel better
during the day, and whether
it just makes me that little bit
healthier, really.
Improving our sleep doesn't
just make us healthier,
it can also boost our brainpower.
At the University of
California in Los Angeles,
neuroscientists are investigating
the link between sleep and memory
by studying how the
brain tackles puzzles.
At the forefront of this
research is Professor Gina Poe,
who has a particular passion.
I'm interested in mazes,
because it's a task that engages
a good portion of your brain,
including a learning and memory
structure that also
maps your environment.
Today, I'm going to
be Gina's guinea pig.
She's sent me to Blenheim Palace -
home to one of the largest
hedge mazes on the planet.
She has sent me a video
which will explain all.
Hi, Michael.
I've sent you to this maze
to run it as fast as you can
and time yourself,
and we'll see how you do.
And then after you've finished,
I would love you to go home and get
a good night's sleep and then
try it again in the morning
to see if you can run it any faster.
Well, that's pretty clear.
All I've got to do now is
check the time and then head off
and see if I can conquer the maze.
Right.
Hmm, that makes no sense at all.
This is a dead end as well.
We need sleep to connect things
that we cannot see when we're awake.
For example, when you turn
left and you run into a wall,
and then you turn right
and you run into a wall,
and then you go straight
and you can go forward.
Those things aren't
happening simultaneously,
and because they're not happening
simultaneously, it's hard for us
to put all of that together.
This looks familiar.
Gina's work suggests that as
I make my way through the maze,
a part of my brain called
the locus coeruleus
is helping to identify information
that will be processed when I sleep.
Locus coeruleus is a
tiny area in the brainstem,
and it provides norepinephrine -
which is like adrenaline,
but for the brain -
to the entire brain.
So when it's active, it's providing
this juice to help us learn
more quickly from anything
that's happening at the time.
I have a terrible feeling
I've come to the entrance again.
HE LAUGHS
I HAVE come to the entrance again!
We are studying how these locus
coeruleus neurons are firing
during wakefulness
to tag memories for...
..reconsolidation during sleep.
Ah-ha.
So I need to go there.
I need to go there...
Ta-da!
Hooray!
Ah! And there we go -
29 and a half minutes.
I'm not sure if that's good
or bad. I suspect that's bad.
Hi, Gina. Hello. Hi, Michael.
I've done the task and it
took me nearly half an hour.
Well, I want to ask you, do you
feel like you have a mental map
of the maze yet in your mind, or...?
It's pretty hazy, I have to say.
Get a good night's sleep
and in the morning,
when you wake up, just try it again
and see if it's a little
less frustrating this time.
OK. That'll be fascinating
because, at the moment,
I feel I haven't a clue.
Ta-ra, then. See you. Bye-bye.
It's about 8:30 in the morning,
so I'm feeling reasonably perky.
But the interesting thing will be,
do I do the maze any better now
than I did yesterday. Right!
At first, the maze is
as puzzling as before.
No. Right.
But as I get going, it feels
easier than my first attempt.
Right, this is the first bit,
so I've managed to get here in a
surprisingly short period of time.
And then round here. Yep.
Gina's research suggests
that my improved performance
is down to what happened in
my brain during specific parts
of my sleep cycle.
Thanks to deep sleep and REM sleep,
I was able to dredge up memories
from yesterday
that I wasn't even
aware of at the time.
There's a brief period of time
during slow-wave sleep called
the transition to REM sleep,
and it's where the hippocampus
is really well connected.
The hippocampus is our temporary
learning and memory structure,
and it seems to be writing
those temporary memories
to the long-term memory storage.
And it's only during
rapid eye movement sleep that
we can selectively
disengage pieces of memory.
So it's a time when you can actually
both write new memories in
as well as erase pieces of memories
that you need to erase,
or weaken connections,
and we can wire together
the proper pattern,
the proper synaptic pattern
that is associated
with solving the problem,
with finding a solution.
Uh-huh.
Good.
And...I remember going
down that one before,
which was a mistake.
And if I am right, I go
round the corner, and ta-ra,
I see Hermes - and indeed
I do! Hello, old friend.
Really delighted to see you again.
I reckon that is just
over six minutes
which, compared to half an hour
the first time,
is obviously a
huge, huge difference.
And there were interesting moments
in there where I really didn't know
where I was, but there
were other moments
where the sort of
memories flashed back in.
Since good sleep is crucial
for memory and problem solving,
it's perhaps not surprising
that disrupted nights can play havoc
with our mental processes.
In the UK, over five
million adults are believed
to suffer from insomnia.
One of them is campaigns
coordinator Valerie,
who has a sleep score
of just 2.5 out of ten.
Valerie's problem, just like mine,
is not in getting to sleep,
but staying asleep.
It's called maintenance insomnia,
which means she may not be getting
enough deep sleep and REM sleep -
stages of sleep that
are crucial for memory.
I just feel like I do
sometimes have brain fog,
so I do sometimes forget
the simplest words.
I can have no memory of
an event that I was at.
I mean, I'm working full-time,
and I do have to make a lot of notes
if people are talking
because otherwise it's just gone.
On average, Valerie gets
between four and six hours
of broken sleep each night.
She can often be awake
for hours at a time.
I'm not in a happy place.
I've been awake for a while.
I've not been asleep that long.
I'd probably say about
a couple of hours or so.
It's Sunday night,
Monday morning, and I'm wiped out.
Valerie has struggled with
poor sleep and its side effects
since she was a teenager.
I just feel like I've never really
been as focused as I can be
because I'm not rested,
but I just feel like I probably
haven't maybe pushed
myself for many things
because I feel like I can't achieve
it because the focus is not there.
Seeking answers, Valerie's
meeting Colin Espie
from the Oxford University team.
He wants to change the way
she thinks about her sleep.
Hi, Valerie, it's so nice
to meet you. You, too.
So I'm going to suggest something
that we call the
quarter-of-an-hour rule.
Have you heard of that before?
Never, no.
The average good sleeper falls
asleep within a quarter of an hour.
If you don't fall asleep
during the night
within that quarter of an hour
period, you say to yourself,
"Valerie, I'm just going to get up,
"go do something else for a
while, and I'll go back to bed
"when I feel sleepy again."
But then what if I
wake up ten times?
It defeats the purpose, right?
We're trying to break
a habit, a connection.
So even in the one night, you might
have to do this several times. OK.
I'll give it a go.
Give it a go. Yeah.
That's all I'm asking.
If the quarter-of-an-hour
rule works,
it will hopefully train
Valerie to get back to sleep
much more easily,
which should help clear her
brain fog and improve her memory.
It's the first night,
and I'm going to give this a go.
So...
..fingers crossed
it all goes all right,
and that I have
a great night's sleep.
Thanks to new technology,
we can explore the sleeping brain
in new ways.
And a lab at Boston University
recently uncovered something
very surprising about what
goes on during deep sleep.
Hi, Laura. Very good to see you.
Great to get a chance to
talk with you virtually.
Neuroscientist Professor
Laura Lewis and her team
have made a fascinating discovery.
Using specially adapted
MRI scanning technology,
they've been able to capture
the first ever moving images
of the sleeping brain in action.
Sleep is something that
really the whole brain does,
it's not just one part of the brain.
And so MRI gives us this
really nice full picture
of how all of these
different things
might be connected to each other.
Volunteers are monitored
as they fall asleep
inside the MRI scanner.
If you're comfortable
and ready to proceed,
can you squeeze the squeeze ball?
BEEPING
The descent into sleep is
usually a very gradual process,
and we'll monitor their
electrical activity of the brain,
and from that we can see what type
of stage of sleep somebody's in.
Now, your brain is bathed in a
fluid called cerebrospinal fluid.
Laura and her team
have been studying the movement
of this fluid during sleep.
What we'd been imaging was
the flow of cerebrospinal fluid,
and that's a liquid that envelops
the brain, it cushions it,
but it also helps
carry waste products
out of the brain eventually.
So waste products being produced
in the tissue can get kind of moved
into this liquid and eventually
become sort of flushed and cleared
from the brain.
And what sort of things
are being washed away?
Things like amyloid.
So amyloid is a protein that's
implicated in Alzheimer's disease.
So if somebody doesn't sleep,
you don't get this waste clearance.
When you're asleep,
amyloid is removed from the brain
at very high rates.
They spotted something remarkable -
that the waves of
cerebrospinal fluid
appear in step with
the slow electrical waves
generated during sleep.
This helps explain why sleep plays
such an important role in helping
to flush toxins from the brain,
like those associated
with Alzheimer's.
It's also really quite hypnotic.
You can actually probe into
the sleeping brain in a way
that just wasn't
possible a decade ago.
This is, I think, the power of MRI.
It's really incredible that we have
this fully noninvasive tool
to look at just brain physiology.
I thought I knew a lot about sleep,
and I have seen nothing like that.
Fantastic.
The benefits of slow-wave sleep
are so profound that scientists
are now looking at how to enhance
them to boost our memories
and stave off age-related
brain degeneration.
Right. I've got a wonderful,
exciting package here
which I've been looking forward to
because it's...
Yeah, great. It contains
these sort of extraordinary devices.
So let's see how that one goes on.
I think that goes on
to my forehead there.
Right, so there are some electrodes
in this band here,
which is pressed up
against my scalp.
And apparently what they can do
is read when you're in deep sleep,
and then what happens is
when you are in deep sleep,
the machine makes some sort
of noise, which apparently improves
the quality of your deep sleep.
This intriguing technology is being
explored at Cardiff University's
Brain Research Imaging Centre.
One of the team
researching how our
slow waves can be boosted
while we sleep is Holly Kings.
When you're in your
deepest stage of sleep,
which is called slow-wave sleep,
this headband can detect that,
and it detects big, slow
waves of activity.
And what we do is we play the sound
near the peak of one of these waves,
and we get a bigger wave,
and we get more waves.
Holly and the team are hoping
that this kind of sleep engineering
will help enhance deep sleep
and, in doing so, improve memory.
What we're thinking is that
these waves are very important
in how our memories
are consolidated at night.
So that's how they go from
where we initially put them,
in a short-term store,
into a long-term storage,
so that we can retrieve them days,
weeks, months later.
So this is basically
engineering sleep.
Sleep engineering is really about
finding these different ways
to influence the sleep.
So by using sound,
we can improve the efficiency
of this stage of sleep.
This shows a typical EEG reading
during slow-wave sleep.
As the sound stimulus is applied,
we can see the waves becoming
noticeably more powerful.
Leading the research
which they hope will one day delay
the effects of cognitive decline,
is Professor Penny Lewis.
We have tried to look at how
well this stimulation impacts
on the brain in younger
and older people -
so is there a difference at all?
And the reason we did that
is because we were hoping
that this might be a way to boost
slow waves in older people
and potentially help with
slowing down degeneration.
What we found is that
in younger people,
you see this nice big boost
in the oscillation
after the stimulation.
Whereas, in the older group -
which, yes, in the ages 56 -
there is a response... Yeah.
..but it's tiny.
Unfortunately, as we age,
our slow waves aren't quite
as effective as they used to be.
This means that the target
the sound waves are trying to hit
is much smaller, and easily missed.
We're working on ways
to optimise it, and hopefully once
it's more optimised, then
it will be more effective
in an older age group as well,
and also just in a
wider range of people.
Sadly, this developing technology
won't be improving my sleep
any time soon.
For now, I'll keep trying as many
popular tricks as I can for getting
a good night's sleep and
keeping my body clock in rhythm.
I do all the regular stuff...
..making sure your room is dark,
cool and quiet.
I make sure I go to bed
at the same time every night,
and I get up at around 7:15.
I never have a lie in.
I go out and expose myself
to the bright, early morning light,
because I know that's a good
way of resetting the clock.
First thing in the morning,
I do my press ups and my squats.
I could go on and on.
And here's another
tech-free sleep hack
that anyone, of any age, can try.
You just need to learn how
to nap like an Olympic athlete.
For top competitors, it's
really important that they get
a good night's sleep.
Dr Luke Gupta is the sleep expert
at the English Institute of Sport.
Napping is something in sport
which has gained a lot of attention,
and if you don't do it, you're
not maximising your performance.
Luke has advised rower and Olympic
medallist Victoria Thornley
on her napping technique,
to make up for her early
starts on the river.
When we're getting up at 6.30,
we can only get in so much sleep
at night, so napping is just really
important to get that extra hour
in the day, if I possibly can,
of sleep and recovery time.
On training days, Victoria
has a short nap after lunch.
Similar schedules are in place
for all of the team's athletes,
based on two key principles.
The first one is the length
of the nap, and we want
this to be kept short, so around
30 minutes is considered optimal.
The next one is to keep it early.
By early, I mean between the hours
of one in the afternoon
and four in the afternoon.
It's where sleep is most likely
in the daytime because you get
this little dip in body temperature
that drives feelings of sleepiness.
By capitalising on the body's
natural rhythms, Luke believes
it is possible to train
even the most reluctant nappers.
My wife loves a nap.
I personally find it
makes me feel terrible,
that I get this really sort of
hungover feeling when I wake up.
Yes, I think it's just
putting it into your routine.
I always call it a power nap.
You know, you don't want
to do it for too long.
OK, well, I'm hoping to
learn how to do it properly.
Yes. Because I've yet
to achieve a decent nap.
This could be my first.
Victoria and I have each
been given a quiet, dark room,
and 20 minutes on
the clock for a nap.
The question is, will I be able
to compete with Victoria's ability
to nap on demand?
It's the gold standard
of measuring something,
what we call sleep propensity -
someone's ability to fall asleep.
Victoria's training seems
to pay off straight away.
WHISPERING: So you can see here
that Vicky is clearly just...
..hasn't really given
much thought to this process,
and just climbed into bed and tried
to fall asleep almost instantly.
And she hasn't really moved since.
Whereas I'm struggling.
The urge to sleep grows
throughout the day,
thanks partly to the build-up
of a chemical in the brain called
adenosine, which makes us
increasingly drowsy.
So trying to go to sleep
halfway through the day
can be tricky,
unless you're in the habit.
KNOCK ON DOOR
Time's up, Michael. Hello.
Ah, right!
So how'd you guys get on?
I think, by the end,
I was probably asleep.
That surprised me,
cos I would've not predicted
that I would have fallen asleep.
Even just 20 minutes of doing
that feels, like, refreshing.
Research shows that a
daytime nap can lift our mood
and improve our concentration
and creativity.
But you may have to practise.
So do you think there are benefits,
if I continue to practise napping,
if you're not an athlete,
if you're someone like me?
Yes, this is a learned behaviour
that, over time, becomes habituated
and almost automated.
So the more we sort of persevere
with the idea of the falling asleep
more frequently, actually
builds confidence in sleep.
I liked what Luke was saying.
The idea that if you nap during
the day, when you actually find
it quite difficult to go to sleep,
this will give you more confidence,
you'll get more practised
at falling asleep.
Luke has given me a tip
that I've never tried before,
and I need all the help I can get,
as I just don't sleep
like I used to.
In my youth, when I was in my 20s,
I could sleep anywhere,
any place. I remember
I slept in a graveyard once,
I slept in a telephone kiosk.
Then, when I hit my mid-to-late
30s,
we had young kids, disrupted nights.
Then hit the 40s,
work got more stressful,
and suddenly I'm waking up
in the middle of the night,
3am, worrying about stuff.
The link between how long
you sleep and your age
was also reflected in our census.
And there were some
other intriguing insights.
Women reported lower sleep
satisfaction than men.
And, in general, people
in the north were sleeping less
than those in the south,
and they also reported
worse sleep quality.
While the shortest sleepers
were in Kilmarnock.
But participants in Guernsey
had the top score for sleep quality.
And we also found that
almost 20% of all participants
said they turned to alcohol
to help them drop off.
Which can, in fact,
make our sleep more disturbed.
It's clear that the causes
and the impact of poor sleep
are varied and complex.
So how much can tips and techniques
really help those who've struggled
with their sleep for years?
Sian has been following her new
sleep extension plan for a month.
She's settled into
a healthier routine.
She's decluttering her bedroom
and has also stopped
using screens late at night.
Before you received any advice,
your average sleep was
five hours, 24 minutes a night,
which is below the recommendations.
And then after the intervention,
after four weeks,
it went up to seven hours,
ten minutes per night.
That's much better.
You're looking very perky.
Yeah, good. Yes, I am. I am.
I'm, you know, a lot less tired,
and, you know, this morning
I've been up since half six,
and I'm still very
awake and very alert.
So a big difference, really.
Sian has increased her
sleep by an incredible
one and three quarter hours.
She's now well within
the recommended guidelines.
It's been a big step in her goal
to change her overall lifestyle.
It has, you know, given me
the confidence to actually
look at this a bit more in detail,
and actually look at
my nutrition as well,
and I have started to be more
mindful about what I'm eating.
Kevin has spent four weeks
on the airway pressure machine
to tackle his sleep apnoea.
Hi, Kevin.
How are you getting on?
Well, I'm sleeping all right.
He's definitely better
with the snoring.
As we said, your original diagnosis
was a pause in your breathing
on average 51 times an hour.
He didn't believe that he was
that bad, and we knew he was.
Yeah. And with the
use of the machine,
that's dropped down
to six times an hour,
which is a phenomenal improvement.
That's phenomenal.
Within normal limits.
So, amazing. I'm really
pleased at that.
Thank you. Very pleased.
Yeah.
Valerie has been following
the quarter-of-an-hour rule,
and has had a slumber breakthrough.
I slept for ten hours - ten hours!
Seriously, that never happens.
I was in bed at, like, ten.
I must have been asleep by about
quarter past - I didn't even read.
And then I finally
woke up at about 8:25,
which was five minutes
before I set the alarm, because
I set the alarm for
half eight this morning,
and I was just like,
"I can't believe it."
SHE LAUGHS
Inside three months, Valerie managed
to improve her sleep census score
from 2.5 - clear insomnia -
to an 8.9 - insomnia free.
As for me, well,
I'm not exactly cured,
but by incorporating
some of what I've learned
during the course of
making this programme,
I AM sleeping better.
You may feel you have
already tried everything,
but I would thoroughly recommend
giving a go to some of the things
that we have suggested -
become your own self-experiment.
And the really good news
is that sleep science is continuing
to evolve at a rapid pace,
with exciting and revolutionary
solutions on the horizon.
So, time for bed, and a chance
to get in as many of those wonderful
deep sleep brainwaves as possible.
of a sleep crisis.
A third of us regularly
struggle with our sleep,
which rose to one in
two during the pandemic.
The highest it's ever been.
I'm Michael Mosley,
and I have suffered from sleep
problems for many years.
The good news is as more
and more of us seek help,
new advances are revolutionising
our understanding of sleep.
We are now able to capture
brain waves of people
while they're asleep
in their own home.
Unlocking the secrets
of the sleeping brain,
which could help solve our nightly
struggles with insomnia.
I slept for ten hours - ten hours!
Seriously, that never happens.
Sleeping better can also transform
our health, from staving off
life-threatening diseases...
Amyloid is a protein that's
implicated in Alzheimer's disease.
When you're asleep, amyloid
is removed from the brain
at very high rates.
..to reducing the sugar cravings
caused by missing out on sleep...
On average, people consume
385 calories more per day.
Oh, wow, wow.
..and even improving
our mental health...
REM sleep is where most
of our vivid dreams occur,
and it's important for
our emotional regulation.
I'll find out if my poor sleep
is impacting my health...
It's bad for you because, if
it's extensive, that could lead
to cell death.
..and I'll see if
brand-new tech can help.
So instead of relying on drugs,
you're using technology to try and
improve the quality of your sleep.
I'm hoping the latest science
can help me, and millions like me,
learn how to sleep well.
Didn't really think this one
through before I did it.
A good night's sleep
is a wonderful thing.
I just wish I had more of them.
For years, I've struggled
with insomnia,
waking up in the middle of the night
and finding it hard
to get back to sleep.
How did you sleep?
I slept like a log.
Lucky old you...
I only woke up when you were
marching around the bedroom.
When I'm awake at 3am, I'm normally
thinking, "Well, here we go again."
I don't think I've slept
through the night for probably
a decade, maybe longer.
To explore the extent of the current
sleep crisis, I've teamed up
with the University of Oxford
to launch a landmark census
of the nation's sleeping habits.
Right, let's give it a go.
OK, so, "How satisfied are you
with your current sleep pattern?"
Not terribly!
"How often do you use alcohol
or prescription medicines
"to help go to sleep?"
Filling in the census provides
instant feedback on the quality
of your sleep -
rated from one to ten.
Anything below five
is a sign of poor sleep.
"Thank you. Your score is 2.8."
That's not great, is it?
I hope there aren't too many
others doing as badly as me.
BELL RINGS
I'm in Oxford,
City of Dreaming Spires,
and home to one of the world's
leading sleep research centres.
It's here that all the data
from our census is being analysed.
Leading the team are Professor
Colin Espie and Dr Rachel Sharman.
What can you tell me?
What did we find?
We're sat at 207,000 people...
Woohoo! Wow!
..which is fantastic.
It just shows how
popular the topic was.
What were the most
interesting findings
as far as you were concerned?
The average sleep in
the UK in 207,000 people
is six hours, 48 minutes.
Wow, that's shorter
than I was expecting.
Shorter than I would like.
The recommended sleep for an adult
is somewhere between
seven and nine hours,
but to average lower than
seven hours is a bit of a worry.
Some people not getting enough
sleep because they're not giving
themselves enough
opportunity to sleep,
but there's other people
in there who would desperately
want to sleep, and they can't
cos they've got insomnia.
As well as all those struggling
to get the recommended
seven to nine hours,
there's a second,
alarming pattern in the data.
When it came to sleep quality,
almost half reported
having poor sleep.
About 44% were showing signs
of having poor quality sleep,
which I think is slightly
more than what we'd expect. Yeah.
And what we mean by poor quality
of sleep is maybe a struggle to get
to sleep or a struggle to get back
to sleep, feeling unrefreshed,
feeling it's affecting
your day time.
And it is higher
than we would expect.
I may complain, but I don't actually
think my sleep is that poor quality.
Even though I wake up
in the middle of the night,
I try to make sure I get enough.
I usually manage to get at least
seven hours' sleep a night,
but I almost never sleep throughout
the night, so I'm very keen to find
out more about what goes
on when I'm sleeping.
To find out what's really going on
in my brain when I'm asleep,
Rachel, from the Oxford team,
has brought along an impressive
new piece of sleep science kit.
This is a really exciting
time for sleep science.
We are now able to
move out of the lab
and actually capture
brain waves of people
while they're asleep
in their own home.
I'm impressed.
This home sleep test is a
miniaturised, portable EEG machine,
designed to record the brain's
electrical activity during sleep.
But not all sleep is the same.
In fact,
it involves four distinct stages,
and scientists are learning
more than ever before
about how they are crucial for our
mental and physical health.
Each stage of sleep can be
identified by its pattern
of brain waves.
I obviously spend an awful lot
of time watching people sleep
and analysing sleep,
and I'm still in absolute awe
of what our brain does.
When we're awake,
our brain waves are short and fast.
As we drift off into the first
stage of sleep,
they begin to slow down.
In this first stage, we're
transitioning from the chaotic,
fast activity to this drifting
activity where the eyes are rolling
and the head is nodding.
Next is stage two, which looks
very similar to stage one,
except for little
bursts of activity.
This is preparing the brain
for learning and memory that occurs
in the later stages of sleep.
The third stage is deep sleep,
where we see a more
spaced out pattern
of taller waves known as slow waves.
It's this deep stage of sleep
that is really important
for our physiological repair,
and it's also really
important for our memory.
Getting plenty of this deep, slow
wave sleep also helps improve
the immune system and our
ability to fight infections.
Everything is kind of
coordinating, is it? Exactly.
It's beautiful. It's almost
like the brain is pulsing.
Finally, we enter stage four, REM,
where our brain waves return
to a shorter and faster pattern,
similar to when we're awake.
Our bodies are paralysed,
but our eyes move
rapidly while we dream.
REM sleep is where most of our vivid
dreams occur, and it's important
for our emotional regulation.
It's really important to not only
just get enough sleep in terms
of duration, but getting enough
of these individual stages.
Rachel has a chart called
a hypnogram to show me how,
in a typical eight-hour sleep,
the four stages are
repeated several times
in what are known as sleep cycles.
We have yellow, which is stage one,
green, which is stage two.
and this blue colour,
which is stage three.
And then we have red up here,
which is our REM sleep.
So it's making sure that
we've got enough of each stage
of sleep of optimal functioning.
OK, so this is the bit of kit
you want me to use? Yes, please.
Right, OK. Good look?
Do we like that?
Definitely.
MICHAEL LAUGHS
I feel deeply honoured
because I'm the first person to use
this device outside the Oxford lab.
Rachel would use the data to map
out not just how much sleep I get,
but crucially, how much
of each stage of sleep.
I'm especially curious to know
how I score on deep sleep.
Hi, Rachel.
Hi, Michael. Good to see you.
Results time.
Results time, exactly.
Here is your hypnogram,
which is the first time
we've recorded this in
the wild, in your home.
Yay! So I'm number one, am I?
Participant One!
By bringing the Sleep Lab
into the home environment,
these devices are going
to revolutionise our field.
Before we get onto my deep sleep,
the device has revealed
something alarming.
I didn't just wake up once,
but multiple times in the night.
You were in bed for
eight hours and 21 minutes,
but actually, when we add
up all of these awakenings
that you've had, you're only
spending 75% of the time
in bed asleep.
That means a quarter of the time
I'm in bed, I'm awake. Exactly.
Anything over about 30 minutes
awake in the night is problematic,
and you're up here
at one hour and 43.
I can actually show you...
The tablet was actually picking
up audio during the night.
So one of the reasons I think
you were coming in and out
is because you were snoring.
LOW RUMBLE
That's me snoring, isn't it?
That is you snoring.
Some of them were right up
there at 45 decibels.
So, that would be
enough to wake me up
or possibly Claire nudging me
and going, "You're snoring."
All too often, these awakenings
are preventing me from reaching
the stage of deep sleep.
We need our deep sleep
to detoxify the brain.
It is our brain's laundry system.
It flushes out all those
toxins that have built up.
You want to have about 20%
of your lights off to lights on
in that deep sleep.
Over those eight hours,
you only had about 12%. Right.
Is this kind of typical
for a 64 or bad for a 64?
It's not great for a 64-year-old.
Rachel is certainly not
mincing her words.
You're not sleeping enough,
and if we're not sleeping enough,
we're putting ourselves at higher
risk of all sorts of nasty things
like cardiovascular disease,
metabolic dysfunction,
and even cancer.
It's very clear
that I have insomnia.
I'm not getting enough sleep,
particularly of that sort
of beautiful, slow wave sleep.
To find out in more
detail how poor sleep
is impacting our underlying health,
I'm taking part in
ground-breaking research
at the University of Surrey.
I'm about to do a remarkable new
test which looks at genetic markers
in my blood and which,
apparently, can tell the impact
that lack of sleep has
on things like stress,
my immunity, and my risk of disease.
Unfortunately, it also means
I have to have blood taken before
and after a completely
sleepless night.
Right, so, Claire, my wife,
is taking my blood.
Fortunately, she's a GP,
so this is not just amateur hour.
Playing at home. Just playing at
home, exactly. Playing doctors.
As well as blood tests,
which will measure genetic markers,
I'm going to find out how well
I cope with the immediate aftermath
of lost sleep.
I think I'm pretty
good at getting by,
but what's the reality?
OK, done.
DOORBELL RINGS
It's bright and early,
and I've got a lovely delivery here,
which is full of goodies.
To see how well I really cope,
Rachel's sent me a
selection of tests.
I'll be tackling puzzles
that measure my reaction times
and mental clarity,
and others that will
assess my concentration
and ability to perform
physical tasks,
while monitoring
the number of mistakes I make.
LOUD BUZZER
Ah!
And, finally, with the help
of my daughter Kate, I will find out
what a lack of sleep does
to my pain threshold.
The idea is I have to try and keep
my hand in there for as long
as possible,
and you have to time it.
Three, two, one, go!
Right, oh, that was cold.
That is cold.
That is really very painful indeed.
OK, that was it.
That was it?!
That was as much as I could do.
He only made it 32 seconds,
but from the sounds of it,
it was very painful,
so I'm curious how he's going
to do when he's sleep-deprived.
It's now time for a sleepless night.
Uh, and yeah, everyone else
is going to head off to bed
and I'm going to
stay here with Terry.
I think Terry's already
keeled over for the night.
My in-built 24 hour body clock
is telling me that
it's time for sleep...
..but by pulling an all nighter,
I'm messing with my
body's natural rhythms.
One of the immediate
effects is that I'm hungry
at an unusual time.
One of the worst things
about being wake in the middle
of the night is the munchies.
I've been having a bit of a wander
around looking for something to eat.
By staying up all night, I'm missing
out on all the benefits that come
with the four stages of sleep.
Finally, my long,
sleepless night is over.
There's something very primal
about having survived a night
and being out here in the dawn.
But how will missing all those
crucial stages of sleep affect me?
How am I feeling?
I'm sort of feeling relieved.
I didn't really think this
one through before I did it.
It's now 9am
and I actually feel like my usual
coping mechanisms are working well.
Research suggests it's possible
to experience brief feelings
of euphoria when sleep deprived,
although we don't really know
what's happening in the brain
that causes this.
What's interesting to me
is at the moment I'm beginning
to go gabble, gabble, gabble.
An area of the brain that's
particularly sensitive to lack
of sleep is the prefrontal cortex,
the part that does a lot of
planning and decision-making.
BUZZER
I think I need to slow down
and be a bit more careful.
Ah! Oo!
Research also shows
our perception of pain is heightened
when we miss out on deep sleep,
something I'm
definitely experiencing.
Ah!
That was bad.
Blimey! Must be wrong.
According to this, I only
lasted 18 seconds this time,
which is truly pathetic.
By mid-afternoon,
I'm suffering from brain fog
and feeling irritated by the tests.
Right...
Our sleep centres also
linked our poor sleepers
with lower mood scores...
..which isn't surprising,
as by staying awake all night,
I missed out on the crucial
REM stage of sleep,
which plays an important
role in regulating mood.
How did you find it?
I was conscious
that I felt grumpier,
but I thought that I was actually
doing quite well in these tests,
and clearly, some of them, I wasn't.
This is the buzz wire,
and this is where you had to move
the little loop through the wire.
The number of mistakes I made
more than doubled when
I'd missed out on sleep.
I was rushing the buzz wire test,
being more careless.
And on the reaction time test,
I was much slower.
Rachel's got a
surprising explanation...
I was having tiny micro
sleeps without even noticing.
This is your lapses,
so this is how many times
you stopped paying attention.
What we can see here,
in the green,
is you're getting
worse overnight.
Both during the night and during
some of the tests in the morning,
my brain was desperately trying
to force me to nod off
to initiate the sleep cycle.
You're getting tiny bits of sleep
coming in as your head nods
and you wake back up,
and these are sort of micro sleeps.
These are 500 milliseconds,
so they're not long at all,
but it was enough for you to miss
the signal that we presented.
What's important is you didn't even
know you were having those lapses
in attention. It's quite scary,
absolutely. Mm-hm.
Being awake after sleep deprivation
is similar in terms of performance
to having a blood alcohol level
of about two or three pints.
You wouldn't drink and drive.
No.
So, what about drowsy driving?
Alarmingly, as many as one in three
of us admit to having experienced
micro sleeps while driving.
It's clear that being sleep deprived
has a much bigger impact
on my mental and physical
performance than I realised.
But what will the blood
tests I did earlier reveal?
Hi, Michael Mosley.
Just push the door. Thank you.
Professor Simon Archer,
who pioneered this new test,
has been looking at
thousands of my genes...
..and, remarkably enough,
just by looking at which
genes were switched on
and which were switched off,
he was able to tell
which blood sample was taken
after my sleepless night.
We knew that we had two pairs
of samples - A, B, C, D.
We were very confident
from the beginning that sample D
was the sample taken
after you'd missed a night of sleep.
What this is telling us,
this big difference with sample D,
is that you staying up all night
has had a big effect on the gene
expression within your blood cells.
Yeah. Big enough that
we can clearly see it.
Most of the effects of the sleep
deprivation are causing genes
to be switched on
that wouldn't normally be.
We have genes that we
know respond to stress.
Yeah.
OK.
And these have all been upregulated
in your blood. Right.
Essentially switched on?
Yep.
So, I'm more stressed.
Losing sleep for just one night
prompted my immune system
to move into overdrive.
If your immune system is
in overdrive when it shouldn't be,
that's not a good thing.
It's bad for you because
you haven't got pathogens
that you need to respond to.
Simon also noticed that the
energy-producing parts of my cells,
the mitochondria, were not
functioning as they should,
which is a potential red flag
for Alzheimer's.
The brain is a very active organ,
it uses up most of your oxygen,
and it needs a lot of energy,
and the mitochondria
provide that energy.
So, this downregulation will mean
there will be a lack of energy
within those neurons.
Right.
And this downregulation
in mitochondria is similar
to the mitochondrial dysfunction
that's associated with Alzheimer's.
If it's extensive,
that could lead to cell death.
The problem comes when people
are frequently missing sleep
and the accumulation
of those negative effects
and how that associates
with health problems.
Very impressive - the fact
that he could look at a sample
of my blood and tell whether
I had been sleep deprived or not.
And, on a personal level,
I did find it very, very striking
because, obviously, you hear
all the stuff about lack of sleep
and what it might do to you,
but knowing what it
actually has done to me
was very shocking,
genuinely shocking.
The fact that it's increased
my stress levels, had a bad effect
on my immune system, and quite
possibly increased my risk
of Alzheimer's,
albeit by a small amount.
All of that is something which
really I find quite disturbing.
So, it's given me a
lot to think about.
I'm now 64,
and my dad died prematurely
at the age of 74,
and before he died,
he was showing signs of early
sort of cognitive decline,
memory loss and things like that.
So, that's something I'll fear,
that that's what's going
to happen to me, as well.
It's not just brain degeneration
like Alzheimer's that's a concern.
Lack of sleep really does affect
almost every system in your body.
In our sleep census, almost two
thirds of those who are classed
as poor sleepers
reported at least one mental
or physical health problem.
And there is one sleep disorder
which, if left untreated,
can be life-threatening
and which millions of people
suffer from without realising.
It's called sleep apnoea.
At the Royal Free Hospital
in London,
security supervisor Kevin
is seeing Dr Swapna Mandal
to confirm whether or
not he has sleep apnoea.
I think sleep apnoea is
more common than we realise
and definitely underdiagnosed.
In the UK alone,
1.5 million individuals
may have obstructive sleep apnoea
and only 20% of those
have been diagnosed.
I have occasions
where I'll wake up and...
..sometimes you just
find it hard to breathe.
LOUD SNORING
It's like you have no
air going through you.
You wake up and there's the taste of
vomit in the back of your throat,
and it's hard to get rid of.
SNORING
Kevin's repeated waking
results in broken sleep cycles
throughout the night.
If this is sleep apnoea,
it could put him at
increased risk of heart disease,
hypertension and stroke.
My wife nudges me
if I stop breathing.
I don't notice it.
It's just something
that she noticed,
and that's how it all came about,
after being given an ultimatum -
doctors or divorce.
She's happy about it,
the fact that it is the first stage
of hopefully getting something done.
GUTTURAL SNORING
The awakenings are usually
so brief that the sleeper
doesn't notice them happening.
Patient goes to sleep and often
the muscles in the upper part
of the airway relax and cause
narrowing of the airway
and sometimes complete closure.
And that means the patient
has a pause in their breathing,
which can lead to a drop
in their oxygen levels.
But more importantly, it means
that they often go from a deeper
stage of sleep to a
lighter stage of sleep,
and so have disrupted
sleep throughout the night.
Why don't you tell me a little bit
about the symptoms you've had?
Last week it happened.
I woke up, literally gagging
for breath - could not breathe.
We need to do a sleep study.
It's this little device here that
sits at the bottom of the neck.
Keep it on the whole night
and then we'll have the results.
When I first started,
patients would have belts
around the chest and tummy,
tubing up the nose, a finger probe
to measure their oxygen saturations,
and then we would have to review
all of that data overnight.
Now, newer devices can give
you an automatic diagnosis.
As Kevin sleeps,
the device will capture sounds
from his breathing
and his heart activity.
LOUD SNORING
During the test,
Kevin's breathing stopped on
average 51 times every hour,
confirming he's got sleep apnoea
and it's severe.
So, to help with his breathing and
reduce his risk of serious health
consequences, Kevin will try
sleeping wearing a piece of kit
known as a continuous positive
airway pressure machine.
A patient wears a mask overnight
that's attached to some tubing,
and it blows some gentle air
pressure into the airway
to keep the airway open.
I now have this little baby.
It sends all the
information via the Wi-Fi.
It's interesting
to know that someone else
is sort of watching
and keeping an eye
on how you're doing.
Kevin will wear the device
for the next few weeks
to see if it radically improves
his and his wife's nights.
As we're learning, a lack of
sleep can impact us in ways
we are not even aware of.
For example, not getting enough
can significantly
increase how much we eat.
And I don't just mean the odd
attack of the midnight munchies.
Our census found that around 60%
of poor sleepers had a BMI
that was in the obese
or overweight category.
Dr Wendy Hall
is a nutritional scientist
from King's College London,
who has been studying
whether improving sleep
can also improve our diet.
Hello.
Hello.
Good parky day.
Yes!
What's the link between sleep
and weight gain?
We know that short sleep
can affect what we eat.
There's a part of the brain
called the hypothalamus
that's very important for regulating
lots of things in the body,
but one of them is appetite.
So, there are hormones
that are produced in the body
that then send signals that act
on the hypothalamus to tell the body
how hungry or full
they should be feeling.
One of these is called leptin,
and leptin is a hormone produced
by fat cells in the body.
So, when you get more
fat stores in the body,
leptin levels go up,
and it's telling the brain
that fat stores are sufficient.
But there's some evidence to show
that people who are short sleepers
have lower levels of leptin.
There's another hormone
that's important as well,
and this is more of a hunger
hormone and it's called ghrelin.
It will go up when you're hungry,
if you've not eaten for a while,
and there's some evidence
that ghrelin levels are higher
in people who are short sleepers,
so they may be getting
a constant hunger signal.
I certainly find that when I'm
sleep deprived, what I crave madly
is sugary, fatty things
like biscuits or croissants.
I think a lot of people
would recognise that feeling.
So how much more do we eat
after a bad night's sleep?
We did a study that pulled
lots of other studies that had got
people in a metabolic unit
and deprived them of sleep.
And, on average, they consumed
385 calories more per day.
Oh, wow. Wow.
It's about 20% of the average
woman's energy requirements,
so that is a considerable amount,
and it would lead to weight gain,
if that was continued over time.
These findings prompted Wendy
and her team to try and help
short sleepers improve their
sleep and, in turn, their health.
Sian, a nursing lecturer,
is classed as a short sleeper.
On average, she gets less
than six hours a night.
I've got into bad habits
with sleeping,
and so I'm awake till 1:00, 1:30,
just doing nothing
of any consequence.
And I know that when I'm staying
up late at night, I'm snacking late
at night and eating things
before I go to bed.
We have a long family history
of type two diabetes.
My mother had type two diabetes,
my father did, my sister does.
It can reduce your life expectancy.
You know, and I have
a lovely daughter,
I want to be fit and healthy
for her as long as I can.
The team want to see if they can
help her increase her sleep.
To do this,
they've asked her to make
some fairly simple changes.
She'll try to improve her sleep
routine by decluttering her room
and avoiding screen
use late at night.
She'll keep up with good habits,
like getting out into
the morning light,
which can help reset the body clock,
as part of establishing
a healthier sleeping pattern.
The hope is this will not
only help Sian sleep well,
but also reduce her calorie intake.
If you could just step on for me
with your heels right at the back.
Thank you.
I think this will probably
give me the push that I need,
whether it helps me lose a bit
of weight, whether I feel better
during the day, and whether
it just makes me that little bit
healthier, really.
Improving our sleep doesn't
just make us healthier,
it can also boost our brainpower.
At the University of
California in Los Angeles,
neuroscientists are investigating
the link between sleep and memory
by studying how the
brain tackles puzzles.
At the forefront of this
research is Professor Gina Poe,
who has a particular passion.
I'm interested in mazes,
because it's a task that engages
a good portion of your brain,
including a learning and memory
structure that also
maps your environment.
Today, I'm going to
be Gina's guinea pig.
She's sent me to Blenheim Palace -
home to one of the largest
hedge mazes on the planet.
She has sent me a video
which will explain all.
Hi, Michael.
I've sent you to this maze
to run it as fast as you can
and time yourself,
and we'll see how you do.
And then after you've finished,
I would love you to go home and get
a good night's sleep and then
try it again in the morning
to see if you can run it any faster.
Well, that's pretty clear.
All I've got to do now is
check the time and then head off
and see if I can conquer the maze.
Right.
Hmm, that makes no sense at all.
This is a dead end as well.
We need sleep to connect things
that we cannot see when we're awake.
For example, when you turn
left and you run into a wall,
and then you turn right
and you run into a wall,
and then you go straight
and you can go forward.
Those things aren't
happening simultaneously,
and because they're not happening
simultaneously, it's hard for us
to put all of that together.
This looks familiar.
Gina's work suggests that as
I make my way through the maze,
a part of my brain called
the locus coeruleus
is helping to identify information
that will be processed when I sleep.
Locus coeruleus is a
tiny area in the brainstem,
and it provides norepinephrine -
which is like adrenaline,
but for the brain -
to the entire brain.
So when it's active, it's providing
this juice to help us learn
more quickly from anything
that's happening at the time.
I have a terrible feeling
I've come to the entrance again.
HE LAUGHS
I HAVE come to the entrance again!
We are studying how these locus
coeruleus neurons are firing
during wakefulness
to tag memories for...
..reconsolidation during sleep.
Ah-ha.
So I need to go there.
I need to go there...
Ta-da!
Hooray!
Ah! And there we go -
29 and a half minutes.
I'm not sure if that's good
or bad. I suspect that's bad.
Hi, Gina. Hello. Hi, Michael.
I've done the task and it
took me nearly half an hour.
Well, I want to ask you, do you
feel like you have a mental map
of the maze yet in your mind, or...?
It's pretty hazy, I have to say.
Get a good night's sleep
and in the morning,
when you wake up, just try it again
and see if it's a little
less frustrating this time.
OK. That'll be fascinating
because, at the moment,
I feel I haven't a clue.
Ta-ra, then. See you. Bye-bye.
It's about 8:30 in the morning,
so I'm feeling reasonably perky.
But the interesting thing will be,
do I do the maze any better now
than I did yesterday. Right!
At first, the maze is
as puzzling as before.
No. Right.
But as I get going, it feels
easier than my first attempt.
Right, this is the first bit,
so I've managed to get here in a
surprisingly short period of time.
And then round here. Yep.
Gina's research suggests
that my improved performance
is down to what happened in
my brain during specific parts
of my sleep cycle.
Thanks to deep sleep and REM sleep,
I was able to dredge up memories
from yesterday
that I wasn't even
aware of at the time.
There's a brief period of time
during slow-wave sleep called
the transition to REM sleep,
and it's where the hippocampus
is really well connected.
The hippocampus is our temporary
learning and memory structure,
and it seems to be writing
those temporary memories
to the long-term memory storage.
And it's only during
rapid eye movement sleep that
we can selectively
disengage pieces of memory.
So it's a time when you can actually
both write new memories in
as well as erase pieces of memories
that you need to erase,
or weaken connections,
and we can wire together
the proper pattern,
the proper synaptic pattern
that is associated
with solving the problem,
with finding a solution.
Uh-huh.
Good.
And...I remember going
down that one before,
which was a mistake.
And if I am right, I go
round the corner, and ta-ra,
I see Hermes - and indeed
I do! Hello, old friend.
Really delighted to see you again.
I reckon that is just
over six minutes
which, compared to half an hour
the first time,
is obviously a
huge, huge difference.
And there were interesting moments
in there where I really didn't know
where I was, but there
were other moments
where the sort of
memories flashed back in.
Since good sleep is crucial
for memory and problem solving,
it's perhaps not surprising
that disrupted nights can play havoc
with our mental processes.
In the UK, over five
million adults are believed
to suffer from insomnia.
One of them is campaigns
coordinator Valerie,
who has a sleep score
of just 2.5 out of ten.
Valerie's problem, just like mine,
is not in getting to sleep,
but staying asleep.
It's called maintenance insomnia,
which means she may not be getting
enough deep sleep and REM sleep -
stages of sleep that
are crucial for memory.
I just feel like I do
sometimes have brain fog,
so I do sometimes forget
the simplest words.
I can have no memory of
an event that I was at.
I mean, I'm working full-time,
and I do have to make a lot of notes
if people are talking
because otherwise it's just gone.
On average, Valerie gets
between four and six hours
of broken sleep each night.
She can often be awake
for hours at a time.
I'm not in a happy place.
I've been awake for a while.
I've not been asleep that long.
I'd probably say about
a couple of hours or so.
It's Sunday night,
Monday morning, and I'm wiped out.
Valerie has struggled with
poor sleep and its side effects
since she was a teenager.
I just feel like I've never really
been as focused as I can be
because I'm not rested,
but I just feel like I probably
haven't maybe pushed
myself for many things
because I feel like I can't achieve
it because the focus is not there.
Seeking answers, Valerie's
meeting Colin Espie
from the Oxford University team.
He wants to change the way
she thinks about her sleep.
Hi, Valerie, it's so nice
to meet you. You, too.
So I'm going to suggest something
that we call the
quarter-of-an-hour rule.
Have you heard of that before?
Never, no.
The average good sleeper falls
asleep within a quarter of an hour.
If you don't fall asleep
during the night
within that quarter of an hour
period, you say to yourself,
"Valerie, I'm just going to get up,
"go do something else for a
while, and I'll go back to bed
"when I feel sleepy again."
But then what if I
wake up ten times?
It defeats the purpose, right?
We're trying to break
a habit, a connection.
So even in the one night, you might
have to do this several times. OK.
I'll give it a go.
Give it a go. Yeah.
That's all I'm asking.
If the quarter-of-an-hour
rule works,
it will hopefully train
Valerie to get back to sleep
much more easily,
which should help clear her
brain fog and improve her memory.
It's the first night,
and I'm going to give this a go.
So...
..fingers crossed
it all goes all right,
and that I have
a great night's sleep.
Thanks to new technology,
we can explore the sleeping brain
in new ways.
And a lab at Boston University
recently uncovered something
very surprising about what
goes on during deep sleep.
Hi, Laura. Very good to see you.
Great to get a chance to
talk with you virtually.
Neuroscientist Professor
Laura Lewis and her team
have made a fascinating discovery.
Using specially adapted
MRI scanning technology,
they've been able to capture
the first ever moving images
of the sleeping brain in action.
Sleep is something that
really the whole brain does,
it's not just one part of the brain.
And so MRI gives us this
really nice full picture
of how all of these
different things
might be connected to each other.
Volunteers are monitored
as they fall asleep
inside the MRI scanner.
If you're comfortable
and ready to proceed,
can you squeeze the squeeze ball?
BEEPING
The descent into sleep is
usually a very gradual process,
and we'll monitor their
electrical activity of the brain,
and from that we can see what type
of stage of sleep somebody's in.
Now, your brain is bathed in a
fluid called cerebrospinal fluid.
Laura and her team
have been studying the movement
of this fluid during sleep.
What we'd been imaging was
the flow of cerebrospinal fluid,
and that's a liquid that envelops
the brain, it cushions it,
but it also helps
carry waste products
out of the brain eventually.
So waste products being produced
in the tissue can get kind of moved
into this liquid and eventually
become sort of flushed and cleared
from the brain.
And what sort of things
are being washed away?
Things like amyloid.
So amyloid is a protein that's
implicated in Alzheimer's disease.
So if somebody doesn't sleep,
you don't get this waste clearance.
When you're asleep,
amyloid is removed from the brain
at very high rates.
They spotted something remarkable -
that the waves of
cerebrospinal fluid
appear in step with
the slow electrical waves
generated during sleep.
This helps explain why sleep plays
such an important role in helping
to flush toxins from the brain,
like those associated
with Alzheimer's.
It's also really quite hypnotic.
You can actually probe into
the sleeping brain in a way
that just wasn't
possible a decade ago.
This is, I think, the power of MRI.
It's really incredible that we have
this fully noninvasive tool
to look at just brain physiology.
I thought I knew a lot about sleep,
and I have seen nothing like that.
Fantastic.
The benefits of slow-wave sleep
are so profound that scientists
are now looking at how to enhance
them to boost our memories
and stave off age-related
brain degeneration.
Right. I've got a wonderful,
exciting package here
which I've been looking forward to
because it's...
Yeah, great. It contains
these sort of extraordinary devices.
So let's see how that one goes on.
I think that goes on
to my forehead there.
Right, so there are some electrodes
in this band here,
which is pressed up
against my scalp.
And apparently what they can do
is read when you're in deep sleep,
and then what happens is
when you are in deep sleep,
the machine makes some sort
of noise, which apparently improves
the quality of your deep sleep.
This intriguing technology is being
explored at Cardiff University's
Brain Research Imaging Centre.
One of the team
researching how our
slow waves can be boosted
while we sleep is Holly Kings.
When you're in your
deepest stage of sleep,
which is called slow-wave sleep,
this headband can detect that,
and it detects big, slow
waves of activity.
And what we do is we play the sound
near the peak of one of these waves,
and we get a bigger wave,
and we get more waves.
Holly and the team are hoping
that this kind of sleep engineering
will help enhance deep sleep
and, in doing so, improve memory.
What we're thinking is that
these waves are very important
in how our memories
are consolidated at night.
So that's how they go from
where we initially put them,
in a short-term store,
into a long-term storage,
so that we can retrieve them days,
weeks, months later.
So this is basically
engineering sleep.
Sleep engineering is really about
finding these different ways
to influence the sleep.
So by using sound,
we can improve the efficiency
of this stage of sleep.
This shows a typical EEG reading
during slow-wave sleep.
As the sound stimulus is applied,
we can see the waves becoming
noticeably more powerful.
Leading the research
which they hope will one day delay
the effects of cognitive decline,
is Professor Penny Lewis.
We have tried to look at how
well this stimulation impacts
on the brain in younger
and older people -
so is there a difference at all?
And the reason we did that
is because we were hoping
that this might be a way to boost
slow waves in older people
and potentially help with
slowing down degeneration.
What we found is that
in younger people,
you see this nice big boost
in the oscillation
after the stimulation.
Whereas, in the older group -
which, yes, in the ages 56 -
there is a response... Yeah.
..but it's tiny.
Unfortunately, as we age,
our slow waves aren't quite
as effective as they used to be.
This means that the target
the sound waves are trying to hit
is much smaller, and easily missed.
We're working on ways
to optimise it, and hopefully once
it's more optimised, then
it will be more effective
in an older age group as well,
and also just in a
wider range of people.
Sadly, this developing technology
won't be improving my sleep
any time soon.
For now, I'll keep trying as many
popular tricks as I can for getting
a good night's sleep and
keeping my body clock in rhythm.
I do all the regular stuff...
..making sure your room is dark,
cool and quiet.
I make sure I go to bed
at the same time every night,
and I get up at around 7:15.
I never have a lie in.
I go out and expose myself
to the bright, early morning light,
because I know that's a good
way of resetting the clock.
First thing in the morning,
I do my press ups and my squats.
I could go on and on.
And here's another
tech-free sleep hack
that anyone, of any age, can try.
You just need to learn how
to nap like an Olympic athlete.
For top competitors, it's
really important that they get
a good night's sleep.
Dr Luke Gupta is the sleep expert
at the English Institute of Sport.
Napping is something in sport
which has gained a lot of attention,
and if you don't do it, you're
not maximising your performance.
Luke has advised rower and Olympic
medallist Victoria Thornley
on her napping technique,
to make up for her early
starts on the river.
When we're getting up at 6.30,
we can only get in so much sleep
at night, so napping is just really
important to get that extra hour
in the day, if I possibly can,
of sleep and recovery time.
On training days, Victoria
has a short nap after lunch.
Similar schedules are in place
for all of the team's athletes,
based on two key principles.
The first one is the length
of the nap, and we want
this to be kept short, so around
30 minutes is considered optimal.
The next one is to keep it early.
By early, I mean between the hours
of one in the afternoon
and four in the afternoon.
It's where sleep is most likely
in the daytime because you get
this little dip in body temperature
that drives feelings of sleepiness.
By capitalising on the body's
natural rhythms, Luke believes
it is possible to train
even the most reluctant nappers.
My wife loves a nap.
I personally find it
makes me feel terrible,
that I get this really sort of
hungover feeling when I wake up.
Yes, I think it's just
putting it into your routine.
I always call it a power nap.
You know, you don't want
to do it for too long.
OK, well, I'm hoping to
learn how to do it properly.
Yes. Because I've yet
to achieve a decent nap.
This could be my first.
Victoria and I have each
been given a quiet, dark room,
and 20 minutes on
the clock for a nap.
The question is, will I be able
to compete with Victoria's ability
to nap on demand?
It's the gold standard
of measuring something,
what we call sleep propensity -
someone's ability to fall asleep.
Victoria's training seems
to pay off straight away.
WHISPERING: So you can see here
that Vicky is clearly just...
..hasn't really given
much thought to this process,
and just climbed into bed and tried
to fall asleep almost instantly.
And she hasn't really moved since.
Whereas I'm struggling.
The urge to sleep grows
throughout the day,
thanks partly to the build-up
of a chemical in the brain called
adenosine, which makes us
increasingly drowsy.
So trying to go to sleep
halfway through the day
can be tricky,
unless you're in the habit.
KNOCK ON DOOR
Time's up, Michael. Hello.
Ah, right!
So how'd you guys get on?
I think, by the end,
I was probably asleep.
That surprised me,
cos I would've not predicted
that I would have fallen asleep.
Even just 20 minutes of doing
that feels, like, refreshing.
Research shows that a
daytime nap can lift our mood
and improve our concentration
and creativity.
But you may have to practise.
So do you think there are benefits,
if I continue to practise napping,
if you're not an athlete,
if you're someone like me?
Yes, this is a learned behaviour
that, over time, becomes habituated
and almost automated.
So the more we sort of persevere
with the idea of the falling asleep
more frequently, actually
builds confidence in sleep.
I liked what Luke was saying.
The idea that if you nap during
the day, when you actually find
it quite difficult to go to sleep,
this will give you more confidence,
you'll get more practised
at falling asleep.
Luke has given me a tip
that I've never tried before,
and I need all the help I can get,
as I just don't sleep
like I used to.
In my youth, when I was in my 20s,
I could sleep anywhere,
any place. I remember
I slept in a graveyard once,
I slept in a telephone kiosk.
Then, when I hit my mid-to-late
30s,
we had young kids, disrupted nights.
Then hit the 40s,
work got more stressful,
and suddenly I'm waking up
in the middle of the night,
3am, worrying about stuff.
The link between how long
you sleep and your age
was also reflected in our census.
And there were some
other intriguing insights.
Women reported lower sleep
satisfaction than men.
And, in general, people
in the north were sleeping less
than those in the south,
and they also reported
worse sleep quality.
While the shortest sleepers
were in Kilmarnock.
But participants in Guernsey
had the top score for sleep quality.
And we also found that
almost 20% of all participants
said they turned to alcohol
to help them drop off.
Which can, in fact,
make our sleep more disturbed.
It's clear that the causes
and the impact of poor sleep
are varied and complex.
So how much can tips and techniques
really help those who've struggled
with their sleep for years?
Sian has been following her new
sleep extension plan for a month.
She's settled into
a healthier routine.
She's decluttering her bedroom
and has also stopped
using screens late at night.
Before you received any advice,
your average sleep was
five hours, 24 minutes a night,
which is below the recommendations.
And then after the intervention,
after four weeks,
it went up to seven hours,
ten minutes per night.
That's much better.
You're looking very perky.
Yeah, good. Yes, I am. I am.
I'm, you know, a lot less tired,
and, you know, this morning
I've been up since half six,
and I'm still very
awake and very alert.
So a big difference, really.
Sian has increased her
sleep by an incredible
one and three quarter hours.
She's now well within
the recommended guidelines.
It's been a big step in her goal
to change her overall lifestyle.
It has, you know, given me
the confidence to actually
look at this a bit more in detail,
and actually look at
my nutrition as well,
and I have started to be more
mindful about what I'm eating.
Kevin has spent four weeks
on the airway pressure machine
to tackle his sleep apnoea.
Hi, Kevin.
How are you getting on?
Well, I'm sleeping all right.
He's definitely better
with the snoring.
As we said, your original diagnosis
was a pause in your breathing
on average 51 times an hour.
He didn't believe that he was
that bad, and we knew he was.
Yeah. And with the
use of the machine,
that's dropped down
to six times an hour,
which is a phenomenal improvement.
That's phenomenal.
Within normal limits.
So, amazing. I'm really
pleased at that.
Thank you. Very pleased.
Yeah.
Valerie has been following
the quarter-of-an-hour rule,
and has had a slumber breakthrough.
I slept for ten hours - ten hours!
Seriously, that never happens.
I was in bed at, like, ten.
I must have been asleep by about
quarter past - I didn't even read.
And then I finally
woke up at about 8:25,
which was five minutes
before I set the alarm, because
I set the alarm for
half eight this morning,
and I was just like,
"I can't believe it."
SHE LAUGHS
Inside three months, Valerie managed
to improve her sleep census score
from 2.5 - clear insomnia -
to an 8.9 - insomnia free.
As for me, well,
I'm not exactly cured,
but by incorporating
some of what I've learned
during the course of
making this programme,
I AM sleeping better.
You may feel you have
already tried everything,
but I would thoroughly recommend
giving a go to some of the things
that we have suggested -
become your own self-experiment.
And the really good news
is that sleep science is continuing
to evolve at a rapid pace,
with exciting and revolutionary
solutions on the horizon.
So, time for bed, and a chance
to get in as many of those wonderful
deep sleep brainwaves as possible.