Sleep

A couple of weeks ago I heard an interesting piece in the Nature podcast on the role sleep (or perhaps more accurately, lack of sleep) has to play in all kinds of health areas. It was an interview with Prof Russell Fraser a neuroscientist from Oxford University linked to the publication of his jointly authored book on Sleep in the “A Very Short Introduction Series” (written with Stephen Lockley). The key point being made was that problems with sleep can have huge impacts which are not currently fully appreciated, or acknowledged by society. Obvious examples are traffic accidents, but evidence actually suggests that many illnesses and conditions are more likely for individuals with poor sleep patterns. Prof Fraser argues that we should think of sleep as one part of a triad of factors influencing or health together with diet and exercise. Things like night-work, shift-work and becoming a teenager/young adult all play absolute havoc with sleep and can have big consequences for health (or concentration in the latter case).

With my interest piqued by the interview, and also having spent the last 7 or so years regularly having broken sleep due to environmental noise (early morning rubbish collections, drunken passer-by conversations, students…) before moving house recently, I thought I would buy the book and read it for myself. It was actually a lot more academic/technical than I thought it was going to be but some key points that I extracted and have been following are to really try to ensure that I have the possibility of 8 hours sleep per night (I pretty much did this anyway) and also not to drink tea of coffee after about 5.30pm (because cafeinne acts to maintain and enhance wakefulness and it takes 5 hours for a cafeinne dose to reduce by 50%). Funnily enough, in the week or so that I have not been drinking tea in the evenings I think I have slept better and there is other evidence for this outcome in the fact that apparently I have not created as much night-time disturbance for my wife (ooh-err perhaps I should have re-phrased that) and so she has reported sleeping better. Such a simple change, but it seems to be a powerful one.