(upbeat music) - Hello folks, welcome back. And if you're a new listener, a very big welcome to the show. My name's Simon Wood, and I'm your host for the High Performance Human Podcast. This week's podcast guest is Sleep Expert Luke Dutter, and I'll tell you more about him in just a moment. But before then, you might not realise it, but you are a high performance human. It isn't just about your fitness level, or your race results, and it's not even how you compare with other endurance athletes. Being a high performance human is about your whole life experience. It's about sleep, nutrition, exercise, relationships, and mental health. And you don't have to be a high level athlete to excel at any or all of these. We appreciate that you might think you've still got room for improvement. And if that's the case, then we'd love to help you. I currently have availability to take on one or two clients, and my wife Beth, who is a certified life coach, also has some availability. So depending on what you're looking to focus on, we've got you covered, and you can find full details in the show notes below. So this week's guest is Luke Gupta, a sleep scientist with over a decade of experience working within high performance sports, including Premier League football teams, England rugby, the lionesses, and Formula One, to name but a few. Now in the past, we've had several podcasts focusing on sleep, and if you're a regular listener, you'll appreciate how much importance I put on sleep as the best recovery tool. Luke specializes in translating sleep science principles into practice, and in this podcast, we will be discussing practical solutions to getting better sleep. And answering questions such as, what does it mean to have good sleep? Should I be worried about waking up regularly in the middle of the night? What you can do to help get a better night's sleep? How to make sure you continue to get good sleep when traveling. And finally, Luke gives us his three fundamental principles for good sleep. So without further ado, let's crack on and hear from Luke. Luke, welcome to the show, how are you? - Very well, thank you, thank you for having me. - Fresh from helping all of those athletes in Paris with getting the best sleep possible while they were preparing for and competing in the Olympic Games, right? - Yeah, absolutely, yeah, not quite recovered, but we're getting there. - One question I regularly ask my guests is do you follow your own guidance and make sure that you get the best sleep? - Well, I'm actually a new father of 18-month-year-old daughter. So yeah, what I thought I knew about sleep has been completely thrown on its head and challenged. So yeah, I'm sort of learning about sleep from a completely different perspective now, but yeah, I do my best. - And of course, there's plenty of those Olympic athletes and others that you deal with that have children. So do you feel like you've got a new found sympathy and empathy for their situation? - Yeah, 100%. I thought I knew what sleep deprivation was, but yeah, now I'm really sort of in the thick of it. So yeah, anyone who's got kids, yeah, a lot of empathy for them. - So first hand insight into how cognitive function tends to decline when you're not sleeping much? - Absolutely. - Well, let's just get a bit of a background to you first, Luke. Let people know why you are chatting with me today and what your areas of expertise and experience are. - Yeah, sure. So I'm a sports league specialist with the better sleep clinic. So I got into sleep about 13 years ago now, I think it was, when I was, like most people I stumbled into this area, it wasn't sort of my sort of goal in my career to sort of be a sports league specialist. I was a sports scientist, fresh out of university and an opportunity to come out to do a PhD. So at the time, sleep was sort of a new camera on the block, a hot topic, you wanna call it that. So when I started my PhD in like 20, 12, 2013, yeah, it was one of those topics where I could have gone absolutely anywhere with it. It was like literally a blank canvas. So usually PhDs get quite a small space to fill, whereas this is an absolute chasm. So yeah, choosing where to work within that was quite difficult, but given my role with the UK Sports Institute, it had to be applied, had to sort of benefit athletes and coaches that I was working with day to day. So we embarked on a programme of study looking at the concept of sleep quality, 'cause at the time it was when the idea of sleep extension, sleeping longer than normal was like a, as a vehicle for optimal performance. So we wanted to go against the grain as it were and sort of look at the other side to sleep and looking at the quality. So someone's self appraisal of what sleep is and what that means to them and what good and bad sleep may look like. - You call yourself a sports sleep specialist. Is that because you specifically work with athletes or is there any difference between the sleep that sportsmen need versus the sleep that everybody else needs? - Very good question. I mean, yeah, you stumbled upon a very relevant topic. Probably not. Like if you sort of take away on the surface, what athletes do, what the general population do, if you want to call them that, it's not that different when you sort of really understand sort of the mechanisms that are causing the disruption of people's sleep. Like everyone has stressful jobs, everyone goes through stressful periods, everyone has life challenges. In the day, we're all human. So how sleep affects one group of people versus another probably isn't that different really. The challenge would be somewhat different in the sense that the context would be different. So athletes may be thrown across the world a bit more. They might be thrown into high performance competition. But likewise, military personnel, other high performing individuals do very similar things. So yeah, I think there's a lot more similarities and differences. - Yeah, I was just thinking there about one of the conversations I have with some of my clients who are running their own businesses or the CEO of a big corporation is they are like the star performer. They're like the NFL quarterback or the center forward for football team. You know, that person might be the most highly paid player on the team and they're the one that scored the goals or makes the touchdowns or they bring home the big contracts. And so you want them to be in the best shape possible when they're at work to make smart decisions and when they're negotiating million or billion dollar contracts. So I think business people at the top level now I'm probably more in tune with this than they might have been. But a long time ago, it was late dinners, drinking, late to sleep, smoking and not particularly healthy lifestyles, wasn't it? And so that high performance and getting good sleep is equally applicable to, as you say, high performers in the military. I have to say that when I get on my next flight, I hope that my pilot has been sleeping well and if I have to have another operation on my knee that my surgeon has got a good night sleeping the night before and he chooses the right leg to operate on. - Absolutely. Okay, well, let's start right at the very bottom. I mean, I have this little Maslow's hierarchy of needs type pyramid for recovery and sports performance and the foundation of all that is sleep right at the very bottom holding everything up. It seems to me like it's not just the best recovery tool. It's three, four, five, six and seven and there aren't really any ways that I know of that where getting more sleep and better quality sleep will make things worse. But let's talk about how sleep contributes to general health and performance. What are some of the things it contributes to that perhaps folks don't realize? - Yeah, a great starting point. So yeah, I think the first thing to say is that it's not a simple cause and effects, which basically means that there's a two-way relationship between both sleep and performance and sleep and health. So what that basically means is that the way you sleep will fundamentally have an impact on how you function, how you perform, but also has an impact on your general wellbeing and your health. But also vice versa, we know that how you perform and the world I work in just by being an early athlete will shape and make your sleep look and feel a certain way. Likewise, we know that as part of general wellbeing health sleep is a symptom of that, but it also contributes to how people sleep. So it's a bit of a circle as well, like to describe it and I sort of dive into different halves of that when we pick out these things. But fundamentally, we know that the role of sleep is one that's barely supporting role. So it supports individuals and their ability to be well and function. So what that basically means is we know that sleep plays a fundamental role in people's ability to manage their emotions on a daily basis. So we know that when we don't sleep well, and it's funny how people always go to what happens when you don't sleep well as opposed to what you have when you do sleep well, but that's the world we live in. And it helps us manage those emotions that we can become more irritable. Those stressors that once before weren't really considered that stress will become more stressful. People's views become shorter. We know that on the more cognitive or psychological side of things that people's ability to make decisions, the ability to concentrate and maintain attention, those things become impaired as well. So interestingly, those two pillars of performance, you'll recall that a very sensitive to sleep disruption. But what's kind of holding up this element of performance is more the physical attributes. So we know that physical attributes of performance are relatively resilient to sleep disruption. So your ability to produce for the ability to sort of endure performance for a period of time, but those sorts of performance metrics seem to hold themselves quite well under circumstances of sleep deprivation. But what changes there is that the perception of effort becomes more. So for a given amount of work, it perceived to be harder than it would be if you slept well. But the crux of all of that really is what I'm saying is that there's infiltrates pretty much everything. Like you said, there's excitement. There's very few concepts that are part of us that infiltrate every aspect of our lives. And when you, again, dial it all back, it is a biological necessity. It's in the same campus breathing, like without it. We don't do very well as a species. And that's the same for every other living thing on this earth. So when you talk about it in those terms, it does become a no-brainer that we should pay attention to it. But again, it does create this element of gravitated importance, which I don't feel is always the right way to go about it in terms of how you approach it. It means it's important, but it also means it's special. And that's kind of where we'll talk about the management and how you go about sort of looking after it. - Yeah, I'm always intrigued by the fact that people are willing to compromise on sleep in order to do more training. So I can get an extra hour of training in a day if I get an extra hour less sleep. But surely, my question's there. Surely an extra hour of training means you need more recovery time and yet you're willing to discard the recovery time. So you're just throwing good money after bad, if you like. I'm also, remember reading Tim Ferris' book. Now, I can't remember whether it was four hour work, we call the four hour body, but in there he talks about ways in which he could minimize his sleep to be more productive during the day. And he talks, is it polyphasic sleep? Where you sleep in small amounts every four or five hours, you do 20 minute blocks. So if you do that six times a day, you can effectively get three hours sleep to make up for the eight hours sleep. I'm like, but there must be a point where all of those things you talk about like emotional control, cognitive function, decision making start to suffer. And then as a result of that, you make bad decisions, you choose the wrong foods to eat. We've all experienced how it's easy to choose junk food when we're tired and rung over and when we're on top of things and well rested, we choose the salad and the steak option or something. So it just seems like this idea of compromising sleep is just only going one way and it's not good. - Yeah, 100%. It's, I think it's a cultural thing as well. And you sort of don't want to go into the history of sleep, don't worry. But when you go sort of go back to sort of those industrial times of the idea of heroic wakefulness was like a big thing back then. Like you was considered to be more like more superior if you're able to sort of get by and actually perform on less sleep, like sleep or something that got in the way of being productive. Whereas now I think it's almost been flipped on its head in some instances, particularly at the high performance level where people are now paying a lot of attention to sleep but a bit too much in some cases. But yeah, you're absolutely right. Those sort of narratives around sort of being that hero have been able to operate well or less sleep is still very apparent and shaped a lot of how sort of those high performing visuals go about their daily life. - When you think about, I mean, even these days, junior doctors been told they've got to work 100 hour weeks. You know, I always just think about the implications of somebody being so tired that they can't really make sense of whether that prescription is 10, one mill of morphine or 100 mils of morphine. I'm not really sure, but I think that's a topic. So outcomes if you just make the wrong decision. - Yeah, 100%. And there's some evidence that supports that sort of the low level of operating people get to under sort of severe levels of sleep deprivation. We know that when you continuously sort of just chip away at the edges of sleep, you begin to get quite normalized to these feelings of like sleepiness and low levels of alertness. But what happens in the background is that your cognitive performance, like you said, their ability to make decisions continues to decline. So you're not really aware of that. You sort of just become a bit more aware of what's normal for you. And that normal might be a low level of operating. - A few moments ago, you touched on the fact that, you know, it's a two way house between sleep and other parts of the way the body performs. And there's a lot more evidence coming out now about the microbiome and how the microbiome and how healthy your gutters can influence whether you have good or bad quality sleep. And equally though, your quality of sleep informs decisions around what you eat. And that can have positive or negative implications for your gut, can't it? So again, if one's leading one poor decision leading to poor performance of another, then that will loop back and lead to poor performance in your sleep. And so you're in a downward spiral. - Yeah, 50%. - I'm just thinking about an event that an athlete I'm working with did recently is called the Transcontinental Race. It's 4,000 kilometers of cycling. We were talking about his fitness levels compared to the people who won. I think he was 36th out of several hundred and he was a day or two behind the winners. And he said, when I looked at the actual riding paces over the time we were riding, I was the eighth fastest. The difference was that they were riding for more hours in the day, whereas he chose every night to go and get a good night's sleep. Consequently, he seems to have recovered very quickly. But I wonder whether there are some folks who are just genetically wired to be able to cope with sleep deprivation or whether they're just storing up trouble further down the road. - Yeah, you raised a very good point. Yeah, so the individuality of sleep is something which I don't think we look enough at in terms of where sleep science is at the moment. There are certain individual characteristics that make someone sleep different from another. And one of those speeches is someone's ability to deal with sleep deprivation. And that comes from two schools of thought. One is, are you someone who's able to operate on less sleep? So that comes from a place of familiarity, not that you can train yourself to operate on less sleep, but also you may need less sleep on that spectrum of what's normal first, sort of a healthy adult. But there's also this other side to it, which is there's someone's ability to deal with the symptoms of sleep deprivation. So we know that some people just don't experience sleepiness in the same way as other people. And that's very classic. When you see individuals in insomnia, they don't feel sleepy, they feel fatigued. And that, like you said, can sort of come back to bite you later down the line. So that experience of that state of mind, state of body is different between people, but it can be advantageous in some situations. So when folks say, I do perfectly well on six hour sleep, have they normalised that minim out of sleep? Or are there some people who really can recover and function well on short sleep? Yeah, the best way to think is like a bit of a bell curve. So there's like a seven to nine hours is what's considered for the call it normal for the sort of general population. But six might be okay, like this is quite a relatively new science and these norms and standards that people set for others to adhere to are our guidelines. They're not sort of rules of thumb. So what's normal for one person, won't be normal for another. And the only way you can really figure out what's best for you is through trial and error. So those people that say I can function on six hours, that may well be true. But there's a difference between functioning, which I feel is a term that's used to describe like the bare minimum versus like performing at your best. And when I speak to high performing athletes, they know the distinction between the two. They know they can operate on say five or six, but they know they'll do a lot better if they could get say seven or eight. Yeah, sort of the difference between surviving and thriving, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really important because I know people say, well, I'll get by on six hours sleep and I've done it for years and I don't see any need to, but they've perhaps not experienced the benefits of getting more sleep. That's it. And it's not until you actually do have those opportunities to get more sleep, that that's realized. And let's be honest, in the busy lives everyone leaves, it's not until you sort of go on holiday on all those stresses and demands when you're removed and you get to sort of sleep as you were, what you could be considered, I don't know, your natural pattern of sleep because you haven't got those demands of having to get up, having to go to bed, other demands that have placed on you from school, work, training, society, it's a very different life. But those opportunities are very few and far between. So I don't think it's really enough for people to sort of really recognize what's normal for them. Yeah. So let's talk about the fundamental principles that you think we should all be adhering to. If we should be saying, right, I'm aiming for seven to nine hours, but I'm going to honestly and truthfully try and find what's best for me, not what I think, you know, the heroic wakefulness you talked about, yeah, yeah, six hours is fine for me, you know, 'cause you can put that on Instagram already. I mean, I remember when I was studying, people used to come into college the next day and say, oh yeah, we've done an all night to stay up, but then they're falling asleep at the desk, so clearly there's a payback for that. So what are some fundamental principles, particularly if you're an athlete, wants to get the best performance that we should be, that are written in stone. And then there were the other things that are perhaps, you know, individual dependent. Yeah, so I think what's the best level to enter out here? So I think the first thing to say is that, I think that it possibly needs to be like a reconceptualization of what sleep is. And by that, I mean, it kind of means like, let's make things a bit muddy, let's make things a bit more complicated, for good reason, bear with me or this. So the first thing to say is that sleep isn't this sort of singular concept that it needs to be a number or a number of hours that people need to achieve. It's multi-dimension, I can list seven dimensions of sleep, which I won't dive into, but broadly, the quality of sleep, the duration of sleep, the timing of your sleep, the regularity, the adaptability of your sleep. That's just a few, because of that, it kind of broadens the goalposts a little bit about what does it mean to have good sleep? It's not all about getting your eight hours. It's about having adequate satisfaction around your sleep, adequately timed sleep. It's about knowing that you're asleep. How is it going to look in different contexts of stress versus when you're not being challenged? Like, is that awareness of what does your sleep look like holistically? And then how can you work with that in the context of your daily life? So that brings us on to the next principle, which is sleep isn't static. It's not a sex thing that needs to be achieved night after night. It's something that's going to ebb and flow. It's going to, it's dynamic like that. You are going to go through periods of stress and challenge and athletes do this all the time and they go through periods of hard training, travel, competition, their sleep is going to, and then it's going to be wobble. It's going to get challenged so their sleep will look different, but they're aware of that. That's normalized for them and they know it's temporary and it's going to bounce back and basically become like it was before. So is that element to it? So it's not static and I think those two things are really important, like knowing that sleep's multiple, it's multi-dimensional, but also knowing it's dynamic just gives people a bit of a way of navigating sleep, not a set goal, like a performance you need to achieve, that makes sense. It's a slightly different approach, which I think is usually a good starting point because it does people more to work with and it kind of makes things a bit more flexible. - I think it's a bit like diet as well, isn't it? This is the ideal and these are my principles that I'm going to try and stick to as often as possible when I'm in control of everything, but then there's times when you're not in control, like you're traveling, you're on an airline. So yes, you could take your own food, but it's not always possible. You're in a country with different cultural eating times. So you go to Southern Europe and they tend to eat later, so then that's going to impact your sleep if you want to go to bed early and the restaurants aren't open. There's different styles of food and eating. So there's sometimes when you can't control, so you have to make the best of the situation you're in, but understanding that you will get back to normality at some point and so I think almost obsessed to me, sleep and nutrition and training are about mindfulness as well, about what's the right, what's the sweet spot for you and how far you've moved away from it and how do you get back there? - Yes. - So what you're saying then, if I'm a listener trying to interpret that is, there might be some principles, but they'll be different. So some people go to bed late, but get up late, that's maybe their lifestyle, that's maybe their choice. Well, incidentally on that, is there really such a thing as owls and larks or is that just a societal change that's been brought about that we didn't have before? - Yeah, the idea of our larks has been around for a while, actually, so the broad term is chromotype, which is basically, are you a late person or an early person? So I think what sort of, I don't know who's done it, but basically we've sort of come too quick to simplify it into you and either a morning person or an evening person, whereas in reality, when you sort of look at surveillance studies of this sort of stuff, majority of people sit somewhere in the middle, they're not quite either, they're able to sort of flex, but people tend to have a preference, you speak to people about this as a personality type, they have a preference, but there's also a biological underpinning to this where people are wired up to go to bed later and get up later, and that was not static either, you're not one or the other throughout your whole life, like when you go through adolescence and your teenage years, we know you'll sleep delays by one to two hours, so you're wired up to bed later for a temporary period of time, but then when you reach adulthood, you sort of settle into a camp, which is partly genetics, partly sort of your environment, but it does have relevance into your life because in the world I work and it's no surprise when I speak to rowers that majority of them are morning people, because if you're an evening person, trying to operate in a sport where you need to be on the water by seven a.m. most days, your sleep's gonna take a bit of a hit on a regular basis, and also it's no surprise when I speak to professionals with the players that there's more of a breadth of chronotypes, morning people, evening people, because the demands are what they have to do, aren't so biased to one day or part-time of the day or another, it's a bit more of an open church, so the sport type and the scheduling of training does seem to have this interaction with someone's biology in terms of the timing of their sleep, which is an interesting place to dive into. - Yeah, difficult if you're a professional footballer playing at the highest level, you're in Europe, the games are scheduled for eight o'clock, you're finishing at 10 maybe, you're still at the ground at 11, you're still hyped up from a game, you're going home, you normally go to bed at 10, but your body's still wired and pumping at one o'clock and you can't get to sleep, so you have to have a strategy around that, don't you? And a strategy around training the next day, you can't call people into the club at eight a.m. because they're not gonna be here. So I guess it's situation dependent as well, but you wouldn't want people going to bed at one o'clock every night either. - No, absolutely. - What do you do when those athletes are travelling? I know that there's been quite a bit written about how the cycling teams look after their athletes. And I think Sky did it first, didn't they, by having individual bedding prescriptions for people, but I've read that the Yumbo Lisa bike, the Visma Lisa bike team have also have an individual prescription. So when athletes are going to the Olympics and they've got the Olympic Village and they've got beds that are made out of cardboard and too short or they go to home peer ponds and it's a rowing facility and you've got beds that are six foot long and what have you, how do athletes make the best, and for our listeners here who travel a lot and go abroad to train and race, how do they make the best of a situation? You know, what is there that you can do? - Yeah, good question. There's probably two sides to this. And the first one is a bit more of, again, a bit more of an approach. So interestingly, when you get to these periods of high importance, like going away on a training camp, which people might have invested money and time in and taking days off work to do that, it becomes quite a precious amount of time that people want to maximize. There's almost like the same competition actually. You get this paradox, like the importance of sleep gets put right up there, the near you get to competition, like it's really important that you have a good night's sleep. I'm sure many coaches have said that to many athletes over the years, but we know the reality is that it's the least likely place you're going to have a good night's sleep because we know that all the things that make sleep work and the things that regulate sleep are all fundamentally challenged by everything goes on when you're going to a place like the Olympic Games, like a training camp overseas. There's no difference, right? You have this unfamiliarity of the bedroom and the environment, you have unfamiliarity of routines because you're traveling, you might be ruling with someone, your bed might be made a cardboard, there'll be noise, all these stresses will be placed on you in a way which is unpredictable, which doesn't really work well with sleep. So that's sort of the reality in the context. You have this heightened importance that you need to get a good night's sleep, but it's very difficult to do so. So a lot of the work that we've done with athletes is one trying to normalize that a bit, sort of try and make people aware of how their sleep reacts under those circumstances of stress and some people wobble with their sleep more than others, some people can just fall asleep any time, any place and don't seem to be bothered by it, whereas others slight like noise or a slight like the fire escape light in the room can really bother people. It's very individual like that. So what we try to do is almost deal with this concept of familiarity, which is kind of what the people like Team Sky in or in your sort of, that's what they're working with there. They're trying to create a home from home. How can you transition an athlete one place to another and make it feel like home wherever they are in the world? It's almost like an impossible design brief because it's by definition of being somewhere different, your brain will be aware of this. It's very difficult to sort of trick that, but the idea of the first night effect comes in, which is basically that your sleep will be challenged. It'll be disrupted just by being somewhere different, but in time and quite quickly, it adapts. And the things you can do to help along with that process, which is almost like holding those routines that you go through to go to sleep, like true to yourself and make sure that you do those things. There's a familiarity of like is what the cycling teams do, like bedding pillows, even entire beds, get shipped around the world to sort of try and make people feel familiar. So is that really? People can take individual items away with them to sort of again, give that sense of that they've got a connection to home, all these things. But the bottom line is you'll not go to sleep as well as you would do if you were at home, like you're going to a place where you're there to perform, you're there to compete. These are stressful situations. Your sleep isn't going to look like it did back at home. And that's the important message to accept, as opposed one to challenge and try and mitigate. That makes sense. - Yeah, I recognize that first night in a hotel, not sleeping as well. Second night is usually not so bad. Where possible, I tend to try and take my pillow with me. - Yep. - Not always possible if you've got baggage allowance. - Exactly. - I do take an eye mask. So I don't have to worry about those fire alarm lights and the red light from the telly and everything. I'm not really comfortable with, I tend to sleep on my left side. And so I find that if I've got earplugs, the beating of my, you know, the pulse up, sort of I can feel that probably in my head. So that keeps me awake. So, but I do, we do have a white noise machine now that I've got used to. And that seems to be really good for cutting out a lot of ambient noise. And then when I'm in a hotel, I try to book, I try to book a room that's at the end of the corridor in the middle floor. So I've not got lots of people walking past. And I know that's something that the US military do for their staff. There's also a security aspect, isn't there? He's like two floors up. So you're away from verbs down at the end of the corridor near the fire exit. So there's some simple things, but you can't always be in control of the type of matches you've got. Although I think most hotels seem to be getting on top of that now and recognizing that, you know, a selling point for the hotel is the quality of the matches and the beds. - Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So it's definitely a one where, yeah, the idea of a poor sleep environment is not always there. I think most hotels now are pretty good at doing enough to make that environment better. But the fact that it's different is the thing that will make your sleep challenged. Doesn't really matter if it's good or bad. (bell ringing) - To show you listening to right now and all of my others that provide you with amazing real-life advice and guidance from top coaches, athletes and successful humans, well, making it takes me a lot of time, but I feel it's well worth it. And all in the name of helping you to improve your health, longevity and performance. And all I ask in return is this. Please send a link to this podcast to somebody you know who you think will benefit. And if you haven't done so already, please click follow this podcast on whatever platform you're listening to right now so that you don't miss any of our future episodes. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. (bell ringing) Are there some common mistakes that folks are making with their sleep that you come across regardless of whether they're athletes or, you know, non-athletes? - One good question. I think making mistakes is all part of the game, really, at one level. So I think the only way people can really learn about their sleep, which again is, I think the name of the game when it comes to working out what good sleep means to you and what it looks like for you, you have to make mistakes along the way. So the only way you can do that is by sort of trying different things. So in that example, there where you said people traveling to different hotels, different training camps, different competitions, the only way that you'll learn how to adapt to those situations is by doing it, to making mistakes and working out what works for you and what that's personal to you. And that's kind of part of it. But the other side to it is there are probably some fundamental societal things going on, which is quite easy to fall into the trap. I'm guilty of it. Many athletes are guilty of it. Is this what are we actually striving for here? What do we mean to talk about good sleep? And in the world I work in high performance sport, there's this concept of high performance sleep or athletic sleep. And this seems to be like this idea that Olympic athletes, professional athletes are doing it better than anyone else. So lots of articles that I've featured in are usually entitled How to Sleep Like a Pro, How to Sleep like an Olympian. And there's expectation that their type of sleep is superior to anyone else's, just because they're a high performing nature of what they do at the top of their game. But if you actually, as interesting when you speak to athletes, you say, right, just give me some words that describes the best athletes in the world's sleep. They'll say long, continuous, restful, napping, all these like qualities of like good sleep. But if you actually really dive into how the elite athlete population sleep, it's not that, it's very, it's very different to that. It's full of disruption and broken sleep in abilities to fall asleep. But the key thing here is that they are able to be aware of that. They're able to adapt and normalise what works for them and what doesn't work for them. So what I'm trying to say here is that there'll be these idealised norms of what good sleep is. And that is long, continuous, unbroken sleep. That's restful every single day. And that's what we need to aspire to. And the wearable technologies do it, people do it, and I don't think it's useful. I think it's almost a goal, which is a bit fabricated, and it's not useful. We should be trying to dive into what's useful for us. - Yeah, I tried the Whoop wearable, and I mean, there's the Aura Ringo, there's a few more available now or something, as well as things like your Garmin and other watches that track this stuff. I found them, I found the Whoop are useful for doing little experiments, what works, what it doesn't. So for instance, one thing I found, which we can talk about a bit more in a minute, is if I drank alcohol too close to bedtime, it had a negative impact on my sleep. But if I had a glass of wine or two with my dinner at six o'clock, then it didn't necessarily affect my sleep. So that was a fairly obvious one for me. If I was to train in the evening and do a heavy training session, I found my resting heart rate was too high when I got to sleep, so that made it harder. And I didn't, my sleep was more restless. I did find that I wake up during the night and go for a wee. But I think that's normal if you're an athlete, mindful about hydration as well, is you've got full bladder and you don't wanna wake up with a wet bed, so you're gonna have to get up. But I do find that folks get frustrated with that, like, oh, every night I wake up and I have to go to the bathroom. But waking up, he talks about the pre-industrial revolution. They're waking up during the night, he's actually quite normal event, isn't it? - Yeah, and it's normal now. I think people aren't really aware of the number of times they wake up in the night and the idea of being awake at night when everyone else is sleeping, it's like almost something that people don't think is a desirable behavior, whereas I've worked with some people who actually enjoy waking up in the night because there's no demands placed on them by anyone 'cause the rest of the world is asleep, so it's all personal preference. And that regard, and that's what I'm talking about in terms of what does it mean to have good sleep? Like, I think, like you said, back in, sort of, Victorian times, the idea of sleeping in two blocks was apparently, that was fairly normal behavior. People would wake up and go about their nights awake, doing nighttime activities, then they'll go back to sleep for a few hours and now we've condensed it and compressed it into a period of time. And now the only way to sleep, apparently, is from one point to another over the course of the night. And is that natural, the jury's out, I think, there's no natural way to sleep. This is something that has been shaped by society, shaped by our attitudes and beliefs towards sleep, but it's very difficult to untangle that and it's a different way to do it in the society that's been built up around us because if you did, you wouldn't fit in. You would probably get disrupted or fired for work or something, do you know what I mean? - Yeah, yeah, well, one of the things I did find about a wearable is that it tries to gamify everything, like number of disturbances during the night, amount of good sleep, you're getting percentage of, you know, a percentage score for your sleep quality, a score for recovery based on resting heart rate and HRV. And as much as I found it useful, I also found it quite destructive in that I felt like I was and my wife recognized it's probably quicker and more often than I did. It's almost like an author's omnia, so I started worrying about my one type of sleep. I was gotten what my walk score was gonna be the next morning that it then led to me having a poor night's sleep. So it was almost self-filling. - Yeah, exactly, yeah. And that's the, I think that's the, where we are with wearable technologies at the moment and how it's engaging with our sleep because our special quality of sleep is that we don't directly experience it. So you experience being awake, you experience waking up in the night, you experience an inability to fall asleep. But when you're actually asleep, you don't experience it, you're unconscious really, you're not really engaging with your surroundings, you don't really know what's going on. It's only when you wake up in the morning that you have this experience of sleep that you know you slept because you either feel refreshed or you don't, or you look back in the night and think, "Oh, I woke up for two hours there or so." But what wearable technology has done has allowed us to visualize and engage with our sleep like we've never done before. That's quite an attractive proposition. It's something that people love to see their night sleep sort of mapped out nicely on a graph. But it doesn't, it's been, it's more performative now. Like it's almost been that sleep performance is sort of a thing now. Like you have to sort of go to sleep and reach your sleep goal each night. And if you don't, you get a red score and then you're sort of, you feel quite bad about yourself despite the fact you actually feel pretty good and your experiences are telling you something different. And that's where you get these clashes of what is my wearable telling me versus how I'm feeling, who's right. And that's what happens. - Yeah, and I've spoken to quite a few people who've done research on heart rate variability. And what's interesting to me is that the objective data that people collect isn't nearly as important to these folks. You know, the researchers and the high level experts as the subjective measures, like, what was my sleep quality? If I give it a one for four and five for excellent, where would it be in there? What was my, how rested do I feel today? How motivated am I to train? How fatigued do I feel? They place more importance on those school. What's my mood? What's my mood is a big one, which you talked about right at the beginning. Those things seem to have a far greater importance in how recovered and ready, prepared somebody is rather than what the data's telling them. 'Cause to be quite honest, if you looked at the Tour de France cyclist in week three, everybody's going to be getting red on their sleep track around there. - Yeah, exactly. And like the sleep track has dive into a component of sleep which I haven't actually spoken around with. It's the architecture of our sleep, like the stages, the light sleep, the deep sleep, the REM sleep. And because those things are now front and center of wearable tech feedback, it kind of generates questions for people to ask, like, how do I get more deep sleep? How do I get more REM sleep? Because my wearable told me I didn't get enough of it. But it kind of leads onto another special feature of sleep that because of that structure of sleep, then the staging of it is completely automated. You have no direct experience of transitioning from deep sleep to REM sleep. You don't know anything about it. So let's say like diet, and it's a good analogy, we talk about diet and sleep. Let's say you're going through a heavy training block and you want to take on more protein. So you take on more protein, you support, like your muscles rebuild and regenerate with sleep. Let's say you wanted to get more deep sleep because you're going through a heavy training block. You can't do it. - No. - You can't do it. What do you do? You don't do anything. Your sleep automatically organizes itself to accommodate that. It's automated. So all people really need to worry about is this idea of how do you access it. And that basically goes into a place of understanding the fundamentals of falling asleep and staying asleep. And the rest is taken care of. So it's a slightly different paradigm. - Yeah, I understand that totally. And I've heard this phrase about sleep opportunity. So say laying the groundwork to make sure you get the best night's sleep possible. But then once you close your eyes and you drop off that's it then. It's in the hands of the gods, right? - Absolutely, yeah. - But is the, you know, when we're in, I mean, I never really understood how you can do a study on somebody in a lab, for instance, when you're trying to measure their sleep. And, you know, he talks about the unfamiliarity with the situation when you've got all these electrodes and things stuck on your head and you've got, you know, you're in a lab situation. I, but even when you're wearing a tracker and a wearable, then they're trying to measure deep sleep and REM sleep and telling you how many minutes you spent in each. Can they really be that accurate? - These are the surrogate markers. So the, the only way you can really measure sleep and that's a lecture of physiological sleep is by measuring brainwaves. What wearables do is try and detect behavioral features of those different states, like movement, lack of movement, even higher variability now has been suggested to be able to score sleep staging from that. And from that, they make assumptions, which in turn equals the stages of sleep, which you see in the wearable. The jury's out, if I'm being honest. I don't think it'll be long before we get there, where you can actually measure these things to the minute and it'll be done very nicely, very accurately. But I still think that's problematic. I don't think the idea of interrogating and something else, like appraising your sleep, irrespective of the accuracy, I don't think that sits well with me, because to me, sleeps about many things, like the satisfaction of your sleep, the timing of it and all of that comes from your ability to basically reflect and be in tune of that. And I think wearables take you away from that. Don't get me wrong, they're useful, they're a place. But I think there's also an element of that that needs to be held and not completely disregarded or taken over. - I will say that when I stopped wearing my woof, almost immediately I felt more relaxed going to bed and my sleep improved. At least that was my subjective perception of my sleep. The woof was probably telling me it wasn't, you know, get me, you need another month's subscription on here, you've got bad sleep. But yeah, for me, it was a good experiment. I've had folks I work with on their sleep, wear them and they've learned some interesting lessons. And for me, what's the takeaway, if you like, from wearing a wearable is that you can learn some great lessons from some of the data, if you do some, and those then help with lifestyle and habitual changes, but ultimately, a lot of it's subjective, isn't it? 'Cause like you say, you'll get a green score from your wearable one day and you'll feel awful and you'll be really irritable and you'll be eating junk food. And the next day you'll get a red score and you have a great, you have a great training session and you feel like you're on top of the world. - Exactly, and you don't know how these scores were actually made up. - Okay, so somebody comes along and they says, "Luke, I want to improve my sleep. "Where are you going to start with them?" - So my first question, most people is why do you want to improve your sleep? It's sleep enhancements, the optimization sleep improvement is something which has entered the realm of health and also the realms of performance in quite a big way. And people often approach myself and others wanting to optimize their sleep because they want to get the best out of it because they may feel that there's more that they could be doing. So there's almost like different people with different needs. So you get some people who fundamentally who sleep, they might not be satisfied with it. They may feel their daytime function and performance has been affected by it. So it's important to quite quickly understand where people are coming from with their need to improve their sleep and where they want to get to. So what is your goal with this? Where do you think you can get to if you're sleeping quite quickly for most people? This idea of taking your sleep beyond the biological realms of what's normal for you is something which people believe is possible and that's no fault of their own. Maybe in some future world we might be able to do that. But the moment we only can work within our biological limits and I think helping people navigate that is probably what I do quite a lot of. It's just helping people optimise their sleep in a way which doesn't go about optimising it like you would with other aspects of training and nutrition. It takes a slightly different approach in order to do that. But there are another group of people who generally feel like their sleep needs to be improved because it is inadequate. They're not satisfied, they're not getting enough of it and then that's a very different conversation. That's a good starting point. - So do you get people to do an audit of what they're doing during the day, what they do in the hours before sleep? - Yeah, yeah, exactly that. - Yeah. - Yeah, so yeah, there's lots of ways to go about it. Like we just had a conversation there about wearable technology. So we can lean on that as a way of sort of getting insight into some aspects of their sleep, like the patterning day-to-day, what time they go to bed, what time they wake up. That's usually quite useful information. But nine times out of 10, just by having a conversation with someone and getting them to articulate their sleep, their lifestyle, their attitudes and their beliefs towards sleep, what they think their sleep is doing for their performance, their function, their health, their wellbeing. Like that's where you get the gold really. The real conceptual information that for me as a sports sleep specialist can work with to usually not to really change that much but just to give people like a different approach to sleep that allows them to feel like they're their own sleep specialist and they can go about the world in a way they're comfortable and confident to do so. - And I think that's to me, is the difference between what coaching is, where there's a person like you or me having a very physical conversation with an individual versus artificial intelligence, which is gathering lots of data and number crunching that and telling people what that is because that doesn't have the, that artificial intelligence doesn't yet have the empathy to understand somebody's situation. So you could say, well, you just need to get to bed at half past nine. But if you've got a mother who's got teenage children who come home late, I remember my mum never felt comfortable going to sleep until I was actually in the door and she heard it locking. So your prescription for getting to sleep early isn't going to work for that person or for somebody who's hyper-vigilant because they live in an area where they feel a bit unsafe. - Absolutely, yeah, so that contextual information is absolutely crucial to sort of help people go about their sleep in a way where they can manage it. - Context before content, right? - 100%. - I talked about alcohol there and caffeine's another one. I have friends who say, I have a coffee before I go to bed and it never affects my sleep. I spoke to a sleep researcher from America and she said, actually, they might go to sleep quickly but I can categorically say, caffeine interferes with your sleep process, where do you stand on that? - Yeah, yeah, so it depends, again, what level you want to enter that conversation at? I think from a physiological level, absolutely, we know that caffeine inhibits some of the transmitters that enables sleep and maintains it, which in turn affects not just the staging of our sleep but also like your ability to, you're much more engaged with your surroundings, more so if you weren't on sort of high doses of caffeine, but that's one school of what the other school of what is the reality, which is the world I work in with high performance athletes. A lot of them do take caffeine, particularly around night games because the goal isn't to sleep well, the goal is to perform well. And we know that theogenic effects of taking caffeine. So we usually get this crunch point come after a match or a performance where people now, after they've performed are now wired on caffeine. I want to go to bed very quickly and fall asleep. And they've got this like cocktail of neurotransmitters kicking about them, sleepiness, caffeine, and it's a bit of a physiological disaster really. But yeah, I think each their own really, people's caffeine sensitivity would be different. People's habituality to caffeine would be different. Some people will fundamentally be able to sleep on relatively low doses of caffeine and won't really notice much difference. So yeah, there's different places to go with it. So blanket guidance to stop drinking caffeine around lunchtime is redundant or in most cases, probably a good advice. In another life, I was a barista and I'm a huge fan of my coffee so I can never give that advice unfortunately. (laughing) - But as a sleep coach? - As a sleep coach, it may be one of the things that if you are someone who's like trying to work out why aren't I falling asleep and staying asleep, it may be something to consider. So it's probably one of the first low hanging bits of fruit that you might be able to drop from your lifestyle just for a little bit just to see what happens. - Are there any other low hanging fruit that folks could investigate that might help them get better sleep? - Yeah, quite a lot actually, I think most of it is really. So when we talk about like there's a lot of rules that are out there on sleep and I don't like the word rules 'cause there aren't any rules to sleeping. Like the do's and don'ts, the sleep hygiene advice which if you read any article online, you read this really nice eloquent article about sleep and something and the recommendations are always sleep hygiene. Go to bed regularly, don't drink caffeine, don't have screen time, all these sorts of things. These are routines that people should be abiding by and these are the way to access good sleep. There's a level below that which I don't think many people really go into and again no fault of their own this information isn't readily available and it's fundamentally working at this level of how sleep operates, how it works and there's like three things really that people just need to get their heads around. If you can get your head around these three things, you will understand how sleep works, you can understand how it goes wrong and it also makes your ability to learn about your sleep much easier and much more predictable when it does get challenged. So I can dive into those in a bit now if you'd like. - Yeah, please do, yeah. I think that, and I know you've got to go in a minute so that might be a good place to finish actually is those really simple fundamental principles that folks look at before they start doing the sleep hygiene stuff. - Yeah, so these are basically the underpinnings of sleep science, like the whole discipline is founded on these three sort of principles really. So we know that sleep regulated by three things. The first one is this drive to sleep or this sleep homeostasis is a technical term but sleep pressure sleep drive is sort of what we sort of more the layman terms call it. And the idea is that, so when you wake up in the morning, there will be a drive that's building throughout the day for you to sleep. So as you get through your day, you go about your waking day, normal life, you'll have this drive to sleep that's building and building and building and building. And they'll come a point in the evening where you start to feel sleepy and yes. - So this is the production of, this is your body producing melatonin, is that right? - No, it's-- - Serotonin. That then is converted to melatonin as the onset of sleep comes in. - That's the different bits, but yeah, we can-- - Oh, okay, right, sorry, sorry. - You're one principle ahead, but you're on the right track. So this is like, you want to talk at that level, identity is sort of the building and building in our full brains and that basically comes to a tipping point in the evening and you need to have a lot of this stuff kicking about in order for you to fall asleep. So for example, if you have a long line or a long nap in the daytime, you get less of it. And the best analogy I've heard is not mine, just from some analysis, it's like an elastic band. So as you go for your day, your elastic band is getting more and more stretched. So if you've woken up particularly early, your band is really, really stretched when you get to your bedtime. And then when you go to sleep, if that band is nice and stretched and you let go of it, it'll snap back quickly and you'll fall asleep. Because quite loose, then you're not gonna fall asleep quickly. So that's a very simple principle and sort of the principle that falls out of that is go to bed when you're sleepy, which sounds very simple, but it's a big one. - So hence the advice not to have a nap for anything longer than 20 minutes otherwise, you lose that elasticity, right? - That's the theory behind it, yes. - Okay, okay, all right, so sleep drive. So can we influence sleep drive by, for instance, certain habits we have in the morning, getting daylight and regular sort of fresh air into our bodies rather than sitting in front of a computer screen all day. - So the best way to influence sleep drive is wakefulness. So if you're a normal bedtime and you don't feel sleepy, actually staying awake later isn't a bad idea at all, because your elastic band will become more stretched or getting up slightly earlier. Again, we'll stretch that elastic band and you'll know this. If you pull an all-nighter that next night, you're falling asleep quickly, like most people will, just because that's how sleep works. So that's something to consider and something to harness as well, like particularly around important competitions, we know that people try to maybe go to bed earlier than normal because they want to get the best night sleep possible for that performance when in fact, we know that actually go to a slightly later, but not a bad idea because you're going to have other things going on in your mind and sleepiness may override that. - Okay, so number one sleep drive? - Yeah, second one is the body clock. So, as you just said this, I'm in the idea of melatonin and the timing of our sleep. And this is equally important. So this is best demonstrated by, so if you say again, you pulled an all-nighter, you may notice that in the daytime, you are not a car crash all day. You have moments where you actually feel quite alert and you have moments where you feel very sleepy. So these feelings of sleepiness aren't static. They are full of ebbs and flows, but fundamentally, we are nocturnal species. We sleep when it's nighttime and we're awake during the daytime. So when we do get to the evening, our sleep drive is high, we will have the release of melatonin, like you said there. So this is a Dracula hormone, as they call it, 'cause it only comes out at night. And this is what defines our biological night. So this is our sleep window. And that's when the timing of our sleep is important. Trying sleeping outside of that window makes it tricky. So these two things need to be aligned, the drive to sleep, but also the timing of it in terms of where our biological clock sits in terms of melatonin. - In terms of that biological clock, there are, you said it ebbs and flows, so I've heard, and again, you might dismiss this as just an urban myth that there are times during the day then when a nap is a better time to have a nap, like early in the afternoon or sort of an early in the evening tea time. So you get this little dip after lunch, which is a little dip in our sort of physiology, which again, makes us still sleepy. Again, there's lots of discussion around what that means from an evolutionary perspective, but across different cultures, taking a siesta, having a nap at that time of day is not uncommon in our society, it's not common at all. But yeah, there is that moment does occur in all of us. - So it was interesting to me that, when we used to go to Spain before the EU and when we were young, and we'd always get a bit cheesed off that they would lazy Spanish having a siesta, you know, and closing the shops when we want to go and get our groceries and things. But now actually, I think people might be thinking, "You know, actually, there was something about this "rather than how they've come into line "with the rest of Western Europe and sort of working all day." - Yeah, absolutely. - Yep, yep, yep. - That siesta might have ended up with better performance and more in keeping with the body clock. - Yes, exactly that, yep. - Okay, sleep drive, body clock. You said there was three. - Yeah, final one, which is probably sleep's most special quality is the automatic processes that basically enable us to fall asleep and when we do wake up in the night, fall back asleep. So the thing to learn about the automaticity of sleep is basically is that it works, we can't will sleep. You can't make it happen. It's not like a light switch that we can just control and turn off and on, unfortunately, as much as people would like to. So it's passive. So, for example, you fall asleep is the language that we use. You don't, like if it's sport got hold of it and sort of worked with that, it would be jumping to sleep or something like that, do you know what I mean? Like, yeah, we don't voluntary do this. It's not like diet where you voluntary choose what to eat. You don't choose to fall asleep. You don't make it happen. In fact, it happens when you do very little. So we actually get in the way of ourselves when it comes to falling asleep. But our brains and our bodies have evolved over centuries around this biological necessity that it's automated. And that's something that probably one thing to take away for most of this is that leaning into the authenticity of sleep is key, by understanding that it will fall asleep. You will fall asleep if you let it happen. And the analogy, which again, I can't remember who the author is, I've heard is, it's not like a cat. If you try and, if it will come to you, if you ignore it, if you try and chase it, it runs away and sleep just like that. And we experienced this in a way. So if you've been on the sofa watching TV, you'll probably find yourself falling asleep if it's around your normal bedtime and it's later in the day because sleep drive is high, aligned with your body clock, melatonin is kicking about. But then as soon as you go up to your bedroom and you head into the pillow, you can't fall asleep. 'Cause we're thinking about it. We're trying to put some effort into doing sleep. So those are the three pillars of it really, and they work together. So you might have high sleep drive, it's the right time of night, your bedtime, but you've got a lot on your mind, sleep won't happen. So questions fall out of this, like a mental checklist, you can ask yourself. Am I sleepy? Is it my appropriate bedtime? Am I calm and relaxed? Those are the three easy questions to ask yourself. If one of those is no, the likelihood is you're not going to fall asleep, so don't. So these are like, again, you can't fall asleep, you can't make it happen, you can't design it, but you can create the circumstances which it's likely. - Yeah, and this, again, back to this question I get asked, and you probably do about, I'm waking up in the middle of the night, and it seems like one of the biggest frustrations for folks is that they can't get back sleep. Nearly always on questioning, you hear them say, "Well, I started thinking about work, "or I started thinking about this and that and the other." Or, "I was getting frustrated, I couldn't fall asleep." So now they're trying to force it to happen, and then it's less likely to. But even if you are lying there, unable to sleep, but you just calm and you're doing some deep breathing, even that itself is restful, isn't it? It's no, that would be no different. Somebody at night lying there in bed, noticing that they are conscious of what's going on around them. Don't it, if they were sitting on their sofa during the day, conscious of what's going on, but actually not focusing on their phone or on the telly, but just sitting there nice and relaxed, it still actually puts you into that parasympathetic state of rest and digest rather than the fight and flight state. So, it might not be sleep, but it doesn't mean it's not restful. - Yes, yeah, and that's usually what happens when people wake up in the night, is they have this awareness, they're awake, and then thoughts enter their heads that I'm awake. And what does that mean? Am I going to be able to fall back asleep? If I can't, what does that mean for my performance the next day? I'm going to be a car crash and it spirals. And that feelings of alertness just goes round and round so breaking that cycle is sort of the name of the game. And as you just suggested, they're like doing some sort of relaxation, ideally out of the bed might be a way to do that, but equally just staying awake a bit later isn't going to do your sleep drive any harm. And next night, you will be even sleepier. So the likelihood of you falling asleep will be increased just by sort of refocusing across a couple of nights as opposed to just the one. - Luke, I really appreciate you being here today. That's been very insightful. And I thought I'd got a good handle on all of this, but I'm glad I'm pleased that you've been able to educate me today. I also feel like there's a lot more stuff that we need to discuss. And I think probably the listeners will be like, I've got a question. So maybe it'll be possible to get you back on from another call where we do a very specific Q&A in the future. - Yeah, happy after that. - All right, for now, Luke got to sport sleep specialist. Thank you for being here and sharing that knowledge and wisdom with us. - Anytime, thank you for having me. - Thank you again to Luke for being my guest on the show this week. I found it really interesting to hear that elite athletes don't necessarily have better sleep than the rest of us, but they probably do get more sleep. And to make sure you don't miss any future episodes, please, could you go to iTunes or your chosen platform, search for the high performance you can try out on podcast and then click the subscribe button. And once you've finished listening to this episode, please, if you could share with just one person you think might benefit, that will be awesome. And if you have a couple more minutes, perhaps you could leave me a review on your chosen platform. Please make sure you check out the show notes, links to all of the items I've mentioned above, including how to contact me and Beth if you're interested in coaching and make sure you look for the link to click on that and get my free 10-minute daily mobility routine. Okay, that's all for this week. I'll have another great guest for you in seven days time and I hope you'll be able to join me. But until then, have a happy training and enjoy the rest of your week. (upbeat music)
