Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:01:04: Books behind this week's episode

00:04:37: Three things Sarah learnt from her book…

00:05:06: … 1: how sleep affects memory

00:07:16: … 2: it's good to sleep on it

00:08:14: … 3: sleep is personal

00:09:13: The SATED questionnaire

00:10:39: Three things Helen learnt from her book…

00:11:08: … 1: different chronotypes

00:13:51: … 2: social jetlag

00:14:48: … 3: sleep and light

00:16:49: Changing your sleep pattern

00:21:27: The target market for the books

00:22:58: Sleep's night-time theatre

00:23:55: The role that stress plays in sleep

00:24:49: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast.  In the next few episodes, we're doing something a bit different for the summer, and you might be listening outside the summer, and that's fine too.  But we thought we would focus on some of the factors outside of work that we think will help you to succeed in work.  We're covering health, sleep, which we'll be talking about today, money and relationships, and we are absolutely not the experts on any of these topics, so much so we had a debate about whether we should even talk about them and should we get guests. But in the end, what we decided to do for each episode was choose a different book to read, so we could dive a bit deeper into the topic, and in our conversations together we're going to talk about what we learnt and how it's helped us.  So hopefully, it gives you some useful ideas for action and tools to try out, just like the rest of the Squiggly Careers podcast.

Helen Tupper: I also think it's a good thing in a way that we're not expert, because hopefully a lot of people listening don't consider themselves to be experts in this area, and they're a bit like us, looking for help; so, we're all in it together.

Sarah Ellis: So, shall we share what books on sleep we both read and why we choose these books?

Helen Tupper: Yes.

Sarah Ellis: Do you want to go first?

Helen Tupper: So I read, Sarah can see this, I read Lifetime.  This is a beast of a book; that is not the subtitle!

Sarah Ellis: It feels like that's not going to be the quote that they'll use on the poster!

Helen Tupper: Yeah, not so much! The subtitle, the professional one, the approved one, is The New Science of the Body Clock, and How It Can Revolutionize Your Sleep and Health, written by Russell Foster, who is the Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at the University of Oxford.  It is a brainy book, everyone, is what I would say!  What about you?

Sarah Ellis: I just remember you being quite proud of yourself when you messaged me when you finished it!  I feel like it was quite an achievement --

Helen Tupper: I thought you were going to say, "I remember you were quite proud of yourself when you were reading it"; I did not feel proud.  I was like, "This is a slog through sleep", and I read some of it on a beach as well, and it's not really a beach book.

Sarah Ellis: Well, I wouldn't describe mine as a beach book either, but I think it is described as "accessible science" in some of the reviews, and it does what it says on the tin.  So this is Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker, which I would guess some of our listeners will have read, because that book has been around for a few years, I've seen it on lots of bookshelves, it's been on my bookshelf for a while, I always see it in bookshops. Actually, I was looking at some different courses that you can take around the world, and Matthew Walker's course on sleep has been taken by hundreds of thousands of people.

 I think he teaches over at California, and he's been studying sleep, again a bit like your author, I think for 20, 25 years, so really, really knows his stuff, but I do think has set out to write a book that everyone could read, even though at times I still found it quite sciency.  But I think I wasn't necessarily the best science student at school.  But it definitely all made sense to me, which I think was a good start.

Helen Tupper: So maybe on the science scale, yours sounds like accessible science.

Sarah Ellis: It was.

Helen Tupper: I wouldn't say mine is inaccessible; I think it might be higher on the science scale, would be a nice way of saying it!

Sarah Ellis: One thing actually I did want to say on reading books about sleep, the reason this has been on my bookshelf for a few years and I've only read it now, is I don't think I could have read this book before now; I think I would have found it really demotivating.  So, for anyone who has young kids who don't sleep, or perhaps you care for somebody and that means that your sleep is really disrupted, so almost the quality of your sleep health is out of your control, I remember feeling very frustrated, borderline angry, when people would talk to me about how important it is to sleep when I was getting no sleep, and there wasn't a lot that I could do about it.

I think I've also had to bide my time a bit with thinking and reading a bit about sleep, because I think we all intuitively know it's really important, but if you're not quite in the right mindset, I actually think this book would have done more harm than good.  I don't think I would have been able to read it all two years ago, three years ago, certainly not five years ago when my little boy was first born. So I just thought, maybe that's not relevant for that many people listening, I don't know, but I just thought if that is you, I don't think this book makes you feel better; I think if anything, it will make you feel worse, because it will remind you of just how important sleep is and then the fact you're not getting any!

Helen Tupper: I'm trying to look at my notes and just think that the people in that situation, before they give up on this podcast and they're like, "I don't want to listen to this either!", I would say, "Fair enough.  Come back for next week's on money", I'm just trying to think about whether there's other insights that I've got.  So, even if you feel like your sleep's not entirely in your control, is there anything that you could do differently?  I think there might be.  Purse for the test, everybody, and see if there's other things that if that isn't in your control, there might be some different things that you can do. So, we wanted to start with three things that we had both learnt from each of these books, and hopefully they're different things.  Sarah and I haven't talked about this beforehand, so it might be just three of the same things about sleep, but who knows?  So, Sarah, do you want to go first with your three things that you learnt?

Sarah Ellis: Yes, and actually to your point, I think some of these things are interesting, if you're just curious about how the brain works and how we learn.  So these things, I just felt I was more knowledgeable about how we learn, which was interesting; that wasn't necessarily what I'd expected to learn from a book about sleep. So my first thing was, of course sleep is good for us in loads of ways, so memory, creativity, diet, you live longer, so there is a really long list of how sleep helps us. 

But I think it's more interesting when you get specific.  So then I tried to dive in with the three things.  It's like, specifically, why is it good for us? One of the things was around memory.  So, we can only hold so much information in our short-term memory.  He describes it as almost temporary storage, in what's called your hippocampus; that's one part of your brain.  And when you brain, you transfer some of what's in that short-term memory into your long-term secure vault, which is your cortex. That made sense to me, that kind of, I mean I'm not imagining it, I'm sure very accurately, but I'm almost imagining going in through my forehead, and then as I go to sleep, it goes into the rest of your brain, and that frees up space for the next day, which we all need. 

And he does describe sleep as essentially, "The save button in our brain that helps us to consolidate what we learn", and I really liked that.  I was like, that "save button", I think which we've all done, you know, Control+S, because we all save all the time, that really made sense for me as a way of thinking about how it helps us to learn and to absorb. He also, as a side point, because he obviously does a lot of teaching himself, he talked about the difference between spaced-out learning and mass learning, and why spaced-out learning is so important, because as the name suggests, when you do little and often, you stand a chance of that stuff making its way through the save button into the cortex and sticking and staying with you.  Whereas, mass learning, sure, maybe you're trying to cram and do a lot, maybe you're cramming for exams, for example, it might help you pass the exam, but it doesn't actually help you to learn. He practises what he preaches, so he doesn't have exams in the courses that he does.  He does this idea of spaced-out learning, because he said that's how people will actually learn about sleep.  So, I thought that point about sleep and memory and how they work together was fascinating.

Helen Tupper: I read a bit actually about memory, talking about these three stages of memory: acquisition, consolidation and retrieval; and that consolidation bit, the vault, being the bit that gets most affected when you don't sleep well.

Sarah Ellis: And so the second thing was, you know when we say to each other, and I think we actually do say these words to each other, "I'm going to sleep on it", I definitely say that; that is genuinely very good advice backed up by science. 

And interestingly, Matthew Walker points out that a version of that phrase exists in most languages.  So, regardless of culture and where you are in the world, this idea of sleeping on it is good for us, because it helps us to be creative and problem-solve in a different way to the way that we can do when we're awake.  It's almost impossible for our brains to work in the way that they do when we're asleep. So, the brain fuses together those almost disparate sets of knowledge that means that we can problem-solve in a new way.  He mentions a quote from John Steinbeck where he says, "A problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it".

Helen Tupper: I love that!

Sarah Ellis: I just love this idea of all these little sleep people in my brain!  And then the final thing, and I'm sure I cannot believe you've read a book about sleep and not done a questionnaire on sleep, so we'll come to that, is that sleep is personal for all of us, in terms of what it looks like and what our sleep rhythms are, but there are a few things that we all have in common. So again, we are all hard-wired, Matthew Walker says, to have a dip in alertness that occurs in the mid-afternoon. 

So, whether you're a morning person, an in-between person or an evening person, mid-afternoon, really think about how you're spending your time.  I was like, "That's really interesting", because for most of us, mid-afternoon is when we are working, most people are probably working mid-afternoon, so I was connecting back to the first podcast we did on this series on walk, and I was like, "Okay, is that almost the perfect time to take a walk, because it's probably not the perfect time to do any work?"  He even makes a joke like, "Never get the mid-afternoon slot in a meeting; don't try and do your best problem-solving then; don't try and do the hardest thing mid-afternoon", so I was like, "That's quite interesting. I worked out that I'm actually not a morning or an evening person, I'm one of the 30% that is, to be honest, sort of boringly in between with a slight leaning towards evening, which I recognise in myself.  And his questionnaire, the one that he recommends having a look at, which is really easy to remember, is called SATED, which stands for Satisfied, Alert, Timing, Efficiency and Duration, and we'll put a link to it in the podcast, and it's literally, "Do you feel satisfied with your sleep: somewhat, or very much satisfied?" and you just get a score out of ten, and it just helps you to break down a little bit where you might want to work on your sleep a bit more. Let's say, you might be someone who wakes up quite frequently; you might get enough sleep, but maybe you wake up quite a bit; or, maybe you're not sleeping for long enough; or, maybe you struggle to decompress in the evenings.  So, it almost helps you to -- it was simple and it made sense to me very quickly, but it did help me to think, well if I was going to do something different, when we get on to what might you do differently, it helped me to think what might I do in my day, what might I do in my week; and also, what do you already do well, because sometimes you do things well.  I definitely read some things, "Oh, I do that", and it's a good thing.

Helen Tupper: Give yourself some credit!

Sarah Ellis: Well also, just keep doing it.  You know sometimes if you don't realise, then you don't know that you're doing that well.  So, I'll perhaps come onto some of those things when we talk next about what we're going to do differently, but they were the three things that I took away, for me, from reading it.

Helen Tupper: So, I wrote down five things, which I'm glad I did, because two and a bit of the things are the same as yours, which is quite interesting though.  But what I liked about the way that you described --

Sarah Ellis: It shows that the research is real research, right!

Helen Tupper: Yeah, but I do think that the way that you described some of the ways that he talked about it, Matthew Walker, it sounds like the idea of a vault and switches and things like that, it's quite a nice tangible way of talking about the science, which I think this book doesn't pretend to do.  At no point does it talk about points and things. But the three things that I have taken away that are slightly different, just to build on your last point about people having different types, in this book they're called "chronotypes", which I think obviously that's your body clock, so we all have a certain chronotype, and there are three types that people often have a preference for. So, 10% of people are larks, ie early-morning birds; 65% of people are apparently doves, so that's the people that are in the middle, so no major preference, to be honest; and 25% of people are owls, so people who have a strong preference for a more of a night-time-based chronotype.  So, Sarah has said she's in the middle with maybe a leaning towards an owl.  I am an out-and-out lark.  I took the survey, which is in the back of the book actually, and this one is an appendix, and I kind of thought, "I'm not sure I need to answer this many questions.  I'm a pretty clear lark".  So, it's maybe more beneficial for people who don't have clarity.

Sarah Ellis: They're not sure.

Helen Tupper: Yeah.  I was like, I mean, I'm just proving what I already know.  But I did think it was quite interesting that only 10% of people are early-morning birds, because it made me think, "Gosh, I must irritate 90% of people", was my reflection when I go, "Just get up in the morning, or do it earlier".  That is a preference for a minority of people.  So, if you are an early-morning person, don't assume that other people are like you, because most of them aren't.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.  Matthew Walker actually makes the point, he says how irritating it is.  You know when CEOs say -- you know there is a thing, though, about CEOs, about two hours before everyone has got up, they've already been for a run and read a book, and we've talked about that before about how that feels really unrealistic.  And I think sometimes we can beat ourselves up, because maybe some of those CEOs you hear about are in the 10%, so that might genuinely work really well for us. It's a bit like Libby who wrote Do Walk saying she gets up at 5.00am, 5.30am and goes for her really big walk at that time in the morning.  If I took from that, well for me to go for a walk, I've got to do it at exactly the same time, then again it feels like something you ignore, because it doesn't feel right for you.

Helen Tupper: You don't want nine out of ten people to beat themselves up, because they struggle to get up to go for a walk in the morning, or do whatever it is the CEOs do.  Yeah, so I thought that I maybe had a bit of empathy about that.  But the thing I actually really took away from that insight was that you need to match your work to your chronotype for the best success. So, they talked about people that do nightshifts and things like that.  So for me, I need to design my day around the fact that I'm an early-morning person.  So, if we are recording a podcast in the evening, that is never when I'm going to do my best work.  So, I think it is trying to design your day around your chronotype, as much as possible, has a lot of benefits for your performance. 

I thought that was quite interesting. Insight number two, social jetlag, which I'd never heard of before, was a new term to me.  So, there's a whole chapter of the impact of jetlag on sleep and performance and what you should do if you travel a lot; I won't go into that.  But your social jetlag is the mismatch between when you naturally want to wake up and when you force yourself to wake up.  So you know if you're like, "Well, I naturally want to wake up at 7.30am, but I force myself to do it at 6.00am because I've got to get a train", then you can suffer from this thing called social jetlag. It talks about when the clocks change, the impact of that on people's performance is actually quite significant.  I just dismiss it and go, "Get over it, clocks change every year", but actually there's quite a lot of research that shows that for some people, you have higher levels of depression, you have higher levels of accidents, a whole load of issues when the clocks change because of this social jetlag. The third thing that I learnt was all about light, and the importance of sleep and light. 

So basically, all of us, whether you are a lark or an owl or a dove, wherever you are, morning light is important and everyone should try and get -- so, what morning looks like might be different, the hour that you might determine a morning to be, light is important for all of us in resetting our body clock.  So, the sooner that you can go and get some natural light, the better it is for you and your energy over the day, which I thought was quite interesting. Do you go for a walk; do you walk to a station; do you go for a walk in the morning; do you -- I've even had a breakfast outside a few times while it's been hot?

Sarah Ellis: Fancy!

Helen Tupper: I know, it always feels really fancy; it's like going for brunch!  I feel like going for brunch is quite fancy.  And the opposite of that is you should avoid light at night.  So obviously, you hear a lot about your phone, like your phone emits a certain amount of light, and there certain like, I don't know, some blue light symptoms you can get.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I learnt quite a lot about blue light!

Helen Tupper: Everyone goes on about that, don't they?  The most interesting thing I was reading was about your bathroom light, because your bathroom is one of the brightest rooms in your house, very often, because you have a lot of lights over your mirrors, and all that kind of stuff, and obviously you're in there before you go to bed, probably brushing your teeth, and the light's very bright.  It was saying you should try and have dimmer light in the evening, get light in the morning, dimmer light in the evening, and that's something we can all do to improve our sleep.

Sarah Ellis: I now feel good about the fact that my bathroom is very dark.

Helen Tupper: My dingy, dark bathroom is great for my sleep!

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, it is quite dingy!  But I was thinking, it's not very bright --

Helen Tupper: I wasn't trying to insult your bathroom!

Sarah Ellis: -- but I was like, "Okay, well that's quite good then, because that is the bathroom that I use to brush my teeth and stuff".  Maybe I just need to reframe it as rather than dingy, it's just resetting me ready for evening.

Helen Tupper: Well, they call it your "psychological sleep preparation".  So, as you go to bed in the evening and you reduce your light, it's part of your psychological sleep preparation.  So, your bathroom is now part of that sleep.  I don't know how bright it is in the morning, but at night you're sorted!

Sarah Ellis: So, let's move onto the next question: what, if anything, has the book made you think or do differently?  I know that you said when you were reading it, you found some of it quite confronting about how much sleep you get, Helen.  So, has anything changed in your sleep pattern, or is it TBC?

Helen Tupper: Well, I actually have gone to bed earlier, definitely; not every single night, and there are some nights when I'm out for work things.  I say work, I'm just out having a party!

Sarah Ellis: Partying!  Work things?  That's definitely in inverted commas!

Helen Tupper: Just out, and then I'll get up early for work things.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, that's true, you do do that.

Helen Tupper: That's true.  That hasn't changed, but I wouldn't compromise on that anyway.  But there are nights when I almost end up, you know, you watch Netflix or I just listen to music for longer than I need to; and those nights, I've definitely more consciously gone, "What am I doing?  Go and get some sleep", because of what I've been reading. 

And I have, like I mentioned about the going outside, because it's been warmer, I don't think I'd do it in the winter, but there's been definitely mornings when I've thought, "Why am I sitting in my dining room?"  I might just go out the door and sit outside and have my breakfast. Those are two things I've definitely done as a result of reading and reflecting on the stuff on sleep in the book.  What about you?

Sarah Ellis: So, I don't think I've done anything differently.  I think there was one stat that shocked me a bit, that I'm just working myself up to whether I do anything about it, which is, do you know that caffeine has an average half-life of between five and seven hours, and I quite like a coffee.  I actually love tea as well, but I do drink quite a lot of decaf tea, so I'm used to that.  And one of the questions that Matthew Walker says in the book, he's asking some questions about, "How would you feel about X or Y to do with sleep?" and most of them I was like, "Oh, that's fine, I like going to bed". 

And I think because I had a couple of years, when my little boy was first born, of really bad sleep, I think I value it even more.  You know when something's been taken away, you then realise just how great it is? But one of the questions is, "Can you imagine waking up and then not having a coffee, or functioning as well without having a coffee?" and I was like, "No, absolutely not".  It used to be tea, but coffee is my first drink of the day.  I feel like that happens a bit when you get older maybe, I don't know, but it definitely has become my first drink of the day. Do I think I could give up my first coffee of the day?  Absolutely not, I'm definitely not there yet.  But I do have more than one coffee and I was like, "Well, maybe --" a bit like I drink a lot of decaf tea, I was like, "Maybe as the day goes on, I could then switch to decaf coffee".  Because also he says, "Decaf coffee doesn't mean non-caffeinated, it just means less caffeine", and I was like, "Oh, okay".  So even that's not quite a solution.  And he does talk about that it lasts in your system for so long, so much longer than you imagine. Even things like, and I mean I am going to do this straight after this podcast, you're not meant to eat chocolate in the evening, and I thought, "I've got some giant Buttons downstairs that I'm definitely going to eat after this!"

Helen Tupper: I love your chocolate!

Sarah Ellis: I was like, "I really chocolate and I really like coffee", so I definitely eat and drink some things that could be getting in my way.

Helen Tupper: It's like you're starting your day with the caffeine and ending it with chocolate!

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.  I go for a walk with the coffee, so it's like, "Do they balance each other out and equal each other?"  I don't know.  And the one other thing which I recognise, but I'm not sure I could really do anything about, is exercise is obviously really good for you and really good for helping you to sleep. 

But if you exercise too late in an evening, it actually wakes you back up.  And I really recognise that from when I play later netball matches. So some of the matches are 8.00pm in the evening, or 8:20pm, so you don't finish playing until maybe gone 9.00pm, and I find I just wake myself back up.  And I always find those nights, it takes me way longer to decompress and go to sleep.  And I mean, I'm not going to stop playing in those things, because that's a different aspect of something I really enjoy, but I think it's probably recognising if you are doing that, because lifestyle-wise that's what you're doing, what you could then do when you come home; so for example, maybe trying not to eat later, actually having a hot shower, but then letting you cool down; your bedroom temperature apparently needing to be about 18°C. At the end of the book, in the appendix, there's 12 tips for healthy sleep, which anyone can access. 

I think it's almost a health service list, it's not necessarily Matthew Walker's list.  It's a, "These are sensible things for us all to do", and I think going through that 12 is actually quite helpful in just being like, "Okay, well I do that one well, maybe less so, but if I am going to play netball late at night, here's what I could do to still try and help me get a good night's sleep". I will try and dig out that list and put it into the PodSheet.  So, if you're listening and you're like, "I'd quite like those 12 tips, please", then we will dig it out, put the link in the PodSheet, and you'll be able to access it there. So, who would you recommend this book to, Helen?  You sold it as quite a hard-core read, I'm going to say, at the start of the podcast.  Who do you think would enjoy the book?

Helen Tupper: I've put, "I would recommend this to somebody who likes facts and research.  Heavy!!"  So, maybe someone's listening and they're like, "That is me.  I like facts and research, with a double exclamation mark"!  If that is you, this is the book on sleep you need in your life.  What about Matthew Walker's?

Sarah Ellis: I would say anyone who enjoys accessible science, because I do think the majority of it is interesting, and if you're just curious about sleep and how sleep works, I felt like I was just learning about that generally.  So, even some of the parts that felt less relevant to me, like there's a whole section on sleeping pills, where I just didn't know anything about sleeping pills, I've never taken them before, it certainly makes you less likely to take them having read the chapter about them. 

He's not completely anti-them, but he just talks about why they can be quite detrimental. I think if you are having trouble sleeping, he definitely doesn't suggest, read the book and he's going to solve all your problems, he's not suggesting that, and he does talk a lot about people should go and see doctors and GPs, and how important it is to do that if you are having more serious problems sleeping.  But I think if you were just thinking, "My sleep quality is not as good as I would like it to be", I think this book would be a really good place to start, and I'd feel pretty confident it would help you with at least some ideas or some things to try out.

Helen Tupper: And, what about your favourite sentence or bit of the book, or has something surprised you from it?

Sarah Ellis: So, it was a sentence, probably slightly longer than a quote, and he says, "Sleep provides a night-time theatre in which your brain tests out and builds connections between vast stories of information", and I just really liked that idea of a night-time theatre, a bit like we described that community and stress committee that comes together when you sleep.  But I think the night-time theatre was even more evocative for me, in terms of what might be happening, and these stories of information and this problem-solving and creativity and memory storage and pressing save that was happening.  That sentence just really stood out to me. I think Matthew Walker using those kinds of descriptions really helped me to understand some of the concepts that at times, I was probably at risk of losing my way, or not quite understanding, even though it was accessible science.  And I think some of those descriptions really brought me back into the book.

Helen Tupper: My favourite bit, it's a bit actually that I think connects last week's episode on health with this week's on sleep, and it's the role that stress plays, and there was this really nice analogy of what stress is like for your brain.  So I think last week, we talked about Dr Rangan Chatterjee saying, "Not all stress is bad.  Some stress can actually be activating, but it's when it is sustained stress and unmanaged that it becomes an issue". In the book he says that, "Rapid stress is a bit like putting a car engine into first gear.  It gives you an immediate and helpful acceleration, but if you leave the engine in first gear for too long, you may destroy it".  I thought actually, I kind of get that.  You know you rev a car; I thought I see how that affects so many things: it affects the quality of sleep, it affects some of the other things we've talked about health, and I just thought it was a nice sentence to join the dots between the two different episodes.

Sarah Ellis: So, we hope you found that useful to listen to, and something a little bit different from us.  Next week, we're going to be talking about money, before we then move onto relationships.  I think money is the one we're both most scared of, probably because we both realise that I wouldn't say it's either of our fortes.  Also, I reckon we have quite a different approach to money, do you think?

Helen Tupper: Yeah, we definitely do.

Sarah Ellis: So, it's going to be an interesting one next week!  But if you do want any of the links to the resources that we've mentioned, some of those questionnaires and those quizzes, we'll put everything in the show notes.  And if you ever get stuck, or you can't find something you're looking for, you can always email us.  We're helen&sarah@squigglycareers.com.

Helen Tupper: Thank you so much for listening, everybody, and we're back with you again next week.

Sarah Ellis: Thank you, bye for now.