March 9, 2025 • 41 mins
We’ve all heard it: "You need 8 hours of sleep to function." But is that really true? In this episode, host Phoebe Parsons sit down with sleep physician Dr. David Cunnington to debunk the biggest sleep myth of them all. He explains why 8 hours isn't the magic number we’ve been led to believe and what really matters when it comes to quality rest. Tune in as they dive into sleep science, bust common myths, and learn how to get better sleep, no matter your routine.For daily FIT(ish) updates follow Phoebe on Instagram here Find out more about Dr David Cunnington by visiting his website: https://drdavidcunnington.com.au/sleep-clinic/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Appoja Production. Welcome to Fit Fish. I'm Phoebe Parsons and
this is the podcast that proves that you don't have
to choose between staying fit and having fun. Welcome to
the podcast, Doctor David Cunnington, specialist, sleep physician. I have
been dying to have a sleep expert on this show
(00:28):
for years now, so I'm so excited to finally have
you on to chat about something that is relatable to
every person on this planet.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah. Thanks, love, Phoebe. I hope I don't disappoint. And
you're right, all of us have to sleep, so it's
something we can't avoid. And that's a particularly sort of
unique feature about sleep.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
And I feel like it's such a seemingly simple topic,
but it's so much more new wance than that. So
I want to start by asking, is eight hours still
the gold standard or is that a little bit outdated now?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Well, it never really was the gold standard. We're sort
of made it the gold standard in industrialized Western society
because if you look in human writings and human literature
about sleep, when this eight hour thing came up, and
it was early nineteenth century Northern England and industrialization and
then the labor movement that said we must have eight
(01:19):
hours only for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours
for sleep. And so this whole eight hour sleep is
a social construct, it's not a biological construct. Humans up
until industrialization had bits of sleep, you know, naps in
the day and bits of sleep. No other mammals have
a single sleep period where they only sleep once, and
(01:41):
if you look at other societies, they still embrace you know,
we call bi phasic sleep like an app or a
siesta during the day, or multi phasic sleep, whereas it's
that Western industrialized sleep is eight hours. Must sleep in
that time, almost machine like, must get eight hours, you know,
you allow eight hours in one minute, and you expect
(02:02):
eight hours of sleep to occur, almost like we flick
a switch off and flicker switch back on again, which
just tells you it's non biological and just a complete myth.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
God. I know people can't see me right now, but
my jaw is literally on the floor hearing that. And
I feel like there's so many things like that in
the health and wellness space, like the ten thousand step thing,
and it's just something that we've all become accustomed to.
But that blows my mind that there's no actual rhyme
or reason. So then can I ask you how many
hours of sleep do you get a night? Because that's
(02:31):
going to be my new gold standard.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Right, Okay, let me back up a little bit. I
will tell you how much sleep I get, but I'll
back up a little bit. So, whilst that eight hours
is purely a social construct, there is good data where
if we look at large population studies showing adverse health
associated with very short sleeping so less than five hours
per night, or very long sleeping more than nine hours
(02:54):
per night. And so we do know that you want
to be somewhere in that window five to nine hours. Okay. Now,
what we also know is if you look at sleep
in population, so be it the developing world. So there's
some data from Mozambique. You look at Western societies, lots
of prevalence data about sleep length in Western societies, people
(03:17):
of working age, sort of working nine to five. You
know seven hours ish is about the population average. Now
it's hard when you then try and think about sort
of messaging you give to the community. You can either
give this sort of nuanced sort of messaging about its
sleep need is individualized and it depends on a whole
(03:37):
lot of life circumstances. But you know what the media
is like. They want you've got your ten second, one
bullet point thing, one size fits all, and so that
you get eight hours sleep absolutely fits that without people
really questioning the data behind it. Wow, all right now
in terms of how much sleep I get, Yes, So
(03:58):
you know, I'm a reasonably healthy guy in my yeah,
in my fifties. That's about it as close as I'll
tell you about it of that my age. But the
interesting thing, if I track my sleep using a wearable
over a period of time, it is incredibly stable. So
it's about six hours and thirty seven minutes per night
if you have consistently, if you average it by week,
(04:21):
or if you average it by month. But if you
look at it day to day, it might be four hours,
might be eight hours, might be six hours plus a nap.
You know, across a week, there's just lots of stuff
goes on. You know, I've got an adult child with
significant disability. I'm on the local turtle care volunteers on
the beach or often up early doing things with turtle
(04:41):
nests over summer, you know, And so sleep is a
bit of a variable feast across the week. But because
it's a biologically regulated phenomenon, our body just automatically takes
care of it if we get out the way very reassuringly,
that self regulation happens to keep it incredibly stable. For
(05:04):
another pro you're looking back at some data of mine
from about five years ago, was the same six hours
thirty seven minutes on average if I averaged it by
week or by month, And so it's just incredibly stable.
And that's not because I go to sleep at the
same time each day or a month at the same
time each day. It's just because I get out the
way let my body auto regulate it, and because I'm
(05:25):
in good physical and mental health it does.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Oh my god. So is it something that we should
be looking at more as a week as opposed to individually,
Because I since I've started wearing a sleep trucker, I
noticed that during the week, my sleep is obviously a
lot less because I work as a fitness instructor, so
I'm getting up at four thirty and I'm going to
bed still around you know, nine thirty ten. But then
on the weekends, I noticed that I sleep for longer
(05:49):
structures at nighttime, but I also have naps on both
of the days on the weekends, so I feel like
I do actually feel quite rested if I'm looking at
my sleep in a week, not individually per night.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Correct. And that's part of the good and the bad
with the wearables. Wearables can be very reassuring to show
you that stability over time, but the bad is you
can ride the emotional rollercoaster of the day to day variation.
It becomes a bit self fulfilling. Oh my god, I
only got four hours last night and this much deep
sleep and today's just going to be crap, you know.
(06:23):
It becomes this self fulfilling prophecy.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah, And people get obsessed with that and they'll look
at it the first thing when they wake up. And
I know I can do this. Sometimes I get obsessed
and I look at my sleep and I'm like, oh,
I only got you know, five hours last night, And
then it's almost like a placebo. I'm like, am I
tired or am I just feeling tired because I've seen
that I didn't have a lot of sleep last night?
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, exactly, And so that's part of the issue with
the wearables. Now, there is a phenomenon called social jet lag,
which you describe where people sleep less during the working
week catch up on weekends. We don't like that so
much because that is associated If you follow that pattern
over time, you see that people accumulate sleepingness over time,
(07:05):
they become more and more tired, so they never totally
catch up. They're always a little bit underdone with that
social jet lag type of sleep or yo yo sleepings
and other terminology for that. So for someone who's a
fitness instructor fitness training like yourself, got to be up
doing those early morning things, you'd be trying to put
(07:27):
a nap in when you don't have clients in the
middle of the day.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, absolutely, rather.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Than necessarily just on the weekends.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
I love enough. Honestly, I think naps are so underrated.
It's just unfortunate that we work in a paradigm now
where it's like nine to five. You don't really have
capacity to have a nap in the day for a
lot of the population.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
And that's where they're working from home. Since the pandemic
has really been great for a lot of people I
see with sleep issues, as you can have your little
nap just quietly without someone looking over your shoulder. Gain,
how dare you take a lunch break that you're entitled
to you should be working. Has allowed a little bit
(08:06):
more of that flexible thinking around sleep and flexibility around sleep.
There's a bit we'll talk about some of the health
interventions for sleep are a little bit Western industrialized as well,
trying to create an idealized sleep and so, for example,
one of the instructions if someone's having trouble with sleep
(08:27):
is under those circumstances, don't nap during the day and
don't go to bed unless you're sleeping. Yep. Now, napping
is great, and there's really only that very isolated time
we don't want people to nap, which is when they've
got quite significant insomnium. We're trying to bully it into line.
But any other circumstances, napping is good. But again, the
(08:47):
public health message that comes out is there's picked up
that thing don't nap during the day, and that's on
realistical of five things to fix your sleep. And so
everyone's about, oh, I can't nap, I shouldn't ap during
the day. I'm just like no, because that develops this
rigidity of thinking about sleep. Sleep has to occur this place,
this time, these circumstances with these accessories, and that's an
(09:11):
unhealthy way of thinking about sleep, but it is a
very Western industrial way of thinking about sleep, because I've
got whole industries designed to set use sleep products that
fit on that list. If I need these accessories, or
I need my mattress to be so on, my sheets
and my curtains and my eye shades and my noise machine,
all these different things to be able to sleep. You know,
(09:34):
it's harnessing that fear of sleep that we have and
trying to build this sort of rigidity around sleep. But
if you talk to a healthy sleeper, good sleeper, how
do they behave around sleep? Totally fluid whatever, Engage them
in a discussion about sleep, not interested. It's just a
nothing for them. And it's really interesting if I go
(09:57):
out to socially meet people haven't met before and they say, oh,
what do you do You know, I'm a sleep specialist.
People have sleep difficulties, go oh, that's really interesting and
are up for talking about sleep. Yeah. People who are
good sleepers go okay, slink off to the bar to
get another drink, and they just don't want to talk
to me at all.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Kind Of like when you think about health and fitness
and nutrition, and you see that people who kind of
have a bit of an issue with their eating, perhaps
they'll do all the complicated things like they'll buy the
sea moss grass and they'll be really rigid and they'll
try and do you know, eating windows and things like that.
But the people who are have a really stable, healthy
relationship with food, they know how to listen to their
body and they just have that baseline. They're not counting calories,
(10:40):
they're not counting this, they're just going with it. And
I've never ever thought about sleep in that same way.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
That's exactly the analogy. So based on that analogy, there's
a term that's been coined which is orthosomnia. So authorexia
is sort of overthinking sort of eating and eating patterns.
So authosomnia is overthinking sleep and particularly with relationship to wearables.
And so yes, there's absolutely a phase when someone's not sleeping. Well,
(11:09):
we want to be proactive and put some steps in
place to get things back on track, but then pretty
quickly we want to back away and just trust that
our body will sort it out, assuming we have good
physical and mental health.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Because it's that stress thing, you know, when you have
like an early flight or something, and you get into
bed and you're like, right, if I go to sleep
right this second, I'm going to get five hours sleep,
and then you stress about it and so then it's
an hour later and you're still no closer to sleep.
But it's like the more relaxed and calm you are,
then more naturally and easier things like that just come
to you.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
And it's really interesting. There's some nice work been done
recently from the University of Melbourne that I've been involved
with looking at the relationship between perfectionism and risk of
sleep disturbance. And one of the subscales or particular types
of perfectionism that associates most with sleep disturbance is pride
in one's own performance, high sense of personal responsibility. So
(12:05):
the same people that are you know, well brought up,
take their job seriously, often early to things very diligent. Yeah,
they're the ones that before that thing the next day
can barely sleep because there's that anticipation.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
I guess it's that braggy thing like if you are
wearing a wearable. It's the same thing if you smash
out a really high intensity workout and you've got really
good fitness and scores on your thing. You're going to
want to put it on your social media and brag, hey,
I just got into, you know, the red zone in
my heart rate monitor, saying for sleep, you want to show, hey,
my sleep score is in the nineties, which I mean
mine has never been in the nineties, but that's something
(12:39):
that you'd want to brag about. And I assume that
if you were someone with a really type a personality
and like you're saying, a perfectionist, the more pressure you
put on yourself, probably further away you actually are from
getting that perfect score.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah, and the really you know, it's a really nice
point because we also sometimes get in our minds that
sleep has to be perfect. You're almost trying to biohack
life by squeezing them how to sleep that we can.
And this is where sleep is really different to exercise
and nutrition, equally important, but really different. Often in those domains,
(13:14):
the harder you go, the more you do, the one
percents you get these incremental gains. In sleep, the harder
you go, the worse it gets. And so it absolutely,
you know, it does people's heads. And I see lots
of both amateur and professional athletes who are nailing the
nutrition and nailing the physical activity, and they try to
nail their sleep and it goes very badly because there
(13:37):
they're taking exactly that same high detail nailing everything approach
to sleep. Wow.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
So it's just like sleep when you're tired, don't sleep
when you're not tired. It sounds so simple when you
say it like that. And just before we get off
the wearables, I just want to ask you this, in
terms of sleep quality versus sleep quantity. I think people
who wear wearables will know that you do. When you
wake up, you get that score of how long you
were in RAM, how long you were in deep sleep,
(14:06):
how long you were in light sleep. Is there like
something we should be aiming for every night in those
particular zones because I was shocked at how long you're
in light sleep for right.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
So a couple of things about that. So one is
the wearables are actually becoming pretty good in terms of
their accuracy about total sleep length. If you then average
it across a few days, there's a bit of you know,
not entirely accurate on any given night, but you start
to average that across multiple days, they're pretty good at
(14:40):
picking sleep lengths. Like I've told you with my own
personal data. They're much less good about picking sub stages
of sleep because there's lots of assumptions that are made
some of it. They use surrogates like movement for you know,
if you're moving, that's called light sleep. If you're still,
it's called deep sleep. And some of us are just
a bit more twitchy jumpy than others, and that'll translate
(15:03):
to more light sleep unless sleep. So he's got to
take those sleep stages with a grain of salt. Don't
hang too much on those type. Yeah, so very rough
and ready, as a rule of thumb, would be deep
sleep twenty twenty five percent of the night. Rem sleep
about twenty percent of the night. But that's very rough
(15:24):
and ready. And again think of it as your body's
going to take the sleep it needs, get out the way.
One night you might be down, the other night you
might be up. It'll sort it out. Now. The other
thing to say about that is a lot of the
wearables call that one that's alarmingly high about sixty percent
of the night. They call it light sleep. It's not
(15:45):
light sleep, it's just part of normal sleep.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
It's just sleep.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Yeah, Yeah, it's just sleep. Right, So Apple are taking
a really nice approach to this. So they've got a
colleague of minor sleep specialists from Stanford in the US.
Now it works for Apple and has been working on
a lot of their sleep algorithms, and based on his advice,
they've changed that and they call that core sleep. So
all your Apple devices, or if you feed your wearable
(16:11):
in via the health app into your Apple Apse, it'll
be deep core and rim just because you change that
word and instead of it being light. Oh my god,
I've got sixty percent of my night is light sleep
to be well sixty percent core. Yeah, okay, that fits
twenty percent. Rem ya come, I'm good to go.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Wow, Igain, it's that like psychological placebo of just reading
the word light sleep. Yeah, that is insane. Okay, So
we've covered the circadian rhythm thing. You don't have to
worry too much about going to sleep at the same
time every night and waking up at the same time
every night. But can you train yourself to function on
less sleep? But I suppose this one is very specifically
(16:55):
related to I suppose people who are getting up early
to go and train new parents and things like that.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
So think of it as you know what determines how
long we sleep. So part of its genetic, So there's
definitely genes associated with short to sleep and light sleeping.
Part of it's just personality. But think of it for
one of a better terms. Where we sit on a
nervous energy axis. Now that'll change across life. So we
can certainly decide, okay, I'm going to push harder on
(17:23):
the adrenaline drive, and I'm going to go harder now
because sleep's are biological phenomenon. You'll sleep less because your
body is in a higher adrenaline state, and you'll find yourself,
if you're previously had been sleeping eight hours, you'll find
yourself sleeping six hours because there's just more of that
(17:43):
adrenaline drive so it naturally wakes you. Wear Now that'll
be okay until it isn't. And so people will be
going for a couple of years going this is all good.
I'm totally smashing it and I only need to sleep
for six hours. And what they don't realize is the
wheels are slowly starting to fall off. Maybe other domains
of life. Their relationships aren't too great, they're a little
(18:05):
it's snappy, their carryo vascular health, they're increasing their risk
of hypertension or long term cardiovascular disease. They're heading into
the anxiety, they're flirting with burnout, you know, all of
these sort of things. So they haven't trained themselves to
sleep less by choice. They've behaviorally switched where their sympathetic
nervous system activity, or their stress response or their quartersol response,
(18:28):
or their fight flight response, or their allosteric load, whatever
term you want to use to describe it. They've elected
to just turn the heat up on that and they'll
sleep shorter. And like I said, it's good until it isn't.
So I see people like that sometimes in my office
in their thirties sleep starting to break up, and that's
(18:48):
usually okay, I can manage that. But I see them
in their forties and they've fully burnt out. They were successful,
but they've either flamed out professionally or in their personal
life and they're now trying to pick up the pieces
and sort of exhausted and fatigued. So, yeah, you can't
really cheat. You can cheat sleep in the short term
(19:10):
or the short medium term, but you can't cheat sleep
in the in the long term.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
So it's more something to look at as a season
like this might just be a lower sleep season.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Yeah, and that's a nice way of thinking of it.
So thinking of it in a you know, and I've
told you I measure my habitual sort of sleep length
just to keep an eye on things. And you know,
like all of us, there's times in life where I
go to you, the next month is going to be
pretty tough, but I just recognize, you know what, and
I'm going to sleep a bit shorter probably in the
next month on average, and I'm either going to build
in more western recovery or at the end of that time,
(19:42):
schedule some time out to just you know, let that
nervous energy drop and then go back to my long
term average rather than of powering on. Now I've got
this extra energy, I'm going to keep powering on. And
that's where too some of the sort of health blogs
I see around sleep, which is the you know you
two could be a five am person, you know, four
(20:05):
am person, see that you were doing things while you're
you while your competitors were sleeping, So come on rising
grind type of philosophy. Again, that's good until it isn't
in essence, and there's really good data showing that people
who are underslept with that sort of high nervous energy.
When they're in leadership positions, make worse decisions, and people
(20:28):
working under them perceive them as a poorer manager and
are less likely to sort of work productively under their supervision. Wow,
and so you get these people who are going, I'm
king of the world. I am absolutely killing it. I'm
only sleeping four hours a night. I'm smashing it. But
what they don't see is all around them, there's this
debris and stuff that's not working all around them.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Because you're so right. For a point of time there,
I feel like sleep is actually becoming something that people
are priding themselves on a lot more now, But for
a big period of time there, it was almost like
a brag, like, Hey, I'm only sleeping four hours a
night because I'm so busy doing xyz. It's like, that's
who are you trying to impress.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
But it still exists, particularly in a couple of areas.
So it definitely exists in politicians politics because we constantly
hear about you know, we see the vision of the
politicians out walking first thing in the morning and stuff.
You know, finance entrepreneurs, tech startups, you know, these sort
of areas that still very much have that sleep when
(21:32):
you did Little Culture.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
I don't know, I'm so anti that now now I
want to talk about this. This is mostly just to
cut through the absolute slur of bullshit that exists now
on social media. And there are so many influencers now
pushing these really complicated like ten step nighttime routines that
they're saying, help them get, you know, a beautiful, deep
(21:55):
eight hours of sleep. Can you talk us through just
a basic for the average person who doesn't have to
spend hundreds of dollars on you know, necessary accessories and
things like that. What does an ideal nighttime routine look like?
Speaker 2 (22:09):
All right? So the high level summary is we've got
to be respectful for sleep, So that is, you've got
to allow an appropriate opportunity for sleep. But then we've
got to be disinterested in sleep. So our job is
to provide an appropriate opportunity and just to arrive at
that opportunity in the right sort of frame of mind
(22:30):
both physically and mentally for sleep, and then who cares
what happens in that space. I've done my bit. Yes,
So with that sort of overarching principle, you don't want
the pre sleep routine to be too complex, too detailed,
have too many steps, have oh you know, all this stuff,
(22:53):
and that's far too often people end up saying me
and my professional role as a sleep specialist. Their families go, yeah,
you've got this whole sleep performance that starts two or
three hours before before bed. It's exhausting. You're going to
do all this thing and we're time poor. Who's got
two and a half to three hours every night to
be you just trying to sleep? Now, exactly what to
(23:16):
do before you go to bed. It's a bit different
from person to person, but if you tend to be
a little bit more busy, mind, it's just down tools down,
you know, it's giving yourself permission to clock off. I
am switching. It's almost like you have to take your
Superman suit off, I'm into the phone booth, come out
in your pajamas, and just behaviorally, by that action, you're
(23:37):
giving yourself permission to Okay. It's my persona of being
the supermom, the person who does absolutely everything that's closed
down for today and then on analogy, going to do
some sort of activity that just helps me pull bring
down that nervous energy. And if that's reading something in bed,
(23:58):
if it's just watching some something that's just mind numbing,
that just allows you to make that transition. Great, some
sort of distractor to make that transition. And then when
you feel like that nervous energy has dropped and your
eyelids are starting to get heavy, turn the lights out.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
I love that because something that I started doing a
couple of years ago was as soon as I'm done
eating for the night, I'll brush my teeth, because there's
nothing worse than dozing off and then opening your eyes
and realizing, oh my god, now I've got to go
and wash my face and brush my teeth, and then
you're awake again by the time you get back into bed.
So it's like, be really ready to sleep by the
(24:36):
time you start to get dozy and tired.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Yeah, And so it doesn't need to be any more
complicated than that. And this is the tricky part too.
So a lot of the sleep hygiene instructions will say,
you know, don't watch anything, have no light, no no
anything else. Now through in a busy world where we've
all got busy minds, when else in the day do
we have empty space with nothing to distract us? Almost
(25:02):
never and so we don't tolerate h your space. Well,
so if you force yourself, you're not tired. Dur in
this dark room, you can't do anything. That's when the
thoughts build and build and build, and there's that thinking
and anxiety. You guarantee you're not going to sleep. So
that's when you pop the light on, do something else,
distract yourself until again you're feeling that just settled and
(25:24):
the heavy eyelids and then lights out again.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
I love that it sounds so simple when you explain
it like that.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah, and I just want to come back. You ask
me a little while back about that sort of regular
go to bed and get up time. So do you just
want to come back to the get up time? Getting
up at a similar time each day is actually really
helpful in sinking our body clock to get a sense
of right. This is the anchor time. So at about
the same time each day, our body is getting a
(25:52):
signal that we're upright, we're moving, we're getting food, we're
getting light. Then that regularizes a whole range of different
bodily functions and translates to improved health across many domains.
Just sleep. So that sort of engagement with the outside world,
which light's one of the keys, but movement and meals
(26:13):
or other parts of that is just really important for
maintaining good health.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Ah. And then would the idea behind that be when
your body kind of knows that, So say, let's use
my wake up time, for example four point thirty. I
naturally am quite tired by nine o'clock. Is that because
my body just kind of has found a nice rhythm
where it's like, we know that you're waking up at
four thirty am? This is how much kind of average sleep?
(26:38):
And I'd say I probably average about six and a
half hours a night, and that does feel okay for me.
I don't force sleep. I go to bed when I'm tired,
and I sit there with a book and when my
eyes start to shut, I shut the book and it's
light out.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah. Absolutely, And it's a nice example of it just
keys in those body rhythms and the things we don't
think about, we haven't really talked about or isn't talked
about a lot in the nutrition since, but is becoming
The research showing it's important is timing of meals, because again,
if you think of it as the body clock drives sleep,
which is what people sort of talk about, but also
(27:13):
drives how the body handles energy. So if your body knows, okay, well,
I get up at four point thirty and by five am,
I'm expecting a meal load of about this mix of
protein and carbohydrate, I'll be ramping up enzymes and gastric
motility to deal with that. But if the meal doesn't come,
and it comes four hours later and it's a massive
(27:33):
carbohydrate load without the protein, the gas tro intestional track
woudn't expecting that. It's not geared up for that, and
it's going to process it differently. You're going to store
more of the carbohydrates. It's going to have to push
your insulin up to deal with it. So, you know,
we think about that timing in terms of sleep, but
it's actually important across a range of domains as well.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah, that's fascinating. I really like that. I think that's
a really good baseline for people to stop worrying about,
you know, the set time and the wake up time
and just really focus on that wake up time. So
I want to run through a couple of more rapid
fire things to kind of finish us off, and I
want you to let me know whether these are harmful
or help Number one harmful or helpful. The bedtime social
(28:15):
media doomscroll.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
So guilty, and depends on how you conceptualize it or
what it means to you, if it's just a mindless
scrolling rather than oh, that's interesting and I'm off over here,
and that's interesting and I'm off over here. If it
really is a mindless scrolling, it can help fill that
space while your nervous energy is just dropping, and then
you're ready to go to sleep.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Okay, So it's not like you know how sometimes people
say that the blue light emitting from the phone can
get in the way of your cicading rhythm, and it's
all very scientific, so it can.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
So light's a thing, but there's a massive variability between individuals.
So there's about a fiftyfold variation between individuals. Again, it's
not in clinical practice just yet that we test that,
but there are some tests being validated for that, and
so it will be for some people important, probably more
important for people with depression or mental health disorders and
(29:07):
people on antidepressants, but probably less critical for others. And
it's this balance, right, So if not the phone, what
else A long form book? Well, Unfortunately, not many people
read long form books anymore. A kindle maybe it doesn't
have a back light. You know you can read, but
it's again long form reading rather than that really sort
(29:28):
of short form. So if you you know, at a
personal level, if you need the distractor, then the doomscrolling,
and if that works as a distractor for you, great,
I'd much prefer that than lying in the dark getting
stressed about not sleeping.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Well, I'm sure a lot of people will be fist
pumping right now hearing that answer. Okay, next handful or helpful.
A glass of wine at dinner.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Again, bit of both. Alcohol has a negative effect on sleep.
It has this early on positive effect, but as it's
metabolized has some alerting effects, so it can wake you
up during the night. Maybe it just turns out that
someone's having a glass, so less than ten grams of
alcohol at dinner, it's probably pretty neutral for sleep. The
negative bit for me is if someone feels like for
(30:09):
me to switch off, I need that alcohol. That's where
I see it become a problem where someone doesn't have
their own self soothing skills to be able to bring
down that nervous energy, and the only way they can
do it is with the alcohol, because then one glass
comes two becomes three, and that's.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Problematic, harmful and helpful an afternoon coffee or dit.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Cooke generally okay. Again, massive into individual variability with caffeine.
So some people can drink caffeine late, doesn't have any
impact other people exquisitely sensitive to caffeine. Most people know
where they sit, and so if you know you're sensitive,
yeah you don't have it late. But it's interesting. I'll
see people who are paying no attention to stress management.
(30:53):
They are stressed out to the max and not sleeping,
but they've cut out coffee after midday. I'm just like,
that ain't the thing. I hate to tell you, but
you know that's not the thing that's impacting on sleep.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Because people love to blame anybody else but themselves, myself included.
I'm totally there too. Next handful or helpful exercising at nighttime.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
So although we've said that's bad, there's really a couple
of nice papers recently have shown any exercise is better
than no exercise. Morning's preferable to evening, but only preferable,
not a must. Not exercise at night. And so again
work out for your own individual circumstances. If the only
time you can fit it in is at night, sure
(31:38):
go for it. But just don't have that expectation that
you've been in the gym, it's pumping, it's light, you've
really gone hard, that you're going to come in the door,
throw your pajamas on, turn the light out, and go
bang straight to sleep. You know you've been in a
high energy environment that's going to take a little while
to come down from.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Handful or helpful magnesium or melatonin supplements before bad.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
So each of them may be helpful. So some people
can find magnesium supplements helpful, some people find all atone
and helpful. The bit for me is, if you're finding
you need to take a supplement to get yourself to sleep,
you should be taking a step back and going, Okay,
what's not working, Here's what's underpinning this. Why can't I
(32:22):
get to sleep?
Speaker 1 (32:23):
I guess it's that same reliance you were talking about
earlier with the wine at dinner. The second you become
really reliant on something, maybe look at why I be
doing to ask you this one helpful or harmful mouth
taping This is rife on TikTok at the moment.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, and then it's bled from TikTok into some of
the traditional media as well. Actually had a couple of
requests for media interviews about it, which I've turned down
because there's no evidence whatsoever. And you know, I don't
want to get into her, he said, she said, you
know type of thing. No, And when something's going to
(32:59):
fix all ills, you know that it's really probably doesn't work, right,
because not just mouth taping that's going to reduce snoring,
it's mouth taping that's going to make you sleep better
and be a bit of human you know, a whole
range of different different things.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Yeah, it's like mouth taping. Will you'll wake up feeling
more rusted, You'll have more ram sleep, You'll have this,
You'll have that, Like what is it a genie a
bottle or is it a piece of sticky tape you're
putting over your lips?
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Yeah, yeah, that exactly. And it's really interesting. So, you know,
we talked a bit about cultural beliefs around sleep. You know,
there's been a very long held belief in western medical
writing and society writing that people who mouth breathe are dirty,
slovenly poor, and that's just associated with pre Victorian sort
(33:46):
of times when often the poor had a lot more
upper respiratory tract infections and nasal obstruction. And so there
is a strong association in Western cultures between nose breathing
and being virtuous and a better overall citizen in essence stuff.
So I see the mouth taping a bit of an
(34:06):
extension of you know, it's virtue signaling.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Oh my god, I mean I am allowed. My whole
family is loud and proud mouth open sleepers, and I
mean it's not pretty, but I don't feel I've take
my mouth shut before, and I didn't feel any different
when I woke up. And then the last one helpful
a harmful again, pretty rife on social media at the moment.
LED and red light therapy.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, so rather than the red light being a positive thing,
think of the red light replacing potentially the blue light.
So if we know that the wavelengths of light then
can have a negative effect on sleep, with the colder
colors bluey, sort of whitey, greeny, those harsh cold colors
(34:50):
associated with the morning and often interior lighting. So the
LED lighting we now have in our homes is that
cold color temperature, and so it's probably a negative for sleep,
whereas the red light is less of that cold color temperature,
so it's going to be a bit more neutral for sleep.
(35:10):
So rather than helping sleep, think of it as the
red light takes away the need for the light that
might be negative for sleep.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
That's so good. I actually missed one too, And then
this is really important. Snoozing an alarm.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
Again goes both ways generally. Okay, we haven't talked about it,
but a lot of the way we behave around sleep
is aspirational. So people will behave around sleep the way
they wish they slept, even if it never materializes. For me,
that's one of the funny things about sleep because almost
no other domain in life, you keep doing the same thing,
wishing the outcome would be different. But sleep is right now.
(35:47):
Some people, particularly more late night types, just find it
hard to get going in the morning, so it can't
do the hit the alarm right now. I'm ready to go.
You know, we all get sold that we're going to
be waking as soon as the alarm goes. Leap out
of bed. There'll be butterflies and daffodils and the sun
shining and things. It only you took more of a
(36:09):
particular vitamin or supplement, you too could be like this.
It's a About three percent of the population have a
body clock length just under twenty four hours that allows
that waking as soon as the alarm goes. The other
ninety percent of the population have a slightly longer body clock.
In fact, the median across the humans is about twenty
four hours seven eight minutes, So if you think about
(36:32):
it that way, two hits of the snooze button, you're
about average for a human. If it takes you that
seventeen minutes after your alarm first goes before you feel like, Okay,
now my body thinks it's time to get up. My
cycle is ready to start. But it don't be too
hard on yourself. You've got to hit the snooze button twice.
The times it's negative is if you're sort of kidding
(36:54):
yourself and you're having this constant internal negotiation of the
I wish it were but it's not going to be different,
and you're just stuck in a cycle of hitting the
snooze button multiple times. Yeah, there may be something that
was wrong with your sleep, or stop kidding yourself and
just change your alarm time to when you actually want
to get up.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Yes, that is the point I was getting at. And
I say that because when I first met my partner,
he used to set like fourteen alarms in the morning,
and I was like, just let yourself sleep until your
last alarm and then get up, and then you're not
having broken up sleep. You can just sleep through till
that last alarm when you know you're going to get up.
But anyway, that is a story for a different day.
So then there's just two little takeaways that I want
to chat to you about before we wind up. And
(37:32):
this is very relatable to the people I think who
are listening to this podcast. If you've had a terrible
night's sleep, is it better for you to skip the
gym and opt for a to have a little bit
more sleep or just push through.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
I think as long as you haven't had consecutive bad nights,
I'd just get up go to the gym, but I'd
be thinking about your day as to thinking, Okay, that's
my uptime is going to the gym, wherein Miday is
going to be some downtime, which doesn't necessarily mean it's
going to be more sleep the next night. It could
be some feed up time when you get home. It
(38:08):
could be a nap during the day if you're working
from home, for example, Because if you there's something that
happens really really often, people start having trouble with sleep.
They start giving up other activities to get more sleep,
or in an attempt to get more sleep, and that
starts feeding this negative cycle of not feeling well, poorer health,
(38:31):
sleep becoming more and more important because look at all
these things I've given up because of my sleep, and
then sleep just becomes you know, there's more and more
pressure and more and more anxiety around sleep, and I get.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
I guess like that living thing, like having a perfect diet,
means nothing if you've sacrificed your entire life and you've
got no enjoyment anymore because you just are so focused
on maintaining a perfectly clean diet. If your whole life
is devoted to getting a perfect eight hours of sleep
every single night, it's probably going to come at a
detriment to other areas of your life. And then, lastly,
(39:04):
do you do you have any tips for trying to
fall asleep when your brain just won't shut off?
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah, don't. That's it? So you know, literally if your
brain won't shut off and it's not ready for sleeping,
don't try and sleep, because one you won't sleep, and
too it'll just add to that frustration. You won't get
calmer laying in bed trying to sleep. In fact, you'll
(39:33):
get more distressed. And so pop the light on, sit up, read.
If your partner won't tolerate that, go to another room,
do something else until you're feeling a bit more settled.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
That is the most rational piece of advice I've ever
heard from a doctor in my entire life. That is
so brilliant. And then, just to finish off, what is
one piece of advice you would give to everybody listening
to this podcast about sleep.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
And maintain flexible and rational thinking about sleep rather than
that sort of aspirational, emotional, more social norming sort of
way of thinking about sing I.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
Love that so much, Dr David Cunnington, thank you so
much for chatting. Can you let people know a little
bit more about where they can find you here?
Speaker 2 (40:17):
So I practice both seeing people face to face on
the Sunshine Coast and I see people from around Australia
via telehealth, and that's via my website. Dr David Cunnington
dot com today you and.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
I'll pop all of that information in this week's show notes.
Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
I learned so so much today, No worries, pleasure.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Thank you so much for listening. Guys, I really hope
you enjoyed the episode, and don't forget to help a
sister out by following the podcast on Apple or on
Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Rate it,
write me a review, and if you want more finish,
we do have a private Facebook group. There is going
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guests in that group. That's going to be events going
(40:59):
live first, so much fun stuff happening. Just look up
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part of the fetish online community
Appoja Production. Welcome to Fit Fish. I'm Phoebe Parsons and
this is the podcast that proves that you don't have
to choose between staying fit and having fun. Welcome to
the podcast, Doctor David Cunnington, specialist, sleep physician. I have
been dying to have a sleep expert on this show
(00:28):
for years now, so I'm so excited to finally have
you on to chat about something that is relatable to
every person on this planet.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah. Thanks, love, Phoebe. I hope I don't disappoint. And
you're right, all of us have to sleep, so it's
something we can't avoid. And that's a particularly sort of
unique feature about sleep.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
And I feel like it's such a seemingly simple topic,
but it's so much more new wance than that. So
I want to start by asking, is eight hours still
the gold standard or is that a little bit outdated now?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Well, it never really was the gold standard. We're sort
of made it the gold standard in industrialized Western society
because if you look in human writings and human literature
about sleep, when this eight hour thing came up, and
it was early nineteenth century Northern England and industrialization and
then the labor movement that said we must have eight
(01:19):
hours only for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours
for sleep. And so this whole eight hour sleep is
a social construct, it's not a biological construct. Humans up
until industrialization had bits of sleep, you know, naps in
the day and bits of sleep. No other mammals have
a single sleep period where they only sleep once, and
(01:41):
if you look at other societies, they still embrace you know,
we call bi phasic sleep like an app or a
siesta during the day, or multi phasic sleep, whereas it's
that Western industrialized sleep is eight hours. Must sleep in
that time, almost machine like, must get eight hours, you know,
you allow eight hours in one minute, and you expect
(02:02):
eight hours of sleep to occur, almost like we flick
a switch off and flicker switch back on again, which
just tells you it's non biological and just a complete myth.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
God. I know people can't see me right now, but
my jaw is literally on the floor hearing that. And
I feel like there's so many things like that in
the health and wellness space, like the ten thousand step thing,
and it's just something that we've all become accustomed to.
But that blows my mind that there's no actual rhyme
or reason. So then can I ask you how many
hours of sleep do you get a night? Because that's
(02:31):
going to be my new gold standard.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Right, Okay, let me back up a little bit. I
will tell you how much sleep I get, but I'll
back up a little bit. So, whilst that eight hours
is purely a social construct, there is good data where
if we look at large population studies showing adverse health
associated with very short sleeping so less than five hours
per night, or very long sleeping more than nine hours
(02:54):
per night. And so we do know that you want
to be somewhere in that window five to nine hours. Okay. Now,
what we also know is if you look at sleep
in population, so be it the developing world. So there's
some data from Mozambique. You look at Western societies, lots
of prevalence data about sleep length in Western societies, people
(03:17):
of working age, sort of working nine to five. You
know seven hours ish is about the population average. Now
it's hard when you then try and think about sort
of messaging you give to the community. You can either
give this sort of nuanced sort of messaging about its
sleep need is individualized and it depends on a whole
(03:37):
lot of life circumstances. But you know what the media
is like. They want you've got your ten second, one
bullet point thing, one size fits all, and so that
you get eight hours sleep absolutely fits that without people
really questioning the data behind it. Wow, all right now
in terms of how much sleep I get, Yes, So
(03:58):
you know, I'm a reasonably healthy guy in my yeah,
in my fifties. That's about it as close as I'll
tell you about it of that my age. But the
interesting thing, if I track my sleep using a wearable
over a period of time, it is incredibly stable. So
it's about six hours and thirty seven minutes per night
if you have consistently, if you average it by week,
(04:21):
or if you average it by month. But if you
look at it day to day, it might be four hours,
might be eight hours, might be six hours plus a nap.
You know, across a week, there's just lots of stuff
goes on. You know, I've got an adult child with
significant disability. I'm on the local turtle care volunteers on
the beach or often up early doing things with turtle
(04:41):
nests over summer, you know, And so sleep is a
bit of a variable feast across the week. But because
it's a biologically regulated phenomenon, our body just automatically takes
care of it if we get out the way very reassuringly,
that self regulation happens to keep it incredibly stable. For
(05:04):
another pro you're looking back at some data of mine
from about five years ago, was the same six hours
thirty seven minutes on average if I averaged it by
week or by month, And so it's just incredibly stable.
And that's not because I go to sleep at the
same time each day or a month at the same
time each day. It's just because I get out the
way let my body auto regulate it, and because I'm
(05:25):
in good physical and mental health it does.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Oh my god. So is it something that we should
be looking at more as a week as opposed to individually,
Because I since I've started wearing a sleep trucker, I
noticed that during the week, my sleep is obviously a
lot less because I work as a fitness instructor, so
I'm getting up at four thirty and I'm going to
bed still around you know, nine thirty ten. But then
on the weekends, I noticed that I sleep for longer
(05:49):
structures at nighttime, but I also have naps on both
of the days on the weekends, so I feel like
I do actually feel quite rested if I'm looking at
my sleep in a week, not individually per night.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Correct. And that's part of the good and the bad
with the wearables. Wearables can be very reassuring to show
you that stability over time, but the bad is you
can ride the emotional rollercoaster of the day to day variation.
It becomes a bit self fulfilling. Oh my god, I
only got four hours last night and this much deep
sleep and today's just going to be crap, you know.
(06:23):
It becomes this self fulfilling prophecy.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah, And people get obsessed with that and they'll look
at it the first thing when they wake up. And
I know I can do this. Sometimes I get obsessed
and I look at my sleep and I'm like, oh,
I only got you know, five hours last night, And
then it's almost like a placebo. I'm like, am I
tired or am I just feeling tired because I've seen
that I didn't have a lot of sleep last night?
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, exactly, And so that's part of the issue with
the wearables. Now, there is a phenomenon called social jet lag,
which you describe where people sleep less during the working
week catch up on weekends. We don't like that so
much because that is associated If you follow that pattern
over time, you see that people accumulate sleepingness over time,
(07:05):
they become more and more tired, so they never totally
catch up. They're always a little bit underdone with that
social jet lag type of sleep or yo yo sleepings
and other terminology for that. So for someone who's a
fitness instructor fitness training like yourself, got to be up
doing those early morning things, you'd be trying to put
(07:27):
a nap in when you don't have clients in the
middle of the day.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, absolutely, rather.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Than necessarily just on the weekends.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
I love enough. Honestly, I think naps are so underrated.
It's just unfortunate that we work in a paradigm now
where it's like nine to five. You don't really have
capacity to have a nap in the day for a
lot of the population.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
And that's where they're working from home. Since the pandemic
has really been great for a lot of people I
see with sleep issues, as you can have your little
nap just quietly without someone looking over your shoulder. Gain,
how dare you take a lunch break that you're entitled
to you should be working. Has allowed a little bit
(08:06):
more of that flexible thinking around sleep and flexibility around sleep.
There's a bit we'll talk about some of the health
interventions for sleep are a little bit Western industrialized as well,
trying to create an idealized sleep and so, for example,
one of the instructions if someone's having trouble with sleep
(08:27):
is under those circumstances, don't nap during the day and
don't go to bed unless you're sleeping. Yep. Now, napping
is great, and there's really only that very isolated time
we don't want people to nap, which is when they've
got quite significant insomnium. We're trying to bully it into line.
But any other circumstances, napping is good. But again, the
(08:47):
public health message that comes out is there's picked up
that thing don't nap during the day, and that's on
realistical of five things to fix your sleep. And so
everyone's about, oh, I can't nap, I shouldn't ap during
the day. I'm just like no, because that develops this
rigidity of thinking about sleep. Sleep has to occur this place,
this time, these circumstances with these accessories, and that's an
(09:11):
unhealthy way of thinking about sleep, but it is a
very Western industrial way of thinking about sleep, because I've
got whole industries designed to set use sleep products that
fit on that list. If I need these accessories, or
I need my mattress to be so on, my sheets
and my curtains and my eye shades and my noise machine,
all these different things to be able to sleep. You know,
(09:34):
it's harnessing that fear of sleep that we have and
trying to build this sort of rigidity around sleep. But
if you talk to a healthy sleeper, good sleeper, how
do they behave around sleep? Totally fluid whatever, Engage them
in a discussion about sleep, not interested. It's just a
nothing for them. And it's really interesting if I go
(09:57):
out to socially meet people haven't met before and they say, oh,
what do you do You know, I'm a sleep specialist.
People have sleep difficulties, go oh, that's really interesting and
are up for talking about sleep. Yeah. People who are
good sleepers go okay, slink off to the bar to
get another drink, and they just don't want to talk
to me at all.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Kind Of like when you think about health and fitness
and nutrition, and you see that people who kind of
have a bit of an issue with their eating, perhaps
they'll do all the complicated things like they'll buy the
sea moss grass and they'll be really rigid and they'll
try and do you know, eating windows and things like that.
But the people who are have a really stable, healthy
relationship with food, they know how to listen to their
body and they just have that baseline. They're not counting calories,
(10:40):
they're not counting this, they're just going with it. And
I've never ever thought about sleep in that same way.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
That's exactly the analogy. So based on that analogy, there's
a term that's been coined which is orthosomnia. So authorexia
is sort of overthinking sort of eating and eating patterns.
So authosomnia is overthinking sleep and particularly with relationship to wearables.
And so yes, there's absolutely a phase when someone's not sleeping. Well,
(11:09):
we want to be proactive and put some steps in
place to get things back on track, but then pretty
quickly we want to back away and just trust that
our body will sort it out, assuming we have good
physical and mental health.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Because it's that stress thing, you know, when you have
like an early flight or something, and you get into
bed and you're like, right, if I go to sleep
right this second, I'm going to get five hours sleep,
and then you stress about it and so then it's
an hour later and you're still no closer to sleep.
But it's like the more relaxed and calm you are,
then more naturally and easier things like that just come
to you.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
And it's really interesting. There's some nice work been done
recently from the University of Melbourne that I've been involved
with looking at the relationship between perfectionism and risk of
sleep disturbance. And one of the subscales or particular types
of perfectionism that associates most with sleep disturbance is pride
in one's own performance, high sense of personal responsibility. So
(12:05):
the same people that are you know, well brought up,
take their job seriously, often early to things very diligent. Yeah,
they're the ones that before that thing the next day
can barely sleep because there's that anticipation.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
I guess it's that braggy thing like if you are
wearing a wearable. It's the same thing if you smash
out a really high intensity workout and you've got really
good fitness and scores on your thing. You're going to
want to put it on your social media and brag, hey,
I just got into, you know, the red zone in
my heart rate monitor, saying for sleep, you want to show, hey,
my sleep score is in the nineties, which I mean
mine has never been in the nineties, but that's something
(12:39):
that you'd want to brag about. And I assume that
if you were someone with a really type a personality
and like you're saying, a perfectionist, the more pressure you
put on yourself, probably further away you actually are from
getting that perfect score.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah, and the really you know, it's a really nice
point because we also sometimes get in our minds that
sleep has to be perfect. You're almost trying to biohack
life by squeezing them how to sleep that we can.
And this is where sleep is really different to exercise
and nutrition, equally important, but really different. Often in those domains,
(13:14):
the harder you go, the more you do, the one
percents you get these incremental gains. In sleep, the harder
you go, the worse it gets. And so it absolutely,
you know, it does people's heads. And I see lots
of both amateur and professional athletes who are nailing the
nutrition and nailing the physical activity, and they try to
nail their sleep and it goes very badly because there
(13:37):
they're taking exactly that same high detail nailing everything approach
to sleep. Wow.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
So it's just like sleep when you're tired, don't sleep
when you're not tired. It sounds so simple when you
say it like that. And just before we get off
the wearables, I just want to ask you this, in
terms of sleep quality versus sleep quantity. I think people
who wear wearables will know that you do. When you
wake up, you get that score of how long you
were in RAM, how long you were in deep sleep,
(14:06):
how long you were in light sleep. Is there like
something we should be aiming for every night in those
particular zones because I was shocked at how long you're
in light sleep for right.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
So a couple of things about that. So one is
the wearables are actually becoming pretty good in terms of
their accuracy about total sleep length. If you then average
it across a few days, there's a bit of you know,
not entirely accurate on any given night, but you start
to average that across multiple days, they're pretty good at
(14:40):
picking sleep lengths. Like I've told you with my own
personal data. They're much less good about picking sub stages
of sleep because there's lots of assumptions that are made
some of it. They use surrogates like movement for you know,
if you're moving, that's called light sleep. If you're still,
it's called deep sleep. And some of us are just
a bit more twitchy jumpy than others, and that'll translate
(15:03):
to more light sleep unless sleep. So he's got to
take those sleep stages with a grain of salt. Don't
hang too much on those type. Yeah, so very rough
and ready, as a rule of thumb, would be deep
sleep twenty twenty five percent of the night. Rem sleep
about twenty percent of the night. But that's very rough
(15:24):
and ready. And again think of it as your body's
going to take the sleep it needs, get out the way.
One night you might be down, the other night you
might be up. It'll sort it out. Now. The other
thing to say about that is a lot of the
wearables call that one that's alarmingly high about sixty percent
of the night. They call it light sleep. It's not
(15:45):
light sleep, it's just part of normal sleep.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
It's just sleep.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Yeah, Yeah, it's just sleep. Right, So Apple are taking
a really nice approach to this. So they've got a
colleague of minor sleep specialists from Stanford in the US.
Now it works for Apple and has been working on
a lot of their sleep algorithms, and based on his advice,
they've changed that and they call that core sleep. So
all your Apple devices, or if you feed your wearable
(16:11):
in via the health app into your Apple Apse, it'll
be deep core and rim just because you change that
word and instead of it being light. Oh my god,
I've got sixty percent of my night is light sleep
to be well sixty percent core. Yeah, okay, that fits
twenty percent. Rem ya come, I'm good to go.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Wow, Igain, it's that like psychological placebo of just reading
the word light sleep. Yeah, that is insane. Okay, So
we've covered the circadian rhythm thing. You don't have to
worry too much about going to sleep at the same
time every night and waking up at the same time
every night. But can you train yourself to function on
less sleep? But I suppose this one is very specifically
(16:55):
related to I suppose people who are getting up early
to go and train new parents and things like that.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
So think of it as you know what determines how
long we sleep. So part of its genetic, So there's
definitely genes associated with short to sleep and light sleeping.
Part of it's just personality. But think of it for
one of a better terms. Where we sit on a
nervous energy axis. Now that'll change across life. So we
can certainly decide, okay, I'm going to push harder on
(17:23):
the adrenaline drive, and I'm going to go harder now
because sleep's are biological phenomenon. You'll sleep less because your
body is in a higher adrenaline state, and you'll find yourself,
if you're previously had been sleeping eight hours, you'll find
yourself sleeping six hours because there's just more of that
(17:43):
adrenaline drive so it naturally wakes you. Wear Now that'll
be okay until it isn't. And so people will be
going for a couple of years going this is all good.
I'm totally smashing it and I only need to sleep
for six hours. And what they don't realize is the
wheels are slowly starting to fall off. Maybe other domains
of life. Their relationships aren't too great, they're a little
(18:05):
it's snappy, their carryo vascular health, they're increasing their risk
of hypertension or long term cardiovascular disease. They're heading into
the anxiety, they're flirting with burnout, you know, all of
these sort of things. So they haven't trained themselves to
sleep less by choice. They've behaviorally switched where their sympathetic
nervous system activity, or their stress response or their quartersol response,
(18:28):
or their fight flight response, or their allosteric load, whatever
term you want to use to describe it. They've elected
to just turn the heat up on that and they'll
sleep shorter. And like I said, it's good until it isn't.
So I see people like that sometimes in my office
in their thirties sleep starting to break up, and that's
(18:48):
usually okay, I can manage that. But I see them
in their forties and they've fully burnt out. They were successful,
but they've either flamed out professionally or in their personal
life and they're now trying to pick up the pieces
and sort of exhausted and fatigued. So, yeah, you can't
really cheat. You can cheat sleep in the short term
(19:10):
or the short medium term, but you can't cheat sleep
in the in the long term.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
So it's more something to look at as a season
like this might just be a lower sleep season.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Yeah, and that's a nice way of thinking of it.
So thinking of it in a you know, and I've
told you I measure my habitual sort of sleep length
just to keep an eye on things. And you know,
like all of us, there's times in life where I
go to you, the next month is going to be
pretty tough, but I just recognize, you know what, and
I'm going to sleep a bit shorter probably in the
next month on average, and I'm either going to build
in more western recovery or at the end of that time,
(19:42):
schedule some time out to just you know, let that
nervous energy drop and then go back to my long
term average rather than of powering on. Now I've got
this extra energy, I'm going to keep powering on. And
that's where too some of the sort of health blogs
I see around sleep, which is the you know you
two could be a five am person, you know, four
(20:05):
am person, see that you were doing things while you're
you while your competitors were sleeping, So come on rising
grind type of philosophy. Again, that's good until it isn't
in essence, and there's really good data showing that people
who are underslept with that sort of high nervous energy.
When they're in leadership positions, make worse decisions, and people
(20:28):
working under them perceive them as a poorer manager and
are less likely to sort of work productively under their supervision. Wow,
and so you get these people who are going, I'm
king of the world. I am absolutely killing it. I'm
only sleeping four hours a night. I'm smashing it. But
what they don't see is all around them, there's this
debris and stuff that's not working all around them.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Because you're so right. For a point of time there,
I feel like sleep is actually becoming something that people
are priding themselves on a lot more now, But for
a big period of time there, it was almost like
a brag, like, Hey, I'm only sleeping four hours a
night because I'm so busy doing xyz. It's like, that's
who are you trying to impress.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
But it still exists, particularly in a couple of areas.
So it definitely exists in politicians politics because we constantly
hear about you know, we see the vision of the
politicians out walking first thing in the morning and stuff.
You know, finance entrepreneurs, tech startups, you know, these sort
of areas that still very much have that sleep when
(21:32):
you did Little Culture.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
I don't know, I'm so anti that now now I
want to talk about this. This is mostly just to
cut through the absolute slur of bullshit that exists now
on social media. And there are so many influencers now
pushing these really complicated like ten step nighttime routines that
they're saying, help them get, you know, a beautiful, deep
(21:55):
eight hours of sleep. Can you talk us through just
a basic for the average person who doesn't have to
spend hundreds of dollars on you know, necessary accessories and
things like that. What does an ideal nighttime routine look like?
Speaker 2 (22:09):
All right? So the high level summary is we've got
to be respectful for sleep, So that is, you've got
to allow an appropriate opportunity for sleep. But then we've
got to be disinterested in sleep. So our job is
to provide an appropriate opportunity and just to arrive at
that opportunity in the right sort of frame of mind
(22:30):
both physically and mentally for sleep, and then who cares
what happens in that space. I've done my bit. Yes,
So with that sort of overarching principle, you don't want
the pre sleep routine to be too complex, too detailed,
have too many steps, have oh you know, all this stuff,
(22:53):
and that's far too often people end up saying me
and my professional role as a sleep specialist. Their families go, yeah,
you've got this whole sleep performance that starts two or
three hours before before bed. It's exhausting. You're going to
do all this thing and we're time poor. Who's got
two and a half to three hours every night to
be you just trying to sleep? Now, exactly what to
(23:16):
do before you go to bed. It's a bit different
from person to person, but if you tend to be
a little bit more busy, mind, it's just down tools down,
you know, it's giving yourself permission to clock off. I
am switching. It's almost like you have to take your
Superman suit off, I'm into the phone booth, come out
in your pajamas, and just behaviorally, by that action, you're
(23:37):
giving yourself permission to Okay. It's my persona of being
the supermom, the person who does absolutely everything that's closed
down for today and then on analogy, going to do
some sort of activity that just helps me pull bring
down that nervous energy. And if that's reading something in bed,
(23:58):
if it's just watching some something that's just mind numbing,
that just allows you to make that transition. Great, some
sort of distractor to make that transition. And then when
you feel like that nervous energy has dropped and your
eyelids are starting to get heavy, turn the lights out.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
I love that because something that I started doing a
couple of years ago was as soon as I'm done
eating for the night, I'll brush my teeth, because there's
nothing worse than dozing off and then opening your eyes
and realizing, oh my god, now I've got to go
and wash my face and brush my teeth, and then
you're awake again by the time you get back into bed.
So it's like, be really ready to sleep by the
(24:36):
time you start to get dozy and tired.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Yeah, And so it doesn't need to be any more
complicated than that. And this is the tricky part too.
So a lot of the sleep hygiene instructions will say,
you know, don't watch anything, have no light, no no
anything else. Now through in a busy world where we've
all got busy minds, when else in the day do
we have empty space with nothing to distract us? Almost
(25:02):
never and so we don't tolerate h your space. Well,
so if you force yourself, you're not tired. Dur in
this dark room, you can't do anything. That's when the
thoughts build and build and build, and there's that thinking
and anxiety. You guarantee you're not going to sleep. So
that's when you pop the light on, do something else,
distract yourself until again you're feeling that just settled and
(25:24):
the heavy eyelids and then lights out again.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
I love that it sounds so simple when you explain
it like that.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah, and I just want to come back. You ask
me a little while back about that sort of regular
go to bed and get up time. So do you just
want to come back to the get up time? Getting
up at a similar time each day is actually really
helpful in sinking our body clock to get a sense
of right. This is the anchor time. So at about
the same time each day, our body is getting a
(25:52):
signal that we're upright, we're moving, we're getting food, we're
getting light. Then that regularizes a whole range of different
bodily functions and translates to improved health across many domains.
Just sleep. So that sort of engagement with the outside world,
which light's one of the keys, but movement and meals
(26:13):
or other parts of that is just really important for
maintaining good health.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Ah. And then would the idea behind that be when
your body kind of knows that, So say, let's use
my wake up time, for example four point thirty. I
naturally am quite tired by nine o'clock. Is that because
my body just kind of has found a nice rhythm
where it's like, we know that you're waking up at
four thirty am? This is how much kind of average sleep?
(26:38):
And I'd say I probably average about six and a
half hours a night, and that does feel okay for me.
I don't force sleep. I go to bed when I'm tired,
and I sit there with a book and when my
eyes start to shut, I shut the book and it's
light out.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah. Absolutely, And it's a nice example of it just
keys in those body rhythms and the things we don't
think about, we haven't really talked about or isn't talked
about a lot in the nutrition since, but is becoming
The research showing it's important is timing of meals, because again,
if you think of it as the body clock drives sleep,
which is what people sort of talk about, but also
(27:13):
drives how the body handles energy. So if your body knows, okay, well,
I get up at four point thirty and by five am,
I'm expecting a meal load of about this mix of
protein and carbohydrate, I'll be ramping up enzymes and gastric
motility to deal with that. But if the meal doesn't come,
and it comes four hours later and it's a massive
(27:33):
carbohydrate load without the protein, the gas tro intestional track
woudn't expecting that. It's not geared up for that, and
it's going to process it differently. You're going to store
more of the carbohydrates. It's going to have to push
your insulin up to deal with it. So, you know,
we think about that timing in terms of sleep, but
it's actually important across a range of domains as well.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah, that's fascinating. I really like that. I think that's
a really good baseline for people to stop worrying about,
you know, the set time and the wake up time
and just really focus on that wake up time. So
I want to run through a couple of more rapid
fire things to kind of finish us off, and I
want you to let me know whether these are harmful
or help Number one harmful or helpful. The bedtime social
(28:15):
media doomscroll.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
So guilty, and depends on how you conceptualize it or
what it means to you, if it's just a mindless
scrolling rather than oh, that's interesting and I'm off over here,
and that's interesting and I'm off over here. If it
really is a mindless scrolling, it can help fill that
space while your nervous energy is just dropping, and then
you're ready to go to sleep.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Okay, So it's not like you know how sometimes people
say that the blue light emitting from the phone can
get in the way of your cicading rhythm, and it's
all very scientific, so it can.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
So light's a thing, but there's a massive variability between individuals.
So there's about a fiftyfold variation between individuals. Again, it's
not in clinical practice just yet that we test that,
but there are some tests being validated for that, and
so it will be for some people important, probably more
important for people with depression or mental health disorders and
(29:07):
people on antidepressants, but probably less critical for others. And
it's this balance, right, So if not the phone, what
else A long form book? Well, Unfortunately, not many people
read long form books anymore. A kindle maybe it doesn't
have a back light. You know you can read, but
it's again long form reading rather than that really sort
(29:28):
of short form. So if you you know, at a
personal level, if you need the distractor, then the doomscrolling,
and if that works as a distractor for you, great,
I'd much prefer that than lying in the dark getting
stressed about not sleeping.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Well, I'm sure a lot of people will be fist
pumping right now hearing that answer. Okay, next handful or helpful.
A glass of wine at dinner.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Again, bit of both. Alcohol has a negative effect on sleep.
It has this early on positive effect, but as it's
metabolized has some alerting effects, so it can wake you
up during the night. Maybe it just turns out that
someone's having a glass, so less than ten grams of
alcohol at dinner, it's probably pretty neutral for sleep. The
negative bit for me is if someone feels like for
(30:09):
me to switch off, I need that alcohol. That's where
I see it become a problem where someone doesn't have
their own self soothing skills to be able to bring
down that nervous energy, and the only way they can
do it is with the alcohol, because then one glass
comes two becomes three, and that's.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Problematic, harmful and helpful an afternoon coffee or dit.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Cooke generally okay. Again, massive into individual variability with caffeine.
So some people can drink caffeine late, doesn't have any
impact other people exquisitely sensitive to caffeine. Most people know
where they sit, and so if you know you're sensitive,
yeah you don't have it late. But it's interesting. I'll
see people who are paying no attention to stress management.
(30:53):
They are stressed out to the max and not sleeping,
but they've cut out coffee after midday. I'm just like,
that ain't the thing. I hate to tell you, but
you know that's not the thing that's impacting on sleep.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Because people love to blame anybody else but themselves, myself included.
I'm totally there too. Next handful or helpful exercising at nighttime.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
So although we've said that's bad, there's really a couple
of nice papers recently have shown any exercise is better
than no exercise. Morning's preferable to evening, but only preferable,
not a must. Not exercise at night. And so again
work out for your own individual circumstances. If the only
time you can fit it in is at night, sure
(31:38):
go for it. But just don't have that expectation that
you've been in the gym, it's pumping, it's light, you've
really gone hard, that you're going to come in the door,
throw your pajamas on, turn the light out, and go
bang straight to sleep. You know you've been in a
high energy environment that's going to take a little while
to come down from.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Handful or helpful magnesium or melatonin supplements before bad.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
So each of them may be helpful. So some people
can find magnesium supplements helpful, some people find all atone
and helpful. The bit for me is, if you're finding
you need to take a supplement to get yourself to sleep,
you should be taking a step back and going, Okay,
what's not working, Here's what's underpinning this. Why can't I
(32:22):
get to sleep?
Speaker 1 (32:23):
I guess it's that same reliance you were talking about
earlier with the wine at dinner. The second you become
really reliant on something, maybe look at why I be
doing to ask you this one helpful or harmful mouth
taping This is rife on TikTok at the moment.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, and then it's bled from TikTok into some of
the traditional media as well. Actually had a couple of
requests for media interviews about it, which I've turned down
because there's no evidence whatsoever. And you know, I don't
want to get into her, he said, she said, you
know type of thing. No, And when something's going to
(32:59):
fix all ills, you know that it's really probably doesn't work, right,
because not just mouth taping that's going to reduce snoring,
it's mouth taping that's going to make you sleep better
and be a bit of human you know, a whole
range of different different things.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Yeah, it's like mouth taping. Will you'll wake up feeling
more rusted, You'll have more ram sleep, You'll have this,
You'll have that, Like what is it a genie a
bottle or is it a piece of sticky tape you're
putting over your lips?
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Yeah, yeah, that exactly. And it's really interesting. So, you know,
we talked a bit about cultural beliefs around sleep. You know,
there's been a very long held belief in western medical
writing and society writing that people who mouth breathe are dirty,
slovenly poor, and that's just associated with pre Victorian sort
(33:46):
of times when often the poor had a lot more
upper respiratory tract infections and nasal obstruction. And so there
is a strong association in Western cultures between nose breathing
and being virtuous and a better overall citizen in essence stuff.
So I see the mouth taping a bit of an
(34:06):
extension of you know, it's virtue signaling.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Oh my god, I mean I am allowed. My whole
family is loud and proud mouth open sleepers, and I
mean it's not pretty, but I don't feel I've take
my mouth shut before, and I didn't feel any different
when I woke up. And then the last one helpful
a harmful again, pretty rife on social media at the moment.
LED and red light therapy.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, so rather than the red light being a positive thing,
think of the red light replacing potentially the blue light.
So if we know that the wavelengths of light then
can have a negative effect on sleep, with the colder
colors bluey, sort of whitey, greeny, those harsh cold colors
(34:50):
associated with the morning and often interior lighting. So the
LED lighting we now have in our homes is that
cold color temperature, and so it's probably a negative for sleep,
whereas the red light is less of that cold color temperature,
so it's going to be a bit more neutral for sleep.
(35:10):
So rather than helping sleep, think of it as the
red light takes away the need for the light that
might be negative for sleep.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
That's so good. I actually missed one too, And then
this is really important. Snoozing an alarm.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
Again goes both ways generally. Okay, we haven't talked about it,
but a lot of the way we behave around sleep
is aspirational. So people will behave around sleep the way
they wish they slept, even if it never materializes. For me,
that's one of the funny things about sleep because almost
no other domain in life, you keep doing the same thing,
wishing the outcome would be different. But sleep is right now.
(35:47):
Some people, particularly more late night types, just find it
hard to get going in the morning, so it can't
do the hit the alarm right now. I'm ready to go.
You know, we all get sold that we're going to
be waking as soon as the alarm goes. Leap out
of bed. There'll be butterflies and daffodils and the sun
shining and things. It only you took more of a
(36:09):
particular vitamin or supplement, you too could be like this.
It's a About three percent of the population have a
body clock length just under twenty four hours that allows
that waking as soon as the alarm goes. The other
ninety percent of the population have a slightly longer body clock.
In fact, the median across the humans is about twenty
four hours seven eight minutes, So if you think about
(36:32):
it that way, two hits of the snooze button, you're
about average for a human. If it takes you that
seventeen minutes after your alarm first goes before you feel like, Okay,
now my body thinks it's time to get up. My
cycle is ready to start. But it don't be too
hard on yourself. You've got to hit the snooze button twice.
The times it's negative is if you're sort of kidding
(36:54):
yourself and you're having this constant internal negotiation of the
I wish it were but it's not going to be different,
and you're just stuck in a cycle of hitting the
snooze button multiple times. Yeah, there may be something that
was wrong with your sleep, or stop kidding yourself and
just change your alarm time to when you actually want
to get up.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Yes, that is the point I was getting at. And
I say that because when I first met my partner,
he used to set like fourteen alarms in the morning,
and I was like, just let yourself sleep until your
last alarm and then get up, and then you're not
having broken up sleep. You can just sleep through till
that last alarm when you know you're going to get up.
But anyway, that is a story for a different day.
So then there's just two little takeaways that I want
to chat to you about before we wind up. And
(37:32):
this is very relatable to the people I think who
are listening to this podcast. If you've had a terrible
night's sleep, is it better for you to skip the
gym and opt for a to have a little bit
more sleep or just push through.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
I think as long as you haven't had consecutive bad nights,
I'd just get up go to the gym, but I'd
be thinking about your day as to thinking, Okay, that's
my uptime is going to the gym, wherein Miday is
going to be some downtime, which doesn't necessarily mean it's
going to be more sleep the next night. It could
be some feed up time when you get home. It
(38:08):
could be a nap during the day if you're working
from home, for example, Because if you there's something that
happens really really often, people start having trouble with sleep.
They start giving up other activities to get more sleep,
or in an attempt to get more sleep, and that
starts feeding this negative cycle of not feeling well, poorer health,
(38:31):
sleep becoming more and more important because look at all
these things I've given up because of my sleep, and
then sleep just becomes you know, there's more and more
pressure and more and more anxiety around sleep, and I get.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
I guess like that living thing, like having a perfect diet,
means nothing if you've sacrificed your entire life and you've
got no enjoyment anymore because you just are so focused
on maintaining a perfectly clean diet. If your whole life
is devoted to getting a perfect eight hours of sleep
every single night, it's probably going to come at a
detriment to other areas of your life. And then, lastly,
(39:04):
do you do you have any tips for trying to
fall asleep when your brain just won't shut off?
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah, don't. That's it? So you know, literally if your
brain won't shut off and it's not ready for sleeping,
don't try and sleep, because one you won't sleep, and
too it'll just add to that frustration. You won't get
calmer laying in bed trying to sleep. In fact, you'll
(39:33):
get more distressed. And so pop the light on, sit up, read.
If your partner won't tolerate that, go to another room,
do something else until you're feeling a bit more settled.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
That is the most rational piece of advice I've ever
heard from a doctor in my entire life. That is
so brilliant. And then, just to finish off, what is
one piece of advice you would give to everybody listening
to this podcast about sleep.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
And maintain flexible and rational thinking about sleep rather than
that sort of aspirational, emotional, more social norming sort of
way of thinking about sing I.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
Love that so much, Dr David Cunnington, thank you so
much for chatting. Can you let people know a little
bit more about where they can find you here?
Speaker 2 (40:17):
So I practice both seeing people face to face on
the Sunshine Coast and I see people from around Australia
via telehealth, and that's via my website. Dr David Cunnington
dot com today you and.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
I'll pop all of that information in this week's show notes.
Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
I learned so so much today, No worries, pleasure.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Thank you so much for listening. Guys, I really hope
you enjoyed the episode, and don't forget to help a
sister out by following the podcast on Apple or on
Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Rate it,
write me a review, and if you want more finish,
we do have a private Facebook group. There is going
to be exclusive Q and A is happening with my
guests in that group. That's going to be events going
(40:59):
live first, so much fun stuff happening. Just look up
fit ish in brackets on Facebook and you can be
part of the fetish online community
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