Most Replayed Moment: Better Sleep Doesn't Always Mean Longer Sleep! Fix These Habits Today

What if getting better sleep has less to do with sleeping longer, and more to do with your daily habits? Dr. Kristen Holmes is a performance scientist whose work focuses on sleep, recovery, circadian rhythms and the everyday behaviours that influence how well our bodies and minds perform. In this moment, Dr. Kristen Holmes opens up about her childhood and the catalyst to her passion for health and human potential. She reveals the overlooked habits that can quietly disrupt recovery and answers common questions about sleep disruption. Is one glass of wine really going to impact my sleep? What about caffeine? If I don't have time for 9 hours of sleep every night, can my sleep still be restorative? Order Dr Kristen Holmes’ new book, Aligned, here: https://linkly.link/2qdKk Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/ckeUet3eG5b Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/p1hrOE8eG5b Watch the Episodes On YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  When I talk about being able to change your behaviour and break a habit, it is nothing in the context of someone who is ensnared by an addiction of sorts. It is nothing, it's a completely different conversation.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:20Steven Bartlett?

  What is it like growing up with a mother who you observe at a very young age? You were how old?

• 0:28Speaker 01

  I'm in my whole life.

• 0:29Steven Bartlett?

  Your whole life?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, like she.

• 0:32Steven Bartlett?

  As a child, when you, when you see a parent, someone you love,

• 0:38Steven Bartlett?

  that is in, that is sort of gripped by addiction, what is that like?

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think at a, at a fundamental level,

• 0:49Speaker 01

  you just feel deprioritised, I think, generally, you know, like you, you know, I think you feel,

• 0:58Speaker 01

  you know, you're, you're unsupervised, number one. There isn't a lot of supervision, you know, so you end up like really having to defend for yourself. My dad worked a lot, you know, he was definitely workaholic, such a good man, so much integrity and, but I think that was his form of escape, but it kind of weeds, you know, you get to figure out how to eat, you gotta, you know, you gotta figure out how to do a lot of the basic stuff on your own. So you develop a lot of independence, I think, but it, it's hard to,

• 1:36Speaker 01

  you know, form emotional attachments, I think, as an adult, unless you really work through that, you know, because you're, you're afraid that you're not going to be taken care of.

• 1:47Steven Bartlett?

  What did you come to understand about your mother's addiction and what she was struggling with, if anything at all?

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think what was so sad about that time period is, is, you know, I think it was well understood. You know, I think

• 2:06Speaker 01

  a lot of those behaviours, I think, to a degree are normalised and I don't know that there, the connection between depression, you know, she was, it's no question, she, she had massive seasonal affect disorder, which is one of the reasons why I'm so interested in, you know, kind of everything related to light and just the opportunity there for, for, for health, but, you know, she had major depressive disorder and, you know, it was not diagnosed properly. I don't even remember, I have no idea if she ever even went to the doctor to, you know, to try to get treated.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  So, you know, I, I think the, the biggest thing that I learned is that we can actually make choices. And I, and I know that there are, you know, when you look at regions of the brain, we understand that people are predisposed, but I think there's a lot of things that we can, we can actually control to reduce our vulnerability to, to some of these diseases.

• 3:07Steven Bartlett?

  How was that experience defined and shaped you when you look back and connect dots?

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I just, I always, you know, I was very competitive, high level athlete representing the US and so there's definitely trying to understand my own body and my psychology so I could perform my potential, but there's no question that like this whole, everything that like underpins the work that I do is, is trying to, to understand, you know, how we can improve our own situation so we can,

• 3:43Speaker 01

  you know, self-actualise and, and live our potential. And so that was, I always, you know, felt

• 3:54Speaker 01

  so bad, you know, for my mom.

• 3:59Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 4:02Speaker 01

  You know, that she wasn't able to become the version

• 4:07Speaker 01

  of herself. Like wasn't able to realise her potential. And she had so much.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  I can't believe you did this to me.

• 4:24Steven Bartlett?

  Would you like a tissue?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 4:32Steven Bartlett?

  You're very, you're a very special person and it all makes, makes sense, it makes sense why you've got such an incredible, incredible drive and mission to you. I didn't, I didn't know any of those, what you've just said, but.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  I've never talked about that publicly, so I'm just, yeah.

• 4:47Steven Bartlett?

  What a, what a wonderful way to have channeled such an unimaginable pain to then sort of fix, you know, hundreds of thousands of people's other lives and help them get closer towards their own potential.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  And I, I never want to like project my values onto other folks, but, but I think that's always been like at the core of like why I do what I do is, and the reason why I coached for so long is, I just love seeing people like realise their potential or understand their potential, knowing that we're always of course a work in progress, but I just, like I want like everyone to be able to wake up and feel, you know, be energetic and be able to like really, really live the things that you, you care about, you know, and just in understanding, I think the path to that,

• 5:48Speaker 01

  you know, requires some work, you know, in terms of making sure that you're attending to some of these non-negotiables that we're talking about. And I think sometimes it takes folks time to connect those dots and there's a lot of wonderful learning that comes with that. But I think if I can kind of help accelerate some of that wisdom and keep people from experiencing, I think some of the pain that I felt, you know, it's worth it to me.

• 6:14Steven Bartlett?

  It's the most incredible, incredible thing that you've committed your life to because me and you are both aware that there's going to be a tonne of people who are either on a path towards such an addiction or are currently enthralled by such an addiction. And the work that you were doing, the message you're spreading is going to prevent and lift some of those people out of that situation, which has, has a wonderful karmic effect on the world. And I think if there's anything that we can convert our pain into, it is, it is exactly that. I want to talk about alcohol. I've recently quit drinking alcohol. I think it was about three to four months ago now. It was so interesting. I had a conversation with some of my best friends. I said this on a podcast a couple of, couple of months ago.

• 6:57Steven Bartlett?

  And one of my friends was an alcoholic, so he managed to quit alcohol and he's writing a book about it. And then as I look across the group of my other friends, none of them are alcoholics, but they're all sort of casual drinkers. And we were sat there together around this table having dinner and he was telling us about this book he's writing about quitting alcohol. And I was sat there thinking,

• 7:19Steven Bartlett?

  that book that he's writing doesn't necessarily resonate with me because I've never had, I've never felt like I've had an addiction or really, to be honest, any problem with it. I am such, I was such a casual drinker, I would have maybe one glass of wine a week if that. There's probably months I've gone without any alcohol at all, so I couldn't think of a reason to quit. So really I was saying to him, is there another book that someone else could write for me? That just takes those people that are, those casual drinkers that are right on the fence and just gives us a reason to nudge over the other side. And because I have this podcast, I thought, you know, I'll just try and quit and see if, see what the implications are for my life.

• 7:59Steven Bartlett?

  Alcohol, health, circadian rhythms.

• 8:04Steven Bartlett?

  What are you, what's your perspective on all of this?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Well, I, I like to think about it. I love this, the principle of non-neutrality, right?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  And, and this is

• 8:17Speaker 01

  how I like to think about behaviours and, and how I've kind of always thought about it is if you've got a series of behaviours, we talked a lot about, about sleep and, and, you know, physiological things and you've got the psychological things and they're either going to support your, your values, kind of who you want to be in this world, or they're not. And, and I think that's the lens with which I look at alcohol, you know, in what way is this supporting my values? Of growth and impact and, and presence and compassion and

• 8:49Speaker 01

  tolerance, you know, the, the things that are like core to who I want to be in this world. And, and I think when you look at it through that lens, the choices become really clear to me. If you're honest with yourself and you have some degree of self-awareness, understand what you care about, I think choices become a lot clearer, like there's way, way more clarity about how to live your life in the micro, which is really what we're talking about. There's just many choices throughout the day. Does it, does it, does it support who you want to be in the world or does it not? And, and there's very little grey actually, and the grey are excuses in my view. And we can rationalise and make stuff up,

• 9:33Speaker 01

  you know, all day long, right, to, to make ourselves feel better, but when you can step back from all of that and look at it really, you know, taking yourself kind of out of the equation and look at it from a very objective standpoint, you know, I think a choice like alcohol becomes very clear.

• 9:54Steven Bartlett?

  But it helps me to socialise, Kristin.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, if, if you need alcohol to bond or to, you know, form a connection,

• 10:07Speaker 01

  there's probably something else going on that is unaddressed and from my perspective.

• 10:13Steven Bartlett?

  Is there such a thing as?

• 10:17Steven Bartlett?

  Such a small dose of alcohol that it doesn't matter, in your opinion?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on who you are.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  And I think there's a lot of individual variability there as well. I know risperatrol is something that's talked about a lot and there's,

• 10:39Speaker 01

  you know, suppose in wine and grapes, there's risperatrol and that's been linked to enhanced health and wellbeing, but I think you'd have to drink like 10 bottles or something to get the amount of risperatrol to actually make a, to make a dense. I don't think that's the argument. So, yeah, I don't know that really any amount of alcohol is gonna be, is gonna be helpful. And we know from the literature that just one to two drinks per week will, can have, you know, negative implications on, on health. So it's actually, I don't know that any, like even a moderate amount of alcohol is good for you.

• 11:18Steven Bartlett?

  What's the implications for our circadian rhythms that we've been talking about?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's mainly because it impacts sleep. It's going to impact when you go to bed and when you wake up. So I think that's the biggest, the biggest impact. And I think, again, when we go back to melatonin, you know, it's when you're disrupting that, that sleep onset offset, that's going to obviously have all the downstream negative effects that we, we've already spoken about. So I suppose if we're drinking, we're staying out later, so we're exposing ourselves to light. So, yeah, there's lots of, we're gonna be eating later. There's other behaviours that accompany drinking that kind of, you know, pile on the, the negative effects.

• 12:03Steven Bartlett?

  I was reading some research from the Sleep Foundation and it says that a 2007 study with 29 young adults found that moderate doses of alcohol up to one hour before bedtime reduced melatonin production by nearly 20%. That's the study on alcohol and melatonin in young adults. A 2018 study of 4,908 Finnish participants found that sleep quality was, was reduced by 9.3% after one glass of wine and by 24% after two glasses of wine and by almost 40%, 39.2% after three or more glasses of wine or an equivalent amount of alcohol.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:43Steven Bartlett?

  Which is really, really staggering that your sleep quality will, could dip 40% after three glasses of wine.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's, I mean, we see, it is, we just finished this analysis, actually, looking at alcohol and markers of recovery, so heart rate variability and heart rate. And literally with every drink, it is just, there's a linear relationship in the decline, like and it is significant. So, I mean, yeah, it's, we're talking, even one drink will produce clinically significant reductions in heart rate and heart rate variability.

• 13:16Steven Bartlett?

  This was maybe the most compelling motivator for me to quit alcohol was when I got my Whoop the first time, and then I think it was someone's birthday or something, so we went out and I had a glass of wine or something. I woke, I woke up the next day, looked at my heart rate variability, which is the, a measure of how well I'm gonna be able to deal with stress and load and all those things the next day, how well my body's gonna be able to deal with life. And it was flashing red, which is like a warning. And it says on there, when I clicked on the flashing red thing, it was like, did you have a really stressful day? Are you sick? Or did you drink alcohol last night? And I felt so targeted.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  I know.

• 13:53Steven Bartlett?

  I was like, how does this thing know that I had one glass of wine last night with my friends? Why is something flashing red with, inside of me? People keep diaries on Whoop, don't they? They keep like the Whoop Journal, I think it's called.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  They do, yeah.

• 14:05Steven Bartlett?

  So.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  It's a goldmine of information, actually.

• 14:07Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:08Steven Bartlett?

  What have you learnt from that in terms of alcohol? I imagine that's where a lot of the conclusions derive from.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we see a 6% reduction in next day recovery after alcohol on average. So this is, you know, one drink to 10 drinks, you know, it's just basically looking at the, the average is 6%.

• 14:26Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so the average of, okay.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Reduction in recovery.

• 14:28Steven Bartlett?

  So if someone's have, if someone was binge drinking, they could have a 30 or 40% reduction?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it kind of, and we, we might, and that specific data point might, we might have controlled for, you know, the, the 30 drinks or, you know, it's probably somewhere in the range of five drinks, you know, per night. And, and the average recovery reduction is 6%, 6%.

• 14:51Steven Bartlett?

  And that's relying on self-reporting, right? So I wonder if there's biases in what.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  There might, there might be, yeah.

• 14:56Steven Bartlett?

  People that had 10 drinks think they had four.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  But I think, yeah, exactly. I don't really remember how many drinks I, I had, so, yeah, or any drinks I had.

• 15:04Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting, super interesting. The other thing we obviously drink is coffee.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:09Steven Bartlett?

  Caffeine, surely there's a correlation between circadian disruption and caffeine?

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's definitely one of the circadian, it definitely can disrupt circadian rhythms if we're having caffeine, you know, within eight to 12 hours, I would say, of when we intend to sleep. It's gonna impact our sleep onset, of course. And even if we're, you know, tired enough where we have, you know, we're sleep deprived, we might, might fall asleep, but it will invariably end up disrupting or fragmenting our sleep. So we're not kind of getting into that deeper stage of sleep, we're not achieving the sleep quality that, that is gonna, you know, allow us to wake up feeling restored and refreshed. So timing of caffeine is really important.

• 15:51Steven Bartlett?

  All of this conversation makes me have a huge amount of empathy for shift workers.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 15:56Steven Bartlett?

  And when I say shift workers, I don't, I don't mean people working, you know, warehouses. I mean, doctors, nurses, firefighters, firefighters, the police, truck drivers, people that are baking.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, anyone who's up between the hours of, you know, for more than two hours between the hours of 10pm and 4am is considered a shift worker. So it's, yes, there's a lot of, a lot of individuals walking around who are shift workers, but people who are, you know, literally up during the biological night, you know, it's, it's a huge sacrifice. We know those folks on average are going to die 15 years sooner. It is, you know, shift work is considered a carcinogen by the World Health Organization. It's, you know, shift work is, those folks make an enormous sacrifice.

• 16:46Steven Bartlett?

  They're gonna die 15 years sooner?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  On average.

• 16:50Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, that's terrifying.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  I know.

• 16:55Steven Bartlett?

  Is anybody, is anybody trying to sell for that?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of the work that I do is, is looking at shift work, you know, trying to understand, you know, what other levers, you know, can we deploy to offset some of the, the, the impact of, of being awake during the, the biological night? And, you know, time of shift eating is a lever, you know, really thinking about when we're eating protein, you know, when we're viewing light, you know, what, what did the, what's the cadence of, of, you know, on, off? So we minimize the disruption to circadian rhythms. I mean, the fact is, like, the roster size at these hospitals are just simply not big

• 17:38Speaker 01

  enough to be able to, I think, deploy schedules that mitigate some of the, the risk associated with this disrupted circadian rhythm. But it is frightening and, you know, there is a lot of work to try to understand how we can mitigate some of the, the negative effects. But it's, it's, it's a tough problem to solve.

• 18:01Steven Bartlett?

  It's not just, I guess it's not just that those individuals will die, you know, on average 15 years earlier, but their quality of life, I imagine, won't be as good because if they're not sleeping consistently.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Depression, suicide, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's higher, you know, for, for folks in, in these professions, you know, who are having to operate counter to the naturally dark cycle.

• 18:26Steven Bartlett?

  So let's talk about that then, mental health, depression, suicidality. What's the correlation there between?

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a lot of interesting research. I mean, you know, one is just, you know, we talk about just the layperson, so getting outside of shift work, we come back to shift work. You know, if you look at this, most folks experience social jet lag, right? Which is basically characterized as, you know, a big, a difference between our weekday sleep schedule and our weekend's sleep schedule, right? So pretty much anyone, you know, between 20 and, 20 to 30 probably is, you know, kind of falls into this bucket of, of having social jet lag. But one of the things that we, one, a research study we saw looking at specifically a social

• 19:12Speaker 01

  jet lag in college students, they saw that for every hour of variability between weekday and weekend schedules, they saw a 17% increase in non-suicidal ideation. So these folks aren't committing suicide, but they're fantasizing about committing suicide and that increases 17%. And this was more pronounced in individuals who were already vulnerable. So kind of coming back to circadian disruption being present in 100% of mental health issues, we can see where shift workers would be extremely vulnerable, right, to mental health issues,

• 19:53Speaker 01

  given that their variability, and we look at the Whoop data, it's basically random in terms of looking at their sleep-wake time. It's so variable that it's like, we can't even see a pattern, it's random. Which is frightening.

• 20:07Steven Bartlett?

  Why is that frightening?

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Because, you know, the more variability you have, like, the more psychological and physiological, you know, negative consequences there will be.

• 20:21Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a correlation here between how we deal with stressful events in our lives as well? Because I'm assuming there must be.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. Managing stress throughout the day and the degree, or even during the night, can definitely increase your tolerance for stress. So, you know, deploying breathwork, for example, as, you know, on-demand self-regulation tool to pay down in-the-moment stress can be, and to activate the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system, can be really powerful. So, you know, I kind of call these mini-moments of deactivation. So, doing that proactively for folks who are in these high-stakes, high-stress environments is an amazing strategy. Because lots of those folks, again, if you think about just baseline, when you are engaging

• 21:12Speaker 01

  in shift work and you're awake during the night, your system is humming at a, kind of a stress level that is above what would be normal, right? Like, your system is having to work so much harder to maintain homeostasis because you're doing exactly the opposite of what your body wants to do. So, all of the kind of biological preferences are being bypassed, right, when you're up during the biological night. So, to pay down some of that stress, you know, these mini-moments of deactivation are absolutely critical for that population. So, that means just literally taking 30 seconds where you're doing the physiological sigh, for example, which we know has emerged as being the most

• 21:54Speaker 01

  efficacious breathwork technique in the moment to reduce not only in-the-moment anxiety and stress, but actually, you know, your perception of anxiety and stress, like, in the future.

• 22:05Steven Bartlett?

  What is that sighing?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  The physiological sigh. It's basically a double inhale followed by an extended exhale. Perfect. It's exactly right. So, basically, like, when you're crying, you know, you kind of do that double inhale followed by an extended exhale. But that, like, reduces stress in the moment in a really powerful way. If you do that, you know, five, 10 times, you end up activating the parasympathetic branch. So, you're reducing your heart rate. And, you know, kind of doing that throughout the day is a great way to mitigate negative stress accumulation.

• 22:45Steven Bartlett?

  There's a pretty unfortunate paradox, a pretty tragic paradox, in the fact that our shift workers, some of them like doctors especially, are the people that we need to be most focused.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Firing on all cylinders.

• 22:56Steven Bartlett?

  Exactly.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:57Steven Bartlett?

  But those are the people that are, from what I've learnt today about the circadian rhythm, most likely to suffer with things like focus and sleep and all of those things that are imperative to showing up well.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there's a relationship, you know, we know that with every 45 minutes of sleep deprivation accrued on the WHOOP platform, we see a 5% to 10% next-day decrease in mental control.

• 23:20Steven Bartlett?

  Mental control.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Executive function. So, we measure this with an MBACK and a STROOP. So, these kind of performance tests to measure executive function. And we see for every 45 minutes of sleep debt accrued, we see up to 10% decrease or decline in next-day executive function.

• 23:40Steven Bartlett?

  And what does executive function mean for people that are?

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Our ability to make decisions.

• 23:45Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. You used the word there, sleep debt. What is sleep debt?

• 23:49Speaker 01

  So, that's basically what you need versus what you actually got. And that's highly individual, right? And that's one of the kind of beautiful things on the WHOOP platform is that we learn your body, we learn how efficient a sleeper you are, we learn what your optimal sleep-wake time should be, and we basically tell you how much time you need to spend in bed. So, a lot of the work that my team has done specifically at WHOOP is to try to understand, you know, what is this relationship of sleep debt to other performance metrics that we care about, right, that tell us a story about someone's ability to kind of function in their environment. And one of the studies that we did was looking specifically

• 24:31Speaker 01

  at business executives, so CEO types. And we basically looked at, this one was a six-month study, looking at two different cohorts, both, you know, I think, equal distribution between men and women. And what we saw was for every 45 minutes of sleep debt accrued in these business leaders, we saw a 5% to 10% decrease in next-day executive function. So, the leader's ability to make decisions in the presence of sleep debt, you know, gets worse the more sleep debt you accrue. We did a follow-up study, and this one was wild. So, we basically looked at, it was roughly, it was about 70 business executive

• 25:16Speaker 01

  CEO types, and we looked at all of their objective markers, sleep debt being one of them, and we looked at the psychological safety of their direct reports during team meetings.

• 25:29Steven Bartlett?

  And define psychological safety.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Your, how, how safe you feel to show up in your environment as your true, most authentic self. And what we saw is, again, for every 45 minutes of sleep debt the leader had, there was a significant decrease in psychological safety of the direct reports. So, they felt less safe in their environment to show up as their true self when their leader had 45 minutes of sleep debt accrued. And some of these folks were carrying a couple hours of sleep debt. So, and there was a linear relationship between the amount of psychological safety and the amount of sleep that the leader had. So, and what was so interesting, and I think compelling about this research, is that the leader had no

• 26:15Speaker 01

  idea, they couldn't perceive their own cognitive, physical, and emotional declines, right? But that's what's so insidious about sleep deprivation, is that you can't really tell when you're operating at a lower level. You just adapt to that lower level of functioning. But everyone around you can feel it, right? Just with how you hold your face, how you emote, the kind of eye contact you make, how tolerant you are. And you think about how sleep deprivation, you know, it, and I think this is really what this research surfaces, it's just, it's not just, sleep deprivation just doesn't impact me, right?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  It's going to impact every single person I come in contact with. And from a business perspective, just from a sheer, like, numbers perspective, Google did a study called Aristotle, and they looked at, they looked at a bunch of different metrics related to team performance. And what emerged in that study is being most predictive of team performance was the degree to which the team had psychological safety, felt safe in their environment to kind of show up as their, as their true self. And they brought in, to the tune of $4.5 million more than teams who are lacking psychological safety. So, this is like a really important concept that I don't think a lot of people talk about. But when we go back to this concept

• 27:42Speaker 01

  of the principle of non-neutrality, right, and what are behaviours that promote, enable you to live your values and kind of show up as your best self as consistently as possible, minimizing sleep debt is right there at the top of the list.

• 27:58Steven Bartlett?

  It's fascinating. And as it relates to sort of accident and injury, is there correlation between sort of injury of oneself and accidents you commit on others?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:08Steven Bartlett?

  Correlation between that and sleep debt?

• 28:09Speaker 01

  It's very well established that the more sleep debt you're carrying, you know, the more accident-prone you are, you know, the more risk you're going to take. And, yeah, we see this in the medical field, we see this, you know, in, you know, just car accidents. And, yeah, the list goes on and on.

• 28:31Steven Bartlett?

  Car accidents. A 2016 study by the Foundation for Traffic Safety found that drivers who reported that they usually sleep four to five hours per day had 5.4 times the crash rate of drivers who usually sleep for seven hours or more a day, which is horrifying.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. It's, yeah, I mean, when we think about, you know, sleep, it's, we're not getting better at it as a society. And I think we're kind of coming at this conversation from the wrong lens. You know, we're telling folks just to spend more time in bed without addressing the behaviours that are actually, enable us to fall asleep and stay asleep. You know, that's, to me, that's, that's the conversation. And it's not about spending more time in bed. And, yeah, that might be what needs to happen, but it's about, you're not going to get there. For folks who, who are not thinking about all the circadian things that we're talking about, and, you know, some of the environmental stuff, the

• 29:34Speaker 01

  cold, dark, the quiet, yes, that matters. But, but at a foundational level, I think folks are not engaging in the behaviours that are going to enable us to pay down the sleep deprivation.

• 29:45Steven Bartlett?

  The other study that I found that was super interesting was that a 2021 study found that less than seven hours of sleep is associated with increased risk of injury. And if this is sustained for at least 14 days, the risk of muscle and bone injury is 1.7 times, almost two times higher.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:03Steven Bartlett?

  So, as someone that goes to the gym a lot and likes to work out, if I have a high sleep debt, then I'm much more likely to get an injury, almost two times more likely to get an injury if that's sustained.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 30:14Steven Bartlett?

  Which is crazy.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. Yeah. And, you know, I'm so grateful that I think folks are finally realising that sleep is the greatest natural performance enhancer that we have on this planet. Yeah. And that is certainly super evident in all the research that we're doing.

• 30:35Steven Bartlett?

  What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.