 Hello, good afternoon. My name is Philip Preston and I would like to welcome you to today's webinar Express. Positive Sleep in a Post Lockdown World, hosted by CIM Greater London. Before we get started, I'd just like to go over a few things so you know how the event will work and how to participate. The presentation will last for approximately 30 minutes, followed by a short 5 to 10 minute Q&A session. We'll be able to post any questions you have by typing into the Ask a Question chat box in the Q&A panel, which you'll see on the right hand side of your screen. You can send in your questions at any time during the presentation and we'll attempt to answer as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. If you want to share your thoughts on social media, we are using the hashtag CIM events. The webinar is being recorded and we will share a link to the recording with you over the next few days. And finally, you'll also be emailed a short feedback survey after the event, which we'd love you to complete. It'll only take a few minutes, also very responsive and anonymous, so please do let us know your thoughts. OK, I'd now like to hand over to Giles Watkins, who is our guest speaker today. Philip, thanks so much and delighted to be here with you all today. If you like me, have torn yourself away from the cricket for this event, I trust I can make it worthwhile for you. In the next 30 minutes, I promise that I will deliver five things for you. I'll share my own sleep story and how it led me then to doing this kind of work and writing a book called Positive Sleep to help others with sleep challenges, both organizational and individual. I will give you some feedback on the questionnaire that many of you kindly filled in as to how your sleep is being affected in this unprecedented time of COVID-19. I will also share some sleep science. Now it's a newish field over the last 100 years and it's a massive field in terms of active research. So I'll really skim the service, my aim being to give you an idea of why sleep matters. I will then touch upon organizational sleep issues and opportunities and why you, if you are a leader in organization or simply someone who has significant influence with a peer group. Why your actions and your approach to sleep can really make a difference with the individuals around you and as a result add value to your organization. And finally, I'll give you some tips. When I talk about sleep and, you know, as an author on the subject, if I'm in the back of a cab or I'm stood at a bus stop and I strike up a conversation with people and they find out what I do, they always ask for some tips. So I will give you a menu of five tips that you can choose from. Now, why me? Why would you want to listen to me on the subject of sleep? Well, I had a relatively normal childhood from a sleep point of view. The only exceptional thing I would say is my parents were favored naps. They really thought that having a nap in the afternoon, the weekend particularly or sometimes in the week if my mum was home, for example, was a great idea and we were encouraged to do so. So the idea that having a nap as a supplement or maybe a substitute for some sleep at night was something I was introduced to at a very young age and I have found that very powerful and very useful. You will find writers that disagree with me, but from a personal experience and looking at a lot of the data that's out there, naps can be very, very useful. In fact, if I wrote another book to follow positive sleep, I think it would be called The Art of Napping because I think naps are underrated as a way of helping many of us recover from short sleep. However, like many people who've experienced a sleep problem, there was a clear trigger event. In 2002, I was engaged to be married and I was also facing the possibility of a larger organization and potential redundancy if I didn't get a new job in that organization. Now I'd faced that with my then employer, a large multinational oil company many times in the past. However, I hadn't been engaged at the time, so the pressures of that I found were tremendous. And as a result, the next day after that announcement, I didn't sleep so well and it just changed my sleep from then on. For the next 12 years, I experienced sleep problems and you see those pictures there, you know, over those 12 year periods, life happened. You know, my mum died, I moved several times to different countries for increasingly senior roles. I became a dad, all the challenges that that presents for sleep. My relationship began to experience significant problems. All of these are very, very normal, nothing abnormal there for many people listening on the call today. It's just they all came to get, you know, over a period of years and the upshot was that by about 2014, I was regularly getting up at 3am. I thought the day started at 3am, basically. And at the time I was studying from masters in coaching and consulting for change in the Singapore at the same time of being a CEO of a business of 600 people in Sri Lanka. Now that's quite a lot to do at the same time. And my solution to that was to shorten the night to go to bed about half past nine, get up at 3am and work on things. Unsurprisingly, I was shattered. So shattered that when going out for dinner one occasion in 2014, I was with a group of friends at the best restaurant in Colombo, in my opinion, felt difficult. I couldn't really cope with how tired I was when the starter arrived. I went for a walk, sat down and I was found half an hour later asleep in the doorway of a house about 50 yards from. The restaurant. I literally couldn't cope with the lack of sleep that I was getting. Fortunately, I was studying a masters. So the upside of the masters was definitely that I could I could focus my thesis to qualify for the qualification on any subject. And I chose my sleep problem. And at the same time, the professor that was supervising my work said to me, did I know. That there was an emerging link between lack of sleep and Alzheimer's. Well, that stopped me in my tracks. I had no idea. And as soon as I learned that I vowed that yes, I would do my thesis on sleep. And I would do it on my own sleep issues, not some abstract third party discussion about white sleep matters, but why it matters and why I needed to fix it and what I was going to do to fix it. And over the next couple of years, I went through that process and I guess that's why I'm here today to share those findings with you. Now, Philip, can you support me in sharing a definition of sleep? Because I think it's more important that everyone is absolutely clear what we're talking about here. It may sound a strange thing to say this would be a definition of. But the Harvard Medical School has put together a very good four point definition. So could you just read it for me? Okay. A phase of the day when activity drops right down compared to the balance of the 24 hours associated with a habitual posture. In the case of humans, this is typically lying down with closed eyes, which may seem very obvious, but apparently giraffe sleep standing up and of course that sleep upside down and all sorts of things. So it is a human sleep position. When we are asleep, we are less reactive to external stimuli. I'm sure any parent of a teenager will be well aware of that. And finally, unlike hibernation and being in a coma, we can reverse the state of sleep relatively easily. So that's important to understand it is in most cases a reversible process. Thanks so much, Philip. So why do we sleep? Well, there is no absolute consensus on this. I'm going to share the nearest that we have at the moment to a consensus on sleep. If you'd asked me why we dream, I would just scratch my head and give you a few mumbled answers because that is really the, I think where a lot of people are putting their time and focus in the sleep neuroscience world at the moment because why we dream is really poorly understood. But why we sleep? It seems to be that it's there to support us in the four main areas. One to do with our bodies and three, which is to do with our brains in the area of the body. It's really around what as you'd expect really the recharging and the enabling of our body to renew and recharge. So every time we get decent sleep, that really helps. The three areas that support an improvement in our neuroscientific status, if you like, is that sleep can also restore the energy used by the brain. That's the little figure on the left hand side plugging into the wall for a bit of recharging and restoration. It enables the brain to reorder and store important information acquired during the day. And the way I like to think of that is it's a bit like an upgrade of an operating system. It's a bit like having a new release every day and the app store says to you are. This is Tuesday, you've got the new release this morning and that integrates the learnings from Monday. So that's represented by the sort of thing that I remember when I started. Well, which is a filing cabinet where you actually put new information in and new new faxes or you send or text telexies or emails or whatever it happens to be to make sure that is that is stored and then integrated into your data system. And then of course operating system the following day. And finally, sufficient sleep is also needed for the development of new brain cells that are important for long term memory. Now I always thought that we were born with feeling like a finite number of brain cells and they just it was just a one way one way system and you just lost them more and more as you got older. But apparently not you can actually you can actually renew them so sleep helps to renew them now speaking as someone who went through a month. In 2010 during a huge personal and professional crisis where I slept three hours a night for for 28 days. I can tell you that if you get down to that minimum amount of sleep, you can physically lug your body around during the day, but you can't think straight at all. It's like it's worse than being drunk. It's worse than being slightly over the alcohol limit that that kind of deprivation on sleep because what's happening is you're only really getting some element of physical rest and renewal at three hours a night. Fortunately, no one tick the three hours a night box or anything like that on the survey. And what determines when we sleep. Another thing to bear in mind just for those of you that are larks know that they're larks or night owls and wonder why that is that is genetically determined. Apparently, there is considerable body of research to show that you are born a lark or a night owl. So better to understand that and do your best to play to that strength, whichever it may be, then try and fight it. And that's why there is such a strong case, which I know is challenging to implement. Maybe in COVID post COVID times people think about it a bit more logically, but there's actually a very good case for adolescents being allowed to vary their start times and actually go in a bit later. Because the. The way they are functioned or the Cacadian clock that I'm going to talk about a second actually evolves as you're an adolescent such that they actually should not start learning till a bit later in the morning. Now. There are two elements as I said to what makes a sleep. Or what determines when we sleep sleep, I should say one is the Cacadian clock. Often talk people talk about Cacadian rhythms as well or your body clock basically. That is the system that if you are locked in a cave for six weeks and people have done this with no natural light, you would see that you typically needed eight nine hours sleep a day you would sleep for about that. And as soon as sunlight gets introduced, it tends to move nearer towards eight. And I'm talking eight hours sleep seven and a half to eight hours sleep in a 24 hour period. So that could include naps as well. Many of you will know that in Shakespeare's time, for example, people seem to go to bed when the sun went down and then get up in the middle of the night and Shakespeare was supposed to bring quite a lot of his plays in part in the middle of the night by candlelight. Then you go back to bed again. So it's it's about the amount of sleep you get in a 24 hour period, not in one stretch, which often is a comfort to people. And melatonin is released as the green light for when we sleep within this system, this sort of Cacadian body clock system. And adenosine is the other chemical that is being released by the brain to create pressure to sleep. The Cacadian clock on the adenosine chemical release system operate in the same direction to mean by say 10 11 o'clock or midnight, you're ready to bed in ready to sleep. Yet they are independent systems. They do not link in any way so far as we can gather. And yet they almost miraculously might say work towards putting us back to sleep. And adenosine is developed and produced every second of the day that you are awake. So it constantly constantly builds. Now, the importance of thinking about adenosine is linked to the importance of thinking about caffeine. Every time you have a caffeine drink or a shot of caffeine, maybe in green tea, which can claim to quite a lot of caffeine. There's no chocolate, iron brew, other energy drinks are available. And I'm sure most of them have got caffeine in them. All these fluids and many foods including ice cream in some cases contain caffeine and that effectively blanks out adenosine. So every time you have some caffeine, that's what you're doing. So those are some basics around sleep science, why we sleep, what the functions are. And why we sleep when we sleep, as it were, what is driving the rhythm of the process. Philip, could you just share with us this quote here? Because this is from an excellent paper that I'm happy to, I've got a copy I can distribute if you like afterwards, on organizational impact of sleep. Because most people talk about the individuals, but actually the cumulative effect in organizations is massive. So can you just read this out for us as sort of setting the scene around the business case for sleep? Yes, sure. Sleep management at one level is obviously an individual issue, part of a larger energy management challenge that also includes other forms of mental relaxation, as well as nutrition and physical activity. But an increasingly hyper-connected world in which many companies now expect their employees to be on call and to answer emails 24-7, this is also an important organization of topic that requires specific and urgent attention. I don't think anyone that I've read has put it better than that. And as we move to a world where many more people will be working part or all of their time at home, the ability to manage yourself and the ability to manage the way you interact with the organization becomes different if you're in office with the sort of cultural pressures of capitalism and so forth, of being in an office. And I meet very different groups of people around that and how it's affecting their sleep. Some people say, oh, it's fantastic. I get an extra half an hour in bed. I've reclaimed the one and a half hours of commuting I used to do. I sleep an extra 30 minutes. I read an extra 30 minutes and I work an extra 30 minutes or something like that. And they've managed to find a way, a rhythm of doing that. But for most of us, we're still actually searching for the new rhythm. I think the new way of working, especially if we're now blending it between going to the office and working from home. So it's a really good paper, which has been written to help us understand what's going on with sleep in organizations and why it matters and what the real cost is. So a few things I like to highlight around the business case for sleep, some of which I make no apology I have taken from that particular, that particular paper which I'm happy to share with you because I think it's a definitive paper on the subject. The first is results orientation. The clear fact is that if you are not sleeping correctly, your attention and your concentration will suffer. We all know that. So the ability to stay focused as well as see the bigger picture is impaired. When I worked for Shell, it was called helicopter vision. In other words, you could rise up and look at things, the big picture, the strategic overview, and then you could absolutely dive down for a forensic level examination of what was going on and what needed to be done. And so many people in leadership positions, whether it be state or private sector in the last six months have had to do that. They've had to look at things in a big picture level in terms of the trends in their industry and what's happening with the market for them. At the same time, they've often then had to look at very, very individual and small aspects of the business and often even had to take over that. So for example, sales directors may have disappeared and the CEO finds himself as the sales director as well. So he's then still got to be a CEO is still going to have strategic view, but it has got to dive down and look at that forensic level of data. Now, if you've been getting an average of seven and a half hours of sleep a night, you will have a much better reaction times in terms of results orientation and your ability to do what I've just said in terms of the change in lens, if you like, or the change in focus will be great. But if scientists have shown that if you're awake for 20 hours and studies of some large consultancies show that often people are sending emails as much as 19 plus hours apart. If you're awake for 20 hours, your individual performance equals that of someone who is legally drunk in the results orientation space along with attention and concentration. Now, not many of us would go to work drunk anymore. Might have done it in the eighties wouldn't do it now, but people are sleeping less than four hours a night and then going to work. So they are effectively going to work drunk in terms of their performance in this area. The next quality that is so clearly affected and supported by a good night's sleep is solving problems effectively. And like many things and one of the reasons I call this talk and I called the book positive sleep is that, you know. Unlike a lot of articles you'll read around sleep, which will just spend their time telling you all the bad stuff by trying to focus on the positives and the positives are. If you start getting proper sleep or you take a nap after lunch before 3pm for say half an hour before you've got to do some serious problem solving work, your performance will shoot up. So a bit like, you know, if you give up smoking, they say 80% of the benefits are felt in the first month. The good thing about sleep is if you take up sleep, as it were, and if you start sleeping five, six, seven, sort of seven or eight hours rather than five or six, you will immediately see the benefits. And most of us know that if you go to work the next day and we've had a great night's sleep, the difference is palpable. And of course REM sleep, which we haven't got time to go into too much detail, but it's one of the different types of sleep has great creative thinking properties which allows for the integration of information to develop creative solutions. So there are multiple reasons for supporting sleep for problem solving. When it comes to seeking different perspectives, I know only too well that if you get, I had a particular director when I went to Sri Lanka. I think a very bright man who I didn't fully appreciate at the time because every time we had a management meeting, he'd come in at 5 to 5 on the Wednesday afternoon and say, I just thought of a couple of things that would really give us a new perspective on that particular problem. And of course what I did was I eloquently or elegantly, I should say, showed him the door as soon as possible because I was completely shattered. I was sleeping regularly less than six hours a night and I couldn't cope with people coming with a different perspective at that time in the afternoon. But the mental capacities of learning, the willingness to learn, memory and decision making all require good quality and quantity of sleep to enable you to seek different perspectives and avoid tunnel vision and bias. So in order to make great critical decisions, you should avoid being tired and that's why the phrase sleep on it is such a good one in this regard. And the last one that I want to highlight when it comes to positive qualities to support a good night's sleep is the supporting of others. Your emotional reactions and your ability to develop trusted relationships will both benefit from a good night's sleep. And they are key to a person's ability to support the team that they lead and those they work with. This is because if you want to help other people and support other people, you must have some understanding of them. And as we've heard many times in other presentations, no doubt in other trainings we've done and other things we've read, often this comprehension is best achieved through nonverbal cues. In other words, it's not the what they say, but the how they say it via facial expressions or tone of voice. And research suggests that when sleep deprived, we are more likely to misread these cues to overreact and to be more negative. And other studies show that when we trust that we actually trust less when we're sleep deprived, and even that our teams are less engaged. So you have often thousands and tens of thousands of pounds being spent by corporates on employee engagement initiatives, where actually if they could simply get their leadish to sleep better, they wouldn't need to do that. They would find their employee engagement scores shot up. Really, that's not often explored and absolutely true. I'm also somebody very keen on sport, not just cricket, but many other forms of sport. I'm not quite as good at them as I'm keen on them, but always keen on looking at lessons from sport, because I often think that some of the lessons from sport are then applied to the business world shortly after the ones that are learned in the heat of the sporting battle, as it were. And there are five here that really support the importance of sleep in sport and that carry over into work. The first one is improved reaction time. You'll see the person dodging the arrows on the top left. Research shows that properly rested people getting an average of seven and a half hours of sleep a day can have two to three times the reaction times, sorry, two to three times the reaction speeds of those who are sleep deprived. In other words, if you're getting proper sleep, you just pick things up that much quicker. Okay. Fewer mental errors goes up hand in hand in that vital for sportsman. And at the very least helpful for many of us at work and personally in multiple ways. The third area is the reduction of injury rate and I'm actually going to read this out to you because this comes from the clinical journal of sports medicine. Very interesting study that multiple studies point to this, including one particular that I'm referring to from the University of California, showing the injury rates in young athletes climb as soon as they sleep less than six hours a night. So a number of you, I think, you know, the survey results we had in suggested that I think it was a third of people that aren't the survey of the 50 people sleep less than six hours a night. Okay. So from a sporting point of view, if you were a sports person, your chances of injury would go up dramatically. In other research, it was found that the amount of sleep a high school athlete had was the strongest predictor of injuries more accurate than any number of hours of practice or any other parameter. Remarkable. Okay. So you, as a group, have said to me a third of you are sleeping less than six hours, nearly half are sleeping six to seven and a half hours, which is a bit borderline. But from those sleeping seven and a half hours plus, which is really what we would recommend, that's only one in five of the group. And that's pretty typical, I think, when I look at other studies. Except we often get more extreme people sleeping less than four and a half and others sleeping more than nine, which often is a sign of severe obesity or depression or something like that. Out of interest, just to share the other results with you, about 47% of people said on the server that was sleeping the same as they had before COVID struck. Of the balance, 37% they were sleeping less than only 15% said they were sleeping more. And the University of Bristol, who I liaise with periodically with the neuroscience department to see what their research is on such things, they're seeing very, very similar trends and their sample sizes are sort of three to four thousand. I'm looking at a much smaller sample side here. So about of those are sleeping differently, two thirds say they're sleeping less. And 60% of you said that it was all personal and professional stress. It wasn't to do with doing more exercise to help you asleep, but stress personally and professionally was driving this sleep reduction. Fourth area to think about is the longer playing career and, you know, our ability to work longer may be required in the way the pension systems are changing. People are having children later, etc, etc. That isn't meant to be a illustration to the bottom left there of Roger Federer. However, he is legendary for sleeping around about nine hours a night. In fact, when he comes to Wimbledon, he hires two houses, one for him and his team and one for his wife and the four children that they have to make sure that he's not disturbed during his Wimbledon fortnight and I, it's obviously served him well. And there's parallel research across a much larger group than just one in majorly baseball to show that there's a linear correlation between plenty of sleep and performance and the length of a career. And finally, accuracy and faster sprint times. Well, that's physical, but just again, I guess that links to response times. It's no coincidence. I think the cheetah, which is probably one of the fastest animals on the planet, sleeps up to 18 hours a day, but can go from 0 to 60 in three seconds. So there are multiple benefits from a physical sporting way that can help you. Now, here are a few things. If I had half a day with you guys, which I often do workshops with organizations like that, we do give people opportunity to make posters and think about how to communicate the importance of sleep within reorganization. But these are some of the main tenants that always come out in those sessions that if you want to prompt better sleep in your organization, you need to be the change you want to see if you're the leader. You need to set meetings at sensible times. This will increasingly become a talking point as we go back to work in September post COVID where people are still working from home, others in the office. What's sensible time to help people travel at the right time to accommodate the fact that people at home schooling or some kids are going into school in a different pattern to the way they were before, for example. And setting email boundaries is important there. People say, how can you do that? Well, ask the German car companies, the big names that you all know, and many of you will drive their products. They switch their servers off typically around about eight, nine o'clock in the evening and switch them back on again at seven in the morning. Because the white collar unions in Germany, which are very powerful, said to the German manufacturers, if you're expecting our leaders and our management cadre to answer emails 24 seven at the weekend, then you need to pay them for it. And they said, we can't afford to do that. They said, well, let's switch off the server set. So there are ways of setting these boundaries, not just through personal leadership, but also through system fixes. Creative ways of increasing energy and saving time as an oil trader in the nineties, we always had stand up meetings for 15 minutes, a great way of getting things done quickly, feeling quite energized by it. As soon as you get people to sit down, meetings last a lot longer. Something that also when I worked in Paris, they were very good at doing lots of stand up meetings for an expresso at nine o'clock in the morning, 10 or 15 minutes, your shot of caffeine for the day and off you go. Encouraging walking meetings, sometimes called the wisdom walk in the world of coaching. The opportunity again, which I think people have started to explore. Now we have to do things or certainly in the days of significant social distancing. There is there is still that that legislation in place. You know, there's amazing that you can do to have a conversation with a colleague at the weather is good. Walking around and actually having that conversation and stopping to make notes either on a little notepad or on your phone. Multiple studies show that office windows and natural light help productivity and then help people sleep better at night up to 45 minutes. In some cases, and a major consultancy in London I have previously worked for moved office a year ago and put all the analysts and the junior staffs deaths next to the window. And their previous office or the junior staff are in the middle and the directors had offices next to the window, which of course is a waste because most of the directors were never in. They were out seeing clients or traveling world or both. So that natural light and the ability to just have meetings in a more creative environment really helps. And all this will move towards a culture we hope of working smarter than longer and deliver real rewards. And I'm sure you and your colleagues and friends that you meet and family are all talking about how working from home has affected them. As I said, there's people that love it. Those that are the primary childcare and or supporter of homeschooling tend to find extremely difficult and really benefit from coming into the office at least some of the time. And many people that just don't have the space or miss the social interaction. I think some of the younger members of the workforce find it quite tough as well. So there's a real difference in how people experience working from home and many of the debates around that will be linked to some of the points I've just said. Lastly, I want to give you as I promised a menu of personal tips for positive sleep. The first one is around routine. And I think if I talk to businesses as I do in my consulting role and my coaching role, the thing they're most struggling with at the moment is the loss of a rhythm, a loss of a routine. You know, if you're if you're a bookshop, for example, work with a bookshop, they're saying we always knew when books were coming out. You'd have your launches in September, the launches in November, Easter catalogue, when the fairs were, you knew six months in advance what what the possibility of the books publishing schedule was. You could place the appropriate orders, etc, etc. That's gone out of the window. There's all sorts of changes in that world and there's no real new pattern or rhythm. It's the same with sleep. If you can get. If you say to people, I'm not available. I mean, even people in your in your nearest nearest. Don't bother me between 11pm and 7am please. Unless it's an urgency. That gives you the best chance of using that time for sleep or reading or something else or just relaxing. But blocking some time. If you can block eight hours a day for nothing apart from rest. That's a great start. Managing your caffeine intake is number two. I talked about caffeine, why it's such a killer when it comes to sleep. I was a seven expressos a day guy 15 or five years ago. Part of my addressing my sleep issue was to quit completely. I had a week of the worst headaches you can imagine real to cold turkey in my case. And the upshot was that. I. I then came out and thought, well, you know, I've just been through that. I don't want to go through it again. As a result, I'm going to have another month without coffee and another month, another month, and that was five and a half years well just over five years ago. However, a lot of people I know that give up caffeine just do it in a small doses. So if they're drinking five cups a day, they just cut down to four or something like that. If you remember, green tea has caffeine in it. Lots of people think it's a herbal tea. I can tell you whenever I have a green tea by mistake, having now given up black tea and coffee and so forth. I'm wide for that two days. So it definitely has caffeine in it. That's using that strategically the two optimum maps that I recommend. One is the 26 minute nap. Now that sounds a bit absurd, but NASA did a lot of research on this and came up with 26 minutes. Basically, if you lie down for 30 minutes, it takes you a couple of minutes to nod off and you should sleep about 26 minutes. But when NASA researched it, they came up with that. Others, and I don't really recommend this, but I know that students often use the express route for this. They have an express so they'll lie down and they know that within 30 minutes the express will kick in so they'll wake up again. A nap after lunch, if you can have it, if you're working from home, block your diary for half an hour. Fantastic, especially if you've got some serious problem solving to do in the afternoon. The other nap that I recommend is the 90 minute nap. That's the full sleep cycle. We haven't had time to go into sleep cycles in detail, but that is your full sleep cycle of all the different types of sleep that you can get within one cycle. And then we sleep a multiple of these naps. If you don't set an alarm, you will tend to sleep four and a half, six hours, seven and a half hours, those sorts of numbers because you're sleeping full sleep cycles if you don't get woken up. And the 90 minute nap, especially at the weekend on a Saturday or a Sunday, just before you go out on a Saturday night or when you're slightly recovering on a Sunday, for example, absolutely fantastic. So I really, as I said, I'm an advocate of naps. Giving us off time to wind down and wind up in the book, Positive Sleep, I call that book ending your night. So allowing an hour to an hour and a half to just put things away, watch a bit of TV, preferably on a TV rather than on an iPad or an iPhone, putting away your tablets and other electronic devices and just hiding up at the end of the day, winding down, doing a bit of meditation, reading, talking to your loved ones, etc. The opposite obviously is also winding up in the morning. People often have heard about the importance of switching off these devices. Very few people seem to have cottoned onto the fact that you really need to make sure that you wind up slowly in the morning because if you're taking in more data and you're starting to go straight on to your phone or your laptop at 6.30 in the morning without having working up properly, you haven't properly digested what's happening the previous night. So that new operating system hasn't finally been relaunched, if you like. It's a bit like an old car starting. We need half an hour, an hour, ideally even an hour and a half before we start working. So if you can walk the dog, have a cup of tea, do all those other things you need to do before you start work, you will get the benefit. And how many times do we then get in the shower a few minutes after we wake up and suddenly get an idea? Well, of course, that's a function of what's been happening overnight in the brain. And you don't always get those ideas if you go straight to work rather than actually have that time to stimulate and allow that to emerge. And the last thing I recommend, which is very personal to me, is reading in bed or reading in another room close to the bedroom because reading is a wonderful way to relax and unwind. I always recommend people read paper rather than off a screen, although I know that kindles have no great main problem when it comes to emitting blue lights, etc. And try and read for fun. Read Cricut Box in my case or something to do with my leisure activities as an interest or read a novel. But don't read the Harvard Business Review just before you go to bed because that's only stimulating you and actually making sure that you're staying on rather than switching off. Okay, well, thank you very much. I've really enjoyed delivering this session to you and I hope you've found something of value in it. I think for me the thing I'd like you most to think about is off that menu I've given you what is one thing you could do individually plus reflecting on some of the things in the organizational piece that would make a difference to you now and make a difference to those that you care about those that you work with or those that you live with. If you want to discuss anything further, please contact me via my INSEAD email or LinkedIn. I'm a regular user, I'm a rare user of Instagram but that may increase in the future. And of course we will be giving out a discount code for the book Positive Sleep after this session. So if you are interested in reading that it's a handy pocket size guide that many people have found quite useful. You'll see the reviews on Amazon are quite positive and very happy to engage in further conversation if I can help. Thanks very much. Over to you, Phillip. Okay, that's brilliant. Thank you very much, Giles. We're going to go straight to the Q&A session. As a reminder, you can still submit your questions via the chat box in the Q&A panel which you'll see on the right-hand side of your screen. But first of all, I'll go to a question that came from Liz early on in the session Giles was how do you best establish what sleep bird you are? I think it's just through observation really. When do you naturally, if you went on holiday, do you naturally still want to get up in the morning at a similar time to the time that you would if you were commuting for example or having to work Monday to Friday? Or do you, are you someone who loves to sleep in at night? You'll soon see when you haven't got pressures like study or work and so forth what you are. And I'm clearly an early morning person. I struggle to lie in, but I get really ratty if I'm up late at night on a regular basis, especially without any naps. So that's typically it's sort of individual experimentation and ask people around you, see what they think. You do get people that are kind of balanced in the middle, but more often than not, you'll get a distinct preference for one or the other. Okay, Giles, what do you think about banking sleep? In other words, perhaps catching on sleep at the weekend? Great question. All the research says it doesn't work. That you've really got to catch up with your sleep, your sleep debt in 24 hours. So if you have a crap night sleep to use a technical term. If you can compensate that for it with a short, you know, the half hour power nap, the 26 minute time I was talking about, or even better a full 90 minute sleep cycle. The following afternoon or even late morning. Fantastic. That will that one that will help you. But all the search that I've seen shows that it's about regularity of rhythm. So all that burning at the candle at both ends of the weekends that most of us did in our 20s and early 30s wasn't really great for our for our long term health and not great for our sleep. Is sleep altered with age at all? When you when you're born and through your child like your sort of your your your your your early life. Yes, significantly. You know, baby sleeps at 1820 hours a day and then gradually you get to adolescence and you'll, as I said, there's this shift in the clock, which generally means people want to wake up a little bit later and sleep a bit later. But certainly my my 14 year old boy, for example, thrives on 10 hours. He really fight if you give them to sleep for 10 hours or 10 to 10 at night late in the morning. He's by far and away to his best. As you get older. People tend to say they need less sleep. I don't think there's any medical evidence to show that. Medical evidence to show that people don't aren't tired enough to need more sleep as it were. In other words, they just haven't done enough in the day to be tired enough to sleep at night. So that's why if you're 80 my dad's 87. He tries to make sure he gets it's out in the conservatory or goes for a walk or gets sunlight every day because he knows even in the winter if you can get outside and just get some exposure to some sort of sunlight he will sleep better. So it tends to be around just your activity level rather than something that is. As far as we can gather to this day, hardwired to your age. There's a couple of questions Giles about caffeine. So that's all it is decaf a good alternative giving up coffee or at least looking at. And secondly, do you have any recommendations for the non caffeine drinks when you like tea and coffee? Yeah, I think the first thing is that decaf doesn't mean no calf. Okay, so if you look on the side of all the different types of decaffeinated coffees you'll see how much caffeine there isn't there. So it doesn't mean no calf. It means less calf, right? And often people who drink decaf then drink more of it and later in the day just because they almost think it's no calf, but it's not. So I'm probably maybe I'm a bit heretical like on this subject and possibly. Anyway, I don't actually know anyone in the decaffeinated in the decaffeinated coffee industry. But to me it's a bit like no alcohol beer. I kind of think what's the point really? That's a bit of a personal view. No alcohol beer I get the point of but you know either either have a coffee or don't have it. I would say either have a cup of tea or don't just think about what time of day you're going to have it and how many you're going to have. And the easiest way is to cut down. It's just to say, okay, I'm going to keep a score in my notebook or something. Instead of having four before lunch, I'll have three for a couple of weeks and I'll go to do etc. When it comes to alternatives, there is a massive, massive, massive range of herbal teas in the market. In literally tens, dozens you go to any supermarket or whole food store and things like that. You'll see lots of range. So I find, you know, lemon and ginger and lots of the I personally use if I'm working from home, I have fresh lemon grass in the fridge. I've got a local grocery that sells it. I use ginger, lime, lemon, all those sorts of substitutes. Fantastic. Worked well for me. I said I speak as a real coffee addict who's who's given up. They've really worked well for me. And going to bed chamomile tea is fantastic. It's a really good soothing drink. But lots of people will be sitting there going, I don't like either of those flavors. Well, there's plenty of others to choose from. Cardamom, licorice and Lord knows what. So yes, try the herbal teas and you can often buy. I mean, I'm just going to mention one brand that I happen to know. I don't know when dorsing this, but pucker teas, for example, you can buy a variety of pack a bit like used to be able to have little cereals. Probably still can. You can buy a variety pack of different teas. So you can try different teas out and see what you like and give them away to your friends if you don't like them. So there's plenty of alternatives. I certainly find if I'm working from home and I want to treat drink. I shall use sparkling water or tonic water. Neither of these are probably the best. There are probably some detrimental aspects to your system of them. But they're nowhere near as, I think, as bad as drinking certain expresses today. So there are some of these sorts of things that can also be quite nice and perk you up a bit. But for me, herbal teas have been the great solution. Charles, another question. Does your recommended seven and a half hours include the awake but resting time? Can you repeat that? Sorry, Philip. Sorry, does your recommended seven and a half hours include the awake but resting time? Not to me, that would be your awake. So my seven and a half hours means you're asleep. So that's why if you block eight hours and you say, right, I'm going to bed at 11 and I'm going to get up at seven, then that includes that awake but resting time and also that time just before you go to sleep. Maybe you're having a chat with your partner or whatever. And that time when you just come to the morning before the alarm goes off if you have to set it. I do encourage people not to set alarms if you can possibly get away with not sending an alarm. The benefit is amazing. Just a couple more questions then before we wrap up. If you know a colleague suffers from insomnia, a lack of sleep, how do you deal with that within the workload? I guess it depends on how close you are to the colleague really. It's great to engage in the topic and you can do it in different ways. You can say, I had a really bad sleep last night. How did you get on? And you can sort of try and understand how they're doing and then look to see how you can support them in improving their sleep because if you can help them and they want to engage in it, then you're changing their life basically. Because if someone's suffering really bad from insomnia, if they're working from home now, you could start to have a conversation about how they can plan in naps and plan in ways to catch up. But ultimately if someone's work is sleeping only three or four hours a night long term, they're doing themselves massive, massive damage. Their chances of Alzheimer's and other such relation. As a list, I don't even talk about the poor health effects of bad sleep because when I researched it, I came up with between 75 and 85 different categories of illness that resulted from sleep. So basically everything. Every single element you have, bad backs, coughs, headaches, the lot, you can trace back potentially. I'm not saying compellingly, I'm saying potentially to poor sleep. So there are, you know, and there's plenty of arguments in the book, there's strong physical and neuro-science reasons for sleeping better and those are the arguments you as a colleague, I would say. But ultimately they're accountable for themselves. Okay, final question, Charles. What would be your number one tip for trying to get to sleep during this heat wave? That's a good one because I've been finding it quite tough myself. I find a fan is fine in the room. Some people find it keeps them awake. Personally, I find the rhythm of a fan quite soothing and helps me. I would say keep the room as cool as you can. Hydrate appropriately, but not too much in the last minute because if you have a huge amount of water, just forget about it. You're bound to wake up to have a pee and then sometimes it's difficult to get back to sleep. So I would keep the room as cool as you can. Make sleep more of a priority. Think about it more in terms of preparing the night. You know that time rhythm point I made about actually making yourself an allowance to wind down and wind up the following morning. And then also in my book I describe a very well-known mindfulness technique called body scanning. If you're lying there and you can't sleep at 3 a.m. It's a fabulous idea to start using the body scanning technique which is where you just basically focus on different parts of the body scanning down and then scanning up very slowly and at each part of the body you basically give thanks. I combine it with a great mindfulness technique. So now basically say thank you to my forehead for housing my brain and what it's done for me and you know work my way down the body and upwards as well. And I write a called Dr. Guy Meadows in his sleep book which is one of the early books I read on the subject which really helped me in my early days. That technique was probably the first technique along with giving up caffeine that helped me solve my chronic insomnia issues. Okay, that's a great tip. Thanks Charles. Okay, that's all we have time for today. So I'd just like to say thank you to Giles for today's presentation. See how I'm great at London for hosting the event and I thank you for attending. I hope you found it interesting and worthwhile. Our next webinar express is on Tuesday the 25th of August at one o'clock. The topic is getting from giving CSR life lessons which is going to be hosted by CRM South East. You'll find it listed on the CRM website. We can register for the session if you haven't already done so. Once again as a reminder you'll shortly be receiving a survey on today's event and we would really appreciate it if you could provide your feedback. You'll also get a link sent to you for the recording of this event. So finally on behalf of CRM thank you for joining us and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day.