 Hi everyone and welcome to this Science Exchange series from the University of Western Australia. My name is Sam Elingworth, I'm a Senior Lecturer in Science Communication here at UWA and the Science Exchange series has been put together as a way to bring the amazing research that's done in the Faculty of Science out to other people and to other communities so that people can understand and realise the important work and the impact that we're having on society as well. So today I'd like to introduce our speaker who is Dr Michelle Olath, who is a post-doctoral research fellow in the School of Psychological Science at UWA. Michelle researches health at the intersection of sleep and psychology, investigating how poor sleep impacts brain and mood health and function and creating interventions to help people attain better sleep for better health. She recently returned from Wisconsin where she was invited to work on the oldest and most influential sleep database and currently works with the Health Promotion Unit at UWA, co-creating a brief sleep intervention for university students. So please Michelle take it away. Hi everyone, thanks for joining us today and thanks Sam for that introduction, that was lovely. So we're just going to get on into it. Okay it's night and you're awake again and everyone else is tucked up in their bed asleep and you're trying so hard to sleep but you can't because your head won't turn off. You're going to be so tired tomorrow, your head tells you and isn't that that day you have that thing we need to perform really well and is the fridge door still open? And so the thoughts go and go. And while many of us can relate to this kind of a feeling or these kinds of thoughts from time to time, it's up to about 40% of the population that have these problems chronically and may actually end up with a diagnosis of a sleep disorder. So before I continue this, I'd just like to acknowledge that I'm presenting from Wajak Nungar land and I'd like to acknowledge the strength and resilience of the Nungar elders. Today we're going to talk a little bit about what sleep is, why you do it, what healthy sleep is, why sleep is important and then I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the research that I'm doing with the health promotion team and the school of psychological science in university students. And then we're going to end with some tips that you can take home to improve your sleep. Sleep is actually a behaviour and it's a reversible state of reduced awareness and selective responsiveness to your environment and in people this kind of looks like laying down, closing your eyes and moving very little but in different species this actually looks, it can look quite different. So for most people we have one consolidated period of sleep but depending on your culture you may actually have two or more periods of sleep and for people with little babies this might look like lots of little blocks of sleep for those babies. So sleep is a behaviour, it's impacted by culture, it's impacted by environment and it's impacted by the kinds of things you have going on in your day. In this picture here what you're looking at is a sort of a hypnogram we call it and what this shows is that sleep is at one solid state, sleep is actually many different states where you sort of you will go down into light sleep and then your sleep will get deeper and you'll get less responsive as you go down into deep sleep and during the night it's completely normal for you to wake up lots of little times during the night. In fact often these periods of wake are things that you won't even notice but some might you might notice and if you wake up and you notice about three to four periods of time awake during the night this is completely normal and expected. Those sleep, sort of sleep types of sleep, deep sleep, light sleep and dreaming sleep are thought to actually contribute to different components of your health. Light sleep is thought to be really important for good mood and for memory and learning and deep sleep is very important for you for recovery from physical exercise. There was some really cool research going on down at the Centre for Sleep Science a couple of years ago where look I wouldn't be putting my hand up for it but they were dipping athletes into ice baths after they were doing intense exercise and they were showing that these guys were dipping down into deep sleep quicker and getting a longer period of deep sleep and that was translating to better sports recovery. Now I just want to put up a poll if that's okay Sam just wait for your responses. Okay so what you can see here the point of this poll is to show you that sleep isn't just impacted by your environment and sleep isn't just this sort of this universal state that everyone experiences. Sleep is quite individual and when we're trying to give sleep advice some of the things that we might say to people are cut down on caffeine use because caffeine can impact your sleep but for some people that's just not true and you need to actually look at how individual factors impact your sleep. So we try to give these sorts of recommendations but what really need to be doing is using a sleep diary to track what individual factors affect your sleep. Okay all right thanks very much for that. Okay so let's move into I think we've kind of got a bit of an idea of sleep what is it. All right now sleep why do you do it? So sleep serves a vital function it's actually something that you can't live without you can survive for about 21 days without food but you can only survive for about 14 days without sleep. Sleep serves a very important biological function so after about four days without sleep you'll actually start to hallucinate. You'll start to not be able to tell what's real and what isn't real. There's some amazing studies done back in the 60s I think they were where they had a volunteer deprive himself of sleep for three to four days and after three to four days he was still able to his motor functions was still really good he could still play ping pong and get amazing scores but he actually thought he was a famous footballer which he wasn't okay. So and then after about 10 days you start to organ start to break down it's not a pretty process. So sleep serves a very important biological process and as such your body is going to force you to sleep and what you can see on screen here is that on the vertical axis as you go up along vertical axis that's an increase in your want to sleep so your sleep drive and as you go along the horizontal axis that's time over about two days. Now we think of your sleep drive or your your sort of your biological pressure to sleep as having two separate drives so we think of it as having a sort of a C drive which is your biological pressure to sleep. We call it a sleep drive because that stands for circadian or clocks. Now every single cell inside your body has a clock inside it and it tells you when to sleep. If you were locked in a basement your natural body clock would actually go a little bit over a 24 hour clock so your clock needs to be reset every day to a 24 hour clock by daylight and it's reset every day by light going in through your eye and hitting a little set of cells called the suprachiasmatic nucleus and this resets your body clock to make sure that you run on a 24 hour clock. So every day I think most people will be able to recognize this around two or three o'clock in the afternoon most people start to feel a little bit sleepy and then also around two three o'clock early in the morning as well that's when you'll probably get some of your deepest sleep because that's when our sort of our circadian drive is at its strongest. There is also a H drive and this is the drive sort of the homeostatic drive that's why it's called the H drive and this is the physiological pressure that builds up over the course of the day and that's why you can see two arrows here because it's over the course of two days of the sort of these metabolites that you build up throughout the day and one of those is adenosine and adenosine is actually blocked by caffeine and that's why caffeine or it competes for binding with caffeine and that's why caffeine is one of those chemicals you can have that gives you this oh sort of feeling of more awakeness because it's stopping your adenosine from binding but all sorts of tablates build up throughout the day and that also adds to your sleep pressure so that you want your body wants you to sleep healthy sleep now healthy sleep for most young adults or adults is around seven to nine hours but allowing for individual variability anything from about six to ten hours is considered a healthy amount of sleep healthy sleep is is not just quantity though it's also quality so and the quality is a little bit hard to gauge unless you have EEG on because when we're looking for quality of sleep we're looking for nice big fat waveforms as they go and to show that your brain's getting into a nice deep sleep we're looking for a big consolidated period of sleep where there's not too many awakenings but for you guys at home quality of sleep basically is if you can wake up the next day and after about a half hour or so period of sleep inertia you can feel awake and you can feel like you can get the things done that you need to get done then we'd say you probably have good quality sleep another way that you can gauge your quality of sleep so quantity is a component to healthy sleep as quality as is quality and another way that you can gauge your healthy sleep is to calculate your sleep efficiency and basically this is a kind of a way of saying are you getting and the amount of time you're spending bent is enough of it or a good chunk of it spent asleep and basically what you do is you take the total time that you think you slept you put that in the first box you take you divide that by the total time that you actually spent in bed so that's lights out to lights on times it by 100 and you get your percentage sleep efficiency if it's over about 80 85 percent it's 85 percent or above then we would say you have good sleep efficiency so saying that your sleep drive got high enough you didn't spend too much time in bed and it's a pretty good gauge of how good of quality you're getting why is sleep important and now we're getting to the title of my talk sleep one of the fundamental reasons that sleep is important is because it cleans your brain now the there is a system in your brain called the glimphatic system and it's a bit synonymous to the limb fatigue system and that's why it's ended up with the name glimphatic system so we all know that our limb fatigue system is an important part to washing bacteria or pathogens that might get in because it's an important part of our immune system your brain doesn't have an immune system in it so it doesn't have a way of washing these metabolites that it builds up because it's been working very hard throughout the day in the system that they found only a few years ago is actually the glimphatic system and it only really operates maximally when you're asleep so when you're asleep there are all these perivascular systems inside your brain that open up about 60 percent more and all of the cells in your brain actually reduce in size and when that opens up to that 60 percent more that's when it can wash out all of those metabolites like adenosine and it can replenish all of those those sort of those energies that you need to be able to feel brain to be able to work properly there's a lovely quote that says that you can think of it like having a house party you can either entertain the guests might have fun and do lots of thinking or you can clean up the house but you can't really do both at the same time so when you sleep you clean house this sleep or this cleaning your house seems to be imperative to physical health performance and also mood health if you aren't getting enough sleep your mood will be more labile people with sleep disorders often have more relationship problems they can't perform to their best and their immune system actually doesn't work as well as it could as well so I'm going to share with you a little bit about the sleep research that we're doing with university students so I've been working on a project which is a collaboration between the school of psych and the health promotion team and this has been funded by the local drug action group and in university students they appear to be quite vulnerable to sleep disorders especially a disorder called insomnia and also to circadian rhythm disorders insomnia is where you have trouble trying to get to sleep staying asleep or you don't have good quality sleep and this happens despite having the right environment for good sleep as well and circadian rhythm disorders are a desynchronization between your internal sleep weight rhythms and the light darkness cycle so anyone with teenagers or if you are a teenager you'll kind of recognize this as being wanting to be awake later into the evening then would be good for your university schedule which might start around nine o'clock in the morning or eight o'clock if you've decided to sign up for some of those early tuition sessions over on the east coast this is part of the reason that some schools have decided to start putting high school hours later on in the day start times around 10 or 11 in the morning so the sleep problems in university students impact on their grades their mental health and also increase the use of stimulants and alcohol and there are a few programs out there that use CBTI which is a cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia and they also use mindfulness and they're showing a really good impact on student health and demonstrating more effectiveness than medications however these don't seem to they seem to target disorders rather than poor sub or sort of poor sleep or suboptimal sleep and these interventions have been taken from adults and then manipulated to sort of suit young adults there's also they're also quite long so on average they they have at least four sessions of about 45 minute interventions and there tends to be quite a high dropout rate and also these interventions are peer led too so they seem to be a little bit problematic because university students don't tend to actively seek help so the intervention that we are using we're calling good night poor sleep and this is GPS or navigating your sleep and what we want to use this is to try and address the gaps in the literature that are there for university students when we go and do a bit of a literature review we find that the things that are on the screen at the moment are the things that are problematic for sleep for university students so using digital devices late at night the type of day so they tend to sleep more on weekends than on workdays poor sleep hygiene or poor sleep knowledge these kinds of things when we talk to the university students these are the things that they said that they endorsed were the most problematic for them so we were running focus groups earlier on in the year to try and find out what kinds of things they were endorsing and saying were problematic so what we want to do what we're doing now is we collect a lot of this data and we're going to start going out to colleges and running some interventions now to be able to address these factors and stay tuned later on in the year hopefully we'll have more information about that okay so I said to you as well that I would give you some information on what you could do to improve your sleep when you're at home so first and foremost make sure that you don't have an underlying sleep problem so if you are concerned about your sleep always reach out to your GP and have a chat to them however if you want to make some simple changes at home the thing that you kind of want to look up is sleep hygiene and basically sleep hygiene is in tune with the talk it's about cleaning up your sleep and your sleep habits to make sure that you have a really strong behavioral association between your bed and sleep so during the day one of the things that you can do is you can have a wind down routine so so when I'm talking about this with people I like to say one of the things that you think of is what would you do to put a small child to bed you would make sure they have a really solid routine they'd go bed at the same time and they'd wake up at the same time and the research tells us that those having a really good consistent routine around your sleep particularly the same work wake up time is really important because that allows your brain and your body to understand what time to release the melatonin to make you go to sleep and the cortisol to make you wake up in the morning and that's one of the most important things you can do to make sure that you have a good quality sleep period if you like your naps and it doesn't really work in with your work schedule kudos to you if you can fit a nap in with your work schedule you want to limit your naps to about 20 to 30 minutes and the reason you want to do that is because that will mean that it won't impact your nighttime sleep because 20 to 30 minutes doesn't allow you get down to that deep sleep and it won't really stop you having a high sleep drive later on in the evening another thing you can do is make sure that you have an outlet for stress early on in the evening so talk to a friend organize your or early on in the day sorry not in the evening or talk to a friend organize your to-do list to write in a journal and get some exercise stop if you one of those what was it 27% so they could drink coffee if you're one of the other people then make sure you stop drinking coffee about eight hours before your bedtime because that's about how long it takes for the caffeine to get out of your system try not to eat a heavy meal with foods that might irritate your digestive system too close to bedtime and this might include the different things for different people people talk to me about cheese and onions and but chili things that irritate your digestive system are definitely things that are problematic keep your fluid intake down and this includes alcohol or water so less than four glasses of water over the afternoon and that's so that you don't wake up during the night needing to go to the bathroom if you're thirsty you probably want to be able to increase your your fluid intake earlier on during the day so make sure you reserve your bed for sleep and for sex and this is important because if you're watching screens in bed it makes bed a really exciting place to be and you don't want to do that screens are really bad for many reasons and if there are any parents with teenagers watching this talk they'll be giving me a good hurrah yay this one because screens a screen time one a lot of the things that we do on our screens answering emails or going on social media is interesting or it's stressful so that can be a bad thing because it's raising that kind of emotional and cognitive arousal just before bed but the light itself that comes out of a lot of our digital devices is blue light and that blue light goes into your suprachiasmatic nucleus that one we were talking about earlier and it actually makes your body think that it's daytime so it can push your your nighttime sleep further away into the evening and that's not necessarily great you can get some pink filters that you can put on your computer if you want to use your devices but i'd say go back to good old-fashioned books have a really nice sleep space make it cozy make it comfortable have it to around 19 to 20 degrees celsius and in when you're in bed it's okay to have about 10 to 20 minutes to need to fall asleep if you're falling asleep in less than five minutes it would suggest that you're actually sleep deprived get some sunlight on you in the morning because that helps you reset your body clock and during the day make sure you do things like that will battle fatigue so get up from your desk move around do some exercise get out the sun drink plenty of water have good nutrition because sometimes feeling sleepy during the day isn't anything to do with the nighttime sleep that's to do with your daytime fatigue as well okay so we've talked a little bit about sleep hygiene so those are some nice tips that you can take home and i think i think that's the end from me sam so i can go to questions if we want to that's great thank you michelle that was absolutely fascinating and i've picked up loads of tips myself i'm actually one of those people who can have a coffee like up to five minutes before they go to sleep which is quite nice and i've got loads of questions myself but i'm gonna go to the participants first so just reminding people to drop questions into the q&a box so a question here hi michelle it's a really nice talk and thanks for sharing in the afternoon around two to three p.m i normally feel tired and want to sleep please could you give me advice to reduce tiredness at this time okay so first of all that's a really normal time for you to feel a bit sleepy because your um sleep pressure your sleep drives are starting to build up during that time so there's nothing abnormal going on look there's lots of different things that you could do i would say book up to do some exercise go for a walk go outside get some fresh air uh you could have a 20 to 30 minute nap if you really wanted to get up even just stretching simple stretching or planning to have a talk with a friend at that point in time those kinds of things you can battle your sleep drive with things that you find exciting or stimulating that's great thank you a question here from um brenton lesk who asks what are your thoughts on blue light blocking glasses are they just a sales gimmick oh no they're actually yeah they really work so um blue light blocking glasses do work i've got there's a fair bit of research on them they do do things you can also get the opposite side of things where you can get um the glasses and allow more blue light here that's so strange there's some really cool applications that you can get that will help you manage jet lag and i was in wisconsin for a conference with romela one of the two uh the the uh one of my coat one of my researchers that i work with a lot um old head of school for school psychology um and she had this lovely app and what this app did is it divided her day up into when she should wear blue light blocking glasses when she should have a coffee when she should have a nap and those processors were helping her adjust her jet lag so that when she got back into australia her sleep was and adjusted a little bit and was easier for her to get back in so rubbing your feet on the carpet and whatever other tricks they used to have don't work blue light glasses oh that's great so this is a question from kylie and i'll just add my own bit to the end so it says how long do you need to put your device away before wanting to go to sleep and i want to add to that does it depend on the person because i know that for example i can look at my phone up to a minute before i go to sleep whereas my partner my wife is the complete opposite it needs like an hour or so away from the screen is it depends on the person or is the general advice there so that is a you've asked me a lovely complicated question and it depends on the type of light it depends on the intensity of light because the screens all give different intensities so i would say and it depends on the individual as you've said sam your yourself and your wife are completely different so i would say the best way that you can have you could have a look at is to download one of the free to use sleep diaries and to just run some experiments with yourself try putting away your device half an hour before bed and doing something else that's relaxing and see if that helps or maybe you need to expand that time where you can shrink that time so the sleep health foundation have a sleep diary that you can download it used for free and you can track and i guess tune your fine tune how early away you need to put your device so then it works for your sleep right thank you um michelle so jane come uh karmic nanny has asked hi thank you for this i work with young children and get a lot of questions from parents on sleep or lack thereof what are your thoughts on sleep training and at what age do you think it is appropriate okay so there's there's a lot of sleep training courses out there lots of different ones um and some of them have some good research behind them and they have paired sleep training up with attachment to make sure that the child is still getting their emotional needs met and some of these courses can be really helpful there's some excellent ones coming out of canada and some of the courses unfortunately don't have a lot of research behind them so i would say there's a mixed bag out there you need to do your research behind which one you're going to use before you engage with one um and you need to probably pick one that has some some solid research behind it as well and more than anything you need to make sure you're working with the parent and the child to make sure the parent is understanding that they still need to be meeting the child's emotional needs but that they're getting their stress levels down as well because sleep is really important for the parents too to make sure they can function well during the day now absolutely absolutely um a question here from Alex Wheeler who says if you don't feel sleepy at 2 to 3 p.m. and that's actually Alex's most alert time much later in the day and struggle to wake up in the morning at all is there any hope for changing sleep patterns to become less of a night owl and maybe more from a morning person instead oh okay so you guys are all asking amazing difficult questions so that's going to depend on your chronotype so Alex it sounds like you might be an evening or a night owl chronotype and your chronotype does it does change when you feel most able to go to sleep so that will make things a little bit more difficult for you that will change as you get older often people not all the time there are some night owls often people as they get older will switch to be a more morning chronotypes or what do they call the morning larks um but you can use light therapy to make sure that you shift your sleep period so what you want to be doing is you want to be using early morning lights you want to be getting outside early in the morning to be able to bring your sleep period forward a bit more um and that that can that can tend to help you out a little bit uh so light therapy and give yourself some compassion because maybe you're one of those evening chronotypes that's great so um a question here from Geraldine who asks how does the current research account for the few folks who don't sleep a lot for example three hours and yet seem able to function normally is that true can these people function normally or is it or are they actually is that actually a misnomer um so that's a complicated question again okay so there are there's a lot of people out there so I think I think there's a lot of very famous politicians that often claim that they can sleep for about three to four hours but then I would say they're also they often make a lot of mistakes too so very public mistakes so perhaps they're not actually getting the amount of sleep that they do need if you decide that you're going to squish your sleep period down to three to four hours over time you will actually start to get less sensitive to your sleep cues so there may be a false perception that you need less sleep um however they're accounting for individual variability if you've taught your body over a certain period of time to sleep for less that sleep period does become I guess more consolidated your body does learn to compensate for it however I would say it's a bit of a still a bit of a misnomer and I'd say these people are probably just less sensitive to their sleep cues because there was a lovely big piece of research out there where they showed that people who were sleeping five hours or less their alertness was the equivalent to them having a blood alcohol level of 0.05 so they were driving dangerously but they weren't aware that they were driving dangerously wow I mean I wonder if part of that you know it's related to like the Dunning-Kroger effect as well you know this idea that people just don't understand the extent to which they are like you say massively sleep deprived so another question here um thank you for your talk for my question what is the reason as to why people have a difficult time waking up this person says that they would normally sleep for nine hours but then would always struggle waking up even after that long sleep is there any way to remedy that particular predicament right there could be lots of different reasons for that so you could be sleeping out of tune with your chronotype you could be oversleeping so sometimes if you are actually needing less sleep than that and you're oversleeping that actually increases your sensation of sleep inertia so it makes you feel sleepier for longer in the morning as well it also could mean that your quality of sleep isn't great it's a it could be lots of it could be an underlying sleep issue it could be over use of alcohol in the evening to sort of get to sleep which then disrupts sleep throughout the night because it increases your cortisol levels throughout the night or could be having a poor routine around sleep so lots of reasons I guess could lead to that one of the best things you could probably do is download that sleep diary and then have a look at a few of those things and see if changing just one decreases that sleep inertia in the morning and makes you be able to get up easier and then sort of fiddle with another one instead but also experiencing sleep inertia in the morning for about half an hour sometimes to an hour is completely normal because it's your body switching from one state of awareness to another right so there's a couple of questions just more generally asking about like how they can improve their sleep patterns and I think that's you know get this sleep diary look at look at monitoring yourself so that's really useful some slightly different questions here Georgina asks I have heard about sleep and its role in reducing dementia is this related to the cleaning function of sleep and the shrinking of the cell oh come on over and do a phd with us Georgina that is where we're at at the moment so there is correlational research to show that poor sleep early on in life is associated with the increased risk of later life dementia and for mild cognitive impairment but it's association so we don't know if it's causative but we do know they're associated okay great and then a question here from Claire who asks how good are wearable sleep trackers are they accurate at tracking your sleeping patterns and then also for me to add on to that is there a danger sometimes when we look at those sleep tracking patterns that we can then get into this you know cycle where we're like oh no I'm not getting the exact amount of sleep and they can actually negatively reinforce maybe some of those bad habits that we've got okay so the sleep trackers that we have that are out there the commercially available ones they're just as good as they've done some studies that show that they're just as good as the ones that you can buy if you're running a sleep clinic or if you're in a medical setting so equivalent however because they record and guess your sleep off an algorithm they're not as accurate as what you could get if you're measuring sleep we're using EEG so the only way we can actually know whether you are or aren't asleep and whether you're the only way we can know definitively oh gosh and that's even low that's even it's got another tangent onto it in my brain right now as well and the only way we can definitively know if you're asleep is if we have before using EEG so this is kind of measuring your brave brain wave forms the sleep trackers don't tend to do that I think they're are starting to become some commercially available ones so you need to allow about a 10 error on either side so if it said your sleep efficiency is 75% could actually mean that it's 65 all the way through up to 85 and 85 is good sleep efficiency so you need to give it there's a fair amount of error I guess you could say you can't put too much confidence in them but as they're getting a decent gauge on your sleep you could get a sort of a guesstimate on how much sleep you're getting and whether it's decent quality and then yes to answer your question Sam we can get definitely into a bit of a worry spiral or a spiral or a stress spiral over getting enough sleep and that's one of the worst things that we can do you've got to you really need to accept that you're going to have imperfect sleep and if you have enough energy during the day then that's that's really what you should be aiming for that's great thank you and question here from Samantha who says that they suffer from chronic pain and random dislocations which makes their sleep awful have you got any specific advice that they could maybe think about for addressing that so chronic pain is one of those horrible ones because as we know poor sleep then impacts pain and pain impacts sleep I would say that if you haven't gone to see your pain team then go and see them and have a talk to them about sleep and a lot of the activities that a pain management team will talk to you about like mindfulness will also help you with your sleep as well thank you Michelle so Alex has got a question here and which reverts back to this idea of what we should be using our bedrooms for what do you think about having a study desk in your bedroom should your designated work area be somewhere else ideally yes because essentially what you want to do is build a really strong association between your bed and sleep however again comes down to individual variability if you're not having any trouble sleeping and your office desk is in your room there's nothing wrong with that but I and so I know for myself one of the big naughties is that we say don't read or watch tv in bed but I could listen to podcasts and read just before I go to sleep and I have no problems with it so I would say track your sleep individually if that is if your sleep is problematic for you that would be one of the first things that I would move to take your study desk out of your room great and then just on this subject of tracking your sleep someone's asked when they look at their tracker they constantly have above average awake time and light sleep time and below average REM time is there any way that they can actively try to improve the amount of time they spend in the REM phase again allowing for the fact that there's probably some area of error in how those can trap your REM or not sure so yeah exactly there's going to be a fair amount of error for that and I'm not really aware of any sort of scientific ways that we have of increasing your REM sleep cold showers seem to increase your deep sleep probably relaxing activities beforehand are going to increase the quality of sleep beforehand so mindfulness meditation things that you might find relaxing but I'm not really sure of anything to particularly target increased REM sleep okay great and then last question now I mean just because we're running out of time we've got so many questions um thank you very much for this presentation just one question even after several days of roughly eight to nine hours of sleep I sometimes wake up exhausted and need sometimes more than one hour to get out of bed or my partner can just jump out of bed as soon as they hear the alarm they usually do not wake up at night and seem to be having quite a deep sleep does that mean that their sleep quality is low do you think um so it could mean many things again I would say use a sleep diary and track the kinds of habits that you have around your sleep and see whether there are some things that you could do some sleep hygiene things that you could do to clean up your sleep one of the things that you could do most importantly assuming that you're not already doing it is have a sleep period where you wake up at the same time every day and go to sleep at the same time every day if everyone comes away from this talk and makes one change to their sleep that's the one I would say to pick um there's some amazing research done by a man called Till Ronenberg and he looks at people who because we exist in a society where work operates from nine to five um where that's not necessarily the right sort of pattern for everyone and so we're sleeping out of our natural phase and his research takes people and it allows them to sleep according to their chronotype and they're allowed to sleep to the time of day they want to and then just go to work and everyone has a different sort of pattern and a different time they like to sleep and his research shows that if you allow people to sleep according to all of their different patterns and timings they actually have better mood better productivity um but there's a lot of variability out there so make some changes but unfortunately you might also just be sleeping out of what your body naturally wants you to do that's great thank you so much Michelle and I learned loads we had an incredible number of questions so I know our participants must have as well so thank you very much everyone for joining us today thank you for Sarah for running the back end of these talks and thank you very much Michelle for such a fascinating and enlightening topic stay safe everyone and we look forward to seeing you at the next science exchange webinar thank you and goodbye