 What simple steps can we take to get more and better sleep? That's the topic that we will be diving into today. I talk about sleep all the time. The catchphrase in my household is sleep is the most important thing. I have to be honest, sleep is something with which I've had a pretty dysfunctional relationship with for much of my life, but it's getting better. There is a certain irony. I say this as I'm recording this podcast at silly o'clock in the morning. I tend not to be able to sleep past four and do regularly find myself forcing myself to stay in bed until the time I'm allowed to get up at four. But I do go to bed early and I have got some really good routines around sleep. And actually, I feel as an adult at this point in my life, my sleep is better than it has ever been. So it's something I'm always working on and it's something I'm really aware of as something that can make a huge, huge difference to how we think, behave and feel. Today's episode isn't specifically about sleep for any particular group, so children or adults or autistic people or any of the other particular groups that I've spoken about or to recently, but rather just some general pointers for good sleep, these are things that might feel like no-brainers, but they are worth touching back in on every now and then. So it's just a short one, but sleep really matters. Sleep is the most important thing. And when we get sleep right, everything else feels just a little bit more manageable, just a little bit more possible. When you think about a day when you've had really bad sleep and you think about how you might be more irritable or more likely to burst into floods of tears or less likely to be able to solve problems and often you find yourself just unable to find the words that you want to. Just everything's harder when we're really, really tired. So good sleep makes a big difference. It massively increases our window of tolerance, which is our ability to cope with the day to day and it just makes us feel better. The other good thing about sleep is that it's a really uncontroversial starting point if we are looking to improve the well-being of someone that we might be working with or caring for or indeed ourselves. It doesn't involve any big, deep, meaningful kind of conversations. It's just a very practical one. What are the things that we could do to make a difference with sleep? Before I dive into the ideas here, the other thing I want to say is that when it comes to improving sleep, a little difference goes a long way. So instead of saying, ah, you know what? Right now I'm getting four hours of sleep a night and I want to aim for eight. That's unrealistic. That's just not going to happen. And it will feel so big that you won't even bother trying. If instead you said, OK, I'm getting four hours of sleep a night. How can I make sure those four hours are a good sleep rather than a really kind of, you know, light or disturbed sleep? Or maybe I can get it up to like four hours and 10 minutes. What would that look like? What would that take? Like with so much else in this work that we do together, it's about working out the next tiny step. And from there, of course, you might choose to take another step and another step and another step, and that's fantastic. But make the first step so tiny that it feels totally, totally achievable. If you take that tiny step, even if you just took one and you did it every day with sleep, it will make a difference over time. OK, so in terms of those tips for better sleep, the key thing to remember here, basically, is that when it comes to sleep, we should just imagine what we would do if we were suddenly given the charge of a three year old child. If somebody said to you, hey, look after this kid for a while. I mean, you might have other things on your mind like what's going on here from a safeguarding perspective and so on and so on and so on. But just to spend disbelief for a moment, you're in a Hollywood movie and suddenly you've got someone else's three year old child to look after for the next couple of weeks. There are all sorts of things that you would do to support that child. But one of the things that you would likely rapidly do would be to think about what their nighttime routine looks like, because we're really good at doing this for small children. We'd probably make sure that they had a regular bedtime. We would put them to bed at the same time every night. We'd think that they were needing to be doing kind of calming activities. We'd make sure they had a nice bedroom that was comfortable and not too hot and not too cold. We'd get them some nice pyjamas and we'd probably give them a bath and read them a story before bed. We'd get into a routine of doing these things every day in order to try and help them get to sleep at the same time, get good sleep. We'd know just what to do, right? And I guess one of my biggest questions always when it comes to sleep in life is if we know kind of almost instinctively what to do for that three year old child we just inherited, why do we get it so wrong for ourselves? It's not so different. If we just treated ourselves like a toddler, our sleep would improve. OK, so we're going to think about four hours because it's me. You know this by now. We love the alliteration four hours. Just go with it. Four hours for better sleep. And these are basically just summarizing what one would do to look after a toddler. So by all means, if you're a parent tuning into this and you've got a toddler that's not sleeping well, do these things. OK, so the first is routine. This is about actually having a bedtime. And as adults in particular, we often think that that's not something we need or want. The good thing about a bedtime, if you go to bed at the same time or roughly the same time every day, your body gets used to going to bed at that time and you will be ready for sleep at that time. So all sorts of things begin to happen if you stick to a regular sleep routine in terms of what happens with the levels of your hormones and that sort of thing. And your body just will be like really, really tired and ready to go to sleep at the same time if you keep it on the regular. It works super, super well. It's not ideal on the odd occasion when you need to stay up behind your bedtime and you'll find you're totally good for nothing. But a regular bedtime will mean that you will find it much easier to get to sleep. So even if you can't find additional hours of sleep, you'll find that you spend more of the sleep window that you've allowed yourself actually asleep because you'll get to sleep very quickly. This I have to say is the thing that's probably made the biggest difference for me. I used to take literally hours trying to get to sleep. And I used to not bother trying to go to bed because I knew that I wouldn't be able to get to sleep. And I used to stay up until, well, the kind of time that I get up these days often. But actually, I found that going to bed at the same time every night over time had a really, really positive impact. And sometimes now I fall asleep with remarkable speed. And the other thing is that I don't know the research on this. But for me personally, I track my sleep with a tracking device. And it's very interesting. All of my deep sleep happens really early. So I know personally for me, if I don't go to sleep quite early, I'm not going to get a good amount of deep sleep. That deep sleep for me all happens before midnight. I don't tend to get much of it anyway. But if I get an hour, I've done really, really, really well. That's like a really good night for me, an hour of deep sleep. But it all happens before midnight. So unless I am in bed as sleep nice and early before midnight, then that deep sleep is not going to happen. And I tend to really, really feel the impact of that. And I don't know how that works for different people. You'd have to get curious about your own sleep cycles and sleep patterns. But what I do know is I fall asleep quickly and then I rapidly go to that deep sleep, which is indicative of, you know, good, restful, very kind of good, good sleep. It's great. So having that regular routine, going to sleep at the same time every night makes a big difference. I also find getting up at the same time or a similar time each day really helps. One thing for those of you who work in education, and I know there are many of you who listen in, who are working in education to think about is what does that routine look like in the holidays? Because you can be quite good at having the routine in the term time. And then in the holidays, we just allow ourselves to take a break and have as much sleep as we need. And that's good and important, but that sometimes doesn't actually help in the sort of medium term. So you might want a day or two where you're just kind of, yeah, almost taking like a duvet day and what have you. But then trying to get back into a regular routine will often mean that you'll actually sleep better and that that will be easier to maintain when you return to school. You don't have to keep the same sleep and wake time in the holidays as in the term, but you just might make a decision on the new sleep and wake times. So our bodies are programmed to love that kind of sense of routine. So find a routine about what time you're going to go to bed. Set yourself a bedtime. You can also think about the routine around your bedtime. So we love routine. We love to do things in the same way in a kind of ritualistic way each day. What would that bedtime routine look like for you? This is something I should set my children on. They love creating something about their generation. They love creating these routines and watching each other. It's like self care routines, bedtime routine, study routine on YouTube and stuff. They just love to watch that stuff. But having a routine, having a way that we just habitually do things can mean that we do those things in the same way every day. And again, that whole routine, that build up to bed can mean that we're really readying ourselves to sleep. We can also be thinking about some of the other bits that we'll touch on in the other hours building those in as part of that daily routine to get ourselves absolutely ready and rested for bed. So think about bedtime. When are you going to go to bed? When are you going to get up? What is the routine and the rituals that you'll have in that lead up to bedtime each day? Number two is restful. And this is about in that kind of hour or so before bed, actually thinking about engaging in activities that calm you rather than energize or activate you. So this will be doing things which bring you to a point where actually you're ready to switch your brain off and go to sleep. When we do kind of heavy exercise or we engage with big worries or we are working hard on something that really makes us think, then our bodies or brains or both are kind of highly energised and activated and just not ready to then be like, OK, great. It's bedtime. Let's go to sleep. They're still going and so we need to think instead about how to help with that switch off process. So we're trying to look to step down those activities. So we would look to move the kind of high energy exercise and the big taxing activities and engaging with the big worries too early on in the day and not engaging with those in kind of the last hour before bed. This is something that I think about a lot with my daughters because often those few minutes before bed are a really good window for a little chat. And sometimes that's when they might begin to open up about something. Now, with them and I think it's just worth touching in on this with them, it's helpful to hand those worries over and bring them out and make an appointment with them at that time. So what do I mean by that? If you've got something that's on your mind, we need to remove it. We'll think about that more in a moment. We need to remove it so we can move on and go to bed. So it might be that one of my daughters has got, say, a friendship issue that's really troubling her. And what I'll tend to say is this sounds really important and we do absolutely need to talk about it. Let's talk about it at breakfast time tomorrow. So we'll make an appointment with that worry. We might even write it down. We'll agree that we're going to discuss it. We're going to say, but for now it's time to go to bed. Because if we start unpicking that worry right then, that's going to be all going around in her head as she is trying to go to sleep. So it's because I often talk about finding those windows for conversations with your children and we just need to be careful about what we open up just, just as we're about to go to sleep. So we want to shelf that worry for now. So we're thinking about those restful activities. So what might that look like? So that might be, again, think back to your toddler. You might give them a bath, have a bath, have a shower, do something that feels kind of self-caring and soothing and relaxing. You might read. I often read for half an hour before bed, which is a great pleasure and a great joy and much more helpful to me than doom scrolling and doesn't engage me with the external news and the world outside and get my brain all activated and scared and anxious and stuff. You might do other activities that you enjoy. Perhaps you like to make or listen to music or you like to create but in a gentle way, you might do colouring or anything really any activity that feels kind of relaxing and restful can be really, really helpful in this time. Again, just think what would you do for a toddler? How would you help them to calm down and be ready to engage with sleep? What restful activities and it's about removing those energising or high anxiety type activities to earlier on in the day? That might involve a bit of time blocking. So, for example, if you've got loads and loads of work on, you're not going to get through your massive to-do list and be really productive if you have a really bad night's sleep tonight. So sometimes it's about accepting, right, I'm going to need to go to bed. I've got more to do than I can get done. But actually, if I get a bad night's sleep tonight, I'm not going to be able to carry on with this tomorrow. So I'm going to bookend it. I'm going to block out my time. I'm going to work until nine p.m. Then I'm going to give myself an hour where I'm going to actually wind down and try and get rested, get a really good night's sleep and then perhaps I'll get up and do the rest of that work in the morning. For example, it's going to be about you and what works for you. But blocking that time, making a limit, setting a boundary, being a little bit strict with yourself here. When in doubt, as an adult, think about what behaviour you would be happy for the children in your care to copy. Would you be happy if your child or a child that you're supporting said, Oh, actually, well, I'm going to sit with a glass of wine and I'm going to carry on doing my work until half past one in the morning. Probably there's all sorts of reasons why that wouldn't feel like quite the right thing to do. But, you know, if it's not good enough for them, why is it OK for you? And I think that's always a question just worth touching in on. So we're thinking about routine. We're thinking about doing restful activities in the lead up to bed and maybe thinking about how those restful activities might form part of the routine. And then we think about remove. That's our third R. Removing worries from your mind by writing them down. So you might journal or you might you might sort of speak to someone. You might do a voice recording of things you want to look at tomorrow removing those worries from our mind. So we're not going to sleep with them. So this is about not opening up a massive can of worms, but either just getting them out. So we might journal, we might draw, we might voice memo, we might call a helpline, talk to a friend, do any of those things. But knowing that there's a finite limit to that and that we're not going to just open that kind of worms and really sit there. We just want to get them out, remove them and potentially making an appointment with those worries for tomorrow. So that's not necessarily like always emotional worries. Sometimes that's the concern of, gosh, I really need to work at how to solve this problem for work. I don't know, maybe you're an engineer and there's some tricky maths or physics thing that's playing on your mind. And you've got the potential here to like dive deep into that and get really stuck in that problem, trying to figure it out. And it's going to be all going around and around in your mind. Instead, I would look to capture where you've got to so far. Leave that for yourself to pick up the next day, knowing that that problem is not going away. It doesn't need to be taking up your thought space right now. You need to be getting ready for bed. So removing those worries by kind of getting them out in the world, writing them down and potentially making an appointment with those worries for tomorrow, should we need to. And then the other things that we look to remove are things that might be preventing sleep. So I look to remove screens. We try to look away our screens. We have the phone police in our house who come and collect up all devices at about half past eight in the evening. And we try to put them all in a charging station away from bedrooms. And so we're not engaging with a the kind of outside world. And there's all that fear of FOMO if you leave a conversation partway through. But knowing that you're going to end it at this point. And then the phone goes away. I think it does seem to help. We'll see as the kids get older, they're 13 now, 12 and 13. But for me, it certainly helps that it kind of bookends those conversations. And we allow that time to slip sometimes. But we do all put our phones away to charge elsewhere, they certainly don't stay by our beds. And removing those devices also removes access to the outside world and the ever depressing kind of news and stuff. And there's also a whole ton of research around blue light that comes off screens and how that activates and energizes. Good in the morning helps you to wake up blue light, but not great at night when you're trying to go to sleep. So removing devices, screens and any other sort of distractions from your room. So your bedroom, your place of sleep needs to be a place of sleep, not a place where you're going to be distracted by other things. So again, if you've been working on some sort of gnarly work problem or something and you've got some, I don't know, your laptop or a book or something that's going to remind you about that problem, get it out of sight and out of mind, actually remove it from the room or put it somewhere where you're not going to be reminded of it and tipping straight back into that problem again. So I find personally keeping the bedroom or the sleep area, you might not have like the privilege of having a whole separate room that's only for sleeping. But if that's the case, the sleep zone of the room. So even if it's just literally the bed, keeping that just for sleeping, not involving it with other tasks, that wouldn't be a place that would be encouraging children to sit and do their homework, for example, or even sitting and having like big, deep conversations. I'd encourage them to sit elsewhere in the room or just go elsewhere. Bed is for sleeping. We need our brain to know that, link it with sleeping, not with problems, not with homework, not with other things. And then finally, the final R is for relax. So this is about actually trying to get to a point where we can allow sleep to wrap around us like a big, cosy blanket. We can slow things down, let our thoughts just drift by and get ourselves to a calm space and actually physically get to the point of sleep. Sleep can be really challenging for some people. And I think, you know, there's a whole big other topic. But trying again to get into a little bit of a habit about what we do as we're going to sleep, we can help our body to condition itself to having certain expectations. So when I smell this thing or hear this noise or feel this feeling, then I am getting ready to go to sleep. So we've often used music in our house to help with sleep. So we'll have some music or sounds that will make us feel sleepy. So I will never in my life be able to hear. There's a song by Mogwai that when Lyra was a small child, she listened to on repeat all night, every night. As she was going to sleep and I would sit with her as she was going to sleep and then she would leave it going all night and I'd sit with her for quite a long time. You take a long time to get to sleep. And this song would just be on repeat and it's a beautiful song. Literally, if it comes up on a kind of playlist or something, I start yawning because I've heard it so much in relation to sleep in that dark room, in that calm, quiet as she's trying to go to sleep. And it's the same for her. I've noticed it. If it comes on, she's like, oh, you know, it's really, really funny. And I have a similar one. I listen to a podcast as I'm going to sleep. I need the sound of kind of voices. But as my sleep's got better and better, I don't hear a lot of that podcast anymore. And just the opening music of it is enough just to make me begin to feel pretty tired. So having little things that you do the same way each day can just, yeah, remind your brain, oh, yeah, when this piece of music comes on, then I'm ready for sleep. Equally, it might be, you know, putting on your nice cosy pajamas and that sort of sensory input is telling your body it's time for sleep or perhaps you have a particular smell that you use in your room. It's about giving yourself cues. It's time to relax. It's time to go to sleep now. And then as we actually sort of enter our bed, just making sure that we are comfortable. We're at a good temperature. We can relax. We've kind of shelved all of our worries for tomorrow. And we can think about really entering a nice calm place. You might use breathing strategies or breathing exercises or just focus in on breathing more slowly and deeply. All distractions gone and for giving yourself as well. If you don't fall asleep right away, one of the biggest blockers to sleep is worrying about sleep. And so a really important thing to remember is that rest is almost as restorative as sleep. So actually just being in your bed as long as you're not stressing about it and being there and being restful and maybe just listening to a podcast or something like that, just gently, calmly will be really restorative for you too. And in time, you know, sleep will come. And as we build these habits up, it does tend to become a little bit easier. Of course, there's loads of barriers to sleep for some people. And there might be all sorts of things that mean that this really simple stuff that we've talked about today, which is really designed just for general population ideas that generally work to improve our sleep a little bit, that you might need a bit more support and help than that. And I'd be really happy to dive a bit deeper into some of those sorts of topics if you let me know what's of interest. But as a general rule in terms of improving our sleep, because we do not, as a general population, do enough of the right things that we really do know would help in order to help us. These are what I think will help routine, restful, removing distractions, removing worries and then trying to get to a nice, relaxed state as we ready ourselves for sleep. I hope there are some helpful ideas in there. And remember, it's not about trying to make massive changes. It's about thinking what's the next tiny, tiny step that I might be able to take in order to embrace this just a little bit more, give myself a little bit more sleep or a little bit better quality sleep. Tiny, tiny steps make all the difference. OK, until next time over and out.