So hello everyone and welcome to this Fitness Passport Sleep webinar.
I'm Toby, a partnership manager here at Fitness
Passport and I'm here with my colleagues from the fitness from the Partnership
team.
We're really excited to be hosting this session today and introducing you to our
keynote speaker and exploring the connection between sleep,
exercise and well being to help you find your rhythm as we head into 2025.
Now I'd like to start by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of country
throughout Australia and acknowledge their continuing connection to land,
waters and community.
We pay our respects to the people, the cultures and the elders,
past and present and future leaders.
I'd like to acknowledge the Maori and Moriori peoples of Altaroa,
New Zealand and their rich contribution to society.
I'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone here today.
We've had a significant and positive response to this webinar with attendees
from across Australia and New Zealand spread over 5 different time zones.
So whether you're just finishing your morning coffee in WA or you've got the
kettle on for your afternoon cuppa in New Zealand, thank you for joining us.
Now, we have a large number of attendees here
today who are not current members of Fitness Passport.
So before I hand you over to our presenter,
I'm going to give you a quick overview of how Fitness Passport works and how you
and your family can benefit from this member based, membership based programme.
We partner with organisations throughout Australia and New Zealand to provide
employees and their families access to a wide variety of health and fitness
centres for a single fee.
Our aim is to make it as easy as possible for you and your family to lead an active
and healthy lifestyle and to do it in a cost effective way.
A Fitness Passport membership provides access to a large network of gyms,
swimming pools and leisure centres.
Members and their families get access to these facilities like any standard member
would and this includes weight rooms, includes group classes,
pool facilities and for 2724, seven places round the clock access.
Now here's the good bit.
Members can visit any facility on their programme.
You can go to as many facilities as you like, and you can go as often as you like.
So all Fitness Passport partner organisations have their own unique
programme page.
This is where you can find all facilities and programme information.
The interactive map makes it easy to explore facilities and the different
activities they offer.
There are details of the packages and pricing available and you can sign up now.
Package wise we have individual, family and dependent child memberships
available.
So individual memberships is for the for the employee.
Family membership includes you as the employee,
your partner and all children of yours under 18.
Independent child membership is for children of yours between 18 and 25 who
still live at home.
Now for Australian organisations, we also have different levels of
membership, the Silver membership which gives access
to state based facilities and we have a Gold membership which gives access to our
national network and the only option in New Zealand.
All membership cards are digital and are accessed via our My FP app.
So once you've signed up, you'll be prompted to download this if
you haven't already done so.
Essentially this makes everything easier as it's all on your phone.
So it's got a good user friendly facility map,
it's got fast easy check in via QR code scan and it's very simple to add family
members.
Now to find your employer's Fitness Passport programme page,
simply visit fitnesspassport. com dot AU to contact us and our friendly
operations team will provide you with the correct link.
OK, thanks for listening about to Fitness
Passport info.
Now some quick digital housekeeping before we get into the presentation.
Due to attendance numbers we have disabled the chat but reactions are
turned on so feel free to use those throughout the session.
We have had a great response to the pre event Sleep Knowledge and Behaviour
survey, so thank you to all those for taking part.
Doctor Bin's presentation will include answers to many of those of the themes
and questions raised and we'll address any other questions raised following the
presentation.
So I'll be back with a bit more fitness passport info at the end,
but let's move on to the main topic for the day, sleep.
Now, we all know how important a role sleep
plays in maintaining positive health and quality of life,
but too often we fall prey to life's competing attentions.
We thought, what better time than the start of the
year to reassess sleep habits and get some expert opinion into the key elements
of sleep hygiene and the impact of physical activity on sleep and circadian
rhythms.
That's my absolute pleasure to introduce you to Doctor Yu Sun Bin,
epidemiologist and public health researcher at the University of Sydney's
Charles Perkins Centre.
Doctor Bin's expertise is on habitual sleep as a lifestyle risk factor and the
impact of disordered sleep on public health in Australia.
She has more than 16 years experience in quantitative health research and has
previously consulted for the World Bank.
Sun, over to you.
Thanks very much Toby for the introduction and thanks everyone for
being here and the to the Fitness Passport team for organising.
I'm just going to share my slides.
OK, Wow.
I just saw, you know, everyone who's attending pop up on my
screen.
That was many, many boxes.
OK, so hopefully you can all see my slides.
Please yell out Toby if you can't.
Yes, that's all good.
Fantastic.
So the Fitness Passport team has put together a great survey to help anchor
some elements of this talk.
I think there are about 300 people who responded to this survey and you can see
that the majority, so around 60% are saying, you know,
we have very good sleep quality or very fairly good sleep quality.
But there is definitely room for improvement and hopefully some of what
I'll say today will have some practical relevance for what you do at home and
does sort of move everyone up into that very good, fairly good sleep quality spec.
Yes.
OK, so why sleep?
I mean, you're clearly here because you think
it's important and something that, you know,
we should think more about from a biology evolutionary perspective.
It uses up a lot of time.
And so the thinking is very much that if sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital
biological function, then it's the biggest mistake that
evolution has ever made.
And this is just a quote from one of the modern fathers of sleep research.
So why is it that we sleep?
I guess the most obvious reason from a daily functioning perspective is all
around emotional well being.
So sleep is really a time for us to process emotional information.
And what we find in the research is that sleep deprived people have a stronger
response to negative things.
They're more reactive, would say, to images like this picture of the lipid
and it's threatening, it's negative, and we tend to pay more attention to that
information.
And if we're sleep deprived, we actually have a reduced response to
positive things like the picture of the cute puppy.
And so you can see that overall sleep deprived people are going to have a much
more negative view of the world and perhaps miss and don't pay attention to
some of the more the things that make our lives better.
The picture of the seal, I should add, is just an example of something that's
neutral in our research studies.
So in terms of our long term health, the strongest,
strongest evidence is around how important sleep is for our mental health.
Because if we follow people over time, over the course of months and years,
we see that the people with poor sleep are at double the risk of developing
depression, anxiety and unfortunately suicidal
thinking and behaviour.
More recently, within the past 50 years or so,
we've accumulated more information about the role of not getting enough sleep,
so insufficient sleep on physical health.
So there's an increased miss risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity.
There's a risk of cognitive decline and dementia in people who don't get enough
sleep.
And overall, this adds up to a higher risk for
premature death.
And that includes deaths due to heart disease and diabetes,
but also due to things like accidents and injuries.
And that's both sort of car accidents, but also workplace accidents.
So one of the very important areas where there's been a lot of work is around
recognising that sleep is part of a healthy lifestyle.
I think historically we're focused on what we eat and nutrition and physical
activity as being our daily behaviours that contribute to our overall health and
well being.
But we've neglected sort of that, you know, the other third of our day,
our sleep.
So how does sleep interact with these other health behaviours?
Well, increasingly we're recognising that what
happens at night is really important for what happens during the day and vice
versa.
So we know that for physical activity, lack of sleep actually increases the
perceived effort of exercise.
So if you think exercise is going to be difficult,
you're less likely to engage in that exercise.
The other thing that is very interesting about this is that if you are sleep
deprived one night, maybe get a couple of hours less than
you're used to and you go to the gym.
What we find that objectively, you're still able to swim your lap or
still still able to, you know, do your jog on the treadmill and it's the
sort of same amount of effort for your heart and your lungs and or your muscles.
But it's the subjective that is change.
So even though you're working as hard as you would normally,
you feel that that work is harder.
The other aspect of how lack of sleep influences physical exercise is around
exhaustion.
So you feel exhausted or closer to exhaustion in less physical activity than
you would normally.
So again, both of these things add up together to
mean that lack of sleep equals less physical activity.
From a nutrition or diet perspective, we know that lack of sleep alters the
regulation of your appetite.
So there are increases and decreases in appetite regulating hormones.
So hormone corn ghrelin produces more hunger or more feelings of hunger when
we're sleep deprived and a hormone called leptin changes.
So that means that we actually feel less full.
There's less satiety when we are sleep deprived.
So that those things together mean that we might eat more and we also might eat
more unhealthy foods.
So make unhealthy food choices because again, we have these changes in appetite,
but we also have this subjective fatigue where we feel tired and that makes us
crave high energy calorie dense foods.
So this slide is just around how sleep effects our productivity.
And if we think about that spectrum of having good sleep,
having not very good sleep, all the way to having insomnia,
which is a clinically significant sleep disorder.
It really effects our ability to focus and to pay attention at work,
but also at school.
I've got here absenteeism, which is around how often people are away
from work.
And you can see that if we have good sleep where you know,
over the course of the month, maybe away an hour from work on average,
whereas someone with a clinically significant sleep disorder is going to
lose about a day a month away from work because of their sleep disorder.
The other metric that I've got is around presenteeism.
So turning up to work and just not being able to focus and get your work done.
And again, you can see, yeah, you know, most of us do some faffing at work and
maybe we're not always concentrating as much as we can,
but it's very few hours over the course of a work month.
Whereas for someone with poor sleep, that increases to maybe one or two days
lost per month.
And someone with clinically significant insomnia,
where their sleep is disturbed sort of more nights than not,
they're going to lose about a whole week due to presentism.
So how much sleep do we actually need?
Well, these are the current sleep duration
recommendations.
It's between 7:00 to 9:00 hours for adults who are aged between 26 to 64
years, younger adults.
So those under 25 need a bit more, but the idea really is that you should
feel refreshed during the day and not sleepy.
The other thing to keep in mind with some of these global recommendations is that
people are very variable in how much sleep they need.
So between 6:00 to 10:00 hours might actually be appropriate for you.
So the way that I like to frame this is to say, well,
allow yourself sufficient sleep opportunity.
So actually spend enough time to in bed so that you get the hours that you need.
So we have some interesting results from the survey that you did before the
session, which is that from the 300 people who
responded on an average work night, you're reporting around just under 8
hours of sleep, which is great that it's not less,
although a bit worrying that some people are sleeping only three hours on a free
night, which is not a work night.
So a Friday night or a Saturday night, for those of us who work sort of Monday
to Fridays, we're sleeping more.
And this is really important to see, first of all,
because it tells me that there might be a little bit of sleep debt from your work
days that you're having to catch up on your weekend nights,
but also that there's inconsistency then in how much we're we're sleeping on work
nights versus free nights.
And this is very, very common.
So how do we change that?
Our advice is always around allowing yourself enough opportunity for sleep
every night, and to prioritise sleep every night.
So allow yourself enough time in bed, including some time to actually fall
asleep and then some time to wake up naturally without an alarm if you can.
That's sometimes a little bit scary to do because you know you have to wake up at a
certain time for work.
But the more you can do that without an alarm,
the more it shows that you are actually getting the sleep that you need and that
your sleep is not being disrupted by the alarm and you're waking up in the middle
of your sleep cycles.
The other sort of metric that I want to introduce to you all is around sleep
quality.
So one of the ways we calculate sleep quality is using sleep efficiency,
which is the proportion of time that you spend actually sleeping over the total
amount of time we spend in bed.
And what we want this number to be is to be high, but not at 100%.
So the reason we don't want you to basically fall asleep as soon as your
head hits the pillow and to get out of bed as soon as you wake up is because
that's an indication that you're probably not allowing enough time for sleep.
Because you're falling asleep as soon as you get into bed and you're waking up as
soon as your alarm goes off.
We want to allow that extra sort of buffer time to fall asleep naturally and
also to wake up actually.
So the second message I really want to get across today is around how sleep is
the function of two processes, sleep pressure and the circadian rhythm.
So I'll go into these in a bit more detail.
So sleep pressure is probably the part of the sleep system that we pay more
attention to.
Basically, the longer we've been awake, the stronger our desire to sleep.
It's pretty obvious, right?
So the longer we've been awake, the more sleepy we feel.
And then during sleep we are essentially dissipating that sleep pressure or
alleviating that sleep pressure.
The other process, which is maybe less obvious is the
circadian rhythm or body clock.
And it's this idea that we all have 24 hours biological cycles that help us
essentially survive on Earth where there is a 24 hour cycle of day and night time.
And almost all living organisms have circadian rhythms.
Now, the only living organisms that don't have
circadian rhythms are those that don't get that 24 hour cycle of day and night.
So, you know, things that live really, really deep in the ocean and things that,
you know, live in caves.
So the circadian rhythms are really fundamental to our biology and
fundamental to our sleep.
So for humans, the circadian rhythm, or the body clock regulates all of our
Physiology.
And a key input is the level of light in the environment and that's detected by
special cells in our eyes.
And it basically sends a signal to the brain to say it is this bright outside,
therefore it is this time.
So without that light input, our internal clock or internal body clock
or circadian rhythm, there's different names for it.
That clock can run fast or slow because our innate Physiology might not be
exactly 24 hours.
So for about 75% of us, without any light input from the
environment, we will naturally live a day as if it
were 24 longer than 24 hours.
Whereas for others, about 25% of us, if we don't have that light input,
we will live a day that's shorter than 24 hours long.
And that's why it's really, really essential to be aware of light and
to get light input to tell the brain and the rest of the body what time it is in
the environment.
OK, so I've mentioned that the circadian
rhythm regulates lots of processes, including sleep and wakefulness,
but also a physical performance, cognitive performance,
our metabolisms and our immune response.
I guess to sum up, the role of the circadian rhythm is
really to make sure that not everything happens at the same time.
To give you more of an example about circadian rhythms and how it influences
particularly physical activity and physical exercise.
We know that reaction time, the flexibility of our joints,
the strength and the power of our muscles, all of these things peak in the late
afternoon and early evening, and that's a direct result of our
circadian rhythms.
We also know that in the late afternoon and early evening around the same time,
our perception of how hard physical activity is is at the lowest,
meaning that physical activity seems easiest at that sort of late afternoon,
early evening time.
So if you're just getting into exercise, maybe scheduling your exercise in the
late afternoon or early evening is the way to go to make it seem easier for
yourself.
We find that generally for endurance type activities that tends to be stable
throughout the day.
So the chart and illustration is just showing this peak in performance for
hockey players.
So you can see the peak again, peak performance is sort of around four,
4:00 PM for them.
So this slide is around alertness and how important, again circadian rhythms are,
because our levels of alertness are driven by the circadian rhythm as well as
our levels of sleepiness.
So what you can see on these charts is basically that our risk of motor vehicle
accidents is directly opposite to our levels of alertness as determined by
circadian rhythms.
We have our lowest alertness levels around sort of 4:00 AM in the morning in
the early hours and that's also the highest risk for car accidents,
even though there aren't that many people on the roads at this time of day.
The other sort of peak in rather the sort of low in alertness that we notice might
be your post lunch low.
So for some of you, you will notice that you know you'll have
to your lunch and then you feel like you're in need of a nap.
Part of that is due to the need to digest your lunch,
but the other part of that is due to your circadian rhythm.
So basically what's happening at that point in time is your sleepiness has been
increasing.
It's about halfway through your day now, so you're building up a fair bit of sleep
pressure and the desire to sleep.
But also at the same time, your circadian rhythm has just started
decreasing.
So your circadian rhythm of alertness is decreasing and you're sleepiness is
increasing and that's why you get that lull and that desire to sleep after lunch.
So one of the key takeaways then is to improve the regularity of our circadian
vythms to try and improve the quality of that sleep because our sleep is dependent
on not only the sleep process, but also the circadian vythm process.
And the practical takeaway is to aim for a consistent bedtime or a consistent wait
time.
And I think most of you who did the survey recognise that going to bed at the
same time and waking up at the same time each day does have an impact on sleep.
The advice around aiming for a consistent bedtime or consistent wait time,
you can simplify that and just aim for one or the other because typically if you
have a consistent bedtime, you will be able to get a consistent wait
time after a few days.
And equally, if you have a consistent wait time,
you will naturally feel sleepy around the same time every night.
The other aspect of sleep regularity I want to touch on is around this idea of
social jet lag.
So it is very easy for most of us to go to bed late on the weekend because we can
and because we have time to sleep in on the weekends.
And so if the time we go to bed and the time we wake up is later on weekends
compared to work day nights or weekday nights,
it means that on Mondays we're forced to get up earlier and forced to go to bed
earlier on Sunday night.
And that causes a type of jet lag because we're essentially trained ourselves over
the weekend to go to bed later, and then we're forced to shift our
circadian rhythm earlier on Mondays.
So having a consistent bedtime and a consistent wait time on both work days
and weekends will help overcome that social jet lag.
What about for shift workers?
I know some of you who did the survey are shift workers and you just can't have
regular bedtimes and wait times because your work dictates when you can sleep.
A lot of the advice that we give around sleep do consider the timing of things
and therefore need to be tailored to shift workers.
So our advice around the sleep schedule and bedtimes awake times is to have the
same bedtime and the same wake time for a particular type of shift.
So if you work day shifts, your bedtimes are going to be consistent
for your day shifts, whereas if you work night shifts,
you're going to have a consistent bedtime for your night shifts.
And I've put a link here to the sleep guidelines for shift workers because we
do know that you know, they, you do have different needs to people who
work office hours.
And so they're worthwhile checking out just to have a look at how the advice is
tailored to you, particularly around the timing of things.
OK, so how else can we improve our circadian
rhythms or the regularity of our circadian rhythms #1 is to try and spend
time outdoors during the day.
This is a chart from a camping study.
So essentially, a bunch of researchers went camping and
they had a look at how much light they were exposed to.
I think it's in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
So you can see here that in black is the levels of natural light exposure and in
grey are the levels of electrical lighting.
So what they would normally get if they spent the day in the office,
and what you can see is that natural light is many,
many times brighter than artificial light in the office.
And you can see the profile.
Oh, I should mention that this is double
plotted as well.
So it's two days of natural light exposure compared to two days of light
exposure in their office or in their normal daily routines.
And I think the profiles of the light are really different as well because they're
getting under camping conditions, they're spending time outdoors,
they're getting all this sunlight exposure during the day between the hours
of sort of eight and 4:00 PM and they're getting no light exposure after sunset.
Whereas in an office environment, we sort of have a much more blunted
profile where we get some light during office hours,
mostly indoor office lighting, but we're also getting a fair bit of
light compared to not getting any at all after sunset.
So that profile of light exposure that we get is very different to the one that our
circadian rhythms actually evolved to try and cope with.
So it's very confusing for our cicadian rhythms.
When we do get light exposure at night.
Again, this is a schematic of what light
exposure we would get.
I think this study is in Melbourne actually.
So our light exposure due to natural sunset is in yellow and our home lighting
is in blue.
And you can see that we're getting lots of artificial light at night.
But the other thing to realise also is that our artificial lighting is very dim
relative to bright natural light.
So we, what we want is basically bright days and
dark nights.
And what we're getting instead when we're spending time indoors is sort of not very
bright days, but also not very dark nights.
And and that's making our circadian responses.
It's changing them from what they've evolved to, which of course,
brings us to the role of screens and sleep.
I'm sure you've all heard this advice about avoiding electronic screens and
sleep.
And that's because the cells in our eyes that detect light for the purpose of
circadian rhythms are most sensitive to the wavelengths that the electronic
screens emit.
So that's around sort of blue green type screens.
If you are interested in the particular light profile of your electronic devices,
you can go to this website I've got on the screen here.
Just you know, what's the light expert emitted by an
iPhone look like.
And you can see in grey is the is the chart for what wavelengths our melanopsin
cells or our special light detecting cells for circadian rhythms,
they're most sensitive to wavelengths around that 460 nanometer mark.
And you can see of course, your iPhone is also emitting a lot of
light in that range, so hence the advice to avoid screens as
much as possible, particularly close to bedtime.
So this was an exercise I believe the Fitness Passport team shared with you,
and you might want to do it for yourselves,
but just to be aware of light and darkness.
I've taken some pictures with a light metre app on my phone to show how bright,
you know your normal phone is compared to what happens if you use dark mode or
night shift or night mode.
It does help make a difference.
The other thing to know is that you know when we talk about lux,
we're talking about the bright.
Also, one lux is the brightness of 1 candle one
metre away.
So we're just trying to put a measurement on those levels of brightness.
This is another example of, you know, looking at your electronic screen at
night compared to the same electronic screen in dark mode.
So it does make a difference to how much light you're receiving through the eyes.
In an ideal scenario, you wouldn't be using screens at all
after sunset.
But I do understand that, yeah.
You know, they're a part of life.
And so you do sometimes have to do work or you know,
do your personal things on a computer, on a phone after dark.
So how important is light?
I'm sure some of you will be sitting there going, well,
I can still fall asleep and go to bed even though I've been on my smartphone.
And that's absolutely fantastic.
I guess who we're targeting with the light based advice tend to be the people
who are more sensitive to light than others,
and they're the ones who tend to be night owls because light has a strong impact on
them.
It's very easy for them to go to bed later and later and it's very hard to
essentially do the opposite and not be influenced by the lighting.
So this is just an example of that information.
So you may have heard of melatonin, which is sometimes known as the sleep
hormone.
Essentially, as soon as it gets dark, that's a cue for our brain and
particularly our pineal gland to generate melatonin,
melatonin which prepares the body for sleep.
So melatonin is rising after sunset and what we see in people who are sensitive
to light, they're much more, there's a greater reduction in melatonin
at very low levels of light.
So I said 1 lux is equivalent to 1 candle a metre away from me.
So even with the brightness of only 10 candles a metre away from me,
melatonin suppression is seen in those people who are sensitive to light.
Whereas for other people it's not until they get to sort of supermarket levels of
lighting that their sleep is influenced by the light.
So there is a very big range there.
So again, take home message is really for the night
owls, be more aware of your light exposure and
avoid screens and electronic devices after sunset.
And then the next question that commonly comes is, is watching TV.
OK.
So I think most of you in the pre survey said that watching TV in bed disrupts
sleep and that is true.
But there's different aspects of TV to consider.
So we talked about light at night and actually from a light at night
perspective, if you are watching TV in say,
for instance, your living room, your TV probably isn't emitting that much
light because you're sitting sort of further away.
If you're watching TV on in bed in your, you know,
with your laptop close to your eyes, that's not recommended.
There's the stimulating content of the TV show that you're watching.
That's something to be aware of, but the main thing I think I would like
you to sort of go home with is the idea that watching TV in bed or doing work in
bed is not recommended because we want to link being in bed and the bedroom with
being asleep rather than being awake.
So yes, watching in TV in bed we consider as
disruptive to sleep.
And that brings me to the idea of stimulus control it's called,
which is really a simple idea of the bedroom and the bed should be linked or
associated with with sleep.
And we don't want to introduce ideas of being awake or actually being awake in
bed or in the bedroom.
And so you may have heard the advice of what's called the bed restriction,
which is that if you're unable to sleep after about 20 or 30 minutes,
get out of bed, do something else and try later.
Now, I can see that this one in the pre survey
was a little bit controversial.
It's absolutely fine to stay in bed.
If you're someone who occasionally sort of wakes up and you know,
for 20 minutes and then you sort of slowly drift back to bed, that's sorry,
slowly drift back to sleep, that's absolutely fine.
The advice is really important though.
If you are someone who habitually wakes up and can't sleep for half an hour and
you're just lying there looking at your clock going, well, I need to wake up,
you know, tomorrow morning for an early meeting,
why can't I get back to bed?
It's really about not trying to sleep and trying to remove yourself from the bed so
that when you are in bed you are asleep and you can reassure yourself that the
bed is for sleep.
I think it goes probably without saying that all your electronic devices and
working in bed, all those things are known as and that's
all part of stimulus control and having a good sleep environment.
So I think I've talked already about sort of the importance of waking behaviours,
but here I'll talk a little bit more piece meal about individual behaviours
that contribute to the quality of our sleep,
but which also feedback into the quality of our wakefulness.
And really it's this idea that what we do while we're awake is really important.
It feeds into our sleep and then sort of feeds back into what we do when we're
awake.
So it can be a virtuous cycle, but it can also be a harmful cycle.
OK, so maybe #1 on your list as Fitness
passport members is physical activity, right?
So we know that we should aim for five hours of moderate intensity physical
activity each week or 2 1/2 hours of vigorous intensity exercise per week.
These are the current national guidelines.
Moderate intensity physical activity is exercise that you can do but still carry
on a conversation.
Whereas vigorous intensity exercise is where you're exercising such that you're
huffing and puffing and you can't carry on a conversation with somebody while
you're doing it.
What we know is that physical activity improves the quality of our sleep.
It increases the total time that we're actually asleep when we're in bed,
and it also makes it easier to help us fall asleep.
Now we're there's some uncertainty is around the idea of should we exercise
within two hours of our bedtime?
Now historically we didn't recommend exercising strenuously within two hours
of bedtime because we thought that would disrupt sleep.
Now I think there's a bit more research come out to say,
we know that if you start an exercise programme and you do this sort of close
to sleep, it will change the nature of your sleep.
But once you get into that exercise, it does not disrupt your sleep.
But it's unfortunately an ongoing area of research.
And one of the reasons why exercising before bedtime might still disrupt sleep
is because of the role physical activity has on a circadian rhythms.
So we know that if we exercise outdoors during the day,
that's a good opportunity to get light exposure and synchronise our circadian
rhythms to the day night cycle.
But now there's new research to say that exercise by itself, separately from light,
might act on circadian rhythms.
So if we exercise at moderate intensity for one hour in the morning or in the
afternoon, what we see is that exercise seems to
bring forward people's natural bedtimes, so makes you fall asleep about an hour
earlier.
Whereas when people exercised in the evening,
the exercise actually delayed their circadian rhythms.
So meaning that their natural bedtimes or the time at which they naturally would
feel sleepy, was delayed by about an hour.
So this is, I guess, one reason to be cautious about
exercising too late because not only is there an impact of the exercise on
circadian rhythms, but while you're exercising you are
exposed to artificial light.
Having said that, you know, if exercising within two hours of bedtime
is the only time you can exercise, I think everyone recognises that physical
activity is incredibly important for health.
So we're not going to sort of discourage that.
And we really need sort of a bit more research here to try and figure out what
exactly this piece of advice should be.
So sorry I can't be more definitive on that point.
I guess to take home is really be aware of your light exposure.
If you're someone who's not that sensitive and exercise before bed is the
only time you can do it, feel free to do it.
I should add that this is specific to more strenuous or moderate to vigorous
intensity.
Exercise doesn't apply to things like yoga and Pilates,
which is at a lower intensity and doesn't seem to have the same effects on sleep.
I'll talk a little bit about alcohol.
I think most of you are already aware that yes, alcohol does impact sleep.
Basically the more alcohol you have within about two hours of sleep,
the greater the impact of that alcohol on your sleep.
So there's, if you have 4 or more strength standard
drinks, there's about a 5 to 10% change in your
sleep.
So what does that change look like?
Usually means, and I'm sorry I have a lot of technical
language on this slide, but basically it means you fall asleep
more quickly.
It increases what's called slow weight sleep, which is your deep sleep,
but unfortunately it delays the start of your REM sleep in the second half of the
night and also decreases the amount of REM sleep we have.
The other thing that alcohol increases is the amount of wakefulness or what's
called WAZO wakefulness after sleep onset over the course of the night.
So it is changing the nature of your sleep and overall introducing more
wakefulness and reducing the total amount of sleep that you get.
So even though it helps you fall asleep, exercise, exercise,
alcohol really isn't recommended as a way to try and promote your sleep.
The other one that people are already aware of is around caffeine.
I think the main thing to be aware of with caffeine is that the timing of
ingestion is really important because of the half life of caffeine being quite
long.
So it takes about six hours for your body to process half of the caffeine that
you've consumed.
And so if you work sort of backwards from your bedtime,
do you still want that amount of caffeine in your system?
So if you went to bed at 10:00 PM and you had a coffee at 4:00 in the afternoon,
then you're still going to have around 100 grammes of caffeine in your system.
So again, this is something that's sort of
dependent on individual sensitivity to caffeine.
But if you are sensitive, it would be ideal to basically avoid
caffeine in the afternoons.
And I think the advice from my colleagues in nutrition is to be very aware of what
things contain caffeine because there are things like dark chocolate,
which can contain a fair bit of caffeine depending on, you know,
how much you eat and energy, energy drinks where the caffeine content
may not be that obvious.
The other sort of newer research that's coming out about caffeine is that again,
it seems to be something that potentially delays circadian rhythms.
So this particular study found that if you had a double,
double espressos 3 hours before bed, it actually pushed back your natural
bedtime by about by about 40 minutes.
And that's not including the direct impact of caffeine on your sleep quality
as well.
OK, so the main takeaways from this talk are
really to prioritise sleep.
Allow enough, allow yourself enough time in bed for
sleep gives you give yourself a bit of time to wind down,
go to bed and wake up at the same time every day if you possibly can,
including weekends and holidays.
And be aware of and use light to your advantage and use all the blue light
philtres that you have on your computers and your smartphones.
But more importantly, spend time outdoors, particularly soon after you wake up
because that's when we're expecting bright light in the mornings and that
will help you go to bed at the same time and wake up around the same time every
day.
OK.
If you do feel like you need professional help for sleep problems,
it's important to be aware of sort of who to go to.
Go to your GP in the first instance and they will refer you to either a sleep
physician who is a specialist in respiratory disorders,
but also a sleep specialist.
And you know, they can do things like an overnight
sleep study and diagnose particular sleep disorders if there is a problem,
generally with insomnia.
So that's difficulties with sleep on more nights than not during the week and a
significant impairment in what you can do during the day.
You will most likely to be referred to a clinical psychologist with sleep training.
One of the things that you could do for yourself is to have a look at online
treatment for insomnia.
So this this way up has a good online cognitive behavioural therapy for
insomnia course that you might like to look into before.
Maybe you want to seek professional treatment.
And then other resources are just around different aspects of sleep.
I mean, this is a really, really big topic and my talk just really
touches the sort of the top of the iceberg.
There are some books that talk about South Internal Time is a great book on
circadian rhythms.
Matthew Walker's While We Sleep has been on the bestseller lists for a long time
and hopefully is a great primer.
Hopefully you will have read it, but it is a great primer as to why sleep
is important.
If you're worried about sleep in your kids,
have a listen to this podcast from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.
If you're someone who enjoys napping, there's a great book on naps.
And then if you're worried about sort of bed partners and potentially, you know,
you have one, one partner who is a shift worker and you
work office hours and you have different sleep schedules and you're thinking about,
oh, what do we do?
A Sleeping Apart is a great book by an Australian author that sort of deals with
some of these issues.
And I think I've mentioned the links already.
So thank you very much and I'll hand over to Toby for questions.
So, and thank you, that's very insightful.
It's really, it's a obviously a huge topic to cover,
but really appreciate you, you know, giving us a, an overview of all of that.
It's really fantastic to get some real interesting points.
I I'm particularly interested in hearing about circadian rhythms and how they're,
it just regulates so many processes within the body.
Absolutely no, I have a fair amount of work to do,
particularly with my sleep efficiency and things.
So, you know, certainly keen to, to look at a,
a whole range of those things and hopefully that's provided people with a
bit of some great info to take home.
Now I, I did just want to expand.
So I know we had, there's been quite a few questions raised
in the Q&A.
So thank you for those.
And I'm not sure that we're going to get time to,
to hit all of those given that we are sort of running out of time.
We did ask people to, to provide some questions in the pre
event service.
So look, thank you so much for those people that
did that.
There were a few questions, a number of questions that got asked and
we've broken it down into some sort of key themes and I just thought I'd briefly
touch on some of those that came up with you soon.
I know you touched on melatonin, but there was a,
quite a few people had asked about melatonin, its general effectiveness.
And then also with for people during pregnancy or also during sleep
disruptions due to hormonal changes such as menopause, that sort of thing.
And, and are you able to speak to, to that?
Yeah, so I'll, I'll talk about supplements first.
So in general, melatonin is only available by
prescription in Australia.
So if you think you do need to take it, please do go to your GP and ask them
about it.
I believe the advice is a it's currently only available for people who are aged 55
and above for their, that's what it's approved for.
It's approved for improving sleep in people aged 55 and above.
Now having said that, I know you can get melatonin overseas.
If you travel, you can get melatonin supplements.
And so again, I would probably recommend that you speak
to your GP about it, mainly because of potential sort of
safety concerns.
We know there's been some research to show that sometimes when you buy
melatonin over the counter in North America,
there's quite a bit of sort of very variability in the dose of melatonin
that's in each sort of tablet or capsule.
And the other thing is just make sure to take your melatonin at the right time for
you, which is depending on when you go to go
to sleep, it's generally in the hour before bedtime.
It's generally used as a sleep aid rather than a cue to the circadian rhythm per SE.
But if you have, you know, a circadian disorder or if you're a shift
worker, you can use melatonin as a cue to the
circadian rhythm as well to help you, you know, adjust, for instance,
to night shift.
So, you know, that's something to talk more to your
sleep physician or your sleep psychologist about if you do use it as a
prescription medication.
Great.
OK, thank you.
That's great advice on that.
And obviously there's a few up on the screen there,
but there was one other that I was keen to touch on that got raised a few times.
So it's around sleep stages.
And again, I know you touched on this in a talk,
but around the different stages.
So light deep R.E.M.
sleep.
And how much of each of these is optimal?
Yeah, look, I want to tell people not to worry about
their sleep stages because guess what?
Your brain is going to work it out for you.
So your natural sleep stages go from, you know, stage 1,
which is the process of falling asleep, to stage 2, which is sort of light sleep.
And then stage 3 is your deep sleep or your slow wave sleep.
And then you get into your REM sleep, which sort of in terms of brain activity
looks a lot like you're being awake, but it's also when you're having,
you know, your bizarre dreams.
And I say not to worry about that because when you're sleep deprived,
your brain will naturally prioritise deep sleep, slow wave sleep.
So it will go into that sleep as slow wave sleep earlier,
over and above the other sleep stages.
So I think the main things to be aware of when it comes to the sleep stages is your
brain will work it out how much you spend in each sleep stage,
but also to give yourself the opportunity to get a full sleep cycle,
particularly at the end of a night's sleep.
So, you know, being woken by your alarm in the middle
of your deep sleep is horrible, makes you feel groggy, you're not ready,
ready to wake up and it's you're in the middle of that sleep cycle.
The other thing I would note is that at the end of every sleep cycle,
which is about 90 minutes, there's a very brief period of waking up.
That might be one minute, that might be 5 minutes.
Most people don't notice this at all because there's four to six sleep cycles
each night.
So you might wake up four to six times.
Most of us don't notice.
If you do notice, just be aware that you know that's normal
and it's likely that you'll fall asleep soon within, you know,
and go into your next sleep cycle.
So that's the two main things.
Fantastic.
All right, that's great.
And look across the board there's, you know lots of lots of excellent
information hopefully for for everyone here.
And I know they've been a lot of questions that have come up on the Q&
A.
I'm going to probably I'll come on to a start in a SEC that where we can,
you can provide some information to us and we can hopefully answer some of those
questions down the track.
I'm conscious of time somewhat.
So just before we close proceedings for the day,
I just wanted to quickly loop back into Fitness Passport and talk about a couple
of I'll share some of the feedback we received from our annual survey.
Last year.
We had 22,000 responses, couple of key ones here, 91% of that 22,
000 said that Fitness Passport helped them achieve their movement goals and
some other interesting stats on there.
And part of being part of Fitness Passport employees said that on average
they increased their level of physical activity by 157%.
So from 2 1/2 days per week to 3. 9 days per week since becoming a member
of Fitness Passport.
So you know, there's some great reasons there to to
use Fitness Passport for your benefit and well being,
whether it be for your mental health, your physical health,
your sleep health or your work life balance.
You know, we'd like to just have a look at what
Fitness Passport offers.
Really only remains for me to thank Doctor Usain Bin for her wonderful
presentation today.
Really appreciative of her expertise and time.
It was a incredibly insightful and interesting talk.
I know I'll be putting your advice to good use and I trust that there's some
valuable information that everyone will take away with you too.
So thank you, Sun.
Now for those of you that have and I, I was going to just jump in and say I've,
I can see all the great questions and I'm we're going to try and take them down
somehow and get back to you all with some sort of
responseyeswevegotthiswebinars@fitnesspassport.com dot AU email address for anyone that's
got specific questions today.
There's a range in the Q& A that people have put in and I apologise
that we haven't had the time to get to all of those, but we will.
We will attempt to address those and, and email you back with some,
some responses to see what we can give you some, some information about that.
Just so, so please do send any, any through to that email address on the
screen there.
There were a couple of questions about sharing some of the information provided.
Happy to share some of those resources that you provided soon and also that
circadian rhythm chart and a few other things we can share with people.
So there will be a post event survey.
This, this has been recorded and we will send
it out to everyone to your employers after today.
And so, you know, we, we really hope you will encourage your
colleagues to check it out as well and, and find out some,
some great information about, about sleep.
So I just wanted to really just leave me that.
Thank you all for attending today.
We really appreciate everyone's time being with us,
so do look out for this post event survey where you can provide some feedback as
well as suggest some other topics and themes that you would like to see us
cover at any other future Fitness Passport webinars.
So thank you, Sun Thank you everyone for attending.
It's been a great and informative session.
We'll reach out to us at the webinars email address for any other questions.
And that's it from us today.
Remember, keep moving and sleep well, everyone.
Thanks everyone.