Nicola Barclay’s Top Tip for Optimising Your Sleep

During her recent Q&A with Mammoth, Dr Nicola Barclay, Sleep Scientist and Psychologist, explains her number one tip on how to optimise your sleep and feel refreshed every morning.

“So, consistency in bedtime and consistency in the wake-up time. We don’t necessarily always have control over the time we wake up or the time that we go to bed, but we need to optimise our environment to set that up nicely. Imagine if you go to bed at 10 pm one night and that’s your optimum time to go to bed, we wake up at our optimum time – fantastic. But the following night, we might go out somewhere or go to bed later, and we’ve missed our sleep optimisation zone, so we have these kind of optimum zones where we can get to sleep easily and wake up easily so we’ve missed that initial cue. We then might sleep in a little bit later the following morning to make up for the fact that we’ve had a late night and the circadian rhythm is then kind of pushed out of sync and this then contributes to how you get to sleep the next night so even one night of inconsistency in your bedtime can kind of spiral over successive nights.

If we go to bed consistently at our optimum time and wake up at our optimum time every day, even at weekends, and resist that urge to have a lie in then our circadian rhythm will be nicely in tune. Otherwise, it doesn’t know when to secrete melatonin, so it works on a very functional clock and that clock is well timed and if we behaviourally override the ticking of that clock it can then go awry and make it difficult to get to sleep the next night. So, bedtime consistency and wake-time consistency is my top tip, no lie-ins at the weekend, and I know that’s difficult if people haven’t had enough sleep during the week. But I’m hopeful now that people are able to get enough sleep with more flexible work times and more understanding about individual differences in sleep timing, trying to make awareness of individual differences in chronotype and favouring people going to bed and working in accordance to their chronotype, hopefully, we should be able to reduce that sleep deprivation that we might see across the working week so we don’t need to sleep in at weekends and risk messing up the ticking of our clock.”

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