BBC News Podcast
- "BBC Education Podcast" از ARMINIC PODCAST توسط ARMINIC.com. منتشرشده: 2024. ترک 106. سبک: PODCAST.
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Hello and welcome to this podcast from the BBC World Service. Please let us know what you think and tell other people about us on social media. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising. Tired of ads barging into your favourite news podcasts? Good news. Ad free listening on Amazon Music is included with your prime membership. Just head to Amazon.com slash ad freenewspodcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Enjoy thousands of Akash shows ad free for prime subscribers. Some shows may have ads this message comes from BOF sponsor eBay. You’ll know real when you get it. It’ll say eBay authenticity guarantee and you’ll feel it. Maybe it’s a head turning handbag, a watch that says it all, jewellery that makes you look like the gem, or sneakers and street wear so fresh every step feels fly. EBay gets it, so look for the blue cheque mark next to that thing you love. And be confident that every inch, stitch, sole and logo is checked by experts with eBay authenticity guarantee. You can trust that feeling of real is always in reach. Ensure your next purchase is the real deal. Visit ebay.com for terms. Sleep is an elixir. A good night’s rest can reset and boost your mood, your energy. It can, in the long term, transform your health. But sleep can also be elusive. A third of us struggle with it, myself included. So for all of you who crave better sleep, help is at hand. I’m Dr. Michael Mosley, and this is sleep well. This is a podcast series with a difference. We’ve designed it to help you get more rest. I’m going to guide you through some simple, scientifically proven ways to make it easier to drift off, and tools for getting a better night’s sleep. So please, get yourself comfortable and let’s begin. Bed is where it all happens. It’s the backdrop for our sleep stories, and if you struggle sometimes to fall or stay asleep, then you’ll know all too well that your sleep story can quickly become a psychodrama, and that’s never going to help you to drift off. But there’s one simple thing you can do to change that story. It’s one of the most effective and well used methods in sleep therapy. If sleep isn’t coming, then just get up. It may sound counterintuitive, but it’s all about making bed a place of solace, so that your brain associates being in bed with sleep and not with trying to get to sleep. I’m going to explore how best to make friends with your bed and look at this surprising idea of getting up in more detail. But first, let’s breathe and melt away the day. Breathe in and out. Notice how the air feels as it passes the inside of the nostrils. As you sit or lie there, just observe your body become attention spotter. Notice how things feel starting at your toes and moving up. Observe and notice how sometimes just spotting that part of your body makes it change a little as you breathe. Just observe. The tension can start to unwind just by passing your attention over. So let’s turn our attention back towards where we sleep. Think about your bed and your bedroom. It’s an important place. You will probably spend at least a third of your life there. Most of us do a lot of things in the bedroom, watch tv, cheque our phones, plan our futures. 40% of homeworkers in lockdown said they worked from bed at some point, but this is not a great idea. If you really want to sleep well, then you need to spend your time in bed doing mostly one thing. Teaching your brain to connect your bed with sleep is part of a highly effective sleep treatment called stimulus control therapy. A recent study found that insomniacs who used this approach fell asleep faster and their sleep efficiency, the proportion of time they spent in bed asleep, improved. All you have to do is follow a simple set of rules or steps designed to reassociate your bed with sleep. Dr. Colleen Carney is director of the Sleep and Depression Laboratory at Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada. Stimulus control is one of those treatments that’s going to help no matter if you have difficulty falling asleep, you have difficulty staying asleep, or you have both. Although there are many different types of insomnia, at the heart of stimulus control is the idea that you shouldn’t struggle to make sleep happen when your brain and body just aren’t ready. If you do, then an association forms, making your bed a battleground, a place where you don’t sleep. You could think back to a famous scientist you probably heard of, Pavlov, who would train dogs to drool when they heard bells. The way they did that is they paired meat with the sound of a bell over and over and over again, and each time the dog drooled until finally they could take the meat away and just ring a bell and the dog would drool. And unfortunately, what happens with us is that the bed has become associated with wakefulness over and over again. And so getting rid of that association and replacing it with an association with sleep again is really the core of what we’re doing. No matter what you do, no matter what medication you take. If your bed is the place where you become wide awake, then there needs to be a strategy to get rid of that. And that strategy, as long as you’re able to do things consistently, it’s actually a pretty quick uncrossing of those wires or reassociation of the bed with sleep. So the first step of stimulus control is really to be able to recognise when you are sleepy enough for sleep. Don’t go to bed until you’re actually literally falling asleep. So determining this moment of your eyes closing your head, sort of cracking forward or backward, or you’re reading the same page of the same novel over again, or losing the plot in something you’re watching or listening to, which is different than a lot of people think. They want to go to bed when they feel tired, and they want to go to bed early to give themselves this larger opportunity of sleep. But this will backfire, so wait until you are actively falling asleep. The secret is to stop trying to fall asleep and instead allow your body to decide when it is ready for bed. You will be surprised how quickly things turn around. For most people, following these steps is going to produce fairly quick results, so we tend to see some benefits within the first The first week, and certainly by the second week, we see quite a lot of improvement. So if you want to improve your sleep with stimulus control, there are five simple rules or steps. You first step, stay up until you feel sleepy. You should only head to bed when you feel like sleep is near. Not just because it’s your usual bedtime or you’re feeling a bit tired, but when you’re genuinely sleepy, when you can feel yourself just nodding off. Second step, if you go to bed and you can’t get to sleep, or you wake up in the middle of the night and you can’t get back to sleep, if it feels like 15 minutes or so has gone by and you aren’t ready to drift off, then get out of bed, find somewhere warm and quiet and do something which is not terribly stimulating. Something like reading, listening to music, or even knitting. All this helps to build sleep pressure, so that when you go back to bed, you are ready to drift off. When you first start doing this, you may have to get up more than once. That doesn’t mean the approach isn’t working. It just means you are trying to change a deeply ingrained habit. Do be patient. Step three, try to avoid napping during the day. We’re trying to build up your sleep pressure so sleep becomes inevitable. Step four, get up at the same time every morning. This creates a pattern for the day, but it also has an impact of when you feel sleepy in the evening. And finally, step five, save the bed for sleep. If you want to try this approach. And it certainly works really well for me, give it at least a couple of weeks. Most people start to get positive results and see a lot of improvement in that kind of time. Now it’s time to dive deeper, to look at what’s going on inside when our brain is forging these positive connections. As your breathing slows, relax and start to imagine the beautiful, fizzing complexity of the brain. The brain contains around 85 billion neurons. These neurons give rise to everything you know about the world. They send chemical and electrical signals through a vast and intricate network. Each neuron has hundreds of thousands of branches that connect to other neurons. As we live our lives, new connections are constantly being made and unmade. New neural pathways form. As you strengthen the connection between your bed and sleep, the neural pathways associated with this become stronger and more powerful. Imagine making a new trail in deep, fresh snow. The more it’s walked, the clearer it becomes. This is what happens when we consciously change our conditioned responses and make new associations. Now imagine that these new pathways, these connections between your bed and sleepiness are creating a chemical that promotes sleep, a chemical that builds up through the day and makes us drowsy. It’s called adenzine and is found in every cell in the body. It accumulates in an area at the bottom, the brain that controls sleep, called the basal forebrain. Here it acts as a cue to make us feel drowsy. It inhibits activity in the arousal centres of the brain. Things start to drift away from a waking state, bringing pure sleepiness closer and bit by bit. This new connection, this track in the snow, one that leads to better and deeper sleep, it you take shape. I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey into the bed and the brain. All the episodes are waiting for you to listen to in your own time on BBC sounds. Next up, the temperature of sleep rest well this podcast is brought to you by eHarmony. Finding someone who gets you is hard, right? You’re not alone. That’s because we’re human, and there’s a lot of different humans out there. Which is why eharmony’s personality based dating app helps you find someone you can be your whole self with, someone you can be fully comfortable with. That’s what true connection and compatibility are all about, being seen, heard, understood. When you match based on personality, you’re already one step ahead when it comes to getting to know one another. So try eharmony and get started today for free. Eharmony get who gets you tired of ads barging into your favourite news podcasts? Good news ad free listening on Amazon Music is included with your prime membership. Just head to Amazon.com slash ad Freenewspodcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Enjoy thousands of Acad shows ad free for prime subscribers. Some shows may have ads.
