DR MICHAEL MOSLEY: How spending LESS time in bed could beat insomnia trends now
We all know how important good quality sleep is, and how awful we feel after a run of bad nights.
Poor sleep affects almost every organ in your body, from your brain to your heart, your immune system to your sex drive — so it is not a great surprise that being a good sleeper is linked to a longer, healthier life.
A recent study of more than 170,000 people, by Harvard Medical School, found that men who were good sleepers (i.e. they rarely had problems falling or staying asleep) lived, on average, 4.7 years longer than poor sleepers; for women, the longevity boost from good sleep was 2.4 years.
But if you're a poor sleeper, what can you do about it? One solution could be to spend less time in bed.
It may sound counterintuitive, but sleep restriction therapy, as it's known, is one of the elements of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), which can be very effective. And it's something I'm doing as part of new study on sleep disorders.
Dr Michael Mosley says poor sleepers should try spending less time in bed to get better sleep
If, like me, you struggle with insomnia, then you will know that one of the worst things about it is that you can lie in bed for what feels like hours fretting about the fact that you are finding it so hard to sleep.
Night after night I wake up at 3am, and I just can't persuade my brain to switch off.
The idea behind sleep restriction therapy is to counter this by spending a few weeks cutting down the amount of time you spend in bed. If you only go to bed when you are really tired, the idea is that this will retrain your brain to associate 'bed' with sleep and sex — and nothing else. That way early morning wakings should become less frequent and fleeting.
Although this approach is not widely used by GPs, numerous studies show it is effective.
A U.S. trial with postmenopausal women (who often suffer from bad insomnia, because of night sweats, for instance) showed just two weeks of sleep restriction led to 30 minutes more sleep a night, a large reduction in fatigue and sleepiness, and a big boost in energy, reported the journal Sleep in 2019.
A more recent review of eight trials by Oxford University came to similar conclusions.
I've written about sleep restriction therapy before — and now I'm actually going to try it, as part of research being carried out at a sleep research lab at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.
They've recruited 30 patients with common sleep problems — everything from restless leg syndrome to chronic insomnia — but initial tests have revealed that many, without realising it, also have sleep apnoea, where
