The role of sleep in healthy buildings & workplaces
charlie morley / sleep / healthy sleep / healthy buildings / workplace wellness / cognitive performance
Welcome to episode 46 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate.
I’m your host, Matt Morley of Biofilico Healthy Buildings and in this episode I’m talking to none other than Charlie Morley, a bestselling author and teacher of mindfulness, lucid dreaming and all round sleep expert whose latest book deals with resolving trauma affected sleep through a set of practices called ‘Mindfulness of Dream & Sleep’.
Charlie, who is as you may have guessed my brother, was “authorised to teach” within the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism by Lama Yeshe Rinpoche in 2008. Since then he has written four books, delivered retreats in more than 20 countries, spoken at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, as well as the Ministry of Defence Mindfulness Symposium and The Houses of Parliament.
Our conversation explores the connections between my world of healthy buildings and interiors, and Charlie’s world of healthy sleep. We discuss sleep hygiene, the physiological impact of sleep on our bodies not to mention our brains, pre-industrial age sleeping habits vs todays, the power nap as a productivity tool, how to create restorative spaces or sleep pods in an office or educational environment that people will actually use, and the role of meditation and restorative deep relaxation practices in improving rest.
Full transcript courtesy of Otter.ai
“Unless you are part of the ‘sleepless elite’, which is less than one percentile of the world’s population, who can do very well on five hours or less sleep, almost everybody in the world, needs seven to nine hours per 24 hour period - this is still the golden standard of sleep. ”
Matt Morley
When thinking about sleep the building blocks of creating a healthy night's sleep in terms of how much we need, the risks of poor sleep hygiene and what you've described as the ‘sleep delusion’, how does one evaluate and measure a good night's sleep?
Charlie Morley
So the measure of sleep is inherently subjective. How do I feel upon awakening? What are my energy levels the next day? What is my cognitive ability the next day, so we can look at it like that.
They've done some interesting tests where people who are very high achievers are only getting kind of six, or five or six hours sleep, great social lives etc who say, this is all I need, I work perfectly well on six hours sleep, but then you put them into a brain scanner, or you give them cognitive ability tests. And although they say they feel optimal performance, their brain shows significant sub optimal neurological performance.
Now, that's one of the scariest pieces of research I came across, because it shows that even if you think you feel fine, in fact, a state of sleep deprivation has been so normalized by ourselves and by society that are natural, I feel fine state is actually one of suboptimal neurological functioning.
Sleep and cognitive performance in the workplace
So what's the next step, you force these people into position where they have to have one extra hour of sleep per day, it can be a nap during the day or an extra half an hour at night, but you get one extra hour per 24 hour period. Their cognitive performance went through the roof, the descriptions they have is like it feels like have access to a superpower. They're social lives, become more vibrant, their interpersonal relationships get better, or their performance at work gets better, just through one extra hour. So yes, it is subjective. But also there are very objective measures that show seven to nine hours for most people is 17 hours will allow us to function optimally. And crucially, just one extra hour per night can do massive, massive benefit to everyone.
Matt Morley
And how do you see then in terms of integrating an element of tech so that you're able to literally see the sleep quality over the course of the evening that otherwise we're over the course of the night that otherwise you might not? You might have a sense of how you slept, but you don't really no? Are you buying into this? Do you think there's there's real value in it, or were we being sold product and service that frankly, we've managed pretty well without all these years. And we're, in a sense trying to create a desire that, that we don't necessarily need to own these things.
Sleep trackers for health metrics
Charlie Morley
So at the moment, one of the higher end sleep trackers called the AURA ring, who sponsored a sleep science study that was part of even the aura ring, which is really the top end of the market is still only 60 to 70% accurate, which means is a crucial 30 to 40% of the time where it's just getting it wrong. And that's that worrying, let alone most people have a much cheaper version, the kind of, you know, the wrist based ones that hook up to your iPhone and stuff like that.
So if sleep trackers are benefiting your sleep, if they are making you feel more refreshed, if they are leading to more healthy relationships with sleep, then continue to use them. For a lot of people, they lead to a real neurosis around sleep. So take them with a big pinch of salt. I mean, in my new book, The first chapter is about becoming your own sleep tracker. So in the morning, taking most of how do I feel upon awakening? What are my energy levels throughout the day? Yes, what time do I go to bed?
What time do I wake up any dreams, I can remember, becoming your own sleep tracker to create a baseline is far better than that than the level of tech we've got at the moment. However, there is something on the market that we use when we do this sleep science studies called the Zed max or the Z max. Now that's about $600. And that's like a mini EEG machine. That's very, very accurate. So give the technology five years when we can get the technology of the XEmacs into an aura ring or into the to the app on your phone. And then sleep tracker data will be very, very accurate. But at the moment, we're just a little bit behind. So yeah, I wouldn't take don't take it too seriously.
Matt Morley
So if we then jump into establishing exactly what's going on during a night's sleep, you have what you've described as light, light sleep, the dream phase, and then deep sleep. So sort of the top line concepts for each of those three, and how is the sleep connecting with our health during the rest of the day? Like what are the processes going on? Sure. So there's
Charlie Morley
Actually two there's the gateway in and out either side to the hypnopompic and hit sorry hypnogogic hypnopompic. So stage one of sleep is called the hypnagogic state and is experienced by most people. Less is asleep stage proper, more a state of drowsiness. So you can still hear the sounds of the room, you can still feel your body in the bed. brain goes into deep alpha and theater, the brain looks almost indistinguishable to a brain that is in hypnosis.
So every time you fall asleep, the gateway into sleep, whether in a nap in the middle of the day or at night, you go through this natural state of hypnosis. And it's actually in that state that we can do a lot of really beneficial stuff for asleep because it's in the hypnagogic state that we can practice ns a nonslip, deep rest to us, humans term, or yoga nidra practices or my term hypnogogic mindfulness, which are the states of deep relaxation that happened just before we enter asleep.
So we have the hypnagogic state, really good for you, deeply relaxing, but a state in which people who have stressed out sleep will spend a lot of the night you know, you're kind of tired enough to be in that drowsy state, you can't quite pass the threshold. Eventually, though, with normalized sleep patterns, you'll move from hypnogogic into light sleep, light sleep is named for the quite untechnical reason that it's just quite easy to wake people from, you know, back in the early days asleep science, they would register the depth of sleep just by poking someone and saying their name.
So light sleep as it sounds, you're easy to be woken from it, you are now blacked out, you can't hear the sounds in the room. Unless they're loud enough, you can't feel your body in the bed. But you're yet to be dreaming. Light sleep is really good for procedural memory integration. So sleep is all about memory. That's why there's a direct link, as we know, with our with our mum, between sleep and Alzheimer's, and sleep and memory. So let's say you're learning to drive a car, it's light sleep, that you'll be processing the memory of how to do this, the stick in this and the the gears and all of that, and the pedal in the gas and everything that will be happening in light sleep procedural memory, whereas if you were in a car crash, that would be processing dreaming sleep.
So dreaming sleep is about processing emotional memory, memory reconsolidation, especially traumatic or stressful memories too. So we have the hypnagogic state stage one, then light sleep for procedural memory and learning, then we move into deep sleep. Deep Sleep is very, very interesting. This is where the brain is almost entirely switched off. So your brains never fully switched off. But if you look at the brainwaves of the waking state, they're very close together ticket ticket ticket ticket, if you look at the brain wave of someone in deep sleep, this will delta wave is dominant brainwave, and are very far apart.
I know people can't see me, but I'm making slow deep waves, signals with my hand. So in deep sleep, the brains almost entirely switched off, very unlikely to be dreaming very little happening in the brain. Apparently, but actually, if you look at the neuroscience of what's happening, loads is happening. Deep Sleep is when cerebral spinal fluid is flushed up into the brain. And it actually removes toxins from the brain a bit like imagine he had a fruit smoothie, and he drank all the fruit smoothie, but there's still kind of the remnants of the fruit smoothie in the bottle. And then if you put a bit of water in that bottle and shook it up, you could get all the remnants of the fruit smoothie out, right.
That's what's happening in deep sleep, the cerebral spinal fluid is flushing through the brain. And the blood capillaries go big, small, big, small, big small, which creates this kind of flushing motion. And that directly flushes out amyloid plaques, which are what cause Alzheimer's and many other forms of dementia.
So also a human growth hormone is released. So I know you're really into your fitness. If you have like a big workout during the day, like you're you're kind of working out you're lifting weights in the gym. Unless that night you get enough deep sleep, your muscles will not grow, there'll be massive reduction in muscle gains. And the same goes for losing weight.
So if you spent your whole day dieting, but then at night, you don't get enough deep sleep, you will lose weight based on the calorific deficit of not eating that much. But you won't actually make changes to your metabolism that leads to long term weight loss. So deep sleep so so important for memory for toxins flushed out for changing the body in any way we want.
We have that period of deep sleep, and then we'll move into dream. So dream actually comes at the end of the cycle, we think of dream as being a very active sleep state. And it is but by the time you get the dream, you've been knocked out for at least 6070 minutes. And if you put those together that makes up the 90 Minute sleep cycle, the cycle continues throughout the night. What changes is the amount of time you spend in each one until you get to the last two hours or you're almost in full dream for like two hours.
sleep for human performance
Matt Morley
Okay, so I think that's really given us the kind of foundations between these connections between sleep like what's happening at night and how are we performing? How are we feeling, how we cognitively how we functioning during the day so effectively that is the basis of sleep as a form of maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
Charlie Morley
“Yeah, there is no biological process that is not adversely affected by insufficient sleep - anything less than seven hours per 24 hour period, yet we don’t teach kids about this in school, we have a sense of almost pride that we can get by off of a lack of sleep. It’s crazy. ”
Certain parts of America lost an hour because the daylight saving. So like 1.6 billion people do this every year different times, but based on your countries, but on that day where people lose one hour of sleep, the next day, American Studies have shown as a 22% increase in cardiac arrest the next day, just by robbing people of one hour asleep. That's 10s of 1000s more death, because of one hour lost sleep. There's also a massive increase in traffic accidents the next day, when you take one hour of sleep.
Conversely, when the clocks change, and you gain an extra hour of sleep, there's a 22% decrease in heart attacks the next day, and a 15% drop in traffic accidents. Now, when you roll that out in 26 countries around the world that have these daylight savings, that is millions of people live longer, or live shorter lives based on robbing or giving them one extra hour of sleep.
Sleep health in a historical perspective
Matt Morley
Yeah, that's powerful stuff. If if we can take a step back to a slightly sort of, let's say, a historical perspective, just to understand the connection between pre Industrial Age sleep cycles, modern sleep cycles, and the potential benefits in accepting and embracing the idea of a nap, a siesta, or sleeping again, after the amount, number of hours you managed to get during the night. So when do you draw the line between how things were before the Industrial Age? And how things are now? And is that necessarily have the optimal version of our sleep pattern?
Charlie Morley
Sure. So I'm sure many of your listeners have heard about this. heard this before. That before the Industrial Revolution, so about 200 250 years ago, most people in Western Europe slept very differently. They didn't sleep all in one, they would obviously this depends on seasonal fluctuations. And a lot of research was done in England, actually, especially the British Isles, where it can get dark as early as 4pm in the nighttime, in the wintertime, so people get asleep within about two hours of sundown.
So because candles are really expensive. They're made of whale oil, only the wealthiest people could have these candles and kerosene was difficult to come across, or whatever they use back then. So people get asleep within about two hours of sundown. So it could be 6pm 8pm. But like early, right asleep for about two, three hours. And then they would wake up again, like fully awake, pubs would reopen.
People would have these like tobacco circles, you kind of sit around and smoke, people would go into the field and milk their cows, they believe the quality of the milk. If you milk them at this time was better people would have sex they felt you're more fertile. That actually true. There is a fertility booster at that time. There are hundreds of these records is oh, there's even a 15th century prayer manual from Portugal, full of prayers especially to do in the second sleep. Sorry, between the first and the second sleep.
So you get this reference the first and second sleep. The way it actually came about was a crime researcher was looking at records in courts and other crimes were committed after the first sleep basically the middle of the night, you'd get your three hours sleep you got Rob someone's house and then go back to bed again. It was like perfect crime. Right. S
o this is how it first came into, into public awareness. Now is that the best way Oh, sorry. And then you would go back to sleep after two hours until sunrise. seasonal fluctuations. So you'll still be averaging about like 678 hours sleep but Krushi with a two hour gap in the middle. Fast forward to the modern day, the most common form of insomnia. In western societies, the most prevalent form is not sleep onset insomnia, which is where you just can't get to sleep. It's actually sleep maintenance insomnia.
Now, here's a description of sleep maintenance, insomnia, the ability of the subject to fall asleep upon first awakening. Within two to three hours, the subject awakens again, feeling fully awake and conscious for up to two hours. The subject is then able to fall asleep again till morning. That is flippin exactly the same description as the pre industrial sleep cycle.
So could it be that there are millions of misdiagnosed insomniacs, who aren't actually insomniacs, they are showing from an anthropological point of view a much more natural sleep cycle than the rest of us who are trying to blackout for eight hours. Does it mean that blackout of eight hours is not the way to do it and we should all be having that nighttime waking No, not at all, perhaps is a chronotype thing perhaps type thing. But it is important for people to know, if they do have that sleep pattern, you're probably not insomniac.
And actually just knowing that it's okay to be awake in the middle of the night moves us out of the fight or flight sympathetic response that keeps us awake and allows us to fall asleep. And secondly, there are a lot of people who have that sleep pattern, but they don't know that there's a second period of sleep waiting for them in the wings. So they don't stay awake for two hours, they just get up and Assad do there is another four hour sleep waiting for you.
But you have to allow yourself to slip back into it. Interestingly, the term insomnia was first produced in print as a, as a kind of a coined term in the New York Times in 1901. It was called the new fangled malaise of insomnia, within 30 to 40 years of us changing the way we sleep, we suddenly have this term insomnia cropping up. So very, very interesting. So no, I wouldn't say we should be sleeping like that. But if you are sleeping like that, it may not be such a bad idea. It may be just the way your body is, is working. And the main thing to know is there's nothing wrong with it. You know, nighttime wakefulness is not a pathology. For some people. It's just the way they're built.
Matt Morley
We introduced the idea of bi-phasal sleeping or perhaps sleeping for X number of hours during the night, and then catching up at another stage during the day. And interestingly, that's one of the connections between your work in healthy buildings / workplace wellness and you work, right. So when I'm looking at, say, healthy building concept of trying to create spaces within a building that are designed to foster wellness, and wellbeing for people spending eight to 12 hours of their days or nights, if it's a residential context, or if it's an office environment, then it's a place where they go to work and to be productive.
With the leading healthy building standard, that's called the WELL Standard, they have an entire concept around MIND. And one of the features there is the idea of restorative opportunities and, and nap policy.
So we're starting to see the way sort of trickle down effect from the top whereby the certification systems that are becoming increasingly common now in the world of real estate are encouraging and completely accepting the concept of a nap being a healthy part of a workday, it might sound confusing for some people, but it's out there.
But for sure, it's already happening. It's already coming. Now, once you have that policy as a as an employer, you then need to offer some kind of a space where that happens. So yeah, that might be an area where I'd say okay, well, I'm going to try and introduce some, some natural elements, biophilic design, I'm going to think about light, I'm going to think about the thermal qualities of the temperature in there and think about the acoustic isolation.
When you think about what I know you've turned sleep hygiene. And so the restorative environment in which one goes to sleep like what are your your key touch points there? Like what are the essential elements that we need to think about when we're creating an environment, whether it's at home, or in a potentially office space, where it's congenial to having a 20 or 30 minute nap during the day?
Restorative spaces in the WELL standard
Charlie Morley
First of all, before I answer that, I just like to say, that's so good to hear that that's part of, you know, you building regulation and part of what businesses are thinking about.
“Apart from any kind of philanthropic aim that the business might have, your employees will be 30% better at anything they do after 60 to 90 minute nap. That’s the science. That’s a fact. ”
It's like if you want to make more money, give your employees a nap because they will make better deasl. They make better trades, they'll have better interpersonal relationships. It is very good for your employees. Yes. And also you will make more money. It seems crazy. They aren't implementing this. I did a thing at Deutsche Bank at Deloitte. I was telling them you will make more money if you do this, and hasn't been implemented. Not that I know. But really anyone listening?
The science is there. This isn't hippie dippie stuff, your employees will be better at whatever they do after a 60 to 90 minute nap. So rant over next bit. I would say when you people sleeping in public is a really vulnerable thing to do. So actually, your question is not so much about the bedroom at home, but actually sleeping in public, which is very different sleeping and public. I would save for Start, you need something that's lockable, if possible, something that's lockable.
So I know the are these great sleep pods in I believe it's Munich Airport, you can rent them for like an hour, a pop, and these little kind of micro pod beds, but they're lockable. And it's really important that that it's not just quiet and dark and all the sleep hygiene II stuff. But they're lockable. And a lot of the traumatized populations I work with, like veterans and people with C PTSD. simply placing a lock on your bedroom door can increase sleep quality by up to half an hour, an hour a night. Because there's something about humans, we need to no one's going to come in, we're in this deeply vulnerable state of rest.
So I would say they need to be not only private and a correct temperature for sleep, and yes, dark and quiet if you can, but also lockable. There was one rest port I went in, and there is a difference in arrest port and asleep port, where my legs were exposed, there was kind of a big bubble thing over most of my body in my head, but my legs were exposed, very difficult to fall asleep. And one of those, you know, my feet, people could brush by they could do something to them, I wasn't able to fully sleep.
So yes, it would be enclosed, it would be lockable, it would be private. Just to say that those rest pods, you know, there is a difference between NSDI non sleep deep rest and napping. Non sleep deep breath has loads of benefits, too. So even if you can't provide a full private, lockable, even just a space for rest and mindfulness like they have in the Google offices in London are really, really good.
Recharge rooms in tech offices
Matt Morley
Yeah, it is often the tech companies that are approaching the and saying, Well look, we want to create a space in a sense, in your terms, clearly that they will then actually be breathing a multifunctional space where there can be some of that depressed slash napping going on. It can also be a space where it's congenial to restorative practices, whatever that might be taking some time out of your day, perhaps to meditate perhaps to do your prayers, or just simply take some time by yourself.
And in fact, there's often the term the quiet room, or a restorative space where the idea is really just to take some time away from your key tasks to recharge, to go back. And then I think within that there's perhaps a subgroup too, which is the the nap pods or sleeping pod? The issue there with my sort of design head on is okay, you got to think about hygiene.
Now, post COVID, you got to think about ventilation. If it's lockable, and it's an enclosed space, then the best thing to have their own fans and and suddenly, you know, the prices do go up. But I think there's there's real value in that. So we've established you mentioned temperature just to dig into it. So thermal comfort typically is actually cooler than we think, isn't it in terms of the ideal sleeping temperature.
Thermal comfort during sleep
Charlie Morley
I can't remember the exact temperature ideal to seven temperature. First of all, they differ from men and women. I remember a brilliant chapter in a book called The The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry. And the title chapter was air conditioning is sexist. Now you see that the title chapter anyway, I'll come on straight to that chapter. He's absolutely right, the average the default setting of air conditioners across the world are set to the male preferred temperature at room temperature. And women need it about up to one to two degrees warmer. So actually, air conditioning is sexist.
So the first thing your points would need to be would you need to adjust it because women would want a slightly different to men. Basically, if you're in bed, and you can stick your foot out from the blankets or out of the duvet, and it's warm enough to keep it outside your rooms too hot. Your bedroom should be pretty cool, but not cold. But if you stick your foot out, it should feel cool. And your nose should be cool. You know this is cooler, the better many people with sleep problems, they just have the room too hot, it becomes the Princess and the Pea.
You know they pile up loads of blankets and and they get really really hot and you can't you know sleeps about thermo regulation. Remember the we used to we now know actually that human beings used to even hibernate for long periods of time where the deep sleep state would go for a massive percentage. And you could actually move into these almost hibernation states for days or weeks. And of course, what's hibernation about thermo regulation? So yeah, temperatures, pretty important.
Matt Morley
There is a there's a really interesting book was published recently by the Harvard Chan School for public health by Dr. Joseph Allen, in which he discusses exactly that point around the sexual or sort of the differences between the two sexes in terms of body temperature and therefore thermal comfort within a space and it seems that a lot of the regulations that were still in place or to have guidelines in the US and in fact, even in older buildings how the HVAC aircon systems have been programmed, referring to some data that was plucked from sort of 1980s office buildings were so slick as well. What was happening in 1980s, it was male dominated, they were probably wearing a suit.
And there's now just much more sexual, let's say equality. And therefore, as the man in the three piece suit or in a shirt, a tie, and a jacket is completely different to me sending in a normal summer dress. So some of the solutions around that seem to be around, ultimately creating almost sort of microclimates within or having clusters or microclimates where it's adjustable, if they're getting there with the HVAC and aircon systems, it's sort of within the next five to 10 years, it seems like that would be in a really smart building. So like sort of high performing building where they're able to adjust and allow each individual occupant to have some say over the temperature in their space, just by you know, the kind of airflow that's going on within that.
So yeah, another crossover between Your world and mine. Let's talk about mindfulness. Again, it is something that's part of the healthy building concept, the idea that a allowing time within the day and allowing a space within an office environment, for example, where meditation or mindfulness practice and perhaps breathwork, and can take place is positive, again for productivity, but also for worker well being. So how do you integrate mindfulness and meditation with sleep?
Because obviously, once once we're asleep? There's, in theory, for most of us, at least, there's no active meditation or mindfulness going on, right until you get to like next level, Tibetan Buddhist practice of dreaming. Yeah. But before that, yeah, how what's the connection between mindfulness and improve sleep quality, so that if someone's perhaps practicing or finding time during the day, they're also able to have a positive impact on the sleep at night, which is, I think your another gain, isn't it?
breath work and deep relaxation for rest and sleep
Charlie Morley
Yeah. So mindfulness has a whole wealth of benefits. As far as sleep goes, actually more than mindfulness, it's about regulation of the autonomic nervous system through the breath, and through deep relaxation. Those are the two things that you really find affecting sleep. And it's all based on this thing called parasympathetic drive.
So there's a system within the autonomic nervous system called parasympathetic drive, which is, think of it like a battery, which is charged up every time you do anything relaxing during the day, you charge up this parasympathetic drive battery. Now the reason most people tend to sleep slightly better on holiday than in their working day is unless you're screaming kids and stuff, on holidays, you're probably doing more relaxing things. So every time you do anything relaxing the day zap, you get a little charge to the parasympathetic drive. If you spend at least half an hour a day doing something really, really relaxing, that moves you into a deep parasympathetic emphasis, such as yoga nidra, slow, deep breathing, coherent breathing, other forms of non sleep deep breaths, you're spending 30 minutes charging up that parasympathetic drive.
Now what happens is then when you go to sleep at night, even if you charge it at 11 o'clock in the morning, or 10 o'clock in the morning, that battery will store the drive until you choose to go to sleep at night. So when you fall asleep at night, the brain kind of downloads that battery power from parasympathetic drive, allowing you to fall asleep quicker and stay asleep longer.
This means we need to completely reconfigure the way we view sleep. Sleep is not about oh, it's half an hour before bedtime quick put on some sleep hygiene tips like not looking at my phone, going wearing my fancy red sunglasses, all this kind of stuff. It's like That's too late dude. Like if you if you've got high levels of stress or trauma, but again, who hasn't got high levels of stress off last two and a half years we've been through as a global society. Sleep good sleep begins during the day.
How much time can you spend charging up that parasympathetic drive battery, and that's where periods of mindfulness but especially slow deep breathing, and NSDI, non sleep, deep breaths, kind of the hypnogogic, mindfulness practice, those really, really work to regulate the nervous system and help you sleep well at night. So that's the link mindfulness is good, because it can help create a habit of mind that sees not getting perfect sleep as more okay, but as mindfulness creates, fosters an attitude of okayness with myself and compassionate acceptance if it's taught in the right way. But the link between just standard mindfulness and sleep is quite tenuous. The link between non sleep deep rest and slow deep breathing and sleep is very, very direct, because it's based on this parasympathetic drive.
Sleep quality for productivity in the workplace
Matt Morley
So then you you see that there is effectively a short term benefit. That is, if you like he's reaping those benefits. Well, first of all, the person in question so the worker the occupant, and indirectly, the, the employer, that's more than that. So the people who are then that they're producing for once they go back into their work environment and are just sort of recharged and fresher and able to do more or get through the rest of the day without hitting X number of coffees.
But then that same building Brunt that same worker gets their own slightly more medium term benefits later on in the day, that's an entirely private matter once they end up trying to get to sleep that also suggests, you mentioned sort of the three hours, I think there's often, you know, there's practical considerations, of course, around when you work out an exercise, right. But when I see people exercising at 9pm, and the best hours of sleep seem to be between about sort of like 11 and 1am, right. There's just it's a crunch between the late workout, getting to bed and getting good quality night's sleep. So it's that would then suggest if, if at all possible exercise should happen lunchtime slash middle of the day.
Charlie Morley
It depends what the exercise is. So for it again, this is about the sympathetic and parasympathetic system. So for example, lifting heavy weights, like you're doing a big weight session actually can lead to such a parasympathetic hit off with this deep tiredness that comes out was it could be reasonably beneficial or at least neutral to do in the evening. However, as we both do a lot of martial arts like Thai boxing, kickboxing, something really fight or flight II like Krav Maga at 10pm, you want to go to bed at midnight? Yeah, you're going to be while you're going to be in that state.
So it's not so much the exercise, but the type of exercise the effect that has on your body, and you can feel it after your workout. Do you feel deeply relaxed? Do you feel that sense of calm? Or do you feel it's kind of jittery? You know, you've still got your pre workout shake in your system or something like that. So it's kind of subjective and personal. But generally, exercise is really good for sleep. But yeah, if you can do it within like three hours of your preferred bedtime, that's best. Sorry, I would do it not, not over three hours before your preferred bedtime. That's best.
Matt Morley
Cool. Plus, I think we can carry on for a while yet, but we're gonna wrap it up there. So if people want to follow along, see more of your work, or reach out with any questions or buy the books like where is that all happening online?
Charlie Morley
Yeah, my website, Charliemorley.com
I'm also on Instagram So check it out.