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In his new book 'Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock, and How It Can Revolutionize Your Sleep and Health', Oxford University’s professor of circadian rhythm Russell Foster gives a broad overview of the many ways in which your body recharges its batteries. While the book is readable and the insights are new and exciting its practical tips can be digested as follows. If you find it difficult to get to sleep, try scrunching your toes a hundred times and then breathing in through your nose for four seconds and out through your nose for four seconds. If or when you get distracted gently bring your attention back to the sensations you are feeling in your body. For those who need the ‘how’, the foot scrunching improves the circulation in your feet which helps the body’s core temperature drop (an essential part of the ‘going to sleep’ process). The breathing helps to engage your vagus nerve which when ‘managed’ by your cerebral cortex is gently coerced into a state of relaxation precipitating all the necessary conditions for loss of consciousness. If you wake up in the night, don’t beat yourself up about it. Scrunch your feet, practice the breathing technique above and know that even if you find yourself guiding your focus back to your breath for an hour you will be having about seventy to eighty percent of the benefits of real sleep. If you want to give up with the breathing. Go to the kitchen, make a hot non-caffeinated drink, drink it whilst reading anything non-digital and then go back to bed. If you wake up at the start of your day feeling tired you are probably not honouring the minimum average human requirement of five 90min cycles per night. Make sure your alarm is set to a minimum of seven and a half hours after lights out. If in doubt prefer eight hours. It takes most people about 30mins to fall asleep anyway. Furthermore, there is always a chance you’ve shifted your sleep pattern from its natural position. For example, if you were naturally an early riser in the past and you’ve now found yourself sleeping late; make time – one brutal morning – to seek daybreak. This will reset your circadian rhythm and you will fall asleep earlier. Foster’s book details the recent discovery of a third set of light receptors in our eyes that react to the blue light during dawn and dusk. These moments of the day are extremely useful for all the cells in your body that have a circadian clock (in fact most of them). So go ahead and actually get outside at these times of the day. Staring at the sunrise or sunset through a window is not the same. We don’t need to tell you how important sleep is. The good news is your body really knows how to do it. All you have to do is take your foot off the accelerator.
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