#63 Let me bore you to sleep - Jason Newland (13th December 2018)

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland and this is let me bore you to sleep number 63. A lucky number for some, completely meaningless for others, but 63, only listen to this when you can safely close your eyes. So really the main point behind this session and all the other let me bore you to sleep sessions is that I just talk for roughly an hour and I'm not really going to be necessarily talking about anything particularly important.

Although I think in this session I am going to talk about sleep. So I'm going to bore you by talking about sleep and I'm recording this on the Spreaker app. So I've got my iPhone and I've got the app on Spreaker and I've got my little microphone attached to my top.

You can possibly hear a little bit of background sound. I've got my laptop on so I'm going to be doing a little bit of research about sleeping whilst I talk to you and I can read some of that stuff off for you. So this could be educational as well as pointless.

So yeah, it's a good little mixture isn't it? Pointless education, useless knowledge and the internet has got a lot of that there available. Available. So I suppose I personally prefer to just do the voice recordings rather than videos because it frees me to just just to talk without being self-conscious of how I look or just it's something about having a camera in front of me and seeing myself.

It's a bit off-putting really. It's a distraction. Although I've done hundreds and hundreds of videos, I quite like recording stuff when it's not live as well.

That way I can relax a little bit more as opposed to, you know, when I'm recording something or I'm broadcasting live, I've got people saying hello on the screen and writing comments and it's, I do get, I do get distracted by that. I'll admit that.

Which is okay, you know, it doesn't really matter and it's fun for the people involved and but I do wonder about those that are listening afterwards whether or not the sessions are as useful in being boring and sleepifying as maybe these kind of sessions are where I am giving you my entire focus and attention which is I guess another word for focus and I suppose I've described these sessions in a way where you know you're you're sitting down, maybe you're just tired, you know, you're tired and you're perhaps physically tired and you know you kind

of you're awake but you know the times maybe that perhaps you need a coffee or you feel that you need something to a little bit more stimulating to keep you awake and keep you alert and then you're faced with someone like me who's just talking about, it's not so much that I'm talking about nothing although I do talk about nothing, it's that the person might be talking about something that you're not, you're just not interested in yourself and there's nothing wrong with that, we've all got our own interests and see if you're interested in football

you can talk about football to someone else that's a fan of football but then if they're a fan of a different team to who you're a fan of then at some point they're going to lose interest or you're going to lose interest in what they're saying because you're not going to want to hear about the opposing team perhaps and they're perhaps not going to enjoy hearing about your team if it's an opposing team to them so there's that commonality of football as it is but then there's going to be a point possibly where boredom, a

little bit of sprinkle of boredom is added and perhaps you stop giving the attention that you would have done or perhaps were and perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, I wonder how many times I can say the word perhaps during this session, during this recording, maybe lots because maybe is just another word to replace perhaps, possibly is another word maybe, perhaps, possibly, potentially, trying to think of some more words don't come the words always come so it's kind of like that I can be that boring person to you so you can instead of listening with intense excitement which

hopefully won't be happening because if it is happening then perhaps you need to listen to something else because this isn't supposed to be in the slightest bit stimulating and I realize that some of when I sort of tell you tell people about my life sometimes I find it humorous when actually I'm just being serious about my life but there you go so think of me as like the most boring person you've ever met and you're trying to listen to me but actually it's just so tedious and it's not it's not not in a negative way

not in a a cruel way but you just kind of just start to zone out and your mind just starts to drift now what I thought I would do because sometimes I'll do different things sometimes I go on to my website sometimes I go on to the podcasts and I'll read out the stats from the podcasts but I'm not going to do that today what I'm going to do is I'm going to see what comes under sleeping when I google that once let's have a look right so brain basics understanding sleep let's have a look

so this is brain basics understanding sleep it's the National Institute of Neurological blah blah blah so yeah it just says sleep is an important part of your daily routine you spend about one third of your time doing it quality straight no not quality straight that's a that's chocolates isn't it quality sleep and getting enough of it at the right times is an essential is as essential to survival as food and water without sleep you can't form or maintain the pathways in your brain that let you learn and create new memories and it's hard to concentrate

and respond quickly oh sleep is important to a number of brain functions including how nerve cells neurons in brackets communicate with each other in fact your brain and body stay remarkably active while you sleep the recent findings suggest that sleep plays a housekeeping role that removes toxins in your brain that build up while you are awake so when you're asleep your brain is doing housework that's uh that's an interesting you'd think that'd be noisy wouldn't you if your brain's vacuuming the carpet you know washing the clothes in your washing machine tumble dry all that stuff

it's everyone needs sleep but its biological purpose remains a mystery sleep affects almost every type of tissue and system in the body from the brain heart and lungs to metabolism immune function mood and disease resistance research shows that a chronic lack of sleep or getting poor quality sleep increases the risk of a bunch of disorders i won't read them out sleep is complex a sleep is a complex and dynamic process that affects how you function in ways scientists are now beginning to understand this booklet describes how your need for sleep is regulated and what happens

in the brain during sleep all right here's the next bit i'll tell you something if you're not bored you should be because i am so anatomy of sleep several structures within the brain are involved with sleep now the hypothalamus a peanut-sized structure deep inside the brain contains groups of nerve cells that act as control centers affecting sleep and arousal so within the hypothalamus is the is the very hard word to pronounce suprachiasmatic nucleus in brackets scn i imagine a lot of professionals just call it scn instead of trying to pronounce it and i bet you

a lot of them over a period of time so used to saying scn that they've forgotten what it stands for they know what it is but what the actual pronunciation is that's a guess but you see when i was at university there was quite a lot of that a lot of um is it acronym acronyms i don't know you know when it's something it's just a like csn uh cognitive behavioral therapy with cbt and uh i prefer to use the actual full name otherwise i forget what it is because cbt it's easy to remember cbt

cbt c but then okay what does it stand for cognitive behavioral therapy but there are so many other things that i would learn at university where i was learning these uh is it abbreviations or is it acronyms but i'd start seem to forget what they were so what's it so c scn is clusters of thousands of cells that receive information about light exposure directly from the eyes and control your behavioral rhythm some people with damage to the scn sleep erratically throughout the day because they are not able to match their circadian rhythms with the light

dark cycle most blind people maintain some ability to sense light and are able to modify their sleep slash wake cycle so that's quite interesting because um so what is uh within the high thumb out within the hip hypothalamus is a super geostomastic nucleus and it controls the behavioral rhythm and some people with damage the csn sleep erratically so that's me that's what happens to me i've got um well maybe that's that's what my thing is so i don't have any trouble getting to sleep really but i do sleep at very weird times and so i

don't you know i'm quiet i know when i was at work when i had my last job i'd be at the computer screen in the call center and sometimes i just want to just lay down underneath the table and go to sleep just you know for maybe 10 minutes or 20 minutes it was that that feeling you know that feeling where maybe you're sitting in your chair watching television and it's time for bed or maybe it's not time for bed but you're just so tired and you just want to get to bed but you can't

be bothered to do things that you need to do before you get to bed like maybe brushing your teeth going to the toilet just you do it but as you do it the more tired you get and then you actually get to lay down on your bed and it feels so wonderful that feeling of release the feeling of just not um not having to do anything that feeling of not not needing to think about anything the opportunity to just completely let go and lay down on your bed in whatever position you want to whether it's

flat on your back on your front on your side your left side or your right side so i've got a double bed and i sleep on my own unless andre sleeps on a bed with me which is occasionally and i will spread my entire body out over the bed because i spent most of my adult life including my childhood sleeping in single beds so once i managed to get a double bed i enjoy it enjoy spreading myself out i can actually feel the muscles in my body just relaxing in fact i can kind of feel

that now just imagining laying down on my bed which is something that i'm going to be doing very soon in fact when this is finished i'm probably going to be going to bed and just that feeling of comfort knowing that you've got this thing that we call a bed that's been made specifically for your comfort it's been made and designed and you know the design has been improved over hundreds of years or however long beds have been around for your comfort so you can just relax your body and have your body supported so that you

can just let go and sleep so that's quite cool i like i like beds so where was we on this the brain's the brain stem that's a lovely start to a sentence isn't it the brain stem at the base of the brain communicates with the hypothalamus to control the transitions between wake and sleep and in brackets which means it's telling me something that's possibly important it's also going to be filled with words that i don't understand the brain stem includes structures called the pons medulla and midbrain in closing brackets sleep promoting cells within the hypothalamus

and the brain stem produce a brain chemical called GABA and it's G A B A it's big capital letters well not big capital letters it's big letters but it's capital letters and not sure if that is an acronym or anyway it says the uh yeah so that the brain stem produces a brain chemical called GABA which acts to which acts to reduce the activity of arousal centers in the hypothalamus and the brain stem the brain stem in brackets especially the pons and the medulla the medulla doesn't it sound like something from ancient greece some kind

of uh something from jason and the argonauts doesn't it now i do a lot of the medical terms are from greece aren't they sort of some some of them and sort of some medications and stuff i think i might have made that up also plays a special role in REM sleep or REM sleep so i've named this sleep after the band just shows you how how influential pop music can be it sends signals to relax some muscles essential for body posture and limb movement so that we so this is quite funny so that we don't

act out our dreams so if you're if you're dreaming that you're running a race so instead of your your legs running around moving around like a dog does when it's asleep your legs are relaxed and i suppose if you're you're dreaming that you're driving a car you haven't got your arms up moving the steering wheel with the imaginary steering wheel that's because your arms are relaxed isn't the body clever the brain very clever but it does all these things the thalamus acts as a relay for information from the senses to the cerebral cortex and that

is the covering of the brain that interprets and processes information from short to long-term memory during most stages of sleep thalamus becomes quiet letting you tune out the external world but during REM sleep the thalamus is active sending the cortex images sounds and other sensations that fill our dreams so i find that interesting because the one says during most stages of sleep thalamus or the thalamus becomes quiet letting you tune out external the external world see i notice because i sleep during the day and as well as during the night so um sometimes it'll be

like building work going on and you know i fall asleep and it's in the background and i don't hear it anymore and then sometimes i'll actually be aware that i'm waking up but i don't hear anything and then the it's as if my ears start to work afterwards once i'm awake and then i can hear the sounds in the background so there's something it's not it's like i've got like a plug my plugs have been put into my ears but they haven't so it's clearly must be the brain is switching off the ears the sounds

being recognized so if you think about that where does it say it so most during most stages of sleep so that's most of the time that we're asleep the fellow the thalamus thalamus thalamus yeah the thalamus becomes quiet letting you tune out the external world which means that most time that we're asleep we're not hearing what's going on but it's just we're tuning out of it which means basically means that background sounds whatever they are have no reason to interfere with anybody's sleep because the brain just switches that stuff off anyway isn't the brain wonderful

so what's next um it's gonna go down a little bit the brain stem especially the pons and medulla also plays a special role in REM sleep it sends signals to relax muscles essential for body posture and i've already read this bit out i don't know and live uh okay the pineal gland located within the brain's two hemispheres receives signals from the scn and increases production of the hormone mirtonin which helps put you to sleep once the lights go down so there's a natural thing in our brain that once you turn the lights off there's an

activation in the brain that having the lights turned off activates the brain to produce melatonin which helps to put you to sleep once the lights go down so this all this stuff's going on inside your brain inside my brain as well because i also have a brain believe it or not all this stuff's going on that we're not really aware of at the time but it's happening naturally so it seems that in a sense oh that's another word version of perhaps isn't it in a sense perhaps possibly maybe all we need to do is get

out of our own way and allow nature to just i know it's a cliche but just nature to take its course for us our brains to just be allowed to operate in the way that they naturally do which means falling asleep naturally i mean we're born with this stuff aren't we i guarantee that no newborn baby has ever listened to any of my balling sessions to get to sleep babies don't need sleeping tablets they don't need sleep hypnosis videos or mp3s sleeping is the most natural thing we're born to sleep we're born to fall asleep

all the time obviously but at the suitable time the required time but it's not always going to be suitable you know we're not always tired at exactly the right time that we'd like to be and perhaps we're not always hungry at exactly the right time that we'd like to be either but routine can pretty much stabilize those times you know if you eat at the same time every day your body your mind everything kind of gets used to that routine so i suppose at the same way sleeping habits are also influenced by our routine so

let's see what other long words i can find oh this is interesting um people who have lost their sight and cannot coordinate their natural wake sleep cycle using natural light can stabilize their sleep patterns by taking small amounts of melatonin at the same time each day oh i didn't know that scientists believe that peaks and valleys of melatonin over time are important for matching the body's circadian rhythm to the external cycle of light and darkness so it's kind of it's basically it seems to be saying that it's about getting more in touch with nature if

we're able to you know instead of ignoring the fact that it's dark outside and trying to pretend that it's not and carrying on you know like i do i know most people probably do maybe maybe not doing as people used to do in the past and go to sleep when it was dark and wake up when it's light because you know our life styles might not accommodate such things you know if you have to be at work at a certain time or you don't get home till eight or nine o'clock in the evening you need

to have the lights on so you can see what you're doing maybe getting more in touch with nature or realizing that actually maybe having less light leading up to bedtime maybe not looking at a computer screen for an hour before going to sleep before going to bed maybe not watching television for an hour before going to bed could take away that artificial light and getting in touch with the darkness you know the fact that it's night time and it's dark and maybe that's what's needed for the brain to produce the melatonin which induces sleep so

i suppose in a way as we are in society everything and it's not i'm not complaining because i'm one of the people that appreciate this stuff but everything is kind of instant these days a lot of very instant even television you can now stream things you don't have to wait till you know every week i've got to wait a week for the next episode of your program like it used to be like 20 years ago but now maybe and i say this this is just a question mark maybe we feel that we should be able

to just fall asleep instantly you know lay down and that should be it and perhaps perhaps that never really often happened in the past but perhaps we've forgotten that perhaps there's that i actually enjoy that period before falling asleep that that sensation of laying down and just relaxing my body and you know what if you spend your life supporting let's say other people or it could be even supporting you know paying the mortgage or supporting whatever you know you've got a job and you're supporting your boss at the work and there's lots of different children

or whatever you know you're doing all that you're kind of supporting this lifestyle or this life that you're leading but then when you go to bed you've got something and you're laying on something that is supporting you that bed is supporting you and you don't have to do anything you don't have to support anything while you're being supported on that bed so even if you're not drifting off into a deep natural healing sleep instantly you can enjoy the the feeling of knowing that you're being supported by that bed that bed can become a friend i

mean isn't a friend someone that you perhaps can share your dreams with well isn't that a literal thing that you do with your bed you share your dreams with that bed as well as maybe many intimate moments so that friend that bed is your friend that bed is a part of your life and it supports you every day every night that you lay down on that bed or every day depending when you're sleeping there's lots of people sleep during the day work in night shift where they sleep at different times but whenever you go to

sleep that bed is there supporting you so let's have a look the next bit on here by the way if you want to read this online it's https semicolon forward slash forward slash www dot n i n d s dot n i h dot gov forward slash disorders forward slash patient dash caregiver dash education forward slash understanding dash sleep so the next bit here is the basal forebrain so the basal forebrain near the front and bottom of the brain also promotes sleep and wakefulness while part of the midbrain acts as an arousal system release of

adenosine if i'm pronouncing that right adenosine in brackets a chemical byproduct of cellular energy consumption close brackets from cells in the basal forebrain and probably other regions supports your sleep drive i didn't understand a word of that sentence so caffeine counteracts sleepiness by blocking the actions of the adenosine so let's go back to what an adenosine does so i said basically it supports your sleep drive so the amygdala an almond-shaped structure you get the feeling that the person who mapped the brain very into his nuts very very likes nuts describe parts of the brain as

different kinds of nuts i think he was a squirrel the amygdala an almond-shaped structure involved in processing emotions becomes increasingly active during REM sleep so when we are in REM sleep we are according to this processing emotions which you know coming from a background of studying psychotherapy freud sleep analysis jung all that stuff it makes a lot of sense i mean all this stuff is theory anyway it makes a lot of sense that we would process emotional things when we're asleep or when we have time to process them i would say that sometimes if you

have time and where you're not needing to focus on something else that some of those emotional things can be processed during the waking state but i suppose at night or whenever it is you sleep but it gets processed because when it comes to emotions and processing emotions it doesn't really seem there's a lot of difference between adults and children in a sense that children will process their emotions while they're awake a lot of the time is i suppose with the daydreaming and also with the the tantrums and the extreme emotions that a child will show

because we grow out of that and our brains develop so maybe our brains get to the point where that processing of emotions that childs do children do possibly while they're asleep as well and awake but we only do it when we're asleep because in society we wouldn't be able to function if we were processing while we were awake and acting like children having tantrums of course there are some adults that do that and that's why we have prisons so yeah non-rem sleep there's quite a few there's three sleep stages or one two three then there's

the fourth one which is rem sleep i was always quite interested in play therapy with children because they could be um well i did some therapy with children as a counsellor and quite similar with adults as well and is they would express themselves in a way that it's not aimed at the actual subject at the actual person so if they're angry at a person they might take it out on a teddy bear or someone else and adults are quite able to do that as well aren't they so i'm very fascinated with this whole dream processing

emotional stuff while we're asleep which i guess shows the importance of allowing yourself to drift into a sleep and allow that healing to take place because that's what i class it as a healing process where you're allowing those things that your brain needs to do to just get on with it brain needs to do certain things and your mind needs those things to be done so that you can feel happier when you're awake so therefore it's surely a great opportunity to feel happier when you're awake by allowing yourself to sleep easily so here are the

sleep stages there are two basic types of sleep rapid eye movement rem sleep and non-rem sleep which is three different stages oh it annoys me when you got something has two stages but each has three stages and each of those three stages has two stages and each of those two stages has 100 stages and it's very tedious to follow sometimes but this isn't too bad let's have a look so each is linked to specific brain waves and neuronal neuronal neuronal activity you'll cycle through all stages you cycle through all stages of non-rem and rem sleep

several times during a typical night with increasingly longer deeper rem periods occurring towards morning so stage one is non-rem sleep is the change over from wakefulness to sleep during this short period lasting several minutes of relatively light sleep your heartbeat breathing and eye movements slow and your muscles relax with occasional twitches your brain waves begin to slow from their daytime wakefulness patterns stage two non-rem sleep is a period of light sleep before you enter deeper sleep your heartbeat and breathings slow and muscles relax even further your body temperature drops and eye movements stop brainwave activity

slows but it is marked by brief bursts of electrical activity you spend more of your repeated sleep cycles in stage two sleep than in other sleep stages stage three non-rem sleep is the period of deep sleep that you need to feel refreshed in the morning it occurs in longer periods during the first half of the night your heartbeats and breathing slow to the lowest levels during sleep your muscles are relaxed and it may be difficult to awaken you brainwaves become even slower and you got rem sleep first occurs about 90 minutes after falling asleep your

eyes move rapidly from side to side behind closed eyelids mixed frequency brainwave activity becomes closer to that seen in wakefulness your breathing becomes faster and irregular and your heart rate and blood pressure increase to near waking levels most of your dreaming occurs during rem sleep although some can also occur in non-rem sleep your arm and leg muscles become temporarily paralyzed which prevents you from acting out your dreams what if you're dreaming of being asleep as you age you sleep less of your time in rem sleep memory consolidation most likely requires both non-rem and rem sleep

i've never been so interested and bored at the same time sleep mechanisms two internal biological mechanisms circadian rhythm and homeostasis homeostasis work together to regulate when you are awake and sleep circadian rhythms directly a wide directs a wide variety of functions from daily functions in wakefulness to body temperature metabolism and the release of hormones they control your timing of sleep and cause you to be sleepy at night and your tendency to wake in the morning without an alarm your biological your body's biological clock which is based on a roughly 24 hour day controls most circadian

rhythms circadian rhythms synchronize with environmental cues such as light and temperature about the actual time of day but they continue even in the absence of cues sleep wake homeostasis keeps track of your need to sleep the homeostatic sleep drive reminds the body to sleep after a certain time and regulates sleep intensity this sleep drive gets stronger every hour you are awake and causes you to sleep longer and more deeply after a period of sleep deprivation so factors that influence your sleep wake needs include medical conditions what you eat and drink as well perhaps the greatest

influence is the exposure to light specialized cells in the retina of your eye processes light and tell the brain whether it is day or night and can advance or delay our sleep wake cycle exposure to light can make it difficult to fall asleep and return to sleep when awakened night shift workers often have trouble falling asleep when they go to bed and also have trouble staying awake at work because their natural circadian rhythm and sleep wake cycle is disrupted in the case of jet lag circadian rhythms become out of sync with the time of day

when people fly to a different time zone creating a mismatch between their internal clock and the actual clock i do believe that's enough so we got through how much did we get through we got through about a third of the page yeah so what introduction anatomy of sleep sleep stages sleep mechanisms so yeah that's uh i suppose if i just read them without any kind of uh interjection i could have read a bit more but uh i didn't because i didn't want to because that would have been too boring for me although it's it's an

interesting subject but at the same time reading out loud and it's all right i suppose i suppose i guess i've learned something what i've learned is make sure i'm not gonna say anything just yeah i've learned a bit of thing a bit of stuff so hopefully you're fast asleep calm and relaxed and if you're not then don't worry because you will sleep and you'll notice over time the more you listen to me you know these let me bore you to sleep boring sessions the more you listen the more relaxed you feel generally and the easier

you find it when it comes to time for you to sleep the easier you find sleeping you know feeling supported on your bed enjoying that feeling of comfort that release and things change and you start to notice those changes and how your ability to sleep improves and how you feel happier within yourself when you're awake so that's it from me for today i'll speak to you next time bye