The Modern Way To Sleep: The Myth Of 8 Hours w/ Nick Littlehales (SSOF Ep 74)

Nick Littlehales0:37

And we did a little bit of work with one of the players. That led on to doing a bit of work with some of the other players. That led on to thinking about more significant things when they started to do doubling up preseason training sessions. So they train in the morning and in the afternoon, which they'd never done before, in preparation for the season.

So that opened up certain discussions about the data that was being produced in the afternoon and the morning. That sort of slightly changed that, led into things like, I'm sure we'll come on to things like chronotypes, these sort of little genetic twists about morning and night timers. That led on to a recovery room in between training sessions where we'd encourage the players to go and knock it out for 30 minutes as a powerful thing.

Strange old time when you look back at it, the late '90s. But I think I pretty much got my first phone that just made phone calls. So it was very unusual to be talking about sleep with a football club as big as Manchester United back then. So probably any other manager, any other club at that particular time, that conversation would have never developed.

So a lot of those players went on to play for the national squad, England squad. One of the lead physios for the national squad was also a physio for a club called Arsenal, and that led to me getting asked to go in and coach the first team squad at Arsenal with their manager Arsène Wenger at the time, who had a completely different maverick approach to managing athletes. So that's why he let me in.

It was at that time that the media found out that there was somebody going around talking to these pampered first team footballers in the UK about sleep, and it was a bit of tongue-in-cheek. It was a bit of laughing in the media, like, "What on earth is this?" So basically I was given the title as a sleep coach. He's obviously, coach in sports and it's about sleep, so they gave me the title of sleep coach.

And from that particular moment, I had to sort of make it up, to be honest. So what is a sleep coach? What does he do? How do you approach things? How do you deliver things? And so that sort of started my journey. And I can fairly safe to say, apart from one very loose area in the military where they would have somebody specifically about recovery and sleep within the military, but it was very basic, I was pretty much the first ever sleep coach, probably in sport, ever.

So a journey then led to working with other clubs, other sports. Around 2008, I got involved with a pretty much a dynamic cycling team called British Cycling and the Sky Procycling Team. That led us into 2012, the London Olympics, where we were smashing gold medals left, right, and center, winning the Tour de France. And it was all based on a thing called the aggregation of marginal gains.

And that's just looking at absolutely everything and seeing if you can find a little 1% factor. Then it all comes together to create an overall improvement rather than looking at any specific thing or any specific areas. Look at absolutely everything, like how you wash your hands, all that sort of stuff.

So interesting. That really brought me a little bit more to the forefront because in the aggregation of marginal gains, they couldn't ignore sleep. They got me in to help with that particular area, which was a very broad brush of all sorts of elements about the recovery and sleeping environments and everything.

And then since then, over the last two decades, wow, hasn't this world changed for anybody who's older than 30? It's just been a constant shift of things. So now my role is a combination of protecting people from the challenges of this 24/7 world we live in, but also looking at performance. And so it's a combination of the two.

There's a lot more coaches around now. There's a lot more sleep experts. There's a lot more knowledge and information about. But I have to say, as I wander around working with all sorts of different elite athletes, including fighters, esporters, poker players, never mind women's football, women's rugby, snowboarders, skiers, whatever it is, they're just humans who sleep. And whatever occupation they have to be in sport, you want to try and optimize that and not waste time doing it without benefits.

So I think whilst there's a lot more focus on the area and a lot more knowledge and awareness, I think we're still on those first baby steps of trying to define an approach that people can adopt and feel comfortable and confident about it and stop worrying about it. Because that's its biggest disruptor. So funny old journey. Didn't set out to be a sleep coach or whatever, but I have to say, it's been a bit of fun and quite rewarding when you're working inside of some of the most elite level sporting athletes and organizations. So good fun and thoroughly enjoyed it.

James de Lacey9:33

Oh, nice. And you mentioned about the approaches as well, so that's where I want to start this. Because the general advice is always just sleep 8 hours. And as you mentioned, it can cause anxiety if you're going to bed maybe later than usual, you have to get up earlier than usual, you're only going to get 7 and a half, 7, and you go, "Oh [expletive], I need to fall asleep fast," and you can't fall asleep, and you get into the cycles of not being able to sleep for whatever reason.

But do you want to maybe dive into your approach and this idea of, I guess, the myth of getting 8 hours? Because obviously within your approach, you're not looking to hit that 8 hour mark, you do things in cycles. So maybe just dive into that a bit.

Nick Littlehales10:03

Yeah, that's a big question, so I'll just tap into some of the key bits. Yeah, I became, you hear this, get your 8 hours. If you only get 6, you're going to fall apart and complications in the short and the long term. I haven't met anybody, including myself, who ever achieved a solid 8-hour block consistently without awakenings, disturbances. So I thought, well, you can allocate 8, 9, 12 hours if you want, but are you actually going to go into a sleep state and get that?

Quality sleep, sleep well—that's down to your brain. So I was confused by just because you allocate the amount of time, does that mean you're getting the quality from your sleep? And the answer for me was no. There was no real argument about the percentage of recovery time in any 24 hours that a human would be in this sleep-type state. So it's 30-ish percent, that makes 8 hours. So that's really where that comes from.

But I was also fascinated by up until electric light came into our lives back in the sort of 1930s, not that long ago, is that there was no evidence of humans actually sleeping in a what's called a monophasic block, which is just one block nocturnally. It was always either twice a day, three times a day, or four or six times a day. And that's not necessarily the way that we perceive sleep today, but that was a lot of sort of going into a sleep state for a period of time, but also then other recovery moments.

We're aware of things like siesta midday. There's one late afternoon. And it's sort of like, well, that's called polyphasic sleeping. Now why did we shift away from that? And that's because we invented light. We changed exposure to light. We spent more time inside than outside. We sort of readjusted our own internal circadian clocks to do it.

But probably up until the mid-'90s, we were getting away with it, one block. And since then, there's so much more pressure and challenges—exciting, sometimes scary—in the world that we live in, and particularly in sport, that you just simply could not adopt that. The whole premise about sleep's performance was getting a solid 8 hours. So, it was always creating worry and anxiety that it's not being achieved.

So I had been in many sleep clinics and I had seen clinical professionals measuring humans in a clinic, and they would look at a 90-minute cycle, right? They would watch brainwave patterns going through a 90-minute period, shifting through light sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep, this sort of thing. And they would come in sort of various percentages. So light sleep would pretty much dominate. The deep sleep, non-REM stuff, was probably around 20 to 25% max in any particular cycle.

What was also, when you looked at the next 90-minute cycle, then those brainwave patterns keep generating it, but the same thing is happening. The brain's looking for that deep sleep, but it's only around 20 or 25%. Once you move into the third cycle, the third 90 minutes—so you're 4.5 hours in now—the brain sort of stops hunting for that deep sleep because you're actually moving into wake cycles. Because it's a bit like the sun sets, it comes round back to your zip code, postcode, and it's about to start waking the planet up again. So it stopped looking in cycles four, five.

And a 90-minute cycle is the length of a football game. So when I'm trying to change the sort of narrative, the language, and stop people thinking about sleep in 8 hours, it made sense to sort of think about, well, five 90-minute cycles is 7.5 hours. Well, that defines it a little better, but we're thinking in cycles.

It also allowed me to focus their attention on it's the first two cycles of any sleep period that is the critical two cycles for developing this quality deep sleep, which can easily be lost. So if you looked at a sleep-wake routine between say 11:00 at night and 6:30 in the morning, that's five 90-minute cycles, that's 7.5 hours allocated. And so it's the first two cycles that we're trying to focus on in that five-cycle routine.

It gave us timings, it gave us sort of an anchor point, a reset point, like 6:30 is when we normally want to start our day, that's our sunrise. So we're trying to recreate an anchor point to start that 24 hours like the sun does.

We think about the first 90-minute cycle, the second cycle. So when you get an anchor point like 6:30, then you've got 16 cycles, and there's 16 little rhythmic patterns to what you're doing: cycle 1, cycle 2, cycle 3, all the way through. So cycle 16 is your wake cycle into 6:30 from 5:00. You've got 11:00 into 6:30, which is five 90-minute cycles. But you could also consider 12:30 into 6:30, four cycles and 6 hours, without awakenings, without the disturbances, still generating that deep sleep.

So what happens is you are improving the quality of your recovery and taking the focus away from how much time you're allocating to it. You can start to think of that polyphasic approach—maybe you can add in a little 30-minute cycle, because that's 30% of a 90-minute cycle, known as the nap. Snoozers for losers, so try to change that.

So we look at little controlled recovery periods and say, let's think about a 24-hour polyphasic approach to our recovery. And maybe four cycles at night between half-past 12 and 6:30, maybe little tiny little micro CRPs every cycle throughout the day, and maybe a little 30-minute cycle late afternoon when we're not trying to sleep, we're just vacant mind spacing.

And that takes the pressure off phase 3, so we can start to sort of depressurize the process, create a bit more space in the day to get what we needed done. And that helps the brain when you do present yourself to go to sleep to look for that quality. So hopefully everybody got that, just trying to give you a short answer.

James de Lacey17:06

No, that's perfect. And I'm going to try to get this as practical as possible for the listeners too. But so I think I recall—I read the book a long time ago—but you can aim for a number of cycles within a week. So then obviously you're not so dead set on the day of hitting the number and getting anxious about it. It's okay, I can, if I have less sleep tonight, I can make it up later in the week. Is that part of that philosophy?

Nick Littlehales17:33

Absolutely. I think many people will be aware of HRV, heart rate variability. And it's a good indicator to recovery and how an athlete is and how we all are, because we've all got trackers. So it is those sort of variabilities, isn't it, what you're looking for in there. It is what sort of numbers and data you're getting from those variables.

So you've got human recovery variabilities. So what it is, we've all hardly slept, not slept at all, had a really disturbed night, and the following day we still smash it, right? We still go out and really achieve. So we kind of look at it and say, well, if you go five cycles a day, your five day—make sort of sleep recovery your first health pillar rather than tagged on at the back—and think five cycles a day could look like, four cycles nocturnally at night, like I mentioned, and six solid hours without disturbances, which could give you real quality.

We can think of all these other little tiny moments in every other cycle that adds up, and then we can look at that 30-minute cycle as another one.

So a five-cycle routine could look like four nocturnal, one midday short one. It could be just five nocturnal between 11 and 6:30. But what you've got is a five a day. So seven days, you got 35 cycles. If you're using one routine, then that's 35 cycles nocturnally, 11 to 6:30, if you're on a five-cycle routine. But if you're on a four-cycle—a five-cycle routine but four nocturnally—then that's 28 nocturnal cycles each 24 hours, bolstered by this late afternoon cycle, which you'll have seven of them in a week.

And maybe you're looking at four, five, or six little micro recovery periods, just looking out the window, half-filling your hydration bottle so you have to go refill it, creating little recovery moments, two or three minutes for your brain. All adds up.

So you can actually sit down with a coach or yourself and go, look, 35 cycles across a seven-day period. I can truly try to look at this and adapt it to see which sort of combination works best for me. Four at night or five at night? We've also got things getting in the way. In sport, it could be late-night arrivals at airports, it could be traveling from east to west coast in America. There's all sorts of things. There's parties, there's holidays, there's late-night games, there's all sorts of things that will get in the way.

So what you're sort of looking at is, rather than going, I've got some variability, so across the course of seven days, if I'm sort of achieving 28 nocturnal back-to-back cycles, if I'm balancing that with other little moments, then I'm getting my 35. But they might adjust themselves a little bit depending on certain things that are going on, right?

So it really gives a coach a really—to look at the week, look at the month, look at the year, because you just prat that up, don't you? This is the target for the athlete: 35 a week, five a day, bang, bang, bang. And you can really sort of see where the pressure points are.

And the thing about it, you can start to take the pressure off those pressure points before you even get there, because you'll be able to adapt that technique in your head a little bit by going, I'm going to add something in midday as well as late afternoon. I'm not going to get in until 2:00 in the morning there, so rather than actually forcing myself to go to sleep when I'm high on adrenaline or I've been traveling, it's actually do other recovery activities in that bit before 6:30.

Then midday, late afternoon, you're back on. So we all know about sleep deprivation, but you can't catch it up, you can't get it back, it's gone. So it's that far more positive attitude towards what you're doing. It's in certain periods of time, your cycles will look a little bit different, but you're very positive of how you're optimizing your recovery. So instead of worrying about losing sleep or losing cycles or having to catch up and readjust, that's the last thing your brain wants is a random approach to this.

It likes some elements of rhythm and pattern and consistency and sustainability. It's not looking at Monday through to Sunday. It has no relationship with 24 hours, that's the clock we put on it. It has no relationship with Sunday or Monday or Tuesday. So as a human, you should just sort of resync yourself into that mindset of it's your rolling cycles as you go through every day, every seven-day period, keep revealing what's going on, being able to adapt and adjust, bang.

And suddenly you start hearing athletes talking, "How did you sleep last night?" and they go, "I don't even think about it." "Why not?" "Well, I don't worry about it." "Why not?" "'Cause I'm on a 35-cycle routine. 28 nocturnally, 7 midday, and 42 little tiny CRPs. And that's my parameters. And as long as I keep doing things in every cycle of my day that I know adds up to help my brain, so when I present myself to sleep, I don't have to worry, 'cause my brain will take over.

It'll go and get the quality of sleep that I would like. Sometimes it won't, but when I wake up in the morning and start my day at 6:30, I just crack on with the same approach."

I don't worry about what happened last night. I just keep doing the things I know work, and hopefully more times than not I get good quality recovery. And that's a far better mindset than, "Oh my god, I've only got 8 hours left before tomorrow morning. I need to go to sleep. Sleeping pill, melatonin supplements, have a few beers, wherever it might be. Let me listen to this, let me meditate." It's all this sort of panic of you're in control of your sleep, but by that time it's way too late. So it's trying to—sleeping is about what you do while you're awake, not while you're asleep.

James de Lacey23:48

Nice. And just to take, I guess, this even deeper for someone who maybe is working full-time, so for example a lot of the listeners might work full-time, they might train before work or after work or both, and in that day it might be difficult to fit a 30 or 90 minute nap in there. So what advice do you have for someone who has a schedule like that?

Nick Littlehales24:19

Well, the thing is, schedules get created by us and by the occupation that we have. So it's a little like when children come along into people's lives and it sort of completely shifts the whole ball game with schedules, doesn't it? But it's like, so you've chosen this occupation six months, yeah, and you've chosen this occupation, these are the demands of the occupation, and this is how you've got a role. Okay.

The first thing you have to remind yourself is pretty much every single person I've ever coached, when they say exactly the same to me, is there is time, it's just you don't allocate it right. There's a lot of time in all of our lives where we're filling it—we're filling it with stuff to do—and that can become quite obsessive.

What you sort of do is go, well, there is 20 or 30 minutes that we can have for us. It's just how important it is to you, right? So you give somebody that mindset that you can be more productive, you can train better, you can have less injuries, you can have more of a mental psychological gain, you can feel comfortable. You're not wasting valuable time. I mean, 30% of a day—8 hours—is a long time. It's more than anything else we do apart from breathing, probably.

So it's like, I don't want to be doing that 30% of my day is doing that and I'm not getting any gains from it, or I would love to get some gains, and that's what the 30 minutes become. So once you shift them into thinking like that, they start doing it. And suddenly they can actually put in more productive training sessions.

They can protect themselves, they're more consistent, they create more space in the 24 hours because there's periods when they will feel tired, there is fatigue, and they'll push through it. And it's trying to get rid of all of that to make them even quicker, faster, stronger.

And when it doesn't take much for me to convince them because that's why they're coming to talk to me, is there is another you, right? There's another you that you just don't know because you think you're at your personal best, you think you're doing everything amazingly well and successful, but I can tell you now there's another one that's just a little bit quicker, little bit smarter, little bit more alert, not so fatigued, and that's the person you want right to be when you need them to happen.

So I always sort of just remind them, the last person I was coaching was a single-handed round-the-world sailor. Now that person decides to go on a challenge of sailing around the world on a boat. They're racing against other boats, but they can't see them. They're going through real challenges every day. They can't leave the deck and go down and get any sleep unless certain things are in place, 'cause it's too dangerous.

So we coach in one of the approaches, which is polyphasic—six times in every 24 hours. So they'll just go down, strap themselves in, 26 minutes, grab some recovery, whatever that means, either sleeping or just flat back on their deck, off. And they do that for three months. And a lot of them will come back after that and they've absolutely smashed it, and they go, "Why have I been trying to sleep in such long blocks when actually I've just spent three months in a very intensive challenge and I gathered all my recovery in a polyphasic way?"

So when they come back and they're unsure again, they just go, "It's polyphasic for me, right?" Because it's given them an example. And I think anybody who's listening to that, "I haven't got time to cram in a 30 minute whatever," so fine. And as a coach, you don't tell somebody to do something they won't listen to you or they won't sustain. You join the gym in January, they've left it in March.

What you do is you take them on a little journey, and suddenly they realize that actually this is happening, and actually nothing's changed. They've just changed what they think is important. And once you're in that place, you never go back and wish you'd done it a long time ago, however old you are.

But I certainly, when I'm working with elite athletes now who are 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 years old, 18 years old, they absolutely love it because they do not want to waste a minute of their days doing something without any benefits. They don't. They want to smash it 24/7. They want to feel like they're doing something that protects them, that allows them to have a long career and achieve what they want.

So they can look at it and go, "Wow, that's my edge. If I can get my—if I can go into that area and find my gains in that 30%, that's going to give me a real head start on everybody else, right? Because I will be better than everybody else when it matters."

James de Lacey29:45

No, that's it.

Nick Littlehales30:17

The very specific word, which is the first place you start on any journey, is are you coachable? Do you want to be coached, right? And you have to ask yourself that question. Otherwise what you try and do is consistently make it up yourself. There's too much information at the end of your fingertips to find it out yourself, and you think you can manage and coach yourself and discipline yourself and everything else. I can tell you now that ain't working. It doesn't work for people.

James de Lacey30:48

That's a good call. And I wanted to dive into that nocturnal sleep cycle as well a little further. I think in the book you mentioned around when you mentioned setting your wake time, and that's always your wake time. So if you miss, for example, the 11 to 6:30 example, say you missed the 11:00 window for whatever reason and it's 11:30, you would then wait till 12:30 and then always wake up at 6:30 regardless.

Nick Littlehales30:48

Yeah, well, then what you're sort of reminding yourself is it's called circadian rhythms. It's the sun going around our planet, and it's basically about light, dark, and temperature shifts. And we used to be so synchronized to that, but humans keep creating things like daylight saving time, which is a nightmare. Shifting the clocks through season—I hate it too. There's things like we invented the electric light bulb and then suddenly thought, "Oh, we can just sleep at night. That's no problem."

We invent 24/7 tech and culture, and "Oh yeah, it's absolutely fine to be shopping for clothes at 3:00 in the morning and getting them delivered by 7:00 in the morning. It's fine, isn't it?" And gaming. But one fundamental thing is that we've all got a chronotype. It's a little genetic twist. Now, some would say there's four chronotypes. Some trackers these days identify up to six because it's just related to the data that's going in. But the real thing is there's two, and that's a morning type and a nighttime.

Thinking about your anchor point, you've got a natural chronotype wake time. So say you're an AM, that might be 6:30, 6:00. You start thinking about 8:00, that's like mid-afternoon to you as an AM. So you would pick a natural wake time of 5, 5:30, 6:00, 6:30, 7-ish maybe. Now the nighttime chronotype's thinking more like 8, 9:30.

So if you had complete control and allowed your natural chronotype to reveal itself, which is just a phase delay on sunrise, AMs react to sunrise quicker than PMs do because of little pineal gland and light receptors. So there's a little phase delay. So maybe my natural chronotype might be 8:00, your natural chronotype wake time could be 6:30. Then we apply our occupational wake time.

So we both do the same job, we both got to get up about 6:30 to get to our workplace for a particular time or training. So basically I'm having to wake up at 6:30, which is not my natural time. It's a full cycle before my natural time. Your occupation and natural chronotype is the same, so you're in heaven. You're hitting all the boxes.

And what we're doing is say we need to have this anchor point because this is our sunrise in any 24-hour period. This is when we start the day. Yesterday is gone. It's the sun and us as humans starting a new day. So that bit and your post-recovery period, which is in this example 6:30 into 8:00, your first 90 minutes.

So the nighttime chronotype, me, has to really focus on what I do in that first 90 minutes, particularly focused around lights, because I've got to get myself into the same place as you do more naturally. So it sort of gives you a focus. Is we're both at 6:30, I know my chronotype, you know yours. What do I do in that first 90 minutes?

James de Lacey34:11

So what you're saying is you come back again, excuse me, is the fifth cycle between 5 and 6:30 is your wake cycle. So if you're waking up 5:30, quarter to 6, 6, 6:15, and then you're able to start your day around 6:30, don't get too hung up. It's not exactly on the 6:30 clock, it's within that little timeframe. Is that that's when I get up?

Nick Littlehales34:53

Have a wee, hydrate, breakfast challenges, lots of lights, get on with my day. If I wake up a bit closer towards 5, I then ask myself the question, I'm not getting far enough into that final cycle. So maybe I can just restrict my sleep time a little bit and push that closer towards 6:30. And the reason I can do that is I would just choose 12:30 for a few nights because that'll just shift it back a bit.

I can also, like you said, I may look at 11 into 6:30 is my optimal approach and I can do that because of my occupation. So that's your... But if there's... I want to be able to react, I want to be able to adapt with confidence.

So if I think that that 11:00 slot is going to be under pressure and I don't want to sort of... you start thinking pre-sleep around 9, in that sort of 9:30 into 10 into 11, is then I will just go to the next cycle and it does take it down to 4 and a half hours. But I've also got this mindset of a little 20-minute midday, I've got my one late afternoon. So it's kind of not disrupting things. I'm keeping rhythm, I'm keeping pattern, it's not random.

I think if you got in, quarter past, 20 past 11 and think, oh rush upstairs, brush your teeth and dive into bed because you're missing out on sleep, well your brain's had no chance to sort of drag itself away from what's just been happening. So it's inevitable you'll probably have some awakenings going to the toilet or disturbed sleep or thoughts and things like that cropping up that won't allow the quality.

So it's sort of like reminding yourself that what you're trying to do is reveal the quality and what you're trying to do is not put your brain under pressure to try and do it when you're out of control of it. And actually help it, not just expect it to do it. And that's why, if you've got a flight and you could easily get up, but say 5:45 to go and catch that flight, not 6:30, then choose 5:00 to get up or go back to 3:30 or go back to 2:00 or go back to 12:30 or go back to 11. You come all the way back again.

So what you're doing is, when you're looking at everything you're doing, 'cause these timings are just subconscious, is you just constantly going about your life and you're always looking for these little opportunities. When nobody else needs to know about it, but you sort of go, you're able to sort of go, well I want to go and do some training before I get to work.

Well for you and I, that would mean 5:00 wake time to be able to get up and do some stuff before we got to work at the same time. So we're adding a full cycle on because we want to up our training schedule later in the day. But sometimes when you start doing that, you think, well I've got to go to bed earlier to replace that earlier start.

What you immediately do is, no, I just need to create a 20-minute window midday along with my 30-minute window late afternoon, which I always do, and that will just balance that approach, rather than thinking I've got to go to sleep at 9:30 'cause I'm waking up at 5.

The brain does not like this because in the natural circadian rhythm of the day there's four phases. And if you look at it, 6:00 in the morning into 12 midday, 6:00 in the evening into 12 midnight, there's a very distinct four phases. One is the dark period nocturnal, you've got the serotonin blue light period phase one and phase two, and then you've got that melatonin phase three period. And depending on the seasons, we mess about with that.

But what you're always trying to do is you and your brain is asking yourself to fall within a rhythm and a pattern. And the more times you're consistent with that, the better it will be. If you just shift it around and thinking you can just reset it like that, then you're on a road to poor performance.

James de Lacey39:32

Interesting with the napping as well, 'cause obviously you mentioned you can do 20, 30, or even 90-minute cycles as a nap. Are you setting alarms for that? 'Cause I'm thinking now, sometimes I fall asleep setting alarm and you just kind of get startled awake and you feel groggy, maybe mid-sleep cycle. I don't know, is that something you're doing or not? Do how often do you do it every day?

I used to. I haven't napped in a while. I probably should now after talking about this. Yeah, I used to nap every day.

Nick Littlehales40:03

If I do something that I think is positive, maybe taking half a liter of water on every 30 minutes, okay, then I shift that to half a liter every two or three hours, I'm starting to feel the effects of it. And it's because I'm shifting that thing. If I'm doing certain exercise routines and I stop it for a week, when I go back it seems to be more difficult. It's not so natural, it's not so easy.

So what you do is put it in the context with absolutely everything else you do. If you allocate that time every day, it doesn't have to be specifically at the same time. For me, it's in that area about between sort of 3:30, 4:00 into around 5:30, 6:00, in that space. I'm always thinking to have my time. So because it's there every day, is you sort of, your brain gets used to it.

So you kind of get this little nudge that, oh today we're definitely going to snooze this one out, because we can. I can feel it. So when I go, I sit down and I just nod it out and we had a little micro-slip. Sometimes no indication whatsoever. So I might try and play a few new chords on my guitar, I might read a few more passages of the book I'm reading, I might just sit outside and just look at nature, I might listen to something.

What I'm doing is just it's a vacant mind space slot that is available for me and my brain to take advantage of if we so wish, as required. But it's always there because it helps with the whole process. Now when you start this, it's probably advisable, because when people do it randomly what happens is you will drift.

And the reason why it's 30 minutes, pilots use 26 within that 30-minute slot, is inside of there if you start to develop, moving towards those non-REM and REM sleep stages, the slightly deeper sleep stages, what's going to happen is when that alarm goes off or you wake, you're going to feel really groggy and not refreshed.

So it's kind of like practice, practice, allocate the space, do it every day, don't expect to go to sleep. It's a vacant mind space that's just as valuable as anything else you're doing. And what it becomes is then it creates that little moment, that rhythm. So every time you go, right I'm doing my 30 minutes, it's kind of like that's the trigger. So the more times you do it, you sort of go into a sleep state maybe 15 minutes, bit longer, wake up, feel great, get on with it.

At the start, you could think, I don't want to suggest anybody should use caffeine, but caffeine is used in all sorts of positive ways. And if you use...

Caffeine, fine. But a little bit of caffeine in a controlled way over your rolling 24 hours gives you a little nudge, right? And when it has about 15-20 minutes to kick in. So a little bit of caffeine, part of an overall plan, right? A little bit of caffeine just before it, you drop into some sort of micro-sleep or not. It then starts to kick in a little bit and hops you out if you did, right? In a nice controlled way, like cyclists on time trials. It's not, we don't want the highs and lows of caffeine. We just use it or not.

Anyway, so if you put an alarm on and you just sit there, don't go into a micro-sleep, and the alarm goes off, you feel fine, right? It's just timing a period for you, isn't it? If you did go into a micro-sleep, it stops you going too far. And if you feel groggy, you're sort of like, good, because I stopped. I was about to start shifting. That could have turned into like an hour. I was out with the fairies, what I mean?

So the alarm is to stop you going forward. The alarm is to just remind you that's the period of time you allocated. It means you've got confidence if you do go into a micro-sleep, something's going to kick you out of it. And the more you do it, the less that grogginess will start to appear.

Because if anybody's got like a go-to, a dawn wake simulator light, an SAD lamp, seasonal effective, they produce 10,000 lux of blue light, right? And that is a strong level of light. And the blue light is what triggers your serotonin and unsuppresses all your functionality, right? And that's what happens at sunrise when we're outside in blue light.

So you can have a little lamp, and you can put it on a timer so it starts to come on 15 minutes into your 30 minutes, so that when you hop out of sleep, if you did hop out of sleep, when the alarm, that light is already making you feel fine because it's just nudging your serotonin level up a little bit. So there's, you see what I mean? Once you start doing it every day, seven days a week, 365, it's just part of your everyday routine, like trying to get eight hours at night. It becomes a really positive.

And what happens is you start to find little things that work for you, right? Of what you do in those 30 minutes, what you do sort of slightly before, during, or after. That once you keep doing it, that grogginess just disappears. And you're still awake at 10 o'clock at night thinking, I want to go for a mountain bike ride. Still sunny, it's summer. Whereas a month ago you were sitting in front of the telly thinking I want to go to sleep, I'm knackered.

So it's suddenly these little moments that start to go, oh, that grogginess is disappearing because I do it every day, and I don't sleep every day, but it happens occasionally and I'm glad I do it. That starts to shift. That starts to shift. And that's why I hate the word napping, kipping, snoozers for losers. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

If you, you would never give me a piece of advice that I could take one glass of water a day and get away with it, would you? You tell me that I have to hydrate at a higher level of that and regularly. Eating is the same. If I said to you I'm not going to exercise for the next month, you'd go, but you've got to do something. You've got to walk at least for 30 minutes. You can't do absolutely nothing, surely.

So we have these really specific factors, these really good markers that we know we cannot sort of mess around with too much because we know the consequences. And as soon as you get that in and go, it is a controlled recovery period for me and my brain that equals I go quicker and faster, achieve more, healthier, more dynamic, will live longer, we achieve all my goals, will achieve all my objectives, and any challenge that comes my way, I will smash it and deal with it with good levels of stress, managing the difficult times of stress, anxiety, and everything that comes my way.

I am absolutely comfy to take it on, right? And that's what that 30 minutes, or it's a nap and a waste of time to others. Pick your choice.

James de Lacey47:51

I love it. Can you shift chronotypes? Obviously you hear some people say, hey, you can be a morning, you can be a night person and turn yourself into a morning person, et cetera. Is that something that you can do or you would ever advise somebody? What you thought?

Nick Littlehales47:51

It is, you can't stop the sun going around our planet and you're a human being, right? So any change in that, we won't be around, right? And that's our challenge in the modern world today. So there, that's it, right? We give that a 24-hour period.

Now what happens is that humans have to live in all sorts of different places on the planet, northern, southern hemisphere, here, there, everywhere. The different climates, different cultures, different all sorts of things. So you sort of go, you get this natural circadian clock of your zip code, your postcode, which if you were born on the west coast of America or the east coast of America, your clocks will be different inside you, subtly, because of that natural rhythm.

So we can all see the sun and the moon wherever we are on this planet, so it gives you that sort of mindset of, hang on a minute, keep that in place. What you do is then, you're going to be a surgeon and you have to work night shifts. You're a firefighter, you're a policeman, you're a pilot, you're a parent. Nowadays, we have 24-hour businesses and shops and everything else. So you're just doing a normal job, but you work nights and shift patterns.

So what you do is you just adapt, don't you? So you camouflage your natural chronotype. So you can't change it. It's a genetic twist in a gland. You can't have it operated out yet. Maybe you could. But what you can do is ignore it, camouflage it, and overstimulate around it, right?

And so when you're doing that, you sort of go, I'm actually putting myself under more pressure than I would like, ideally, every rolling 24 hours. Because what I'm doing is counterintuitive to my natural chronotype, but it's also creating other pressures for me. Because maybe I'm over-caffeinating, maybe there's too many energy drinks going down my neck trying to get past it. Maybe I'm just pushing it at the gym too much, pushing this here, pushing that there, just trying to keep myself active all the time to push past these little moments that I naturally sort of take for myself.

So you can ignore it, you can camouflage it, you can adapt and adjust as a human being to almost anything that's coming your way, because it's amazing. However, you always want to be conscious about when you make choices. And we've all got to deal with this, everything that we do. But it's kind of like, what we do know is that AMs do not like flying through time zones. They don't like shifts. They love breakfast, they love getting up early. They don't really like the evenings and late nights. It's not their thing. It's not their natural C-flow.

So it's like, but the PMs do like shifts, they do like the night, they do like, so if you were going to be a pilot, the PM can be a long-haul pilot, not a problem. The AM as a pilot wants to do short-haul shifts, right?

So it's sort of like, if you want to be a pilot in that example, and you know that part of that occupation might have its long-haul stuff, it's not to avoid it. But what you have to say is, I know so many pilots who did long-haul in their morning chronotypes, and after 10 years they've had enough. They've probably had enough after the first year. After the five years, what they've been doing is compensating like mad for something that's going on all the time, is they are naturally fighting a natural rhythm to their day by being a long-haul pilot as an AM, right?

So we're starting to use this knowledge we have now to, certainly the work I've done and what was in that book, and there's another one coming out soon which is slightly different.

James de Lacey52:03

Awesome.

Nick Littlehales52:03

It's more like a workbook, handbook. Because inside the book you read several years ago, there was a technique hidden in there somewhere, wasn't it? The R90 technique, recovery cycles, looking at these all those various key factors. Well, that's all being put together inside a handbook that you can just download and create your own approach with me by your side, sort of thing.

So I think it's just become very apparent that humans are not that smart. And they keep doing things, amazing, absolutely exciting things, but sometimes we just don't think about the consequences too much. We just bowl on in there.

We're reminded all the time that the key to anybody's success is to remind yourself you're a human being and remind yourself of your inside and outside balance. Because whether you like going camping or not, right, everybody's aware that going for a walk outside or sitting outside on the bench or sitting by the coast or by a river or by the mountains, it doesn't take too long, does it, for you to sort of go, well, life's...

Not that bad, is it? Because it's that sort of shift, isn't it? If you ever go camping for a week or something, you're out in the mountains, it doesn't take that long because you got no fancy mattresses, you've got no real security, but suddenly you start waking up naturally. You start having breakfast when you probably wouldn't normally do and rush off.

There's a bit more space in the day, you're getting more of that synchronized process, lots of the right light, blue light midday, morning midday, lots of that sort of more melatonin type light, amber light in the evening. And everything's just within sort of like 48 hours, you wonder why you want to go home.

It's like wow. So what you're sort of trying to say to yourself is sit down, get a piece of paper or whatever, stick it on your pad, get your pencil out and just try to sort of reflect that. If you went away for a week or something like that, on a holiday, on a break like that, even if you're with other people and family, is just how far are you away from that as an everyday approach.

And so not worry about it because some people live in apartments and city blocks and live in busy cities, and some people live in the countryside, and some people live in different parts of the world. It's just a sort of, it's just this aggregation of marginal gains, isn't it? If you can just start to do little things in cycle one from 6:30 into 8, 8 into 9:30, moving to cycle eight, and then you're doing your little 30 minutes, then you're doing that, then you do that, and you're sort of doing little things each week, each month that just keep building up.

Suddenly you find what is your optimized rhythm and you sort of think, well at least I've moved some percentage point towards that outside natural human life so I'm improving what's going on, so I get a better balance. It's all about regaining your balance. So sometimes the pressure will sort of tip you a little bit in that direction, so what you do is just make those subtle changes again and just bring it back.

And that's really what sleep is all about, to stop worrying about it. It's just now how to optimize your best balance as you as a human being, and it is that relationship with that whole thing that's key to your success.

James de Lacey56:22

Now that's a perfect way to end this podcast too, Nick. So thanks for coming on. And for anyone who wants to learn more, read more, make sure you pick up his book, there'll be a link in the description for that too. But where can people follow you and find you, Nick?

Nick Littlehales56:22

I'm a sport, no S, sleep coach. So sportsleepcoach.com. I'm always chucking content up there, the social media places, Instagram, TikTok, all the places you can find it where I'm not a prolific poster. I sort of post when I think there's something worth saying or sharing.

There's a little audible course on the website which I did myself with a company, so you can just listen while you're walking the dog or riding your bike or even fighting in the ring or whatever, listen to me talking to you about little steps. There's the book, it's still relevant, it's moving into its eighth year now. It's in 18 languages around the world: Arabic, Japanese, Chinese. We're all human, we all sleep, so everything in that book just applies to everybody, whoever you are.

And even though maybe some of it might be, I wouldn't say out of date, I think that's understating it a little bit, but it's definitely worth a read. And if it gets you on that first step of making some little changes, that would be amazing.

James de Lacey57:19

I can tell you that's amazing. You're talking to me after seven years of reading that book, so it must have had some impact.

Awesome. So anyone, those will be down the description too to check out. But thanks for coming on, Nick, appreciate it.

Nick Littlehales57:19

No problem at all. Hey, go and get one of your little CRPS that you stopped doing, bring it back into your life.

James de Lacey57:48

For sure. I need to do it, that's what I'm going to do today. All right.