What it means to be a good sleeper? I think all of our goals when we have a chronic sleep problem is to be a good sleeper. A good sleeper is not somebody who sleeps well all the time. The ratio is they have good sleep most of the time but about 15-20% of the…
Will coffee kill your sleep?
‘Will coffee kill my sleep?’ This is probably one of the most common questions that sleep clinicians get. In reality, everyone has a different sensitivity to caffeine. Someone might have caffeine late at night and not feel any effects… While somebody else might swear they cannot have it any time of day because it’s definitely…
How do I get back to sleep?
What’s the trick to get back to sleep in the middle of the night? This is a question that people are expecting me to easily answer as a sleep clinician. But actually, it requires a more complicated answer than expected… If this is happening to you over and over again, it means you have a…
Can we recover from sleep debt?
I have been studying sleep for a long time. Dealing with many different types of patients. I even worked at Harvard labs doing studies around astronauts’ sleep and blue light. And, a really interesting subject that comes up is sleep debt. Our natural tendency As humans, we feel that we need to recover when we…
Is it insomnia?
When I was working at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS hospital I saw thousands of cases of insomnia. And it would present differently with everybody. I saw people who had menopause and then they got insomnia. People who went through illnesses, took new medications, had a lot of stress in their lives… Others having the…
How much sleep do you actually need?
The important element when fixing the problem One of the keys to fixing a sleep problem is timing, which is often overlooked… We talk a lot about changing the duration and quality of our sleep, but we miss out the timing. Why is this important? I worked for Harvard Sleep Labs on a NASA funded…