Watched until 22m22, ironically during a bout of insomnia.
Made notes:
A third of Britons suffer from insomnia (either trouble falling asleep or waking up in the middle of the night and finding it hard to go back to sleep)
Easy way to find out if you're sleep deprived is to go to bed in the middle of the afternoon - if it takes you 15 minutes or more to fall asleep, you're ok, 10 minutes and you're sleep deprived and under 5 minutes you have severe sleep deprivation
We should sleep in 90 minute cycles, 5 or 6 throughout the night, each culminating in a short period of REM sleep which is when we dream
You go through various stages in these 90 minutes (see 07h55 for graphic): 10 minutes of drifting in and out of consciousness, another 20 where your brain waves slow, then into deep sleep and back to slow brain waves before a short period of R.E.M.
During deep sleep (from about 30 minutes of sleep onwards) is when we lay down memories and scientists also think that this is when the brain detoxes and cleanses
Genetics can be partly to 'blame', scientists can now run tests to identify genetic markers for whether you're a morning person or a night person, whether you need more or less sleep than average, increased tendency for insomnia, efficiency of sleep and sensitivity to caffeine
Caffeine contributes to insomnia but alcohol contributes to port sleep quality and relaxes your throat muscles, increasing your tendency to snore
There are some very big studies that have now associated sleeping too little (or too much) with type 2 diabetes and obesity - when you're sleep deprived your body produces more of the hormones that make you hungry and less of the ones that keep you full
In particular, high cravings for sugar and carbohydrates are common, but even if you resist temptation, shorter sleep raises glucose levels in the blood
Your gut bacteria controls how efficient your gut is at extracting energy from food - when you're sleep deprived, there is now research that suggests that your gut bacteria extracts more calories from your food intake
Sleeping pills are addictive and you build a tolerance to them so over time you need more and more to get the same quality of sleep - you need to find the underlying cause
The eyes detect the dawn-dusk cycle and set your internal body clock
If you mess with the hypothalamus' setting of the internal clock, all of your individual organs and systems are thrown out of whack, keeping their own time.
Tips for good sleep hygiene: remove all screens and technology from the bedroom, keep it declittered, turn your clock away so you don't obsess over the time and use your bedroom only for sleeping.
If you are feeling tired but have to stay awake (to drive for example), experiments have shown that having an espresso or cup of black coffee immediately followed by a nap (which is possible because the caffeine takes a little while to reach your brain), this is much more effective than having either a cup of coffee or a nap by themselves
4 experiments were attempted by subjects on the program, the one that reported the best results was taking prebiotics just before bedtime and there was moderate improvement after a few days with the other 3: taking a bath and then stepping out into a cooled room, mindfulness practice and eating 2 kiwis an hour before bed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08q8p13![image](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/194400/26013563/f81279c4-3750-11e7-9c79-817675a64798.png)
Watching this program now.