Can this headband help you sleep better? DR MICHAEL MOSLEY tested this –

I really like the feeling of waking up after a good night’s sleep. I just wish it happened more often.

I’ve struggled with insomnia for years, waking up in the middle of the night and having trouble falling asleep again. And I am not alone.

We’re in the throes of a sleep crisis: One in three people say they often have trouble sleeping, and about half say their sleep got worse during the pandemic, King’s College London reports.

In a new documentary for the BBC, I explored this by examining scientific breakthroughs that are bringing us closer than ever before to understanding why so many of us seek help and how to get a better night’s sleep.

As part of my research, I collaborated with researchers from the University of Oxford to create the UK’s largest online sleep habits census involving over 200,000 people – and here’s a summary of what we found and what it could mean for you. .

Based on the answers to questions about their sleep habits, each person who completed the count was given a sleep score of 1 to 10: more than 5 “good”; My score was 2.8.

Our participants reported an average of just six hours and 48 minutes of sleep per night, well below the recommended seven to nine hours, with people in the south of the UK sleeping more than those in the north.

Curiously, people in Guernsey scored highest for quality of sleep, which is just as important to health as quantity.

One of the best ways to measure sleep quality is to calculate sleep efficiency, which is the ratio of the time you actually spend in bed. If you go to bed at 11 pm and get up at 7 am, that’s eight hours in bed. But how long have you been sleeping?

You can use a sleep tracker to guess, but I took a closer look by attaching an electroencephalogram (or EEG) to my head to detect my brain waves. This defines when you sleep and what sleep stage you are in.

King’s College London is in the throes of a sleep crisis: One in three people say they often have trouble sleeping, and around half say their sleep got worse during the pandemic. [File photo]

Normally this would happen in a sleep lab, but the Oxford team lent me a wearable when it was first used outside of their lab.

There are four stages of sleep. In the first, our brain waves begin to slow down. This is when your eyes start rolling and your head starts to shake. In phase two, the brain wave pattern is similar to phase one, except for short, rapid bursts of activity that prepare the brain for learning and memory consolidation.

The third stage is deep sleep, which is characterized by longer and more intermittent brain waves or “slow” waves. Getting enough sleep is not only vital to your memory, it also helps boost the effectiveness of your immune system, and this is when toxins are cleared from the brain and healing occurs.

Finally, there is rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, in which our brain waves return to a shorter and faster pattern, similar to being awake, except that our bodies are paralyzed. This is where most of our vivid dreams come true and is important to our emotional health.

Getting enough sleep and getting enough of these individual phases is essential.

My EEG readings showed that I have relatively low sleep efficiency, in fact I only sleep 75 percent of the time I’m in bed (ideally, it should be above 80 percent). And I seem deficient in deep sleep, which only accounts for 12 percent of my sleep (ideally 20 percent).

There are many proven techniques to improve sleep (and sleep more soundly), including going to bed and waking up at a set time; avoid bright lights and social media before bed; and abiding by the ‘quarter-hour rule’ (get out of bed if you don’t fall asleep within 15 minutes, or if you wake up and can’t go back to sleep). This helps retrain the brain to associate “bed” with sleep (and sex) and nothing else.

I already do most of these and more. In addition to regular morning exercise (exposure to morning light helps correct the body’s internal clock) and a Mediterranean diet (high fiber and low sugar, shown to improve sleep quality). I also avoid caffeine after 10 and rarely drink alcohol.

However, I was particularly fascinated by the advanced technology I encountered, which was tested by researchers at Cardiff University’s Center for Brain Research Imaging. It consists of an electrode strip that identifies you are in deep sleep (when the brain produces long, slow waves); then it makes a soft sound near the crest of a wave, which effectively stimulates your brain to create slower and deeper waves.

So far, researchers have found that fascia works well in teenagers, but it didn’t have much of an effect when I tried it, which didn’t surprise Professor Penny Lewis, the neuroscientist who led the research team.

He told me “in the elderly” (I’m 65) “there is a reaction but it’s small”. This is because with age these slow waves are not as large or effective, meaning that the target the sound waves are trying to hit becomes smaller and is easily lost.

As for me, despite the EEG results, I feel like I’m sleeping better now – the key for me is trying not to worry and using breathing and mindfulness techniques definitely helps.

Search the UK Sleep Count online to be included in our sleep count.

Sleep Well with Michael Mosley, BBC2, 31 March, 9:00 pm.

I know running is good for me, but I hate it: It’s something I do with my teeth clenched. But maybe I should try to smile.

Researchers at the University of Ulster found that smiling makes running easier and more efficient. In their study, they fitted 24 regular runners with masks to measure the amount of oxygen they consumed while running for six minutes on a treadmill; this allowed them to smile, frown or run normally.

Surprisingly, runners expend 3% less energy smiling (measured by oxygen uptake) than frowning.

Runners also said they found it easier to run when they smiled.

One theory is that smiling makes you more comfortable, allowing you to run more efficiently and feel better about seemingly everything.

Boys or girls? it’s in your father’s genes

I am one of four children: three boys and a girl. And I have four children, three boys and a girl.

Is this a coincidence? Apparently not. A University of Newcastle study based on family trees of half a million people found that you are more likely to have children if you have more brothers than sisters. And vice versa. At least if you’re male.

So what’s going on? Sperm contain X or Y chromosomes: if a sperm containing “X” is combined with a female egg (which always contains an X chromosome), you will get a girl (XX); or if a Y chromosome joins the sperm and egg, it is male (XY). Researchers think there may be a gene or genes that determine whether a man produces more X or Y sperm.

This may explain a strange phenomenon after both world wars. Normally, slightly more boys are born – around 105 boys are born for every 100 girls in the UK.

The reason you don’t see more men than women is because men are more likely to die in childhood and nearly every other stage of life – not only are men more reckless, they also have weaker immune systems. But after both world wars there was a particularly big boom in the number of male births.

This is because if you are a father with many children who go to war, at least one of your children is more likely to return home than if you are a father with only one child. All surviving children will inherit the propensity to have children, so you’ll have a baby boy boom for a while.

At some point, everything returns to normal when the balance between men and women is restored. This shows how intelligent nature is. I warned my children to expect boys…