Date: 2016-10-26 23:00:00+00:00
Keywords: kindle; nonfiction; psychology; self-help
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Rights: All rights reserved.

Nick Littlehales

SLEEP

The Myth of 8 Hours, the Power of Naps …
and the New Plan to Recharge Your Body and Mind

Contents

Introduction: Don’t Waste Your Valuable Time Sleeping

PART ONE: THE KEY SLEEP RECOVERY INDICATORS

1  The Clock is Ticking

Circadian Rhythms

2  Running Fast and Slow

Chronotype

3  A Game of Ninety Minutes

Sleeping in Cycles, Not Hours

4  Warming Up and Cooling Down

Pre- and Post-sleep Routines

5  Time Out!

Redefining Naps – Activity and Recovery Harmony

6  The Sleep Kit

Reinventing the Bed

7  Recovery Room

The Sleeping Environment

PART TWO: R90 IN ACTION

8  A Head Start

Using Your R90 Recovery Program

9  Sleeping with the Enemy

Sleep Problems

10  The Home Team

Sex, Partners and the Modern Family

YOUR PERSONAL BEST

Notes

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

For my father, Herbert James Littlehales

Introduction

Don’t Waste Your Valuable Time Sleeping

When I asked the person behind the counter of my local bookshop where the sleep section was, she gave me a quizzical look, turned to her computer and, after some searching, pointed me in what she hoped was the right direction. Up four flights of stairs, in a dark and dusty corner, I finally found it: a small collection of academic tomes on the science of sleep; a handful of volumes on dreams and what they mean, New Age takes on an ageold process.

My hope is that this is not where you found this book.

There is a revolution going on in sleep. For too long it has been an aspect of our lives that we take for granted, and historical patterns suggest we’ve placed less and less importance on sleep itself (certainly by leaving fewer hours for it). But a burgeoning body of scientific research is drawing links between our poor sleeping habits and an array of health and psychological issues, from type 2 diabetes, heart disease and obesity through to anxiety and burnout. It’s time for sleep to take its place in the spotlight. It’s time to look at this essential process of mental and physical recovery and see how we can do it better, so that we can get the most out of our waking day and be more effective at work, give our best to our relationships with family and friends, and feel great in ourselves.

Until the mid-1990s we were getting away with it. Most of us took two consecutive days off for granted (otherwise known as the weekend). Our work finished when we left the office – or wherever it was we did our jobs – and shops were generally closed on Sundays. Then came a seismic change in our lifestyle. The internet and email altered for ever the way we communicate, consume and work, and mobile phones, initially just phone call and texting devices, soon morphed into the little pools of blue light at which we now spend so much of our time gazing. The idea of being constantly connected became a reality, the 24–7 working mentality was born, and we had to make adjustments to keep up. Overstimulating on caffeine, popping sleeping tablets to come down and switch off, burning the candle at both ends – the traditional idea of a good eight hours’ sleep at night became the stuff of legend.

The result has been extra stresses and strains on relationships and family life. Not only that, some scientists and researchers connect our lack of physical and mental recovery time with a tangible increase in many diseases and disorders. Something has to give.

I am a sports sleep coach. It’s a job that is unlikely to come up at your local careers service, and that’s largely because it’s a role I’ve managed to fashion for myself.

This journey began when I was the international sales and marketing director of Slumberland, the largest sleeping comfort group in Europe, in the late 90s. I became intrigued about what the top football club in the country did about sleep and recovery. They must have a sophisticated approach to it all, I thought, so I wrote to Manchester United to find out. It turned out that they did nothing. The reply from Sir Alex Ferguson – who would soon make history with his treble-winning team – asked if I’d be interested in coming in and taking a look.

Sleep wasn’t considered a performance factor back then, but I was fortunate that sports science was becoming a bigger part of the game and that the curiosity of one of the greatest managers of all time had been piqued. I was equally fortunate that I was able to work with one of the players who had a back problem, and make some adjustments to his routine and products. You can’t cure a back injury with a mattress, of course, no matter what some manufacturers might claim, but I was able to have a positive impact on the player’s management of his condition.

I became more heavily involved with the club, even providing Ferguson himself with some products and advice, as well as the famous class of ’92 – Ryan Giggs, David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt and the Neville brothers. This top-down approach, where everyone from the manager and coaching staff to the players uses the methods and products I’ve recommended, is one I implement to this day.

By this time I was in the process of leaving my role at Slumberland. The world of sleep had begun to engage me beyond simply selling products. I had been chairman of the UK Sleep Council, a consumer education organization set up to advise on and promote better sleep quality, which helped further my knowledge, and it was there that I got to know Professor Chris Idzikowski, a leading expert in the field who would grow to be a valued friend and colleague. Meanwhile, the press had coined my job title, branding me Manchester United’s ‘sleep coach’. ‘What’s he doing,’ they asked, ‘tucking the players in at night?’

In fact, I was doing things like introducing probably the first training-ground sleep recovery room on the planet at Manchester United’s Carrington facility. Lots of top clubs have them now, of course, but that was the first.

Word spread. The Manchester United players in the England team, never the type to suffer second best, soon had Football Association executive Andy Oldknow and England physio Gary Lewin – who was also Arsenal’s physio – coming my way. I worked with the national side, having new sleeping products shipped in and advising players on improving their habits. Gary could see the benefit of what I was doing, and he invited me along to Arsenal too, where a new manager by the name of Arsène Wenger was busy changing a lot of the received approaches to football. Another early adopter of sports science, Sam Allardyce, manager of Bolton Wanderers at the time, got me involved too.

Later, I would work with British Cycling – advising stars such as Sir Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton, Jason Kenny and Laura Trott – and Team Sky, including their successful Tour de France campaigns, as part of performance director Sir Dave Brailsford’s marginal-gains approach, where I designed portable sleep kits for the riders to sleep on instead of the beds in their hotel rooms. I would be brought in by British Olympians and Paralympians, sports such as rowing, sailing, bobsleigh, BMX and cyclo-cross, as well as by rugby and cricket teams, and many more football clubs, including Manchester City, Southampton, Liverpool and Chelsea.

This revolution in the sporting world wasn’t confined to Britain; sleep is universal, after all. I was invited to join up with leading European football clubs such as Real Madrid, where I advised on adapting their luxury training-ground player apartments into the ideal recovery rooms for some of the world’s best players. I worked with the Netherlands women’s bobsleigh team before the Winter Olympics in 2014, I coach cyclists from places as far away as Malaysia and I have had conversations with National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Football League (NFL) teams in the USA.

All of this came about because I was the first to ask the question of professional sport, and Sir Alex Ferguson, whose willingness to embrace new ideas never dimmed during his decades at the top, was sufficiently open-minded to help me explore the subject. As he said at the time: ‘This is a tremendously exciting development in the world of sport, and one I wholeheartedly support.’

The reaction of many people when they hear what I do is to conjure up images of sleek sleep pods and hi-tech science-fiction-style white labs with slumbering subjects wired up to supercomputers, but nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, I use all sorts of technology when necessary, and yes, I’ve worked closely with leading academics in the field of sleep such as Professor Idzikowski, but my day-to-day work isn’t in a laboratory or a clinic – I’m not a doctor or a scientist.

In recent years, the importance of sleep for our health has been proven with clinical evidence. Revered institutions around the world – Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Munich universities, among many others – produce pioneering research in the field. This research has demonstrated everything from the links between sleep and obesity and diabetes[1] to showing that our brains effectively wash away their waste toxins during sleep, potentially illuminating one of the key reasons why we do it.[2] Failure to get enough sleep and clear out these toxins is linked to a host of neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s.

The health factor, much as for Jamie Oliver and his sugar campaign, is a big reason why governments and businesses are starting to prick up their ears and listen when it comes to sleep, and why more attention is being given to research and funding. Stress and burnout are bad for business.

But as mind-bendingly brilliant as the people researching sleep are, there is a limit to it. There’s so much about sleep that we just haven’t yet worked out. As Philippe Mourrain, Associate Professor at the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine, writes: ‘We don’t really know what sleep is. This may come as a shock to the uninitiated.’

What we do know, and even the scientists can all agree on this, is that sleep is vital to our wellbeing. Quite simply, we’re not getting enough of it. It is estimated that, on average, we’re getting between one and two hours’ sleep less than we were in the 1950s.[3] So is the answer that we should simply get more of it?

What about a single mother, who is up at the crack of dawn to get the kids off to school, work all day and then come home at night to make dinner, put her children to bed and then get the housework done before she collapses into bed? How is she supposed to fit more sleep in? Or a junior doctor working all the hours and more that their job entails, as well as trying to maintain some faint sliver of a personal life – how do they get more? There are only so many hours in the day.

How does sleep research directly benefit their lives? What can the everyday person take from it beyond an interesting nugget of information they might read in the news on the train to work and forget about by the time they sit down at their desks?

Athletes don’t want too much of the clinical approach: sleep is one of the few remaining privacies we have, away from the glare of our employers who have managed to enter our personal lives through our phones. People generally don’t want to be wired up and monitored while they sleep, with the truth about what they’re getting up to at night being shared with their managers. It’s too intrusive.

My approach is different. Science and research inform what I do, of course, but I’m hands-on, working directly with people to give them the maximum advantages in recovery so that they can perform to their best when it matters. What I see, and the people I work with see, is the vast improvement in those who apply my methods to their lives: in the way they feel, the way they recover and, most importantly, in their level of performance. This is the benchmark clinical test for any professional athlete, and there’s no arguing with the empirical results that competitive sport provides.

I talk to these performers about their habits, give them practical advice and arm them with the skills to plan and manage their rest in clinically accepted cycles of sleep. I design and source their sleeping products, help them with everything from coping with a newborn in the family to getting them off sleeping tablets, ensure hotel rooms are producing a conducive environment for recovery for cyclists on the Tour and footballers at international tournaments and, when needed, I go into their homes and address their sleeping setup there.

However, for those of you hoping for a sleep-andtell exposé on the contents of Cristiano Ronaldo’s bedside cabinet, you’re in for a disappointment. These performers and sporting institutions trust me implicitly. They’re letting me into a very personal and private sanctuary, and I’ve had to earn that right. After all, would you let someone you didn’t trust into your bedroom? But what I can tell you all about is the methods and techniques I bring into these sanctuaries, and I can show you how to set up yours just like an elite athlete.

‘Fine,’ you might be thinking, ‘but what do the sleep habits of top sports people have to do with me?’ Absolutely everything, is the simple answer. All of the advice and techniques outlined in this book are as relevant to you or me as they are to Cristiano Ronaldo, Victoria Pendleton or Sir Bradley Wiggins, and indeed I work with many people outside of sport, from corporate clients to anyone at home looking to improve their sleep regime. The only difference between top sports people and the rest of us in this regard is quite simple: it’s commitment. If I tell an Olympic athlete what to do to improve their recovery, they do it. Sports people are like that. If they can see a gain to be made, no matter how marginal, they’ll go for it, because it all adds up and they’re in the business of performing better than their opponents. For the rest of us, it’s all too easy to adhere to a method for a few days before real life starts intervening and next thing we know we’re working well into the night or passing out on the sofa after a couple of glasses of wine too many.

But this isn’t that kind of book. This isn’t a fad ‘sleep diet’. I’m not going to give you a rigid scheme to stick to that you’ll abandon after a week. I don’t want to make your life more difficult.

I am going to show you my R90 Sleep Recovery Program, the very method I use with elite athletes. I have developed this program over nearly two decades as a professional sleep coach, acquiring knowledge from doctors, academics, sports scientists, physiotherapists, mattress and bedding manufacturers, and even from my children, through the experience of being a parent, and testing my methods at the forefront of professional sport, where sleep simply must be effective. These athletes operate at the margins of what is possible for human beings to achieve, and I can show you how you can work at the margins of what is possible for you too.

Through integrating this approach into your own life, you will be able to reap the benefits of the extra mental and physical energy you will feel. You will learn to look at sleeping in a polyphasic way. I will help you choose the best sleeping position (and there is only one that I recommend). You will no longer think about how many hours a night you’re sleeping, but how many cycles per week you’re fitting in, so that you can learn to accept and relax about the odd bad night’s sleep – we all have them, and we all get up in the morning and carry on.

It will inform your decisions about things in your day-to-day life that you might never have thought about before: which desk to sit at in an office, choosing a side of the bed in a hotel with a partner or whether the bedroom in the house you’re considering buying is fit for purpose (and this should be a deal-breaker). I will set out the seven Key Sleep Recovery Indicators (KSRIs), which are the building blocks of the R90 program. Within each of these I will give you seven steps to improve your sleep. Even adopting just one of them could go a long way to improving your life, and if you adopt one per day, you can completely revolutionize your approach in just seven weeks.

Your lifestyle won’t have to suffer. You can still have that inviting-looking coffee you crave. You don’t have to say no to another glass of wine when you’re enjoying a fine summer night with friends. And if you’re sitting down to dinner in a restaurant after nine o’clock and wondering if it’s too late to be eating, think again. Too late for what?

Life’s too short to miss out on good times and great experiences, so I want to give you the confidence to make these decisions and have the flexibility not to worry about getting to bed ‘on time’ or stress about ‘sleeping well’. Through adopting the measures mapped out in this book, you can learn to improve the quality of your rest and recovery, rather than spend time agonizing over the quantity.

This book will explain what we can learn from our Palaeolithic ancestors to better regulate our sleep – think a Palaeo sleep diet – while also managing modern-day challenges like smartphones, laptops, jet lag and working late. Technology is a wonderful thing, and I certainly won’t be advocating discarding it for a good night’s sleep – all of our devices are here to stay, and this is only the beginning of it – but with just a little more awareness they don’t have to be detrimental to our wellbeing.

We’ll see how your love life can dramatically improve with just a little bedroom know-how, why we should all hail the power of the afternoon nap – and how you can nap with your eyes wide open in a room full of people. I’m going to show you that, in all likelihood, the mattress you’re sleeping on is the wrong one, even – or maybe especially – if it’s a two-grand ‘orthopaedic’ slab you’ve just remortgaged your house for. The good news is that I can show you how it needn’t cost the earth to remedy it. I will give you a foolproof method for picking the right surface to sleep on that will mean you’ll never again have to endure another salesman trying to sell you a ‘multi-thousand-spring’ mattress with go-faster stripes and a price tag to match.

The R90 Sleep Recovery Program shares some of the spirit of Sir Dave Brailsford’s ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ approach. With the cycling team, recruiting my expertise in sleep was just one facet of many – another was teaching the riders how best to wash their hands to avoid catching a virus – in which Brailsford sought to make an improvement, even by just 1 per cent, so that when they were all added up it would produce a significant increase in performance.

With the R90 approach, we look at everything we do from waking until closing our eyes at night as having an effect on our sleep. As we funnel our attention down towards going to bed, we can aggregate our own marginal gains by implementing the advice set out in the Key Sleep Recovery Indicators.

You might not see results overnight – even after a particularly good night’s sleep. But give it time. It took a few years for a Team Sky rider to win the Tour de France. You’ll see results in your sleep much quicker than that with the R90 program. It’s not uncommon for me to receive a call from someone a few months after we’ve worked together and hear them say, ‘You changed my life.’

You can change yours too. Let’s start using the time you spend asleep wisely. Like the athletes I work with, you should be getting the absolute maximum of physical and mental recovery out of it. You might learn that you actually need less sleep. You will certainly feel an improvement in your mood and capabilities at work and at home, and you’ll also become more aware of when it’s time to pull back a little, to take a break and switch off for a few minutes. ‘Oh, but I don’t have time for that,’ you’re saying. Think again. There is a host of little tricks and techniques to find time for breaks, enabling you to get more done in less time.

If it’s a book about how to get your pyjamas on and have a cosy time in bed with your cocoa you’re after, then you’ve come to the wrong place, though I can certainly point you in the direction of a dusty corner. I am, however, going to show you how to sleep smarter, to use it as a natural mental and physical performance enhancer. It’s time to stop wasting time on sleeping without benefit.

Part One

THE KEY SLEEP RECOVERY INDICATORS

One

The Clock is Ticking

Circadian Rhythms

You wake up to your alarm, on your phone, and reach over to turn it off. While you’re there, you check the notifications beamed in overnight from your news, sport and entertainment feeds, your social media apps, emails and texts from work and friends. Your mouth is dry, your head already awhirl with what’s to come this morning, the curtains leaking light and the TV standby light at the foot of the bed staring unblinking at you, reminding you how you finished the night before.

Welcome to your day. Did you sleep well? Do you know how to sleep well?

The average person in Britain gets a little over six and a half hours’ sleep a night. Furthermore, over a third of the population get by on only five to six hours a night, 7 per cent more of us than just three years before.[1] It’s a similar story around the world, with over 20 per cent of the population in the USA reporting less than six hours’ sleep on work days, and Japan not far behind. The statistics show that in these countries, as well as the likes of Canada and Germany,[2] most people ‘catch up’ on their sleep at the weekend. Their work lives are limiting their sleep. Almost half of the UK population report being kept awake by stress or worry, and when you take a look at the schedules of many people, it’s not difficult to see why.

A top cricketer might play an international final in India one day and then be back at his county the next day to hear me talk to the squad about sleep. He’s probably wondering when he’s next likely to get some, as he’s about to spend the next few months on the road, playing cricket in all its forms – Test match, one-day, Twenty20 – all over the world. You can do it for a while, of course, with the right approach. Round-the-world sailors can get by sleeping for thirty minutes every twelve hours while they’re at sea for three months; we’re remarkably adaptable creatures with incredible reserves of stamina. But do it for too long, and sooner or later something has to give. The player associations in sports like cricket and rugby league are starting to get me in to educate the players and help them manage their schedules, because they’re seeing a rise in players coming to them with depression, relationship problems and burnout.

It’s not just in sport, of course. These patterns are replicated all over society. All of us face difficulties fitting in the demands of our work and personal lives. Knowing what I know now, I can say that I stayed in a job for five years too long. I was working long hours, with an abundance of day-to-day stress and plenty of travel, which meant a lot of time away from home. But they were business-class journeys along with plenty of fine dining, gin and tonics and coffee to keep me going, so at the time you think you can handle it, you can compensate for it through various measures. The truth is that it took a very heavy toll on my family life.

How much was I sleeping then? How much is the England cricket team getting? What about that teenager sitting up playing computer games deep into the night? How much are you sleeping? Does it actually matter?

The amount isn’t the important thing at this stage. What is important is a natural process that has been with us since mankind began, a process that many of the aspects of modern life are taking us away from. Artificial light, technology, shift work, sleeping tablets, travel, checking our phones when we wake, working late – even running out of the house and skipping breakfast to race to our jobs on time. They’re all taking us away from this natural process, and this is where our problems with rest and recovery begin.

Off the Grid

Let’s start by going off grid for a while. Let’s get back to nature for real. You and I will leave all our possessions behind – our watches, computers, phones – and head out to an uninhabited island, where we’ll live off the land, just as our ancestors once did. We’ll hunt and fish and sleep under the stars. Eat your heart out, Bear Grylls.

So out there on this island we make camp in a great rolling field. When the sun eventually goes down, and the temperature drops with it, we build a fire. We’re going to spend quite a lot of time now without daylight, so we want to eat. We cook and devour our spoils for the day, and then sit back sated, chatting softly, absorbing the amber light of the fire as we look into it. Eventually the talk subsides, and we gaze up at the stars for a while before, one by one, we turn over, curl up under our blankets and drift off into sleep.

At some point in the morning, the sun is going to start approaching the horizon. The birds will start singing even before it gets there, and when it does, the temperature will start to rise. Even if it’s really cold, it will still rise by a degree or two, and everything will get lighter. Whether or not we’ve got our head under a blanket, the light gets in and we wake up. The first thing we’re likely to want to do is empty our bladders, and then we’ll start thinking about drinking some water and eating breakfast. Then it’ll be time for a bowel movement, before we go fishing and hunting for the day – all of it in daylight. Nothing hurried, all in its natural time.

Later in the day, when the sun starts going down again, we’ll sit back down in the field. The temperature will drop and it will get dark again, so we’ll have to light the fire – we’ll do it all again. This is really getting back to what we do naturally, working in harmony with our circadian rhythms.

Got Rhythm?

One of the first things I ask anyone I work with, whether it’s a top footballer or a City broker struggling to sleep, is, ‘Are you aware of circadian rhythms?’

A circadian rhythm is a 24-hour internal cycle managed by our body clock. This clock of ours, deep within the brain, regulates our internal systems such as sleeping and eating patterns, hormone production, temperature, alertness, mood and digestion, in a 24-hour process evolved to work in harmony with the Earth’s rotation. Our body clocks are set by external cues, chief among them being daylight, as well as things like temperature and eating times.

It is vital to understand that these rhythms are ingrained within us; they are part of the fabric of each and every one of us. They are the product of millions of years of evolution. We could no more unlearn these rhythms than we could teach dogs to stop barking or ask a lion if it wouldn’t mind giving vegetarianism a go. Each of these animals, of course, has its own body clock and its own circadian rhythms, just as every other animal and plant does. These rhythms function even without external stimuli. If international events conspired to rain a nuclear apocalypse down on us all and we had to move underground and live in caves without daylight, they would persist within us.

A typical circadian rhythm, which describes what our body wants to do naturally at various points throughout the day, looks like this:

So, on our island, once the sun’s gone down and we’re sitting round the fire, we can see that melatonin secretion starts. Melatonin, a hormone that regulates our sleep, is produced in the pineal gland, which responds to light. Once it’s been dark for long enough, we produce the melatonin to ready us for sleep.

Our body clock isn’t the only regulator of our sleep. If we think of circadian rhythms as being our urge to sleep, then our homeostatic sleep pressure is our need to sleep. This intuitive need builds from the moment we wake up, and the longer we are awake, the greater it becomes. However, our circadian rhythms are able to override this at times, which is why we can experience a ‘second wind’ when we’re slumping and why, as many night-shift workers and nightlife lovers will be able to testify to, we can have trouble getting to sleep at certain points of the day even if we’ve been up all night. We’re fighting against our body’s circadian urge to be up with the sun.

If we keep ‘regular’ hours and get up in the morning, our need to sleep peaks at night, which coincides with our circadian urge, producing the ideal sleep window. During the night we tend to reach our most effective sleeping period around 2–3 a.m. (which is mirrored with another period of sleepiness twelve hours later in the form of the mid-afternoon slump), and our body temperature dips at its lowest point not long after, before the sun comes up and everything gets started again for us. Melatonin secretion stops, just like a switch being flicked, because we’re moving from dark to light. Daylight gets our bodies started on producing serotonin, the mood-boosting neurotransmitter from which melatonin is derived.

Light the Way

Light is the most important time setter for our body clocks, and there’s nothing better than daylight on a morning for it. Out on the island, sleeping under the sky, we’d get our fix as soon as we woke. But too many of us in the real world spend our time indoors – at home, on the train and in our places of work – and even an overcast day dwarfs any artificial light in terms of brightness. Get the curtains open when you wake, eat breakfast and get ready in daylight, and then go outside.

We are particularly sensitive to a wavelength known as blue light. Because of its prevalence in the light given off by electronic devices such as computers and smartphones, blue light gets a bad press. But in this case it’s not so much that it’s bad light – only badly timed light. Daylight is full of blue light, and during the day blue light is good. It sets the body clock, suppresses melatonin production and improves alertness and performance.[3]

Once it’s dark, however, these are all undesirable qualities. If you’re using devices or have the lights blazing late into the night, then it’s going to cause problems. It’s going to lead to what Professor Chris Idzikowski calls ‘junk sleep’ – disrupted and diminished sleep as our lifestyles and gadgets inhibit the production of melatonin and push our body clocks later.

On the island it was all daylight and darkness. The light from our fire was the only man-made illumination, and the yellows and ambers and reds that fire gives off don’t affect melatonin production.

Sitting by the Fire

No matter what we do in our lives, the sun will go down and it will come up again. When we’re in harmony with this process, our brain triggers the functions within us to make the events described on our circadian rhythms chart happen. They might not occur at exactly the times on the chart, but your brain and body will want to do them at some time around then.

Many of us only really become conscious of our circadian rhythms if we fly long haul and experience jet lag, which is when our rhythms are out of sync with the local light–dark cycle because we’ve travelled so fast across time zones. It’s a similar story if we work a night shift and our hours are at odds with the light–dark cycle. But being aware of your body clock in your day-to-day life will allow you to begin to understand why you might be feeling lethargic at certain times of the day, and why you might be struggling to get off to sleep. And it’s not just your sleep that benefits from this knowledge: it’s the whole of your waking day.

If you get up and out as quickly as possible in the morning, grabbing snacks and coffee as you jump on the train to work, you’re out of step with your rhythms. Back on our island, we weren’t in a rush. We’d have breakfast, and, as our bowels are suppressed overnight, we’d go to the toilet – because we don’t want to go when we’re out hunting for the day.

It’s the same on the train. Is it in your interests to need the toilet on a packed commuter train or to suppress the urge unnaturally? It’s no coincidence that you will see adverts for all sorts of digestion products – from yoghurt drinks to anti-diarrhoea tablets – at train station platforms. One of the leading brand’s tag lines is ‘Restore your body’s natural rhythm’. Right message, wrong answer.

If your exercise regime involves hitting the gym hard in the early evening, be aware of what that means. Your blood pressure is highest at this time, and the kind of sharp increase in blood pressure that intense exercise causes is something you need to know about, especially if you’re a bit older. Just ask the BBC’s Andrew Marr about that (he blamed his stroke on a high-intensity session on a rowing machine). Get a wearable fitness tracker on, have a look, maybe think if there’s a better time to be doing this.

Think about your rhythms when you’re using technology. I don’t shy away from it (I don’t actually live on an island). I use social media as an important part of my business, I have a smartphone and am just as able to be reached anywhere on the phone or email as the next person. But I do know that, if I’ve been working on my laptop late at night or video-calling a client in a different time zone when it’s convenient for them, the artificial light from my computer is going to suppress the natural sleep process. So I won’t go to bed straight away; I’ll put the laptop to one side and stay up for a bit, so that my pineal gland can function efficiently and get on with producing melatonin now that it’s dark, just as it wants to.

So much of what we do in our lives today interferes with our circadian rhythms, and there’s little to be done about a lot of it. If we have to work shifts or late into the night, then it’s often a case of tough luck for us, we need to get on with it. But if we’re aware of our rhythms, we can make sure we’re not doing too many things to add to the problem. We don’t want to be at war with our own bodies.

As Professor Russell Foster, Director of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford, told the BBC’s Day of the Body Clock:

We are the supremely arrogant species; we feel we can abandon four billion years of evolution and ignore the fact that we have evolved under a light–dark cycle. What we do as a species, perhaps uniquely, is override the clock. And long-term acting against the clock can lead to serious health problems.

We’ve only had artificial light since the nineteenth century. Computers and televisions, let alone smartphones and tablets, are mere babies when put against the length of our evolutionary process. We haven’t evolved to cope with these things in the way many of us are using them now.

Whatever it is you’re doing, I want you to think about the two of us out on our island, in harmony with a biological process as old as mankind. That is our ideal. Every step we make to improve our sleep, no matter how small, needs to be a step towards us sitting by the fire.

CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS: SEVEN STEPS TO SLEEP SMARTER

1. Get outside! Set your body clock with daylight, not artificial light.

2. Take the time to learn about your rhythms and how they affect you – engage family and friends too.

3. Know your peaks and troughs: monitor yourself against what should be happening naturally – use a wearable fitness tracker to measure.

4. Peak sleeping time is around 2–3 a.m. If you go to bed as the sun comes up, you are fighting against your body clock.

5. Slow down in your mornings: rushing off from the word go can disrupt your body. Sleep quality is all about what we do from the point of waking.

6. Blue light is badly timed light in the evening – dim it down when you can. Go for red or yellow light – or even candlelight.

7. Picture yourself by the fire on our island: what are you doing right now that is in conflict with this? What are you going to do about it? Plan simple changes to current routines to align yourself better with the circadian rhythms chart.

Two

Running Fast and Slow

Chronotype

It’s late at night. Steam rises off the turf in the floodlit football stadium. It’s the World Cup semi-final. The crowd are frantic. A final attack is launched by the team in the ascendancy – but the ball is desperately hoofed away from the goal to safety as the whistle is blown for the end of extra time. It’s the dreaded penalty shootout. You are the manager – you must pick your penalty takers.

You choose the first four easily enough, but you have a decision to make on the fifth. They are two players of very similar ability. Player A hasn’t played at his best tonight, particularly as the game has worn on, but he’s the consummate professional and has certainly not lacked effort. He looks shattered, but then it has been a long night. Player B has played well, he seems sprightly and alert despite playing two hours of frantic football, but something’s bugging you about this player. He’s ill-disciplined. He’s regularly late to training on a morning, and when he does get there it’s like he sleepwalks through it. Will he crack under the intense pressure of a penalty shootout with the world watching? Your eyes are telling you he’s the right choice, but your head says go with Player A.

With the penalties delicately poised, Player A steps forward to take his kick. He must score for your team to remain in the competition. He places the ball carefully, takes a few steps back and pauses to take a deep breath. He runs up to the ball, strikes it firmly …

And it goes wide. Game over.

Owls and Larks

Once upon a time, long before we started to redefine our approach to sleep, we used to talk about there being two kinds of people: owls and larks. Today, we ask, ‘Do you know your chronotype?’

Your chronotype describes your sleeping characteristic – whether you’re a morning or evening person. But it doesn’t just determine the time you get up and go to bed – it indicates the times that your body wants to perform the functions outlined in the circadian rhythms chart in Chapter 1, which might come as a relief if you looked at that and thought those timings had no bearing on your life. If you’re a morning person (an AMer), your body clock is a bit fast, while if you’re the evening type (a PMer) your clock’s running slow.

Chronotypes are a genetic trait, and I can usually spot them a mile off in people I meet. Do you like staying up and going to bed late? Do you need an alarm to get you up for work in the morning? Are you partial to a nap in the daytime? Do you often skip breakfast? Do you sleep in on your days off? Then it’s likely that you’re a PMer.

AMers wake naturally, enjoy their breakfast and love the mornings. They tend not to need an alarm to wake them, they’re less likely to feel fatigued during the day and they go to bed reasonably early.

This variation is usually only at most by a couple of hours either way, not five or six. Very few people have a makeup whereby they naturally want to wake at noon. Even with the curtains drawn and you hiding away in bed, your brain knows that the sun is up. It wants to be up too. Most of us have an idea of our chronotype, but if you’re still unsure, the University of Munich Chronotype Questionnaire is a good place to find out.[1]

As children, we tend to exist as AMers, rising early for the day and usually going to bed long before the adults. When we reach adolescence, however, our body clocks switch to run much slower. We have the urge to go to bed later and sleep in longer. Teenagers get a bad press, but they’re often just doing what their bodies want them to. As we pass the peak of our late-running clocks, at about the age of twenty, our rhythms revert to their genetic type, and they continue to creep earlier as we get older.[2]

The Inbetweeners

There is a third category of chronotype – the inbetweener. Many of us genuinely are inbetween, but in fact almost all of the population live their lives as inbetweeners, regardless of their real chronotype. With all the entertainment options available – dinner, drinks, a 9 p.m. screening at the cinema, enjoying a box set at home (‘Just one more episode before bed …’) – why should only the PMers get to enjoy staying up late? And a PMer might fancy a lie-in, indeed they’re genetically predisposed towards it, but they have to be at work for 9 a.m. tomorrow. So we mask our true chronotypes through alarm clocks and overstimulating: being overactive both physically and mentally, and using caffeine and sugar.

Why is it important to know your chronotype? If we were left to our own devices, to get up and go to sleep whenever we wanted, to wake naturally and start work at a time of our own choosing, it wouldn’t matter hugely. But, strangely enough, working cultures have yet to develop with this in mind. Whether you’re an AMer or PMer, you still have to get to work for 9 a.m., you still have to be at training in the morning if you’re a football player, and in this instance, it’s the PMers that suffer because they are effectively trying to operate in a different time zone to their internal body clock. ‘Social jet lag’ is an expression that has been coined to describe this.

Because they naturally get up earlier, AMers tend to get tired sooner and go to bed earlier too. This means that, when morning comes around, they will have enjoyed plenty of restorative deep sleep during the peak time of around 2–3 a.m. and they will be in a lighter sleep state as they approach their wake time. They often won’t even need the alarm. PMers, on the other hand, will push on later at night, meaning that when morning comes, the alarm often needs to rouse them from an earlier part of sleep (only for the snooze button to be hit repeatedly), and they will spend the rest of the morning playing catch-up. A PMer is likely to lean on caffeine to do this.

Caffeine Highs and Lows

Caffeine is the world’s most popular performance-enhancing drug – a neurostimulant with psychoactive properties which fights off fatigue and has proven beneficial effects on alertness, reaction times, concentration and endurance.[3]

We use caffeine in sport, particularly in cycling, as a legal and safe boost to performance, but we control its use. We give tailor-made measurements to athletes at strategic times (for an endurance event, we would give them a dose nearer the start time than for a sprint), and if a rider turns up after having a double espresso with their breakfast, we would take this into account. There is a coffee culture in all levels of cycling, but the professionals are disciplined enough to be familiar with the caffeine content of the brand they’re drinking.

Sarah Piampiano, a professional triathlete, doesn’t even drink caffeine in her everyday life – she only uses it when she competes, in the form of sports gels with a specific amount of caffeine in them which she takes before and at various stages throughout the race.

I have, however, seen instances of performers in other sports drinking coffee at home, taking caffeine supplements and chewing specially imported caffeine gum at training – consuming it in unregulated quantities that are going to have a detrimental effect.

High use of caffeine can cause agitation and anxiety. Having it in your blood can make it more difficult to get to sleep, and more difficult to remain asleep. It is a habit-forming drug, and you will develop a tolerance to it with high daily use. You will need more and more to get that hit from it you want. Once overstimulating becomes the norm, you think you are performing at your best, but you’re not. You are always going to be a couple of steps behind it, a wired shadow of yourself, because you are using caffeine simply to get to the point at which you can perform.

Studies show caffeine is at its most beneficial in athletes at moderate quantities of around 3–6 milligrams per kilo of body mass,[4] and the Food Standards Agency in the UK recommends 400 milligrams as the daily intake of caffeine for the average person. To put that in perspective, a Starbucks Grande brewed coffee contains 330 milligrams. The same chain’s single espresso contains 75 milligrams, and a home-brewed cup of coffee can contain as much as 200 milligrams.

On top of this, caffeine has a half-life of up to six hours, which means it will be present in your body much later than you might think. Deciding not to drink caffeine later in the day to aid your nocturnal sleep is all well and good, but what if you’ve already had a Starbucks Grande, a coffee from the machine at work, a couple of cups of tea (which could each contain anything from 25 to 100 milligrams) and a can of Coke (35 milligrams) with your lunch? And then there are the things we consume that we might not be aware contain caffeine, such as chocolate, painkillers and even decaffeinated tea and coffee, which definitely doesn’t mean the same as caffeine-free.

If you are overstimulating on caffeine in a scattergun approach, day after day, you aren’t using it like we use it in sport. You are using it habitually, rather than for a specific event. No one is suggesting you can’t have that great cup of coffee you crave – the legions of Lycra-clad cyclists sipping espresso outside cafés up and down the land are testament to that – but why not get a measure on how much you are consuming, and use it strategically. If you have a meeting you need to be sharp for, or a piece of work that requires the very best of your concentration and focus, why not save it for this? Use caffeine as a performance enhancer, instead of simply to get yourself to a position from which you can perform.

Managing Your Chronotype

Daylight is a more effective tool in the long term than an out-of-control caffeine habit. For the PMer, daylight on a morning is vital if you want to set your body clock to play catch-up with the AMers. Get a dawn-wake simulator, which recreates a sunrise in your bedroom to wake you up, from a reputable brand such as Lumie or Philips; open the curtains, go outside.

The really bad news for PMers is that you should cut out the lie-ins at the weekend too. If you spend all week adjusting your body clock to the demands of your job, then let it all go at the weekend, your clock will drift back towards its natural, slower state, and you’ll be starting over come Monday. The symptoms of your social jet lag will be so much worse.

Offices and workplaces should take this more seriously. Instead of having desk hierarchies where the more senior people get the window seats, allocate them to the PMers struggling through their morning and the AMers for their afternoon. Investing in daylight lamps will help both the AMers and PMers conquer their respective difficult parts of the day and increase their productivity, especially in winter, when there is less light. With football clubs, I put daylight lamps in the dressing rooms at training grounds. The players don’t notice – they’re just lamps to them – and you could do the same thing in meeting rooms.

It’s not all bad news for PMers. They have a natural advantage not only when it comes to enjoying nightlife, but also when working shifts. An AMer nurse working night shifts in a hospital would equally be in need of daylight lamps and caffeine to play catch-up with their PMer colleagues. The most important thing for either chronotype to find is some harmony with their environment.

If we go back to our fire on the island, and we assume that you’re a PMer and I’m an AMer, as we return to the natural rhythms of our respective body clocks, we’d learn to start working in harmony. You would sit up, keeping watch, tending the fire and sorting out the camp for the morning while I drifted off to sleep, and then in the morning, when I woke an hour or two before you, I would get the fire started again, cook us breakfast and prepare for the day ahead.

Back in the real world, we can use this to benefit our daily lives.

An AMer might live with his partner, a PMer, and they both have to leave for work at 8.30 a.m. He gets up at 6.30 and she gets up at 8, but, of course, every time he gets up on a morning, he disturbs his partner. She goes back to sleep, and imagines it’s doing her good, but in reality she’s flitting between wakefulness and sleep. But what about if a compromise could be made? They both get up at 7 instead, which is a big shift for her, but the AMer makes the breakfast and gives the PMer the space to sit in daylight, to reset her body clock and wake up naturally. It will take a bit of adjusting to, but all of a sudden the couple are working more in harmony. When the evening comes round, it is the PMer’s turn to do her bit, maybe cooking the dinner or doing the washing-up later, when the AMer is tired.

If you’re an AMer, you know you’re at your best in the morning, so you can plan your day to take advantage of this. Let’s say your job involves managing your company’s social-media accounts, some bookkeeping and a lot of communication, but also some of the more mundane realities of office life such as taking the mail to the post office and filing. Presuming you have a bit of freedom in the order in which you do things, you could manipulate your schedule so that you compose all your tweets and press releases in the morning, everything that requires you to be at your most alert, and then spend your afternoon taking the post out and doing the filing. Speaking as an AMer myself, if you give me some accounts that need adding up correctly, I’d advise you to ask me in the morning.

Often there isn’t this kind of freedom in our daily work, and sometimes a job to write a press release or something similarly requiring of thought will land on your desk in the afternoon and it has to be done right at that moment. But where we’re able to, instead of spending what feels like for ever on getting something done in the afternoon, wondering why it’s taking so long, just stop and have a think about it. If you’re struggling with it now, come back to it in the morning, when you’re fresher and more alert.

It’s the same philosophy with PMers. I will identify the chronotypes of each player in a squad I’m working with, which is of benefit to both the performer and their coaches.

Player B at the start of the chapter is a PMer, while Player A is an AMer, but their manager didn’t know that. However, if I was brought in to work with the squad, and I identify this and talk to Player B, it becomes clear to him why he’s struggling to get out of bed first thing, why he needs that alarm and why he’s not so keen on training in the morning. I can give him some advice on what he can do about it.

From his manager’s point of view, he now knows that it might not just be a case of ill-discipline because the player’s makeup means he naturally doesn’t want to train in the morning – he’d prefer it in the afternoon. The manager’s not about to split training and tell the AMers and PMers to come in separately, of course, but he now knows that he needs to control it. He can’t keep making the player do everything in the morning because something eventually will give. He might not manage to shake that niggling injury fully, or he might just do something silly in the heat of a moment in a big game, because you’ve been pushing him in a manner that goes against his biological makeup.

It also gives the manager a bit of know-how late on a summer evening during the World Cup with penalties looming. Player A is an AMer. He’s masking it, playing late into the night, but in the choice between him and the similarly skilled Player B, it’s no choice at all really: the PMer is more alert and he’s in his element in the evening. He should take the penalty.

CHRONOTYPE: SEVEN STEPS TO SLEEP SMARTER

1. Know your chronotype, and establish those of close friends and family. Use the Munich University questionnaire if you’re not sure.

2. Manipulate your day so you can be at your best when it matters most.

3. Use caffeine as a strategic performance enhancer, not out of habit – and no more than 400mg per day.

4. PMers – don’t lie in at weekends if you want to beat social jet lag.

5. Fit meeting rooms, offices and desks with daylight lamps to improve alertness, productivity and mood at work.

6. Know when to step up and when to take a back seat: should you volunteer to take a penalty in a late-night match when you’re an AMer?

7. Learn to work in harmony with your partner if your chronotypes differ.

Three

A Game of Ninety Minutes

Sleeping in Cycles, Not Hours

You wake up to darkness. How long have I been asleep? you wonder. After getting up and going to the bathroom, you check your phone: 3:07. That’s OK – plenty of time left in bed. If you just get back to sleep now, you’re still on course for around eight hours when your alarm goes off at 7.30. You’ve got a big day tomorrow, lots to do at work. You need to be fresh. You need your eight hours.

So you lie there for a while. And then a while longer. You check your phone: 3:33. That’s still OK. Plenty of time. You have that 10 a.m. meeting of course, so you have to be fresh. Now, how is that going to go? you ask yourself, and the butterflies begin again; your shoulders, almost imperceptibly, have tightened. You’re no longer lying on your side; you’ve switched to your back, fingers interlinked behind your head. All the better for thinking with. You check the time once more: 3:56. Something about the proximity to 4 a.m., about losing a whole hour before tomorrow of all days, fills you with a dread unique to these hours of the night.

The taunting numerals 5:53 are the last you remember before your alarm shocks you from sleep at 7.30, with your mouth parched and a growing ache behind your eyes. You haven’t had anywhere near eight hours. How are you going to manage today?

One Size Fits All?

If you were asked to think of a number, any number, between one and ten, given that you’re reading a book about sleep, it’s likely you’ll think eight. Eight hours of sleep each night is a nice round number, but it is one of the enduring pieces of so-called sleep wisdom that doesn’t add up for everyone.

The idea of eight hours a night is a relatively modern one. We’ll talk about sleeping in more than one phase later in the book, but for now it’s enough to say that, until the nineteenth century, with the industrial revolution and the introduction of artificial light, it is unlikely that people were sleeping in one eight-hour chunk at night-time. It’s unlikelier still that they were worrying about it.

Eight hours’ sleep is an average amount of sleep people get per night, and it somehow seems to have become a recommended amount – for everyone. The resultant pressure people put on getting this is incredibly damaging and counter-productive to getting the right amount we individually need.

This one-size-fits-all mentality doesn’t apply to other areas of our lives. With things like calorie consumption, there is an industry-accepted standard in differences for the sexes, and that’s before we consider the difference in need between a Herculean fitness fanatic and someone who lives a largely sedentary lifestyle. There are guidelines for a maximum daily consumption of things like sugar and salt, but having less than these amounts is considered acceptable. There is no definitive length of time that should be spent on daily exercise (more than the recommended amount is usually good). It is only in sleep – and, as we’ll learn later, not only in this aspect of sleep – that such wisdom is simply accepted.

The truth is that each of us is different. There are the Margaret Thatchers and Marissa Mayers of this world, getting by on four to six hours each night while running Britain or being CEO of Yahoo, respectively, and then there are people like tennis-legend Roger Federer and fastest-man-ever Usain Bolt, who say they need as much as ten hours per night.

And even allowing for these extremes, our need for sleep changes throughout our lives. As children and then adolescents, we need much more sleep than we do as adults. According to the National Sleep Foundation in the USA, the average teenager (fourteen to seventeen years old) needs between eight and ten hours of sleep. The average adult needs between seven and nine.

If you need less than eight hours’ sleep per night, but you’re forcing yourself to try to get eight, going to bed when you’re not tired and lying there awake, you’re wasting your time. If you’re looking at the clock in the middle of the night, anxiously calculating how much short of eight hours you’re going to be, tossing, turning and growing more and more concerned about getting enough sleep, you’re doing likewise – you’re wasting your valuable time on not sleeping.

Shift workers, airline staff, City traders, long-distance lorry drivers – they’re not getting eight hours per night. The athletes I work with don’t get eight hours per night, and that’s not only because of the pressures on their time. It’s because they don’t look at sleeping in hours; they do it in cycles.

The Cycles of Sleep

The R90 approach simply means Recovery in 90 minutes. I haven’t randomly picked a number, any number, between one and a hundred; ninety minutes is the length of time it takes a person under clinical conditions to go through the stages of sleep that constitute a cycle.

Our sleep cycles are composed of four (or sometimes five) distinct stages, and it’s easy to think about our passage through a cycle as being like a journey down a flight of stairs. When we turn the lights off and get into bed at night, we’re at the top of the stairs. Down at the bottom of the stairs is deep sleep, which is where we want to get to.

The Top of the Stairs: Dozing off

Non-REM (NREM) Stage 1

We’re slowly taking our first couple of steps down the staircase, and we’re somewhere between awake and asleep for a few minutes. Have you ever jerked awake suddenly because you’ve imagined yourself to be falling? That happens here and it’s just a hallucination, but it means we need to begin our descent down the stairs again. It’s very easy to pull us back up the stairs from here – a door opening, a voice in the street outside will do it – but once we manage to negotiate this stage successfully, we make our way down to …

The Middle of the Stairs: Light sleep

NREM Stage 2

In light sleep our heart rate slows and our body temperature drops. From here, we can still be dragged back to the top of the stairs by someone shouting our name or, in the case of a mother (and women are biologically susceptible to this), her baby crying. We spend the biggest percentage of our time asleep in this state, so it can feel like a long flight of stairs at times, particularly for those getting stuck in light sleep, but it isn’t time wasted if it’s part of a well-balanced cycle. Information consolidation and improved motor-skill performance is linked to this stage,[1] and as we move further down, we begin the transition to the really good stuff.

The Bottom of the Stairs: Deep sleep

NREM Stage 3 (and 4)

Congratulations. You’ve reached the bottom of the stairs. Down here, it takes a good deal of effort to wake us. If you’ve ever had to shake someone awake, or if you’ve been unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end and woken up punch drunk and confused, you’ll understand the kind of power deep sleep has and the effects of sleep inertia. For the sleepwalkers among us, this is the stage when you will take to the floor.

Our brain produces delta waves, the slowest-frequency brainwaves (we produce the high-frequency beta waves when we are awake) in deep sleep. We want to spend as much time as we can down here, wallowing in it, as this is where we reap the major physical restorative benefits of sleep, such as the increase in our release of growth hormone.[2] Human growth hormone (HGH) might be familiar to some readers as a banned performance-enhancing drug in sport, but our bodies produce it naturally, and its effects are powerful. Dr Michael J. Breus, a clinical psychologist and sleep expert in the USA, describes it as ‘a key ingredient we all need routinely to grow new cells, repair tissues, recover our bodies from the daily grinds, and essentially be (and feel) rejuvenated’. We hope to spend around 20 per cent of our time down here in deep sleep during the night.

Helter Skelter: REM

In the Beatles’ song ‘Helter Skelter’, they sing of going back up to the top of the slide, where they stop and turn and go for a ride. It’s not too dissimilar to this stage of sleep. We head back up the stairs, to light-sleep territory for a while, before we reach a stage of sleep many of us are familiar with: REM (Rapid Eye Movement). This is where our mind takes us off on a ride – we do most of our dreaming in this stage while our bodies are temporarily paralysed, and REM sleep is believed to have beneficial effects on creativity.[3] We need to get back up towards the top, stop and turn and go for a ride every bit as much as we need to get to the bottom of the stairs, and again, we should be looking to spend around 20 per cent of our time in this stage. Infants spend more like half their time asleep here. At the end of the REM stage we wake – we usually won’t remember this – before beginning the next cycle.

Each cycle during the night is different. Deep sleep accounts for a higher portion of our sleep in earlier cycles, as our body prioritizes getting this as soon as it can, while REM sleep accounts for a higher portion in later cycles. However, if we have been getting less sleep than normal, our brain will drop into REM for longer in earlier cycles, demonstrating its importance to us.[4] This is just one of the reasons why ‘catching up’ on sleep – by going to bed earlier than normal or sleeping in later – is a waste of your time. Once sleep has been lost, it’s gone. But our bodies are remarkably good at doing our catching-up for us.

Ideally, we would spend a night in bed smoothly making the transition from one cycle to the next, in a pattern of sleep–wake–sleep–wake … gradually getting less deep sleep and more REM sleep as the night progresses, until our final wake in the morning. This is the key to getting the right quality of sleep: all the light sleep, deep sleep and REM we need in a series of cycles which feels to us like one long continuous night’s sleep.

However, there are all sorts of obstacles in our way: noise, age, stress, medication, caffeine, physical disturbances like a partner’s leg touching us, breathing through our mouths instead of our noses, snoring and sleep apnoea, temperature and the necessity of a bathroom visit can bring us back up towards the top of the stairs and leave some of us doomed to spend too much of the night in the lighter stages of sleep, or take us out of our cycles entirely.

The knock-on effects of this can range from growing levels of daytime fatigue to fatal consequences. Our bodies can dump us straight down into a micro-sleep during the day when we least expect it, such as when driving a car or operating a piece of machinery.

If we’re trapped in light-sleeping patterns then it doesn’t matter how much sleep we’re getting – we’re not benefiting from it fully. The R90 approach tackles the obstacles that stop us getting down the stairs, and it all starts with our morning alarms.

Wake Up!

Flexibility seems like a desirable trait in the modern world. Late nights, weekends and travel mean that it should pay to avoid fixed approaches to life. If you had a couple of drinks and some food after work, doesn’t it make sense to set the alarm a bit later for the next morning to give yourself a bit more sleep? Surely it’s best to forget about the alarm altogether on a day off?

In fact, setting a constant wake time is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal when looking to improve the quality of our recovery.

Our bodies love it, with our circadian rhythms, set by the rise and fall of the sun, working around a consistent point, and our minds love it, because through this constant wake time we can build the confidence to be more flexible in other aspects of our lives.

Picking a constant wake time requires a little thought, and no little effort too, because you should get up at this time too. It’s advisable to look back over the previous two or three months of your life, factoring in your work and personal life, and choose the earliest time you have to get up. The time should be one that is achievable every day and there should be nothing in your life that requires you to be up earlier except for special circumstances, such as an early flight. So don’t pick 7.30 a.m. if you occasionally have to be up at 7 a.m. to get to a meeting. You pick 7 a.m. in that instance. And remember, you will be using this wake time at the weekend too, so don’t choose something completely unrealistic on the assumption that you can sleep it off on your days off.

Give some thought to your chronotype. If you’re a PMer, don’t pick something far earlier than when you have to get up, but do bear in mind that it should have some relation to when the sun comes up. The further you get from that, the more you depart from the circadian process. For a PMer who has to be up for work at a time that is at odds with their natural rhythms, this wake time is going to be essential for resetting their clock every day so that they can keep up with the AMers and inbetweeners.

Once you’ve established the earliest time you need to be up, make that your wake time. Ideally, your wake time should be at least ninety minutes before you have to be at work or college or any other obligation, so that you can have enough time to prepare yourself after sleep.

You will need an alarm to wake you, certainly to start with, but what you will find is that your body and mind become trained to get up at this time. Before long, you’ll find yourself turning off the alarm yourself because you’re already awake.

Using your wake time, you can now count backwards in ninety-minute cycles to establish when you should aim to be asleep. If you’re the average person, aiming to get around eight hours in at night, that would be the equivalent of five cycles per night (which equates to seven and a half hours). If you’ve chosen 7.30 a.m. as your wake time, then you should be aiming to be asleep by midnight, which means curling up and letting go fifteen minutes before – or however long it takes you to get off to sleep.

When I start working with an athlete and I ask them how long they slept the night before, they’re likely to give a vague answer. ‘Oh, about seven or eight hours,’ they might say. But they, just like the rest of us, have a random approach to it. They think they went to bed around eleven, they’re pretty sure they woke up to go to the toilet once during the night and, as far as they remember, it was around 7, 7.30 a.m. when they rose. The night before, who knows?

Setting a constant wake time eliminates the random nature of our sleep. It helps us instil a routine that gives us the confidence to know how much we’re getting. If I ask an athlete I’ve been working with for a while, they will answer without hesitation: ‘I got five cycles in last night.’

Do that every night and you’ve got a 35-cycle week, which is simply perfection. It’s also never going to happen. Life gets in the way: an evening kick-off for a footballer; a delayed train home, a late dinner, a book you can’t put down or a phone call from an old friend for the rest of us. You need to have the flexibility to work with this, to still enjoy your life and get on at work without worrying about bedtime. So this isn’t fixed. You get up at exactly the same time every day, but you have ninety-minute intervals to go to bed, although you should not use the one before your ideal bedtime. As we’ve said previously, there’s no catching up on lost sleep.

So if you get home a bit later, and you’re not prepared to go naturally into a sleep state at midnight for your chosen wake time of 7.30 a.m., you can go to sleep at 1.30 a.m., which is four cycles (six hours); come in later still and you can go to bed at 3 a.m., only three cycles. Now you’re pushing it.

Now you’re working at the margins, like the sportsmen and women I work with. They love the idea of these ninety-minute slots: they’re measurable and achievable. Footballers of course like them because they’re the same length as a football match. They know that, when an event demands it, they can start manipulating these cycles to their own ends. They are in control of their recovery, rather than the other way round.

Scheduling Sleep

Worrying about sleep is an obstacle many of us face when trying to get what we need from it. Going to bed when we’re not tired or prepared for it is only going to cause problems, and stressing about it in the middle of the night isn’t going to help us get back to sleep. Once we start worrying and stewing over it, stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol are released, which make us more alert.

For those of us who don’t suffer from a sleeping problem, the ‘bad night’s sleep’ often occurs in isolation, or as a part of a period of pressure and stress. If taken as part of a broader sample, it might only be one day out of a week, or a few days out of the month.

I talk about sleep in cycles per week, not hours per night. All of a sudden, one bad night out of seven doesn’t seem too bad. We immediately take the pressure off, because it isn’t an all-or-nothing eight hours per night. Everything isn’t riding on tonight. Instead, someone who needs five cycles a night is aiming for thirty-five per week.

I will sit down with a performer and look at their schedule, and I’ll show them how they can achieve this. We will look at their week ahead, and flag where the problem areas are. For a footballer we would identify things like an evening away game in the Champions League in midweek as an issue. The match won’t finish until near 10 p.m., there are media commitments afterwards, adrenaline to come down from and travel to take into account. He’s not going to get his five cycles in that night. So we’ll look at how he can compensate for them.

We try to avoid three consecutive nights of fewer than five cycles. Instead, we’d look to follow a night or two of this with the ideal routine. If we can get at least four nights in a week of an ideal routine in our schedules then we’re doing OK. Most importantly, we’re aware of how much sleep we’re getting. We can see quite clearly if we’re pushing things too much. Five nights of fewer cycles in a week, which isn’t part of a short-term regime change? We need to look at that.

‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,’ says the proverb, and it applies just the same to the R90 program. I’ll reach a point with a client when I can hand their schedules to them and say, ‘I know you can get thirty cycles out of this. Whether you do is up to you.’ It’s all in their hands from then on.

It is empowering for anyone to take control of their sleep like this, and it is possible to start manipulating cycles in the short term to free up more time for a specific event or period in our lives as part of a controlled regime change. An athlete gearing up for the Olympic Games might switch from a five-cycle routine to four cycles per night, which frees up almost two extra days per month. There is confidence to be gained in knowing that time can be unlocked, even if it’s only temporarily. Some people switch from five cycles to four and find that they function better. They’re not waking up during the night any more. They know how much sleep they need now. They feel refreshed and optimistic that there are enough hours in the day after all.

You can do this in your own life. Start on five cycles, and see how you feel after seven days. If this is too long, move it down to four. Not enough? Move up to six. You’ll know because you should feel good once you’ve adjusted to it. What I really want you to feel is the confidence that you are in control of your sleep. Once you’re comfortable with what you think is your ideal night, then you can look at adjusting it to fit with the demands of your lifestyle. Just like an elite sportsman or woman, you should look to follow two nights of fewer cycles with your ideal one, and achieve at least four ideal routines per week.

There’s no need to panic if you’re not always adhering to this – just like there’s no need for all that witching-hour worry about getting eight hours that night – because you are starting to take charge of your sleep. Through scheduling it, you are able to see where you are getting less, where problems may be occurring, instead of simply feeling you haven’t slept enough without having any kind of evidence to back it up with and identify where you can make changes to your routine.

Once you’re comfortable with sleeping in cycles, you can start to emulate the Olympians preparing for the Games in making short-term regime changes for a specific set of circumstances. If you are training for a marathon and you have to fit in your training around your job, you can cut down on your cycles at night to make it work. If you are involved in a project that is making more demands on your life, move down to a four-cycle routine to get it done. If you’re really being pushed in the short term, see if you can get down to three.

You might now be saying to yourself, Wait a minute – I can’t manage on three or four cycles per night! But that’s because you’re still thinking about sleeping in a monophasic way, purely as one block each night, instead of as a 24-hour recovery process with the other windows and opportunities this offers us to compensate for fewer cycles at night. And you’re not yet seeing the time we spend preparing to go to bed and how we spend it after we have slept as a non-negotiable component of this. As you will see in the next two chapters, sleep is about so much more than the time spent doing it at night.

CYCLES NOT HOURS: SEVEN STEPS TO SLEEP SMARTER

1. Your constant wake time is the anchor that holds in place the R90 technique – set one, and stick to it. If you share your bed with a partner, get them to do the same, and ideally make them the same time.

2. Think of sleep in ninety-minute cycles, not hours.

3. Your sleep time is flexible, but it is determined by counting back in ninety-minute slots from your wake time.

4. Look at sleep in a broader tract of time to take the pressure off. One ‘bad night’s sleep’ won’t kill you – think of it in cycles per week.

5. Try to avoid three nights of fewer cycles than your ideal back to back.

6. It’s not simply quality vs. quantity. Know how much you need. For the average person, thirty-five cycles per week is ideal. Twenty-eight (six hours per night) to thirty is OK. If you’re getting anything less which isn’t planned for, you might be overdoing it.

7. Aim to achieve your ideal amount at least four times per week.

Four

Warming Up and Cooling Down

Pre- and Post-sleep Routines

It’s been a long day. You arrive home somewhere close to 11 p.m. after staying back at the office to work and then joining a couple of colleagues for a late dinner and a few glasses of wine. You kick off your shoes, undress and throw your clothes in a crumpled heap on the floor before brushing your teeth in the unforgiving glow of the bathroom light. Finally, you head to the bedroom and get under the covers next to your partner, who wakes briefly then turns over and goes back to sleep. You’re full and tired, and you have been looking forward to this all the way home in the taxi. You close your eyes and drift away …

You jerk awake suddenly, your mind racing with the conversation at dinner. What did your colleagues mean with some of the things that were said? Did you come across a little unprofessional – maybe even a little rude – in what you said about others in the office?

Now you’re awake. Your mind is moving on to other matters: will you get the project you’re working on finished in time? Are you going to be late again with it? How will that look?

Your heart is speeding up, and your old friend indigestion has arrived after the dinner you finished just an hour ago. You’re twitchy and uncomfortable: should you get up or stick it out in bed? You’re absolutely shattered – why on earth can’t you just get off to sleep?

The Before and After

If I arrived home some time around 11 p.m. – my ideal sleep time to get five cycles in before my constant wake time of 6.30 a.m. – I would not come in, brush my teeth and jump straight into bed. Instead, I would wait for the next slot, at 12.30 a.m., and I would be in for a four-cycle night. How else would I fit my pre-sleep routine in?

‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail’ is a phrase that could have been written with pre- and post-sleep recovery in mind. What you do immediately before you go to bed has a direct consequence on the quality and duration of your sleep, while what you do after waking has significant consequences for the rest of your day (and the coming night).

In the R90 program, we look at these pre- and post-sleep periods as being just as important as the time spent actually asleep. In fact, they’re more important, because you can exercise some direct control over them. It is here that we start looking at ninety minutes not just as segments of the time you spend asleep, but as portions of your waking day. Ideally, you would have a ninety-minute period for pre-sleep and the same amount for post-sleep.

Looking at it like this, a four-cycle routine is not only six hours of sleep at night, but it is nine hours dedicated to the process of rest and recovery. That isn’t to say you need to block off ninety minutes every morning and night when you do nothing but prepare for sleep or for the day ahead. It’s more about toning down what you are doing, setting aside the unhelpful factors that will inhibit the hours you’re about to spend either sleeping or dealing with the challenges of your waking day, and introducing aspects better fitting of your circadian rhythms and chronotype.

Pre-sleep

Your pre-sleep routine is the preparation to make sure you are in a state ready to go to sleep. It’s the work you do to put yourself in a position where you can start your first cycle and then move seamlessly through the subsequent cycles during the night, getting as much of the light and deep sleep and REM as you need.

Much like a Team Sky cyclist would with their marginal gains when approaching an event, when we’re heading towards going into a sleep state, a position in which we’re vulnerable for several hours, we need to start pushing aside the things that are going to get in the way of this.

If you’ve eaten late, then you need to set aside this factor by not going straight to bed. Being full and digesting food is going to interfere with your circadian urge to suppress the bowel at around 9 or 10 p.m., and it’s going to affect the quality of your sleep. Alcohol, despite having the capability to give us a pleasantly drowsy feeling, affects the quality of sleep when consumed to excess. If you’ve had several fraught work conversations, then you’re not going to just stop thinking about them as soon as you jump into bed. You need to download your thoughts. You need your pre-sleep routine.

On an ordinary night at home, when I’m planning to be asleep by 11 p.m., I will start preparing for it at 9.30. Nothing dramatic happens – I don’t bolt out of my chair and cry out, ‘Let’s ready the pre-sleep!’ But I know that, if I’m still a bit hungry, I need to have a light snack; I need to take on my last fluids for the night, so that I don’t wake up thirsty. And I will empty my bladder, because I don’t want to be woken with the urge to go to the toilet during the night.

Pre-sleep isn’t just about addressing the seemingly obvious bodily functions before bed. There are a multitude of other factors that we can work with to ensure that we’re fully prepared to enter a sleep state.

Technology Shutdown

Putting a stop to computers, tablets, smartphones and televisions in the period before sleep will restrict your exposure to the artificial light these devices emit. For those who can’t live without their tech before bedtime, software such as f.lux and Apple’s Night Shift mode on their mobile operating systems will ‘warm’ the colour temperature on devices, reducing the amount of blue light. But this doesn’t solve the other problem with tech before bedtime: its effect on our stress levels and capacity to keep our brains alert.

If you’re responding to emails and messages right up to bedtime, you’re keeping yourself open to potentially stressful situations. The message you receive fifteen minutes before you go to bed could be the kind that will keep your mind whirring when you’re trying to sleep. You might struggle to get to sleep before you receive a reply to the message you’ve sent – something even more out of your control to worry about.

If we put a curfew on our emails and messages, we can deal with any potentially stressful situations at least ninety minutes before bed. If you’re the type to get stressed while waiting for a reply to a message you’ve just sent, then you could draft your message and leave it till the morning to send it – which is a bit like sticking a stamp on it ready to post it. This way you’re taking control not only of your correspondence, but of your availability. You’re saying that you’re not always on hand to answer 10 p.m. emails.

Personal messages are, of course, slightly different. If you’re in the throes of a new relationship, you’re not going to stay away from your phone for an hour and a half before bed if there’s a chance of receiving a text message from your lover. Who knows what you might be missing out on? But shutting down laptops, tablets and similar devices, putting a stop to work email, saying no to a high-octane action movie or video-game shooter in bed on your flat-screen television with hi-definition sound, simply reducing any of your tech usage in this period before sleep would be a good start.

Some people are already very good at this. I see an increasing amount of email signatures and out-of-office replies saying ‘I only check email three times a day’ or making clear that they are not connected 24–7 to their email. For them, it’s easy to shut down the tech, but for the rest of us, it’s not enough to take a prescriptive approach of don’t do this. How do you stop it if you don’t know how?

One great step is to identify how often you check your device throughout the day and for what reason (texts, email, alerts, social media – work and non-work). Apple revealed that the average iPhone user unlocks their phone eighty times a day, which sounds like a lot until you start monitoring how often you do it. For most of us, it’s at least every time we receive an alert.

If we look at finding a window during the day when we can have a break from technology and do something pleasurable instead, we can start to take control of it. If you leave your phone behind when you exercise – swimming is a particularly good option, as even the most tech-addicted person doesn’t want to get their smartphone wet, but it could just as easily be the gym or going for a walk – you are creating a reward for your body and mind in the form of the benefits of the exercise and allowing them to be free of constantly responding to alerts and messages.

It doesn’t just have to be exercise. You could put the phone away on your journey to work and read a book instead, or you could leave your phone locked in your drawer when you go for lunch with a friend or colleague – all of which gives your brain that association between pleasure and a technology break.

Once you’re comfortable doing this, you’ll be better able to integrate it into your pre-sleep routine, which is itself a reward for your body and mind, and ensure that your phone goes to sleep when you do.

There are, of course, some helpful applications tech can provide us with in this period. There are many mindfulness and meditation apps that can be used to relax us as we prepare to sleep, and if they work for you, stick with them (though the device they are used on should ideally be kept out of the bedroom, or removed after use, if possible).

From Warm to Cool

When we were out on our island in Chapter 1, the temperature dropped when the sun set and we started to become ready for sleep. Our body temperature naturally drops in the evening, as part of our circadian rhythms, but things like central heating can interfere with it. We can overcome this and tap into our biological urge at home through a couple of short cuts.

Firstly, while it might seem obvious, make sure your duvet isn’t too warm or too cold. It might make sense to you to curl up in a toasty bed, but once your body temperature gets to work with it, you will start to overheat and possibly perspire heavily, all of which can pull you out of a sleep cycle. Hanging your leg out from the duvet, which requires conscious thought, may work for a bit, but ultimately disturbed and broken sleep will prevail. Hot-water bottles and electric blankets are a no-no, unless you’re using them to reduce the bite in a particularly cold room or you are especially sensitive to temperature.

Keeping the bedroom itself cool (not cold) is important. In winter you could do this by turning off the radiator or turning down the temperature control in the bedroom when trying to enter sleep. You could have a warm (not hot) rinse under the shower, just to raise your body temperature a degree or two, so that when you get into your cooler bed, you’re approximating that shift in temperature from day to night.

In summer, keeping the curtains or blinds closed all day and ventilating the room can help keep it a degree or two cooler than the rest of the home. Sleeping with just a sheet or the duvet cover (with the duvet itself removed) will help. For those of us who have air conditioning, use this to cool the room prior to sleeping on a particularly hot night, while everyone else could use a fan with a bottle of frozen water placed in front of it.

Some people find having a shower before bed is a helpful part of their pre-sleep because they feel more comfortable getting into bed clean, but you don’t need to have a full shower; just a quick rinse will do. Like much of the advice in this chapter, it’s about finding what works for you.

From Light to Dark

Our body clocks respond to the shift from light to dark. We start producing melatonin, so that we will become sleepy, but many of the things we surround ourselves with as bedtime approaches interfere with this. We’ve already mentioned our technology, but there are several other areas in which we could look to improve.

Dimming everything down as you enter your pre-sleep is a good idea. Turn the main lights in your home off, and have less-powerful lamps with warm-colour bulbs – red or amber, which will not affect you in the same way blue light does – or candles in your living room and bedroom to provide ambient lighting. Of course, it’s easy to undo all this good work by then brushing your teeth before bed in the blazing fluorescent light of the bathroom. One solution would be to brush your teeth earlier, and another would be to change the bulb in the bathroom to something less dazzling. Or what about a candle? If you stand in front of the mirror next to your partner while you both brush your teeth in silence under the unforgiving glare of the bathroom light, night after night, it might make for a welcome break from this recurring pre-sleep nightmare. It’s hardly a candle-lit dinner in the romance stakes, but it lends an extra element of occasion to a very mundane part of your pre-sleep routine, and it might just help you sleep a little easier.

You should be able to put your sleeping environment in darkness or blackout so as to replicate the circadian process. Most of us will have some kind of artificial interference in our bedrooms, especially if we live in a town or city. So make sure the curtains or blinds are of sufficient quality that they keep it out. That means no little gaps around the curtains where the light can creep in. Invest in some blackout blinds if necessary. On the Grand Tours in the glamorous world of professional cycling, I will sometimes tape black bin bags over the riders’ hotel-room windows to keep the light out.

If you like to read before you go to sleep, consider doing it outside the bedroom, so that you’re moving from light (in the room you’re reading) to the dark of your bedroom. If reading in bed is a pre-sleep ritual you would sooner toss and turn all night for than go without, then consider turning off your lamp when you’ve finished reading, leaving the room and coming back in to darkness before going to bed. Dawn-wake simulators have a setting to go gradually from light to dark, which you could use too.

Everything in Its Right Place

With the emphasis of your pre-sleep routine being on moving away from using televisions, smartphones and laptops, it’s possible you might be wondering, What does that leave me with to do?

This is a good time to declutter. I’m not talking about emptying your house out as part of a fashionable lifestyle craze, but rather to take some positive actions in your environment so that once you’re either asleep or preparing to go to sleep, your mind can be free of little niggling thoughts about packing your bag in the morning, remembering to take your dry cleaning with you to work – or the sudden realization that you’re out of tea bags. It’s incredible what can pop into our minds at night.

Doing some simple, non-stimulating tasks around the home to better prepare you for the next day will take care of this and give your mind the space it needs. This might involve ironing and hanging up your clothes and tidying your environment, taking out the recycling and putting everything in its right place for the morning. Don’t worry if you’re not the obsessively tidy type – it can equally involve throwing your clothes on the chair where they belong and dumping your bag on the floor by the front door so you don’t forget it. Everything in its right (for you) place.

Rather than leave the washing-up for the morning, now would be a good time to do it. It’s a simple task, not requiring much effort or energy, and it means you go to bed with the kitchen clean. Whether you’re aware of it or not, it’s one less thing for you to have on your mind during the night. If you normally put the dishwasher or washing machine on at night, for convenience or because electricity is cheaper, stop and think about this. You might not hear it when you first go to bed, but what about if you wake up during the night? Do you hear it then, when the world is just that bit more quiet and new noises become audible? Put it on at a different time if it isn’t far away enough not to have an impact.

Using this period of time to get your little essentials right for the next day will declutter your mind for the night ahead, and with the little everyday thoughts taken care of, it leaves you time to take care of the bigger problems.

Downloading Your Day

One of the strongest pulls to take you out of a sleep cycle is thought: ruminating about the day you’ve just experienced; worrying about the one ahead. Some 82 per cent of people in Britain complained of being kept awake by this at some point in their lives.[1] Reducing unhelpful tech in the lead-up to bedtime helps prevent any fresh anxieties entering the equation, but it won’t eliminate existing troubles.

There are millions of tiny moments that accumulate and make up each of our days – a conversation with a colleague, the commute, lunch with a friend, using a new piece of software at work, daydreaming while looking out of the window – and the brain must digest them. Indeed, scientists believe one of the key reasons we sleep is to process our experiences into memories and consolidate learnt skills.[2]

We can better prepare our minds for this by downloading our day. We take all of our experiences over the course of the day and file them away, ready for our mind to digest them as we sleep. The simple tasks just described help us do this, and there are other methods to incorporate in our pre-sleep routines that can do it too. Some people find meditating and breathing exercises useful, and if this is something that helps you download your day then you should make it part of your routine.

I find it helpful to take a piece of paper and a pencil and simply write down a ‘what’s on my mind’ list, addressing any thoughts I have and anything that has worried or concerned me during that day. It’s not my actual ‘to-do list’, which is safely saved on my calendar in the cloud, but something more personal. If a particular piece of business has been playing on my mind, I might write down a note to call the client in the morning; if a birthday of a loved one or something like Mother’s Day is on the horizon, I could draw a bunch of flowers as a reminder. I’m just scribbling on the page, even doodling at times, in a very relaxed, informal process that you could do at any spare moment before going to bed. I will then leave my piece of paper next to my house keys – or anything I never leave home without – for the next morning, so I won’t forget it.

Putting it all down on paper means that I go to bed feeling that I have consciously addressed the issue for now, and I can trust the work that goes on in my sleeping brain to take care of it overnight.

Security

Going into a sleep state is the most vulnerable position we will put ourselves in all day, so we need to feel as secure as possible. Locking all the doors and windows – or double-checking they are all locked – will help instil this feeling of safety and, like the downloading of our day, it will eliminate the unhelpful thoughts – such as Did I leave the bathroom window open? – that will stop us entering a sleep state.

Sleep Exercise

Strenuous exercise should be avoided in the period prior to sleep (unless it’s sex, of course, which we’ll talk about later in the book). It elevates your heart rate, body temperature and adrenaline, and the glaring light and pounding music in many gyms is about as far from the two of us sitting by the fire as is possible. But a bit of light exercise – a short walk around the block before bedtime, some yoga such as sun salutations, a gentle cycle on a static bike or stretching exercises can help. This exercise can have the added benefit of raising body temperature, so you make the transition from warm to cooler when you enter your bed.

Sleeping through Your Nose

Breathing probably ranks even higher than sleeping as something most of us take for granted. Yet getting our breathing right while we sleep is vital if we want to transition undisturbed through our sleep cycles. Common disorders such as snoring and sleep apnoea – in which the sufferer stops breathing repeatedly during the night and their brain’s oxygen-warning light wakes them each time (the patient won’t even remember this in the morning – it’s often partners who first notice it) – can disrupt our sleep significantly, as well as that of anyone sharing a bed with us, and both of these issues stem from our breathing.

In his excellent book The Oxygen Advantage, something of a bible on nose-breathing, Patrick McKeown writes, ‘Breathing through the mouth has been proven to significantly increase the number of occurrences of snoring and obstructive sleep apnoea … As any child is aware, the nose is made for breathing, the mouth for eating.’

Breathing through our nose seems simple enough, and there is a host of health benefits to be enjoyed through adopting this method – but it’s how we breathe at night that matters to us. If you wake up with a dry mouth and almost always take a drink of water to bed with you, it suggests you breathe through your mouth when you sleep. A wet mouth on waking would suggest you breathe through your nose. So how can we try to influence something that happens automatically when we’re asleep?

If you’ve ever seen cyclists or runners with what looks like a plaster on their nose, then you’ve seen the answer. As part of our pre-sleep routine, we can put a Breathe Right nasal strip on our nose which dilates our nasal passage and encourages us to continue breathing through our nose. More advanced products, such as the Turbine or Mute by Rhinomed, have taken over. They go inside the nose and open up the airways that way, and are used by a growing number of elite athletes. It is personal preference as to which you might use to sleep with. It’s advisable to put them on and breathe through them for a period before you go to bed to get used to the product, and you can practise with them any time – while travelling to work, at your desk, in the gym and at any opportunity to make nose-breathing natural for you.

Patrick McKeown goes one step further: he wears a Breathe Right strip and tapes his mouth shut with a light, hypoallergenic medical tape to ensure that he breathes through his nose at night. Patrick’s quality of sleep improved immeasurably when he adopted this method, and it is one he recommends to his clients – once they’ve been assured that they won’t suffocate in their sleep, of course. (It’s perfectly safe.) A product called SleepQ+, a lip-seal gel innovated by Rob Davies of Rispiracorp, which lightly seals the mouth to promote nose-breathing at night, promises to revolutionize this practice.

Post-sleep

If your pre-sleep is everything you do to prepare yourself to get the best quality of sleep, then your post-sleep is your routine to make sure all of that work and the subsequent hours spent asleep have not been wasted. A good post-sleep routine will help you move from a sleep state to a fully awake state, so that you can manage your day positively, and it will even set you up in the best way possible for when you go to bed that night.

Again, ninety minutes can seem like a long time to set aside on a morning, but this can include your journey to work. Post-sleep, of course, begins with the anchor of the R90 technique, the constant wake time – but the trappings of modern life immediately provide an obstacle to our biological needs.

The Return of the Tech

If a professional athlete wakes up, checks their phone immediately, sees a tweet they don’t like the look of and starts responding in anger when they’re not awake enough to do so rationally, they could be opening a can of worms that will take up the rest of their day. They might be waking up to an unwanted story in the papers the following morning.

I won’t check notifications and alerts on my phone the instant I wake up because I know that I’m not in a fit state to deal with anything properly. You wouldn’t want to respond to a message when you were drunk, would you? We’re not quite with it when we wake, and our levels of cortisol – a hormone we produce in response to stress – are at their highest shortly after waking. We don’t need to make them any higher or keep them up throughout the day, throwing our rhythms out of sync. The first part of your waking day doesn’t have to be a potentially stressful one.

So ideally keep your phone out of your room overnight. Have a standard alarm clock, or better yet, a dawn-wake simulator, to wake you up, so that the first thing you do on a morning is in keeping with your circadian rhythms. Then you should open the curtains or blinds and get the daylight flooding into you. This raises our alertness, helps set our body clock and allows us to make the final hormone shift from melatonin to serotonin. It puts us in a better position than we were even just a few minutes before to deal with whatever is waiting for us on the phone.

Ideally, you would leave your phone and other devices alone until later in the morning, once you’d fuelled and hydrated, but at the very least you should make sure it is not the first thing you do when you wake. Just as with technology at night, we can train ourselves to have a break from it on a morning. You could set your alarm on your phone to go off fifteen minutes after you get up so that you don’t touch it until then. You could then increase that to twenty minutes, and so on. Ninety minutes tech-free at the start of the day is a lot to ask of some people, but fifteen minutes is better than none – it’s that much closer to being in a full wake state.

Breakfast of Champions

‘Breakfast is the most important meal of the day’ goes the well-worn cliché, which might have certain breakfast-skipping PM chronotypes rolling their eyes. Let me put it another way: there is not a single athlete I have ever worked with who does not eat breakfast, regardless of their chronotype. They simply wouldn’t be able to do what they do without it.

Having some breakfast gives us the fuel we need to start our day. If you had your evening meal at 8 p.m. the night before and then woke up at 7 a.m., you haven’t eaten anything for eleven hours. If you’re the kind of person who isn’t hungry on waking, try to have something to eat in those first ninety minutes after, even if it’s just something small, such as a few bites of toast, some sips of a smoothie or a nibble of some fruit. Do it every day, and you will soon find yourself eating the whole slice of toast or piece of fruit, and slurping the last of the smoothie.

Eating breakfast gives us fuel for the day and ensures that we then get hungry again at lunchtime, and later at dinnertime; in other words, we’re getting hungry at the right times, instead of feeling the need to snack on food that isn’t good for us here and there and feeling tired and sluggish.

Breakfast doesn’t have to be a time-consuming ritual: toast, cereal and fruit are all quick to make and consume. Take some fluid on too and get hydrated. If you have the time and the resources, eat your breakfast outside when the weather allows, or eat in a daylight-filled room, so that the sun can do its bit to wake you up too. If it’s dark and the middle of winter, use a daylight lamp to eat your breakfast by instead of the artificial light in the kitchen. It’s all too easy on a morning to eat something hurriedly with the curtains closed before dashing off to work.

Some of us love nothing more than a cup of tea or coffee to start our day and, used in moderation, this is a perfectly acceptable part of a post-sleep routine. We use caffeine in sport because it’s a fantastic performance enhancer, but we use it carefully. Having too much caffeine when you wake immediately puts pressure on that upper limit of 400 milligrams per day. Daylight, hydrating and fuel will all help your body wake up in good time if you let them, and they won’t make you crash later in the day. Remember, sleep quality is all about what you do from the point of waking.

Exercise

Exercise is an excellent aspect to incorporate into a post-sleep routine. There are those who swear by an early-morning run, swim or gym session before work, but it doesn’t have to be that strenuous. Going for a walk, a bit of gentle yoga or pilates to ease your body into the day, or walking or riding a bicycle to work if you’re lucky enough to be able to do so, are all good ways to spend part of your post-sleep routine. If the exercise is outdoors, then all the better. You’ll benefit from the sunlight waking you up, boosting your serotonin levels and setting your biological clock, which is the kind of post-sleep activity that will help you sleep at night as well as benefiting your waking day. For the increasing number of home workers we’re seeing in society as working habits change (4.2 million were reported in the UK in 2014, some 13.9 per cent of the workforce, compared to 2.7 million in 1998),[3] going for a good walk outside for some fresh air and sunlight is a good thing to incorporate into your routine before you start work.

Gentle Mental Challenge

Getting the brain in gear on a morning can be a gradual process, so some simple acts of mental stimulation, such as listening to the radio, ironing a shirt or doing any odd jobs around the house, can help. Reading a book or the news, or listening to a podcast on the way to work are all good ways to begin engaging with the world.

Chronotype

Understandably, chronotypes have a big part to play in our mornings. Post-sleep routines are more important for PMers because the AMers, whose last cycles of sleep before waking will be lighter, are at their best in the mornings anyway. Although it may sound counter-intuitive when it could mean more time in bed for them, the closer to ninety minutes that a PMer is able to dedicate to post-sleep, the better. Be aware of your colleagues with opposite chronotypes that may run you ragged in the morning and you them later, or vice versa. Get a daylight lamp on your desk to compensate.

Duvet Days

If you’re partial to a lie-in on your days off, the constant wake time in the R90 program is likely to be the first thing you’ll sacrifice when you’re in the mood for a duvet day with a box set after a particularly tough week at work (or a late night out). But there’s no need – you can still incorporate these things into your life while maintaining some kind of harmony with your body clock.

You should still set your alarm and get up at your constant wake time, and then do those aspects of your post-sleep routine you can muster. You will probably skip the exercise, but you can still go to the toilet on waking, get some daylight on you and have your breakfast. Then you can go back to bed. This way you’re doing what you can to be in tune with your circadian rhythms, while also doing what you want to do – you’re not making great sacrifices or depriving yourself of enjoyment to stick to the R90 program. Even professional sports people have days like these (usually after an event, of course), and sometimes there’s nothing better for us than a movie marathon from under the covers – as long as we’re managing it and not allowing it to disrupt our natural routine too much. It is important to try to associate only recovery activities with our bedroom as much as possible.

Sleep Efficient

We can’t control what we do while we’re asleep, but we can control everything we do leading up to it and afterwards. Incorporating pre- and post-sleep routines into our lives can appear difficult at first, particularly when our time can already feel pinched, but through some subtle changes to our schedules, we can all find ways to do it.

The benefits can be summed up in one word: efficiency. Our pre-sleep routine gets us prepared to enter our sleep cycles, so we can get the very best quality of recovery during our time in bed – even if that time is truncated through our lifestyle. It gives us the flexibility and freedom to go to bed later when needed, confident that we can download our day and do our best to dispel any lingering unhelpful thoughts so that we won’t waste our valuable time on not sleeping.

Our post-sleep routine enables us to be more efficient in our waking day. Through taking the time to apply it, we are able to arrive at work or social engagements more prepared and alert, so that we’re getting the maximum out of these activities and putting the most we can back into them. We can arrive at our 9 a.m. appointments feeling sharp instead of rushed and over-stimulated on caffeine.

Through adopting a post-sleep routine we can start to feel empowered to make decisions that will preserve it. If your constant wake time is 7.30 a.m. and someone suggests an 8.30 a.m. meeting, you can politely suggest 9 a.m. instead, so you can have your ninety minutes to get yourself ready. If they can’t budge, then sixty minutes is acceptable as a post-sleep routine, but anything less – such as for an 8 a.m. meeting – is too short and counter-productive, in which case you’d move a whole cycle back and get up at 6. These decisions can then start to feed into other aspects of your life.

If you have a plane to catch and need to drive to the airport early in the morning, you have a decision to make. You can either jump out of bed, get dressed and drive there, or you can make a one-off choice to bring your wake time back one cycle (from 7.30 to 6 a.m.). If you choose the latter, you’re more likely to stick to the speed limit because you’re not feeling rushed and you are more alert, despite getting up earlier. You’re fuelled and hydrated, you’ve been to the toilet, exercised and exposed yourself to daylight (whether that’s naturally or through a daylight lamp), all the things your body wants to do instead of jumping straight into a car and driving. Once you get to the airport to meet your friend, you can hold a conversation more competently. If you don’t like the look of something when you’re at the airport – an unattended bag, for example – you can make a better decision as to what to do about it.

In sport, these decisions can produce microscopic advantages in real time – a couple of thousandths of a second in a race – which might make all the difference. For a PMer sprinter competing earlier in the day, when they’re not quite at their best, a good post-sleep routine could be the difference between snatching the bronze medal at the finishing line and finishing fourth, outside of the medals. It might mean an athlete having the alertness to know not to push it any more in training, while their rival without an effective post-sleep routine pulls up with a calf strain, and their race is over before they’ve even made the starting line.

PRE- AND POST-SLEEP ROUTINES: SEVEN STEPS TO SLEEP SMARTER

1. Pre- and post-sleep routines directly affect the quality of your sleep and waking day: value them as the important activities they are, and you’ll be more efficient all day and night.

2. Take technology breaks during the day as a reward and training for body and mind.

3. Post-sleep is vitally important for PMers if they want to keep up with the AMers – don’t forgo this in favour of the ‘snooze’ button.

4. Don’t text drunk! Raise your alertness before you reach for your phone.

5. Moving your body from warm to cooler helps trigger the natural drop in body temperature – a quick warm rinse under the shower and a cooler sleeping environment will achieve this.

6. Declutter your environment and mind and download your day before bed, so you don’t lie awake thinking when you could be asleep.

7. Pre-sleep is about shutting down – nose-breathing, relaxing, light to dark – while post-sleep is about starting up in an unrushed way: these periods belong to you and no one else.

Five

Time Out!

Redefining Naps – Activity and Recovery Harmony

Welcome to your Friday-afternoon post-lunch meeting. The sun slants into the warm room through the half-closed blinds, illuminating the dust hovering in the air. Your pizza lunch still sits heavily in your stomach, and you try to listen to the presenter’s voice describing the slides while the projector whirrs soothingly in the background. Your eyelids are becoming heavy just as …

Woah! You snap awake. How long were you out for? You look around the table for disapproving stares, a colleague’s stifled grin, but instead all eyes are on the presenter. What a relief. It must only have been a matter of seconds.

You got away with it, but it’s time to really concentrate on this now. You turn towards the presenter, pick your pen up from the table and do your best to style out your momentary lapse of consciousness, really giving it your all.

And then it happens again.

The Afternoon Slump

To some it’s the corporate graveyard slot, to others the post-lunch slump. Whatever you want to call it, this midday period when daytime fatigue kicks in, which the Spanish have traditionally indulged with their siestas while the rest of the world push on through with unproductive meetings and heavy doses of caffeine, is an all too familiar phenomenon in homes and workplaces across the planet. It is also the key to redefining ‘sleep’ as you know it.

In the R90 program thus far we have addressed your approach to sleeping at night, but if you really want to learn to do it like the elite athletes I work with, you must learn to unlock the hours in the day as well. It is here that we will learn to think not in terms of sleep but, instead, of the process of mental and physical recovery.

Recovery is a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week commitment, and through using the daylight hours in addition to your nocturnal approach you will be able to give your mind and body the opportunity to continually reboot while dealing with the demands of modern life.

The second natural recovery period at midday is where we start, as this is the biggest and most effective natural window to claim back a cycle we have missed out on at night, to prepare us for a potential later evening ahead and to use in harmony with our nocturnal cycles as part of our weekly sleep–wake routine. Through using this time to have an afternoon nap we can begin to maximize all the hours in the day in order to perform better.

Don’t be put off if you’re not a napper. Napping as you know it is part of the old-school approach to sleep. We don’t call them naps in sport – we call them Controlled Recovery Periods (CRP). We don’t nod off indiscriminately. We take ownership of these opportunities during the day and extract the maximum benefits from them. Just like the CEOs of leading corporations and some of the most successful figures in the arts and entertainment do. Just like you can, even if you think you can’t sleep during the day, because anyone can learn to use a Controlled Recovery Period, and it’s something everyone should learn to do.

When Urge and Need Collide

History is littered with famous afternoon nappers, such as Winston Churchill, Napoleon Bonaparte and Bill Clinton, and the siesta period is still observed in countries all over the world, not only in Spain but elsewhere in the Mediterranean and in the tropics and subtropics. If we look at the hunter-gatherer communities that still exist today – the closest we can get to looking directly at how we might have lived thousands of years ago and certainly easier than relocating to an uninhabited island to find out ourselves – we can see that polyphasic sleep is very much the norm. Carol Worthman, Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, USA, studied tribes in places like Botswana, Zaire, Paraguay and Indonesia, and reported: ‘Sleep is a very fluid state. They sleep when they feel like it – during the day, in the evening, in the dead of night.’[1]

The patterns of the internal sleep regulators in our bodies show that sleeping in a polyphasic way is perfectly natural. In Chapter 1, we talked about how our sleep is regulated by our circadian rhythms – our urge to sleep – and our building sleep pressure – our need to sleep. The main sleep window occurs at night when our circadian urge climbs (it peaks at around 2–3 a.m.) and intersects with our high need for sleep.

But in the mid-afternoon – between 1 and 3 p.m. for most people, or a little later for some PM chronotypes – something interesting happens. Our sleep pressure builds steadily as expected, but our circadian rhythm spikes upwards from its morning low, producing an increased urge to sleep that coincides with quite a high need as the day has gone on, which offers up another sleep window.

This window is a perfect opportunity to fit in either a full ninety-minute cycle or a thirty-minute Controlled Recovery Period perfectly in harmony with our body’s urge and need. When I’m addressing an athlete’s schedule, this midday period is used to compensate for fewer cycles at night, whether that’s the night before or in anticipation of the night ahead. When totting up the cycles for the week, getting one in here – either thirty or ninety minutes – counts towards the total for the week.

The Power of the Nap

The power of the nap cannot be ignored. A study by the University of Düsseldorf has shown that even very short naps enhance memory processing,[2] while a NASA study looking at their effects on pilots on long flights reported, ‘Naps can maintain or improve subsequent performance, physiological and subjective alertness, and mood.’[3] One of the authors of that report, Mark Rosekind, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the USA, has said that ‘a twenty-six-minute nap improves performance in pilots by 34 per cent and alertness by 54 per cent’.[4]

Naps are of critical importance to pilots flying long haul – they fit one in while the co-pilot takes over, later reaping the benefits of improved alertness. We’d all like a pilot to be at their best when it’s time to land.

They are a significant personal performance enhancer for athletes too, and they can have the same benefits for anyone. Given the demands on our lives, sleeping at night is often the first thing to suffer, and we have to find ways of managing this. But we also have to find ways of fitting CRPs into our own schedules, as sleeping during the day still isn’t regarded favourably by many employers.

An elite athlete is more likely to enjoy the luxury of capitalizing on a full ninety-minute cycle in this period, as physical recovery is a very real and accepted part of their job. They (usually) don’t have a manager wondering where on earth they’ve disappeared to for ninety minutes.

A ninety-minute cycle has a potential drawback immediately afterwards, in the form of sleep inertia, which is the groggy, disorientated feeling on waking. This is important to bear in mind when scheduling these Controlled Recovery Periods. If an Olympic athlete is competing in the evening, then they will have the time to overcome any potential sleep inertia and enjoy the benefits of this period of sleep; if they’re competing earlier, then we would look at either a thirty-minute nap period or none at all.

The thirty-minute option is likely to be the most practical for the rest of us. While studies have shown that thirty-minute naps can produce sleep inertia, as it is possible to reach deep sleep over this period of time,[5] this is of very little consequence in my experience and won’t be a factor at all if you do it like the athletes I work with.

Caffeine up beforehand – espresso is a good, quick fix – so that it takes effect towards the end of your CRP. Caffeine takes about twenty minutes to affect the body, and it is a useful performance enhancer in controlled doses. Try not to consume your caffeine as a leisurely latte, as you might find the caffeine is already taking effect as you begin your CRP, and be aware of the amount of caffeine you have already consumed. If you are hovering around the 400 milligram daily maximum, go without a caffeine top-up.

Daylight lamps on your desk or getting out into natural daylight will also see you through any inertia very quickly, so that you will enjoy all the benefits of a Controlled Recovery Period, just like those who took the twenty-six-minute NASA naps.

How to Take a Controlled Recovery Period

Branding the mid-afternoon snooze as the ‘power nap’ has allowed the practice to shed some of its bad reputation in the corporate world. The effectiveness of these short restorative sleeps has been acknowledged in many company wellbeing programs, which provide facilities for their staff to take a power nap in the afternoon. These facilities can range from the relatively basic to the space age, with all sorts of whale noises and essential oils piped in. The truth is, you don’t need any of this.

When I was working with Manchester United in the late 90s, the club introduced double training sessions in pre-season for the first time, and I suggested providing facilities for the players in which they could relax and have a CRP between sessions to improve their recovery from the first training session and prepare them better for the second. Both Sir Alex Ferguson and head physiotherapist, Rob Swire, supported the idea, so we introduced what was probably the world’s first ever training-ground recovery room. We allocated a suitable room that could accommodate up to twelve players at a time, put in some single-sleeper loungers and coached the players on how to use it.

It was all very basic – no whale noises or essential oils – but it did the job. It was a key step towards where we are today with sleep recovery, and the players of one of the most successful teams in the club’s history – or any club’s history, for that matter – took full advantage with an open mind to something as radical as daytime sleeping.

The truth is that we can nap anywhere. Most of us will have experienced nodding off in meetings or on a packed train, and if we can do it there, then we can certainly try it in a more controlled environment. Even if you don’t work for the kind of employer that has a wellbeing program, you can find a space somewhere to do it: an unused office or meeting room, a quiet corner in the communal kitchen, the sofa in the staffroom or even in the park or on a bench when the weather permits. It’s not like going to sleep at night, so if you’re unable to find somewhere to lie down comfortably, do it sitting up. I’ve even known of people locking themselves away in the toilet cubicle for an afternoon nap, and pilots do it in their cockpit seat while flying at over 500 mph at 35,000 feet.

You don’t need to worry about people being around you, either. Once you get good at this, they won’t even be aware of what you’re doing. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s just start by finding a spot where you can get yourself comfortable at some point during this afternoon period. If you’re a home worker, don’t use your bed for this, use a sofa or armchair – keep your bed for sleeping in at night or for a full ninety-minute afternoon cycle. Set your phone to ‘do not disturb’ if possible, just so you’re not going to be interrupted by the sound of an incoming notification or message, and set the alarm for, ideally, thirty minutes. If you have less time, set it for whatever you have – shorter naps are of benefit too.

You should then close your eyes and just let go. Easier said than done, you might be thinking. Some people will be able to do this and fall asleep promptly. They might wake up ten or twenty minutes later, or it might be their alarm that wakes them. Others, those who steadfastly claim that they simply ‘can’t nap’, won’t be able to fall asleep. But this is one of the revelatory things about this process for those people: it doesn’t matter.

It does not matter if you don’t actually enter a sleep state. What is important is that you use this period to close your eyes and disconnect from your world for a while. Falling asleep is great, but so is catching that place on the verge of sleep, when you’re not quite awake but not quite asleep either, and so too is that point of daydreaming when you’re not really thinking about anything at all, when your mind is just a great big blank.

There are products that can help with this. There are meditation practices, mindfulness apps and all sorts of other things that you can use to just take yourself away from it all. Through doing this, we’re able to step away from the stresses and strains of our day, which enables us to get a head start on some of the ‘downloading’ that we will do later as part of our pre-sleep routine. With the focus of our conscious mind diffused and its energies spread elsewhere, we’re able to absorb and file away the events of our day so far.

The brain is a powerful tool that can be trained to do all kinds of remarkable things. Through regularly putting ourselves in a position to take advantage of this mid-afternoon slump, even those who maintain that they ‘can’t nap’ will find themselves becoming better at it. When used in conjunction with a shorter-cycle routine at night, when this period of fatigue will be even more pronounced, they might find themselves drifting off to sleep, even if it’s just for a few minutes, which is enough for our brains to begin processing memories. After a nap, take five minutes to become aware of your surroundings, hydrate and get some daylight on you if possible. Your heightened mood and alertness, as well as the dip in your need for sleep, will benefit you throughout the rest of the afternoon – and even into the evening.

The Early-evening Recovery Period

For those unable to capitalize on the midday recovery period, another opportunity presents itself later in the day. If you’ve ever travelled home from work and caught yourself nodding off, or you’ve arrived home in the early evening and drifted off in front of the television for a short while, you’ll already be familiar with this slot.

Sleeping twice in the night is not without precedent. Historian Roger Ekirch presented evidence in his book At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime that we once slept in two distinct chunks, the first after dusk and the second through to dawn after a couple of hours spent awake in the middle of the night. However, this was before artificial lighting opened up the potential of our evenings and the industrial revolution changed our approach to time: segmented sleep seemed like a waste of it to their productivity-driven society.

I am not for a second suggesting we return to this. The night is very much alive for us today, and none of us want to miss a good evening out if we can help it. What I am suggesting is capitalizing on a time in the early evening, around 5–7 p.m. (or a little later for some PM chronotypes), when our need for sleep is high, particularly if we’ve had less than normal the night previously, even if our urge is dipping. This window can be used for a thirty-minute Controlled Recovery Period if the midday window has been missed; however, a ninety-minute cycle is likely to interfere with your nocturnal sleep later.

This window is more practical for many people, particularly those working 9–5 jobs. While they might struggle to fit in a midday CRP due to work commitments, or they simply don’t work in an environment conducive to being able to take a suitable break, this early-evening window can be convenient: they can come home from work (often exhausted), have their CRP and then get more out of their evening.

The early-evening period is steeped in the cliché of an old man with his pipe and slippers nodding off with the newspaper in his lap. Times have changed – and this recovery window is an opportunity to redefine this tired old image. There is a myth surrounding sleep that says our need for it declines as we get older. In fact, while our ability to sleep efficiently declines with age, the amount we need does not.

The more mature CEO of a business who wants to keep going for as long as possible should take note of this. We naturally become more polyphasic in our sleep as we get older, so instead of scheduling meetings and overstimulating to push through these periods, use them. If you’re feeling sleepy in this time slot, take control of it. Find a quiet place, set the alarm on your device for thirty minutes and close your eyes: the improvements to your performance will far outweigh those any cup of coffee would have, and you’ll be adding to your diminishing and increasingly fragmented cycles at night. If you tend to nod off in this period on the sofa at home, take control of this too: take yourself off to a quiet place, set the alarm and have your Controlled Recovery Period so that you get the maximum benefit out of it.

For any of us who miss out on the midday period and instead anticipate using this evening slot to take a CRP, there is still the small matter of the afternoon to get through. This is where some manipulation of the schedule of your day is in order, if your job allows you to, so that you’re not exposing yourself to anything too taxing when you know you’re in a slump. You could try to avoid meetings in the post-lunch period, or at least control the times of any you schedule yourself. If you can manipulate things so that your least demanding tasks are around this period – a bit of filing or photocopying, or putting together the elements of a report you’ve already done the hard work on – then all the better, and if there is any aspect of your job that involves being outside, such as going to the bank or post office, try to make it around here.

Daylight, as always, is our friend when it comes to giving us a boost, and it is the reason why, if you work in an office, you should not spend your entire lunch break eating at your desk. If you do eat at your desk, try to get outside for some daylight and fresh air instead of just ‘working through’. If you can’t manage this, you (or your company) could invest in a daylight lamp to give you a boost at your desk, or you could use a product such as Valkee’s Human Charger, which, to the casual observer, will look like you’re listening to your tunes on your headphones as you work. In fact, it delivers light therapy to your pineal gland through your ears.

Wherever you work, get some light on you in this period. Your productivity is down and you need a break and a boost here to help you through the mid-afternoon slump.

Take a Break

Opening up these two windows of time during the day will give you the confidence to take some of the pressure off your sleep. It will allow you to go to bed later and not worry as much about whether you’re getting enough sleep; if you’re awake in the night, there’s reassurance to be found in knowing that you can schedule a CRP the next day. These periods can’t replace your nocturnal sleep in the long term, which is why the R90 program advises that you get your ideal routine in at least four times in a week, but they can work in harmony with your body’s rhythms to augment your cycles at night, strengthen your recovery and help your mood and productivity remain high.

‘Sleep’ is not just about physical sleep; it is about giving the mind the opportunity to recover throughout a 24-hour process. Naps open up these two windows in the day, but we must also look to tap into even smaller windows more regularly throughout our day if we are to give our minds and our bodies the opportunity to perform at their best.

Using breaks is a vital part of the approach. In sport, the physical necessity is obvious: if we’re putting an athlete through a particularly lung-busting training routine, they’ll need to recover before they attempt the next part of their session. But there is a mental necessity every bit as important, too. We need regular breaks to help consolidate information and because our concentration won’t hold without them. Elite performers are just like the rest of us in this: they get distracted – bored, even. The concentration of any elite athlete will eventually waver if they continue doing a task for too long.

Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, whose research formed the basis of the famous ‘10,000 hour rule’ of deliberate practice required for world-class mastery of a skill, wrote:

Expert performers from many domains engage in practice without rest for only around an hour … Elite musicians and athletes report that the factor that limits their deliberate practice is primarily an inability to sustain the level of concentration that is necessary.[6]

While most of us might not look at what we do in our day-to-day lives as something so grand as ‘deliberate practice’, the lesson still holds. We can’t sustain the levels of concentration we need when we’re working, so eventually, without a break, we’re going to become less efficient. We’re going to become fatigued and frustrated.

Take a break. If you’re able to step away from your work every hour then you should do so, but for many people this isn’t tenable. However, if we look at recovery in ninety minutes as we do with the R90 approach, it becomes a bit more possible. Most of us can find a reason to get away from our desks every ninety minutes in an office, and even if you work on a shop or factory floor or somewhere more restrictive on your time, ninety minutes is going to be easier than every hour.

No time for a break? Then make time. You’re going to be more efficient for having one, with refreshed levels of concentration to bring to bear. It doesn’t have to be a major break. Go and make a cup of tea; go to the toilet (even if you don’t really need it); pop outside for a couple of minutes; get up and talk to a colleague or make a phone call. It doesn’t really matter – the point is that you’re moving away from the environment and mental state you work in to give your mind a little recovery window. If you sit at a desk all day, it will do your body some good to get away from it too.

Start making little adjustments that will mean this is easier for you. No one is going to stop you getting a drink of water, so instead of filling up a two-litre bottle and keeping it on your desk, just have a glass of water that needs refilling more regularly.

During these breaks, we can tap into what we try to do when we nap, which is to disassociate our thoughts from our environment and just tune out for a little while. These ‘mind breaks’ every ninety minutes will improve your performance immediately after taking them, reduce stress levels, and they will accumulate during the course of the day to stop you feeling quite so tired in the afternoon and early evening. They are also contributing to the ‘downloading’ of your day, allowing you to subconsciously absorb and file away what you’ve been doing. Every ninety minutes, along with a Controlled Recovery Period when necessary – they all add up.

With a bit of practice, you’ll be able to take advantage of moments in meetings or conversations in groups in which you’re not heavily involved to just step back and take a little mind break. You’re effectively napping with your eyes open in a room full of people: they have no idea what you are doing.

You could go and talk to a colleague about last night’s football match or what they watched on television, something that isn’t fully demanding of your attention, and do it there. Something comfortable and effort-free to talk about is a nice break for the mind – and you can always drift away in your own head if the person you’re talking to is going on a bit.

You can use your headphones at your desk to listen to a meditation app or something to just help you switch off for a minute or two. I carry around with me a polished stone with some very strong associations for me; when I need to switch off in this way, I can reach into my pocket, hold it in my hand and just drift away for a while, giving my mind the opportunity to recover. You might even be talking to me while I’m doing it – you just won’t have a clue.

Set the timer on your phone for every ninety minutes so you don’t forget to take a break. This will start to give you a sense of what ninety minutes feels like, and before long you won’t need the timer any more – you’ll naturally feel that it’s time to get away from what you’re doing for a while.

You’ll soon see that your whole day – not just your night – can be broken up into cycles of ninety minutes. You can use these to get some harmony between your periods of activity and recovery. With your cycles at night, your pre- and post-sleep routines, your Controlled Recovery Periods and these breaks, your day no longer looks like one long stretch of go, go, go before you crash into bed for maybe eight hours, probably less, and do it all again.

You can start to get creative with these breaks – using them to benefit other elements of the Key Sleep Recovery Indicators. Every ninety minutes, you could have a break from your technology. Like the breaks from it you take to benefit your pre- and post-sleep routines, make them a reward for your body and mind. Start with just five minutes, but try to work up to twenty, so that in every ninety minutes, you are only spending seventy connected to email, social media, alerts and messages. If the urge comes to you to send a message, write it down instead and send it later. You aren’t going to lose friends or status at work because you take twenty minutes to reply to emails at certain times of day, and the confidence you gain from your ability to take these breaks is all good training for when it is time for you to pare back your tech use during your pre-sleep routine later.

If You Don’t Snooze, You’ll Lose

Naps have had a bad press, with their practitioners often labelled as lazy or work-shy, and even the Spanish are looking at phasing their siesta out. Many companies have made strides in their wellbeing programs, but too many are still stuck in the dark ages when it comes to attitudes towards mental and physical recovery, and this has to stop. There is an awful phrase – ‘you snooze, you lose’ – beloved of a certain type of opportunity-grabbing business person, but you’ll be stuck with these kind of dinosaurs in the queue marked ‘Burn Out’ if you don’t adopt these ideas. When it comes to recovery, if you don’t snooze, you will lose eventually.

In the UK, the Department for Transport estimates that a quarter of accidents on major roads are sleep-related,[7] while a US report has highlighted the correlation between time of day and traffic accidents where sleep has been a factor.[8] No surprises to learn that they’re most likely to occur between 2 and 6 a.m. and in the mid-afternoon slump between 2 and 4 p.m. – even when no sleep deprivation has occurred.

Tiredness kills – and it kills performance too. We use Controlled Recovery Periods in elite sport, where the athletes are anything but ‘lazy’ or ‘work-shy’, and, as K. Anders Ericsson points out, elite performers in other fields, such as famous writers and musicians, have an ‘increased tendency to take recuperative naps’.[9]

In other words, if you want to learn from the elite, it’s time to learn to take a break and recover. It is time for corporations to redefine their culture and take these periods seriously: minimize meetings during the post-lunch slump, and make it a legitimate opportunity for staff to get away from their work; promote regular breaks; provide the facilities and encouragement for staff to take a Controlled Recovery Period. Take a leaf out of the book of tech giants like Google, whose flexible working hours and culture allow them to talk so boldly of their working philosophy: ‘To create the happiest, most productive workforce in the world.’

Start taking these breaks seriously, because companies will enjoy the benefits of increased productivity and happiness in the long term – and so will you.

ACTIVITY AND RECOVERY HARMONY: SEVEN STEPS TO SLEEP SMARTER

1. A Controlled Recovery Period during the midday window (1–3 p.m.) is the perfect way to supplement your nocturnal cycles in harmony with your circadian rhythms.

2. The early evening (5–7 p.m.) is the next best opportunity, as the need is high – but limit this one to thirty minutes maximum so it won’t affect your sleep at night.

3. Can’t sleep in the day? It doesn’t matter – just spend thirty minutes switching off and disconnecting from the world.

4. Take breaks at least every ninety minutes to refresh your mind and your concentration levels. Avoid technology during these windows, so that you’re not spending a whole ninety minutes connected.

5. Stop any preconceived notions of daytime sleepers being ‘lazy’ in whichever culture you work in, and provide a culture where CRPs and breaks are accepted – if you don’t snooze, you’ll lose.

6. Use meditation apps, mindfulness or hold an item of personal value to help you slip away from your immediate environment.

7. If you really can’t get away, manipulate your day so that you’re not caught doing anything too taxing in the mid-afternoon slump.

Six

The Sleep Kit

Reinventing the Bed

A young and ambitious couple have just bought a flat together. After years spent sleeping on whatever came with their furnished rented accommodation, they are buying a double bed and mattress for the first time.

They have done some research, looking up the ‘top tips’ on various websites. They know that they need to spend as much money as they can on the mattress because these top tips have told them so; it’s an investment because a good one should last ten years. Memory foam, pocket sprung, spend more on the mattress than the frame – they feel they know the basics, and they know their budget.

They undo it all immediately by buying a double bed frame they like the look of online, blowing half their budget in the process. But you can’t just order a mattress online, can you? That’s not what the top tips suggest. You need to try it out. They enter the bed shop with the express intention of really lying on some mattresses for a whole five or ten minutes to get the feel for one.

The salesperson greets them, immediately checking out the expensive watch, the tailored jacket, the designer handbag, and thinks to himself, Let’s start these guys out on a £2,000 mattress.

He shows them a pocket-sprung orthopaedic mattress, top of the line – a really firm investment. ‘It will do wonders for your posture,’ says the salesperson, smiling. It’s got all sorts of go-faster stripes and thousands of springs, but he can see a look of discomfort on their faces when he tells them the price, so he takes them down to the £1,500 option, and then the £1,000 option.

The couple bounce around on the beds, lie on their backs on them for a couple of minutes, assume what they imagine to be their sleeping position, using the pillows provided. ‘Go on, get right in and give it a try,’ says the salesperson. They get in, laughing, and close their eyes in the middle of the brightly lit shop.

The fun eventually comes to an end, however, and now it’s time to make a decision.

‘Which one felt the most comfortable to you?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe the second one? It was nice and firm, but not too firm.’

The second option is £500 over their budget, but it’s the middle option and they feel reassured by the fact that it has more springs than the cheapest. That’s got to count for something, they think. They turn to the salesperson and say together, ‘We’ll take this one.’

‘Excellent choice,’ says the salesperson, beaming.

The couple walk out of the shop having spent £500 more than they intended to. They have their double mattress, and they’re grateful that they won’t have to do that again for another ten years.

But did they make the right decision?

The Mattress-buying Blind Side

Can you think of another purchase involving such a significant amount of money that you would walk into so blind? Would you buy a car armed with nothing but some ‘top tips’ from a newspaper puff piece – or from the retailer itself? You’re about to spend a third of your life on this thing.

Yet millions of people do exactly the same every year. They walk blindly into a shop, throw themselves at the mercies of the salespeople, and more often than not leave with something that will do the job but is unlikely to change their lives. They won’t even know if they’ve got the right or wrong one because they don’t know what the right or wrong one is.

We buy beds and mattresses infrequently – a good one should last us ten years, we’re told – so few of us are armed with much up-to-date, reliable information. Why would we be? Beds are about style, and a mattress is just something most of us take for granted.

When it comes to buying a new one, we will do a bit of cursory research online – and there is a lot of contradictory advice online – the bulk of which says ‘You need a good mattress’ without ever getting to the crux of what that actually means, and gives people all sorts of ideas about how much they should be spending and how long it should last.

The bed retailers and manufacturers, meanwhile, are well aware of this. And I should know – I have worked in the industry, and indeed continue to work in it today, as I produce mattresses and bedding as well as sleep kits for athletes.

The first thing to realize about the bedding industry is that there is little in the way of regulation. I could manufacture a mattress with the tensile strength of the springs ratcheted so high an elephant could sleep on it, put some high-density foam pads on top to make it firmer still and cover it in an attractive, faux-medical fabric with a label saying ‘orthopaedic’ on it, and this could go out on a shop floor and no one could stop me. Am I an osteopath or a doctor? Have I put the mattress through a series of tests to determine its orthopaedic properties? All I’ve done is make the hardest mattress I possibly can, and there is nothing to stop me making the claim that it has beneficial qualities.

I might then make sure it has 2,000 springs in it, because my competitor has a 1,500-spring mattress and 2,000 sounds better than 1,500. It becomes like an arms race, with manufacturers making smaller springs so they can fit more in. You’re not comparing apples with apples here, but few of us ask these questions. And what if you only really need fifty springs anyway? Unless we have something to gauge a number against, what use is it? The young couple didn’t stop to interrogate the data they were being provided with; they simply made that leap to assume more is better. They also didn’t take notice of the small print. The 2,000 springs is likely to be the amount in the king-sized mattress, with fewer springs as you go down in size. Retailers won’t always make this clear.

Things have improved in sport, but one piece of advice still applies: do not send athletes into these shops to buy their mattresses. It would be like sending a Premier League footballer into a discount sportswear store to buy his football boots. They need to be armed with the right knowledge or I go with them – or I could simply make the product for them.

Gary Pallister was the player with the back problem I helped at Manchester United when I first got involved with the club. He was a seasoned defender, but the years of playing top-flight football had taken their toll. He suffered from a lot of lower-back strains and pain, but surgery on a spinal injury even in today’s game would be a very last resort.

Instead, they were wrapping him in cotton wool. Dave Fevre, the head physiotherapist at the club, was treating Gary for a good length of time every day, and the player’s training was reduced to a bare minimum. They were even considering stripping out seats on the team coach to instal a lumbar-supporting chair-bed.

When I came in, we looked at what he was doing away from the club in terms of ‘dehabilitating rather than rehabilitating’ the condition, to use Dave’s words. Among other things, Gary’s mattress was not good for his posture and was aggravating his condition. Shortly after we changed it, Dave started to see that Gary needed less treatment. He wasn’t cured, not by any stretch of the imagination, but he was no longer aggravating it, and the club didn’t have to completely remodel the coach.

If an elite sportsman or woman goes into a shop, and the salesperson recognizes who they are, they’ll be taken to the realm beyond the young couple’s at the start of this chapter, and straight to the very top end, for the most expensive mattresses of all. Thousands and thousands of pounds can be spent on a mattress, but it won’t be spent in the quest to find the right one. It will be because the salesperson wants to sell them the most expensive one, with all of the latest marketing jargon.

One Size Fits All? (Again)

Earlier in the book, we discussed the eight-hours-of-sleep-per-night approach and the fallacy of applying a one-size-fits-all mentality to sleep. The same logic that applies to the amount of time you spend sleeping extends to the surface you spend that time on.

LeBron James is an American professional basketball player. He’s six-foot-eight tall (over 2 metres), very well built and weighs the best part of 250 pounds (113 kg). There is no logic in thinking that the best mattress for him would be the same as for British four-time Olympic gold medallist cyclist Laura Trott, who stands at around five foot four (163 cm) and weighs in at around 115 pounds (52 kg).

There is no acknowledgement of body profiles in the mattress industry. No salesperson will look you up and down and point you to your relevant ‘size’. Some brands will offer a variety of mattresses of differing firmness, but you could walk out of the shop with any one of them, whether or not they’re the right one. Some of the new fashionable brands, with clever marketing strategies behind them, only make one mattress. One mattress – for everyone, any shape or weight. How does that work?

This doesn’t happen when you buy footwear or an item of clothing. You buy the size that fits. So why should a mattress be any different? Similarly to the Small, Medium and Large sizes in clothing, there are three body types, with the extra-smalls and larges and XXs at the extremes:

Ectomorph is a lean build, with narrow hips and pelvis and long arms and legs. They typically have less fat and muscle mass than the other profiles. Sir Bradley Wiggins and Mo Farah are good examples of this body profile – as are many of the professional touring cyclists. For a female example, take your pick from models Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne, or actress Joanna Lumley.

Mesomorph is a medium body shape and build, with thick bones and muscles, and a well-defined chest and shoulders broader than the hips. Many professional athletes fit this body profile, with tennis players Rafa Nadal or Björn Borg good male examples, and British heptathlete Jessica Ennis for a female.

Endomorph is a larger build, with wide shoulders and broader hips. Think comedians Dawn French and Miranda Hart or the singer Adele for the girls, and the likes of Hollywood actors Russell Crowe and Seth Rogen, and boxers Anthony Joshua and Muhammad Ali for the boys.

Naturally, there is crossover – it’s a sliding scale, with some people a blend of Meso and Ecto and others on the Endo–Meso border. You can be tall or short, carrying weight or underweight, and still fit your profile. The characteristics of men and women differ too.

It makes clear sense that even two people of the same height but of different body profiles are going to have different requirements in a sleeping surface. Their mattresses are going to need to give to different degrees to provide the requisite level of comfort. Partners complicate matters too, and where there is a difference in body profile, you go with the dominant one (so a Meso and Endo couple would go with the Endo; an Ecto and Meso with the Meso).

But before you rush off to check your body profile, there’s a far easier, foolproof method to guarantee you’re buying the right mattress. And it all starts with making sure you are sleeping in the correct position.

How to Sleep

So far we’ve looked at the preparation before and after sleep, organizing your time in bed according to your sleep cycles and how to compensate for late nights. We’ve looked at what to do around your sleep – but we’ve been taking it for granted that, once you get into bed at night, you know how to sleep.

Just like the body profiles, there are three basic sleeping positions, and we’re all familiar with them: front, back or side. Again, these aren’t three mutually exclusive positions – you can manoeuvre your limbs into all sorts of contortionist arrangements while you sleep to blur the lines, and a mountaineer at high altitude might wonder where ‘hanging in a bag by a sheer drop’ features on the list. But for those of us getting into a bed at night, these are the three main positions.

Sleeping on our back is a popular option, with the postural benefit of keeping the back and neck aligned (provided you aren’t sleeping on a pillow that interferes with this), but it makes us relax our throat and cause a narrowing of the airways. The British Snoring & Sleep Apnoea Association says: ‘Individuals who sleep in the supine position (on the back) are more likely to snore or have increased apnoea than those who sleep in the lateral position (on the side).’ These are factors that are going to interfere with our sleep: they can take us out of a sleep cycle altogether or doom us to a night of light sleep. And they can do the same to our partners if we have them, not to mention cause resentment and put strains on a relationship. Lying on our back also leaves us feeling exposed and keeps our brain in a state of alert.

Sleeping on our front might help with snoring, but it comes with plenty of its own problems. Stomach-sleepers twist their spine into an unnatural position and, unless they’re sleeping face-down into their pillow, which can become an aggravating factor in itself, their neck is being twisted too. Lower-back pain, neck ache and all sorts of postural problems can stem from sleeping on your front. Furthermore, the postural problems caused by sitting in front of a computer all day and looking down at our smartphones and hand-held devices can be exacerbated, which all adds up to neck and spine aggravation.

Sleeping on your side is the only sleeping position I recommend – but it might not be the side you currently sleep on. When the athletes I coach go to bed at night, they get into the foetal position on their non-dominant side, because this is the less used and therefore less sensitive side. In other words, if you’re right-handed you sleep on your left side, and vice versa. If you’re genuinely ambidextrous, think about which side you would instinctively use to protect yourself.

The foetal position should involve a gentle bend at the knees and your arms out in front of you, gently folded. You should have a smooth, straight postural line through the neck, spine and bottom. You want to remain in this position for as long as possible during the night. (You will, of course, move during the hours of sleep, but your mattress should allow you to adopt this position for longer periods.)

Your spine and neck are in a natural position where you won’t be causing any postural problems. Your chances of snoring or sleep apnoea are reduced. Your brain likes this position because it feels that your body is secure – your dominant arm and leg are protecting your heart and other organs, and your genitals.

When I spent some time travelling around Europe, I would occasionally sleep overnight in a train station, having missed the last train that evening and with nowhere else to go. I would lie down on the ground – a particularly firm mattress – with my backpack for a pillow and my valuables tucked away in my inside jacket pocket, covered by my dominant arm. If anyone were to try to pickpocket me, I would be able to defend myself with my strongest side. This kind of security, which allows us to fall asleep in an exposed and potentially problematic environment, is welcome even in the safety of our own home, so that our brain feels secure enough to put our body into the almost paralysed state of REM and deep sleep.

I’ve read various so-called psychological studies pontificating on what your sleeping position says about your personality, but the only thing that adopting my recommended sleeping position says about you is that you are taking your mental and physical recovery seriously.

The Mattress Check-up

You can now carry out the mattress check-up, which is as effective with your existing mattress as it is when you are trying out a new one. This is precisely what our young couple at the start of the chapter should have been doing in the bed shop.

A partner or friend is useful to have around to do the check-up, but you could use the camera on your phone. At home, stand with a good, upright posture and your arms gently folded. Bend your knees – effectively do a shallow squat – into a comfortable and balanced position. This is your standing foetal position.

Adopt this position on the floor, lying on your non-dominant side, and hold this posture for a little while. Your partner or friend will acknowledge the gap between your head and the floor, or you can take a selfie on your camera to see it, and you’ll certainly feel it in your neck (pillows would traditionally fill this gap). As you lie there, with your posture aligned and the pressure building on your shoulder and hip on the unforgiving surface, you’ll feel the urge to move and adjust, which commonly happens to us during sleep – particularly on surfaces that are too firm – or the surface will simply aggravate sensitive muscles and joints. Now, you could sleep here on the floor – you’d probably end up lying on your front – but you are sacrificing the quality of recovery.

You should then adopt this position on the mattress you’re checking. If it’s your mattress at home, strip the bed, including the pillows, so it’s just the bare mattress; in a bed shop, you’ll often be testing on a bare mattress, but go ahead and pull the sheets back if not. Once you’re settled in position, again get a friend or partner – or take a selfie – to judge the gap between your head and the surface.

If there is a clear gap of six centimetres – about the width of two hands flat on top of one another – or more between your head and the mattress when your head, neck and vertebrae are in alignment, with your head needing to drop towards the surface, as it did on the floor, then the mattress is too firm. It will offer you little in the way of comfort and postural alignment. If your hip is dropping into the mattress and out of alignment, and your head is being raised up by the mattress, then it is too soft. The correctly profiled surface should easily accept your body shape and weight, distributing your weight evenly and giving you a straight postural line, like the diagram below.

If you are trying a mattress in a bed shop and it is not doing this for you, move along. No matter what it is made of or what it cost, if your mattress at home isn’t doing this, it’s time to think about replacing it. But don’t despair if you can’t afford to – there are less expensive measures that can be taken to compensate for it.

The right mattress topper will sit on top and provide an extension to your mattress that will be able to better provide the body profile requirements you need when you sleep. A body comforter, which is essentially a mattress-sized body pillow, can be added to improve the comfort and protect sensitive muscles and joints. You could use a spare duvet to achieve similar results, with your bed sheet on top.

However, many of us are already compensating for the wrong mattress every night with the use of something that, as the diagram suggests, we shouldn’t really need.

Pillow Talk

If you go shoe shopping, you find the footwear you like and ask for it in your correct size. If the shop doesn’t have it, you’re left with a choice. You can’t really contemplate going smaller, because you’ll be in pain when you walk, but you can go a size bigger if you’re willing to add inner soles.

A pillow is an inner sole for a mattress that does not fit. We use them to fill that gap between the head and the surface when the mattress is too firm; and when the mattress is too soft, they push our head even further out of alignment and can cause postural problems. If you are sleeping on two or even more pillows, then you’ve either got a very firm mattress or you’re storing up trouble for yourself.

You can buy memory-foam pillows, feather pillows, value-range polyester pillows, anti-snoring pillows, and even that label beloved of the bed industry, orthopaedic pillows. Some come in wonderfully exotic fabrics and fillings (Siberian goose down!), others in the most basic of man-made fibres (but they all look pretty much the same with a pillow case on them). It doesn’t matter what their manufacturers claim of them or how much they cost, they’re all doing the same job – compensating for your mattress.

If we have the right sleeping surface, a pillow is on the verge of being entirely superfluous. But they’re a difficult habit to kick. We like pillows – we’re used to them. We like to hold on to them in the night. We like to rearrange them and fluff them up before we get into bed, and we love to wrestle with them, pound them into submission when we’re struggling to sleep. So a single shallow pillow for comfort will do you just fine, which on the correctly profiled mattress will compress to fit. And better a bargain-basement polyester pillow that fits the profile than an expensive ‘orthopaedic’ neck brace of a pillow that is going to cause you problems.

Super Size Me

The young couple made many mistakes when they chose a mattress, but they made perhaps their biggest before they even set foot in the shop – when they decided to buy a double bed.

For most of us as children, our first beds are a standard single bed, which is three-foot-wide (90cm) by six-foot-three to six-foot-six (190–200cm). We might carry on in a single throughout adolescence and early adulthood, but usually when we leave home we upgrade to a double bed.

A double bed is a four-foot-six- or four-foot-seven-wide (135–140cm) bed. You don’t have to be a mathematician to work out that there’s nothing ‘double’ about it. If you’ve spent most of your life up to a certain age with a single bed’s worth of space, what effect is an extra person but only around 50 per cent more space going to have? Do you think it’s likely to maintain the quality of your sleep?

Despite what their labelling claims, bed retailers only sell one genuine double bed. It’s called a super king – so branded to make it sound a suitably decadent purchase – and it measures in at six feet wide (180cm), exactly double the width of a single bed. If you’re serious about sleep, serious about your relationship and you have the room for it, this is the minimum-sized mattress you should be considering. A super king is two single-sized sleeping spaces side by side; a ‘double’ is a bed for one person.

If you do have space for a super king but it means your bedside cabinets would have to go, set them free. This is more important. If your bed frame is the problem and you can’t afford to replace it, set that free too and put the new mattress on the floor. The young couple spent 50 per cent of their original budget on a frame. Most sources will recommend spending more on the mattress than the frame, but you could just as easily spend 100 per cent on the mattress. I don’t even make bed frames; I only produce sleeping surfaces. The frame is a largely decorative choice, to make the bedroom look good. As long as it’s a firm and level surface for the mattress to rest on, it doesn’t matter what it is. You could use wooden pallets, which are a fashionable, industrial-chic and low-cost choice, or the floor. Many athletes actually prefer sleeping in their sleep kit on the floor, as it’s cooler there (heat rises).

The less room we have in bed, the more we’re likely to disturb a partner’s sleep. A stray leg or arm touching you in the night, a partner turning over and fussing with their pillow right next to you, a partner breathing on you up close – they can pull you out of a cycle and stop you getting down to the deep sleep your mind and body deserve.

Building a Sleep Kit

In 2009, Shane Sutton, the head coach of British Cycling at the time, put me in touch with Matt Parker, the head of marginal gains. The academic and clinical expertise on sleep they had looked into had proven too intrusive and impractical to use, so I worked very closely with Matt, drawing upon the techniques and interventions I’d established over the years, to see where recovery gains could be unlocked. I then presented our redefined approach to mental and physical recovery to Sir Dave Brailsford and his extensive team of the best coaches and sports science professionals from across the globe. The reaction was simply: ‘This could really make a difference.’

It was an exciting time to get involved in cycling. Sky’s significant investment in British Cycling – the country’s governing body – allowed them to launch a professional team, signing up some of the best riders, including Sir Bradley Wiggins, with the ambition of putting a British rider on the top of the podium at the Tour de France.

To this end, the team were addressing everything from the obvious things like the bikes, fitness and tactics to the less overt such as psychology, avoiding viruses – there’s no point turning up to the gruelling Tour de France with a chesty cough – and, of course, sleep. All as part of their ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ approach, in which they sought to take every individual component involved in the sport and better it, even by just 1 per cent, so that when it all came together the improvement could be significant.

I laid out the Key Sleep Recovery Indicators, and showed not just the riders but every member of staff the importance of sleeping in cycles, using recovery breaks and how to maintain their environment at home, educating them in the R90 program. But I knew that I could have more of an impact.

The key to the approach in other fields was consistency. The riders were on the same nutritional plan all the time, riding the same bike and wearing the same gear – but they were sleeping in a different hotel room, on a different bed, every night when they were riding on a tour event. So I designed and produced the R90 sleep kit for the riders to enable them to sleep on the same custom-designed surface every night.

The sleep kit is basically a portable single-size bed. It is composed of two or three layers, depending on the rider, of visco-elastic foams – essentially two or three mattress toppers – with a body comforter on top. This is wrapped in a removable machine-washable outer cover, combined with a shallow pillow, combination duvet and bed linen. All of this is housed within a specially designed backpack, so it can be folded in half, zipped up and carried out in a matter of seconds. When it needs using again, simply carry it into the room, unzip it and put it wherever you need it – either on the bed base (we’d move the existing mattress out of the way) or straight on to the floor. It’s ready to use.

For the riders, it was a revelation. It meant that they could have their sleep kits at home, become used to sleeping on them in the way I’d shown them, and then we would load up the Sky bus with everyone’s kit. So when the riders retired to their rooms after a hard day in the saddle, they would know what was waiting for them: the support staff had already been in and laid down their sleep kits. It’s familiar to them, because they’ve been sleeping on it for weeks. When they leave in the morning, the staff will be back in to zip them up and take them out – and the riders know that they’ll be sleeping on exactly the same surface the following night. There would be some strange looks from the other teams as Sky arrived at each hotel and started bringing in a kit for every rider. It wasn’t just for the riders, either – the staff on the team bus would sleep on their own kits too. It was a top-down approach, looking for the marginal gains in everyone’s role.

On his Tour de France winning campaign in 2012 Bradley Wiggins’s mattress was basically a couple of pieces of foam. At the 2012 London Olympics, Sir Chris Hoy would ignore the bed and sleep on the floor of his five-star-hotel room on his own sleep kit, correctly profiled for his very different body shape, of course. When he travelled to the Olympic Village in Stratford, London, to compete, winning two gold medals in the process, he did so in a helicopter with his sleep kit loaded in there with him.

These athletes, just like their teammates, were putting their bodies on the line, day after day, and required the very best in terms of mental and physical recovery – and if they didn’t need a heavy multi-thousand spring mattress like our young couple bought, why would you?

Building Your Sleep Kit

While Team Sky, at the very pinnacle of their sport, are able to buy the materials to fit a bespoke product for each person to an exact measurement, they aren’t the only people I provide sleep kits for. I also work with athletes who don’t have any lottery funding and live within more modest means: sixteen- to eighteen-year-old BMX riders with an eye on the Olympics in 2020, whose only source of funding is their parents; keen amateur cyclists who want the best in recovery at an enthusiast’s, not a professional’s, price point. It has to be affordable for these people too.

If we follow the principles that guide the professional athletes, we can create our own bespoke sleep kit. We won’t be carrying it around the world, of course – it will be a domestic version, ideally a super king, with components sourced from wherever we choose, according to budget, to give us the very best chance of making the most of our nocturnal cycles.

Piece by Piece

Some retailers claim you should change your mattress every seven years; some manufacturers claim theirs will last you ten years. This is the kind of logic that sees our young couple spending £1,500 on a mattress thinking that’s only £150 a year. But I would rather you spent £150 every year, or £300 every couple of years, on your sleeping surface for ten years than spend it in one go. When I was sales and marketing director of the Slumberland Group and chairman of the UK Sleep Council, I was part of an industry initiative to encourage sleepers to change their beds more often. The average lifespan was more like twenty-plus years, so manufacturers and retailers got together to promote a change at ten years.

(Even today, however, the message is unclear, because if we are asked to change our beds every seven to ten years, why do we have ten-year or lifetime guarantees? It’s all about reassuring you that spending everything you can afford is what mattress buying is all about.)

Think about what you get up to on your mattress. You have sex on it, sweat all over it during the hot summer months. You might have the odd takeaway on it when you’re enjoying a duvet day or eat breakfast in bed at the weekend; if you have children they might jump in and cause all sorts of mayhem and mess. Some people even let their pets on their bed. With all those bodily fluids, hair and dead skin cells only a sheet’s width away from it, why would you want to hold on to a mattress for ten years? To get sentimental about the stains?

It’s not just the superficial damage. Mattresses degrade over time. The box-fresh springy surface you invested in will inevitably head south with age. The properties will deteriorate after around eight hours per night of your (and your partner’s, if you have one) body weight on top of them. Dust mites, which we’ll come to shortly, are increasingly likely to have set up home.

Instead of this every-ten-years approach, you could build your sleep kit piece by piece. Start with your main core surface. This could be your existing mattress or you could buy one that better fits your (and your partner’s) profile, which might only cost two or three hundred pounds, and add layers to that (5–8cm deep is fine for extra layers), building it up. If your existing mattress isn’t correctly profiled, these layers will improve it at a fraction of the cost of replacing the mattress. If you have a well-profiled mattress, another layer could improve upon it still, and offer you even better comfort.

Add a body comforter to go on top of it. The sleep kits I make have a mattress cover that can be removed and washed, so you can get rid of any unwanted stains, unlike the stitched-up permanent covers of most commercially available products. Add this feature, or at least a mattress protector, to your own kit. You have the potential to build your own, one-off, bespoke sleeping surface, sourcing the elements from wherever you choose so long as they fit your profile.

If you build it incrementally, you will feel less precious about replacing sections of it in a few years rather than every ten because it hasn’t cost you £1,500. The stains and natural degrading of materials we talked about earlier aren’t as important, because they are simply affecting the layers on top which will be replaced more regularly.

I send portable sleep kits and foam mattress toppers all over the world for events. The high-grade visco-elastics I use can be rolled up and packed so that shipping costs are kept down and, once the athlete has used it, they might well decide not to bring it home with them afterwards. It’s not quite a disposable item, but compared to a £1,500 slab, it certainly feels more so. The athlete might give it to charity or to a local academy if it isn’t coming home with them, or it can travel on with them.

Bedding

Your sleep kit covers should ideally be hypoallergenic; in fact, all your bedding should, whether you suffer from allergies or not.

Dust mites live in carpets, clothing and bedding; they love humid environments and feast on your dead skin scales. It isn’t the mites themselves that trigger allergic reactions, it’s their droppings. In the wrong kind of environment, you could be lying down to sleep in a cloud of their faecal particles.

People in sport can tend towards mouth-breathing, particularly when they’re competing and they’re trying to suck in as much oxygen as possible. Allergens can affect breathing during the night, making it difficult to breathe through the nose, resulting in the mouth-breathing complications – snoring, sleep apnoea, dry mouth – that can potentially pull someone out of a sleep cycle. If you are sleeping in hypoallergenic bedding – mattress, mattress cover, sheets, duvet, duvet cover, pillow and pillow case – it’s another marginal gain.

The bedding in your sleep kit also needs to be breathable so that you don’t experience any unwelcome changes in temperature. We need to be cool under the covers, and if it gets too stuffy and warm under there it will interfere with our sleep. The bedding I use is designed with nanotechnology and uses microfibres a fraction of the diameter of a human hair, the pillow is designed to keep your head cool through using this material, and the duvets are lightweight and breathable, while providing the requisite tog rating (level of thermal insulation). The combi duvet in the portable sleep kit for athletes is, just like those you can buy in the shops, two duvets joined together that can be used like that to give, for example, a tog rating of 13.5 for winter conditions, or separated and used individually, with a 4.5 tog rating for the summer and a 9.0 tog for the spring and autumn months. When it’s particularly warm, just use the duvet cover on its own. This gives you four options to control your body temperature, instead of just the one duvet year round. Not all hotel temperatures are the same, and if a rider comes down and says it’s a bit warm in his room, we can switch the duvet around to compensate.

The bed linen is all white, which is clean and neutral. The duvet is lightweight enough to be machine washable, which means that it will perform more efficiently. Take this approach to your home kit, as there’s no excuse for the kind of dirty, stained duvets that many people own which have degraded and lost their tog rating because they have never been taken to the dry cleaner’s or replaced.

Cleanliness, in fact, is of major benefit when it comes to bedding. It took me some time to work up the courage to share one of my ideas for the portable sleep kits with Matt Parker and the coaches at British Cycling: ensuring that the riders had fresh bed linen every single night.

There’s nothing particularly scientific behind the idea. I just know that, when I’ve got fresh linen on my bed, I look forward to getting into it. It’s clean, it’s cool – it’s an incredibly welcoming environment, and it’s one I climb into and immediately feel relaxed in. It’s a psychological thing – I can just switch off and drift away immediately in it, enjoying a refreshing night’s sleep. So why not every night? Thankfully, Matt got it straight away – even if it did mean commandeering the washing machines on the team bus, which were used to wash the riders’ cycling kits.

The bedding had to be quick-drying, which would rule out Egyptian cotton, but because ours was made from hypoallergenic microfibres, it wasn’t a problem. It would wash in low temperatures and dry in minutes, and the riders at the end of a long day in the mountains would have their fresh bed linen almost every night. It’s the little things, sometimes.

This is a very easy gain to make in your own life. Stripping the bed, washing the linen and re-making the bed every day is obviously not an appealing prospect for anyone, but how often do you wash your sheets? If it’s every two weeks, why not try taking it down to every week? Simply double up on what you already do and you’ll enjoy the benefits. You’ll get to enjoy the fresh bedding just that little bit more often, and your bed will become a more consistently inviting place. Changing bed linen is also a great pre-sleep routine.

As the R90 sleep kit is composed of man-made materials, it might leave the more environmentally minded reader a little uncomfortable when taking this approach to their home kit. The simple fact is that, in sport, we’re interested in gold medals and podium finishes first, and the environment second. That’s not to say that we’re not interested in the environment away from the competitive arena – I take all sorts of measures to reduce my imprint on the environment, and the future for sleep-science technology is likely to involve redefining inflatable mattresses and layers, and recovery suits that only require a sheet to control our body temperature, with the fate of our vulnerable planet very much in mind.

For now, man-made materials are simply better. Nanotechnology can make the fibres a fraction of the size of any naturally occurring product, so breathability and speed to dry can’t be beaten. If you’re uncomfortable about this, or you simply can’t do without your Egyptian cotton, then go for a thread count of around 300 in your own sleep kit, which will offer you the best natural breathability. And look at changing your pillows and duvets more regularly if you haven’t gone for the hypoallergenic options. Just like the mattress, an inexpensive pillow correctly profiled and regularly replaced is better than an expensive wrong one you plan on getting several years out of.

Turning In

It’s important to be realistic about what a product in isolation is going to do for you. But following these guidelines to build your own home sleep kit alongside the rest of the R90 program, when you are ticking all the right boxes around your sleep, will revolutionize your recovery.

The effect the portable sleep kits had on the Team Sky riders on the grand tours was quite dramatic. Whereas before you would catch the riders milling around, putting off going to bed – maybe having a massage or talking tactics – instead they would get everything sorted that they needed to and head straight to their rooms.

They had the confidence to know that, after 200 kilometres in the mountains and their bodies spent, they could go upstairs, climb into their sleep kit in the foetal position, breathe softly through their nose and drift away into their cycles of sleep.

If you get your own home sleep kit right you can know this confidence too. No more walking into this process blind, like the young couple at the start of the chapter. No more tossing and turning to get yourself comfortable. No more shifting on to your front, your back and then your side.

You will know with absolute certainty that you can just get into bed in the foetal position on your non-dominant side, close your eyes and breathe through your nose and then … just drift away.

THE SLEEP KIT: SEVEN STEPS TO SLEEP SMARTER

1. Learn to sleep in the foetal position, on your non-dominant side (left-handed people sleep on their right; right-handers on their left).

2. Do the mattress check-up and know what your correctly profiled surface feels like. Do the same for your sleeping partner.

3. Take an incremental approach: spend £500 twice over seven years on your sleeping surface rather than £1,000 in one go. Think about layers that can be washed and replaced regularly.

4. Use hypoallergenic and breathable bedding, whether you have allergies or not, to keep out potential impediments to sleep and regulate your temperature.

5. Size matters – buy as big as you can. A super king mattress is the minimum size a couple should contemplate (space permitting); a ‘double’ bed is a bed for one person.

6. Don’t buy blind! Engage with the salesperson’s knowledge to help define what is available, but use what you have learnt in this chapter when it comes to making the final choice.

7. Remember the mattress-to-bed-frame ratio of importance: the mattress can be as much as 100 per cent of your budget because the bed frame is effectively a decorative item.

Seven

Recovery Room

The Sleeping Environment

Roy Race is inarguably the most famous fictitious football player ever to play the game (in a comic strip). So when Melchester Rovers ask me to come in and talk to the squad about sleep, and Roy then asks me to come to his home and have a look at his sleeping environment there, I am happy to help. Who could say no to Roy of the Rovers?

Roy’s is a not untypical footballer’s mansion: enough security and CCTV to make Fort Knox blush, the sports car on the drive, the vast entranceway and many rooms stocked by interior designers with bespoke furniture and investment art, the latest flat-screen televisions and audio equipment in every room, and futuristic gadgets everywhere. It might be easy for the casual observer to pass judgement, but my view is that the top professional footballers earn a lot of money and have to deal with a lot of intrusion and pressure, so why shouldn’t they enjoy it?

I cut straight to the chase and ask Roy to show me his bedroom. Footballers talk about the sanctity of the dressing room, so what does that make the bedroom? The people who allow me in are effectively asking me to judge the environment in which they spend their most vulnerable time (asleep) and usually their most intimate time (with their partners).

The cleaner has obviously been in. No one wants to make a bad impression – with, say, underwear on the floor and the bed unmade – so I never see the environment exactly as it is day to day, but I see more than enough to make an assessment.

I immediately clock the huge widescreen television at the foot of the bed which, with the click of a button, will slide out and erect itself, along with some serious-looking surround-sound speakers, for the full cinematic experience in your bed. ‘You should see Fast and Furious on this thing,’ Roy says, laughing.

There is a games console in there too, and the rest of the room is similarly decked out in hi-tech gadgetry. There are smartphone docks and laptops and tablets everywhere, and an impressive array of standby lights illuminating the room. There is a filtered water dispenser by the bed, I note, and, as for the bed itself, it’s big enough – a bespoke size that would dwarf even the average super king – for Roy and his wife, who is a model, a definite ectomorph to Roy’s classic mesomorph profile. I check the mattress, an expensive spring-packed slab filled with horsehair, and the Siberian goose-feather duvet – all of which will roast them nicely over the course of a night.

Speaking of which, it’s warm in the room, so I check the temperature on the electronic control on the wall, which boasts an impressive 25 degrees centigrade. ‘Is it always set to this?’ I ask.

‘Oh, yes,’ says Roy. ‘My wife likes it nice and toasty in here on a night.’

There is a mountain of plump pillows at the head of the bed. The remote-controlled blinds in the windows certainly look the part, but they leak a little light in when closed. The walls seem solid enough and, with the double-glazed windows closed, there is an impressive layer of sound insulation. I check the doors both to the bedroom and the en suite bathroom, and note the slivers of light that leak in under them.

I take in the fashionable colour scheme, the huge pieces of bright, eye-catching art adorning the walls, along with every one of his England caps, when Mrs Race pops her head round the door. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ she asks. Looking round the rest of the house – getting a better feel for the individual’s lifestyle outside the bedroom – is always a good idea, but it’s not always an easy thing to ask without sounding nosy. An open invitation is always welcome, of course.

I follow the Races out of the bedroom down to the space-age kitchen, fitted out with every kitchen appliance imaginable – including a top-of-the-line espresso machine. ‘That’s a beauty,’ I say.

‘I like a double espresso in the morning before I head to training,’ says Roy. ‘Sets me up nicely for the day. Fancy one?’ I think about the caffeine supplements and gum he will consume at the club in addition to this.

‘Just a single for me, please, Roy.’

The Sanctuary

Roy Race is by no means unusual among footballers – and, not just to pick on those who play the world game at the highest level, he’s not unusual among people generally.

While a Premier League footballer might have all the money in the world to spend on sabotaging their sleep in such a bedroom, the truth is that excess isn’t the cause of it. I can just as easily go to the semi-detached house of an Olympic athlete and see them handicap their sleep by more modest means: the standby light on the portable television; the smartphone charger plugged into the socket by the bed; the flimsy, transparent blinds; the bottle of water on the bedside cabinet; the bookshelf stacked with thrillers and horror classics.

You might wonder how some of these factors will affect sleep, but if we look at your bedroom in comparison to our island in Chapter 1, with the two of us sitting by the fire, we can see how far things have moved away from our sleep ideal.

The bedroom once did what it promised on the tin: there would be a bed, some furniture such as a wardrobe, drawers, bedside cabinet and maybe a dressing table or desk. Children would have their toys in there, and books would feature in some bedrooms – alarm clocks and lamps too, of course. Technology changed things, first with televisions in the bedroom, and today with the multitude of devices that allow us to watch movies, listen to music, interact on social media and play video games from the comfort of our sleep kits. The bedroom has effectively become an extra living space, instead of a room for sleep.

For some this is simply a fact of life. Adolescents have always made their bedroom a parent-free sanctuary in which to indulge their solo pursuits (and, hopefully, do their homework). University students in halls of residence and shared houses have to make do with a single room in which to study, sleep and have some personal down time. In fact, it makes financial sense for many people in their twenties and even their thirties to continue living in shared houses as they set out on their careers. But what we’re seeing now is this trend continuing even with people into their forties and beyond, who have good incomes and careers, because prices in both the buying and rental markets, particularly in metropolitan centres like London and New York, are spiralling out of control.

Like the marginal-gains approach, we need to look towards stripping as much of the potential obstacles away as possible as we head towards a sleep state. And if we can’t strip them away – Roy Race is not going to give up his Fast and Furious in bed in a hurry – then we need to at least learn to control their impact.

We have already covered the most important item in the bedroom – the sleep kit – but getting that right isn’t going to do you any good at all if the environment it’s in is all wrong. Our bedrooms must become a sleep sanctuary – a mental and physical recovery room – if we’re to get the maximum benefit from the R90 program.

Cut the Crap

When I travelled with the England football team to the Euro 2004 Championships in Portugal, I did so in the knowledge that I could have an impact on their hotel rooms far beyond that which I could achieve in their homes.

The team would be staying at the same hotel for the whole tournament, so there would be no moving around – no planning and adjusting to a new environment every night, as I would a few years later with the cycling team. This was a great opportunity to have a controlled, consistent environment for the players’ recovery: the manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson, and Leif Sward, the doctor, agreed, so I went out to Lisbon in advance to set things up.

We brought in our own ‘beds’, the media gleefully reported (in fact, they were an early incarnation of my sleep kit – custom-made visco-elastic mattress toppers, which weren’t as easily available as they are today), and used the hotel rooms as a blank canvas on which we could paint the perfect sleeping environment for the players.

Of course, while I took care of the rooms themselves, the FA went to much greater lengths to protect the privacy of those sleeping in them. That particular England squad was a star-studded bunch, with the likes of David Beckham, Steven Gerrard and a young Wayne Rooney in the ranks, and Sven himself was a tabloid draw too. So they sent out thirty-foot-tall fir trees and planted them around the perimeter to stop the paparazzi getting any pictures.

Alongside the new beds and huge trees, there were slot machines, chefs and all sorts of food for dietary requirements – I’d never seen anything like it, and nor had the hotel staff. But there was a real buzz about the place. That squad of players, as well as being star-studded, had a genuine chance of doing well at the tournament. Being able to control their sleeping environment was a real marginal gain to be made.

Today, football clubs take this idea seriously. At Real Madrid, each of the players has an apartment in a luxury accommodation block at their training facility. These rooms can only be unlocked by the individual player’s fingerprint, and are kitted out with hi-spec bathrooms, beds and televisions. Manchester City adopted a similar approach with their new £200 million training complex, with rooms for the players. They don’t quite match the Real Madrid accommodation in terms of luxury, but as I hope I’ve made clear so far, it’s not just about five-star facilities when it comes to recovery. Dr Sam Erith, head of sports science, brought me in to consult on recovery at this state-of-the-art complex, and the rooms have all the ingredients to allow the players to get the maximum rewards from their time spent in them.

This accommodation serves many benefits, allowing the players to rest between training sessions for one, but mainly in being able to control the players’ sleeping environment before a home game (or an away fixture, if they’re playing a nearby club such as local rivals Manchester United), and minimize their disruption on the day of the game. Manchester City players will spend the night before the match at the training-ground accommodation, so when they get up, they’re all there, ready to have breakfast and prepare for the game. They don’t have to travel to the training ground, there’s no danger of any complications making them late. As it’s not a hotel room, there’s no need to worry about the effect the hotel staff or guests might have on the environment: it’s all in the club’s control.

They’re useful after an evening home fixture too. It means that, when the match finishes, by the time the player has attended to his media obligations, showered and changed and had any debrief from the staff – be that a word with his manager or a rub-down from the masseur – he’s not then driving home late at night tired and staring down the barrel of fewer sleep cycles that night. He can just head straight to his room at the training facility, go through his pre-sleep routine and recover there.

We can emulate the Manchester City and Real Madrid experience in our own homes. While the fingerprint technology is likely to be beyond most of us, we can at least start with our own blank canvas. This means taking everything out of your current bedroom. You could literally do this if you felt so committed, but doing it in your head works just as well.

The Empty Shell

This empty room is no longer a bedroom, nor is it an extension of your living space. Starting here, it is your mental and physical recovery room.

My first bit of advice would be to paint it white and put nothing back on the walls. We don’t want any potential stimulus in the room that a loud colour scheme or pictures on the walls might provide, just a very simple, clean and neutral decor.

Then we look at controlling one of the key bedroom prompts for our circadian rhythms – light – with our curtains or blinds. We produce melatonin in darkness, so we need our recovery rooms to be free of ambient light such as street lights. Total blackout is the most effective method, and an eye mask, which can cause discomfort and interfere with your sleep, is not ideal. If your curtains or blinds leak light around the edges, or they are flimsy and transparent, replacing them would be a sensible option. Blackout roller blinds can be bought relatively inexpensively, and there are even cheaper alternatives: you could tape the curtains closed or use Velcro fasteners to attach easily removable blackout material to the window at night. On the Tour de France we would tape black bin bags to the windows, which could easily be taken down in the morning.

We need daylight in the morning, of course, so once you wake up at your constant time, it’s essential to get the blinds or curtains open immediately and flick that internal switch to get you producing serotonin. If light is being leaked in during the summer months, you are likely to find that you’re waking up with it at 5 a.m. instead of your constant wake time of 7 a.m. Blackout allows you to control this.

Temperature Control

Temperature is, after the move from light to dark, the next most important factor to get right so that we can best work with our circadian rhythms and fall into a sleep state. Our bodies want to move into a cooler, but not cold, environment, just as we did around our fire in Chapter 1, so keeping the room at an optimal 16 to 18 degrees centigrade will allow this natural process to occur. Of course, we all have different sensitivities to temperature – 18 degrees might sound a little too close to sleeping outside with nature for some – so find a temperature that works for you (and your partner) that is cooler than the environment in the rest of the house. If you have a sophisticated heating system, this can be set accordingly, but for the rest of us it can be as simple as opening the window an hour before going to bed or turning off the radiator while the heating is on in the rest of the house. Whatever the temperature is, warm to cool is the mantra.

Importing the Essentials

The first thing we put back into the recovery room is, of course, your sleep kit. This, along with an alarm clock of some description, which we’ll come to shortly, is the only genuinely essential piece that you need back in this room. Anything else is unnecessary from the point of view of recovery.

If you’re able to, put your clothes, your wardrobe and drawers – anything that isn’t essential for sleep – elsewhere. However, this isn’t real life for most of us, and these items will have to come back into the room. What constitutes ‘essential’ will be different for all of us too. For a student, it will mean the return of their desk and workspace, which is an activity better kept out of the recovery room if you have the option.

If you are a home worker who has their desk in the bedroom, try to work at the kitchen table or out of the room if possible, so your mind doesn’t make the associations between the recovery room and work. If you have bookshelves in your room stacked with thrillers and horror books, think about the stimulus this gives your mind when you look at them before sleep. They are not calm and relaxing associations for your mind to make.

A bottle of water may seem like a fairly standard and innocuous item to bring into the room at night, but why do you need it? If you wake with a dry mouth during the night it’s likely to be caused by you breathing through your mouth rather than your nose, and if you get up during the night to go to the bathroom, it’s possible that you have been overhydrating in the lead-up to sleep. Putting a bottle of water by your bedside plants the idea of drinking it in your mind.

The only thing you want your mind to associate this room with is sleep.

Tech Attack

Your recovery room needs an alarm clock – ideally a dawn-wake simulator – which isn’t your phone. No other technology is necessary.

A dawn-wake simulator will wake you up gradually with artificial daylight, starting thirty minutes before your alarm time. They are devices not just for those suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), but for anyone who wants to replicate the rising of the sun so that they wake more naturally. Dawn-wake simulators can improve alertness, cognitive and physical performance, mood and wellbeing.[1] In winter, they can be the difference between getting straight out of your sleep kit or hitting the snooze button – and in a blacked-out room they are the most effective way to get you up so you can then open the blinds and let natural light in.

This technology doesn’t have to be expensive – a basic model will do, provided it’s from a reputable brand such as Philips or Lumie. And if you can’t stretch to this, use a standard alarm clock, provided you can turn off the illumination on the display so the light doesn’t bother you at night. (If you choose an analogue option, make sure it doesn’t produce a ticking noise that could keep you awake.)

The light here is key. There’s no point blacking out all the artificial light from outside if you’re going to fill your room up with it. As soon as you start bringing televisions and electronic devices back into the bedroom, you’re bringing in light sources. Your pre-sleep routine involves paring back on technology as you approach the time to go into a sleep state, but if you really can’t avoid watching television, using your laptop or playing on your games console in bed, please just do one thing for your recovery when you’ve finished: turn the devices off properly, instead of hitting ‘standby’. The standby light is like a laser penetrating all the way through to your pineal gland, and interfering with your melatonin production.

The most damaging piece of technology at night, however, is the smartphone. According to Ofcom – the communications regulator in the UK – four in ten smartphone users reported using their devices after they had woken them in bed during the night.[2] Furthermore, even if they have been silenced, the artificial light they emit is another problem. If you can’t stop yourself using your phone as part of your pre-sleep routine, try to build towards it with the tech breaks we talked about in Chapter 5. At the very least, you can keep it out of your way while you are asleep: in another room, in a drawer or turn it off completely. What could you be missing out on? Even the most avid social-media user can’t do it in their sleep.

Keep it Clean!

Professional cyclists are a sensitive bunch – sensitive to their environment, that is. They have to be, given how damaging picking up an unwanted bug could be to their performance. Before they arrived at their hotel every night we would enter the rooms and put a HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Air) filter in to remove the unwanted airborne particles, and then we would use a hand vacuum and antibacterial cleansing products to wipe all the surfaces down, being sure to attend to the hidden-away corners where the hotel cleaners might not have reached. As I’ve said before, it’s a glamorous world on Tour.

While you don’t need to go to this level of obsessive cleanliness, keeping your recovery room clean is a worthwhile pursuit. Who doesn’t want to breathe clean air? There is the subconscious reassurance, much like fresh linen provides, that you are moving into a clean environment to sleep. Dust mites live in carpets as well as bedding, so if you are an allergy sufferer, a HEPA filter that emits no sound or light would be a good investment to help you get down through the stages to deep sleep every night.

A clutter-free environment is also preferable. ‘If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, then what is an empty desk?’ goes the saying, but an empty mind, having downloaded your thoughts in your pre-sleep routine, is a welcome sign before we enter sleep. Clothes all over the floor and items piling up on the surfaces can provide stimulus to the mind, although clutter-free for some people means having clothes piled up in the right places on the floor.

Noise Control

Noise is a big factor in waking us from light sleep. If your name is called or a door slammed loud enough as you are in this stage, you will wake up. Adequate soundproofing such as double-glazing in the windows is great to keep out external noise, but sadly for those of us living in rented accommodation, we’re usually stuck with what we’ve got. Unluckier still are those who live in houses and flats where the soundproofing is woefully inadequate between floors and walls (and you can hear the neighbours get up to all sorts at night).

Soundproofing in such instances is expensive, so earplugs provide the answer for many people. They can be effective up to a point, but the discomfort they can cause might disturb sleep.

There can be helpful noise too. In his 2006 autobiography, Wayne Rooney admits to needing the sound of a vacuum cleaner or hairdryer to fall asleep to. This isn’t as unusual as it might sound – people find the hum of an air-conditioner unit or the dull rumble of traffic (if they live near a road) just as necessary. This sound functions as a kind of ‘white noise’, which masks the peaks and troughs of background noise that might otherwise disturb the likes of Wayne Rooney from light sleep. You can download white noise to use in the bedroom, as a vacuum cleaner or hairdryer manufacturer is unlikely to recommend leaving one of their products on unattended all night.

Security

Perhaps the most important role our recovery room should play – even more so than its engineering for our light–dark and temperature cycles – is in providing us with a feeling of security. We need to feel safe and relaxed in our recovery room so that we can fall asleep easily and rest properly. We are going into our most vulnerable state, and reducing any fear or anxiety surrounding this is paramount.

This idea of security can come in many forms. It could mean locking all the doors and windows in your home as part of your pre-sleep routine; it could be something more personal, such as having a picture of loved ones by your sleep kit or a favourite comfort blanket in there with you. Whatever it is that you need to give you that feeling of security, so that your mind is able to switch off from a state of ‘alert’ and relax into your designated cycles of sleep, is a welcome addition to the room. We take this approach with elite athletes. If a performer needs his or her favourite teddy bear to sleep, it comes with us. Anything to produce the safest and most secure environment for them to go into a sleep state.

RECOVERY ROOM: SEVEN STEPS TO SLEEP SMARTER

1. Your bedroom should not be an extension of your living space if possible – rename it your mental and physical recovery room.

2. Empty your room (if only in your head) and bring back only the items necessary for rest, recovery and relaxation.

3. Black out your room so that external light does not interfere with your sleep.

4. Make your room a cooler, but not cold, environment compared to the rest of the home.

5. Feel safe and secure in your room – a favourite teddy, a picture of loved ones or double-checking the doors and windows are locked can all help.

6. Have a neutral decor, keep it clean and avoid anything that is likely to stimulate the mind (bright pictures or books with which you make strong personal connections).

7. Control tech use in your room – standby lights off at night and your phone either out of the room or at least out of sight (and silenced).

Part Two

R90 IN ACTION

Eight

A Head Start

Using Your R90 Recovery Program

March 2016. Thirty full sleep kits boxed up in individual packages a fraction of the size of an upholstered mattress are on a boat, travelling across the Atlantic Ocean to Rio for the Olympic Games. The athletes won’t actually be competing until August, but this being one of the biggest sporting events on the planet, the level of security and bureaucracy are sky high: every item heading into the Olympic Village has to be ratified and accounted for. There’s no point turning up with a brand-new track bike if you haven’t had it pre-approved.

We’ve been busy for twelve months prior to this. The organization on the ground in Rio has been, frankly, something of a mess, and we haven’t been able to get much in the way of information. But we now know what the beds in the athletes’ accommodation will be: single beds, with an extending thirty-centimetre piece for the taller athletes; the mattresses, rock hard. We know that it will be very hot out there, and we’ve discovered that the rooms will not come with air conditioners as standard. That has now been rectified with portable units.

The sailors have been out in August, the year before, and they’ve spoken of sailing in waters polluted beyond belief. But no matter how much of a mess things appear in an Olympic build-up, they always seem to work out in the end, and Rio will be no different. They will get there in the nick of time.

There are other factors at play: drug scandals, political crises in the governing bodies and Zika virus worries. We can’t control these. We simply work on the elements we can control, and improving the sleeping environment is my part in this. We can’t control the other teams, either, and the kind of planning they might have under way. But our months of work in every aspect of our preparation mean that we have done everything possible that we can to give ourselves a head start.

Recovery Schedule

Through combining the seven Key Sleep Recovery Indicators together to form the R90 program, we can get a head start too. Our days no longer resemble a period of time at work, home and play and then an indeterminate amount of time asleep. They are instead broken up into ninety-minute cycles to build a harmony between our activity and recovery.

Your fixed wake time provides the anchor around which all of your day is structured. In the diagram above, the wake time is 6.30 a.m., but yours could be whenever you choose. Just count back in ninety-minute cycles for your sleep times. In this instance, an ideal five-cycle routine involves being asleep by 11 p.m. It can move later to 12.30 a.m. if your life demands it at the time, or later still to 2 a.m. No need to worry about enough sleep, because it’s just one night out of seven, and your ninety-minute pre- and post-sleep routines, as well as your controlled recovery room and tailored sleep kit, are going to ensure you get the right quality of recovery. You are going to take a break every ninety minutes, even if it’s just to walk outside, tech-free, go to the toilet or get a drink. You have two windows of opportunity to help too, either a ninety-or thirty-minute Controlled Recovery Period in the midday slot, or a thirty minute CRP in the early-evening slot. You’re in control of this.

You then take this daily outlook into a longer period of time. You can look at it as part of a weekly schedule, in which you know that, if you are the type who needs five cycles per night, an ideal week is thirty-five cycles. Twenty-eight is OK, but anything less and you might be pushing it – it’s a potential red flag. You could keep a very simple diary, recording only measurable data.

| Activity | Cycles
Monday | Working late on presentation | CRP: Nocturnal: 4

Tuesday

Dinner after work with the girls

CRP: 1 (30 min midday)
Nocturnal: 4

Wednesday

Running club

CRP: 1 (30 min midday)
Nocturnal: 4

Thursday

Carl’s leaving drinks

CRP: 1 (30 min early evening)
Nocturnal: 3

Friday | | CRP: Nocturnal: 5

Saturday

House party!

CRP: 1 (30 min early evening)
Nocturnal: 2

Sunday

Cinema @ 9

CRP: 1 (90 min midday)
Nocturnal: 4

On this particular week, Jess, who has a Monday-to-Friday job in an office and whose ideal routine is thirty-five cycles, manages to get thirty-one. She will certainly be feeling the effects of only two cycles on Saturday night before getting up at her constant wake time of 6.30 on Sunday, but she boxes clever with this. She gets up, has her breakfast and goes for a walk, before she returns home to slump on the sofa and catch up on her favourite guilty pleasures on television. In the midday window, with no work to interfere, she closes her recovery room’s blackout blinds, sets the alarm and has a ninety-minute CRP in her sleep kit.

She’s achieving her ideal amount of five cycles four times in this week, and she makes sure to follow two consecutive nights of fewer cycles with her ideal. There is nothing in Jess’s diary that would worry me hugely if I was working with her, but if she should start feeling below par or a bit tired after her week, with the help of her sleep schedule she can start to understand why. She can look to change things the following week and achieve more cycles in better harmony by looking at what is negotiable time. Her running club is her main form of exercise, so that’s non-negotiable, and who wants to leave a party early if they’re having a great time? But perhaps she could look to cancel the cinema on a Sunday night or go to an earlier screening next time, and find a way to use CRPs more regularly.

Knowing that you can do something about your sleep in this way is empowering. You have measurable data at your disposal to make adjustments that will benefit the way you feel and perform. Start looking at your week ahead, allocating your recovery periods, estimating the amount of cycles you will get. Is that enough? Can you get an extra CRP in here or there? Plans change, impromptu social opportunities and work demands crop up, but you can be flexible. You can move your sleep time, get another CRP in, use those ninety-minute recovery breaks, get daylight or daylight lamps on you to stay ahead of the game. You’re doing your preparation early, putting yourself in control.

Those who don’t have the head start that the R90 offers are still sleepwalking through a random approach to their recovery. They feel tired, they know they’re not getting enough sleep, but what are they going to do about it? They don’t have any real measure of how much they’re getting, and they don’t have the approach as well as the sleep kit and recovery room you’ve built up to ensure that they are getting the right quality. They might set the alarm to lie in a little longer; they might go to bed earlier than usual; they might nod off on the train home from work or at their desk. But there is no strategy behind this. They don’t have the tools to improve their day-to-day life, so they stumble through, taking actions that seem intuitively to be correct (need more rest = sleep longer), but which are in fact counter-productive. Changing your wake time, going to bed too early – they’re not helping, so stop doing it. If you need more rest, sleep smarter.

Healthy Diet, Regular Exercise – and Recover Well

In terms of the information we are fed from governments, doctors and health organizations around the world, a healthy lifestyle consists of a good, balanced diet and plenty of physical activity. The American Heart Association produced a set of diet and lifestyle guidelines to reduce cardiovascular risk in 2013, which includes detailed advice on food and exercise amounts, as well as warning of the perils of alcohol and smoking.[1] The World Health Organization’s 2004 ‘Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health’ is an approach to tackling non-communicable problems such as cancer, obesity and type 2 diabetes.

There is excellent advice and the very best of intentions in these publications, along with the countless others produced around the world, with just one caveat: where’s the sleep section? Allowing for the fact that the link between sleep and cardiovascular problems has been drawn,[2] and there is growing research to demonstrate the effect sleep is having on cancer, obesity and diabetes, wouldn’t it make sense to include one?

Recovery should be the third part of our approach to healthy living. The benefits I see day to day from those practising the R90 program can be just as powerful as the other two, but they are benefits that can only really be enjoyed in harmony with a good diet and exercise. If you eat poorly and don’t exercise, it’s going to cause problems. Getting these things right will improve the quality of your sleep and, as part of a three-pronged approach, improve the quality of your life immeasurably.

Obviously, the athletes I work with are super-fit and eat a tailored, controlled diet for their needs, and it’s often the very best of these athletes, with the necessary attitude that entails, who show the greatest commitment to recovery.

When I started at Manchester United in the 90s, a young Ryan Giggs was one of the first players to really show an interest in what I was doing. This wasn’t the yoga-practising Ryan that the football world is familiar with today, but it was a good demonstration of the kind of intellectual curiosity and openness to new ideas that would lead to this and to his playing on at the top level long after the average player hung up their boots.

You see this in all the best athletes. I saw it in Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo at Real Madrid, and in the likes of Sir Bradley Wiggins and Sir Chris Hoy. I see it in youth-level prospects you’ve yet to hear of. If you take your diet and exercise seriously and you’ve read this far, you share some of this attitude too.

Diet

If the R90 program is a revolutionary approach to your sleep, adopting a suitable diet in coordination with your rest is anything but. The chances are, you already have one. Eating as broad a range of fresh foods as possible, avoiding food grown, treated or processed with chemicals, being aware of any food allergies and in particular controlling your salt, sugar (your body will crave this if you’re not sleeping well), calorie and caffeine intake are all well-documented, sensible habits.

Hydrating with the correct amount of water is important. Everyone is different, and your activity throughout the day will affect this, so don’t blindly down two litres per day because of the latest health authority recommendations. Athletes don’t do this. They know that there is water present in food, particularly in vegetable-rich diets, so they make adjustments for this. It’s not rocket science: listen to your body and drink when you’re thirsty regularly throughout the day, especially after exercise. The amount of liquid we consume becomes particularly important as we approach our designated sleep time. If you take on too much, it could wake you during the night.

Tryptophan is an essential amino acid found in protein-rich foods such as chicken, turkey, cheese, fish, bananas, milk and nuts. Our bodies use it as a component in serotonin production, and consequently melatonin, so get plenty of it in your diet.

One of the latest biohacks being used in sport is Montmorency tart cherries. These aren’t the kind of cherries you’ll find in the supermarket – they’re grown mainly in the USA and are available either dried or as a juice online and in health stores – but they’re worth tracking down. Professor Glyn Howatson of Northumbria University has led numerous studies demonstrating their benefits on recovery after strenuous exercise, with one such piece of research proving that the cherries produce an increase in melatonin which is ‘beneficial in improving sleep duration and quality in healthy men and women and might be of benefit in managing disturbed sleep’.[3]

You should aim to eat your final meal of the day two cycles (three hours) before your targeted sleep time, and any last light snack ninety minutes before, at the beginning of your pre-sleep routine. Eating ‘too late’ simply means eating too close to your targeted sleep time. If you’re eating at 9 p.m. and your wake time is 6.30 a.m., move a cycle later from 11 p.m. and target 12.30 a.m. as your sleep time. There’s no such thing as too late when it’s part of a controlled approach, although eating late as a habit may interfere with your circadian rhythms.

Our bodies love patterns and harmonies. Your circadian rhythms can also be influenced by eating times, so getting some harmony with this, starting with breakfast, will help along with your regular wake time. Remember, a good diet isn’t necessarily about eating foods that will help you sleep well (though it’s certainly about avoiding those that will prevent you), but about working together with good sleeping habits and exercise so you feel at your best every day.

Exercise

While sleep is taken for granted by many people in our day-to-day lives, it’s easier for me to take exercise for granted when I work with sports people. Exercise is their job, after all.

We’ve already talked about the importance of some exercise as part of your post- and pre-sleep routines, to get your body started for the day and to prepare you better for your sleep time. But on top of this, a regular exercise regime offers considerable benefits to your sleep. An Oregon State University study put the improvement in sleep quality from 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise per week at 65 per cent.[4] It’s unlikely you need such a study to inform you of these benefits. When we’ve exercised during the day, we tend to get into our sleep kit with our bodies nicely tired and just drift away.

A real gym culture has developed in Western society, certainly over the last twenty or thirty years. In the UK in 2015 alone there was a 44 per cent increase in consumer spending on gym memberships, and many of the sports and fitness conferences I speak at are packed full of people bouncing on trampolines, blasting the exercise bikes and looking hungrily for the next bit of kit or exercise technique in their quest for physical perfection. This embracing of the gym is fantastic, but it’s not for everyone – and nor does it have to be.

Some people just can’t get along with the gym. They’d rather do yoga or pilates, or be outside, doing any number of activities from running, cycling and swimming to all manner of exotic and ever-changing exercise classes (including yoga and pilates, when the weather allows). These are all excellent options too, particularly being outdoors, as it can give us a welcome dose of daylight (depending on the time we do it).

There are those whose motivation to get and stay fit is to play a sport. Professional sports people fall into this camp, of course. They might love playing football for a living, but they don’t always love the training and fitness work that goes into it, and it’s not uncommon to see a retired footballer or between-bouts boxer ease their routine and put on a few pounds. For others, it’s playing golf that keeps them fit, or gardening or going for a good walk with the dog every day. It could even be commuting to work on a bicycle rather than the bus.

The point is that there should be something for everyone when it comes to being active. And another great benefit is that we can use the time we spend exercising to give ourselves a mind break, just tuning out as we clock up the metres on the treadmill or the lengths in the pool. If we’re able to give ourselves a tech break too, then all the better. This doesn’t have to mean leaving your smartphone behind if you use it to measure your running progress or your King of the Mountain status on Strava. It could just mean setting it to ‘do not disturb’ so that you’re not engaging with the outside world.

It’s best not to do any strenuous exercise close to sleep, as you will need time to come down from the attendant adrenaline surge and raised heart rate, and be aware of your circadian rhythms if you want to start setting personal bests: most world records in athletics and cycling are broken in the afternoon and evening.

Recovering from your exercise is vital. Factor in recovery periods, hydrate and fuel up when required and use supplements and biohacks like Montmorency tart cherries to help. The comfort of your sleep kit becomes extra important if you do intense exercise and you have aching joints and limbs. The surface needs to give sufficiently so that it doesn’t exacerbate any pain that might stop you getting to sleep – or leave you feeling even worse in the morning. Getting your ideal amount of cycles that night and using CRPs is a sound idea too.

In the USA I work with Michael Torres, a fitness expert whose company SHIFT Performance is at the forefront of the human performance industry. As he says, ‘Personally my view of recovery has broadened over years from the integration of massage therapy to monitoring sleep, performance and stress, and more recently diving into sleep as a recovery system.

‘Recovery is the common denominator that effects all things. We have explored recovery as much more of a training program element, not something outside of the training cycle. This is the future.’

Electric Dreams

You wake up just before your alarm goes off. You get up, turn it off, open the blackout blinds. It’s a glorious day. You go to the bathroom, empty your bladder, then go to the kitchen to make some breakfast. You eat outside, feeling yourself wake gradually in the sunshine as you listen to the birds sing. You shower and ready yourself for work. You feel alert and good, rested and ready for the day ahead – you can’t wait to get started. You pick up your smartphone and check your sleep app to see how you performed last night. It says you had a terrible night’s sleep. Too much light sleep, not enough of the deep stuff. The day is practically a write-off in your app’s eyes.

Wearable fitness trackers, which record data such as steps taken, calories burned and type of activity, are a huge, growing market, predicted to be worth over $5 billion by 2019 (from $2 billion in 2014).[5] Products such as Fitbit and Jawbone have become household names to many, and with companies like Apple joining the market with their Watch, we’ve never been more motivated in our hunt for data to support our fitness and health. These trackers, along with various apps available on smartphones, also claim to measure sleep.

Utilizing performance data is a vital part of modern sport, and wearable trackers such as those produced by Whoop, an American company who tailor them for athletes, play a part in this, particularly in flagging the potential for injury when an athlete is pushing it too much. The performers sometimes grumble about using them as they feel they aren’t in complete control of the data, but they generally accept it as part of the job.

When it comes to tracking sleep data, however, things become a bit muddier. Professional athletes quite rightly think of the time they spend away from their work as their own, and they can be resistant to having their sleep monitored. If an elite performer has their boyfriend or girlfriend over for an early night but a late sleep time, they consider it their own business, not the club’s or coach’s. This is their private time, and athletes can be apt to think that their employer is trying to control them if it’s not handled correctly. You might have little sympathy for this situation, given the amount some top sports people earn, but how would you feel if your employer asked you to wear a wristband so they could monitor what you get up to every night? This might be more pertinent to you than you imagine, as fitness tracker information has been used in legal proceedings.

When I’m working with a team, we will ask athletes to wear the devices for a specific period, and then we, not the athlete, collect the data. We don’t want any data-based doubt creeping in to their heads first thing on a morning, just as you don’t want to allow any data to compromise how you feel when you wake up. We then use the data to advise the athlete in practical terms how they can improve their recovery routines. Just as we do with the fitness data, we use the wearables to spot red flags in sleeping habits. If there are indications of health risks, a player’s overdoing it or things like undiagnosed sleep apnoea, we can make an intervention. I’m not there to play Big Brother to them.

The problem with many of the wearables and apps available for use at home is that they provide their information through an accelerometer, which basically captures motion. Moving a lot indicates light sleep; no movement, deep sleep. While the wearable device can at least guarantee all the movement is yours, the apps, with your phone placed strategically by the side of the bed, aren’t so accurate. If the person you’re sharing a bed with gets in the way, it records that. If your dog jumps on the bed – please don’t tell me you share your recovery room with a pet – it records that too.

Where apps have the potential to be of more use is as an education tool. I have helped Southampton Football Club overhaul their app for players and staff, introducing new sections in their questionnaires to better evaluate the recovery habits of players and offer them tailored, practical advice to improve their regime.

The role of wearable and sleep-monitoring technology is helpful in some ways, because at least it is getting people talking about the subject of sleep. It’s opening up some awareness and providing some limited knowledge on sleep stages and the importance of deep sleep. The reality, however, is that, once the novelty wears off, the information the devices provide rarely has an impact on people’s lives and they stop using it. If you wake up feeling refreshed and ready for the day ahead, but your app says you slept poorly, who are you going to believe?

Only a polysomnogram – in which things like brainwave activity, eye movement and muscle movement are monitored – can accurately record the stages within sleeping cycles, though the devices are certainly getting more sophisticated, measuring heart rate and temperature as well as motion, and a device called the Zeo, a headband measuring electrical signals in your brain, promised to measure sleep stages more accurately, but it’s no longer commercially available.

The simple fact is that, while this technology can provide some kind of guide as to how you might be sleeping, you would be far better off investing your money in some of the things we have talked about so far in this book if you actually want to do something definite about improving the quality of your sleep. Upgrading your sleep kit, a dawn-wake simulator, blackout blinds or red bulbs for your lamps are all better uses of your money. And downloading a meditation app instead of one that promises to measure your sleep is certainly a better use of your time, too.

The Three-pronged Attack

The image I always return to when looking at sleep in conjunction with diet and exercise is one of an Italian family sitting around a table, outside in an olive grove. The sun is shining. There are fresh fruit and vegetables on the table, a carafe of red wine and some cheese and freshly made bread. The family includes several generations, from the children to the old man at the head of the table, still spry and active in his weather-beaten skin, pouring the wine and laughing and joking with his grandchildren. Do you think he sleeps well, as he dozes in the shade later on?

There’s no sign of a gym, with its pounding music and strobe-lighting. It’s just a family doing the simple things right in their own environment. But it doesn’t matter if you live in a semi-detached house in the countryside or a flat on the twentieth floor of a tower block in a city, if you work 9–5 in an office or on a building site, anyone can make their own version of this image. You can find the exercise and activity regime that works for you. You can eat a balanced, healthy diet. There’s no need to become obsessive about it – there’s still room for a piece of cake and a glass of wine when you want one – and you can integrate the R90 program into your life, so you recover properly and make the most out of every day. Because if you get this right, you’re going to feel terrific.

Nine

Sleeping with the Enemy

Sleep Problems

Spring is in the air. The clocks are going to move forward soon. Rebecca[1] recently moved her wake time earlier, to 5 a.m., as part of her tailored R90 program. What might be even more surprising to read is that she’s about to start a three-cycle routine.

When she first got in touch, Rebecca was struggling. She has a high-pressure job in banking, but she lived within walking distance of her office so she was able to go to the gym first thing on a morning, and have a positive start to her day, before work. Then her office moved across town, her commute increased several times over, and she stopped going to the gym. She didn’t have the time.

Rebecca had always been a sensitive sleeper, waking up a lot during the night, having trouble with her breathing in the shape of asthma and allergies. She’d been like that for as long as she could remember. Once that great, stress-busting, energizing start to the day at the gym was out of the picture, she started to feel worse in her day-to-day life: fatigued and irritable, low mood and motivation, relying increasingly on caffeine and sugary snacks to push on through. She was then struggling to get to sleep, waking increasingly during the night, fuelling her fatigue, irritability, low mood and motivation in a vicious circle.

She had spent hours online researching her symptoms, been to the doctor and even engaged with a specialist clinic, but they were unable to diagnose anything specific or provide anything practical for use in her everyday life. She was trying herbal teas, relaxing baths and over-the-counter sleep aids – and then sleeping pills. But none of it was having any impact. Finally, her partner took to sleeping on the sofa bed until she sorted herself out.

When she contacted me I first asked her to fill in the R90 sleep profile questionnaire I use, designed to provide a complete picture of the subject’s everyday life – what they are doing, when and why. It isn’t full of multiple-choice questions asking, ‘How long do you wake up for during the night: fifteen, thirty, forty-five, sixty minutes or longer?’ because, frankly, who on earth can answer questions like that accurately? Instead, I ask questions with a definite answer, often just a yes or no. Are you aware of circadian rhythms? Do you know your chronotype? Do you wake up during the night at all? She also sent in photographs of her mattress and her sleeping environment. Even for photographs, most people, just like the Races in Chapter 7, make sure their bedroom is tidy and looking at its best.

I could see straight away that she had a large bedroom but just a standard double bed. ‘Have you thought about getting a bigger bed?’ I asked. She was sleeping on a pocket-spring mattress with natural fillings. ‘What about getting something hypoallergenic for your asthma?’ She quickly became familiar with cycles and rhythms. Already she started to feel a bit more positive about things. And then we used this knowledge to help her start making some gains in her life.

She packed away the sleeping aids. She was used to getting up at 6 a.m. for work, going to bed at 10 p.m. on an ‘ideal’ night, but, as she’s an AMer and with summer not too far away and the lighter mornings that would bring, we gave her a constant wake time of 5. The sun would be up around then so it’s not going to hurt an AM chronotype to do likewise. Then we counted back in ninety-minute cycles to give her potential sleep times of 3.30, 2, 00.30 and 11 p.m. It’s no good using 9.30 p.m., because with the clocks changing it will soon still be light at that time, and the circadian urge and sleep pressure peak later in the evening. If she needs five cycles, we can use CRPs or her wake time would have to move to 6.30 a.m.

She could go to the gym again, and start her day on the right foot. She starts to feel better at work, and more empowered as she adopts her own R90 program, shopping around to build her sleep kit and manage her environment better. She uses her targeted sleep time of 11 p.m., by which time she’s tired and gets off to sleep OK, but she is still waking during the night. Has she ever considered the idea that around eight hours might not actually be right for her? Instead of lying there tossing and turning, maybe she’s the round-the-world-sailor or Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer type, who needs less sleep than most?

So, having adjusted well to her new wake time, she looks surprised when I suggest she starts going to bed at 00.30. Only three cycles?

Restriction

When people I work with tell me they wake up and get up during the night, that’s an immediate red flag. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for five minutes or an hour – I don’t want you waking up at all during the night.

Much of what we addressed in the Key Sleep Recovery Indicators showed how to push aside as many of the obstacles as possible to transitioning smoothly through our cycles at night. We’ve talked throughout this book about the potential for stress and worry about sleep to keep us awake, and how looking at it in a broader time frame and knowing you can do something about it in your waking hours to adjust can help.

Using ninety-minute cycles in the R90 program provides us with our very own DIY polysomnogram that we can use when we are having trouble with our sleep. If we wake at the start or end of a cycle during the night (looking at a clock should confirm this), then we know that, if we don’t go back to sleep reasonably swiftly afterwards, we can get up, do some pre-sleep activities and try to catch the next cycle. We can look at what might have woken us up. If it’s going to the toilet, did we drink too much liquid the day before? Did we consume more caffeine the day before? Is anything stressful going on? There’s nothing random in our approach – just some very simple self-diagnoses.

If we wake up mid-cycle, we can get up and aim to sleep for the start of the next cycle. We’re in control. If we wake up too early, in the last cycle before our scheduled wake time, we can relax in bed until our alarmed wake time and then kick start our day. If this waking can be apportioned to a specific incident, we can target a sleep time of a cycle later so that we can aim to sleep through rather than experience disrupted sleep. If sleeping problems still persist, we can turn to the process of sleep restriction.

Sleep restriction sounds counter-intuitive at first. If you’re having trouble sleeping, feeling exhausted in the day, how is restricting it going to help? But in fact it works on a very simple premise: if you aren’t getting enough sleep but you’re wasting your time in bed trying, let’s cut down on the time you’re wasting. Let’s make that time in bed efficient time.

So, for Rebecca, whose targeted sleep time was 11 p.m. and wake time 5, she was still waking in the night, struggling to get back to sleep. We’d move her to a 00.30 sleep time and see how she got on.

The biggest barrier is often psychological. After years of blindly accepting that we should spend eight hours in bed a night, it’s difficult to retrain the mind to accept that four and a half hours will be enough. But what is going to be more beneficial: three smoothly transitioning cycles with at least a good portion of the relevant stages of sleep (remember, your mind will prioritize REM if you haven’t been getting enough), or a similar amount of sleep broken up and spread thinly across eight hours in which light sleep dominates?

Rebecca might find it difficult to stay up until after midnight: she will naturally get tired and want to go to sleep sooner, but it is vital for her to resist this. Doing some gentle exercise such as going for a walk and getting some fresh air will help perk her up so that she can make it through. Keeping active until later is key, so she shouldn’t spend all night on the sofa in front of the television. The wake time, as ever, is a constant.

She might well feel fatigued during the day. It is important that she has the maximum amount of pre- and post-sleep routine she can manage (ninety minutes, ideally), uses her breaks every ninety minutes and CRPs when needed, and gets as much daylight on her as possible during these periods to give her a boost and reset her body clock.

With the R90 program, we look at our sleep in schedules of seven days, not one night, so if, after seven days, she’s still experiencing problems we could go down another cycle, to a sleep time of 2 a.m. This might sound incredible to read, but it’s important to realize that it isn’t designed to be a long-term measure. It’s effectively about resetting your sleep pattern, getting you down to rock bottom in terms of the amount of time you are able to sleep efficiently, so that we can then start building it back up.

If a sleep pattern of 2 until 5 a.m. finally works for Rebecca, she will start to see some other benefits. As she’s being dumped straight into sleep – at the time when our circadian urge is at its strongest – and remaining in it solidly for two cycles, she might soon find she no longer needs earplugs as she isn’t in that light-sleeping stage, from which we can easily be roused, for as long. She might even discover that she’s in the round-the-world-sailor short-sleeping group of people – who make up 1 per cent of the population.

What it does give her is a base from which she knows she can confidently achieve three hours of uninterrupted sleep. If you are the type who sleeps soundly through your five cycles per night, this will mean little to you, but for some people, after years of broken sleep, it is an incredibly powerful starting point. We would keep her on it for seven days, monitor it, and then come back to a 00.30 sleep time. Or if during the course of adopting this regime she has started going to the gym after work to keep her going for longer into the evening, we could move her constant wake time to 06.30. This is a positive action. She has changed her routine to find time in the evening for the gym because she now goes to bed later, and she is sleeping through without constant interruptions.

She would settle into this routine for seven days and, assuming it worked, then we would look to move it back again, so that she was on a four-cycle routine. Eleven p.m. until 5 a.m. (or 00.30–06.30) – six hours per night – suddenly doesn’t sound so bad. She didn’t know how much sleep she was getting before, how much she really needed, but now she’s starting to see.

Sleep restriction isn’t an overnight process, so it’s disappointing when I have clients who come to me after they have been on a restriction regime in which, if they slept through one night, without waking, they would move their targeted sleep time fifteen minutes earlier; if they didn’t, it moved fifteen minutes later. In my experience, this approach is too erratic and puts too much pressure on, leaving its participants feeling like they’re indulging in a mean-spirited video game: get tonight right if you wish to proceed to the next level; if you fail, go back to the previous one.

Alleviating this idea that one night is everything is so important when dealing with disturbed sleep. It’s why I look at cycles per week and preach a 24–7 recovery schedule, because it’s not fair to have so much riding on tonight. When sleep is restricted without these parameters, and it is done consistently over a larger sample size of seven nights, rather than just one, then we can look to build confidence in the knowledge that it’s only one night out of several. It’s part of a gradual routine change, not a challenge with penalties and rewards.

Insomnia

Insomnia is the daddy of sleeping problems. It is the first thing most of us think of when we talk of such matters, and it seems an unlikely word to appear for the first time so late in a book on ‘sleep’.

In fact, insomnia is a word that describes a whole host of sleeping conditions in which the sufferer experiences trouble either falling asleep or staying asleep, and which impairs the ability to function in the waking hours. According to Professor Chris Idzikowski, one of my valued industry mentors and former adviser to the UK Sleep Council, ‘Insomnia is caused by hyperarousal, a state in which a person’s brain is simply too excited to sleep.’[2]

For some people, this might mean that a period of stress, such as a bereavement or difficult times at work, causes them to struggle with short-term insomnia. For others, there is the long-term problem of chronic insomnia, a serious condition which might have no obvious cause or be a marker for other problems, such as anxiety disorders and depression.

A colleague of mine suffers from chronic insomnia. He’s lucky to get an hour per night of sleep. When he suffered from it originally, his body would simply crash during the day: he’d collapse straight into sleep anywhere – even in the street. Quite literally a waking nightmare for him. But he has adjusted now, and, while his amount of sleep has not improved, his ability to deal with it has. Our bodies and minds adapt. He now uses the time to get two days’ work done in a day, particularly handy when working with people in different time zones. When we used a sleep-tracking device called Zeo on him, which allowed us to monitor his brainwave patterns, we picked up the kind of activity associated with a sleeping stage … while he was busy sending emails. To me, it suggests the possibility that his brain could be resting in some form while he is awake during the night, though his diagnosis is much simpler: the machine doesn’t work.

This kind of chronic insomnia, or that which suggests a mental health condition, has a very simple recommendation from me: see a doctor. It warrants a clinical diagnosis and medical attention. However, for those suffering from other types of insomnia – which I prefer simply to think of in terms of trouble getting to sleep or waking up during the night – the R90 program is an effective tool. Pre- and post-sleep routines, the constant wake time, harmony with the body clock, a properly prepared sleep environment and regular breaks and exercise can all help, and the process of sleep restriction is a method not only used by me, but by clinics and health services in countries around the world, too. If this is unsuccessful, then see a doctor, but, given the workload of many medical professionals, it could be that they’ll simply write you a prescription for something to help you sleep. And that might be where your troubles begin.

The Drugs Don’t Work

With all the pressures, adrenaline and use – and overuse – of caffeine in sport, it is little surprise that there is a culture of using sleeping tablets in many of the teams I work with. What goes up must come down, after all.

The global sleep aids market was valued at $58.1 billion in 2014, and is expected to be worth more like $80.8 billion in 2020,[3] while a US report put the number of American adults taking prescription sleep aids at around 9 million, with their use tripling between 1998 and 2006 in the 18–24 age bracket.[4]

The dangers of misusing these drugs are significant, with emergency-room visits involving zolpidem – a hypnotic (a drug that acts on the nervous system to induce sleep) which is the active ingredient in sleeping pills such as America’s most popular option, Ambien – almost doubling in hospitals between 2005 and 2010. Sleeping tablets can be habit-forming, can induce memory loss and sleepwalking – with some extreme stories of people waking up having been sleepdriving, with catastrophic results – and they can stay in the body longer than you might expect, affecting balance, alertness and reaction times the day after.[5] They are certainly not a performance enhancer in this sense.

A study in 2012 drawing the link between sleeping pills and mortality and cancer reported ‘substantially elevated hazards of dying compared to those prescribed no hypnotics’ – even in those who took relatively few tablets.[6] So are the risks worth it? A study of Z drugs – the group of hypnotics to which zolpidem belongs – reported an improvement of only twenty-two minutes on the length of time it took the subjects to get to sleep compared to a placebo.[7]

Drugs are not the answer to persistent sleeping problems. They are effective in helping short-term cases of insomnia, such as those caused by grief or similarly traumatic events, and the National Health Service in the UK recommends that they should be used in treatments only up to four weeks. However, Professor Kevin Morgan of Loughborough University’s Sleep Research Centre says, ‘Most clinical insomnias are chronic, so most of these drugs are prescribed for longer than they should.’

But why bother with a prescription? Many sleeping tablets are readily available online without need of one, which means people who are effectively self-diagnosing sleeping conditions are using powerful and potentially habit-forming drugs unsupervised by a medical professional. The UK Sleep Council Great British Bedtime Report in 2013 showed that, while one in ten people had consulted their doctor about sleeping problems, three times that amount had taken medication to help them sleep.

Here’s some very straightforward advice: stop using them. Right now. Unless you have a diagnosed sleeping or mental health condition and they are a necessary part of your treatment, they are doing you no good. They have the power to be psychologically addictive. They can form part of an unwanted pre-sleep routine in which the user has become so familiar with the habit of taking them before they go to sleep that they become convinced they can’t sleep without them. If they try to sleep without this crutch they’ve come to rely on, anxiety will strike and they’ll be kept awake by unhelpful thoughts, fuelling the idea that they’re reliant upon them.

One of the first jobs I will be tasked with at a sports club is to get performers off sleeping tablets. The doctor at the club might already have tried, with their words falling on deaf ears. But the doctor knows that they are taking a toll. ‘I need them. I can’t sleep the night before or after a game,’ might come the player’s reply.

‘Then don’t bother,’ I say. ‘If you can’t sleep, find other ways to recover. Meditate. Watch a highlights reel of your best moments in your sport. Use the time for other things.’

Watching themselves perform at their best can help settle some of the anxiety that might be preventing them from sleeping, giving them confidence for the upcoming performance. When Sir Steve Redgrave couldn’t sleep before he competed, it didn’t worry him. He’d still go out, row like a man possessed, finish first and then recover afterwards.

If you’re struggling to sleep, why not do something similar to give you a bit of confidence and feel better about things? You might not have a highlights reel to watch, but surely you can play something back in your head that you could draw confidence from. It’s got to be better than thinking about not sleeping. Get up, do something akin to another pre-sleep routine – meditate, listen to something relaxing on your headphones – and then see if you can aim to sleep at the start of another cycle (so if you’re struggling to sleep around 1 a.m. and your wake time is 6.30, either 2 or 3.30 would be the next natural entry point for sleep). Take control of your situation and make proactive steps to address it.

Rebecca at the start of the chapter used over-the-counter sleep aids to try to deal with her problem, the sales of which accounted for £44 million in the UK in 2015.[8] Over-the-counter aids, which often use antihistamines as the active ingredient, have limited use in isolation. The placebo effect – I’m taking a tablet therefore I can reduce my anxiety about sleep – can be powerful, as has been found in trials with more potent prescription aids, and many people are apt to forget the steps they take around using a sleeping aid for the first night or two. Having recognized that they need something to help them sleep, they will probably cut down on the unhelpful elements of their lifestyle that night such as drinking alcohol and being out late, maybe reducing their caffeine intake during the day. They might continue this for a night or two, and get some better sleep, but eventually, once they revert back to their usual lifestyle, the product will show itself to be nothing other than a short-term balm. A short-term balm can still be useful when used as part of a coordinated approach, of course, and they’re certainly not likely to cause the problems more potent prescription aids can. But if you want to see more regular results, the R90 program is a far more reliable long-term sleeping aid than any tablet.

Jet Lag

The first leg of my flight to Australia took off from Birmingham airport at 9 p.m. I had a meal, watched a movie, then pushed the button to turn my seat into a flatbed (business class was one of the perks of being flown out there for work) and I slept for the rest of the flight, touching down in Dubai at 7 a.m. local time. I stayed up for the day, met up with my friend Andy Oldknow,[9] who lives in Dubai, had an evening meal with him and then returned to the airport for the 2 a.m. flight on to Sydney. Thirteen hours later, having slept on the plane for a few hours, I landed in the evening. I arrived at my hotel, had something to eat, relaxed for a while and went to bed with the alarm set for the morning, as I had to be at a television studio for 11 a.m. I had been following a fairly normal routine, despite the jumps in time zones, and I went soundly to sleep that night.

In the morning I felt fine – not 100 per cent, of course, but then it’s a long time to spend travelling and there’s always going to be a bit of residual fatigue (long-distance travel in itself is tiring, especially spending several hours in a cramped space, and this can sometimes be difficult to differentiate from jet-lag symptoms). I arrived at the TV studio in good time while they were filming, and as I prepared for my piece, everything was OK … until I just completely shut down with the cameras on me. By the third take, I couldn’t even speak. Everything went fuzzy and felt out of kilter with what I would consider a normal version of reality. I could not push past it, so, having flown around the world to do this very piece of TV work, I had to go back to my hotel. How on earth did that happen?

When we travel a long distance rapidly east or west across time zones, our circadian rhythms struggle with being out of sync with the light–dark cycle of the new environment, and we experience jet lag. Evolution has yet to catch up with the invention of the jet engine.

Disrupted sleep patterns – trouble falling asleep and staying asleep – and enhanced daytime levels of fatigue are the usual signs of jet lag. We’re alert and then tired at all the wrong times while our body clock adapts. Matters are further complicated by the fact that, even once the master body clock in the brain has adjusted to the light–dark schedule, the individual clocks in our cells and organs controlled by our master clock all need to recalibrate.

The further you travel and the greater the time difference, the more acute the impact is likely to be. As a very rough rule of thumb, it is estimated that it takes a day for every hour’s difference to adjust, but it affects different people to different degrees. We could fly a squad of thirty football players out to the Far East for a pre-season promotional tournament, with all of them following the same regime and using the same interventions, and half the players might be fine to play the day after landing – while the others would be wiped out. The truth is that we can put steps in place to attempt to prepare us better for it, but it’s no guarantee we’ll be spared it. On my flight to Australia, I enjoyed the luxury of business class, so I was better able to sleep at the right times than I would have been in a crammed economy-class section, and I was able to bring all my experience in sleep to bear – yet still I crashed.

Those of us who have been on long-haul holidays are likely to have experienced jet lag, and it can disrupt the start of a holiday as well as our reintegration into our day-to-day life when we return home. When we’re on holiday, the symptoms might be unwelcome, but if we’re relaxing on a beach they aren’t going to cause too many problems. For people flying out on business or returning back to work after a holiday, however, the impact can be more damaging. The symptoms need to be managed.

The most effective treatment for jet lag is, of course, time. Athletes at the Rio Olympics didn’t fly in the day before their event, nor did any of the football teams arrive the day before their first match at the World Cup in Brazil in 2014. They flew in with plenty of time for their circadian rhythms to adjust to the local light–dark schedule. If you are able to fly out in advance of a meeting or have a day or two off from work after you return from your holiday, it would help, but the modern demands of business and the high value we place on our annual leave usually mean this isn’t an option.

In American sports leagues such as the NBA (National Basketball Association) and NFL (National Football League), teams have to travel across time zones within the USA for games (there is a three-hour time difference between LA and New York), so jet lag can become a factor in games where East Coast teams play West Coast rivals. Given the more regular demands of domestic league games compared to every-four-year events like the Olympics and the World Cup, time isn’t on their side, so they have to use other measures to combat it.

Some airlines have their own jet-lag apps or online advisers, which can be of help, but as ever, light is our most potent weapon. We can use light before, during and after our flight to reset our body clocks and help offset the effects of jet lag. Adopting a very simple pre-adaptation routine before you fly allows you to get a head start. If you are flying from New York to London, which means five time zones east (five hours ahead), you would need to move your body clock earlier to start matching the time zone at your destination. Travelling east is generally considered to be more difficult than travelling west, so some preparation is especially recommended when heading this way. You could start to move your wake time and sleep time earlier each day for a couple of days before, using light – either natural or from a daylight lamp – earlier in the morning and avoiding light and targeting an earlier sleep time that night.

The same logic would follow the journey in reverse (London to New York), with the journey west meaning you would use light for an hour in the evening to keep you awake longer, so you could target a later sleep time and a later wake time the following morning before your flight to move towards the time of your destination.

On the plane, use light if the daylight hours of your destination require it. While packing a daylight lamp in your carry-on isn’t an option, you could use a product such as Human Charger, a jet-lag aid which will give you light through your ear canals and won’t look any more conspicuous than it would if you were just listening to some music.

Adapting to the new destination is as much about avoiding light as it is about exposing yourself to it. Avoid light on the plane in accordance with the daylight hours of your destination – keep your window blind shut when it’s daylight outside if you’re able to, use eye masks or even sunglasses, which might draw some funny looks from fellow passengers (unless you’re in first class, in which case they’ll just assume you’re famous).

Once you’re at your destination, you can continue to phase in your adjustment by moving your clock earlier or later gradually each day, using sunglasses, blackout and staying indoors to avoid light, and getting daylight on you at the right times, though by this time you might just find it practical to adopt the daylight hours of your destination. If you have trouble sleeping at your destination and you get up during the night, avoid any activities that involve bright light, and similarly during the day make sure you get plenty of daylight on you and avoid sleeping the whole day in blackout. Having done some preparation work, the effects of jet lag shouldn’t be as severe or last as long.

Light is of particular benefit if we’re flying straight in for a meeting or event and we’re not able to phase in the changes to our body clocks. Its ability to boost mood and alertness means we can use daylight devices to give us a fix to get us through the main event, as well as controlled doses of caffeine, and if we crash after it’s all over, it isn’t so important. Light is a far more effective natural weapon against jet lag than overstimulating on caffeine and using sleeping tablets. Looking after yourself by staying hydrated and avoiding alcohol, which won’t really help you sleep, on the plane are important too.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) published results in 2015 showing that global passenger traffic had increased by 6.5 per cent over the year, so our demand for it certainly isn’t going away. If you’re a regular flyer, taking some steps to find what works for you means that jet lag doesn’t have to inhibit your performance, and even if you’re an infrequent flyer, being sharp back at work the day after you land is only going to be possible if you look after yourself when you travel.

If some of this advice sounds familiar, that’s because dealing with jet lag is very similar to what we do every day when we use light to reset our body clocks. It’s what PMer chronotypes do in their day-to-day lives to combat social jet lag. Light is the tool we can best use every day in our lives to regulate our sleep–wake cycles, whether or not we ever fly long haul.

The Night Shift

Think of shift workers and you’re likely to conjure up images of night shifts in a factory, doctors and nurses in a hospital, perhaps even bar staff and the changing patterns of their work. But technology and the culture of working late into the night means we’re all guilty of pulling the occasional night shift.

I have worked with a professional poker player who spends his nights online in high-stakes games. There’s a night shift that doesn’t immediately spring to mind. They have to manage the challenges of a daytime family life with their work, so in effect the challenge they face is just the same as that of the doctor, nurse or factory worker: how to manage a lifestyle that is completely at odds with our body clocks.

As we discussed all the way back in Chapter 1, being at war with our bodies in the long term can have serious repercussions, as Professor Russell Foster, Director of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford, says:

Disrupted sleep, such as in shift workers, can lead to a multitude of problems ranging across suppressed immunity, greater risks of cancer, an increased risk of coronary heart disease and even metabolic disorders such as diabetes II.

If you’re working at night, when your body naturally wants to produce melatonin and put you in a sleep state, you are bypassing the sleep window where urge and need collide. When you come home in the morning, with the sun up and your sleep pressure high but your circadian urge dipping, you are going to struggle to achieve the quality of sleep you would get at night. If we return to the circadian rhythms chart in Chapter 1, we can see the spectrum of functions your body naturally wants to do in harmony with the rising and setting of the sun. Working a night shift is certainly not on there.

When working nights, we effectively have to reset our body clock to work to the new time zone we find ourselves in, just as we would with jet lag. With the R90 program, we can look at using light in the form of daylight lamps and dawn simulators along with our windows of time – at night, the midday and early-evening slots, our ninety-minute breaks and our pre- and post-sleep routines – to adjust to our new timetable. For PM chronotypes, this shift is obviously going to be easier.

So, when we come in on a morning after a shift, we don’t go straight to bed. That’s not what people working in the day do. Instead, we would come home, have a meal (if we really want to adjust to nights, this would be a traditional evening meal, not breakfast), and make this time our ‘evening’. If you have children, you could spend some time with them before they go to school, maybe even do the school run, so you’re not becoming completely alienated from the daytime hours and your family life.

If you don’t have children, you could simply unwind as you would in the evening, watching some television, reading a book (a glass of wine might feel a little inappropriate at 8 a.m.). Get your pre-sleep routine started ninety minutes before your targeted sleep time, and it is here that blackout becomes even more important than it would at night. Just like a vampire, you need to keep the daylight out of your sleeping environment, and if possible, darken the room you’re spending your pre-sleep routine in, so your body feels that night is falling.

When you are sleeping during the day, it’s important to use the two CRP windows of midday (1–3 p.m.) and early evening (5–7 p.m.). Midday is especially important, as your circadian urge, mirroring the 2–3 a.m. period at night, is at its peak here. If you were able to, say, target a sleep time of 12.30 p.m., it would enable you to get to sleep and take advantage of this period. Getting five cycles in during the day is challenging, with broken sleep very common, but four from here, taking you through to 6.30 p.m., would allow you to use some of the early-evening slot.

The wake time in the evening should be constant too, and waking you with light is even more important than it is for a day worker. If your wake time is 6.30 p.m., it means it will be dark in winter, so you’re going to need that light – get a dawn-wake simulator. In summer, the bigger challenge is blocking the light out to sleep. As soon as you wake, get the blackout blinds or curtains open and get some daylight on you. Then go about your post-sleep routine: empty your bladder, fuel and hydrate, do some light exercise. Again, if you have children and/or a partner, you have a bit of time here to spend with them. You’re not entirely alienating yourself from day-to-day life.

Once you get to work, light is vital. Standard artificial light is too weak, so you need daylight lamps, if possible. Blue light isn’t so badly timed here, as it helps with the suppression of melatonin. You want to be awake at this time, after all.

The obvious window for a CRP is around 2–3 a.m., the time of deepest sleepiness for those on a daytime schedule. Use this for a thirty- or (if your job allows) ninety-minute cycle. Caffeine can be a powerful performance enhancer for night-shift workers, but remember that the daily limit still applies: 400 milligrams, and don’t forget the half-life of up to six hours. Shift workers are more likely to be at risk of obesity,[10] so diet and exercise are important, too.

Stick to this every day and, as you trick your body clock into adjusting to a new sleep–wake cycle, you might just feel, as you would when you adjust to a new time zone, you’ve cracked it by the end of the week. However, for many shift workers, this is when they try to revert to daylight hours to re-engage with family, friends and social opportunities. Even worse, for those on ever-changing patterns of shifts, they are effectively constantly changing to different time zones, so they’re always out of kilter with their surroundings.

Constantly making these adjustments is shown to have an impact on health. A study on over 70,000 night-shift working female nurses over a twenty-two-year period showed that those working rotating night shifts for over five years were more likely to die early, and more likely to do so through heart disease, while those working these shifts for over fifteen years had an increased chance of dying of lung cancer.[11]

This constant adjustment is clearly bad for our health, with those on rotating shifts demonstrating more problems than those who work nights permanently. While the R90 program can allow you to at least try to manage the difficulties inherent in shift work, in the long term there is a decision to be made: how long are you willing to carry on doing this? Five years? Ten? Your whole career? For many, there is little choice in the hours they work, but where there is the option, these are the kind of questions you will need to ask yourself sooner or later.

Even my client the professional poker player, who enjoys the benefits of working from home so that he can take a CRP at night when he wants (poker game permitting), and doesn’t have to travel, will have to make a decision eventually, as cheating the clock will take its toll. It always does.

The War on Winter

At the start of the chapter Rebecca was trying a new wake time of 5 a.m. With spring on its way and the clocks going forward in Britain on the last Sunday of March, the extra light and daylight hours would help Rebecca make this change more easily. But would she have been quite so keen on the idea if we had been talking in October, with winter on its way?

On the last Sunday of October every year, the clocks in Britain go back an hour (spring forward, fall back) to GMT, which, along with the already encroaching darker nights that winter brings, means that the evenings become darker still. Daylight saving in the summer was first introduced during the First World War in Britain, and there are plenty of supporters for the idea of remaining on this time all year round. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) estimates that the lighter evenings ‘would have the net effect of saving around 80 lives and 212 serious injuries a year’, and there would be an increase in leisure activities in the evening, helping to combat obesity, particularly in the young. Aligning the clocks with Central European Time would have benefits for Britain’s economy, and there would be environmental rewards too. It is also claimed that ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and sub-clinical depression, suffered by 500,000 people in the UK, would be reduced by this extra hour of accessible daylight’.

Seasonal Affective Disorder occurs when people with otherwise completely fine mental health suffer symptoms associated with depression at a regular, recurring period each year, usually winter. The truth is, almost all of us suffer some kind of what we like to call ‘the winter blues’. Mood and motivation tends to drop in winter, it seems more difficult to get up in the morning, it’s dark and cold, our eating habits can change to carbohydrate-heavy ‘comforting’ foods instead of the fresh salads and light meals of summer, and, when we look to the animal kingdom, the idea of hibernation doesn’t seem so bad. Indeed, many of us go through our own form of hibernation in the winter: going to work and coming home, staying in more in the evenings and at the weekends, doing less exercise because our mood and motivation are low. Television-viewing figures peak in the winter months.

Throughout my career in sport, I have yet to meet an athlete who isn’t affected by this change in season. There is an urge to slow down in activity, just as there is for those staying in and watching more television at home, but in sports like rugby and football, with a heavy winter calendar, this simply isn’t an option.

Aside from the cold weather, which can leave us unwilling commuters on a morning, the main obstacle we face in winter is the lack of light. Serotonin production can be disrupted, more melatonin might be produced and our body clock, which depends on light to set it, can be affected, throwing our circadian rhythms out of whack.

Dark evenings are obviously a big part of this. Rugby players and footballers tend to train outdoors (though they spend plenty of time indoors in the gym too), so they will get some daylight during the day, but most of us work indoors. In the summer, this is OK because we go home in daylight and we can spend our evenings outdoors. But in winter we work all day indoors and then go home in the dark.

Getting out into the daylight on a morning, when we have breaks and at lunchtime is essential at this time of year, even if it’s cold outside. Invest in daylight products to help. I introduce daylight lamps at the football and rugby clubs I work with, and you can do the same in your home and office.

You are likely to feel more fatigued in the dark evenings when you get home from work, so use the early-evening slot for a CRP. Have a fifteen-minute blast on a daylight lamp, either during or after your CRP, to give you a boost so you can make more of your evening.

Pester your HR department at work to provide you with a daylight desk lamp if you struggle in winter. Your colleagues won’t notice – they’ll just assume it’s another desk lamp – when you put it on during the mid-afternoon slump. Use your midday CRP. Your employers will enjoy the benefits of a happier, more productive employee.

Treat yourself to a product for your home, so you can enjoy the benefits of elevated mood and motivation, and you might find that reaching for the television remote isn’t your first instinct on an evening – maybe you will make it to the gym or to meet your friends for dinner after all.

Heads Up

Hollywood superstar Will Smith, decked out in a grey suit and sporting a Nigerian accent in his role as Dr Bennet Omalu in the movie Concussion, scribbles furiously on a whiteboard in an office with an audience of two other doctors. He describes the perils of a particular playing position with the objective logic his character’s medical expertise brings to the table, rather than a fan’s perspective: ‘It is an unremitting storm of sub-concussive blows. The head as a weapon on every single play of every single game and every single practice from the time he was a little boy to a college man, culminating in an eighteen-year professional career. By my calculations, Mike Webster sustained more than seventy thousand blows to his head.’

He talks of G-forces equivalent to the force of being hit on the head with a sledgehammer, Webster’s brain being choked and leaving him unrecognizable, even to himself. At the dramatic climax to the scene, Will Smith looks to the camera and delivers his line: ‘I don’t know football, I’ve never played, but I’m telling you, playing football killed Mike Webster.’

Dr Bennet Omalu is a Nigerian-American pathologist who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head,[12] in the former National Football League (NFL) player Mike Webster, who had struggled with mental illness before his death. While the NFL was slow to accept Omalu’s findings – and both the film and the book on which it is based detail his struggle – it has, in March 2016, at last admitted a link between American football and CTE. This could have huge ramifications not only for those retired from the game and playing now, but for the future of the sport, as parents already worried about the risk of physical injury now contemplate the very real threat of brain disease too for their children, the aspiring players of tomorrow.

American football isn’t the only sport in which this is being taken seriously. Boxing is a sport in which repeated blows to the head are almost the whole point of it – the aptly named dementia pugilistica, a type of CTE, was recognized long before Omalu’s discovery – and in the game of rugby, the nearest equivalent Britain has to American football, concussion and head injury issues are a hot topic. And this is partly why I’m getting involved in this sport.

I have worked with clubs and player welfare organizations in both codes of professional rugby in the UK – union and league. With the latter, I was contracted to coach all the players throughout the Super League, while in union I have done likewise with several clubs and the Rugby Players’ Association, as well as working with the England team, including advising them on recovery strategies during their tour of Australia in 2016, in which they made history by winning a series there for the first time.

While ‘the head as a weapon’ isn’t part of the game in the same way it is in the NFL, the collisions and the risk of head injuries and concussion very much are. As advances in sport improve, and the players use these gains to become quicker, fitter and stronger, so the hits just keep getting harder.

England rugby union player Alex Corbisiero, who took a year out of the game in 2016 during what should have been his peak years as a player, told the Guardian newspaper: ‘I was physically and mentally spent after ten years of full-time rugby. The intensity, the physicality, the injuries and the pressure I put on myself took its toll. I knew if I wanted to play rugby again I had to stop for a while.’

As is so common in modern professional sport, the schedules in the game are incredibly demanding, with many feeling that too many games are being packed into too tight a time frame, without the necessary scope for recovery. As Christian Day, the Rugby Players’ Association chairman, puts it: ‘Sooner or later, someone needs to say, “Look, we’re going to destroy these guys.” They’re going to retire by the time they’re thirty years old; they’re not going to be able to walk by the age of forty-five. I just hope someone at the top of the game is planning.’

I can’t change the nature of their sport – that is up to the administrators in the game, and, just like the NFL found, it is no easy feat when sponsorship and broadcast deals are involved. So while their playing and training schedules remain packed, and while the hits just keep coming at such a ferocious intensity, all I can do is show the players the R90 program and educate them on how they can manage their lives to recover more efficiently so that they’re not doing too much to exacerbate the problem. When it comes to the potential for long-term mental and physical repercussions from the sport, aggregating as many marginal gains as possible in taking care of their bodies and minds is all the players can really do to defend themselves, short of following Corbisiero’s lead and taking a sabbatical, which simply isn’t an option for most. It’s a short career, after all.

While cracking heads isn’t a workplace health risk for many of us, the mental side of things very much is. Stress, burnout, depression and anxiety are issues many of us face or might have experienced thanks to the frenetic pace of our lives, and diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia might be awaiting some of us further down the line, just like CTE for the American football players, if we don’t reform our approach to recovery.

Sleep and mental illness are inextricably linked. Depression and anxiety disorders include an element of sleep disruption – as do psychiatric illnesses like bipolar and schizophrenia – and, while professional athletes are fortunate in many respects that they often have first-rate medical staff on hand to turn to and to keep an eye on them, the sad fact is that there is still a great deal of stigma attached to admitting to mental health problems in sport and in society as a whole. Performers often hide their issues and struggle on, just as many people do in their jobs every day, without seeking the help they need.

While I can help a person manage their disrupted sleep through periods of anxiety and stress, when it comes to things like depression and mental illness, the right kind of medical help is required. Treating patients is, after all, what the clinical approach is for.

In many ways, our modern working practices can be traced back to the invention of the light bulb, which opened up the night to us. Now we’re in need of another light-bulb moment to redefine our approach to work and rest. Companies like Google are leading the way in wellbeing reforms and flexible working, but not all of us are lucky enough to work for such organizations, and that is why taking responsibility yourself and adopting the R90 program is so important if you want to manage the increasing demands of today’s world – and look after yourself in anticipation of tomorrow’s.

Ten

The Home Team

Sex, Partners and the Modern Family

The first time I went into Arsenal football club it was to address the whole squad about sleep and recovery. I had met Gary Lewin, the club’s physiotherapist, through working with the England team, and he had recommended me to the manager, Arsène Wenger.

While my involvement with Manchester United had happened quite organically and informally, with Sir Alex Ferguson’s openness to my speculative letter allowing me to help Gary Pallister out originally and then grow my role to work with the rest of the squad, I hadn’t really thought too much about where it was leading. But as I travelled down to London in an official capacity it clicked that I was about to become a sleep coach to the two biggest football clubs in England, as well as the national team. As I was really only at the beginning of my career in sport, with so much still to learn, the realization was an exciting one – but it made me a little nervous too, so I took my son James with me for support.

In a conference room in the club’s training ground at London Colney, near St Albans in Hertfordshire, in front of the whole first-team squad, Gary Lewin introduced me. I started my presentation, explaining to the players the techniques and relevant aspects of sleep that, although still raw, were the beginnings of the R90 program. About halfway through, I was demonstrating some products, when a couple of the young players asked if they could try one of the sleeping surfaces.

‘Sure,’ I said.

They must have thought, We’re going to have some fun with this. They both proceeded to get on the sleeping surface … and then they started mucking about as lads do, making almost everyone in the room erupt into laughter. My presentation threatened to descend into chaos, until a player stood up and said, ‘That’s enough!’

Everyone in the room stopped and looked towards him. ‘We’re here to listen,’ he said, ‘so let’s keep it quiet.’

Thank you, Thierry Henry.

Sex before the Big Game

Boxers might be warned to abstain the night before a fight, footballers before the match and a sprinter before the race, but there is conflicting evidence as to whether sex will inhibit performance. For some athletes it might even help. Do you abstain the night before a big event in your life?

This was something that always fascinated a close friend and colleague of mine, Nick Broad.[1] He was head of sports science at Chelsea Football Club, and he believed that sex could be used very effectively for a player with the right (personal) approach.

Good sex is an incredibly pleasurable and powerful way to reduce stress, anxiety and worry. It allows our minds to focus on an exciting and spontaneous action, losing ourselves in the moment. It can make us feel loved, wanted and secure. It’s a natural form of exercise – the more regular, the better – and its afterglow can provide a warm, relaxing sense of wellbeing, and, it seems particularly for men, the perfect platform to send some of us straight off to sleep.

Put like this, sex sounds like a pre-sleep routine we can all get on board with, but the idea of using it as any kind of routine is about as big a passion-killer as there is. Your bed is for sleeping first, and sex a close second, so don’t just confine your sex life exclusively to the bed. Use your imagination, keep things fresh and exciting, and allow your mind to make its strongest association between the bed and sleep. You can have sex anywhere (as long as it won’t land you in trouble).

Sex isn’t always good, either. One person in the couple may not always be in the mood, which can inspire feelings of rejection or pressure to perform, or one may be left dissatisfied by the end while the other drifts off carefree into sleep. Partners can be left anxious, unhappy and drained by sex, and it can take a toll on a relationship.

Then there is the question of it being physically draining. Unless you’re indulging in several hours of bedroom gymnastics which interfere with your targeted sleep cycles, it’s unlikely to have much of a physical impact. Clemens Westerhof, a Dutchman who achieved some success managing Nigeria’s football team, put it best when he said, ‘It’s not the sex which tires out young players. It’s the staying up all night looking for it.’

Perhaps the best question any of us should ask ourselves the night before a big event is what the effect is likely to be on us. If it’s the good sex, with the stress-busting, mood-boosting and relaxing benefits, then it is likely to give us some escape from the worries of the next day’s event and help put us in a better position to sleep and wake up revitalized. If it’s the bad kind, however, with anxiety keeping us up into the night, then it’s surely better to stick to the ‘no sex before the big game’ rule.

Perhaps the last word on the subject should come from someone with a broader sample size than many clinical trials are capable of producing – the legendary Manchester United footballer George Best. ‘I certainly never found it had any effect on my performance,’ he once said. ‘Maybe best not the hour before, but the night before makes no odds.’

Do You Come Here Often?

Where athletes will differ from the rest of us mere mortals after they’ve had sex the night before the big event is that, instead of turning over and going to sleep, they will get up and retire to a different room to spend the night in their personal single-sized sleep kit. Sex before a big game is all well and good, but compromising on recovery by having a partner lying next to you? Not an option even worth contemplating for many elite athletes. It’s all about recovery risk-management to them.

The role a regular partner can play in our sleep is huge. When we address each of the Key Sleep Recovery Indicators, we’re initially doing it only with ourselves in mind. But when I’m working with someone like Rebecca at the start of Chapter 9, whose partner is sleeping on the sofa bed while she tries to regain some control over her sleep, I know that, once she has achieved a kind of stability in her own routine on the blank canvas that is just her in the bed, I’m going to have to do a sleep profile with her partner, because who knows what they might be bringing back into the recovery room to cause problems.

After stress and worry, partner disturbance is the most common cause of disrupted sleep in the UK.[2] Snoring, apnoea (it’s usually a partner who notices this), duvet hogging, getting up in the night and fidgeting are all factors that a partner could be bringing to bed with them. But there are more subtle issues at play too that we might not have even considered before that can have an impact, such as different sleep and wake times. Getting into bed when a partner is already in there asleep can disturb them, just as the earlier riser can disrupt the sleep of the partner trying to lie in later.

‘Are you left- or right-handed?’ is a chat-up line unlikely to rival ‘Do you come here often?’ for popularity any time soon, but it will certainly have a big effect on your sleep if the relationship goes anywhere. When we fall asleep facing someone or spooning with them, no matter how loved-up we are, one of us will eventually ‘blink’ first and turn away from the other into our own personal space. We won’t even remember doing it, but breathing in someone else’s air is a disturbance, and we will move away intuitively.

Sleeping with someone has pre- and post-sleep benefits, but in an ideal world we would pre-sleep together then go into our own individual sleep rooms where we’d sleep undisturbed, get up and enjoy post-sleep fully recovered and happy to engage with our partners and our day. Sleeping separately is natural for us – we do it throughout our formative years. Perhaps the bedrooms of the future might include such a feature.

Our ideal sleeping position is foetal, lying on the non-dominant side (right-handers sleep on their left side and vice versa), which achieves the psychological reassurance of protecting the heart, organs and genitals with the stronger side. If you sleep alone it doesn’t matter where you sleep in the bed, but once a partner is involved it becomes more complicated. There is clearly a preferred side of the bed. If you stand at the foot of the bed, looking up towards it, then the right-hand side of the bed is the preferred position for the right-hander, and the left-hand side for the southpaw.

In these positions, both people are lying on the correct side of their body for sleep, and facing away from their partner, out into clear space, so there is no obstacle in front of them to disturb them. If you’re a left-hander and your partner is right-handed, you are made for each other in this sense.

But if both partners in the bed are either right- or left-handed, then one person is going to be sleeping on the wrong side of the bed for them. The right-hander on the left side or the left-hander on the right side will be facing into the bed, and into their partner’s back, exposing them to the possibility of more disturbance. And if they face out of the bed – if, for example, they ‘blink’ first having fallen asleep in a romantic embrace – they are sleeping on their dominant side. The non-dominant side of our body is less sensitive, so it’s easier for it to be in the same position all night throughout sleep.

So what’s the solution – trade in your partner for a more suitable one? Love is blind, so they say, and it certainly doesn’t pay heed to our dominant sides. Instead, be aware of which of you is sleeping on their wrong side and try to make things easier for that person. The biggest bed your recovery room can hold is paramount here (a super king is simply the minimum size for two adults), and if you toss and turn or get up during the night, be aware that your partner is likely to be facing towards you, and you’re more likely to disturb them.

Understanding just how much we can disturb our partner’s sleep allows us to adopt new philosophies when we’re doing things like looking at a new house to buy or rent. We prioritize the master bedroom size, making sure it will fit a super king bed. I’ve cooked in kitchens of all shapes and sizes and showered in small bathrooms, but with a partner in my life I need a bedroom that will hold a bed big enough for two adults to share.

When a big event is on the horizon – the marathon or triathlon you’re training for, the project you’re preparing or even the baby you’re expecting – you can also do what the athletes do and take your partner out of the equation. Move to the spare room or set up a temporary bed – an air bed, topper or sofa bed – in the living room. Pregnancy, particularly in the later stages, can cause a great deal of disturbance to the woman’s sleep, as she struggles to make herself comfortable during the night, and it can be beneficial for both the expectant mother and her partner to sleep separately. A super king might be a bed for two people – but three can be a crowd at this time.

When Roger Federer plays at Wimbledon it has been reported that he hires two houses next door to one another: one for his wife and children, and the other for his staff. He doesn’t sleep in the family house. The athletes I worked with prior to the Olympic Games in Rio in 2016 had their own portable R90 sleep kits so they had a single-sleeping option.

In this sense the bed becomes a kind of sanctuary for a couple to relax in, have sex in if they like, but at that moment when they turn over and go to sleep, the athlete gets out and retires to their sleep kit. It reduces the amount of potential disturbance to just what you bring to bed yourself, a marginal-gains approach to your event – and your relationship. So next time you read about a celebrity couple or hear about your friends sleeping in separate beds, don’t be so quick to judge. They might just be reaping the benefits of getting the best sleep possible, waking up refreshed and in a great mood, with their relationship stronger than ever.

The Family Way

When we’re expecting a child, modern medical technology can tell us all sorts of things, such as the sex and the potential for complications, conditions or disability – but it still can’t tell us what the baby is really going to be like. I have raised two children of my own, one of whom slept all the time and the other who screamed for three years straight – or at least that’s what it felt like.

If you’ve been applying the R90 program to your lives, if you use a correctly profiled sleep kit in the right recovery room and you have your constant wake time, know how to use CRPs and work in harmony with your circadian rhythms, chronotype and sleep cycles, then you have a good deal of preparation work already in place to deal with the disruption a newborn can potentially cause to your life. At least that’s the theory.

You have your 24-hour schedule anchored around your constant wake time, and you should stick to this wake time where possible. You have your midday and early-evening CRP windows, and you have your ninety-minute intervals of targeted sleep times at night. Once the baby arrives, the mother moves to a schedule based entirely around the baby’s, which essentially consists of sleep, wake, feed, bowel and bladder movement on repeat. The partner needs to share in this as much as possible, otherwise it can put extra pressures on the relationship, though the mother is biologically predisposed to waking at the sound of her baby’s cry.

So, with a constant wake time of 6.30 a.m. and a newborn waking at 2 a.m., you would get up, see to the baby, and, assuming you get him or her back to sleep, you now look at your sleep times instead of just going straight back to bed yourself. If you’ve been a parent yourself, you might well have experienced the feeling of going back to bed and finding you can’t sleep, maybe getting frustrated because you’re so exhausted from it all. Don’t waste your valuable time on this. If it’s 2.30 a.m., you target a 3.30 a.m. sleep time, so you do some pre-sleep routine-style activities – declutter, a bit of housework, meditate or even watch a bit of television – before you sleep. If you’re lucky enough to sleep through to your alarm, you get up at your usual wake time.

Don’t sleep during the day outside of the CRP windows if you can help it. If the baby goes to sleep at 1 p.m., do likewise – get a thirty- or ninety-minute cycle in. But don’t have two or three cycles, just because the baby is too. You don’t want to fight your body clock. Get up, do some positive things to catch up – laundry is a constant with a newborn, so put some washing on, tidy up, do a little something for yourself before the baby wakes again.

Eventually, if you’re lucky, the baby will develop patterns, and you can start to move your R90 program in accordance with this, try to slot in with their routine. You’ve got some control of your recovery during this period, while many other new parents are just floundering around and nodding off indiscriminately, lying in bed struggling to sleep at night and feeling like everything is out of their hands. There are plenty of books and advice forums telling you about what to do and look out for in terms of the baby, but not so much telling you how to look after yourself. With your R90 program, you can take control.

And if you’re not lucky? That’s OK too. I’ve experienced it both ways. If you’re repeatedly up during the night, sleep-deprived to what feels like the point of mania and finding yourself saying things in anger to your partner that you would never have dreamed of before, it’s nothing that other parents haven’t been through. Think of yourself in terms of the round-the-world sailor, getting by on thirty minutes’ sleep every twelve hours. Think of those that adopt the Uberman sleep schedule, in which extreme polyphasic sleepers have a twenty-minute nap every four hours – only two hours of sleep in total per day.

We are incredibly robust creatures when it comes to dealing with lack of sleep, and, unlike many of the things we do today that deprive us of sleep, evolution has hardwired us to cope with raising a child. Try your best to keep in harmony with your R90 program, try to maintain a reasonable diet and look after yourself, even if that just means little breaks here and there, in tandem with your partner, and don’t be too hard on yourself or your partner when you can’t stick to the R90 or when you’re operating on only a couple of cycles a night. It isn’t for ever. It will get easier as they get older.

‘Lazy’ Teenagers

Children grow up. Newborns soon develop their own circadian rhythms and adjust to the light–dark cycle (it’s just dark in the womb). The National Sleep Foundation in the USA recommends fourteen to seventeen hours of sleep per day for a newborn, but this amount decreases as they get older, with nine to eleven hours the recommendation by the time they start school and, once they hit fourteen, eight to ten hours is advised.

Taking your own sleep seriously is, ultimately, an informed decision of your own to make. You can read this book, make up your mind about what you take from it and hopefully apply as much as you can to your own life. When it comes to children, however, there isn’t a decision to be made: you must take their sleep seriously.

Sleep is vital for a child’s development. Their body and mind need plenty of it to grow properly. Ensuring they have the right quantity and quality of sleep involves introducing some of the measures we’ve talked about so far – such as providing a suitable sleeping environment and some kind of pre- and post-sleep routines which they will come to associate with going to sleep and starting the day, and making sure they’re not overstimulating (on sugar, in this case, not caffeine) – as well as some that don’t apply quite so much to adults, such as a regular sleep time.

The R90 is a great way to ensure that you can adjust your sleep and wake times to fit into the hours your children require. It provides confidence and flexibility if circumstances dictate a change, and it helps engage parents and children together in becoming more sleep aware. Spot your child’s chronotype early so that when they are at school they know when their best time to study is, an empowering piece of awareness to take through their education and then into the workplace. If your children grow into being sports fans you can even tell them you take tips from the sports sleep coach – who shows their heroes how to do it.

However, the R90 program is not for children to use. Don’t try to limit or restrict their time, just put everything in place for them to be able to get plenty of good-quality sleep with as little interference as possible, and let them get on with what comes naturally. Most children are good sleepers, and you can educate them about everything you’ve put in place to help them when they get older.

Once they reach adolescence, things get more complicated. Teenagers still need a lot of sleep, particularly because during sleep they release the hormone that produces the growth spurt they experience during this time. Unfortunately, getting enough sleep is complicated by biological factors – and increasingly by social and technology temptations.

No matter what their chronotype is before their adolescence, when they reach puberty the biological changes in their bodies cause their circadian rhythms to shift. They start producing melatonin later at night, and so they naturally want to go to bed later and, given that they need more sleep than an adult, they will want to lie in the following morning. It’s time to cut teenagers some slack – they sleep in because that’s what their bodies want them to do.

However, an early start at school or college gets in the way of that. The school timetable conflicts with a teenager’s natural rhythms. A 2008 study comparing sleeping habits in students on school days and on holiday showed that ‘with the impact of school schedule, students accrued a significant sleep debt, obtaining insufficient sleep for their needs and reporting lowered mood and daytime functioning’.[3] The students were, of course, sleeping in at the weekend.

This delaying of the body clock is exacerbated by the social opportunities that open up for teenagers. Many of them want to be out later with their friends in the evening, not cooped up at home. Any parent who has raised a child through adolescence will be familiar with this, but it’s only those doing it now or in recent times who will be familiar with the added problems technology poses.

Even if a teenager goes to their room at a reasonable hour, the multitude of options technology presents them with means they might decide to play video games or engage with social media on their devices late into the night. We have already discussed the impact blue light exposure from this technology can have, potentially suppressing melatonin production and making it harder to go to sleep, but there is also the addictive nature of video games and social media to take into account. If a teenager isn’t sleepy because of their shifted rhythms, saving the world and blowing up bad guys on a video game is an enticing entertainment option, with the heightened alertness and adrenaline they will experience from playing it keeping them up even longer and ensuring that, when the alarm goes in the morning for school, possibly after they’ve fallen asleep with the technology still on, they are not going to be at their best for their morning lessons.

This is the ‘junk sleep’ that Professor Idzikowski talks about, in which neither the quality nor duration of sleep required are achieved. In adolescents this can severely stymie their development and education, affect their mood and concentration and could have a long-term impact on their health (mental and physical) and weight.

An Australian study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2016 concluded that ‘video games and online social media were risk factors for shorter and poorer sleep, whereas time with family was protective of sleep duration’.[4]

If only the answer was as simple as to tell adolescents to turn off the tech and spend more time with the family. While it is unfair to tar all teenagers with the same brush, as many will heed the advice and be aware of the damage it could be having on their education and development, those of us who have raised teenagers or indeed remember being teenagers ourselves will know that, quite often, any such well-meaning advice from a parent can fall on deaf ears. However, a parent should attempt to find some way to manage an adolescent’s tech use before sleep, whether that’s through agreeing to a deal whereby they don’t play their video games after a certain time at night or removing the technology from the bedroom altogether. Asking a teenager to hand over their smartphone, however, might be a trickier proposition, so good luck with that.

Adolescents simply aren’t getting enough sleep on school nights, and the perfect storm of their hormonally shifted rhythms, social opportunities and technology alongside the time school starts is to blame. So what if we were able to allow teenagers more time in bed on a school-day morning?

Moving the school and college start times for teenagers to 10 a.m. would provide a timetable with the needs of the students in mind rather than those of parents and teachers. No more 9 a.m. classes or exams would mean that teenagers would no longer be expected to perform at a time that was at odds with their body clocks, and it would cut down their sleep deprivation too.

Tomorrow’s First Team

I work with a lot of teenagers in sport: the potential Olympians of tomorrow and the youth squads and young players at football clubs in particular. I see first-hand the impact their shifted body clocks and technology has on them, and it is around this age, in the mid-teens, with the demands of their sport and lifestyle making time a precious commodity to them, that they can start using the R90 program, albeit in a format that looks at six cycles rather than five as ideal.

A swimming star of the future has to be at school at 9 a.m. just like any other teenager, but they have to fit in their hours at the pool either before or after school. How is that impacting on their need for a good amount of sleep for their development and recovery every day? Starting school at 10 a.m. would give them a bit more leeway; changing the clocks in the UK to remain on summer time all year round would give them lighter evenings after school in the winter. It’s not just athletes that would benefit: young people are generally more likely to do leisure activities when it’s light.

At the academies of football clubs I see teenagers from all walks of life. Some of them don’t have the parental figures at home to instil discipline about sleep and recovery, how they need it even more than those playing in the first team if they want a good future in the game. They’re up late at night, playing video games, hanging out with their friends and certainly not sleeping for six cycles at night. It’s going to have serious consequences if they don’t sort it out. With the R90 program, they can use a redefined approach to sleep in today’s world, using technology as a positive tool and seeing a way to recover that can be flexible and engaging for them. It’s up to me to really get through to them and instil some trust in them – and it’s up to them to be disciplined about it too, because ultimately it’s about developing the tools to manage your recovery yourself.

Top footballers are often accused of living in a bubble, up in their ivory towers, but what choice do they really have? Whereas once a footballer would have to keep an eye out for the paparazzi if they were on holiday or having an evening out, now, thanks to the cameras on our phones, everyone is a potential paparazzo. They’re paranoid and cut off because they have to be – they can’t afford to put a foot wrong in public. I’ve seen the toll this can take on young players struggling to adjust to it. Some of them can’t manage it. Awww, you might think, they get paid well enough to put up with it. But money doesn’t give you immunity from depression and anxiety disorders.

Technology has created a bubble for normal teenagers to live in too, doing much of their social interaction on their phones indoors at home. I’ve known teenagers not have a clue as to which shops are on their high street because they don’t need to – they can get everything they need brought to their lap from their phone. Including knowledge, which must leave some of them wondering, What do we need school and teachers for?

The changes technology has brought to our society have brought with them huge benefits, but we need to be careful with it, especially as regards young people. A Microsoft consumer insights report in Canada claimed that the average human attention span decreased from twelve seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2013. Of the eighteen- to 24-year-old Canadians they questioned, 77 per cent said that they reach for their phone when nothing else is occupying their attention, and 73 per cent said that the last thing they do before going to bed at night is check their phone.

We haven’t seen any clinical data about the long-term effects of a lifetime of this kind of technology use because we haven’t had it for the long term. The generations growing up now will be the first to have this for a lifetime, and we can already see the impact it is having on their sleep. As parents, we must do what we can to limit its use – just as we should try to do the same in our own lives.

I have universities and schools getting in touch with me now, asking me to come in and speak to students, because they are starting to see there’s a problem. They want to do something about it.

With Southampton Football Club, I helped implement a top-down scheme in which everyone from the manager and his staff down to the youth squad took part in the program. Club doctor Steve Baynes, who is a former Team Sky doctor, instigated the project, which continues today, even though the managers change. Southampton have a proven track record of producing talented young players through their youth system who go on to play in the first team, often for their national teams, and sometimes they go on to play for the biggest clubs in the world. Real Madrid and Wales star Gareth Bale is one such product of Southampton’s youth system. England internationals Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain are just a few of the others.

Southampton are a club who take the future of their young people very seriously indeed. If we want to produce the engineers, athletes, scientists, writers and the great talent of tomorrow, we need to do likewise and start taking seriously the rest and recovery of our young people.

Your Personal Best

Standing with my son James and my family in the crowd in the Estádio da Luz in Lisbon, watching England play France at the 2004 European Championship football tournament, was a wonderful moment for me. England were playing well and winning 1–0, the atmosphere was electric, my family was next to me and I’d contributed in my own way to it all – I’d worked with the squad and all the players had slept on my kit. I’d been tucking the Three Lions up in bed every night, as the media might once have said.

What does pride come before? By the end of the match, France’s captain and star player, Zinedine Zidane, had scored two late goals to win the game and spoil the party. Same old England. But for a moment there – wow …

In only a few years since I’d first asked the question of Sir Alex Ferguson and, by association, the whole of sport, I’d found myself in a place I could never have imagined. Asking that question changed my career and it certainly changed my life, and I have been privileged to help change the lives of others as I’ve done so.

In the years after 2004 I would continue to ask the question, and work with exceptional athletes across all sports, from rugby to cycling and everything in between, as well as with tomorrow’s star performers.

I’m still asking the question now – still knocking on doors and trying to find answers. It’s why athletes and teams looking for the ultimate legal performance enhancer are getting in touch. It’s why schools and universities, big business and ordinary people who want to change their lives are calling me. It’s why I’m having conversations with people like Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post and leader of her own sleep revolution, and being invited to speak at former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg’s global summit for leaders of major cities.

Because they’re all asking the question now, and you should be too: What are we doing about our sleep?

What are we doing about this process of mental and physical recovery? How are we going to change our approach to something we can no longer afford to take for granted? The potential consequences are severe and potentially fatal – cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart disease – and capable of casting you as a shadow of your former self in the form of depression, anxiety, burnout and Alzheimer’s. Depression kills, particularly in young men – the kind I see in academies up and down the country.

It doesn’t have to be this way. With the R90 program you can redefine your approach to sleep just like the athletes and teams I work with, who bring home trophies and gold medals. You will see your mood, motivation, creativity, memory, energy levels and alertness skyrocket. Your work, relationships and family life will be enriched beyond measure because you’ll be setting your own personal bests, time and time again.

It starts with you, but this is a team sport. You must then ask the question of your family, your children, your workplace and your friends. Together, we can make it a huge cultural shift, a redefined approach so that the process of recovery joins exercise and diet as a three-pronged assault on bad living.

Forget about sleep as you knew it. The process of recovery is on a 24-hour ticking clock, a constant rhythm that we all need to learn to groove with. Starting today doesn’t mean when you go to bed tonight. It means right now.

So what are you waiting for?

Notes

Introduction: Don’t Waste Your Valuable Time Sleeping

1. O. M. Buxton, S. W. Cain, S. P. O’Connor, J. H. Porter, J. F. Duffy, W. Wang, C. A. Czeisler, S. A. Shea, ‘Adverse metabolic consequences in humans of prolonged sleep restriction combined with circadian disruption’, Science Translational Medicine, 11 April 2012.

2. L. Xie, H. Kang, Q. Xu, M. J. Chen, Y. Liao, M. Thiyagarajan, J. O’Donnell, D. J. Christensen, C. Nicholson, J. J. Iliff, T. Takano, R. Deane, M. Nedergaard, ‘Sleep drives metabolite clearance from the adult brain’, Science, 18 October 2013.

3. UK Sleep Council statistics.

1. The Clock is Ticking: Circadian Rhythms

1. Sleep Council Great British Bedtime Report, 2013.

2. National Sleep Foundation International Bedroom Poll, 2013.

3. S. A. Rahman, E. E. Flynn-Evans, D. Aeschbach, G. C. Brainard, C. A. Czeisler, S. W. Lockley, ‘Diurnal spectral sensitivity of the acute alerting effects of light’, Sleep, February 2014.

2. Running Fast and Slow: Chronotype

1. https://www.bioinfo.mpg.de/mctq/core_work_life/core/introduction.jsp

2. Till Roenneberg, Tim Kuehnle, Peter P. Pramstaller, Jan Ricken, Miriam Havel, Angelika Guth, Martha Merrow, ‘A marker for the end of adolescence’, Current Biology, Volume 14, Issue 24, 29 December 2004.

3. D. H. Pesta, S. S. Angadi, M. Burtscher, C. K. Roberts, ‘The effects of caffeine, nicotine, ethanol, and tetrahydrocannabinol on exercise performance’, Nutrition and Metabolism, December 2013.

4. M. S. Ganio, J. F. Klau, D. J. Casa, L. E. Armstrong, C. M. Maresh, ‘Effect of caffeine on sport-specific endurance performance: a systematic review’, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, January 2009.

3. A Game of Ninety Minutes: Sleeping in Cycles, Not Hours

1. M. P. Walker, T. Brakefield, A. Morgan, J. A. Hobson, R. Stickgold, ‘Practice with sleep makes perfect: sleep-dependent motor skill learning’, Neuron, 3 July 2002.

2. E. Van Cauter, L. Plat, ‘Physiology of growth hormone secretion during sleep’, Journal of Pediatrics, May 1996.

3. D. J. Cai, S. A. Mednick, E. M. Harrison, J. C. Kanady, S. C. Mednick, ‘REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 23 June 2009.

4. T. Endo, C. Roth, H. P. Landolt, E. Werth, D. Aeschbach, P. Achermann, A. A. Borbély, ‘Selective REM sleep deprivation in humans: effects on sleep and sleep EEG’, American Journal of Physiology, 274 (1998).

4. Warming Up and Cooling Down: Pre- and Post-Sleep Routines

1. Great British Sleep Survey, 2012.

2. Matthew P. Walker, ‘Sleep-dependent memory processing’, Harvard Review of Psychology, September–October 2008.

3. ‘Characteristics of Home Workers’, Office for National Statistics, 2014.

5. Time Out!: Redefining Naps – Activity and Recovery Harmony

1. Jeff Warren, ‘How to sleep like a hunter-gatherer’, Discover, December 2007.

2. O. Lahl, C. Wispel, B. Willigens, R. Pietrowsky, ‘An ultra short episode of sleep is sufficient to promote declarative memory performance’, Journal of Sleep Research, March 2008.

3. M. R. Rosekind, R. M. Smith, D. L. Miller, E. L. Co, K. B. Gregory, L. L. Webbon, P. H. Gander, J. V. Lebacqz, ‘Alertness management: strategic naps in operational settings’, Journal of Sleep Research, December 1995.

4. http://swampland.time.com/2011/04/26/memo-to-the-boss-naps-increase-performance/

5. A. Brooks, L. Lack, ‘A brief afternoon nap following nocturnal sleep restriction: which nap duration is most recuperative?’ Sleep, June 2006.

6. K. Anders Ericsson, Neil Charness, Paul J. Feltovich, Robert R. Hoffman, The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

7. ‘Sleep-related Crashes on Sections of Different Road Types in the UK (1995–2001)’, Department for Transport, 2004.

8. ‘Advanced Driver Fatigue Research’, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) of the US Department of Transportation (USDOT), 2007.

9. Ericsson, et al., Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.

7. Recovery Room: The Sleeping Environment

1. A. Thompson, H. Jones, W. Gregson, G. Atkinson, ‘Effects of dawn simulation on markers of sleep inertia and post-waking performance in humans’, European Journal of Applied Physiology, May 2014; V. Gabel, M. Maire, C. F. Reichert, S. L. Chellappa, C. Schmidt, V. Hommes, A. U. Viola, C. Cajochen, ‘Effects of artificial dawn and morning blue light on daytime cognitive performance, well-being, cortisol and melatonin levels’, Chronobiology International, October 2013.

2. Ofcom Communications Market Report, 2011.

8. A Head Start: Using Your R90 Recovery Program

1. R. H. Eckel, J. M. Jakicic, J. D. Ard, J. M. de Jesus, N. Houston Miller, V. S. Hubbard, I. M. Lee, A. H. Lichtenstein, C. M. Loria, B. E. Millen, C. A. Nonas, F. M. Sacks, S. C. Smith Jr, L. P. Svetkey, T. A. Wadden, S. Z. Yanovski, ‘2013 AHA/ACC guideline on lifestyle management to reduce cardiovascular risk: a report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force on Practice Guidelines’, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 1 July 2014.

2. F. P. Cappuccio, D. Cooper, L. D’Elia, P. Strazzullo, M. A. Miller, ‘Sleep duration predicts cardiovascular outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies’, European Heart Journal, 7 February 2011.

3. G. Howatson, P. G Bell, J. Tallent, B. Middleton, M. P. McHugh, J. Ellis, ‘Effect of tart cherry juice (Prunus cerasus) on melatonin levels and enhanced sleep quality’, European Journal of Nutrition, December 2012.

4. P. D. Loprinzi, B. J. Cardinal, ‘Association between objectively-measured physical activity and sleep’, Mental Health and Physical Activity, December 2011.

5. Parks Associates figures.

9. Sleeping with the Enemy: Sleep Problems

1. Not her real name or identity: all my clients remain anonymous and their details confidential.

2. Chris Idzikowski, Sound Asleep: The Expert Guide to Sleeping Well, Watkins Publishing, 2013.

3. ‘Global Market Study on Sleep Aids’, Persistence Market Research, July 2015.

4. US National Center for Health Statistics.

5. N. Gunja, ‘In the Zzz zone: the effects of Z-drugs on human performance and driving’, Journal of Medical Toxicology, June 2013.

6. D. F. Kripke, R. D. Langer, L. E. Kline, ‘Hypnotics’ association with mortality or cancer: a matched cohort study’, British Medical Journal Open, February 2012.

7. T. B. Huedo-Medina, I. Kirsch, J. Middlemass, M. Klonizakis, A. N. Siriwardena, ‘Effectiveness of non-benzodiazepine hypnotics in treatment of adult insomnia: meta-analysis of data submitted to the Food and Drug Administration’, British Medical Journal, December 2012.

8. Dawn Connelly, ‘Sales of over-the-counter medicines in 2015 by clinical area and top 50 selling brands’, Pharmaceutical Journal, 24 March 2016.

9. Andy was a Football Association sponsorship executive back in 1998 who called me to sort out some better bedding for the England squad at the 1998 World Cup in France. He still claims to this day that he started my career in sport.

10. A. W. McHill, E. L. Melanson, J. Higgins, E. Connick, T. M. Moehlman, E. R. Stothard, K. P. Wright Jr, ‘Impact of circadian misalignment on energy metabolism during simulated nightshift work’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2 December 2014.

11. F. Gu, J. Han, F. Laden, A. Pan, N. E. Caporaso, M. J. Stampfer, I. Kawachi, K. M. Rexrode, W. C. Willett, S. E. Hankinson, F. E. Speizer, E. S. Schernhammer, ‘Total and cause-specific mortality of US nurses working rotating night shifts’, American Journal of Preventative Medicine, March 2015.

12. B. I. Omalu, S. T. DeKosky, R. L. Minster, M. I. Kamboh, R. L. Hamilton, C. H. Wecht, ‘Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a National Football League player’, Neurosurgery, July 2005.

10. The Home Team: Sex, Partners and the Modern Family

1. I first met Nick when he was working as a nutritionist at Blackburn Rovers FC with former Manchester United physiotherapist Dave Fevre. Nick then got me in to do some work with the squad when he was at Chelsea, and Carlo Ancelotti was the manager. Nick followed Carlo, who regarded him very highly, when he moved to Paris Saint-Germain. Sadly, Nick lost his life in tragic circumstances in France.

2. Sleep Council Great British Bedtime Report, 2013.

3. S. Warner, G. Murray, D. Meyer, ‘Holiday and school-term sleep patterns of Australian adolescents’, Journal of Adolescence, October 2008; 31, 5.

4. E. Harbard, N. B. Allen, J. Trinder, B. Bei, ‘What’s Keeping Teenagers Up? Prebedtime Behaviors and Actigraphy-Assessed Sleep Over School and Vacation’, Journal of Adolescent Health, April 2016; 58, 4.

Acknowledgements

When I decided to start a family, I thought it was a good time to call it a day on trying to make it as a professional golfer and so I joined the family furniture business. I could never have imagined back then that one day I would be asked by one of the leading international publishers to write a book about sleep.

So a big thank you has to go out to everyone at Penguin who played a part, with special thanks to Joel Rickett for supporting my approach and the need for a change in the way we look at sleep, and to Julia Murday for being so enthusiastic about the book and its contents, and putting together a launch programme more fun than expected for the world of sleep.

Special thanks too go to my ghostwriter Steve Burdett, who has taken all my experiences and encapsulated my passion to create a unique story about sleep that I hope will provoke comment and, most of all, redefine the approach of those who read it.

Thanks also to Patrick McKeown for giving up his time to talk about breathing, and to Rob Davies, a breathing-product innovator.

Just some of the people from my industry years need a mention: Peter Buckley, Morgan McCarthy, Patrick Newstead, the late Roger Head, Pam Johnson, Mark Bedford, Jeff Edis and Alan Hancock. John Hancock and Jessica Alexander were instrumental in creating the first ever UK Sleep Council, where I met my sleep mentor, Chris Idzikowski.

Sir Alex Ferguson, for his foresight way back in the late nineties, Dave Fevre, Lyn Laffin, Andy Oldknow of the FA, Gary Lewin, Rob Swire and my dear friend the late Nick Broad, all contributed to, if not kick started, what has become my new career.

I had some of my best times developing a sleep retail business based in the heart of a resurgent Manchester, which provided some real city-living challenges that very much informed the R90 program, so thanks to Chris Lloyd, Howard and Judith Sharrock, Dave Simpson, Anna Litherland, Steve Silverstone, Brian McCall, Richard Locket, the late John Spencer, Flik Everett, Andy Nichol, Simon Buckley, Claire Turner, Kate Drewett, Roberto Simi, Zoe Vaughan Davies, Coby Langford, Darryl Freedman, Jason Knight and John Quilter, plus so many more.

It was during this time that a new Communications Director joined Manchester United and chose to move to the same Northern Quarter street as my first shop. We remain friends to this day. Thank you for all your support: Phil Townsend and brother John.

A couple of other key Manchester moments really helped define the work I do today. The first came in 2009–10 when I got involved with British Cycling and the birth of Team Sky, whose success stories are clear for all to see, and never more so than over the summer of 2016, running into and during the Rio Olympic Games. So special thanks to Sir Dave Brailsford, Matt Parker, Phil Burt and Dr Steve Baynes. The second key moment was consulting on Manchester City’s new state-of-the-art training facility, so big thanks to Sam Erith for his support.

Without the support of my R90 product supply partners behind the scenes, I wouldn’t have been able to complete many of my projects, so thanks to Icon Designs, Trendsetter, Acton & Acton and Breasley.

For the future, thanks to Michael Torres of Shift Global Performance, my USA R90 partner, for all his and his team’s support.

Of course, big thanks to my family, who have had to listen to endless talk about sleep. Perhaps, given that my father invented petrol injection and travelled the world with his job in international motor racing, I should have been a racing driver, which might have made for more interesting conversation for them. But as new grandchildren appear and my family grows, my hope is that they’ve been listening to at least some of what I’ve been saying.

THE BEGINNING

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PENGUIN LIFE

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First published 2016

Copyright © Nick Littlehales, 2016

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-97598-5