Gooday, thanks for joining us on the body and soul podcast called Healthy Ish. I'm your host of Felicity Harley. How did you sleep last night? Were you really hot? Perhaps you are hungover? Perhaps he had a late night. Well, my guest today is going to help you manage all of the above. I'm joined by Nicole Moyan. She's the director of science and clinical Research at eight Sleep and
holds her PhD in physiology from Stanford University. She's also worked at various health tech companies like Fitbit and Whoop, so she knows a lot about sleep and she's going to help us manage our sleep quality and our quantity during the festive season. And also she gives some great tips on how to set up your room for the hot summer nights. Make sure you're listening to our sister podcast, Extra healthy Ish, where we talk more about circadian rhythms
and the key factors affecting sleep. You can grab that one wherevergy podcasts. Nicole, Nice to have you joining us from the US. How are you?
Thanks for having me. I'm doing well. How are you?
Yeah? I'm good well, actually, thankfully I had a good night sleep last night. How about you did you, yes, I did. Actually, as a sleep researcher, do you feel, you know, pressure to have a good night sleep or how's your how do you feel about approaching your night sleep?
I feel since working out of sleep Company, I feel much more aware of my sleep, and I think also we're constantly looking at our own data as well and talking about it, so then you're you're it's the first thing that you look at in the morning and the first thing you reflect on and think about. So it's definitely changed my perspective. But I don't know if I feel pressure to have a good night sleep. I just know that it's essential to performing well the next day.
Do you have any non negotiable habits when it comes to sleep that perhaps you didn't have four and now you actually you know in your job you're more focused on.
Yeah, there's like what I've really noticed in tracking my data is that if I'm more of like an early bedtime, early riser person, and I would try to stay up with other people but then still be up early, and it just I finally realized from looking at my data that if I don't go to sleep like between nine and ten, I usually miss my a good chunk of deep sleep, and I don't seem to recover that later in the night. Even if I sleep later in the morning, I just miss it, and so I have like I
just it's a bad night of sleep for me. So now I've been a lot stricter about like, Okay, I need to go to sleep at nine pm, even though it feels really early a.
Lot of times, what time do you get out of bit.
Between five and six?
So it's absolutely yeah.
Yeah, so that's been my like my newer non negotiable.
Yeah, talk to us about managing slight during this particular time of year, because li's light not I mean, you do want to hang out with friends, you might have a few drinks, then you're sleeping. What do you how do we do? How do we manage?
Yeah? I think it's tricky and it depends on the person and what their holiday festivities look like. I don't know if you're familiar with the term social jet lag that's come Yeah, you've heard of it. Okay, it's come about in the last couple of years where if you know your body is really needs this specific rhythm. We're like, we pretend like we're not like little kids, but we really do better on a schedule, just like little kids do.
And if we keep that schedule, our body becomes very attuned to it, and all the functions within your body work really well, your circuitian rhythm. And the second we try to deviate from that, all these things in your body change, right and trying to adapt to it. And
so that's true for sleep. So if you stay up one to two hours later, it's almost like you traveled time zones to a new place, which is why they call it social jet lag, because now you're trying to stay up later, but then you're still your body is still on a different time zone. So that's one thing that can if you can try to instead of staying up late, if you're not a late night person, meet people for coffee or a run or something during the
day so you can kind of keep your routine. That's helpful. Easier said than done. Alcohol You've probably heard most of them, but try to mix a drink of water with a drink of a glass of wine or a beer, and then having electrolytes can really help you. So drinking electrolytes before you go to sleep and then potentially when you wake up as well, because alcohol dehydrates you. That can really help. And then eating before you drink too can be helpful to help absorb that alcohol.
Can we just go back to the first one. I want to ask you a question about that that's really interesting. So our body basically can get used to a certain time frame as to how we sleep or routine and schedule. Yeah, and how quickly does it fall apart? Is it after? You know, if you have one light night on a Thursday and one late night on a Friday, is that is the weekend gone basically? Or And how long does it take to recover?
Yeah, So there's there's some research showing that even just one hour of sleep debt. So if you're off by one hour, let's say you stay up an hour later and you wake up at your normal time, so you lose an hour of sleep that night, it can take up to four days to recover that one hour of sleep debt, So it can it can add up pretty quickly. So yeah, to answer your question, it just depends on the person and whether you can recover that leak with
a nab or something else. But generally it compounds pretty fast.
What about sleep ins? Are they useful? Can they be more detrimental. You know, if you do have a late night and you want to sleep, you better just you know, you automatically wake up at say six thirty, if that's what time you would, and you know often you're well myself, well like okay, just try and go back to sleep, and then I do, and then I wake up at
eight thirty? Is can that be more detrimental? You better get am I better getting up at six thirty and just getting on with my day even though I might feel like crap.
Yeah, I think no, if you're going to feel like crap, I think sleep in and getting that extra sleep is good, right, But in general, trying to keep your body on that same rhythm, it is going to be really helpful.
Yeah. Rhythm is based now down here in Australia, not where you are in Chicago. It's pretty damn hot right now, and I think that can be well, that can break heavic on you sleep at night. Talk to us about optimal sleeping temperatures and how we can things we can do to sleep better in the heat.
Yeah. So this is a great question, and there's a lot of research showing that sleeping in the heat is actually much worse for you than sleeping in the cold. And I think a lot of that is because after a certain point, you can't like remove more clothing or bedding, you're kind of stuck, Whereas when it's cold you can
keep adding more layers or more blankets. And so generally that there's a wide range of comfortable temperatures from seventeen C all the way to twenty eight C. Twenty eight C is like if you have no clothing and bedding, that is deemed to be the comfortable temperature if you're
sleeping naked, and there's studies doing that there. So fourteen to nineteen C is pretty comfortable if you are where like normal bedding clothing, having light layers is going to be helpful for you to regulate temperature throughout the night. And there's actually research since you're in Sydney, coming out
of University of Sydney from Olliej's lab. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he's really working on climate change and heat related topics, and he's shown that having a pedestal or ceiling fan in the room can actually, like on medium setting, can really help you stay cool and you can keep you from using the AC until you reach about twenty six twenty seven C. So instead of using the AC earlier in the night, you can turn on a fan that will help you stay cool
as well. And then of course there's how heat camass capacity mattresses or like what we have a temperature regulating mattress which can also help you stay cool throughout the night.
Is sleepy and I say bad? Is it? Can it affect your sleep?
No, it's fine. I haven't seen anything. I mean, I haven't seen anything that would impact your sleep negatively unless it's really really cold. But even then, sleeping in the cold hasn't hasn't been shown to be detrimental, unless it's like causing you to wake up more often because it's too cold.
Now you've got a pretty exciting job. I mean, you're in the research. You're in the forefront of, well, the development of slate research a part of it. Actually, that's really great, great study out of Sydney UNI. What else is out there? What is there anything exciting you research into slate that you're specifically across or reading about.
Yeah, so we are. I mean we've been pioneering modifying the temperature of your bed based on the sleep stage that you're in. And this came initially out of some labs at Northwestern that showed that having cooler temperatures earlier in the night can improve your deep sleep. So they boost your deep sleep, and naturally, your core body temperature is going down in the beginning of the night and then it starts to get warmer before you wake up, and as it drops down, that's when you get most
of your deep sleep. So we've essentially modified now we did talked to what temperature you are, what sleep stage you're in real time, and then modify the temperature of your bed to help promote more time in each sleep stage. So that's really what we've been working on pioneering at the forefront of sleep.
Nice. It was lovely having you on Healthyah Nicole, Thank you for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
Well friends. Looks like it takes a few days to catch up on that late night sleep or that hangover. Oh yeah, it takes me a few days hangover front. Anyway, if you did enjoy this chat, you can rate and review this episode, subscribe to this podcast anything else, hit Body and Soul dot com dot follows on socials. You can DM me at Felicity Halle check in our print edition, which is out in your local Sunday paper, and until tomorrow, stay healthy.