Matthew Walker: Rethinking Sleep

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, I'm Amol Rajan and this is Rethink. This podcast is all about the enormous opportunity we have to change what the future looks like after the coronavirus pandemic.

Let me pitch a wonder drug to you. This magic pill will radically improve your memory, metabolism and immune system. After taking it, you'll absorb new information faster, feel less tired and anxious. and be much, much less likely to suffer heart disease. This pill has almost no side effects. And it's free. Would you take it? Something like this irresistible idea formed the core of Matthew Walker's best-selling book, Why We Sleep. He asked us, inevitably, to rethink sleep.

In America alone, according to a 2016 study, sleep deprivation cost the country $400 billion and 1.23 million lost days of work annually. Many people wrongly assume sleeping less is good for productivity. In fact, as Walker argues, the opposite is true. Sleep, or the lack thereof, is an economic crisis. And yet it's also been called a public health crisis.

and with good reason. Well, we're living through a public health crisis right now, and more sleep could help in countless ways. I say countless, but here's two. First, by boosting the nation's health, it could reduce the burden on our health systems. And secondly, well, actually, I'd better let Walker explain. I'll sleep.

does seem to have changed during the pandemic. There's some emerging data from some sleep tracking companies that suggests people are going to bed at different times than they were before, but also typically on average wake up a little bit later. Now for some people overall that means that they are getting actually more sleep.

I think what we'll find is that when we look at the data, there's probably at least two clouds of results. There are some people during the pandemic who will have been struggling with sleep and been getting less and it's more difficult. And then others who are actually getting more. But I think what we're really seeing in this data is that people are starting to sleep more in harmony with what we call your chronotype. In other words, are you an evening person? Are you a morning person?

Or are you somewhere in between? And it turns out, by the way, that you don't really get a choice in that. It's largely genetically determined, so it's hardwired. What does this mean for the future then? Or what could it mean for the future in terms of sleep? Well... Perhaps when people return to work, what if we asked everyone to fill out a very brief set of questions and we asked them about their preferred sleep times, when they would prefer to wake up?

when they prefer to go to bed. And companies can then start to try and accommodate as much as they can people's individual work schedules. And in that way, they allow the employee to start sleeping in a much more... compatible way with their biology rather than in conflict, which is what many of us seem to do in this modern world. Society is really designed to bias and favor these mourning types. But there's a great big range.

And as a consequence, we could have better rested employees, better rested leaders. And we know that more sleep does equal more productivity. It's not true that less sleep equals more productivity. It's the opposite. and people utilize fewer healthcare resources when they're better slept, there could be manifold consequences. There's probably a second implication here, and it comes on to immunity.

What we know is that there's a very intimate relationship between your sleep health and your immune health. And one example I think has implications for the coronavirus going forward. One study actually looked at people's sleep in the week before they get their standard flu shot. And what they found is that if you're not getting sufficient sleep in the week before you get your flu shot, you produce less than 50% of the normal antibody response, rendering that vaccination far less effective.

What is an idea for the future? Well, perhaps we can start to inquire about people's sleep as they're coming in for ultimately the COVID. vaccination. There will be a point when we have a vaccine for COVID-19. And can we try to enhance immunity, enhance the effectiveness of that vaccination simply by timing that vaccine? vaccination with the moment when people are well rested, when they are best slept. I think that could be an interesting idea based on the scientific data we already have.

That was Matthew Walker, whose book on why we sleep has changed a lot of lives around the world and could yet change plenty more. Perhaps a new, better attitude to sleep in the post-pandemic world where we stop staring at gleaming screens before going to bed even more exhausted and wired than we already were is the revolution that we need.

I hadn't realised just how strong is the connection between our sleep and our immune systems. Given we're trying, collectively, to fight off a virus, perhaps we might even start to think of a good night's sleep not just as a way of being kind to ourselves. but of being kind to each other. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Rethink Podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. If you want to hear more, head to BBC Sounds where you can hear lots of essays on a range of issues.

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