Many people try to make up for lost sleep on weekends, but does it help? Research shows that while sleeping in on weekends can temporarily reduce sleep debt and improve mood and performance, it doesn't fully reverse the adverse effects of sleep restriction during the week. For example, a 2019 study by Depner et al. found that weekend recovery sleep did not prevent metabolic dysregulation caused by weekday sleep loss, particularly in glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity (essential for maintaining a healthy weight and glucose balance), as well as obesity.Catching up on sleep may improve subjective feelings of rest and reduce daytime sleepiness in the short term. However, inconsistent slee...

I was recently asked to provide media content for a journalist fielding questions about sleep, exercise, and related helpful strategies and tools. I thought you might also find this content applicable to some of your clients. Q1. When is the best time of day to exercise to enhance sleep quality and quantity? When we discuss recommendations, it is important to recognise that people have different alertness cycles. For example, teenagers are more likely to go to bed later than their parents. This isn't to annoy their parents; their biological clock is 'phase shifted' later by about an hour or two. It is considered an evolutionary survival characteristic, having different groups of people ...

On reviewing a client recently, I was struck by the difficulty of changing a habit, even when they knew it meant they would be better off, in this case experiencing less pain. On reflection, a lot of long-term outcomes revolve around our ability to affect +ve changes in our clients' lives. From my clinical perspective, the question was "Why would someone knowingly choose an action that causes them pain?" We could take smoking as a litmus test for this question. Smoking is strongly associated with every nasty health condition, the action is considered socially inappropriate, millions of $ are spent on education and each durry costs a small fortune. So you would think stopping would be a piece...

Shining a light into the world of sleep.... Being onto stuff, you will have known that March included World Sleep Day! On such an important occasion, I thought it was worth throwing out a 30% discount on our Sleep Mastery Course to celebrate this important annual milestone. Looking forward to receiving feedback from the many many clinicians who took up the snap sale offer and finding out how they are integrating this new knowledge into their clinical practice. Hot on the heels of this, I was sitting in the Perth T2 airport lounge waiting to return home and my lovely wife while browsing the bookstore noticed and purchased for me Dr Michael Mosley's book Fast Asleep. Needing no introducti...