Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Flipping the sleep switch
A breakthrough sleep technique designed for pilots could help anyone struggling to sleep during the pandemic.
Aviation psychologist Allan Baker is changing the way we sleep by treating it as skill that can be developed.
Explored in his new book ‘BLIS for insomniacs’, the technique is not yet part of the repertoire of sleep specialists, he said.
‘‘All the other treatments out there that say ‘eliminate this, and do this’.’’
‘‘And the message is if you get rid of all the obstacles, you’ve got sleep. That’s too passive.’’
Baker estimates the sleep industry is worth $50 billion worldwide, not including the comorbidities than that occur due to poor sleep.
‘‘The downstream effects of disturbed sleep and health are massive,’’ he said.
‘‘If you’re getting two hours less sleep than what your optimum is, on average you’re shortening your life by seven and a half years … it’s connected with the integrity of the immune system.’’
Published by Blenheim company Golden Micro, the book is appropriate for anyone struggling to sleep, but was targeted at one of the world’s most underslept groups: international pilots.
With his background as a military pilot, Baker had been working in aviation psychology for 15 years. In spite of the disastrous consequences of tired pilots, he had come up against dead ends when it came to helping them sleep.
‘‘The sleep advice out there is actually pretty useless,’’ he said.
‘‘I found I did not have the tools to help this very specialised market. If you want to take on a challenge of helping people sleep properly, take on international pilots.
‘‘They sleep at funny hours, they work at times the rest of us are asleep, they’ve got time zone changes, every night’s in a strange hotel.’’
In the past sleep therapy has focused on sleep hygiene — ‘‘replete with urban myth’’ — or cognitive behaviour therapy, which encourages the brain to focus on internal rather than external stimuli.
A new method makes the ‘‘third leg’’ of the sleep stool, and involved changing the frequency of waves emitted by the brain.
The electrical activity of the brain is ‘‘buzzy and chaotic’’ during wakefulness, emitting an alpha frequency of 32 hertz.
‘‘In slow wave sleep, delta sleep, it’s a very low wave transmission, around half to two hertz,’’ he said.
‘‘What I knew from combining other areas of therapy, it turns out it is possible to train quite easily your brain to shift from emitting alpha waves to delta waves.’’
‘‘When the brain emits delta waves, it basically brings on sleep.’’
Coined ‘BLIS’ — bilateral induced sleep — the technique used the mind’s hard-wired instinct for rhythm to trick the brain into emitting waves at a sleep-level frequency. In essence ‘‘creating a rhythm consistent with slow wave sleep.’’
In keeping mind internally focused, the technique was equipment-free and could be used by anyone.
In an ironic twist, Baker’s book was targeted at pilots who now may be lying awake for very different reasons since coronavirus halted international travel.
The ‘‘staggering’’ job losses in aviation were unimaginable when he was writing the book six months ago, but the wellbeing of pilots was still important.
‘‘This time last year we were all fretting about where the world was going to find half a million pilots in the next 20 years to handle the expansion in aviation,’’ he said.
‘BLIS for insomniacs’ was available for purchase as an e-book.