MICHAEL MOSLEY’S FAST WAY TO A GREAT NIGHT’S SLEEP

GETTING enough sleep is important for keeping your immune system strong and protecting you from coughs, colds and viruses. As fears about Covid-19 mount, it makes sense to take all possible steps to protect yourself against it, and there is one simple way to shore up your defences: a good night’s sleep.

Studies show that sleeping less than six hours a day can make you four times more likely to develop a cold than those who get more than seven hours.

Even one night of poor sleep leads to a decrease in our T cells by up to 70%. These killer cells are our first line of defence against viruses.

This is frightening news if, like me, you are one of the estimated third of the population who suffers from insomnia.

I know how infuriating and debilitating it can be to lie awake at night when everyone else is asleep. Like you, I have been frustrated by the fact that conventional sleep advice, gadgets, pills and potions so rarely work.

That’s why I’ve devised a new insomnia-busting programme, based on the best available science. It’s all in my book, Fast Asleep, exclusively serialised in the Mail all this week. While researching the book, I found a very effective way to reboot your sleep: Sleep Restriction Therapy (or SRT). It is not yet mainstream but I am hoping to change that.

SLEEP fasting, I suspect, will be met with the same suspicion as intermittent food fasting. When I first wrote about this, more than seven years ago, few people had heard of it. There was a lot of scepticism.

People called it ‘faddy’ and said it would be too hard to stick to. Since then, the science has progressed significantly and millions of people around the world have been using it to lose weight, improve their health and do things like escape the tyranny of type 2 diabetes.

Yes, intermittent fasting is tough to start with, but most people soon adapt and shortterm hunger pangs are well worth the long-term benefits. One of the first people to put sleep restriction to the test was an American psychologist called Arthur Spielman.

In 1987, he gathered 35 middleaged patients who had been chronic insomniacs for more than 15 years. These men and women were spending an average of eight hours in bed each night, but only sleeping for five hours and 20 minutes — which meant they were awake for two hours and 40 minutes every night! And that was despite the fact that most had been taking sleeping pills for many years.

Spielman pointed out that the common-sense solutions they had been offered by their doctors (such as getting to bed earlier and napping) were actually making their insomnia worse. Instead, he asked them to restrict the time they spent in bed each night to just five hours and 40 minutes.

He didn’t ask them to cut out coffee, increase their exercise or sniff lavender. All they were expected to do was stick to his programme and avoid sleeping during the day. The results were nothing short of amazing. Within a week, everyone on the study reported improved sleep.

Gradually, over the eight-week experiment, Spielman allowed them to increase the time they spent in bed and their sleep continued to improve.

By the end of the experiment, his patients were spending, on average, 90 minutes less time in bed every night. But they were sleeping for 25 minutes longer. They were not only sleeping more but their sleep was deeper and more intense, so they felt much better during the day. And what was particularly impressive was that when they were retested nine months later, the improvements were still there.

Spielman’s experiment has been repeated many times since.