Dr Michael Mosley: Lack of sleep can kill - here’s what I did to fix my insomnia
Michael Mosley: Busting the myths about getting a good night’s sleep. Photo / Supplied
‘How do people go to sleep? I’m afraid I’ve lost the knack,” writer Dorothy Parker once said, no doubt regretfully. Then, as now, she was not alone. A quarter of Kiwis have trouble sleeping and the confirmed insomniacs among them will not appreciate your sleep tips and supplement suggestions. They will have tried them all.
British doctor Michael Mosley, though, is not to be put off. After great success with guides on diet, exercise and healthy living, he’s polished up his 2020 book Fast Asleep, which went rather unnoticed during the pandemic, and released 4 Weeks to Better Sleep, with updated evidence and his own personal experiences.
After 20 years of intermittent insomnia, Mosley has been enjoying improved slumber for at least nine months. Last year, he put himself through a clinical trial on sleep at Flinders University in Adelaide and went on to create a four-week schedule to get the sleep-deprived snoozing better. His sleep regime had long involved getting up in the night (as he explains in our extract) but, he told the Listener, those occasions are getting rarer.
Mosley’s new schedule starts with things like keeping a sleep diary, following a Mediterranean diet, and breathing exercises if you wake up in the middle of the night. It gradually includes more intensive regimes, such as sleep restriction therapy, resistance exercise and boosting gut-friendly foods. Weight loss can also play an important part.
But first, some myth-busting. That blue light from your mobile phone, or even the TV, is unlikely to be the cause of sleeplessness. The light is so weak that it can’t possibly be having any effect, says Mosley, so forget the expensive blue light filters. Instead, it’s probably what you’re looking at on your phone that’s stimulating your brain when it should be relaxing and calming down.
Likewise, the claim that cheese gives you nightmares is a myth, although “eating anything that is rich in saturated fat just before you go to bed is likely to disrupt your sleep. But there’s no evidence that cheese is worse than any other food, or that it triggers nightmares.”
What is clear, he says, is that the standard advice on “sleep hygiene” will barely touch the sides for people with real sleep problems and current treatments are either not particularly effective or, like sleeping pills, have distinct downsides.
In the main, sleep supplements are largely ineffective, with the exception of melatonin. “The short answer is that it may [help]. The Cochrane reviewers [a research review] concluded the use of melatonin by night-shift workers increased the amount of sleep they got by 24 minutes.”
As for sleep-inducing food such as kiwifruit, cherry juice and turkey, that’s a “no” to any such claims, according to the evidence.
Sleep restriction therapy
Mosley trained as a doctor, but has made a name internationally as a TV presenter and writer. He reckons his superpower is in recognising the value of possibly forgotten research that has proved effective and then throwing a spotlight on it. In 2012, he resurrected research on intermittent fasting to reverse diabetes (he found it worked on him, too). For this book, he’s gone back to work on sleep restriction therapy that’s been around since the late 1970s and which forms a large part of his programme for treating entrenched insomnia. It was also the bedrock of the Flinders trial.