Thank you very much, Antony, and that was really, really kind of you to say such lovely things. And I've got to say I've really enjoyed this, this link with nurses, and we've, we've even done some research along the way and the, the whole, the whole sort of side of discovering a new profession. I've worked a long time and lots and lots of time in mental health and in lots, worked with lots of different professions, but it's been so interesting working with the veterinary profession, and I've begun to realise that You guys are very similar to GPs and when I went away to a conference recently and sat and talked to you that, you know, there's some real character traits, I think, that make you very similar to your general practitioners, and I just mused on that from time to time.
But just like the GPs who I'm doing a lot of work with at the moment in the UK and other doctors who are in a place of struggle obviously with COVID-19, hence the title, it's Choosing Sleep in Difficult Times, and I use that phrase choosing sleep because the model I think that works best is a model of psychological flexibility. Because the one thing that gets in the way of us being good sleepers is a rigid mindset. And so it's this finding choice and making that choice work for you in terms of sleep seems to be the real factor that makes a huge difference.
So tonight's session, Anthony was quite, quite right, we are going to be looking at sleep. But, we're also going to be looking at how we calm our minds, how we deal with really scary, difficult thoughts. And I'll just share with you something that happened this morning.
My first, it was a webinar as usual this morning, was with a load of anaesthetists whose job at the moment is to, largely is to put people onto the, onto the breathing apparatus and to anaesthetize them in order to for them to get through COVID-19 hopefully alive, and they are just dealing with stuff that that they've never had to deal with before in their life in terms of the intensity of it, and they were all quite angry and cross this morning about with themselves, and they were saying, you know, I really thought I would cope better than this. I thought, you know, I've been disappointed because, you know, I've really struggled and I've been snappy with people at home and You know, I've not been, I've not been functioning as well as I would like, and I just stopped them and said, you know, we, we, we, you're living at the real front line of the most scary. Fear inducing pandemic that we've ever ever known.
And so of course you know you're going to be struggling and I think that that goes for all of us as well, you know, we all are finding that these times are meaning that our capacity to manage stress is being significantly tested. So a bit of what we're doing tonight is kind of pragmatically trying to look at that. So, we're gonna look at the paradoxical sleep effect and I'll talk more about that in a minute.
And I'm gonna take a new stance, a, a, a very evidence-based but new stance towards sleep hygiene and patterns. We're going to look at thoughts as I just explained then, and we're going to kind of argue that an urge for control linked to sleep is very unhelpful. And above all though, it's to help all of us who are coming on tonight live or listening to this via recording just to enjoy, and that's the key word here, really enjoy taking a different stance towards our sleep and towards our lives.
So my hope is that, you, you're all gonna get an awful lot from this or just a little bit, but my hope is that it will help you sleep better. Now, I've also sent through to the wonderful webinar of that organisation, a booklet. So it's a four session booklet, sleep booklet that covers most of what I'm doing tonight, which they'll send out, .
With the recording, I imagine, and I've sent through one of the absolute go to sleep meditations that sometimes I have mixed feelings about the sleep meditation later because I'll do a whole sort of 1 to 1 therapy approach with somebody who's struggled to sleep. And, week two I introduce the sleep meditation and when I meet them a few months later, they say, oh my God, I'm still sleeping brilliantly. And I said, well, what are you using for my course?
And they said, oh, no, just the, just the sleep meditation. And it leaves me thinking, you know, what was the point in the rest of the stuff, but it, it is a really, really good, sleep tool. So let's start by just being really curious about the 6 maintainers of sleep problems.
And The first one is poor sleep hygiene and That's why I'm coming there first, because if we don't get our sleep hygiene, absolutely sorted, then, we're gonna struggle. And I slide, the next slide is really going into more detail. The second big issue and maintaining factor for why we get into a pattern of poor sleep, because we don't need to worry about one or two nights every now and then where we just don't sleep as well, you know, that's kind of, you know, we cope with that fine, don't we?
It's when we get into a pattern of poor sleep and we start to worry. So worry as of itself and, you know, as a factor is a huge issue in terms of whether we are good sleepers or not. Another real The factor that is very often overlooked is our own unhelpful and inaccurate beliefs about sleep.
And very often we get into this very unhelpful thing about I must get 8 hours sleep, and it's such a misnomer, you know, and there's such a poor evidence base for actually Becoming wedded to individuals saying all human beings need 8 hours sleep. No, they don't. All human beings need to get good, restful, restorative sleep.
That is a combination of deep wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. The deep wave sleep helps us restore physiologically, and the rapid eye movement sleep allows us to process all of the stuff of the day in order to sort of clean our mind through. I'm ready for the next day.
So many people with sleep problems also become very selectively attentive, so they start, what I mean by this is they only pay attention to the deficits of a night's poor sleep, and they also start to attend in a sort of very rigid way to all the things that might keep me awake tonight. Because I had a bad night last night. And, and as a result of that, we developed these really counterproductive safety measures, and I was working with a couple recently and doing some couples work, and the husband was saying his wife didn't sleep well.
So we did a couple of sessions as part of the work, and we, we looked at some sleep stuff and one of the things we did was we introduced progressive muscular relaxation. About an hour before bed. And, and she said it doesn't work at all, Mike.
She said, I get really relaxed, but by the time I've gone to bed, it's, it's gone. And I said, Oh, what, what happens afterwards? And the husband chirped up.
There was some marital discord going on, I should add, but he chirped up and said, Well, the problem is, love, he said, that what you do is you do your relaxation and then you go around our four kids yelling at them that they'd better be quiet tonight because if they're not, they'll be trouble because Mom desperately needs a bad, a good night's sleep and if she doesn't have a good night's sleep they'll be hell to pay tomorrow. And I kind of looked at her, and she said, I said, do you? She said, yeah.
She said, you, I do every night, and she said, because I can't bear the thought of the kids waking me up. So you know that counterproductive safety behaviour wears her up, makes her feel a bit rubbish about herself as a mom, so of course she doesn't sleep. And the final one there is this misperception of just how dreadful I feel the next morning after a bad night's sleep and the belief that we get that.
You know, I've got a, a cannula to put in tomorrow into a goat or something and . I don't know much about veterinary practise. I'll just add that one in, and, and, and, and I'm convinced that I'm going to get it wrong, you know, because if I haven't had a good night's sleep, my hands will have a tremor, and I'll make a dreadful, dreadful mistake.
Well, if you do, it won't be because of the bad night's sleep. One or two poor night's sleep don't affect us like that. Chronic sleep deprivation does have a pretty deleterious effect upon our our functioning, but not the sort of generalised kind of a couple of bad nights here and there or even a week of troubled sleep.
It really isn't going to affect us as much as we think it is. So my aim tonight is to look at how we might reverse these five maintaining processes. Look at that slide there both during the day.
And the night because we've got to do, we can't just focus on, you know, those few hours before we go to sleep and the time that we're in our bed because it's, as I said in the introduction, it's so much all about patterns. So let's start to do something really, really helpful. So when we look at this slide here, There was a fabulous study came out in the states.
About 2 years ago, and it just came out and just said, you know, why doesn't sleep hygiene work? You know, we, we know that these are really good sleep hygiene. Shifts that If people made them, you know, people would sleep better.
It makes just makes so much common sense. But why is it that sleep hygiene on its own And that seems to make not a hill of beans a difference, and they went in and they explored not the sleep hygiene individual factors. They explored the way we teach it and the way we sell it to our clients and to patients.
And what they found was that we try and get people when we do sleep hygiene work to make all of these changes immediately and you guys know. That when you're asked to make changes to something that is pretty well established as a pattern in your lives, it's hard to make one change, let alone 9. And if we say to people, you know, in order to sleep well you need to Do everything on this list.
It's too much, and the human psyche means that if it's too much, instead of just choosing just to want to do, we do none of it because we've been sold it in such an ineffective way. So the way I'm going to do it tonight is the is the right way, the intelligent, wise, sensible way. So what I'm going to say to you is, as I work through this sleep hygiene list, I'm just going to ask you guys to just, just think, right, do I do that?
Could I improve there? And at the end, just choose two things that you're going to do differently, no more. And if you just make two changes, just 2 changes to your pre-sleep routine, to your sleep hygiene.
It will make a real difference to your sleep, and this is what the research found. So we're gonna do it properly. So generally speaking, we should be careful of what we take into our bodies sort of much after about 2 o'clock in the afternoon.
So we know for instance that in a non-sleeper or someone who struggles with sleep who has that sensitivity, that caffeine after about 2 o'clock is an absolute no no. Alcohol. Fantastic to just relax and drink socially, not a problem at all.
Becomes a problem if we're drinking in order to sleep because we drink too much and then the quality of our sleep is so poor. Smoking cigarettes closely before bed, again, it's too alerting and any other chemicals that might interfere with your sleep. So just have a think now, you know, could I just make a change there?
The second one is turn your bedroom into a sleep friendly environment, but do it in such a way that you're not sort of charging around shouting at the kids that they better be quiet. And what we mean by a sleep friendly environment is, you know, if you need darkness, just get good curtains. You know, make sure you're blotting out the light.
Don't have lots and lots of electrical equipment switched on in your, in your bedroom, and your bedroom should only be for sleeping and for sex, you know, and it certainly shouldn't be an office or somewhere where you go to sort of exercise even, you know, that's, that's your haven, that safe place where you sleep. Establishing a soothing pre-sleep routine. So if we can do that, what a difference that makes.
And what I mean by that is that as a general rule of thumb. A couple of hours, and this is just a little tip here, a couple of hours before bed. If you imagine you had a cactus in the palm of your hand.
Just a little cactus and if you imagine. The musculature you would need to hold a cactus so lightly that it didn't prickle you. You would have to kind of go soft.
You would have to kind of be very, very relaxed, and if you kind of go for the two hours before bed, imagining taking that cactus with you, the moment that you tense, you're going to know that you've tense because you'll feel the cactus. And so the priestly routine and that soothing pre-sleep routine is about. I don't know how many of you guys know.
We have an actress called Joanna Lumley, and I always think that she sort of, when you watch her on screen, she sort of floats about the place, you know, like in a sort of floaty way, and I just imagine that that's how we need to be after about if we're going to bed at 11 from 9 to 11, we don't want any jerky movements. We want to sort of serenely Joanna Lumley our way. Around the house until we get to bed, you know, .
And we need to choose to sleep when we feel tired. One of the mistakes many people make is I've got a big meeting tomorrow or an early start, and so we go to bed too early and we miss our very well established pattern of the time that we normally go to sleep, which works for us. During COVID-19, so many people are spending so much time indoors that that's one of the reasons that we're struggling with our sleep, because we're just not making enough of that natural light.
So where we can, out in the garden, out in the sunshine, getting the natural light, because it just helps us with that melatonin shift that we get when dusk descends. If you're not a great sleeper, we shouldn't be napping, you know, because our brain just doesn't like it. If we're not a great sleeper, try not to nap, and if we have to, no more than 30 minutes, quite early in the day.
And finally, if we're able to exercise in the morning, see the question mark there, there's a bit of doubt about this one, whether it makes a huge difference. Personally, I've always found that I sleep much better if I take my exercise earlier in the day. Some people are saying it doesn't matter, but I think we'll do some more research and find that it does personally.
So when you look at that slide, my challenge to you now is just choose, could I change one thing about my sleep hygiene from that sleep hygiene checklist, you know, just one thing. And if I could, could I change just one other thing? Yeah, and that's it, so.
Yeah, we have to get this right because there's no point almost trying to use the psychological therapy approaches if we're undoing it with poor sleep hygiene. Now, without a doubt at the moment, the biggest reason that people aren't sleeping at the moment is because we're living with this sense of threat, and our amygdala, our fear centre in our brain, is very, very aware. We only need to turn the television on, social media, it's what everyone seems to be talking about, is this sense of impending threat and also uncertainty.
And the brain hates a loss of control, threat and uncertainty. And if you think about it, when is the human body at its most vulnerable to attack? Yeah, it's when we're asleep, you know, and so that.
That sort of surface sleeping that we get when we're anxious is because the brain, the last thing the brain wants us to do is to go into a deep unresponsive sleep because it believes that there is threat around. So we need to do something about our response to what is after all, as I discussed with the anaesthetist this morning. A genuine threat.
And that is where this paradox comes in, because normally what our response to poor sleep is. Is to paradoxically place sleep far higher. Than we've ever placed it before in terms of how important it is that I sleep, and we need to listen to our own language, you know, that we use.
Frequently I hear people saying, oh, do you know, I, I, I didn't get a wink last night. Well, you did. You probably surf is slept, but you will have slept.
You know, you, if, if you were on one of the somnograph machines, the somnograph machine would tell you that although you felt like you didn't sleep, you did, and you probably had a couple of hours, but it was surface sleep, so you're sort of semi-conscious. But you have actually gone into what we call a surface sleep state. Now, The paradox is the paradoxical sleep effect is when we become so rigid and worried and Hypervigilant about everything that we need to do, so we start thinking about whether we'll sleep tonight halfway through our morning, and we kind of like, you know, we, we, we, we are very rigid about our coffee intake, not just after 2.
No, no, I'm only having one coffee today and then we do as my client did, you know, we speak to the rest of the family about how important it is that it's quiet tonight. We scan the room for any *** of light that might be creeping in. And if you imagine what we're doing there, if you imagine your poor amygdala, your amygdala is sort of sitting in your brain going, Oh my God, you know, all of this, this threat alleviating behaviour must mean that there's a terrific threat out there that's coming for me tonight.
And so of course we don't sleep. So what we need to do is to use this wonderful mindful response in the day and in the evening. And Here comes .
Oh. And here comes the first way that we need to be aware of this. So we very much need to be on top of worry because there's a lot of worry about at the moment, and our brains sort of take it upon themselves to send us very unhelpful, worrying thoughts.
In order to keep us very, very vigilant, which keeps us safe. Which stops us from sleeping if we are buying into these worrying thoughts throughout the day. So, on your webinar functions there, you'll see that there's in participants there's a hands up, there's a hands up button.
If you just sort of click on your participants thing, I think you'll see there's a hands up button and just be interested to see on this one because I'm going to do a little experiment with you all. So I want you to imagine, please, and I think this is the same from wherever you're coming, coming from in the world, that you're already in a state of worry at the moment, and then a text comes through to your telephone and the text is from your bank. So I put some bank logos there on my slide.
It might be one of these. And the text says that you must immediately contact the bank because your account has been hacked, your savings account has been hacked, your mortgage has been hacked, and if you don't send the bank immediately all of your secure information, then your account will be emptied. So you must send them your security information right at this moment and you must send it back to this number.
So how many of us immediately are chuckling to ourselves and deleting, or how many of us are just kind of recognising or believing that this is a hoax immediately within a millisecond of reading the text, we're just kind of like, oh God, you know, let's just have a look on the hands up function if you wouldn't mind. Yeah, there's a few people just coming in there. Everybody's putting their hands up, but Mike, there's about 35, 36, so we're all, we're all used to that when they, when it comes through.
Please send everything through to us. Yeah, that's brilliant. And so what you.
Did just then, everybody did this, didn't you, is we used our critical thinking skills. We used our tacit knowledge, we used experience, we used wisdom, and we dealt with it by recognising spam when it, when it, when it comes up. Now if that text comes again in 15 minutes, and this time the language is even more threatening, we still are not going to send our security information to the bank.
We might feel a bit more of a pang of anxiety, so we might just go online and just check out is there a You know, has the security of my bank been breached, so we might just check it out and be curious, but we certainly wouldn't respond immediately as though that text was 100% true. But when we get a thought that comes in about the consequences of a poor night's sleep and it says the thought comes and says you're going to make so many mistakes tomorrow, you're going to get this back. That Instead of stopping and chuckling to ourselves and saying hang on a minute, let's just use my critical thinking skills here.
Let's just use tacit knowledge, wisdom, memory, let's just Be curious about whether there's any truthfulness to this very scary thought I've just had. No, what we do is we worry, and then as soon as we start worrying, the brain loves that because it's got you and you're being vigilant, so it'll send another spam. Thought, and we buy into that one as well.
And before we know it, the cortisol in our body is coming up and up and up because of this stuck worry state. And at the moment what's happening, Hand over fist is people are worrying kind of more than I've ever, ever seen in my long, long career in this business, and we're being spammed all the time. Now, if we can meet these sort of thoughts with a gentle curiosity and just.
Look at it and say, well, I'm not sure that's true. I wonder if my brain is spamming me. And then if we get even more curious, why would my brain want to spam me that something dreadful is going to happen?
And you just will get the answer, won't you, because, because my brain is feeling the threat and it wants me hyper vigilant. Well, OK, so one of the really useful ways is to take a, take a step back and recognise that thoughts, particularly worry thoughts, are very poor determinants of reality and in fact, 99% of the time, our brain is just spamming us, you know, just spamming us. So maybe.
Tomorrow, later on tonight is just switch on your spam antenna, you know, and when those thoughts come in, don't just discard them. That would be daft. But meet them, be curious about them, check out whether they're spam or not, and if they are spam, just gently let them go, you know.
And if they come again, maybe be a bit more curious about them, then let them go and by. Gaining mastery over our response to worry thoughts, we will sleep better, promise you. That's one of the real reasons people don't sleep, obviously.
So this technique here is one of my absolute go to favourites, and it works, it can work for sleep as we've done here, but it can work for just about anything, and it's one of the ways that I love to work with clients, people I'm trying to help, to bring mindfulness into your everyday. And what I'm going to suggest we do, and give this a go tomorrow, is every time that you actually stop. And you take a breath and you get yourself a drink, or you sit down to a meal or you grab a sandwich on the go.
Use that time of imbibing something, having something to eat or drink, as your cue to do a very quick bold. So the idea of the bold is this is when we have that cue comes in, we stop and we take one mindful breath. And then we move into what I call our observing self.
And that's that kind of mindful self where we look at ourselves and we go, what are you doing? With curiosity, no judgement. What are you doing?
What have you been up to? How have you been functioning? So we're just curious about how we are in that observing self.
And then we lean in and we just check in and say, you know, is that the Mike Scanlon that I want to be? Is that the Mike Scanlon that functions well? Is that the Mike Scanlon that kind of gets on with people and manages life well?
And if it is, and we're really pleased with what we find, we say, right, let's make a decision. We'll have more of that today, please, because that's the man I want to be. That's the woman I kind of know works well.
However, sometimes, What happens is we move into our observing self and we lean in and we realise that we haven't taken a break that morning, that we've been plagued by worries, that we've been a bit snappy with our colleagues. Mm. And we lean in and we think, God, no, I don't want to be that person anymore.
And we make a decision, right, change now, and it's a mindful decision. And if we're doing that, what kind of happens is that bringing mindfulness to our day makes sure that we function as a human being in a, in a manner that is so much more conducive to sleep. And so it's A brilliant way to bring that mindful attention into our everyday functioning.
I'm not going to spend a long time on structured worry time, but what I will say is that if you're a worrier, this is for you. If you're someone who over worries, what we're trying to do with this technique here is we're just trying to take over the executive control of the worry function. So rather than your brain constantly sending us worries all the time, what we do is we say no every day, you know, I'm just going to spend 15 minutes.
I'm going to write down all of my worries. I'm then gonna read them through, and if it's a real actual worry, I'm gonna put an A next to it. And if it's a hypothetical, a what if that gets an H.
And any that are H's, I'm just gonna kind of look at them. Recognise their hypothetical, but any of those worries that aren't mine to worry about. I draw a line through and typically we get rid of about 2 or 3 of the 8 or 9 worries immediately.
And then if it's a hypothetical, then there's not much point trying to do something about that because it hasn't happened yet and it's unlikely to. So we just choose one of the actual worries, and we choose to do one thing that will impact on it. So I've got a daughter in London at the moment who, is, Not the most mindful of human beings and so you know, I worry about her, and she's an actual worry because she's my daughter.
So at the moment I'm just giving her a phone call and just kind of just checking in that she's looking after herself properly, that she's distancing, that she's wise and sensible about stuff, and I just say, well, tomorrow I'll give my Isabel a ring and just check in that she's OK. So I've done one thing to impact on my worries. Then later on that night, if I start to get into a bit of a worry place again, I have a quick look at my worry book, realise that I've done something about it, write down a couple of worries that I might think about tomorrow.
And I go to sleep. Mm So, and it just works. And which brings us to what I believe is such a wonderful way to actually drop off.
Of leads on a stream, and this is the one I've sent the the, the recording for. And what we do with leads on a stream is you put leaves on a stream just as you're planning to drop off. So you may do some relaxation.
You've been floating around your house with that wonderful pre-sleep routine. You've had your warm milk and you've listened or you've read a book for a while, and you sense, oh, I'm just beginning to drop off. And you just reach over and you turn your, all of this is languorous and slow, and you turn your device on with no blue light, preferably, and you just lie back and you do some watching of some leaves.
And what you hear is my voice just gently saying to you, to imagine a stream. And a gurgly, lovely, beautiful stream. And there's a tree at the top.
Of the right hand corner of your consciousness and every now and then a leaf falls like leaves do lands on the stream. And is just carried, and your job is to watch that stream. And watch the leaf on it.
Until the leaf disappears and another leaf and another leaf and another leaf. Quite a lot of you will be asleep. If we're still not asleep, you hear my voice say, and now what thoughts is your mind just sending you right at this moment now.
And the thought comes in as I really hope I sleep tonight, and you don't attach to the thought. You take that thought and you see it as a jumble of letters and words and you pop that thought into an envelope and you wait and the leaf falls from the tree. And you just pop the thoughts.
On the leaf and you sit back on the lush grass of the bank. And you watch as your thoughts disappears. And we thought watch for about 3 to 4 minutes.
And Most people. But then Asleep. And the audio just goes quiet.
And we wake up in the morning. Having slept. Because it does two things.
It teaches us that thoughts are just things that can be sat back and looked at, but the somnambulistic sort of quality of the meditation also gets us off to sleep. This slide here is, and the, there is in the booklet, it goes through all of this. It's called cognitive shuffling.
And essentially it works like this, is if you wake up in the night and you're awake and The trick is, is try and stay just sleepy. Don't jump up and curse that you've been woken up. It's just if you need to go for a wee kind of Joanna Lumley your way across the hall and Go and do your way and gently sashay back and.
Comfy back in bed and still soft and sleepy and snoozy, and then you just stop and you take the word bedtime. And you lie there in bed and you just say to yourself, OK. Picture a bee and a buzzy bee.
Picture a balloon, and you use those words picture A and you picture it in your mind and you say the word so it's bedtime, so it's all the bees you can think of, and then all the E's you can think of. Picture an elephant. Picture an egg.
And then we move into the D picture a dinosaur and picture a door, and what's happening is that what you're doing is that you're sending your brain is just using random pictures and random words which mimics what we do in dream. So if we're still in that lovely languorous sleepy state and we start doing some cognitive shuffling. Our brain is kidded to believe that we're actually just surface sleeping still.
And so it lulls us gently back to sleep. And that is such an effective strategy for those of us who wake early or surface sleep and wake with a jolt. My final slide before we get to questions is I'm such a big fan of sleep yoga, and if you're not a good sleeper, you've had a really stressful day.
One of the best things you can do is to do some yin yoga on your bed as Cassandra is doing here, and I've just sent you the YouTube link to this particular meditation. Yoga is yin yoga is a mixture of yoga and meditation, and it's just lovely. So you do your yin yoga, you get totally relaxed.
Just before you sleep, you pop on your leaves on the stream, and you will sleep. So I hope you found my journey. Through these, these such difficult times, useful and thank you so much for allowing me to share this with you because you know, sleep is, is, is, is, is, is important and it's crucial, but it doesn't do if we get too attached to how important and crucial it is.
So, over to you guys, and if anybody's got any questions, any thoughts, anything they'd like to share, then, I'm really happy to come in and see what we do. Yeah, any advice for back to sleep? Thanks, thanks so much for that.
We've got, we'll have to just make sure we get that booklet over to people. So do, don't worry, we'll make sure that there's an email or something coming across tomorrow to make sure that that goes. I did just want to offer to everybody, who's on the webinar, and Lisa, I don't know if you want to put your email address into the chat box, but we, we've created a lot of resource with, the Mind Matters initiative, which is a Royal College initiative that I was talking about at the beginning of the webinar.
A lot of that is mic stuff, but there's other stuff as well. And obviously during this whole terrible turbulent process that we're going through, we've been offering that free to the veterinary profession, and we're gonna do that for the whole of May as well. So if you've found some of Mike's stuff useful today's lecture, he's, he's actually done, a 6 week course on mindfulness, he's done it, I think it was a 4 week course on sleep, wasn't it, Mike, so this was, no, it's a 6 week one, wasn't sleep also 6 weeks.
I know the mindfulness, it might have been 5 actually. It was, it was a few weeks anyway, and you know, those of you who really do struggle with that and you want to have some more sessions, that might be useful, but that's free of charge for the whole of May and that's just a gift from from us because sleep is so precious and I think if we, if we don't get too hung up about it and but sleep better. Then of course we're less stressed and tired when we get into work, Mike, we probably do a better job and and get less worried about things, don't.
We've had a lovely email from Cindy has just come in, just sharing that. I saw that, yeah, that she too was just agreeing that that the perception and mindfulness is absolutely key and that. Sort of tendency to force people to kind of like normalise just doesn't work at any any sort of level, so we've got to hold it lightly as I was saying with the With the hedgehog or with the or or with the cactus and we've got to just be ourselves with sleep it's so important.
Well, it's been great to see Cindy on, you know, the, the webinars in the morning, which is obviously very early or very, you know, late in the evening, early in the morning in in California, and I think it's, it's accepting that your sleep patterns are your sleep patterns, and as long as you're not bothered by those and you feel rested and energetic, you know, as you say, not everybody needs 8 hours sleep from 10 till 6 every morning, do they? I love that. I love the whole idea of sashaying and, and thinking that I'm Joanna Lumley.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna take that one forward for a bit because I do have a little soft spot for Joanna Lumley. I think we all do, yeah. It really does make a difference because, you know, if you're charging around or if you wake up in the night and you sort of trot off to the bathroom, it wakes you up, you know, and, and we just, we just don't get that the physicality, the movement associated with this stuff is so core that our body has so many tells about, you know, whether or not we are still in a sleep place or not.
So we just need to be very conscious of all this. Well, all of these tips also help to slow a racing heart, which is part of it. Yeah, absolutely.
What I would say for that would be the yin yoga. If you're, if you're finding your very word up, then I would pursue some yin yoga, a little bit, probably, a good sort of 30 minute session, and, that really does sort of like create a wonderful calm. And so good physiologically as well.
And we've got the YouTube link up there, Mike, but perhaps if you could just stick that into the chat box, then I know Marie is quite keen on, on just maybe being able to look at that YouTube video, so. Can you take that from your slide, because obviously people can't and just stick it in the chat box for us? Yeah, I can do that in a second, yeah.
Kim's got a question just asking about getting back to sleep with young children or babies have woken you up and you've got to get out of bed to sort them out. You know, that's a tricky one, isn't it, as well? How what any advice on that?
Yeah, I think there is this thing about actually, you know, if you have been woken good and proper and you've finished it, that you, you kind of like accept, just get to that place of acceptance that there's this thing with that sleep window that you're sort of the rhythms are that your sleep window comes round about every sort of two hours and so if you've been well and truly woken up, it's usually better to go down. Make yourself a nice decaf cup of tea or a glass of milk, and sit down, listen to some music, a talking book, something like that. Then very languorously with no sort of rush and hurry, take yourself back up to bed.
I think kind of as parents what we do is we get into that paradoxical sleep effect and, oh my God, they woke me up. I've only got 4 hours left, and so we charge back to bed and we sort of say to ourselves, right, get to sleep quick, quick, quick, and all we do is we wake ourselves up. So it is that whole that this is very much the approach from the London Sleep School which is Guy Meadows is the guy.
Someone else got a nice one here. When I worry, I'm trying to copy that link, Antony, but my techie skills are letting me down for if Lisa Jane's got the, got the webinar, got the PowerPoint, I don't know Lisa Jane, if you have, you can perhaps do that, otherwise I can. Look for it as well, I don't know if I've got it just handy, but we can, we can certainly get that.
Lisa Jane, if you've got the PowerPoint, if you just go to that slide. You should be able to to save that and then just put it up on the screen if that's OK. Mike, we've also got here just somebody saying, you know, if they're wearing a device that sometimes affects how they get to sleep as well, are they, are they talking about something like a Fitbit or?
Let me just say, being on a device before you go to sleep hinder your sleep. Oh, absolutely. Oh my goodness me, yeah.
So even, you know, anything with the blue light is going to affect your sleep. So if you can have that. Oh, being on a phone, yeah, or even like an iPad, which is why I say, you know, when you use the sleep recording for the leaves on a stream just have it next to your bed.
But don't sort of pick up your phone and look at it to switch it on, it just tap it, you know, and and link in because you don't want to wake yourself up, but I think the phone thing is, you know, we're becoming more and more attached to our devices and actually detoxing from them is so important, isn't it? Oh, absolutely, yeah, and I just think that if we can, if we can, if we can, you know that thing I said, you only use your bedroom for sex or for sleep, you know, if you can just don't take. You just don't take your, you just don't, if you can keep your phone out of the bedroom, you know, unless you're going to switch on the leads on a stream on it.
Yes, people use it obviously for alarms and things as well, don't they? So Anthony, someone's asking about how they from Canada about how they get the six week course. Yeah, so what we'll do, Brigitte, is we'll make sure that if you email Lisa Jane, and she's left her email up there, so just copy that now.
She'll actually make sure that you get full access to all of our mindfulness training, and that is free, you know, for all vets and nurses, you know, across the world, because we just, you know, our webinar vet, we're so fortunate having worked so closely with Mike and with the Royal College, the Mind Matters Initiative. Recognising that certainly in the UK vets are, are far more stressed than is healthy, and obviously I don't know, you know, you Canadians are usually a bit more chilled out than us so you may be OK, but you know, if not, that's a resource that at this time of, of worry. We just want to put out there to, to help people.
So, email Lisa Jane, Lisa Jane at the webinar vet.com, and that'll keep you busy tomorrow, won't it, Lisa Jane, hopefully, but we, you know, we want to, part of our mission is to help reduce stress in vets and, and nurses, so it is a tool that we've encouraged the whole team to use, but the beauty of doing these courses that Mike does online is that. You know, sometimes we don't want to talk about mental health, and we do want to keep it to ourselves.
I don't know if that's always the best way, but doing it in this way allows us to, to, to do it without other people knowing. But similarly, if you want to bring it in to be a whole practise thing, you know, you can offer it to people and sometimes that opens up a conversation that allows you to go deeper, maybe with somebody who is troubled or troublesome in work. Often that's, Mike, I don't know if you agree, somebody who's, You know, bad news in work and troublesome, you know, probably got some big troubles in their own lives that in some ways they want to share, but because they can't share, they just decide to be difficult and you know, be ratty with other people, don't they rather than because we feel so, yeah, because we feel so angry and critical of self that it nearly always spills out into the way we are with other people, doesn't it, that.
Interpersonal mindfulness. Yeah, yeah. Mike, I know, I'm gonna let you go now because Mike is now about to jump on a webinar for the NHS in England, which obviously the workers there are, are struggling with all sorts of challenges, so.
Do that, but, you know, if you do have questions, we're just trying to get our social media together, and if there are questions or or emails that you would like to send, so if you send something to Lisa Jane. And said, could you pass this on to Mike, or is there a way of us being able to contact Mike? Yeah.
Do you have, do you have an email, Mike, that you just want to share that sort of use or do we? Yeah, it's the Doctor Mike 62 1 which which if you're very happy for you guys to share we share that out. So if, if somebody wants to speak to Mike directly, just email Lisa Jane and say, look, I'd love to just pop a question over to Mike and, and you know, he's he's very .
Generous with his time and and and he's been a real blessing, as I say, to the webinar vets, so if he can be a blessing to, to others, that'd be great. Yeah, that'd be fine. Mike, I will let you go and good luck on the next webinar.
Oh, thank you very much and thank you for being such a lovely lot to work with tonight. I enjoyed that and great questions, and thanks everyone for coming on rest of the conference. I do.
Yeah, take care, thank you, Mike, thanks everyone for listening. Mike is brilliant, but we've got another brilliant speaker tomorrow morning. We've got my favourite subject, dermatology.
So just come in and come to that tomorrow, tomorrow morning, it's gonna be great. OK, take care everyone and looking forward to seeing you very soon. Bye bye.