Dr. Guy Leschziner

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55 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard Apr 2025

Dr. Guy Leschziner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Something You Should Know · How We Play: They Story of Fun and Games & The Cost of Not Sleeping Well · 21 Apr 2025 podcast

So the answer to that is if you really are burning the candle at both ends, then actually catching up at the weekend is very difficult.

Yeah, sleep hygiene is a horrible term. It really conjures up images of, you know, sleeping in a dirty bed. Essentially, what we mean by sleep hygiene, as you say, is those behaviors that are conducive to a good night's sleep.

And some of those are really obvious, you know, like not drinking several cups of coffee before you go to bed, not smoking immediately before you go to bed or consuming other nicotine containing substances, sleeping in a quiet environment. Some of them are becoming increasingly well known. like avoiding bright light in the evening.

So there is some evidence to suggest that what we do by exposing ourselves to bright light in the evenings is suppress our natural secretion of melatonin. So melatonin is this substance that an area of the brain called the pineal gland puts out that that is the chemical signal to the brain and indeed the rest of the body that it's time to go to sleep.

So by exposing yourself to bright light in the evenings, what you may actually be doing is having a negative effect both on sleep quality, but also making it more difficult for you to get off to sleep in the first instance.

We know that one of the major causes of difficulty sleeping, insomnia, is actually a condition called psychophysiological insomnia, where psychological factors...

um largely surrounding your association your conscious and unconscious association with being in the bed and drifting off to sleep are replaced by negative associations so rather than associating bed with being a comfortable sleeping environment where you feel cozy and you feel the warmth of and the security of knowing that you're going to drift off to sleep it's replaced by

that stress, that agitation, that anxiety that you're actually not going to drift off to sleep and that you're going to lie there awake for prolonged periods of time.

So rather than the bed being an inviting place of comfort, it often gets that psychological association is replaced by a feeling that your bed is an instrument of torture, that it's the place where you go to where you will have difficulties dropping off to sleep and will stay awake for a prolonged period of time.

And for many people, it's addressing those psychological factors that is actually the solution to actually treating their insomnia. For other people, however, there are many biological factors that result in poor sleep, be that medication that you're prescribed for something else, be it a range of sleep disorders like obstructive sleep apnea or a condition called restless leg syndrome.

So there are many different reasons, but we know that by far the commonest is insomnia, which affects about one in three adults at some point every year and about one in 10 adults on a regular long-term basis.

Well, that's just normal. That's a normal response to what's going on in your life. I think that one of the things that's under appreciated is that the range of normal when it comes to sleep is actually quite large. And just because you have a few nights where you don't sleep particularly well, that doesn't constitute insomnia. It doesn't constitute an ailment. It is part of normal life.

You know, people don't appreciate that caffeine hangs around for a very long time, particularly if you consume a lot of it. People, especially nowadays, are very used to using gadgets, you know, their cell phones or laptops in bed. And that's not very conducive, firstly, because of the issue of light exposure. But secondly, also, that's quite a mentally stimulating activity.

You know, one of the issues is that there are a range of sleep disorders that are very poorly known about, not just by the general population, but also by physicians. And in many cases, we often see individuals who clearly have had a problem with a sleep disorder for many years that has gone unrecognized.

So it's knowing about these sleep disorders, recognizing them as sleep disorders, that is really the first step to getting appropriate treatment.

Both, really, because the psychological and the physical interact quite a lot. There are some sleep disorders that are clearly purely biological. Things like obstructive sleep apnea, which is people who are snoring and collapsing their airway in the middle of the night. Things like restless leg syndrome, which is physical.

Things like narcolepsy, which is a very pure neurological disorder that results in

damage to a very small part of the brain but for some individuals there are sleep disorders that have inputs from both so for example people who sleepwalk we know that actually the basis of sleepwalking is purely biological it's as a result of different parts of the brain being asleep whilst other parts of the brain are awake but obviously

Those events can be influenced by daytime stress, sleep deprivation, poor sleep hygiene. So this is a good example of an interaction of the psychological and the behavioral and the environmental and the physical.

Well, I think I mentioned at the start of this interview that one of the essays that I was sent off to write was, why do we dream? And I'm not sure that we have any better inkling now than when I was writing that essay over 25 years ago. I think we know that dreaming probably has more than one function, and it probably has different functions at different stages of our lives.

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