Dr Sutapa Mukherjee

population-based studies that about, you know, 25% of the adult population have got sleep apnea and many of them are completely undiagnosed.

Well, I think it's because physiologically you breathe through your nose and your mouth.

If your nose is blocked for whatever reason, and maybe in your case it was allergies,

then your mouth opens and then you're kind of relying on the back of your throat to remain open.

And of course, your tongue can move backwards and just obstruct the airway quite easily.

So if you open the nasal passages and allow people to breathe well through their nose, then by treating the allergy in your case,

then that restores the patency of the airway and the sleep apnea is treated.

And that's a really interesting area because there's different people who have different factors which contribute to them having sleep apnea.

So sleep restriction therapy is a part of cognitive behaviour therapy for insomnia, which is a well-proven treatment for insomnia.

And insomnia is...

when people have difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep, and they've had that for more than three months.

So what sleep restriction does, and it kind of comes back to what we were talking about earlier, in that that biological pressure for sleep

often lost in people with insomnia who are in bed but they're spending as much time awake as they are asleep.

So what happens is the bed becomes a place for being awake and also sleeping.

So what you do with sleep restriction therapy, which as I said is a part of cognitive behaviour therapy for insomnia, is that you, instead of letting people be in bed and

for maybe 10 or 11 hours.

And a lot of people with insomnia, because they're only sleeping a few hours, they think that if I get into bed and I spend longer time in bed, then I'll actually get more sleep.

But in fact, it's kind of the other edge, the other part of it is that by being in bed more, you're allowing yourself to stay awake more.

So what we do is we stop them from being in bed for so long.

So we say, well, depending on what time they're normally going to bed and getting out of bed, we restrict them to only maybe four or five hours of sleep.