Sophie Bostock
speaker
87 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 28 Jun
Sophie Bostock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.
In the UK, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime.
The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins?
Indeed, it did by vaccine and its protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow.
After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90% lower than expected in women in their 20s.
We're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the UK.
This is something that I really hope my daughters will never have to deal with.
We tend to increase our perception of threat when we're sleep deprived.
And I think this is an incredibly important theme that will probably sort of run through this conversation because that sense of threat, that is not just psychological.
That is very much physiological.
So if your brain and your body are feeling on edge, then what happens?
You amp up that sensitivity of the stress response, this physiological cascade which has evolved to help us to fight or flee or freeze in the face of danger.
And for most of us, that means increasing adrenaline, increasing cortisol, increasing blood pressure, increasing the blood flow to the muscles, perhaps making us
sweat a little bit more, mobilizing blood sugar, blood glucose, so that we're fired up for action.
So that is an evolutionary response to being in an environment where we couldn't sleep well.
So if you think about our hunter-gatherer ancestors, you know, if they were camped out next to a den of saber-toothed tigers, there was an evolutionary advantage in being in this increased state of fight or flight.
They were much less likely to get eaten.
And over hundreds of thousands of years, our brains have learned to associate sleep loss with potential danger.
And so we are more on edge.
So that helps to explain those emotional responses, also the physiological responses that over time our immune system becomes dysregulated, more like to be exhausted almost, because we're constantly ramping up our immune response ready to fight infection.
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