Klaudia Mitura: Hello, happiness seekers. My name is Klaudia, and you are listening to the Happiness Challenge. This is part two of how to optimize your sleep. In the previous episode, we heard from the founder of The Sleep Scientist, Dr. Sophie Bostock on improving the quality of our sleep to stay happier and healthier.

And now it's time for me to put her advice into action. On the basis of our conversation this month, I'm going to track my sleep to understand more about my sleep patterns. But before I dive into my challenge, in this short episode, I'm summarizing key scientific findings on why we sleep and what impacts the quality of our sleep.

Join me.

As Sophie mentioned during our conversation, our need for sleep is wired into our DNA. It was discovered back in 2017 that our body clocks actually exist in every cell in the body, which I think is just mind blowing and fascinating to know. So that means we are programmed to operate on the cycle of being active, engaged during daylight hours, and recovery and rest during the night.

So in other words, we sleep because our body and brain is wired to, but what are the benefits of sleep to our happiness? I mean, we often have so many different demands on our time, not to mention finding some time to relax and sometimes to fit everything in, we may sacrifice sleep. So Matthew Walker, in his book, Why Do We Sleep, describes sleep as the save button in our brain that helps us to consolidate what we learn.

And I think that's an amazing way to describe the key, powerful aspect of sleep. Without sleep, we cannot consolidate our memories and our learnings. Sleep can also help us to come up with better solutions at work and life. It is an incubation period for the brain during which our brain organizes the stored information.

And so we are able to process problems more effectively and come up with more innovative solutions. So actually the old saying sleep on it has a scientific basis, which I think, again, is really interesting to know. Sleep also renews our energy. And of course, with higher level of energy, we are more likely to be resilient, productive, and in much better mood.

So in other words, our brain needs sleep to operate at its normal capacity, which leads to higher happiness. So lots of great benefits for us to consider to really get the sleep we need.

I guess the next question that is worth pondering upon is what factors impact our sleep quality. And there are four specific ones that I think may be quite simple, but actually not easy to implement or sustain.

One is the amount of light at the right time. So we want to be exposed to lots of, if possible, natural light in the morning, and much less light towards the evening with very dim light before going to bed.

Two. The level of stress throughout the day. So it's actually unrealistic for us to have a highly stressful day and expect our body to just relax and sleep at the end of it. This is because the stress is stored in our body and our mind will be thinking about what has happened on the previous day. So we need to think how we're releasing the tension before going to bed.

Three, the third factor that impacts sleep quality is type of a bedtime routine we have. So any drinks with caffeine will last up to six hours in our body. High intensive exercise that energizes us will wake up the body up to four hours and any screen time, which leads to excitement of learning new things and having new stimuli to deal with will actually make our body to produce cortisol and adrenaline, which will prevent the sleep.

So the simpler bedtime routine we have, the better. And the final factor that impacts our sleep quality is consistency of sleep. That is getting out of bed at the same time every day. Having varied times of going to bed and waking up means that our internal clocks in the body cannot get synchronized.

So as already mentioned, I think that these four factors are very interesting to consider in relation to the quality of the sleep. And because they're quite simple, light, stress, routine and consistency may not often be easy to implement or sustain.

In this happiness challenge though, I'm going to reflect of my sleep using the SATED scale, S A T E D scale, which assesses five key dimensions of sleep that have been consistently associated with health outcomes. And these dimensions are:

Satisfaction with sleep - Are we satisfied with the sleep?

Alertness during waking hours: So do we stay awake all day without dozing or napping?

Timing of the sleep: Are we asleep between 2am and 4am?

Sleep efficiency: Do we spend less than 30 minutes awake at night.

And sleep duration: Do we sleep between six and eight hours a day?

So for my happiness challenge, once a week, I'm going to reflect on my sleep and give myself the following score:

Zero, rarely or never - the situation took place in that week.

One, sometimes

Two, usually, always.

So the total for all the items can range from zero, which means that has been a quite poor sleep health that week, or maximum could be 10. That's actually quite good sleep health for that week. So I'm very much looking forward to learning more about my sleep.

And if you're one of the people who currently really want to get good sleep quality, but because of the external factors, you're not able to, listen to episode 111 with Sophie Bostock, who definitely gives some very practical tips for those of us who actually cannot sleep due to some external factors.

Hope you will enjoy it. Otherwise, I hope you will join me in this happiness challenge of optimizing your sleep. Remember to keep in touch and join the happiness challenge newsletter on LinkedIn. I see you at the end of the month so that you can hear what I have learned. Thank you so much for listening and have a wonderful sleep.

Bye.