As World Sleep Day approaches we hand over the blog to our wonderful steering group member and evaluation lead Professor of Sleep and Cognition Caroline Horton.
You can Watch Carolines TEDX talk here
Making sleep a priority in order to improve it
World Sleep Day occurs on the Friday before the vernal (spring) equinox, which falls around two weeks ahead of the Spring clock changes in the UK. This year we will hold the sixteenth annual World Sleep Day; each year an increasing number of activities, celebrating and raising awareness of the importance of sleep, take place across the world. The theme for World Sleep Day 2025 is “Making sleep health a priority”. This aims to raise awareness about the importance of sleep for our health and wellbeing, whilst encouraging people to give their sleep needs as much attention as eating well and keeping active.
I suspect we can all sympathise with the importance of sleep health.
We can’t survive without sleep; even individual cells sleep in their own ways, to have time to regenerate and recuperate. Sleep affects all aspects of our function and has likely evolved to serve several purposes. It restores and resets allowing us to feel energised upon waking, whilst the brain is cleansed to optimise signalling the following day. Although sleep supports all aspects of physiological function, as a psychologist I’m particularly interested in how it promotes higher order abilities like problem solving, creativity, memory, and emotion regulation. All aspects of mental and physical health are affected by sleep.
Disturbed sleep is strongly associated with anxiety.
This also means that disturbances to sleep can lead to disturbances in function. Disturbed sleep is strongly associated with anxiety, depression and many additional mental health disorders. With some physical health complains such as suffering from a virus we often feel the need to rest, which can aid the recovery process. In contrast when experiencing mental health challenges like anxiety it can be particularly hard to sleep, which can lead to a damaging cycle of behaviours of not sleeping well, then feeling even more anxious. Evidence has demonstrated that persistently disrupted or short sleep can increase risks of some cancers, strokes and heart disease, susceptibility to viruses, and even in the short term can increase pain and inflammation.
Despite these essential functions of sleep, as perhaps we all know, sleep can sometimes be hard to come by. We may all occasionally have a challenging night of sleep, but if those occasions become more frequent, it is likely time to start reflecting on our own sleep behaviours. This can be trickier than you might imagine, as many of our daily routines become habitual, meaning that they occur automatically. We might not be aware that we are yawning at a similar time each evening, for instance, as we push ahead to stay awake until our tasks are complete, by which time sleep may be hard to come by. This can occur because we have missed an optimal opportunity for sleep.
We all experience periodic cycles in activity, followed by periods of lesser activity. If we are able to monitor and predict those cycles, we can align our bedtimes with periods of natural tiredness, which can help us to unwind and get to sleep.
Getting to sleep, or sleep initiation, may be one challenge, but remaining asleep (“sleep maintenance”) can be another. Again, monitoring our behaviours closely can help us to identify predictable patterns of behaviour. We must take care not to believe that, just because behaviours occur regularly, that they are somehow set in stone. Many adults wake in the night and go to the toilet. Over time, they believe that they have woken to go to the toilet, which then becomes a routine whereby they will wake up in order to do so. However, with a little monitoring (and sometimes a little behaviour change such as drinking less before going to bed), we can change those habits, remain in bed and – consequently – remain asleep.
Our sleeping environments should be as relaxing and pleasing as we can possibly make them.
It is imperative that we feel safe where we want to sleep, as well as comfortable. We also need to be kind to ourselves to recognise that sleeping well is neither a luxury nor something we can do without; it is worth spending the time being conscious of our sleep behaviours, before we can begin to improve them. Doing so will lead to enhanced sleep, and ultimately, enhanced function during the day.
A final reminder: the Spring clock changes lie ahead, but don’t be fooled that we have to “lose an hour of sleep” – with a little forward planning we can ensure that we sleep for around 7.5 hours a night (which seems optimal for most adults). You may wish to start heading to bed a few minutes earlier than usual from now, and rising a little earlier also, to help to ease yourself into a slightly amended routine, such that by the time the clocks spring forward, you will be ready and fresh to rise early.
In the meantime, sleep well, and do ensure to make your sleep health a priority.
Caroline Horton is Professor of Sleep and Cognition, and Director of DrEAMSLab, at Bishop Grosseteste University. She is the independent evaluation lead for the Lincs Sleep Hub project and has developed The Sleep Well Programme to improve sleep in young adults.
Caroline’s inaugural lecture, “How to make sleep a public health priority: Be sleep conscious” will be delivered on World Sleep Day.
BSS position statement on the clock changes: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsr.14352