Was I asleep and missed something?

Shining a light into the world of sleep....

Being onto stuff, you will have known that March included World Sleep Day!

On such an important occasion, I thought it was worth throwing out a 30% discount on our Sleep Mastery Course to celebrate this important annual milestone. Looking forward to receiving feedback from the many many clinicians who took up the snap sale offer and finding out how they are integrating this new knowledge into their clinical practice.

Hot on the heels of this, I was sitting in the Perth T2 airport lounge waiting to return home and my lovely wife while browsing the bookstore noticed and purchased for me Dr Michael Mosley's book Fast Asleep. Needing no introduction, Michaels' book explores sleep problems and solutions and provides a unique perspective via his wife and co-author Dr Clare Bailey. She is also a GP but has a strong dietary approach to health and wellbeing, so I am looking forward to seeing these two topics integrated and considering how to include this information in clinical and personal practice.

And... I have recently finished listening to Andrew Huberman's episode on oral health and hygiene. Lo and behold, one of his key dental resources (Dr Mark Berhenne aka. ask the dentist) for this episode has a strong focus on the importance of sleep for optimal oral hygiene. Why? Adequate sleep supports the oral microbiome (the focus of the podcast) and the oral microbiome supports the gut biome, which in turn supports the health of the whole organism (us!). Dr Berhenne has a bunch of information about sleep here.

As a segue from oral to aural and many more hours of listening/learning about sleep, the Huberman Lab has just started a six-part sleep special with Matt Walker. With each episode between 2.5 and 3 hours, you will need some serious me-time activities to work your way through this library of information.

Finally, my co-author and I have been playing email tennis back and forth on our manuscript examining the effect of a single sleep education session on participants experiencing neck and lower back pain. This longitudinal study provides us with the first evidence of how effective we can be in changing sleep posture behaviour and the effect this has on waking pain, stiffness, bothersomeness and quality of sleep. As participants were 'normal people' and sleeping in their homes, results are transferrable to our standard clinical populations. Looking forward to publishing and sharing with you all at some time in the future. The back story and related papers can be found here.

If you have come across valuable sources of information about sleep, or you would like to share how you incorporate information about sleep into clinical practice, I would love to learn from you.

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