Name: Do we get enough sleep? - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2026-01-31T12:42:05.000Z
Duration: 19 min 3 s
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Hi, I'm Johnny diamond and from the BBC World Service, this is the global story.

Tossing, turning, feeling wide awake at 2 in the morning and struggling to get back to sleep.

We know how bad we feel after not getting a good night's rest.

We spend around a third of our lives asleep but a third of us regularly struggle.

And recent research shows that bad sleep can increase the risks of multiple health conditions.

How harmful is it to get insufficient or irregular sleep?

And given how common it is, can it be improved?

With me today is Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford.

And Dr. Nariena Ramlakhan, a physiologist and author.

Let me start with the most important question of the day.

Smugly, I have to say I slept beautifully last night.

I celebrate good nights of sleep because for many decades I didn't sleep well.

I woke up once and then got straight back to sleep again.

Two very smug guests in our studio delighted with their sleep.

Russell, you specialize in circadian rhythms.

Some people watching and listening may know what that is, others will not.

And, and I suppose why are they so important?

So if we think about what our biology needs to do, it has to deliver the right stuff at the right concentration to the right tissues and organs at the right time of day.

And what our circadian system allows us to do is give a time structure for our entire biology.

And so it's an internal representation of a day which is fine tuning every aspect of our physiology, every aspect of our biology, to the varying demands of sleep and activity, consciousness and sleep.

And the critical question, I suppose, well, for ordinary punters like me, what does the clock recommend or mandate even as an optimum amount of sleep?

I've often said that sleep is like shoe size.

And there have been some somewhat irresponsible sort of statements saying, you know, if you don't get eight hours of sleep, you're going to die.

I mean, the healthy range for sleep from the National Sleep foundation, which I'm a member of, that board, is somewhere between six hours and it may be up to 10 and a half, even 11 hours for some people.

The average true is about seven to eight hours, but there's lots of variation between individuals.

Narina, you have spent what, three decades helping people to get better sleep?

And I think it's ranged from what Schools to psychiatric wards.

What do people tell you causes their poor sleep?

Sometimes people have these really unhelpful beliefs, you know, these misconceptions about what they should or should not be getting.

And, you know, they go around saying, I've got this amount of sleep and they're measuring it and they're obsessing about it.

And that in itself is creating problems with their sleep, it's creating anxiety.

So I think that there's that side of things.

But there's also what I've been observing for the last 30 years.

You know, I started doing this work in the 90s.

I left the academic world and ended up in a health screening clinic where I was measuring the health of city professionals.

And that's when I started to notice that more and more people wanted to talk about sleep.

And at the same time, of course, technology had exploded onto the scene.

The Internet and mobile phones and everything was going really fast.

So I've been paying attention to the speed and noticing how it impacts our human physiology and as Russell has said, you know, the circadian timer and then how it impacts sleep.

And I think that's playing its part, the speed of life.

I mean, I understand things feel like they've got a lot faster.

Does it mean in your eyes that we are unable to slow down into sleep because we are spending so much more of our lives in a sort of heightened state of existence?

We've certainly lost the ability to slow down.

But not just at night, but, but throughout the day.

Oscillating of all of the physiological processes in the body.

They oscillate in a kind of sinusoidal up and down rhythm.

And I think the way we're living our lives, we've become very restless.

when we had lunch breaks and coffee breaks and tea breaks and people don't, they're stretched to the limit.

So we thought technology would make life easier.

And it does in many respects that we can do this sort of thing, but

it does mean that, you know, people are stretching themselves and often against the limits of their physiological capabilities.

Narina, you mentioned this sort of irony that people, some people at any rate, are now getting so anxious about sleep that it's affecting their sleep.

It leads inexorably to the question how can you tell when you're not getting enough sleep?

Well, I try to encourage my clients and you've mentioned some of them.

You know, they might be children in schools, they could be people in psychiatric clinics with a lot of corporate employees.

I try to encourage people to listen more deeply and to not reach for their phones or their devices first thing in the morning to see what an app has just told them, but

actually to just when you wake up in the morning, before you reach outside of yourself to be told X, Y or Z, just listen, how do you feel right now?

And even to listen to the speed of your breathing or the speed of your thoughts, and

then as you go about your day, to pay attention to how the body feels physically, how you feel emotionally, how you relating to other people.

And I think many people fundamentally don't have a sleep problem.

And, you know, sleep anxiety is now recognized as an issue.

And it arises for lots of reasons, but it means we have a target.

There are things that one can do about reducing one's anxiety either before you go to bed, before you go to sleep, or if you happen to wake up.

There are anxiety reducing regimes that you can adopt to get back to sleep.

And I think an increasing understanding of why you might be having sleep anxiety is really important going forward.

Russell, I want to ask you about whether or not sleep as a block is important.

I mean, I think a fair number of people watching or listening the show will wake up during part of the night and then hopefully get back to sleep.

But worry that somehow the second bit of sleep is not worth as much as the first bit of sleep.

Well, I would argue very strongly that it doesn't matter if you wake up in the middle of the night, as long as you've got the techniques of reducing stress and getting back to sleep.

And we've been so often told that perfect sleep is an eight hour single block, and

As one ages, you're more inclined to have what's called biphasic sleep, whereby you're going to sleep, you're waking up, you're going back to sleep again, or indeed polyphasic sleep.

And historically there are some studies which suggest that this may be the default pattern of human sleep.

And the key thing is that if you do wake up in the middle of the night, the tendency is to think, oh my God, that's it.

I might as well start drinking coffee and doing emails.

And if you lie there and you relax, you almost invariably get back to sleep.