Modern life moves quickly - too quickly for some
- and it's affecting our sleep.
According to the National Sleep Foundation,
a third of people in the UK get less than the recommended seven
to nine hours a night.
We all have a smartphone and a tablet.
Exposure to this blue light of those
devices has negative consequences for our sleep
quality and our sleep duration.
Elevated levels of stress can have a negative impact
on your sleep.
You can choose any song you want...
What can we do about it?
Forgive me for saying that a Sleep Robot sounds a bit weird.
And is the answer napping at work?
When you feel your concentration waning, sitting at your desk,
don't grab the coffee.
Don't grab chocolate and sugary drinks.
Have a nap.
Sleep is important for well-being and for business.
But our minds are overstimulated.
We stay up too late, bingeing on box sets,
as smartphones and other screens are never too far away.
We are in the middle of a sleep crisis.
Globally, the WHO has declared that sleep deprivation
is a huge risk, not only on our health,
but also on our economy.
So I'm going to look at some of the latest solutions on offer.
Ostrich pillows, nap pods, wearable devices,
and sleep robots can all supposedly help.
So you've developed a Sleep Robot to try and combat
this problem.
How does it work?
You hold it during the night, like this, as a Teddy bear.
It will start to mimic the physical sensation
of the falling and rising of the breath, which
will be synchronised to you.
And it guides you to a meditative state of breathing.
And in combination with a speaker that is in there,
you can listen to guided meditation or a lullaby.
It doesn't look like a robot, it is fair to say.
What makes it a robot is the fact
that it can detect your sleep stage.
It detects your breathing pace.
And based upon the breathing pace,
it will tailor its behaviour to get you to sleep in a personal
way.
I hope that every bedroom in the world
will one day have Sleep Robots in them.
Well, I'm not sure there's space for a sleep robot in my bedroom
just yet.
You're supposed to hold it of this.
But It just doesn't feel right.
I tried it for a few nights, but I tend to sleep on my front
and I couldn't get comfortable while cradling it.
Can I fall asleep like this?
I don't think I could.
But this lack of sleep is adding up.
Marco Hafner, chief economist at Rand Europe,
produced a report looking at the economic costs.
If you have less than six hours a night,
over a kind of longer period of time,
this is where negative consequences
on your health and your well-being,
but also on your productivity, can set in.
Sleep deprivation costs the UK economy somewhere between 1
per cent and 2 per cent of GDP every single year.
That's roughly about £40bn.
People, or individuals, or employees
who don't sleep enough, they're more
likely to be absent from work, much
more likely to get a common cold or a flu.
Or you come to work, but you're not as productive
as you could be.
An individual who sleeps, on average, less than six hours
a night, loses an average of about five working days
more, compared to an individual who sleeps somewhere
between seven and nine hours.
So if you were to add that up, what
does that look like at a sort of national level?
It's probably in the hundreds of thousands days lost in the UK.
So we're losing hundreds of thousands of days of work
each year due to sleep deprivation?
Yes.
But do we all really need eight hours sleep every night?
Some successful CEOs and politicians
are said to survive on much less.
The question is whether all these politicians and business
leaders who claim that they only need two hours of three
hours of sleep a night are within this group
of natural short sleepers.
It's questionable.
Potentially, if they do this over a longer period of time
that will have negative consequences
for their health and potentially,
their productivity.
Even if you're lucky enough to be one of those people who
get the recommended seven to nine hours sleep a night,
a daily power nap could still boost
productivity and well-being.
Cara Moore, founder of ProNappers,
is on a mission to change attitudes
to napping in the workplace.
So as a nap fanatic I want to evangelise about napping.
Set a timer for 20 minutes, because you
don't want to nap for more than 20 minutes.
If you do, you'll get into what we call the sleep inertia,
and you'll wake up feeling groggy.
But, I mean, I'm a nap pro.
I can even nap for 5 minutes or 10 minutes,
and it makes such a difference to my productivity
in the afternoon.
We want to normalise napping in the workplace,
and to make it acceptable and accessible for all.
That all sounds great.
But where do you go to nap in the office?
Weird, or...
The reality, according to a ProNappers survey, is grim.
Three-quarters of our survey told us
that they had napped at work.
When we drill down into where they had napped,
the results were staggering.
This is somebody napping on the toilet, by the looks of it.
Yes.
So 23 per cent of our survey who had napped at work,
had gone to loo to take a nap.
Wow.
The most common place that people
went to nap during the working day was in their car,
or at your desk, or under your desk.
I mean, how on earth does somebody's nap
under their desk?
Well, I can nap anywhere.
So if really there was no alternative
and I was in an open-plan office and there was really
nowhere else to go, then I would just put my head down
under a desk.
So just legs poking out then, just
sleep a bit longer for my nap.
Don't mind my legs.
A little trip hazard, maybe.
A UK start-up, Podtime, says it has the solution.
It's sold 600 nap pods to companies in over 20 countries.
So you go in there, you slide the door.
You're in there and no one can see you.
So this is going to help change the culture at companies where
people maybe aren't used to napping, perhaps
because of a lack of privacy.
This is giving them that privacy to feel relaxed enough in order
to drop off.
Yes, indeed.
It's actually quite a small footprint.
Once you're in there, it feels quite spacious.
There's more space inside the pod than I imagined,
but I'm not convinced claustrophobic people would
agree.
It isn't soundproof, either.
But it's comfortable and private.
Nick Taylor uses the Podtime Nap Pod in his workplace about once
a week, and he encourages his staff to do the same.
Sleep is a natural part of a human's life.
And it's important that we are well-rested for our brain
to function well.
So I don't see any reason why we wouldn't want people
in the workplace to take time out and take a sleep for 20
minutes or something.
And then come back in feeling more alert and more engaged.
A cynic, though, would say that this
is about keeping your employees at their desk for longer.
It's not about a 9-5 day anymore.
Your emails don't stop at 5.00pm.
They don't start at 9.00am.
The lines are blurred between the office and home.
So I think it's about empowering employees actually,
to offer them a place to rest.
I don't think it's about being cynical and...
Not about getting their pound of flesh for the employer?
Absolutely not.
OK, but wouldn't a more progressive company maybe give
the staff that flexibility maybe to work at home
rather than to nap but stay in the office for longer?
Yeah, working from home is more and more mainstream.
But for example, if your client facing,
you cannot tell an employee, OK, come at 10.00am
if you're tired.
If you have to actually be there for a client at 9.00am,
that's not going to work, I think.
These days, it isn't just the big tech companies or start-ups
that provide nap stations.
Even The Financial Times has a relaxation room.
OK, so it's a small space with room for just two people
in a building that holds several hundred.
No nap pods here, for now.
So I wouldn't say that there's a widespread nap
culture at the FT just yet.
I can't imagine relaxing enough at work
to drop off, when a colleague could walk in at any moment
to find me snoring away.
The ProNappers provide me with an Ostrich Pillow, a temper eye
mask, and a nap aroma inhaler.
So it's now or never.
I think I did just drop off there, which surprised me.
I wasn't sure I was going to be able to,
wasn't sure I'd be able to relax,
sitting at work with a camera pointing at me.
But I think I probably did.
I've been in here for about 20 minutes.
And despite the noise from the traffic, noise from the road,
I think I had about 10 or 15 minutes there.
According to my Fitness Tracker, I was asleep for 13 minutes.
It doesn't sound like much, but I leave the relaxation room
feeling refreshed and alert.
It's never been easier to monitor
the quality of our sleep, thanks to wearable technology.
Fitbit devices analyse sleep and provide a score based
on resting and sleeping heart rates,
and the amount of time spent in each sleep cycle.
A score of over 90 is generally considered excellent.
Anything over 80 is usually good.
I'm struck by my own scores, though.
I tend to get less than the recommended seven hours
a night, sometimes a lot less.
While my Fitbit sleep score is usually fair,
rather than good to excellent.
But according to Fitbit, I'm not alone.
The global average is just a little bit short
of seven hours.
If we could move the global average up 30 minutes,
I think that will be a big benefit.
And will that apply to me, personally?
I'm getting somewhere between six and seven hours sleep.
My sleep score is usually somewhere around the 75 mark.
It would be nice if you're able to get more sleep.
When you talk to people about why they do not sleep enough,
a lot of cases, it's not a lack of desire or interests.
It's that they have to deal with the reality of getting
a kit to school or they've got an early start at work.
What we're trying to do is provide, at least, information.
But there's a danger that access to too much information
could have an adverse effect.
If you're someone who suffers from insomnia,
or generally you worry about your sleep
and you start tracking your sleep,
and you see that you potentially sleep
less than the recommended seven to nine hours,
you may start actually to worry.
And due to this worry, you sleep even less.
Yeah, there's a danger that we have too much data
available sometimes, perhaps.
It can be very important to track your sleep and your sleep
quality.
At the same time, if it's really negatively affecting
your sleep, then it's not a good thing
if you start worrying about it.
It's also important to mention that while some of the sleep
trackers, and generally trackers,
they become more and more sophisticated and better
in tracking your sleep, they're still potential not necessarily
100 per cent accurate in measuring your sleep.
The way work is going today, people
have more autonomy and flexibility
about how they work at their best and get their job done.
So for some people, it will be going for a run.
For other people, it's having a nap.
And I think if you're one of those people who absolutely
feel that sort of compulsion to shut your eyes,
rather than just powering through, or having a coffee,
or going out for a cigarette, have a nap.
It feels like there's some way to go before work naps catch
on everywhere.
But there are still many ways we can try to improve our sleep.
Going to bed earlier, cutting the blue lights at bedtime,
or trying the latest tech gadget could
leave you feeling refreshed and more productive.
It won't all work for everyone, so a holistic approach
might be the best bet.
I'm going to get on the case - just as soon
as I stop feeling so tired.