DR MICHAEL MOSLEY: How staring at a bright light finally cured my insomnia

One of the benefits of being a TV presenter, especially if you’re someone who likes to experiment on your own, is that you discover a lot of unexpected things about yourself.

Although this is not all good news. Thirteen years ago, I discovered I had Type 2 diabetes through a random blood test, and set out on a journey (with camera crew in tow) to see if I could cure myself.

More recently, I did a series on sleep and discovered why I have insomnia – and that I have another life-shortening condition, obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).

OSA is incredibly common, affecting up to ten million Britons. Essentially, this means that you repeatedly stop breathing while you sleep because your throat and tongue muscles relax and block your airways.

Your brain, always alert, wakes you up just enough so that you lie on your side and start breathing again. This can happen more than 30 times an hour. Those affected tend to make gasping, snorting, or choking sounds as they try to get air into their lungs.

Not surprisingly, if you have OSA, despite sleeping eight hours or more, you are likely to feel very tired during the day and may experience memory loss. But it can also have a terrible impact on your long-term health. However, fewer than 15 percent of Brits who have it know they have it, let alone get treatment.

Although I knew I was sleeping poorly and often felt tired during the day, I thought this was because I woke up frequently during the night and found it difficult to get back to sleep.

Last year I went to Australia to make a series about sleep: among other things, I took part in a revolutionary study from Flinders University’s Sleep Health Institute in Adelaide.

The idea was to take 30 people who have struggled with their sleep for years and use cutting-edge technology to diagnose their problems – and then see if a tailor-made sleep program could help.

We all had to spend a night being observed in a sleep laboratory – we had electrodes on our heads to record our sleep, and we were also filmed and observed at night.

Professor Danny Eckert, an expert in sleep disorders who led the team, told me that my data showed that I had moderately severe OSA, and that it was particularly bad when I lay on my back.

This was a nasty shock because not only do you feel tired, but if you have untreated OSA it also significantly increases your risk of heart disease and stroke.

And it turned out I wasn’t the only one. A third of the volunteers in the study were found to have OSA, and many, like me, were completely unaware of it.

So what are the risk factors for OSA? Most people who have it also smoke, drink (both of which relax the muscles of the upper airways), or are significantly overweight and have a large neck – but none of these things are true for me.

However, OSA is also more common in older men (tick) and can have a strong genetic component (tick, my father had it).

As for treating it, while weight loss can be helpful, my BMI is already in the healthy range.

The team knew I wasn’t keen on a CPAP machine (where you wear a mask while you sleep, which pushes air into your airways to keep them open), so they suggested some alternatives.

First I was fitted with a mandibular advancement device, a type of mouthguard that pushes your jaw forward. This prevents your tongue from flopping back and blocking your airway.

The second device they recommended was a strap worn around the neck that detects when you are lying on your back. It then makes a buzzing sound to alert you to lie on your side.

You can also try cheaper, low-tech approaches as suggested by the NHS, such as sewing a tennis ball into the back of your pajamas or buying a bed wedge. But it turned out that my sleep problems weren’t limited to OSA.

All trial participants had to take an electronic pill, which measures our body temperature. This fluctuates over 24 hours, but is normally lowest around 4am, when you should be most sleepy.

But my core temperature is at its lowest around 1 a.m., three hours earlier than normal.

That might explain why I find it difficult to stay awake much past 10 p.m. and why, when I wake up at 3 a.m., I find it so difficult to get back to sleep (my body clock thinks it’s sunrise and time to wake up).

So the answer for me was exposing myself to bright lights at night.

As Professor Leon Lack, a psychologist at Flinders, explained, this would help shift my body clock later and make me less likely to wake up at 3am feeling so clear and alert.

He also recommended I try “bedtime restriction therapy,” which in my case meant going to bed at 11pm every night and getting up around 5:30am every morning, for at least four weeks.

The idea is to teach your brain to associate lying in bed with sleep, rather than lying awake. Once you start sleeping better, you can gradually increase the time you spend in bed.

It’s hard, at least at first, but it’s also an effective way to treat insomnia in the long term (for more details on all this, see my new book, 4 Weeks To Better Sleep).

All of this has made a huge difference to my sleep; I now have my OSA and insomnia under control and that makes me feel full of energy during the day.

Best of all, I can participate and enjoy family activities, where before I might have felt so exhausted that I withdrew into myself.

As for the rest of the study participants, more than 80 percent experienced life-changing improvements in their sleep.

One said to me: ‘I’m now getting sleep so good it should be illegal.’

The results of the trial were so impressive that they will be published in a leading sleep journal later this year.

Humanity has waged a long battle against nasty microbial infections, but we also owe the microbes a lot: without them turning sugar into alcohol, there would be no beer or wine.

And it seems we can thank them for our brainpower too.

A study from the Cambridge Institute of Science has found that our ability to produce myelin (the insulation around our nerves that allows messages to travel quickly to and through our brains) is thanks to a virus that has been a relative of has infected us. past. Something to think about when you get your next cold.

Like many others, I am increasingly concerned about the growing threat posed by plastic pollution.

It’s not just the plastic bags that litter the hedgerows when I go for a walk, but also microplastics, the tiny particles of the stuff that are literally everywhere and are increasingly seen as a major health risk.

Direct evidence for this came from a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers in Italy examined plaque samples (the fatty deposits lining blood vessels) from patients who had recently undergone surgery to remove it.

Nearly 60 percent of the samples contained microplastics – and patients with microplastics in their dental plaque were almost five times more likely to have a heart attack, stroke or die in the 34 months after surgery.

The researchers think the microplastics cause chronic inflammation, which in turn causes heart disease and stroke.

Analysis showed that most of the particles were made of polyethylene, which is commonly found in food packaging and plastic grocery bags; or polyvinyl chloride (PVC), used in plastic bottles.

There’s not much you can do to avoid microplastics, although my wife Clare and I avoid heating or microwaving anything in a plastic container at home. We also drink tap water instead of bottled water.

You can also boil tap water for a few minutes and then filter it when it has cooled. A study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters found that this removed more than 80 percent of microplastics, especially when the water is hard.

This is because cooking releases calcium carbonate (limescale) from the water, which traps the microplastics, which you can then filter.