The secret to getting better sleep tonight | James Leinhardt | TEDxManchester

Transcriber: Min Zhang Reviewer: Michael Nystrom We have three things in common, all of us here. We all have a spine, we all sleep, and when we were about five years old and we were playing as children, Grandma used to scream: “Posture! ” and all of us would sit up straight.

And that fear of Grandma screaming that word, even to world-leading influencers, doctors who are sat on front row slouching right now. Where is he? Dr C, we’ve seen you even though you’re amazing.

So why do we? Because everyone in the room has been slouching. Liam at the backstage doing the sound all day has literally been like this, doing his sound because it’s comfy.

Posture is the eternal fight against gravity. And sitting up like this, although Grandma was watching, she’s very disappointed in some of you. (Laughter) This is really hard.

Whereas this: Oh, yeah. Get me back here, this is the good spot. The thing that Grandma maybe missed was that if posture is the eternal fight against gravity, then really we need to consider our sleep.

It’s great and it’s comfy. And the beauty and the difference between sitting and sleeping or standing and sleeping - we remember wearing a book on our heads and doing this very nicely - Is that you’re already asleep, that’s the best bit. When you’re uncomfortable in these positions, and this is really my go-to for TV watching, the second you become uncomfortable, you move because you’re awake.

The difference with sleep is significant. I’m going to share and prove it to you now. You will have all, at some point in your lives, either sat in the back of a car and gone like this, or come to a TEDx and heard someone like me talk and done that, and within ten minutes you wake up, and your neck feels like it’s going to burn off.

Why didn’t you wake up then? Is this a completely different thing because you’re asleep? So I think it’s important to really address the average human because we spend so much time.

In fact, I met Youngr last night. He’s so awesome. And Youngr was talking to me about some research that he’d found about using whole foods to reduce the chances of Alzheimer’s.

You eat for four and a half years of your life. The lady that came on before who I’m definitely not going to mess with, nor am I going to mess with her, that guy was really big. Um, but you exercise on average for one and a half years of your life.

In fact, if you add all of these things up, it’s the same amount of time that you sleep. Now, the first or the second talk by James, which was phenomenal. I really know that if I fail in this mission, I know where I'm going for a job.

By law, we can sue James if he doesn’t provide us with an ergonomic workstation provision and an annual screening of our line work surface. But none of you have spent any time in your ergonomic chair because you've all been doing this. This gentleman here is not the average human.

And this is a chap I met just near Old Trafford, the right side of Manchester. (Laughter) And he’s a gentleman. (Applause) Dad that was for you.

He’s so annoyed with me that he said don't. He’s gone mad. Okay.

This is a gentleman that walks into hospital now. He had dementia, but he had a gastro trouble, walks into hospital, was bedridden for two weeks in hospital. And that two weeks becomes seven years.

That position you see him in there is fixed. This is a fixed body shape. So think about his personal care when you can’t separate his legs, think about him trying to swallow, his internal organs, his digestive system, his comfort, his pain.

Who even cares about that? He can’t speak. He can’t move.

He can’t be seated. He can’t shower. And he spends 23 to 24 hours a day in bed.

With very, very simple postural management equipment, we bring the bed to him. And look at what happens three months later. And that’s not rocket science.

That’s really, really simple. If you always do this, you never do this, and that feels really tight and awful. And I’ve discussed the benefits for somebody like that gentleman.

But the benefits for you guys are that it may well increase your energy levels. I met a lady last night at the TED dinner who said she was a great sleeper, and then she told me that she felt exhausted every time she woke up. It can lessen tension in shoulders, neck.

If you’re waking up with really awful tension headaches or your shoulders burning through, it could have something to do with your sleep posture. This happens to the majority of men. Ladies, you’ll be very grateful for this bit.

If you want to get back into your bedroom and you want to stop snoring, sleep posture may well be that thing. And the best bit is it’s the most simplest of equations. You need to consider the position you go to sleep in.

You’ll say, “Well, I don’t stay in one position. ” Of course you don’t. And we don’t want you to.

You’ve moved a thousand times just in the four - I’ve got to figure this out, four minutes and something. So the position you go to sleep in, that’s the software. That’s what you guys are going to address tonight.

So we are legitimately going to find a tangible way to improve your quality of sleep tonight. The second bit is the hardware, we’ll worry about that next time. Now, if you are suffering with sleep, which is in Manchester.

By the way, we are the worst sleep city in England. Congratulations to us all. That does deserve a round of applause because we’re all still smiling, that is the best bit.

In Westminster, in December, the university discussed our sleep deprivation. So in this room, 74% of you get less than seven hours, one in two, I think, gets less than six in the Manchester right now. Definitely not enough.

And every day we read a paper and we read an article that goes: “If you don’t get your 7. 5 hours, your nose will fall off, you’re going to get dementia, dying early, miserable death. Great.

So anyone who’s struggling with sleep tonight is definitely not looking forward to it. But there’s nothing to tell us how to make it better. So we see all these articles, all these phenomenal scientists on TED, online, telling us what happens with the sleep, why we need it, and what happens if we don’t get it.

So this fight between quantity and quality. Who cares about quantity? No one in the room is getting any.

So let’s start focusing on something that we tangibly can because we can’t focus on. I saw James Leinhardt today at TED and he said, “Get eight hours,” and that’s what I’m going to do because you might hate your partner, you might hate your boss, you might hate your kids, you might have a bill you weren’t expecting. There's a million reasons why you won't sleep tonight.

Sleep is definitely not going to help. Last night, I slept for about an hour. Thanks to herb.

(Laughter) And we all know the significance of sleep. In fact, you could argue that sleep is the foundation of all good wellbeing, because you wake up tired, you’re doing nothing about your wellbeing. We know it recovers as we know it restores as it heals us.

But really, you still can't get the hours. It doesn't matter what I tell you. How many wonderful nuggets of information that say if you get eight hours tonight, the world will be a fabulous place and United will win six nil.

Anyway, back to this. What we do know to be true is from a piece of conceptual evidence dating back to 1987, I think it was, that talks about the relationship between a neutral resting spine and the speed of recovery when you’ve had a spinal injury. Now, if you look at this board, it's pretty depressing.

1. 78 billion people have some sort of chronic pain. 60% who have chronic pain suffer with depression.

Imagine waking up in chronic pain. You’re going to be in an absolute stinky mood, and you’re not getting any sleep because everything hurts. You don’t get any sleep, everything hurts, and you’re in a bad mood.

This is a cycle that we’re all in. I can’t just tell you to get your hours. That’s not good enough.

So when you leave tonight, don't worry. You don’t have to go and buy a bed that costs ten grand that flies you to the moon and spins and whatever, lavender spray, or a smartwatch that doesn’t really tell you you’ve had a great night’s sleep. If you drink a bottle of whiskey tonight, you’ll have a great night’s sleep, The best bit about sleep posture is it will cost you absolutely nothing tonight, and I’m going to share how to do it.

As you know, I work with complex neurological patient groups. But when we realized that those people have no voice and no one really cares about the people in beds that have no voice, we went to meet with a load of athletes. And just before Tokyo.

This is one such athlete I met, Katy Marchant, who is a bronze medal Olympic champion, and she sadly crashed out of Tokyo. But she came to me because she was at the velodrome down the road seven hours a day, and she complained of knee pain. “Right, stiff right SIJ, hip”, I think, she said.

And her shoulders were hurting, but she said it was all down to the bike because of course, if you are a cyclist, you need to spend your days like this for aerodynamism, which you can’t do much for your back or neck, I assume. It had absolutely nothing to do with her bike whatsoever. If you look at that position, which I’m going to show you, sorry, front row, the second you bring one leg over the other, you've now put yourself in what we call a provocative posture.

(Laughter) So, a research from a very intelligent chap called Doug Cary out of Australia, talks about the fact that if you go to sleep in a provocative posture, you are more likely to wake up with increased symptoms of pain. But let's not even go with references or worry about any silly clinical words that none of us, including me, really understand. When you bring one leg over the other, this hip is now diagonal, as is my knee when I’ve fallen asleep, and this feels, by the way, ‘comfortable’, my shoulders going to drop forward.

And now I’m face planting. So if you actually look at the picture, you’ll see that Katy had right knee pain because she was squeezing it into the bed. Her stiff SIJ came because she was twisted like a pretzel.

And I think you can see what's going on with the neck. And all she needed to do was remember that if she worked with James, she would have been given an ergonomic chair, and if she only stuck a pillow between her knees or ankles and wants to fill that space she would have looked just like that picture. So this isn’t really an experiment because her naval failed.

What position do you go to sleep in? Because I suspect you sleep in a provocative posture. The provocative posture, by the way, is one where both knees touch the bed.

So if you are a tackler and it's the only way you can go to sleep because it’s comfy, don’t forget that every pregnant woman that went to the doctor and found out that they were a pregnant and a tackler, the doctor said, “It’s time to move onto your left-hand side. ” They all did it. So you can’t not only.

There’s only two positions I’d recommend, and I’m recommending this based on our experience in health care, because these are the two positions we put our patients in for 2 to 4 hours at a time. There’s one significant difference between our two patients here. One, as you can see, is supported, and we maintain good body shape and we preserve somebody’s body, internal organs are working, lung capacity is nice and lovely.

And that’s just horrendous to watch. These guys can’t speak. So you guys have moved probably 100 times in the 12 minutes I’ve spoken.

These people are put for 2 to 4 hours and can't tell you that they're uncomfortable. And none of us have a clue how to do this. None of you in the room have a clue how to sleep properly.

So we called them the soldier and the dreamer. Very simple. Just remember Grandma.

She’s screaming at you right now. Standing nice, standing up straight, shoulders, hips, knees and ankles. And seated posture, I think we’ve been there.

Lovely. Oh, yeah, that's better actually. Anyway, these positions are the only two that you can control.

The only two you can control when you go to sleep. What happens thereafter is anyone's guess. And I'm not here to maintain a singular posture.

In fact, if you sat like this throughout my talk, which some of you have done and you didn’t have to, you still get a point. This is really hard, actually. This is why.

Yeah. Just there. So perhaps, there is a way of reversing this cycle.

Because if you have chronic pain or if you are struggling with insomnia, then you will definitely be struggling with your mental health. So if you wake up in less pain tomorrow just because you stuck a pillow between your knees and ankles and didn’t look like a twisted pretzel, you might wake up in less pain. If you wake up in less pain, you’ll be in a better mood, and you might even sleep a little bit better.

In this room, you are either looking after somebody that you love, like Celia, the lady that’s been taking pictures who after this will be going straight to see her mom. She’s not seen her in two days. Or my dad over there.

Dad, how many times have you been to the GP this week with Grandma? Five. There you go.

Because at some point in your life, you’ll be looking after somebody you love. Or like my wife, you will be looking after someone like me for their whole lives. But the point is, this is going to affect all of us.

It’s not about when we get older, because if Dad’s had a bad night’s sleep, he’s going to be in a bad mood when he goes and sees Grandma. I'd like to dedicate this talk in memory of my uncle who fell asleep with Covid and never woke up. And whilst we know that sleep posture can save lives, we actually are more concerned today with you going and saving your spines.

Thank you very much.