Hello and welcome to session eight of Speaking about Sleeping with Stimuli and me Ellie Sturrock. And so this last session is really going to focus on the internal landscape and the getting to sleep bit and that will include mind and body. We can build on what we've gone through before, going back, particularly thinking about session four, and we've done some sleep restriction.

So we're putting ourselves to bed at perhaps a later time, and remembering in session five that we have we have circadian rhythms and that we, if left in a natural environment, tend to go to bed earlier and get up earlier. So those things are at play here. This is particularly about when we aren't able to get to sleep and if we wake up and then the mind fires up very quickly and it's difficult to get back to sleep.

There is a hormone that is completely connected to sleep and it's called melatonin and it comes, it's produced in the pineal gland in the brain. It slows things down. It slows the whole body down. It slows down the rates of digestion, urine production, kidney function, liver function. We get cold at night, that's partly because we're not moving around, but it's also because the liver is not functioning at such a high rate, and that liver is the organ of heating.

It's a boiler. So it's slowed down at night and it's not working so fast or hard and we're cooler. So melatonin is slowing things down. Another word for slowing things down is depressant. And melatonin has a similar effect on the mind. It's a depressant to the mind, so that means that it makes our mind more prone to taking a negative view and a bleaker outlook, however jolly we are in the day.

So it's not a sign of depression, it just, melatonin has an effect on the mind as well as the body and it affects our perception of time so when we wake up at night we can have an idea of time seeming much longer than it actually is. So thinking at night is not really to be recommended. We could say melatonin affects your thinking negatively. Don't think at night.

That is not possible. That's not possible for anybody and if we have an ADHD mind... But most people find this actually, with or without ADHD, their mind is very busy and part of what it's doing when it's thinking at night is going, I wish I was asleep, I should be sleeping for longer.

Hopefully we know that the amount of sleep we need varies and that our beliefs about sleep might not be accurate. But that will be part of what keeps us awake and worries us. And it's just not a very good environment to be in. Now, when we're worrying, we're producing adrenaline. Adrenaline is linked to fight and flight.

It's about staying awake. We don't tend to feel sleepy if we've just got out from a situation where we felt threatened. Been on, say, a fairground ride, you've got adrenaline. Adrenaline is the opposite to melatonin and so we want to slow things down, we want to work with melatonin and we can do this really simply in the body and in the mind.

So first thing to do is to put your hand on your belly while you're lying down and slow your breathing down. Make it longer, slower, deeper. Breathing at night is slower than it is in the day. So we copy that. We slow the breathing down. Doing it now, just with me, I'm doing this now, I've got my hands on my belly. I put my hands on my belly so that when I breathe, I want my hand to be moving outwards. That shows that your breath is breathing down and into the whole of the lung. And then as you breathe out, the hand moves in as the belly relaxes, the muscles relax.

So a few... longer, slower, deeper breaths. This in itself tends to relax the body because the oxygen rate is good coming in, the carbon dioxide route going out is good. We are using our mind to focus on our breathing so we're slowing the mind down too. So we're marrying of mind and body.

And now we're going to give the mind something to do. We're going to give to the mind the word breathe-ing, breath-ing. We're not saying it out loud, we're saying it in our heads, just the word breathe-ing. Breathe on the in breath, ing on the out breath and we, if we are in bed and we are not asleep, then the mind is saying this one word, repetition.

This is a type of meditation in effect, and long term meditators have got benefits of better heart rate variability, better immunity. They have a sense of life, being okay as it is. And the other benefit is that by doing this is as good as being asleep or just about. It's settling the mind and it's settling the body.

So if you're in bed and you're doing this, it's about as good as being asleep. So you can give up all those worries about not being asleep. By doing this it's about as good as being asleep.

So I'll leave you with that and some better night's sleep and thank you for being here in this program where we've been Speaking about Sleeping with me Ellie Sturrock and Stimuli.