Chapter 2
Dozy, sleepy, drowsy and weary

There are only two things that are satisfying in bed, and one of them is sleep. Sleep is the new black. It's a cool subject that has a direct link to wellbeing. Large organisations have identified that their employees perform well above average if they sleep well. Some employers even track their key people's sleep patterns to ensure they can extract the best return. Even sporting teams are linking sleep to on-field performance.

So it will come as no surprise that sleep is a key strategy in changing attitudes, behaviour and habits. In fact, it may well be the silver bullet. As for your spenditude, we have evidence that if you get a good night's sleep you're on your way to a far more positive spenditude.

And it's free and available every night in a bed near you!

Train your brain

One of the keys to habit change is to basically trick your brain. By improving your cognitive ability you can prepare your brain to accept habit change and stick with it, so it becomes your new normal. It's not difficult, but it does require a leap of faith.

To start moving some of your money habits, keep the end game in mind. Changing money habits will provide you with what you want: more choices, peace of mind and some form of financial security. These are excellent reasons to embark on behaviour change. So is having a healthy life.

Sleep: the brain changer

The first step to changing the way your brain thinks is to focus on your sleep. Yes, good old sleep. There's compelling evidence that we make better decisions, are more focused and feel better if we place more importance and focus on sleep. Numerous studies have linked inadequate sleep to depression, anxiety, repetitive thinking, memory deficit, ADHD and poor self-regulation. Yet, according to a 2016 survey by the Sleep Health Foundation, up to 45 per cent of adults report having insufficient sleep.

We asked Mark .

We asked Dr Mark Ryan - a psychiatrist and accredited neurofeedback practitioner who focuses on the mind-brain-body links - if he believes there could be a link between sleep behaviour and money-related behaviour.

His approach to supporting clients is to combine his understanding of insomnia and its role in mental health with leading-edge technologies and evidence-based research. Mark has a particular interest in the link between sleep and both physical and psychological wellbeing.

His response is great news:

Improve your sleep for better quality and more adequate duration of sleep, and you create a context for much better functioning in all areas of life - better mood and behavioural self-regulation; smarter money decisions; more skilful and better social, occupational and sporting performance and functioning.

Sort out your sleep and you are on your way to sorting out your money habits.

Simple as that.

Sleep really matters

Adults are pretty good at prioritising things other than sleep: 'I'll just finish writing this email', I'm almost at the end of the movie', and so on. We feel signs of tiredness, but we think we have more in the tank we can push through.

In kids, the tired signs are clear: inattention, lashing out, tantrums, yawning and eye rubbing. But as adults we're less aware of the signals, particularly in ourselves. We overcome tiredness with another coffee or think we can 'catch up' on the weekend. Signs of tiredness in adults may be reactive or impulsive behaviours, not being as organised or having less focus. Scrambled thoughts and poor decision making are also issues for those of us who are sleep deprived, but the problem is that we have little awareness or insight into how impaired we really are.

Sleep is as important to our health as diet, exercise and general hygiene. Many important physiological functions are restored and re-set during sleep and there are strong links between sleep and illness, particularly mental illness (people with insomnia are more likely to experience depression). Sleep helps your body reset blood pressure, so there are links between sleep and cardiovascular disease as well as diabetes.

Sleep affects behaviour and helps us screen out irrelevant stimuli. Regardless of whether you think you're getting enough sleep, it's worth considering your nightly habits to see if there's room for improvement.

Mark explains .

People who consistently get less sleep than their body requires don't notice their energy is lower overall. If you are sleeping six hours or less every night, you are in fact as cognitively and behaviourally disabled as if you have not slept at all for 48 hours. So you are basically drunk in terms of your brain function. But you don't have the physical symptoms that you would if you were drunk (stumbling or falling, for example) so you have no insight or awareness.

Ultimately, sleep and our circadian rhythms are important to brain activity, hormone production, immune functioning and cell regeneration. There are quite a lot of essential things going on in our sleep. When we sleep better for long enough and get all the phases of sleep, we synchronise our biological rhythms and match them to social and other demands of life.

Get your nest ready

Sleep behaviours such as slowing down at night and relaxing are important and are equivalent to a pet dog or cat preparing its 'nest' before settling down to sleep. We can't be like the Eveready battery bunny . . . always switched on.

Think of your body as having a sleep-wake switch. Historically, when the sun went down, our bodies recognised the changes in light and triggered the switch. The same thing would happen in the morning when the sun rose. This is your circadian rhythm - your natural body clock. But our modern lives, particularly in the city, deprive us of those triggers in the natural environment. Matthew Walker (a scientist and professor of Neuroscience and Psychology) describes our urban environment and lifestyle as being 'dark deprived'.

Taking time to wind down at the end of the day is important. If we don't factor in some down time, both throughout the day and in the evening, the vigilance regulation system (which keeps us alert when we need to be) won't adequately synchronise with the circadian system. This affects our ability to fall asleep and to stay asleep, as well as the quality of our sleep, compromising sleep consolidation.

Many people skimp on sleep because they work late, get up early and restrict their sleep opportunity at both ends of the night. We need to prioritise sleep and give ourselves a chance to get enough.

The four phases of sleep

There's still a lot that we don't know about sleep. But we do know that there are four phases - these are the different stages that your body and your brain go through when you're asleep. Three of these belong to non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and one is REM sleep.

• The first stage is that state between being awake and asleep - it's when you sometimes get jerks of movement. It's quite easy to wake someone during this stage.
• In the second stage it's harder to wake someone as the brain has inhibited certain cognitive processes, such as hearing, so we're less affected by noise.
• The third stage is slow-wave sleep, or deep sleep. This is when some people walk or talk in their sleep. It's also when your blood pressure drops and your body has a chance to reset. Memory consolidation happens in slow-wave sleep.
• The fourth phase is REM sleep, where your eyes are moving rapidly beneath your eyelids but the majority of your other muscles are virtually paralysed. This is a dreaming state and your brain is very active. If you wake someone in REM sleep they're more likely to remember their dreams. Further memory integration and learning occurs in REM sleep and emotional processing and integration occur over the course of the night with each successive REM sleep stage.

We cycle through the four phases, often for about 90 minutes, but not necessarily in this order. All four stages are important to the restoration of your body.

Mark explains ...

There are three uncoupled processes involved in sleep and they need to be synchronised for sleep and wake to adequately occur.

Firstly, there is an accumulating sleep pressure. Slow waves accumulate in the brain over the time of being awake and using our brains (this is called process S). We want this to peak around the time we go to bed; hence long naps in the latter part of the day, caffeine and other stimulants (especially if taken in the latter part of the day) will disrupt this process. Sleep dissipates this sleep pressure.

Then there is the circadian rhythm (process C). Here we want social time and biological time to be about the same. This is easily misaligned when our social demands and failure to understand the environmental triggers such as blue light result in social time and biological time no longer coinciding. Regularly needing an alarm clock is an indication that there is a misalignment and we are socially 'jetlagged'.

Finally, there is the vigilance arousal regulation system that needs to switch off, so the biological processes 'switch gear' to facilitate the circadian sleep processes and then switch...