TINAH Talks | Mental Health and Wellbeing Podcast

38. Cure Your Insomnia: How Frequencies and Vitamin D Improve Sleep

• TINAH • Season 2 • Episode 38

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In this episode of the TINAH Talks podcast, we’re celebrating the Festival of Sleep, an annual event on the 3rd of January that reminds us all to prioritize sleep and self-care, especially after the busy Christmas period. 💤

Today, we’re diving into the vital connection between sleep and mental health with Anna, co-founder of Zeez Sleep - the revolutionary electromagnetic sleep device designed to use brainwave patterns to improve sleep quality for those struggling to nod off and stay asleep all night long.

We explore Anna's personal battle with insomnia, which began when she was just five years old, the science of sleep, and actionable tips to help with sleep, including discussions about sleep patterns, sleep theory, and how nutrition, particularly incorporating eggs, can boost serotonin levels and improve your mood and ability to sleep. 🍳

We also delve into the roles of cortisol, circadian rhythms, and offer strategies to manage sleep disturbances like restless legs. A key strategy we discuss is the use of minerals like magnesium - covering its benefits as a sleep aid, as well as vitamin D, and sleep insomnia problems associated with deficiencies.

We’ll also introduce you to the Zeez Sleep Pebble, a device praised by The Gadget Show and Channel 5 as a potential cure for insomnia. Using sleep frequency healing and mimicking sleep waves, this innovative gadget could help transform your nights.

If you are feeling sleep-deprived join us for this podcast episode to learn more about how to sleep better! 🤔

Want to learn more about Zeez Sleep?

🛒 Shop The Zeez Sleep Pebble here:

🔔 Follow Zeez on Instagram:

#sleep #sleepdeprivation #howdoyousleep #vitamindsleep #magnesiumsleepsupplement #sleepaid

About The TINAH Talks Podcast: TINAH (Time Is Not a Healer) is your go-to mental well-being marketplace and community! In this podcast, you can expect empowering conversations to support you in your mental health healing journey.

We are on a mission to: ✨ EMPOWER you to prioritize and take control of your mental health ✨ EDUCATE you on mental health and wellbeing practices ✨ ELIMINATE stigma around mental health

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💬 Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share for more empowering discussions on mental health and self-care!

TINAH (00:02)
Hello, and welcome back to the TINAH Talks podcast. Today, this episode is in honor of the Festival Sleep Day. So this is an annual holiday celebrated on January 3rd that encourages people to prioritize their sleep, especially after the business of the holiday season. So I love the sound of this holiday because I know how important sleep is for your well-being, particularly your mental well-being, because a lack of sleep can basically cause so many different health issues.

from cardiovascular problems, weakened immune system, higher risk of obesity and diabetes, impaired thinking, memory loss, and also high cortisol, and in turn leads to depression and anxiety. So to delve into this subject a little bit deeper and have some very thought-provoking conversations around sleep, I think we're going to have today. I am joined by one of the founders of Zeez sleep, Anna, who is an ex-IP lawyer, specialized

in big pharma companies. She was responsible for opening up markets and improving access to medicines internationally. And driven by her own insomnia, Anna actually left law to address her biggest mental health condition, which was essentially poor sleep. And she went on to found Zeez sleep with her co-founder, Steve, who's an engineer. And together, they developed the Zeez sleep Pebble, a device that mimics brain patterns to prompt relaxation and deep sleep.

It's been praised by the Gadget Show and Channel 5, and it dramatically improves sleep for over 80 % of its users. So this device definitely needs to be talked about. And clearly with this background, Anna is super knowledgeable in everything to do with sleep. So that's why we've invited her on today to talk about sleep and delve into that in a little bit more detail. So welcome to the podcast, Anna. So happy to you here. I'm really excited for this conversation. Do you want to just give us a little bit more background on you? Where have you kind of come from, from your...

lawyer background and where you are today with Zeez Sure. OK. Thank you for inviting me, Sophie. So I stopped sleeping when I was about five. I remember it very well because I was five when we left Zimbabwe, where I grew up and came to England. And it took us six weeks on a boat. There were many dock strikes on the way. And I remember wandering around the boat in the middle of the night. I made friends with an old man.

who taught me how to read. We were fellow insomniacs in the middle of the night. And essentially, I'm afraid it started a history of absolutely appallingly bad sleep, which didn't stop for about 50 years. So I finally learned how to sleep reasonably when I was about 55. Until that, every week, I'd have one, two, three, sometimes as many as five completely sleepless nights.

So as a teenager, I was at the stage where I would sometimes hallucinate. It took me quite a while sometimes to work out what was real and what wasn't because I was so severely sleep deprived. So it was a major factor in my life. I think I was also physically very tough and I managed.

from functioning. It did mean that if I went to the cinema, I might fall asleep three times and have to go and see the film three or four times in order to get to the end. But, you know, I spent an awful lot of money and energy trying to deal with the problem. I never sorted it. I had many managing techniques, but which were more or less effective, but it was a massive thing. And I worked with inventors.

So actually, I also worked with doctors, with scientists at all levels, right up to Nobel Prize winning level. So in fact, my specialty was attacking or preventing people from being attacked by the big pharmaceutical companies. So it wasn't working for them. It was actually opening up markets in the sense of defeating patents.

that should never have been there. So that was my background and it made me very conscious of the medicalisation of our health, the fact that we have a skewed view of health because research tends to be done on areas that are profitable and if there isn't a solution, that tends to be under-researched. That has many impacts we've seen forever until recently.

There's been very little research on women, for example, because it's expensive to do research on women, much more expensive than it is to do research on men. And that's because of the menstrual cycle. So if you're researching on women, you've got two hormonal imports, which eventually you have to double up. So we often don't know how something is going to.

work in women until it's actually been used because all the trials have been on men. OK. So one of the things that bugged me was that the correlation between medicine or pills, pharmaceuticals and health was imperfect. That it often

didn't take into account nutrition, lifestyle, and so on and so on. Amongst my experiences was one that was phenomenally interesting, which was formative for me. And that was that as a very young lawyer in the early 90s, I worked with some of the teams of scientists who had been working in Russia. So with the fall of the Soviet Union,

those scientists who'd been right at the top of Russian science found themselves jobless, moneyless, without the support that they'd had at the pinnacle of Russian society, to carry on their research in the Western world. And of course, they hadn't had access to the kind of, they'd had access to everything that Russia could give them, but that didn't include

necessarily the raw ingredients or indeed the computers that Western scientists had access to. they and because the Soviet Union was a capitalist economy, they had looked at things without there being the imperative of profit. So they looked at medicine and health in a completely different way. And it was eye opening.

So in that context, I worked with a couple of the teams of scientists and one of the teams had been working on low power electromagnetic fields and they were doing things that weren't being done in the West. I continued to think about that and 20 years later, I found somebody who could work with me on ideas that I had and indeed had already done parallel work.

in the field of migraines. So our brain works electrically. It makes little electric pulses. The neurons become negative and positive. And that's the nature of the communication within the brain and from the brain to neurotransmitters, peptides, hormones and so on. And our idea was that we might be able to influence this.

and have an impact on the body without needing chemicals and therefore without having the breakdown products and the downsides of having a chemical input into the body. It took us a long time. We started working in 2014. We actually started selling the first product in a very small way, manufactured through Wolf.

through 3D printing for the cases. I actually made the first ones in my kitchen oven, believe it or not, cinema. I did not make the circuit boards, which are incredibly complex. Steve made those. So we began testing in a small way, and we've gone on from there with a few hiccups, pandemic related. And we now have a product called Disease Sleep Pebble, which I'll show you. It looks like this.

There we go. So that's it. It's quite small. It goes under the pillow. It doesn't zap your brain. It creates tiny little fields under the pillow, which your brain picks up. So there are plenty of magnetic and electrical devices which create a field that cross the skull and generate magnetism and prompt electricity within the brain. For depression, for instance, for migraine.

and there are commercial products too, that use a technology called pulsed electromagnetic frequencies. That's not us. We're using power levels that are a thousandth of the levels of devices, even though those devices also are regarded as low power. Because what we're trying to do is to match your brain and to influence the brain to fall into line. All of our brains know how to sleep. We've got that inherently.

Yeah. Plenty of us have forgotten what to do, partly because of stress and anxiety, depression. We can get trapped in a cycle where our brain just isn't doing the right thing, even though we may be eating properly, going to bed at the right time, not drinking coffee. Still, we can have a pattern that's inappropriate and doesn't serve us. That's rather a long introduction. hope that's... No, that was so informative and actually fascinating to hear your story.

And I can't believe it's been since you were five years old that you were struggling with sleep. And like you just said, our brain forgets how to sleep. I can't even imagine how much relearning your brain had to take when you finally were able to kind of combat that when you addressed it a little bit later in life. do you know, looking back at that time when you were five and obviously you were going through such a big period of change, like moving from Zimbabwe and going on the boat, which was

I assume like a brand new experience for you. Do you think that's what triggered it? Or do you know exactly what triggered that lack of sleep? I think it was probably the massive change, the living country, the stress within my family environment. And it continued with stress. There were some very stressful experiences during my childhood, which probably made my insomnia really bad. don't know. I can't tell you that I slept poorly.

between the ages of five and ten I might have done but at five, actually my father died violently and that was a very Very that was the end of my childhood essentially. Yeah from that point onwards. There wasn't you know, there were very good reasons not to sleep. Yeah, so I I just considered it something that

I suppose my belief pattern was I couldn't do it. I couldn't do sleep. It was hit and miss. I didn't know what made it better. I knew that I wanted to avoid medicine, which I think was a very healthy instinct. At the time, I think I'd have been put on Valium. That would not have been a good idea. So we're more sophisticated now. We don't tend to use benzodiazepines in the UK for sleep problems, but we did then. Yeah.

So I feel very fortunate, but it was a major thing. It was very major indeed. And it regulated my life, basically. exactly. I had to run really fast to keep awake. And I did. I didn't physically stop. And mentally, I was continually on the go. I didn't sit down. I remember when I had my first child, and I had to sit down for 25 minutes to breastfeed him. That felt so hard.

Yeah, because my coping mechanism was you just go go go go go, you know come come home drink a gin and tonic drink half a bottle of wine, know, maybe fall asleep maybe not I did not you know, and yet I I I used a lot of professional help So I did I did cope, you know, I had the advantage of money Through the job I was doing that wasn't a problem But I still could I couldn't crack the problem and when I look at it back in hindsight

I can see that there are certain things that I was doing that were undermining myself that I didn't appreciate at the time. So because I felt so hopeless about sleep, I didn't get a bed early enough. only now that I've learned more and learned more about my body through the success of sleeping have I realized that there really is a benefit to going to bed before midnight. It just felt hopeless.

I thought I was doing everything right. Sodamestive disease clients, and they are doing 95 % of things right. But that remaining little bit can make a difference. And also, we do get into a pattern where our brain is stuck. So we can go through all sorts of treatments and still not sleep well. That's not what

Most practitioners will tell you. But it's my experience. We get people who've done every treatment they could possibly do. And some of them may have worked for a short time. They've done sleep restriction. They've been to sleep clinics. They've waited for years on waiting lists. They may have had some short-term success, but they're still left with the pattern, of course. And that is particularly true with people with PTSD. It's pretty hard, I think, to unstick.

the habit of poor sleep that comes with certain experiences. So just to give dramatic experience, if we've had a history of sexual abuse, for example, our body had a very good reason for not falling asleep. And that can be quite tricky to undo. that actually at the beginning of the Z's history,

We had two groups of people who learned about us and found us. One were people with history of sexual abuse. And the other group was veterans who'd taken a drug called mefloquine, which left them with sleep issues. And we had quite a high success rate. Later, much later, we went on to greatly increase that success rate because we tried things that actually ended up

helping people relax during the day. And that combined with giving them the pattern of sleep at night, pretty much cracked the problem. So that was something that I'd love to explore further. Yeah, wow.

Yes, I realise there's a lot to talk about. I was just asking, I think we'll have to do another episode at some point. Absolutely. It's amazing. It's unusual. It's unusual, but it's amazing to see that you've taken such a huge part of your life, essentially, which is all of the experiences that you had, obviously, as a child, and then not being able to sleep for such a huge

chunk of your life and then now you've developed this device to help other people with the problem that you obviously had as well. So I think that that's amazing just in itself, the story of you kind of turning that back around. And I think you have those experiences and what you were saying earlier about understanding like the patterns and the, I can't remember the exact word, the magnetic, the magno-filled.

What's the word of electromagnetic field? Like you having that interest earlier on and it wasn't until kind of 20 years later that you then you developed the device. I think, you know, all of the things that we go through in life and the things that we pick up along the way generally tend to come back around later in life to put us back on that path of our essentially true purpose, I'd say. And I think the story that you've just told just

replicates, emulates that essentially. And like what you're meant to be doing right now is selling this device and producing this device. I think that that's credits to you like to take that very difficult experience and part of your life and turn it into something so positive that helps so has the potential to help so many people. So congratulations for turning that into something so amazing. Thank you. I mean, it is fascinating. And I should say that I, I cracked the major part of my sleep problem before Z's.

And basically I retrained my body to kind of understand night and day really. What the disease gave me personally that was qualitatively different was that when I started using it, I knew I was going to sleep. So even before, I might have one night where I didn't sleep.

And I couldn't quite work out why. So I still had that sense of uncertainty when I went to bed. Was I going to sleep or not? Was it going to be OK? It usually was OK by then. But there was still that uncertainty. Now I know that I'm going to sleep and I'm going to sleep well unless I do something that prejudices myself. So if I go to bed after, let's say, two o'clock,

that's pretty late, but it wouldn't have been unusual for me in the past, then the chances are I'm going to screw up my sleep. If I eat very late at night, I'm going to screw up my sleep. Or if I drink three glasses of wine, I can get away with two, I can't drink three. So now I've learned what my body needs as a basis. And with disease, I now sleep really well all the time unless I do one of those things. Yeah.

Well, it's definitely our lifestyles, our habits, our behaviors during the day impact the quality of sleep that we have, doesn't it? So and then, like you said, as well, if people are struggling with anxiety, depression, any other mental health condition or physical condition as well, if they're in pain, like that then impacts the quality of sleep as well. there are so many different choices that we make throughout our day to day lives that we can do to improve sleep. So what would your kind of like

big ones being, do you think, the most disruptive to our sleep pattern? I'm going to cover that. But first of all, I want to say that that relationship is bidirectional. So if we don't sleep and we have fibromyalgia or indeed any cause, almost any form of pain, arthritis, for instance, our pain is going to increase because of the lack of sleep. And the same is true of many other conditions. So there's a two way relationship. And indeed, there's a two way relationship.

between anxiety and sleep and depression and sleep. So if we got one, the other is likely to develop and then that in turn will worsen the first condition. So you asked me what were the biggest things and I'm going to start with the major one that I think is something that we don't understand. I don't think I'll touch on the ones that we all know about. We all know about coffee. There are lots of things that we know, so I won't talk about that.

The biggest learning for me in relation to depression, which was a big thing for me, realising, or actually, didn't, it was beginning to change my morning habits. I didn't understand why it made such a change at the time. Now I do. And in my case, it made a depression to my, it made a difference to my depression. For many people that I've worked with,

it also made a difference to their sleep. we know that, so in order to sleep, we need the hormone melatonin. It's often called our sleep hormone. It does much more than affect our sleep. So we produce melatonin naturally. The amount we produce decreases with age. So...

By the time we're 60, we're only producing 10 % of the amount we produced at 25. So if we have a problem with our melatonin, unless we address it, it's going to get worse. And I want all young people to hear that. Many young people have a problem with melatonin and don't realize that it's got to be dealt with. So melatonin is made in a magical way by our pineal gland, actually at dusk.

And it's made from serotonin. We commonly know a lot more about serotonin. What we mostly don't know is that it's made in two places in the body. It's made in the gut, and for that we need a good varied diet, lots of vegetables, and it's also made in the brain. And it seems to be only the serotonin that is made in the brain that then goes on to make

that is the building block for our sleep hormone melatonin. So if we're going to sleep properly, we've got to address the manufacture of serotonin in our brain. And it's made in a very interesting way. It's actually made, two areas of the brain are responsible. One, this is an area of the brain as it were, is the back of our eyes.

So about a tenth of the cells in our eyes are responsible for the production of serotonin. They have nothing to do with sleep. Some blind people have them, some blind people don't. The blind people who don't have them have a big problem with sleep. So these cells in the back of our eyes and an area of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus are responsible for the manufacture of serotonin in our brain.

And they require a certain spectrum of light. And that is essentially morning light, the kind of light that we get until about 2 o'clock in the afternoon. After that, it's too late for our body to make, for our brain to make serotonin.

It also requires certain nutrients, most of which are stored in the body, so no problem. One is not, and that is the amino acid protein building block called tryptophan. So we require tryptophan to make serotonin in the brain, and we can only make serotonin in the brain in the morning. Therefore, we require tryptophan in the morning to make serotonin.

Tryptophan is a common amino acid. It's in lots of things. We probably all eat plenty of it, but we don't necessarily eat it in the morning. So the thing that made a dramatic difference to my depression in my 20s was to start eating eggs for breakfast. Eggs are a good source of tryptophan. And it completely changed my depression. I could have two week bouts of very black depression. That absolutely disappeared.

I didn't realize why that was happening. I realized that it was happening. And when I learned more about sleep, I realized the physiology of what was going on. So we don't need to have breakfast at six or seven o'clock in the morning. We're recording this in the morning. I've not had breakfast. It doesn't worry me at all. I might have my breakfast at 1130, 12 o'clock. But we do need to have something to eat.

preferably be exposed to daylight outside because it's much stronger than daylight inside before two o'clock in the, before about one o'clock in the afternoon because we need to be able to digest the tryptophan. So good sources are eggs, salmon, chicken. If we're vegetarian, nuts and seeds have it in, but we've got to make sure that we eat quite a lot of them. So tryptophan is in oats, for example, but you will not get enough tryptophan from eating porridge or muesli.

Right. You need to increase that by adding in lots of nuts and seeds. Interesting. I don't think quantities have been studied by anybody. I've not seen any studies of that kind, but it is known that the stuff about tryptophan being necessary for the production of serotonin in the brain, all that is Although comparatively recently. Yeah. wasn't known when I was in my 20s. Yeah.

I mean, that's super, guess it's such a basic thing, isn't it? Like get a good amino acid breakfast and get yourself outside in daylight first thing in the morning. It's like, I can personally vouch for that. Like I have to be in environments where there's a lot of natural light anyway. Like I am such a drawn to the light person, but I went out a couple of days ago, actually.

I'm currently in Friday Ventura and where I stay, you can see the sunset and the sunrise at the same time. From the same location, mean, sorry, obviously not at the same time, but you go outside. I went outside at like 7 a.m. the other day and the sun was rising and I was just like, wow, like I just felt so much better. had like the best day. I was feeling so good. And I think it is so important to have that natural light. And so many people just don't. They don't think about light being a source of

of that serotonin or giving you all the things that you need essentially. So I think that's something that's really not spoken about enough, but so simple to incorporate into your day. And you mentioned previously before we jumped on the call that you just switched your breakfast. Like previous, it's not that you weren't eating breakfast previously, but you were eating the wrong things. And as soon as you changed your breakfast to incorporate more eggs.

That was exactly when you started to see that massive difference in your depression, which is such an easy switch for people to make. But anybody that can't make that from a nutritional standpoint, are there any supplements that somebody could take to give that same effect? Yes, you could take 5-HTP, which is precursor of serotonin. Make sure that you're also eating enough. You've got vitamin B, vitamin D, plenty of vitamin D, which of course, cancels the sunlight.

So you can get there through supplements. I think if you can eat eggs, that's great because you can just boil them once a week, boil them, put them in the fridge door, take an egg on your way to work. I think that although, as I say, this hasn't been studied, but I think from experience that one egg is often enough to make a difference. So it's not like you sit down and poach four of them.

But you know that is something that I think very often can make a difference because it's something that we forget and also you talked about the importance of light It's not just serotonin. It also is What's called a zeitgeber for our circadian rhythms? Naturally, I think this is another really important thing. It's worthwhile spending some time on naturally our cortisol Should be high in the morning

Cortisol is a good thing at the right time of day. naturally, if we were living way back without having all the stresses of modern life, we would wake up full of beans with high cortisol, let's say 7, 38 o'clock. Our cortisol would continue to rise until about 10 o'clock. And then it would drop in a nice, even decline until actually about 3 o'clock in the morning when it would start to rise again.

But now it's not high enough in the first place because of the way that we live. if we haven't slept properly, we're going to wake up feeling grotty, crawl out of bed, wander around in the dark with our dressing gown on. What we should be doing is opening the curtains or getting outside, drinking in the light, because that alone will

raise our cortisol, which then means that we have a better profile throughout the rest of the day. So even as little as four minutes of light and four minutes combined with four minutes of exercise as early as possible in the morning can make a great difference to raising our cortisol and therefore in the morning when we need it and should have it and therefore lowering what happens with our cortisol during the rest of the day. Yeah.

That makes sense. That makes perfect sense. I've got a bit of an issue at the moment with my own sleep because I've just come out of a very stressful life period the past 12 months, to be honest. It's just been complete chaos in my life. And I've had very, very high increased levels of cortisol. So I'm now on a bit of a cortisol come down where my body is trying to regulate myself. And I'm going through all of the different symptoms of cortisol. And one of the symptoms that I've got at the moment really annoyingly is restless legs. And I wake up at 2 AM every day.

tossing and turning, like can't get back to sleep. So my sleep's really disrupted from like two to about four-ish, which is very annoying. Okay. So should we talk about restless legs? Because that's what I thought. Let's talk about that time between two and four in the morning. So the favorite time to wake up in the middle of the night is three AM, three to four. And that's because that's when your cortisol is beginning to rise and your melatonin-cortisol balance becomes important.

So obviously the overall amounts of those two hormones that we have is important, but the balance is also important. So about that time in the morning, if you like, the balance is disturbed and it's a major risk point for our sleep. So there are two ways of overcoming it. One, you reduce your cortisol. Secondly, you increase your melatonin. And I think that the latter is much easier.

You know, we have stressful lives. We're probably all doing everything we can or we think we can to relax. And it's not enough. We're still waking up at that time of day. So I would say that things that increase your melatonin are really important. We talked about eggs. Something that I did that I think made a difference that until recently, you know, I think I discovered this.

Now people are beginning to talk about is the importance of dusk. So in a natural world, our pineal converts the serotonin that our brain has made into melatonin at dusk. We don't live in a natural world. We switch on our lights if it's a bit dark outside. We have no idea when we're working. And I'm working in front of my computer in Crouch End. I have no idea what the outside world is doing.

and it's been dark for hours and I haven't even realized. So we're detached from the process of dusk. And I thought about this when I was remembering my own childhood. said my childhood was in Africa, very rural Africa. My first word was moon. As a little kid, I'd stay with my mum on the step, our stoop.

waiting for my dad to come home from work and we'd see him walking Park the car outside and walk quite a long distance. I'd seen him coming towards towards us and this was not very far from you know, Clear person to the equator than we are now as he walked towards us the Sun would set Because the timings were much more, you know, it was much more Yeah, the sunset did more or less the same time

So it's not surprising that the moon was important. And it was actually remembering that that thought and made me think, well, maybe we need a dusk. Maybe we need to experience it. So when I was teaching myself to sleep, I created a dusk for myself. I decided that my dusk would be at 10 o'clock because the time of the real dusk, especially in winter, was far too early. Yeah, poor clock.

Yeah, yeah. So I cook, I like cooking, bright light. I want to see what I'm cooking and eating. And then after that, lights off, lights off in all the areas that didn't matter, like the halls, the bathrooms and whatnot, night lights or nothing at all. And I'd go outside, I'd sit in the garden or I'd walk around and really kind try and experience the dark. And then I come back into the house and no more bright light. And I think that made a difference.

Now there are certain studies where people have gone out into the countryside camped and whatnot and are finding that that does help. So I think that's another trick that may help us convert the serotonin that we've created in our body by having morning light and something to eat in the morning that might may help convert that serotonin into melatonin. The second trick not not very well known.

And then the third element is retaining the melatonin in our body, which is well known that we need to avoid bright light. This isn't so much blue light. It's actually the brightness of the light probably that makes the difference. So, you know, once we've got melatonin into our body, then we need to retain it. So now you asked me a question I don't think I've answered. Can you remind me of the question, please?

We've just gone through, covered so much there that I've actually forgotten there is a question honestly. I hope we've covered some really interesting stuff. But it's so interesting, think this conversation is like, we're to have to do a second episode at some point. There's so much, so many different routes you can talk about sleeping and like you're telling me, like I know a lot about this because I've obviously, I've started a mental health business. Like I understand like the correlation between sleep and mental health, but there's so many bits of information here that I didn't know.

it all makes perfect sense to me and like the way that I personally live my lifestyle. I love that the dusk period, the traditional dusk period of like going the sunset time is my favourite time of day. Like every single day I'm in an environment, like I said, I'm in an environment right now where I can see the sunrise and the sunset. Every single day I'm out there watching the sunset and then I try and switch off when I get back and that's my kind of like wind down time I signal to start winding down but it doesn't always happen but

That is I can understand like basically all of the things that you're saying it makes perfect sense to the things that I didn't necessarily know why or what they yeah related to but If I've already incorporated some of them into my life, it's really make me feel better if that makes sense Yeah, so you were already naturally doing things that help your sleep. You're supporting yourself without knowing that you were doing exactly. Yeah

So now you've got now a little bit of knowledge that shows why those were helpful. And but lots of us aren't doing that, you know. Canary Islands is a very good place to watch the sunset. I have done that myself. Yeah, is. Yeah, were talking about restless legs. So one of the reasons that our sleepers, so we've just been over some of the reasons why our sleep is deserved at that time of day. Restless legs.

can also be due to do with mineral deficiencies. And we have to forgive ourselves for mineral deficiencies. It's not our fault. We can be eating an absolutely wonderful diet and still we're not getting certain minerals. And that's largely because they're no longer in our soil. So throughout much of the world, we've been intensively farming for 150 years. We've taken minerals out of the soil and we haven't put them back. So with restless legs,

They can often, it's worthwhile checking your iron levels. That ought to be done properly. You don't want to muck about with iron. You need to get it right. For me personally, and for lots of people, rest of the sex are always to do with low magnesium. And same is true with cramp actually. I tend to get cramp in the middle of the night. Can be low hydration.

that maybe you may be drinking plenty of water and still not be hydrated because the water isn't going from your GI tract into the body and that too is to do with minerals. So what we need to look at here is water soluble minerals that pass in and out of the body quickly. Magnesium is number one. So some people reckon that 80 % or more of our

population in the developed world is severely magnesium deficient. Again, it's understudied because, you know, it's not going to make anybody any money. I think, you know, my own prejudice is that almost everybody who doesn't sleep or has a problem with their sleep needs more magnesium. We tend to need more if we're stressed. We tend to need more if we drink coffee. Yeah. And it's a very safe

mineral. We can take an awful lot of it without any problem. So we can afford to experiment. That's not true of a lot of things. It's not true of iron, but it is true, I think, of magnesium. So it's worthwhile trying that. You can try it in several forms. If we're magnesium deficient, I think we need an oral form, but a spray form can also be helpful. So

I keep a spray by the side of my bed just in case I have a problem. But I also supplement with magnesium every day. And the form that is, if we're looking at mental health, the form that's likely to be most useful for most of us is something called magnesium glycinate. And that's because the glycine in magnesium glycinate also is supportive, helps relaxation.

So that's the first one I would try, know, if I were experimenting. Yeah, you say that because I've just ordered some. So when I get home, I'm going to fly home just straight off of this actually. And as soon as I get back to England, I've got some waiting for me, hopefully. excellent. So I recognise that. Worth noting that most of the magnesium in the high street is magnesium oxide or hydroxide, which we will not absorb.

or 4 % in our gut. That's too late to buy it. So don't buy it. No, definitely not. I actually I'm fortunate enough that I worked with a supplements brand. I learned a lot about supplements and how bad some of the high street or not necessarily bad but like not effective some of the high street formulations are. So I've got I've got a little bit of extra knowledge on that to understand what I'm looking for when it comes to supplements, which is

which is good. But it's definitely something. from what I remember, you recommend that alongside using the Z sleep pebble as well, don't you? absolutely. Disease is prompting the brain. We have to have the chemistry within the brain to create electricity. It's very simple. I'm not saying this is what we need for everything, but this is what we need to make disease work. We need enough magnesium, potassium, calcium. I forgot the other one.

sodium and we need enough hydration and not too much to create the electricity within the brain. The one that is normally problematic is magnesium. That's number one. We rarely have a problem with others, honestly. In order to absorb magnesium, we also need vitamin D in much larger quantities than is often recommended in the UK. Our recommendations were set

in the 1920s when kids in Sheffield were getting rickets because of smog. It's enough to stop rickets in Sheffield when there's smog. It's not enough to help with our immune system, with cancer, or with sleep. we need vitamin D to absorb magnesium, and we need a vitamin called K2 to absorb the vitamin D. So they are, in effect, a triumvirate. Sorry, I'm suffering from...

my eye doesn't like my new contact lens. I'm going to stop, I'm going to cry rather than taking it out. that's why I'm crying. I put a new contact lens today and it's not going down well. So yeah, that triumvirate of vitamins, K2, which we can also get from fermented food. If we don't eat fermented food, then it's worthwhile supplementing. D3.

which we can get from sunlight, but obviously not at this time of year. And we require a lot of sunlight on our skin to make it. Most of us are vitamin D deficient. It is toxic in large quantities, but we're unlikely to reach that level unless we're doing something extraordinary.

even with supplementing at what seemed like quite high doses and then magnesium. So most disease, I ask people to take those three things because I think they do make a difference. Yeah, so for someone that is struggling with sleep then at what point would you recommend that they start thinking about taking the supplements using something like the Z's or looking at

other alternative changes in their lifestyle to improve the quality of their sleep? Like, that like as soon as you start having a bad night or does it need to come like at a certain point? I think that it's almost like sleep, sleep problems like the canary in the mine. Deep sleep.

is the most powerful thing that our brain does all day long. The electrical power of deep sleep is massively more than thinking, for example. So all the things we think of as tough and challenging to the brain, electrically, are much weaker than deep sleep. So if our body lacks something, it's going to show up in our deep sleep.

So, you know, if we're not sleeping deeply, if we wake up feeling less than really good, we know we've got a problem and that's something we should address simply because of that, because it's showing us that something is going awry. It could be all sorts of things. It could be nutritional. It could be, you know, that we've got a relationship we need to sort out. It could be a whole load of stuff. Given our modern, our foods today and our lifestyle,

We're almost bound to be deficient in nutrients and you know, there's no reason not to address that So I would look at my vitamin D in my magnesium my K2 in any event Of course a whole host of other things it could be but but you know, those are likely to be implicated

Sophie, I want to take out my contact lens. Will you cut this bit out of the edit? Yeah, I will do. I'm going to have to stop this the next couple of minutes because I really need to leave to go to the airport. OK. Right. Well, shall we finish that? OK, can I take out the contact lens? No worries. OK, right. Now let's talk about OK. Hopefully that's more comfortable for you. OK, so what are the most important things that we should cover in the next before you have to get your flight? Let's just.

Maybe if you just want to talk about the Z, the sleep pebble a little bit more and how that can help and then what we can do is plan our second recording in the new year. great, lovely. right, so Sophie you've asked me to talk a little bit more about the Z so I'll show it again here. You'll see that it's been designed for simplicity and the reason for that is that I reckon that insomniacs do not want to wrestle with tech.

So it has a single on-off button. There it is now. You might see that that one has an orange light. Some of them come with green light, some of them come with orange lights. There is a difference. This one is programmed for people with a low heart rate.

And by that, mean a heart rate below 60, resting heart rate below 60. So what this does is it starts off by creating alpha frequencies. That's to say frequencies between about four and eight hertz. Those are the frequencies that are naturally produced by our brain, dominant frequencies produced by our brain when we're relaxed. So if we're doing Tai Chi class, for example, or mindfulness exercise,

dominant frequencies in our brain will be around that range, four to eight hertz. So we produce that for 20 minutes. We may not, we may already be relaxed by the time we go to bed and indeed we should be, but that 20 minutes will help us to, to relax in necessary precursor for falling asleep. After that, we have 10 minutes of theta frequencies, slower still.

between about four to eight hertz. That's the kind of state that our brain is in when we fall asleep. It's also a very healing state. It's the kind of state that you get into when you're doing something you're completely absorbed and you wouldn't hear the doorbell ring. You switched off from whatever it is except the thing that you're absorbed in. And then...

Timed with our sleep cycles, so we have sleep cycles that are roughly 90 minutes long. Timed with our sleep cycles, we put in 20 minute periods of deep sleep signals between 0.5 and four hertz. I'll explain hertz in a minute. Perhaps I should have done that in the beginning, but I realize that you may not know what I mean by this.

It's a measure of frequency. We put in the deep sleep signals four times in order to encourage the brain to sleep deeply. And usually it works. If we've got people who have proper mineral levels, our success rate, when we tested it in 2016, we did some very rigorous testing ourselves. Our success rate at that point was about 80%.

So we had people who literally hadn't slept for decades. Most of them hadn't slept for decades. And every parameter of their sleep, their ability to fall asleep, the duration of the sleep, their quality of sleep, how they felt the next day, every parameter improved in over 80%. We've become more sophisticated since then.

But of course, we're also selling, so we can't test people in the same way. Now, if we get people who listen, take the magnesium, the D3 and whatnot, and also make any other changes that we may give them along the line if we're not successful in the first couple of weeks, it's over 90%. We tend to have quite a sophisticated client group, people who

already doing lots of things right and understand a lot. So of course that makes it easier. If we dropped this, if we dropped the Zs in the rust belt, I very much doubt that we would have those success records because it just isn't the level of awareness or good nutrition, poor, it just doesn't happen. within a population of people who

are health conscious, we'd expect those levels of success. And as we learn more, we're able to, you know, we're chipping away at that. So we're chipping away with, you know, different kinds of poor sleep. And I'm now, you know, I'm confident that perhaps it's maybe in the next programme we'll deal with people

who we think we can't sleep, why we can't help them. There are very few and they fall into clear categories. But if somebody's suffering from depression or anxiety, generally, we'd expect to be able to help them to sleep better. Yeah, well, that's amazing. And I'm sure that appeals to so many people. I know that it's such a big problem for so many people that struggle with anxiety and depression. My mum for years had insomnia and she fell into that category of like,

feeling hopeless about sleep, I'd say. Like, was always kind of like when she'd be going to bed, was like, well, there's no point in going to bed because I don't sleep anyway kind of thing. That was the narrative that she'd designed for herself. So, yeah, I completely get that. And I'm really excited for us to have another conversation about this and delve into all of the different avenues that we've not been able to cover today. But I just want to say thank you because that was so informative and so well executed and articulated for somebody that doesn't necessarily understand.

everything about sleep. I think people are to really take away some golden nuggets of information from this episode. So I really appreciate you coming on and speaking about it. Just before we close then, for someone right now that is struggling with their sleep, what's your number one best bit of advice? And how can somebody find these on Instagram or online? I think number one is get as much morning light as you can. I know it's tough.

Walk to work, do whatever you can. Lunchtime light is the second best, but take your lunch early. And you can find the Zs. Our website is [www.zs.org.uk](http://www.zs.org.uk/). think that's it, isn't it? That's the best place look for us.

I'm sure a lot of people will be going to look for you this. Whoever's listening to this, think anyone that's struggling with sleep is clicking through to check you out. We also list Zeez sleep on Tina, so if you are looking for an easy access to their website, you can click through via Tina as well. Definitely, we're going to be having more conversations about this because it is such a big topic and there are so many other news we could go down.

Thank you so much for sharing everything that you shared today. I really appreciate you coming on talking about it and stay tuned for the next episode with Anna on sleep. Thank you.