Sleep physician, Dr. Anup Desai, joins me to talk about the most important part of the day… sleep. What is a good night's sleep? How much sleep do we actually need? What actually defines a good night's sleep? And what are some of the steps you can take for it to really happen?

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Dr. Ron Ehrlich:                    Hello and welcome to Unstress. I'm Dr Ron Ehrlich. A theme you are going to always hear on this podcast, one that needs a constant reminder is sleep. Sleep is without a doubt, the most important part of the day. Over the last 15 years or so it's become an important part of our healthcare program in our practice. In fact, I would imagine any health practitioner of whatever persuasion, be they Medical Practitioner, Naturopaths, Chiro's, Osteo's, whatever - If sleep is not part of the questions that you are asking your patients, or it's not something you're focusing on then it's more than likely you're not focusing on it in your own life, because that's how I came to it.

I mean, when I realized 15 years ago how important sleep was, something which I'd taken for granted for a hell of a long time, I realized the difference it could make. But anyway the questions are, "What is a good night's sleep?" And "What actually defines a good night's sleep?" And "What are some of the steps you can take for it to really happen?" And the key word here is consistently good night's sleep. Just getting one good night's sleep here and there is really not what it's about. I think getting a consistently good night's sleep will help you build the mental, physical and emotional resilience that you need to face the stresses of our modern world.

Now, Anup Desai is the Sleep Physician that I have been working with for many years and you'll be surprised to hear the amount of training that goes into a Sleep Specialist. I mean, many of you may not have heard of this as a specialty, but Sleep Physicians are a specialty and the amount of training that Anup has gone through is kind of mind-boggling, really. It also is going to be insightful just - We're going to cover some problems later on in the podcast - We're going to take a break in the middle of it and I'm going to ask you three key questions. But I hope you enjoy this interview that I had with Dr. Anup Desai.

Welcome to the show, Anup.

Dr Anup Desai:                     Thanks, Ron.

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                    Now Anup, you and I would both agree that arguably sleep's the most important part of the day, but not everybody sees it that way. Perhaps we could tell people why sleep's important.

Dr. Anup Desai:                     Yeah, Ron. Sleep is clearly an extremely important part of the day and it's often a neglected part of the day. At least in the sense that people don't think of it and realize the importance. We all sleep. We often sleep too little or without good quality. We don't recognize that that actually is a key to how we function during the day and to our overall health.

Dr. Ron Ehrlich:                    Now, what actually defines a good night's sleep? I mean, people think putting their head on the pillow's enough.

Dr Anup Desai:                     Yeah.

Dr. Ron Ehrlich:                    What defines a good night's sleep?

Dr. Anup Desai:                     Yeah, no that's a good question. So a good night's sleep has a whole lot of different aspects to it. So firstly, you need to progress through the different sleep stages. There's a whole lot of defined sleep stages from non-REM sleep to REM sleep, different abbreviations to describe different aspects of sleep. So we want to see people progress through the non-REM and then the REM stage several times overnight. Then we want to see enough time for sleep, adequate duration for sleep. As a society, we're increasingly sleep restricted for lots of reasons that many of us can imagine and a lot of people don't get enough time for sleep and therefore that's in...