On Our Minds Only? Episode 008 WHAT’S KEEPING YOU AWAKE? with Alex Lamas

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The episode’s title is a quote from Quantum of Solace, specifically the scene where Mathis attempts to get to the bottom of Bond’s sleep problems. In the Bond films we don’t see our hero getting healthy, natural sleep all that often. Perhaps because, as Hitchcock famously asserted, ‘drama is life with the dull bits cut out’, we’re supposed to assume Bond sleeps like a normal human being when we’re not looking. On the occasions where we do see Bond waking up, it’s usually because he’s been drugged or knocked unconscious. But this is a different story in the books. David has gone back through Fleming’s 14 Bond books and found there are more than 400 direct references to sleep - that’s more than 30 per book! Might this suggest that Fleming himself had an interesting relationship with sleep that he transposed into his character? There are definite patterns across the books, which David guides us through here, highlighting particularly intriguing examples from Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, From Russia, With Love and Thunderball. Is there anything from the Bond films and the Fleming books we can use to help us address our own sleep problems? Both Alex and David have wrestled with sleep issues their entire lives, including experiencing prolonged periods of insomnia. But there are differences… Alex is a night owl, an evening person, someone who has no issue being wide awake really late at night. David is the opposite, a lark, who is mentally and physically most alert early in the morning. Although neither Alex nor David are sleep scientists (and sleep science as an academic discipline is still very new!), both have put in a lot of effort to resolving their sleep issues, including reading some of the same books - sometimes with different results! Here, both talk through the approaches they’ve tried and tested over the years and reveal how they have reframed their relationships with sleep. Sleep hygiene is key for both of them. How does alcohol, caffeine and what we do in the hour before bed make a difference? Alex and David also tackle: Why is it important to know your chronotype (night owl/morning lark, etc)? How does insomnia relate to anxiety? What happens if we never sleep? (Like Gustav Graves in Die Another Day) Should we be concerned if we don’t dream? If we experience night terrors (like Bond does in the books) how can we deal with these? What are the ups and downs of sleeping pills? (There are a lot of them in Fleming!) How do sleep rhythms differ internationally? Why is jet lag so evil? What’s the sun got to do with sleep? Why is it sometimes more difficult to sleep in hotels than home? How does Fleming’s Bond always wake up on time without an alarm clock? And what is his standard wake up time? What chronotype does that make him?