Welcome to this bite-sized episode of A New Way of Being, and this is all about how to

maximise your recovery in 2025, particularly when it comes to rest and sleep. And I'm talking to

the elite sports sleep coach, Nick Little Halesales and Nick worked with top athletes and teams,

including Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson and the British cycling team during their

pomp. And he shares some of the key approaches and insights he has brought to all the elite

sports teams he's worked with with suggestions on how to structure your day

for optimal recovery and high performance.

And I have to say his advice to cut your day and night up into 90-minute cycles is something

I adopted after this conversation and I've stuck with ever since.

Here is Nick Little Dales.

One of the first things you talk about is this idea that everyone has that the ideal sleep is

eight hours and it's not true, is it?

It's not true in the sense of doing it all in one block at night.

Right.

So you've got 24 hours, a circadian process, sun going around our planet, and our brains as humans.

We are totally hardwired into that process.

We've just been walking away from it as far away as we possibly can.

And that's the challenge we have now to get a bit closer back to it.

So in that particular process, if you had been given the knowledge, your parents or you at school,

that up until we invented the electric light bulb, we always slept. Four major sleep wake cycles was

what's called polyphasic. Now that means shorter more often. So there's a biphasic, which is a shorter period at night, but you catch one midday, which is the second natural sleep period. There's another one early evening between five and seven. This is a circadian rhythm process. We just put times on it. There's another one there which is a trifasic so you can do even

shorter at night, midday, early evening, but there clasters being 30 minutes slots. So what

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