Happy Friday, Pod fans. Hope you're well. Are you ready for the weekend? I know I am. I've got a

works Christmas party tonight, which I've been looking forward to. And it's my birthday on Monday.

So this weekend might be a bit full on with a few late nights, but I can have a lying on Monday on my

birthday, catch up, I guess. Although to be

honest, that's not quite how sleep works. If you needed more and didn't get it, then you didn't

get it. It's gone and that's it, really. I'm going to talk about sleep today, but as I've

spoken about it quite a bit before, and it is a common topic for people like me to talk about, I'm going to try and mention things that maybe you didn't know or hadn't really considered. So hopefully you'll learn something new today.

The last time I spoke about sleep, I tried to find some academic literature about how much sleep the average human actually needs.

And there are so many variables, it makes the answers kind of pointless.

Apparently, for most adults, you're looking at anywhere between seven and ten hours. And in our 60s, we're looking

more at the lower end of that, maybe even only six hours for some people. So there's no real

specific answer as to how much sleep we need. Everyone's different. Now, one thing a lot of

people don't realize, though, is the benefits of resting compared to sleeping.

Our brains do need us to sleep, obviously, but so many people worry that they're not getting enough,

and it's those worries, but keep their mind awake, keeps them frustrated, prevents them from

getting sleepy, or even simply

resting. So yeah, sleep is better than just lying there resting your mind, but actually,

even if you only had two hours sleep and you compensated by spending nine hours just resting your mind, resting your body.

That's genuinely the equivalent of five hours sleep, which isn't great, but it's not so little

that you need to worry that you're damaging your brain.

In the sleep studies profession, it's called non-sleep deep rest. Other people might call it

meditation or hypnosis. Call it what you like. Just do it if you need to. Now first off,

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