HOW TO DO HAPPY (PART-1)
One of Australia's Most Popular Podcasts with Hundreds of 5 Star Reviews
Grab your FREE Ebook copy now!
Have you struggled to lose weight and keep it off?
Start your journey to boost metabolism and transform your body into a fat-burning powerhouse.
Episode 252:
Show Notes
In this episode of The Real Health and Weight Loss Podcast, Dr Lucy Burns introduces Dr Gihan Jayaweera (Aka Dr G), a lifestyle medicine doctor from Melbourne known for his work on happiness and well-being. Dr G’s new book, Do Happy, focuses on actionable strategies to cultivate happiness and emphasises that happiness is a skill that can be learned and taught.
Dr G’s Personal Journey
- Dr G shares his motivation for writing Do Happy, which stems from his personal experiences with bullying in high school and the intense challenges of medical school.
- Despite experiencing bullying, he candidly admits to also having been a bully himself, which he describes as his greatest regret.
- Medical school marked a period of stress, OCD-like behaviours, and sacrifices in health and happiness, which ultimately led him to prioritise finding ways to live a happier life.
Philosophy on Happiness
- Dr G views happiness as a skill that can be systematically developed through learning and practice.
- He advocates for defining emotions clearly as a step toward solving problems. Many people lack emotional literacy and use generic terms like "stressed" instead of identifying more specific feelings such as guilt or loneliness.
Lifestyle Medicine Approach
- Dr G integrates lifestyle medicine pillars into his practice, addressing root causes rather than relying solely on medication.
- He emphasises the importance of exercise, sleep quality, social connection, gratitude, and mindfulness to improve both mental and physical health.
- One example he shares is helping a young man struggling with depression and marijuana dependency. By focusing on basketball as an exercise, the young man experienced significant improvement in his condition within weeks.
Key Strategies from Do Happy
- Pressure Testing: Exposure therapy in safe environments to overcome fears (e.g., public speaking).
- Lifestyle Pillars: Tools like the “Do Happy Snapshot” assess areas such as exercise, sleep, and social connection to improve well-being.
- Implementation: Do Happy includes a workbook to help readers apply the book’s concepts immediately, ensuring active engagement instead of passive consumption.
Insights on Sleep
- Sleep is critical for emotional regulation. Losing sleep disproportionately affects REM cycles, which are responsible for recovery and mood stability.
- Dr G highlights how modern lifestyles often undervalue sleep due to societal pressures to maximise productivity.
Medication vs. Lifestyle
- While Dr G acknowledges that lifestyle changes can address many health issues, he also recognises that medications are sometimes necessary and should not be stigmatised.
- He emphasises delaying medication use where possible, but acknowledges its role in managing genetic conditions or severe illnesses.
Reflection on Health
- Dr Lucy and Dr G discuss how people often take their health for granted until it deteriorates. They highlight examples like diabetes and muscular dystrophy to underscore the importance of proactive health management and cultivating gratitude for existing health and abilities.
This episode explores actionable strategies for cultivating happiness through lifestyle changes, while recognising the nuanced role medications play in health. Dr G’s personal experiences underscore the transformative potential of prioritising well-being through intentional practices like exercise, sleep optimisation, and emotional literacy.
Links to Check Out:
📘 Do Happy – New book is out! Check it out here
🌐 Website: drgihan.com
💼 LinkedIn: Dr Gihan Jayaweera ‘Dr G’
Episode 252:
Transcript
Dr Mary Barson (0:04) Hello, my lovely friends. I am Dr Mary Barson.
Dr Lucy Burns (0:09) And I'm Dr Lucy Burns. We are doctors and weight management and metabolic health experts.
Both (0:12) And this is the Real Health and Weight Loss podcast!
Dr Lucy Burns (0:21) Good morning, lovely friend! How are you today? Dr Lucy here, and I am without Dr Mary, but you should see her replacement this morning. I don’t think you’ll get them mixed up. They are, first of all, different genders, so that’s always a good giveaway, along with many other similarities and some differences. I am super, super excited because you’re going to love him. His name is Dr Gihan Jayaweera, affectionately known as Dr G, which I also love, and he is, like me, a Lifestyle Medicine doctor. But he is phenomenal at writing and has a brilliant new book out, which I think you’re going to love. So we are super excited to talk to him because his mission in life is to get everyone to feel a bit happier—and who doesn’t want that? Dr G, welcome to the podcast.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (01:09) I feel so welcome, thank you so much.
Dr Lucy Burns (01:12) Ah, you are welcome! So, yay! You're in Melbourne too, like me. Our listeners are all over the world, which is exciting. But it's funny, I often bang on a bit about the weather, and the reason I bang on about the weather is, for some reason, I don't know whether I was just given the sort of weather gene, but I find the weather really impacts my mood. So I'm constantly chasing a little bit of sunshine to make myself feel happier. But I think you are probably a bit of an expert in happiness, and I have been reading your book, which is phenomenal. The book is called Do Happy—Do Happy, which I'm also intrigued about. So I thought we might kick off by starting a bit about happiness and why that's a driver for you.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (02:00) Wow, so I reckon when someone writes a book about happiness, they were probably unhappy at some point, and that was me. So this book started being written when I didn't even realise it, back in high school. I reckon this is the origin of this book, and I was in the middle of getting quite badly bullied—big forehead, big ears, lunch for a seasoned bully, right? So, and before any of you or any of the listeners start to feel even an inch of sympathy for me, I was also a bully. It's probably honestly my single regret in life, but here we are. You know, kids are dumb, including me.
Dr Lucy Burns (02:52) It is kind of a dog-eat-dog world in childhood.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (02:55)But that was a very tricky period because I was bullied quite frequently, and there were a lot of tears during that period. I remember not liking it, but I also don't remember thinking it was a problem either, like I didn't have the vocabulary to describe what was happening.
Dr Lucy Burns (03:16) Yeah.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (03:17) And that continued for quite a long time, and then that sort of shifted into med school. Thankfully, I wasn't bullied in med school, but medical school was incredibly difficult. I thought if I worked my butt off—I joked that I had no butt by the end of high school because I just worked it all off—I got into medical school, and to my surprise, medical school was harder than high school.
Dr Lucy Burns (03:42) Yeah yeah.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (03:43) And now you're surrounded by very high-performing people, and you sort of constantly, you just can't keep up. Well, I couldn't keep up; I was behind by the first week, and I found that period very stressful. Not that I was unhappy all the time, but that was a very difficult, you know, six years spending time away from my girlfriend that I met at high school—now I call her my wife.
Dr Lucy Burns (04:11) High school sweethearts.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (04:14) My parents and my closest high school friends—there was a lot going on. I was only 17 when I went to Adelaide to study. I had zero life skills, so it was all sort of happening at once, and it was a very, very difficult period. In particular, it came to a head in my fifth year, which was our 'barrier year.' They test us on all five years of medical school; you fail one subject, and you repeat the whole year. In my mind, I was thinking, 'If I have to repeat another year, that's one more year away from my future wife, one more year away from my parents, and my security.' So it was really, really stressful. And it got a little weird, like in retrospect. I was behaving in ways I didn’t realise—I didn’t have the vocabulary. If you had asked me at the time, Lucy, I would have just told you it's hard or I'm stressed. Yeah, that's it. I wouldn't have actually, and I would have been completely honest. I wouldn't be trying to hide anything. I would have just told you I’m really stressed. But then looking back, bizarre stuff like I was showing legitimate OCD traits. I think, you know, I couldn’t control the result of my exams, so I just tried to control all these little minuscule things, like I would check the stove six times, walk back to my room, and check it again to make sure it was off. I would check the taps to make sure they were completely off multiple times, go back to my bed, and think, 'I'm pretty sure I closed that tap, but I’m gonna go check again.' And when I finally did pass medical school, I just collapsed in a heap, and it all sort of came to me. I realised how ridiculous I was behaving and how much I had sacrificed my health and my happiness. And at that point, as soon as I got my results, I just collapsed in a heap and decided I’m never going to let this happen again. Ah, wow. Then the journey became formalised. I started looking for answers, started reading. My favourite place became the airport bookshop because I was flying back and forth from Melbourne to Adelaide, so I would always go to the well-being and entrepreneurship section. Yes, I’d just try to read everything: Martin Seligman’s work, everything that I could find. And I essentially taught myself how to be happy. For me, my belief is that it’s a skill, and if it’s a skill, it can be learned, and if it can be learned, it can be taught. So one of my friends asked me, 'Who did you write it for?' He's another business guy, so I think he was asking, like, 'What’s your niche?' It’s a very technical question. But the answer I gave was I wrote it for the person I was.
Dr Lucy Burns (07:08) Yes, yes, I read that actually in your dedication at the start.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (07:14) Yes, exactly, exactly, well picked up. Because this is the book I would have loved to read if I was in the airport bookshop. It was like, 'Dude, just give me the full blueprint, start to finish, this book would be it for me.' Right, so here we are, and now I’m on a podcast with Dr Lucy. It’s crazy.
Dr Lucy Burns (07:38) I think there was some really great things that I loved about this book is that you've got a workbook that goes with it because I think what a lot of people do and I have certainly done this many times you read a book you go, that's great oh that's amazing and then you don't implement anything. And so the workbook then gives you that next step to implement some of the things that you learned in the book.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (08:05) Absolutely. I think that's the ultimate meta skill, or an ultimate meta skill, is to be able to learn and close the gap between implementation. But if you can sort of... I even say it explicitly in my book: I'd prefer to read a chapter and implement everything in that chapter than read the whole thing and implement nothing. You know, so I couldn't agree more, and it's hard because there's a joy in reading—like there's a joy in sort of progressing through a book.
Dr Lucy Burns (08:35) Yeah, and look, I think sometimes it depends too, you know, where you are in that sort of change behaviour cycle. If you're in that sort of planning stage or the pre-contemplative stage and you're reading something, it makes you feel better at the time because you feel like you're doing something, but you're kind of not really. It's a bit like moving, you know, pushing all the pens around when you're getting your desk ready to study
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (09:00) or checking your email when you should be doing something.
Dr Lucy Burns (09:03) Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (09:05) Can I add something to that?
Dr Lucy Burns (09:07) Yeah, of course.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (09:08) I think the ability to close that gap is an absolute superpower, and one of my single greatest learnings is that for every, and I'm convinced this is true, for every problem that we will ever face, someone has written a book about the solution. So if you get good at identifying the problems in your life, you just need to find the book, yes, and then do the thing. Yeah, otherwise it doesn't work, hence why it's called Do Happy. It's very explicit, you know, a big book on action, right, doing the work. I tell anyone who wants to listen to me talking about books; I will take that opportunity. Thank you.
Dr Lucy Burns (09:56) Yeah, absolutely. And what I loved that you just said then is the do bit—so that implementing—which again is part of your strategy in the book: the think–feel–do model. That’s something we spend a lot of time on in our programs too, based on CBT. Because I think particularly—in Australia, probably the UK as well, not so much in America, because they love talking about their feelings—but Australians and the British, I don't know… And whether people from India, China, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia talk about feelings much—I suspect China not—it’s all just about doing for them. But I think, because we don’t talk about feelings, we have this sort of emotional—well, we’re not very emotionally literate. So, like you were saying, you didn’t have the words. And I think you’re right—lots of people just use stressed when they really mean guilty, or lonely, or resentful. There are all of these other words, and we just use stressed. And people say stressed instead of even worried, because it’s kind of a catch-all word, isn’t it?
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (11:15) I agree. I mean, the vocabulary is a problem defined as a problem half-solved. Unfortunately, I wasn’t wise enough to actually come up with that quote, and I can’t fully attribute it, but it wasn’t me. But the point is, if you can define the problem—and if you are insert unhappy synonym here—you know, stressed, anxious, depressed, overwhelmed, stuck, burnt out, whatever that is—if you don’t have a really good grasp of what that actually is, what the problem actually is, it becomes harder to solve. It becomes harder to solve—hence why I spent so much time defining things. Because once you define it, it’s much easier to sort of point and shoot.
Dr Lucy Burns (12:05) Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because I guess if you can define the feeling, then you can recognise the thoughts behind it and think about what's driving it. Yep, yeah, so I love that. So the book also focuses a fair bit on the lifestyle medicine pillars. So tell me about your journey to becoming a lifestyle medicine doctor.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (12:34) So I didn’t realise I was doing lifestyle medicine until I found ASLM, which is the Society of Lifestyle Medicine in Australasia. I always thought I was sort of the odd one out—like I didn’t quite fit in. When I became a GP or started my training, or even as early as hospital, most of it didn’t make sense. For example, in the hospital I would get paged at 2 in the morning. Let’s say I’m on nights—thankfully, I don’t do nights anymore (how good is that?)—so at 2 in the morning I’d get a page saying, “This patient’s blood pressure is really high, come and do something about it.” Firstly, I’d think, why are we checking his blood pressure at 2 in the morning? Mine would be high as well! But secondly, you go there, and you might prescribe something to bring it down, and it’s like… so what? You're not actually addressing root causes. And addressing root causes is hard, because it takes a lot of time to get to them. But once you do, it's like this aha moment for everyone involved, and the care is so much better. So, naturally I realised pretty quickly that I definitely can’t do the 10- to 15-minute consults for these types of patients who want to, you know, essentially improve their lives—treat their diabetes or their blood pressure, or if they’re unhappy. So I started doing longer consults. At one of my practices, I convinced the practice owner to put a whiteboard in my room so I could teach. And over the years, I started teaching about gratitude, prescribing connection, prescribing zero screen time. You know, for sleep I might prescribe exercise in the morning and no blue light at night—all this sort of stuff. And then on the flip side, I would see the opposite of that: temazepam being prescribed for insomnia with no discussion about actual sleep hygiene—how to improve the quality of your sleep. Or antidepressants being prescribed when actually it’s a situational thing, and all they need to do is... like, I had this one kid—well, not really a kid, he was about 21—his parents brought him in, and he was suicidal, really struggling. They were really worried. He was dependent on marijuana, and his friends had caught him stealing money from another friend. It was all turning into a mess. They came in at breaking point. When he saw me, we looked at what in my book I call the Do Happy Snapshot, which is essentially the lifestyle medicine pillars, and we did a quick check-in on where everything was at. As you’d expect, everything was at zero to one: zero exercise, zero connection, zero time in nature, zero gratitude, zero meditation—everything. So we tried to find the thing that would move the needle the most. For him, it was exercise. He loved basketball, so we got him playing basketball, and within three to four weeks, he wasn’t fixed, of course, but he was much better—much better. On the flip side, it could have been quite easy for me to just prescribe an antidepressant—and maybe that would have been part of the solution—but it wouldn’t have gotten him all the way there. You need to do everything right. So then, I spent the first few years of my career thinking I was the odd one out—like I was the weird one. Am I even doing the right thing? Should I just be prescribing things? Am I going against my medical degree? All this sort of stuff. And then I found ASLM, and I was like, oh cool! And I realised—I wasn’t the weird one. Everyone else was weird. Which is always a nice realisation... what every weird person would say!
Dr Lucy Burns (16:56) Yeah, absolutely—yes, to find your people. I think it’s part of a pillar, isn’t it? It’s connection and feeling like you belong somewhere, rather than feeling like you’re, you know, in the wrong tribe, so to speak. I think it’s hard. I think if you asked any doctor, they would always say to you, “Oh yes, lifestyle stuff—you should always do that first.” It’s just that they don’t ever talk about it. And then there’s also the subtext: “Oh, and by the way, it doesn’t work.” So you know—yeah, yeah, yeah, do it, but it doesn’t work. And I think there are a couple of things going on there. One is that I don’t think doctors do lifestyle medicine very well in general. And part of that is the systemic construct around general practice visits, where we are incentivised to have shorter consults, faster. The government sort of thinks, “Well, the more people the doctor sees, the better it is.” When really, it’s actually the opposite. Because, as you said, you’re just band-aiding problems—more and more band-aids—and then eventually, the dam bursts. I think I’ve mixed about ten metaphors there...
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (17:59) The band-aid was holding the dam together
Dr Lucy Burns (18:02) something like that yes, the waterproof band-aid! But when you—like you—when you see people get better without medication, or even get to the point where you can reduce or eliminate medication, I go, “Oh! It’s so exciting.” It is exciting.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (18:27) Yeah, and I think—I imagine you're noticing something similar. I'd love to hear what you think about it, Lucy. I'm noticing an obvious trend, let's say roughly in people under the age of 50, where they do not want to be on any medications. You can almost see it in their body language—if you tell them their cholesterol is a bit high, they're sort of leaning back, expecting me to tell them they're going to have to go on a lifelong cholesterol-lowering medication. But when I suggest, "You know what? How about we get to the gym? How about we do all the things?"—they sort of lean in again. And you sort of you're in power. It's truly patient-centered. You're truly empowering them, and it's empowering for us the practitioner as well, right?
Dr Lucy Burns (19:16) Right, yeah, absolutely. I see kind of two things happening. One, I see yes—some people who have been on lots of medications are keen to reduce them, which is great because, you know, it’s cheaper for them, there are fewer drug interactions, fewer side effects, and I think that's fabulous. I think one of the things I also see, though—and I get a bit angsty about this—is people judging others for needing medications. It is good to get off medications—that is absolutely good—but it doesn't make you better than somebody else. And I think I see a lot of that. You know, people—and again, it’s not necessarily the jobo public, it might be some, you know, influencers—and they're kind of boasting about their health, which I feel conflicted about. Because on one hand, I'm going, "Yeah, absolutely, I want to prescribe as few medications as possible," but just because you need medication doesn't make you a failure either. Because again, I see people going, "I want to get off my medication, I want to get off my medication." It's great. And then they do all the things—you know, they start exercising, they’re sleeping well, they may have changed their food, they’ve lost 10 kilos—but they still need a blood pressure medication. Like, their blood pressure hasn’t gotten better, even though you’d think, with all the things. And so then they feel like the whole thing was a waste of time. And I go, “No, no, no. You haven’t failed.” Like, it’s not a failure to need medication. What we want to do is get to the point where it’s not the first step in the process—that’s the kind of way I like to look at it.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (21:02) Yeah, that is a fascinating conflict, isn't it? If I were to reflect that on myself—it's that I want to delay the use of medications in my own life and health, whether it's medications or more invasive things. So I wonder whether part of our practice, I mean as lifestyle medicine doctors, is that we have to be very careful about how we advise or project—because it can be a mirror into ourselves, can't it? So that’s a really interesting reflection. I think it's up to the patient to decide. You know, some people want to try everything they can before they start medication; some people are completely fine—"Yeah, if I have to, I will." So I guess it’s gauged by them as well, isn’t it? But sometimes, if you follow the evidence, you do need something.
Dr Lucy Burns (21:50) Yeah, obviously we're wanting the least possible medications—and I always add, at the lowest effective dose. But I sometimes see people who have, say, Hashimoto's, which, for our listeners, is an autoimmune condition that affects the thyroid gland and causes hypothyroidism, or low thyroid function. We often need to replace their thyroid hormone with thyroid medication, or thyroxine, and there are plenty of people who don't want to be on it. Again, it becomes problematic. I think sometimes they're getting their information from people on the internet who are, again, demonising medications and saying, "Well, you shouldn't be on these drugs—you can fix it all by lifestyle." And as much as I'm a lifestyle advocate, you can't always fix everything by lifestyle. You can fix lots of things—but not everything.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (22:52) I think that's true. I think you can do a lot to prevent diseases, as you know, and reduce your risk of things like heart disease, diabetes, strokes, and all those sorts of things. I would add unhappiness to a certain extent—and sometimes, you just need something.
Dr Lucy Burns (23:14) Yeah, yeah, yeah—and I think there are just lots of factors at play that you don’t always have control over. Genetics, for one. Most of my listeners know I have muscular dystrophy—it's a genetic condition. I was just born slightly unlucky with genes. I do as much as I can to optimise my lifestyle around that, but it certainly hasn’t cured it. Honestly, if there were medication for it, I would take it. So, in some ways—it's a slightly weird concept—but there's some privilege in there. If there is medication for a condition and it works for you, and you’ve already done all the lifestyle stuff as well, then I would take it.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (23:58) Yeah, when you just talked about your muscular dystrophy, it reminded me of one of these ancient philosophers—I can’t quite remember who—but they said, "A healthy person will have a thousand wishes, but a sick person will only have one." Sometimes we take it for granted, especially if you don’t have something that’s obvious, something that’s silent, you know, like diabetes.
Dr Lucy Burns (24:26) Yeah, yeah, there was this great ad on tele years ago that actually got pulled because it was a bit controversial. It was by Specsavers, I think, and it was going around interviewing people on the street, asking them, "How much would you sell your eyes for?" People were going, "What? Jeez, really?" They were like, "Well, can I buy your eyes?" "Well, how much will you sell them for?" "I'll give you ten thousand dollars." "No." "A million dollars?" "No." They were incredulous, and you know, "How much will you sell them for?" And of course, nobody took them up on their offer at all. Then it was like, "Your sight is actually invaluable, and you don’t appreciate it until it’s gone." So I think with a lot of things with our health, our bias, our cognitive bias, is to believe it will be with us forever. Mmm, so yeah, interesting, interesting.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (25:16) By definition, I mean, it's one of the few things that we can say for certain won't
Dr Lucy Burns (25:21) Yes, yeah, and I mean, again, like everything, you don't want to go into extremes and be so focused on... you know, people get health anxiety and become so focused on every little thing, and then they get so worried about small things that really probably aren't that important in life in general. But let's bring it back to your book, which I love, as I said, because it gives you a workbook to implement, and that implementation is the key to everything. But tell me about some of the strategies, or tell the listeners, because again, I want them to know some of your... you know, what do you think, what are your favourite strategies in your book? Because I, again, you know, I don't know if it's like choosing your children— which one's your favourite?
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (26:11) What is my favourite strategy? Goodness gracious, it depends on what problem I'm trying to solve. So, it really does depend on the bottleneck in my life. If I was fearful of something, then 100% the chapter on getting out of your own way, which I go deep into, this thing that I call "pressure testing," which is essentially exposure therapy on steroids. It's where you intentionally put yourself in these situations that bring out whatever it is that you're fearing, with the caveat that you have created an environment, an artificial environment, which is completely safe, so the stakes are low, but it still brings out those same fears and anxieties. You repeatedly immerse yourself in it and you play with the three variables of how much, how often, and how intense, and you play with those variables to the point of discomfort. Eventually, it becomes... you just become desensitised. This is how I started public speaking. I had my first sort of MC gig—we ran a charity event many years ago—and the MC gig was in front of 300 Sri Lankan uncles and aunties. I stood up there, had this awesome speech, and no one listened. They didn't even know I was on the stage; they were just talking amongst themselves. I told myself, “I’ll never speak again.” Then, years later, I said, "Well, this is like, years later, I actually did it.” I was like, “You know what? I'm gonna go the opposite. I'm gonna speak as much as I possibly can.” So, I spoke everywhere, everywhere, and eventually just became really comfortable. So, if I was fearful of something, pressure testing would be my favourite. If I was getting a bit lost in life or feeling like something is not quite right, or if I'm starting to wonder, "What is the point of all of this? What is the purpose of any of this?" then the last three chapters in my book, which are all about perspectival action—like changing, or at least reflecting on, our perspectives—reflecting on things like death, reflecting on things like conditionality, reflecting on things like identity, who we are, if anybody. So, if I was in a sort of deeper mode where I need some wisdom, I would start in those final three chapters. And if I just know that I’m a bit off, you know, a bit more irritable, and nothing’s quite right, I would look at those first, those lifestyle medicine chapters. Essentially, there’s almost always something giving, and it’s usually exercise.
Dr Lucy Burns (29:13) Yeah, yeah, and I think it's interesting because for me, I think sleep moves the needle. It’s so interesting when people are stressed or worried, or as you said, when something’s a bit off. They don’t have some major pathological condition, but they’ve just got a lot on their plate and they’re just, yeah, as you said, a bit grumpy, a bit irritable—too many things to do. So, they sit at the end of the day on the couch thinking, "Oh my god, this is my time, I can unwind," and then they don’t want to get off the couch because it's like the whole hamster wheel starts again as soon as they hop into bed. The next thing you do is go to sleep, and then wake up, and blah, blah, blah. So, you delay and delay and delay. During that time, you’re scrolling on Instagram to get a little bit of dopamine, making you feel worse than ever because everyone else is apparently feeling fabulous, and you’re feeling like a piece of poo. And so, you kind of do the opposite of what you know technically should be doing.
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (30:09) Sleep is also—there’s this great quote by Andrew Huberman: If you want to find out how people are doing, don’t ask how they are—ask how their sleep’s going. Yeah, yes! And one of the most fascinating discoveries I gained from researching the sleep chapter in my book is the sleep cycles, and in particular, how the non-REM and REM stages work. It’s fascinating that, say, in an eight-hour sleep session, the cycles are not created equally—they’re all different. So at the start, you have much deeper sleep, much more non-REM (or non–rapid eye movement) sleep, which is really important for things like recovery and memory retention—all that sort of stuff. Then, towards the end, you get most of your REM sleep (or rapid eye movement sleep), which, in the context of this discussion, is one of the most important parts of sleep for emotional regulation. Once you see that graph, you can’t unsee it. Because let’s say if you normally sleep eight hours, but then one night you sleep six hours—how much sleep have you lost? Two hours. But you’ve lost about 50% of your REM sleep. That is why everyone is so annoying if you don’t sleep enough. It’s the same level of annoyance, but you’re missing out on a key part of your sleep. So I think you’re right—people inadvertently sort of mess up the quality of their sleep towards the end of the night by doing things that really wire them up, as opposed to wind them down. And then, given the society we’re in—which I am unfortunately also a part of—where we actually want to do all this stuff, and we’re busy, and we’ve got all this stuff going on, we try to squeeze as much into the day as possible. And then sleep is one of the first things to go. I’m such a big advocate for sleeping more now.
Dr Lucy Burns (32:22) Mm-hmm, I totally get it. I remember somebody once said to me, "I wish I had more hours in the day," and I go, "No, I wish I had more hours in the night."
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (32:29) Ah, I like that! Wow.
Dr Lucy Burns (32:32) Yeah, well, I think we steal from the night to supplement our day, when really, it’s a false economy. My other favourite saying is that humans are the only animals to voluntarily restrict our sleep. No other animal does it. You know, cows aren't out there going, "I should be going to sleep Daisy, but I’m too busy chatting.”
Dr Gihan Jayaweera (32:57) Gotta check my feed.
Dr Lucy Burns (33:00) And that’s where we’ll hit pause on part one of this joyful deep dive with Dr G. In part 2 next week, we dig into the juicy stuff: how your beliefs shape your reality, why doing happy beats just feeling happy, and how to rewire your thoughts for a better life. Plus, practical tips you can start immediately. Speak to you then, lovelies.
Dr Lucy Burns (33:27) The information shared on the Real Health and Weight Loss Podcast, including show notes and links, provides general information only. It is not a substitute, nor is it intended to provide individualised medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, nor can it be construed as such. Please consult your doctor for any medical concerns.
