Here is the full transcript of posture specialist James Leinhardt’s talk titled “The Secret To Getting Better Sleep Tonight” at TEDxManchester 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
We have three things in common, all of us here. We all have a spine, we all sleep, and when we were about five years old, and we were playing as children, grandma used to scream, “Posture!” And all of us would sit up straight. And that fear of grandma screaming that word, even to world-leading influencers, doctors who are sat on the front row slouching.
Right now, where is he? Dr. C? We’ve seen you, even though you’re amazing. So why do we? Because everyone in the room has been slouching. Liam at the backstage doing the sound all day, has literally been like this, doing his sound, because it’s comfy. Posture is the eternal fight against gravity.
The Difference Between Sitting and Sleeping
And sitting up like this, although grandma’s watching, she’s very disappointed in some of you. This is really hard. Where is this? Oh yeah, get me back here.
This is the good spot. The thing that grandma may be missed, was that if posture is the eternal fight against gravity, then really, we need to consider our sleep. It’s great and it’s comfy, and the beauty and the difference between sitting and sleeping, or standing and sleeping, we remember wearing a book on our heads and doing this very nicely, is that you’re already asleep. That’s the best bit.
When you’re uncomfortable in these positions, and this is really my go-to for TV watching, the second you become uncomfortable, you move, because you’re awake. The difference with sleep is significant. I’m going to show and prove it to you now.
You will have all at some point in your lives, either sat in the back of a car and gone like this, or come to a TED and heard someone like me talk, and done that. And within 10 minutes you wake up, and your neck feels like it’s going to burn off. Why didn’t you wake up then?
The Importance of Addressing Sleep Posture
It is a completely different thing, because you’re asleep. So I think it’s important to really address the average human, because we spend so much time, in fact I met Younger last night, he said it was so awesome.
And Younger was talking to me about some research that he found about using whole foods to reduce the chances of Alzheimer’s. You eat for four and a half years of your life. The lady that came on before, who I’m definitely not going to mess with, nor am I going to mess with her, that guy was really big.
But you exercise on average for one and a half years of your life. In fact, if you add all of these things up, it’s the same amount of time that you sleep. Now the first, or the second talk by James, which was phenomenal, I really know that if I fail in this mission, I know I’m going for a job.
By law, we can sue James if he doesn’t provide us with an ergonomic workstation provision, and an annual screening of our lying work surface. But none of you have spent any time in your ergonomic surface, you’ve all been doing this. This gentleman here is not the average human.
The Impact of Poor Sleep Posture
And this is a chap I met just near Old Trafford, the right side of Manchester. And he’s a gent… Dad, that was for you. He’s so annoyed with me that he’s gone mad. Okay, this is a gentleman that walks into hospital. Now he had dementia, but he had a gastro trouble.
Walks into hospital, was bedridden for two weeks in hospital. And that two weeks becomes seven years. That position you see him in there is fixed.
The Benefits of Proper Sleep Posture
This is a fixed body shape. So think about his personal care when he can’t separate his legs. Think about him trying to swallow his internal organs, his digestive system, his comfort, his pain. He even cares about that. He can’t speak. He can’t move. He can’t be seated. He can’t shower. And he spends 23 to 24 hours a day in bed.
And with very, very simple postural management equipment, we bring the bed to him and look at what happens three months later. And that’s not rocket science. That’s really, really simple.
If you always do this, you never do this. And that feels really tight and awful. And I’ve discussed the benefits for somebody like that gentleman.
But the benefits for you guys are that it may well increase your energy levels. I met a lady last night at the TED dinner who said she was a great sleeper. And then she told me that she felt exhausted every time she woke up.
It can lessen tension in shoulders, neck. If you’re waking up with really awful tension headaches or your shoulders burning through, it could have something to do with your sleep posture. This happens to the majority of men.
Ladies, you’d be very grateful for this bit. If you want to get back into your bedroom and you want to stop snoring, sleep posture may well be that thing. And the best bit is it’s the most simplest of equations.
The Software and Hardware of Sleep Posture
You need to consider the position you go to sleep in. And some of you say, “Well, I don’t stay in one position.” And of course, you don’t.
We don’t want you to. You’ve moved 1,000 times just in the four… I’ve got to figure this out, four minutes and something.
So the position you go to sleep in, that’s the software. And that’s what you guys are going to address tonight. So we are legitimately going to find a tangible way to improve your quality of sleep tonight.
The second bit is the hardware. We’ll worry about that next time. Now, if you are somebody suffering with sleep, which is in Manchester, by the way, we are the worst sleep city in England, congratulations as all.
The Significance of Sleep Quality
That deserves a round of applause because we’re all still smiling.
That’s the best bit. In Westminster in December, the university discussed our sleep deprivation.
So in this room, 74% of you get less than seven hours. One in two, I think, gets less than six in Manchester right now, definitely not enough. And every day we read a paper and we read an article that goes, “If you don’t get your seven and a half hours, your nose will fall off, you’re going to get dementia, die an early miserable death.”
Great. So anyone who’s struggling with sleep tonight is definitely not looking forward to it. But there’s nothing to tell us how to make it better.
So we see all these articles, all these phenomenal scientists on TED, online, telling us what happens with the sleep and why we need it and what happens if we don’t get it. So this fight between quantity and quality. Who cares about quantity?
The Relationship Between Sleep Posture and Recovery
No one in the room is getting any. So let’s start focusing on something that we tangibly can because we can’t focus on… I saw James Leinhardt today at TED and he said, “Get eight hours and that’s what I’m going to do.”
Because you might hate your partner, you might hate your boss, you might hate your kids, you might have a bill you weren’t expecting. There’s a million reasons why you won’t sleep tonight that sleep hostility is definitely not going to help. Last night, I slept for about an hour, thanks to Herb.
And we all know the significance of sleep. In fact, you could argue that sleep is the foundation of all good well-being because you wake up tired, you’re doing nothing about your well-being. We know it recovers us, we know it restores us, it heals us.
But really, you still can’t get the hours. It doesn’t matter what I tell you, how many wonderful nuggets of information that say, “If you get eight hours tonight, the world will be a fabulous place, the United will win 6-0.” Anyway, back to this.
What we do know to be true is from a piece of conceptualized evidence based in 1987, I think it was, that talks about the relationship between a neutral resting spine and the speed of recovery when you’ve had a spinal injury. Now, if you look at this board, it’s pretty depressing. 1.78 billion people have some sort of chronic pain.
The Cycle of Pain, Depression, and Sleep
60% who have chronic pain suffer with depression. Imagine waking up in chronic pain, you’re going to be in an absolute stinky mood and you’re definitely not getting any sleep because everything hurts. So then you don’t get any sleep and everything hurts, you’re in a bad mood.
And this is a cycle that we’re all in and I can’t just tell you to get your hours, that’s not good enough. So when you leave tonight, don’t worry, you’d have to go and buy a bed that costs 10 grand that flies you to the moon and spins and whatever, lavender spray or a smartwatch that doesn’t really tell you that you’ve had a great night’s sleep because if you drink a bottle of whiskey tonight, you’ll have a great night’s sleep according to your smartwatch. The best bit about sleep posture is it will cost you absolutely nothing tonight and I’m going to show you how to do it.
As you know, I work with complex neurological patient groups, but when we realised that those people have no voice and no one really cares about the people in beds that have no voice, we went to meet with a load of athletes and just before Tokyo, this is one such athlete, I met Katie Marchant who is a bronze medal Olympic champion and she sadly crashed out of Tokyo.
She came to me because she was at the velodrome down the road seven hours a day and she complained of knee pain, stiff right SIJ, a hit I think she said and her shoulders were hurting, but she said it was all down to the bike because of course if you are a cyclist, you need to spend your days like this for aerodynamicism which can’t do much for your back or neck I assume. It had absolutely nothing to do with her bike whatsoever.
The Provocative Posture
If you look at that position which I’m going to show you, sorry front row, the second you bring one leg over the other, you’ve now put yourself in what we call a provocative posture. So a research from a very intelligent chap called Doug Carey out of Australia talks about the fact that if you go to sleep in a provocative posture, you are more likely to wake up with increased symptoms of pain. But let’s not even go with references or worry about any cynical clinical words that none of us including me really understand.
When you bring one leg over the other, this hip is now diagonal as is my knee, when I fall in a sleep and this feels by the way comfortable, my shoulder is going to drop forward and now I’m face planting. So if you actually look at the picture, you’ll see that Katie had right knee pain because she was squeezing into the bed, the stiff SIJ came because she was twisted like a pretzel.
And I think you can see what’s going on with the neck and all she needed to do was remember that if she worked with James, she would have been given an ergonomic chair and if she only stuck a pillow between the right knees or ankles and want to fill that space, she would have looked just like that picture. So this isn’t really an experiment because an evil failed.
The Recommended Sleep Positions
What position do you go to sleep in? Because I suspect you sleep in a provocative posture. The provocative posture by the way is one where both knees touch the bed.
So if you are a tackler and it’s the only way you can go to sleep because it’s comfy, don’t forget that every pregnant woman that went to the doctor and found out that they were pregnant and a tackler, the doctor said “It’s time to move on to your left-hand side” and they all did it. So you can’t not only. There’s only two positions I’d recommend and I’m recommending this based on our experience in healthcare because these are the two positions we put our patients in for two to four hours at a time.
There’s one significant difference between our two patients here. One as you can see is supported and we maintain good body shape and they’ve preserved somebody’s body, internal organs are working, lung capacity is nice and lovely and that’s just horrendous to watch. These guys can’t speak.
So you guys have moved probably 100 times in the 12 minutes I’ve spoken. These people are put for two to four hours and can’t tell you that they’re uncomfortable and none of us have a clue how to do this. None of you in the room have a clue how to sleep properly.
The Soldier and the Dreamer
So we call them the soldier and the dreamer. Very simple, just remember grandma, she’s screaming at you right now. Standing, nice standing up straight, shoulders, hips, knees and ankles and seated posture. I think we’ve been there. Lovely. Oh yeah, that’s better actually.
Anyway, these positions are the only two that you can control. The only two you can control when you go to sleep. What happens thereafter is anyone’s guess and I’m not here to maintain a single posture.
In fact, if you sat like this throughout my talk, which some of you have done and you didn’t have to, you still get a point. This is really hard actually. This is, oh yeah, just there.
Conclusion
So perhaps there is a way of reversing this cycle because if you have chronic pain or if you are struggling with insomnia, then you will definitely be struggling with your mental health. So if you wake up in less pain tomorrow, just because you stuck a pillow between your knees and ankles and didn’t look like a twisted pretzel, you might wake up in less pain. If you wake up in less pain, you’ll be in a better mood.
And if you’re in a better mood, who knows, you might even sleep a little bit better. In this room, you are either looking after somebody that you love, like Celia, the lady that’s been taking pictures, who after this will be going straight to see her mum. She’s not seen him in two days.
Or my dad over there. Dad, how many times have you been to the GP this week with grandma? Five, there you go.
Because at some point in your life, you are going to be looking after somebody that you love. Or like my wife, you will be looking after someone like me for their whole lives. But the point is, this is going to affect all of us.
It’s not about when we get older. Because if dad’s had a bad night’s sleep, he’s going to be in a bad mood when he goes and sees grandma. I’d like to dedicate this talk in memory of my uncle who fell asleep with COVID and never woke up.
And whilst we know that sleep posture can save lives, we actually are more concerned today with you guys going and saving your spines. Thank you very much.