Our Body: Sleep and Exercise

When you move, your muscles release signals that mobilise immune cells, calm inflammation, and strengthen the body’s ability to cope with disease. We’ll explore how these changes relate to cancer risk and recovery, and what we’ve learned from exercise programmes in people with breast cancer.

In this talk, I’ll share findings from my PhD on how being a morning or evening person, how much you sleep, and how satisfied you are with your sleep, are linked to different types of motivation. I’ll explore how motivation varies between people, when during the day people feel motivated, and how sleep may shape these patterns. Are morning people more motivated than evening people, or just motivated at different times? Does sleep quality affect how energetic you feel? And when we don’t get enough sleep, does it just make us feel less motivated, or does it also reduce how much effort we put in?

Do you ever press snooze on your morning alarm? Yearning for a few more minutes of sleep? Maybe you do it again and again, stalling the waking up for as long as possible? You are not alone. But how bad is this behaviour? Is it true that it just makes you more tired and you should stop immediately? Finally, science has some answers.