United Kingdom 2020: Nicola Morgan

Delegate: Nicola Morgan

Short Bio: Known widely as The Teenage Brain Woman, an award-winning author on all aspects of adolescent wellbeing and healthy development. International speaker on teenage brain/behaviour/wellbeing, stress, learning, impact of screens/social media, peer pressure, risk-taking, motivation, body image and sleep. Current book The Awesome Power of Sleep, for publication late 2020/early 2021. A renowned go-to person in the UK on teenage wellbeing.
Winner of many awards including the School Library Association’s Outstanding Contribution to Information Books.
www.nicolamorgan.com

Activity: On my website I will publish a simple “Steps to a great sleep, starting tonight”. This will be aimed at schools but anyone can do it – would work very well as a family activity. It will be a straightforward activity to enable people to create a healthy pre-bed routine for the hour leading up to desired bedtime and to repeat the same routine for 5-10 days, with the intention of gaining some control over sleep opportunity and latency. It shows them how to create a suitable sleep opportunity and set up the conditions for sleep to happen, also giving some understanding of the suprachiasmatic nucleus behaviour and how they might alter the timing of melatonin switch-on. So, a practical activity but with scientific learning embedded.
There will also be a quiz to allow readers to see what they may be doing “wrong” in the 1-2 hours before bed, so that they can change their behaviour and give themselves a better chance of sleeping well.

Location: I’m based in the UK but anyone can do this anywhere as it will be on my website.

Date of Activity: Starting March 13th for 5-10 days

Submitted By: Nicola Morgan