YOU'LL often find Dr Michael Mosley awake at 3am.
Not because the British documentary maker and science journalist is a renown night owl or party animal, but because he suffers from "terrible insomnia."
"I find it easy to go to sleep but I tend to wake up at 3am and wander around a lot and wake up feeling shattered at five or six in the morning," Mosley tells Weekender.
"The true measure of whether you're getting enough sleep is, how do you feel during the day? I have a tendency to slump.
"I've heard stories of people falling asleep at the traffic lights.
"Australia, you have quite a serious sleep problem. A lot of Australians suffer from sleep problems."
According to an Australian Institute of Health and Welfare study published in November 2021, 48 per cent of adults have reported at least two sleep-related problems.
Mosley says, on average, Australians go to sleep early by global standards at 10.45pm. The average wake-up time of 6.45am is also earlier than most countries.
Mosley is in Australia touring his latest show A Life Changing Experience, which explores weight loss, sleep, wellness and how your body works and provides tips on how to live until 101.
He's best-known for hosting the TV show Trust Me, I'm a Doctor and writing the bestselling book, The Fast Diet, which popularised the 5:2 fasting diet.
The show doesn't merely aim to educate viewers, but to also entertain through video and quirky experiments.
For his Civic Theatre show Mosley will be joined by Newcastle-based exercise physiologist and proud Gomeroi man Ray Kelly.
The pair previously co-hosted the SBS TV show, The Australian Health Revolution, which promoted good nutrition, physical activity and weight loss as ways to reverse type 2 diabetes.
"One of the joys of doing live shows is people can talk to me afterwards and they tell me about their success stories and how they've managed lose weight," he says.
"I met a guy the other day who lost nearly 70 kilograms and he was an insulin diabetic and he's off everything now.
"He was taking massive amounts of medication to treat things, but now he's not snoring, he doesn't have a sleep app machine, he's not taking insulin, he's not on high blood [pressure medication], all of these things changed when he shed some of that fat."
Mosley is also in the country filming his next three-part documentary called Australia's Sleep Revolution, in association with Adelaide's Flinders University.
"Sleep is one of those things that is so fundamental, so misunderstood, and there's so little support at the moment from the medical profession," he says.
"So I think that could have a really big impact."
Mosley believes one of the biggest problems causing insomnia is the modern practice of watching television or reading in bed.
"People have obviously made bed into their entertainment centre and what you're trying to do is train your brain to associate bed with sleep and sex and nothing else," he says. "If you suffer from insomnia and you wake up in the middle of the night worrying about stuff, it turns out the best ways to cure insomnia is to spend less time in bed.
"They've put me on this thing called the sleep restriction program.
"So I'm actually spending less time in bed, and the idea is to get really tired, so when I hit the bed I crash out and don't wake up.
"A lot of people who have poor sleep think they should spend more time in bed, but that just means you spend more time fretting."
The COVID pandemic exacerbated various health issues such as insomnia, type 2 diabetes, depression and anxiety.
Mosley says doctors are ill-equipped to deal with these problems and are too quick to use medicine treatments, rather than a more holistic approach.
"What you learn at medical school is, you learn medication, you learn a lot about the human body, physiology, but you learn almost nothing," he says.
"Doctors are very much in the dark when it comes to the latest science around weight loss. Part of my mission is to go to health conferences and I tell them about the science and the latest stuff, because they don't learn it at medical school."
Dr Michael Mosley - A Life Changing Experience comes to Newcastle's Civic Theatre on Wednesday.
