Few technologies have advanced as rapidly as video games. The Nintendo Classics that many of us grew up playing helped to pave the way for what today is a juggernaut industry that gives players a virtual experience unlike any other, and one that occurs right in our own living rooms and can connect us to a global community.
I have been gaming since I was like maybe four when my dad brought over the Second Genesis, so I would say thirty years I've been gaming, which is crazy to say out loud now.
Will Wiggins is a gaming content creator, graphic artist, and illustrator with a large Twitch following. Online. He goes by the name Black One, and he's heavily involved in the professional gaming community.
It's a little addicting, right because it's something that I love doing and the people watching loved experience, and I'm like, oh, I just have to do it more. I have to do it later. I have to make sure I'm around to get these big raids from all the other content creators. We're smart, and it went to bed on time, like
they'll send their people over to me. I'm like, all right, we've got some viewers, we got some engaged we got some action, and as important as viewers are your health, none of that is going to matter if you're not there to keep them entertained.
Viewers add a whole new element to the gameplay, essentially turning a passive pastime into a globally connected community. So, for Will, what started as playing a couple levels of Sonic the Hedgehog alone after school has ballooned into all night raids and tournaments occurring across different time zones with an untold number of players, all of this happening in vast realities created by nothing more than ones in zero.
There's something different about some of these games and immersive experiences that activate our brains in very different ways. I think when you get into these games, it's very difficult to pull yourself out. You may sit down and think I'm going to play for an hour, get something to eat, and get some sleep, and four hours later you're still involved with it.
Doctor Chris Winter as an neurologist and sleep specialist from Charlottesville, Virginia.
I'm the author of the book The Rested Child. While you're tired, wired, or irritable child may have a sleep disorder and how to help as well. As the sleep Solution, Why your sleep is broken and how to fix it.
One of the focuses of his career is the unique effects that video games, screen time, and other related technology have on our sleep.
Sometimes I find myself going to sleep and thinking about the game I was playing.
I'm like, man, I.
Can't wait to get up and play some more. It still happens even to me, So like if anyone else experiences that, like I get it.
Will's experience navigating this massive community of constantly changing technology is certainly unique, and it created obstacles to getting and maintaining proper sleep, something that Chris knows all about. Using Chris's expertise, Will delve into Will's journey to find out what happens to our sleep when we spend much of the night fighting aliens, looting dragons, and exploring virtual worlds in a way that previous generations never knew.
Hi.
I'm Anahad O'Connor, and this is chasing Sleep and iHeartRadio production and partnership with Mattress Firm. I've spent much of my career looking into the obstacles that prevent us from getting good sleep. Most of these obstacles have been with human beings since we first started walking up right, things like stress, finding time to rest, and even the position
of the sun. But a uniquely modern problem we face comes from technology, both from being bombarded by blue light from multiple screens and also from the extremely recent phenomenon of video games, pulling our brains into completely different worlds, often right before we try to go to sleep at night.
To our brains, these developers and these games are so good that they create real experience. You feel like you were in the deserted compound, surrounded by zombies, trying to figure out how to kill them and get to this next place where all the other players are like, when in fact, no, you're just sitting in a chair in your bedroom looking at a box of light.
A box of light with profound effects. Many of us have fond memories of jumping on turtles and saving princesses in those boxes of light. And as the games got more intricate, not only were they more fun to play, but an entire audience started to grow that liked watching people play. A gamer streaming on Twitch like black ony can neet tens of thousands of followers and views.
Back when I was living in Boston specifically, I was working full time at least forty hours a week. I was streaming at least three to four times a week. I was writing articles and posting videos, I was podcasting, and for a lot of the time, I was single, so I was able to do a lot of this.
It's pretty amazing to me. So many of us have watched the gaming industry evolve literally right before our eyes, from these very unserious, blocky games where the main goal was just to jump from platform to platform to what we have today, these now ultra sophisticated storytelling medium As you rode the wave of this changing technology, what were some of the challenges that kept you from having a healthy sleep routine.
Yeah, it was. It was challenging, especially to realize my limitations and realize like I needed to do better about taking care of myself even though I felt like I was. The sleep part was a really big part of really buckling down, like, all right, I just have to I have to get more sleep, or else this is just going to keep happening to me. I'm going to keep suffering.
It sounds like you were aware of the challenges from pretty early on, especially because so much of the streaming traffic occurs at night.
Yeah, yeah, so I did try to like squeeze in every little bit of sleep I could, but it was mostly because I was especially being on the East Coast and trying to appease to the West Coast viewers as well.
I was staying up till at least two, maybe three sometimes in the morning, every time I streamed, and I was for a while, I was streaming almost every weekday. During some of this time where I was doing just all this other stuff and only getting like five hours of sleep, I definitely remember this distinct feeling of feeling like I was like in this fog, where like I
was just so much slower. Even though I was able to like do so much during that time, I knew, I knew in the back of my head that if I was able to sleep more, I would be that much more efficient. Like once I lay down and sit to go on that bed, like I was out, that was it.
While falling asleep quickly allowed will to steal resting time at every opportunity throughout the day. The ability to snooze as soon as we hit the pillow is actually a bug, not a feature of our brains. According to Chris, it's usually indicative of an unhealthy cycle of sleep.
One are the problems is if you ask most people what is the sign of good sleep, they're going to tell you how quickly you fall asleep. I always call it speed to unconsciousness, if that's a thing. And so when you're talking to two people, well, I'm a good sleeper, but my roommate here, he's a bad sleeper. The good sleepers often defining themselves as a good sleeper because they get in bed and fall asleep fast, and the bad sleeper man, he gets in bed, sometimes takes him thirty
four or five minutes to fall asleep. So it's interesting that Will recognizes that because the idea that he's turning everything off getting in bed and immediately out cold. Great, but that could very well be indicating that his brain is looking for more sleep than it's actually.
Gettingh Yeah, that's pretty unnerving. So you're saying people out there could be suffering from something sleep related and not even realize it.
Yeah, because you again, they're the ones who fall asleep immediately. Yeah, they're the ones who when their partner comes to see me because here she can't sleep, Mike, Well, tell me about your partner. All he's a great sleeper. He's a sleeper, he can sleep anywhere. So I'm usually thinking, as I'm talking to partner A, I'm more worried about partner B. Might want to get partner be in here because he's really sleeping.
That makes sense that if you can fall asleep quickly, it just means that you're starved for sleep. And speaking of partners, I find it interesting that sharing our sleep space and time with someone else often forces us to look at it in a different way.
Being in a relationship forced me to approach it differently. Specifically being in a relationship that I realized early on, like I wanted to give more. For the reason I was single for so long was because like I just wanted to There was always that tension of like, all right, do I spend more time with her or do I spend time focus on my business and focusing on getting my viewership up and getting more followers and blah blah blah.
If you can relate to being sleep starved, and let's face it, most of us can, we tend to exhibit more of these behaviors in our younger years.
I could have obviously been better about it, especially as a younger guy. But I was just trying to fire on all cylinders at all times, and it just drove a wedge in between my health and my ambition.
When we think about our sleepless youth, we might remember actually being able to perform fairly well, or at least well enough. There may have been late nights burning the midnight oil, followed by early mornings cramming for finals or working double shifts. It might even seem like we simply didn't need as much sleep back then. But what's really the case is that our bodies were just better at powering through without And.
When you think about video gaming in the ages of people playing it, I have yet to encounter a sixty seven year old who's crushing it in call of duty every in some competition. They're young people, and the good and bad thing about young people is they can kind of abuse their bodies and still do Okay, Yeah, because you're young. That's why I always tell young athletes so like, oh, I go out and play video games and go to bars all night long, and as long as I get
four or five hours sleep, I'm great. But that's not going to last. This is the time to really invest in your sleep. We see a lot of children in our clinic. The rise of twenty four hour gaming culture
is definitely something that we see. In fact, one of the case studies in my new book, The Rested Child was a family of a daughter who was spending a tremendous amount of time between you know, after school, before she'd go to school the next day on platforms playing games where other people would pay her to do it,
you pay to watch her do it. So it was a very unusual situation of Had she been in some sort of travel soccer team, I guess her parents would be much more supportive of it, you know, which's gonna be the next Carly Lloyd or whatever. But they fundamentally did not like the fact that she was just playing video games all the time. Number one and then number two, dramatically impairing your sleep.
Bad sleep will certainly take its toll eventually, no matter how young you are. The world of esports and professional gaming is so new many are skeptical of its merits or even the value it can hold as a full time career and income source. But gaming is a gigantic industry, one that rakes in over two hundred billion dollars a year with an audience that spans every corner of the entire world. It's an audience that Will did everything he could to reach and engage with early in his career.
As Will dove deeper into his passion, he found it more and more difficult to perform at his best. There was a constant struggle between getting more sleep or getting more done.
So that was always the constant like friction of like, oh, I know I need more sleep, but I know I have to do way more things than just know that sleep would afford me at the time.
It seems like waking up and playing or gaming in the middle of the day isn't really an option. The majority of this community games views or I guess you could say enters the chat later in the day. Would you say that's the case for your audience as well.
Yeah, I think that most people who are playing or specifically playing together with other people are doing it in the evenings because people are off of work, you've had their dinner, looking for some way to kind of like vibe out and play something with their friends or just get real sweaty and competitive and do something really fun. Usually that happens that night.
So I'm a neurologist by draining, so everything boils down to the brain and real estate within the brain. And when you look at sleep and what's generating sleep and where that's happening in the brain, it's sharing real estate that's very close to parts of our brain that regulate body temperature and regulate immune modulation, strengthening or weakening your immune system.
Will can definitely attest to that. He found himself wrestling with multiple debilitating bouts of sickness every year.
I used to get sick like three to four times a year, just like the cold, like or the flu, or just like some random thing that just completely takes me out. And it was because every night, like every night, I was getting like five hours of sleep.
And it's not just all night gamers that see this effect. Any intrusion into healthy sleep has consequences.
And I remember when I was in residency and doing all that call, I was just constantly we were all constantly sick. You know, we had no backup, so unless you were dying, you had to come to us like okay, well whatever. So and as soon as I got outside of residency, all that went away. Cold sotares went away, sicknesses went away, because there's a big tie in, and so it's really interesting to look at some of that work on the immune system and how that works because
we've always known. I mean, our grandmothers and great grandmothers could easily have told us, hey, look, if you don't get sleep, you're going to get sick.
As far as I know, the idea that you could get sick from a lack of sleep was just something people said that took a while to be proven true by science. For a long time, it was just an anecdotal observation that if you were sleep deprived then you'd be more susceptible to flus and colds.
We've always known it, but it took a long time for science to sort of catch up and sort of prove it. And so there's a wealth of information now that really shows that quality sleep through manipulations of cytokinds and immune modulating interlukens in our brain, not to mention the modulation of the chemical growth hormone, which is instrumental in strengthening and bolts during our immune system, all of
those things rely on quality sleep. So when we get good sleep, we tend to shake illnesses much easier, maybe never even manifest symptoms of them.
It can't even be contested or debated like how important sleep is, so just not being sick alone proves worth it.
We'll be right back after our brief message from our partners at Mattress Firm, and now back to chasing sleep. So we have this fantastic community and platform for content creation, entertainment, global connection, you name it. It's incredibly rewarding. We can do it from the comfort of our homes. It unites people from all over the world. But the downside is that it forces us to be staring at these harmful blue screens, these basically light boxes, for hours at a time,
and often right up until bedtime. So there's got to be ways that you deal with this. What are some techniques that you use to make all this green time easier on yourself?
I do wear protective glasses whenever I am playing, just because I know that based on studies, that it has some type of impact on me. So I have two pairs of protective glasses for gaming specifically or for making art. One has an amber tint. So these ones have a little bit like a blue light blocking filter in them, and the other one is a crystalline one that has anti glare anti blue light, but it's much more subtle,
it's more clear. I use that for what I'm designing, and then I wear the glasses protective glasses pretty much all the time whenever I'm creating content on Twitter, Facebook or whatever it is, just because, like I know, that does have an impact on your eyestrain, which has an impact on the way you sleep. And then introducing the blue light into that as well.
Yeah, I mean, it is a box of light after all, and when you add in late night hours and stressful gaming situations, it can be pretty straining. But neutralizing that light may help to reduce the damaging effects of late night gaming.
Light in general is problematic. In other words, our bodies sort of set our circadian rhythm in a large part based upon available light. So when there's lots of light out, your body understands that it's daytime, we need to be awake, looking for food, reproducing whatever organisms do during the day. And then as the light becomes diminished, it's a really strong trigger through the chemical melotone and for us to
get ready to go to bed. But just the light in general being right there, you know, a foot and a half from your face, really bright, very exciting, is interrupting your brain's natural signaling of telling you it's nighttime, it's time to go to bed. In fact, your brain thinks very differently when you're in front of that screen and you see all that light. It's like, oh, it's lunchtime.
This is the time to be awake. So when you're done with that session and turn your light out at midnight, your brain doesn't necessarily quickly realize that it's nighttime.
And will reminds us that when we're worrying about the big screen, don't forget about that little screen that all of us can easily look at too much.
Trying not to be on your phone too much when you're in the bed is a big one too. Usually when I'm going to bed, like I am ready to sleep, so I'll look at it so that I can set my alarm, read any emails that may have come through that I might have missed. Beyond that, I'm not really on my phone too much when I'm in the bedroom, just because, like, I know that you can stay up much longer, you know, if it isn't because you're looking at cat video on Instagram. It's because the blue light.
Is keeping you awake.
So I've made that a priority a pretty long time ago to just like all right, every once in a while I'll wake up and like write something down that I have an idea about. But beyond that, I try to limit the amount of phone I'm using.
The light factor is so impactful that Chris says simply taking down that brightness or wearing protective glasses could make all the difference, because it's not just a box of light. Remember, this tech is changing and changing fast. There are devices that you can strap over your eyes that pull you into a virtual realm. There's entire metaverses being created that blur the lines between the game and real life. So anything you can do to mitigate this bombardment of light is helpful.
This is always a difficult question just because it butts up against reality. You know, I hear you know, various sleep experts speak, you know, well two hours. You know, we just really shut everything off two hours before you go to bed, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I'm always like, well, what are you doing for the two hours? Just sit there in the dark for two
hours and think about life or something. So to me, if somebody says, look, I can't stop playing this video game at ten o'clock and wait around un till midnight to go to sleep, I think that's where you know dimming the light? Can we make your monitor less bright? Can we wear sunglasses or the blue block or glasses?
It wasn't easy, but Will built up a big following and carved out an amazing path in the career of his dreams. We'll Sleep is a lot better now, and so is his overall health and performance in life and work. It takes a lot to stay healthy, even in a community that we don't usually associate with workplace hazards or on the field injuries.
Beyond you know, prioritize time to make sure you sleep is find out what you like with regards to how you sleep, and be conscious of your health. So I'm going to reference a competitive fighting game player. He goes
by Toketo, and he's an excellent gamer. Not only is he like excels at the mechanical part of being a gamer, but he is one of the people who really pushed the narrative of why it's important to take your health seriously when it comes to gaming because it's not always considered like a high impact or performance based profession, right like not like being a basketball player. Taking your health into consideration is just as important as how you strategize
within games to be better about them. Having the immune system to be able to do those late nights whenever you need to, like on rare occasions, like having the mental and physical fortitude to be able to do that without straining yourself too much. All that plays a part in you being able to do what you love to do longer. And not just like in a literal sense
of like marathon sessions, but just life wise. You know, things that you're doing to hurt yourself in this moment can have residual effects down the line if you don't do things to kind of counterbalance it.
So gamer or not, What is something that our listeners can control in their immediate future to improve their sleep?
Your bed? Like think about like what you're sleeping on, and if it's really as good for your back and for your body and for your sleeping patterns as you think. So being aware of your sleeping habits and how you like to sleep, and you know if you're a back sleeper or a side sleeper, the size of the bed, the firmness of it, the softness of it. Having all of those elements into play as well with your health can make a big impact in how well you sleep.
So having some kind of priority on making sure your bed is what you need it to be for you to sleep your best is also a big part of your overall health and something that will help you keep doing what you love to do longer.
There you have it, our beds. Just as each gamer has their console or PC of choice, their favorite controllers and hardware, each of us should treat the thing we sleep on as a tool for better rest. Gaming isn't the only industry that evolves to challenge our sleep. As our world continues to progress and modernize, we can face all sorts of challenges that our hunter gatherer ancestors couldn't even dream of.
I was talking to somebody who was a professor at one time, and she said the hardest part about her job was preparing people for jobs that don't exist now, meaning that I'm talking to a student and in five years they'll be doing something that I didn't even know existed. And I think that really speaks to the rapid evolution of things that are happening right now, particularly within technology.
And if somebody said one of the biggest threat to a younger person in terms of their sleep, I would say it's technology.
And if technology is the biggest challenge to sleep, that puts people like Will Wiggins right in the thick of it. That's all for this episode. Join me again next week when I learn how a wildlife documentarian sleeps in some of the most remote areas of the world, all while being ready to record footage of some of the most elusive animals.
The Alaska Peninsula is one of the densest populations of bears in the world. I've spent a lot of time there intent in the middle of that country thousand pound carnivores and you uns your tent in the morning and there could be two, three or four bears in view.
We want to hear from you. Leave a rating or review for our show on your podcast player of choice. You can find me on Twitter at Anahad O'Connor. Until next time, hoping you're living your best while sleeping your best. Chasing Sleep is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with Mattress Firm. Our executive producer is Molly Sosha. Our EP of Post is James Foster. Our supervising producer is Keia Swinton. Our producer is Sierra Kaiser. This episode was written and
researched by Eric Leijia and Jessica Patia. This show is hosted by me Anahad O'Connor