A special shout out to our soul sponsor, Safa Mattress, So this is coming to you without a bunch of ads, just sponsored by Sofa. Safa sponsored our series on dreaming, the Onorology episodes, which are so good. And since this one is also about sleep and I sleep on a sofa, I also read books on Asafa and lay around and look at my phone on Asafa. But the sleeping part's are the best. Asafa is like getting a first class ticket to Slumberland for the price of a middle seat
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com slash ologies. Thanks Safa, we love you. Oh hey, it's your little step brother who tries to trade you their calcified banana flavor now and later is for your Mini Reese's peanut butter cups, And you're like little dude, step all the way off. That's not how life works. Ali, board back for another episode of ologies. So let's get deep into something that happens usually in the dead of night. If you're lucky sleep, you do it every day or night. Probably, Okay,
Somenology very much a thing. It's the study of how we sleep. And I looked up the etymology of it just after I wrote that intro and Holly smokes you guys. Somness is the Roman god of sleep and yes, the brother of death. I had no idea when I wrote that a few minutes ago, So there you go. Also, Somnos probably a remake of the Greek myth of Hypnos, who was the Greek god of sleep, also the half brother of Thanatos death. So Hypnos lived in a dark
grotto in the underworld. What a bachelor, but was kind of a helper of humans. He was a good dude. His dad was Darkness and his mother was nix or night, and even Zeus was afraid of her. But that and so somenology is the study of the god that comes in darkness to recharge us, and it seems to vex
us more and more. I'm determined to help fix your sleep and may your I mean, are I appall my own friends physicians, I appall my own fitbit with my poor sleep habits, and as a result, I sometimes forget which month it is, and I have eaten more stickers on produce than you need to know about. So you're going to learn the difference between deep sleep, light sleep, rem sleep, What aspects of sleep hygiene are important, how much sleep you really need? Sleep information specifically about kiddos.
From the author of the book The Rested Child. Why you're tired, wired, or irritable child may have a sleep disorder, and how to help and how to help the molecular janitors that live in your skull. This guest has been called the sleep Whisperer and works with professional athletes and normies alike to per form better and to remedy their sleep issues. He has literally written the book on sleep. So get cozy, zip up your onesies, and get ready.
From neurologist and psomnologist doctor William Chris Winter Knowledgious Algy. Algy knows you are a neurologist, but you're also a somnologist. Correct, because you study sleep. Correct. Now tell me a little bit about what is sleep? I mean, that's like the golden question, because it does seem crazy that for eight hours of the day we're so vulnerable to predation, we just clock out, Like, what what is sleep? Exactly? Yeah, I don't think people really know.
I mean, there's all kinds of theories in terms of sleep being something important for energy balance. There's a metabolic sort of pathway that sleeps very important for. So I don't know that we necessarily know exactly what it is, but it's a very important thing for sort of re establishing balance within our body throughout organ systems, and you know,
every organism does it. They do it differently. In some fish that have to continue to always swim, they'll sleep one half their brain and then the other at other times, and really fascinating things like that. But this very preserved process that you know, kind of allows us to sort of reset and go forward about our day. But to answer that definitively, I don't think anybody really can, which is shocking is something, like you said, so basic that we don't really know why we do it.
We don't know is this true? I fact checked it, and yes, pretty much all legit scientific papers start with even though how and why we sleep is a mystery for real, but we do know that there are different stages of sleep. Can you go through the different stages of sleep really quick and sure they happen to nightly or the day.
So it's easy to think about sleep and sort of in terms of three stages. There's light sleep, deep sleep, and dream sleep.
Again, those three stages were light sleep, deep sleep, and dream sleep.
So a lot of people think dream sleep and deep sleep are kind of the same thing. They're not so very distinct. So we spent about half of our night in light sleep, half.
In light sleep. Is normal, that just blew me away, and.
That's sort of the sleep that sort of moves us through all the different stages. So we're awake and we fall into light sleep, and from there we might dream, and then we'll go back to light sleep, and then we might have deep sleep, back to light sleep, maybe wake up and go to the bathroom. So light sleep is not only the sort of the foundation of our sleep, but it's also the portal through which we move to
the different stages. About ninety minutes after we fall asleep, if we're on a schedule and relatively well rested, we'll have dream or REM sleep. So REM sleep rapid eye move and sleep and dream sleep are the same thing. Generally that nine minutes after you fall asleep, I have your first dream. It's a very short dream, typically very fragile.
So if you're in an uncomfortable situation and a lot of anxiety in your life, you're sleeping in a bad hotel, you may drop that first cycle quite a bit, and then every hour to hour and a half we'll have another cycle of dreaming, usually last somewhere between twenty five to forty five minutes, and those get longer and longer the night goes on.
So light sleep starts as a stage called N one as you're starting to drift off, and you might have like a quick funky dream that kind of like yay, I'm falling asleep, nothing is real feeling, and then your brain waves slow down and then a little deeper light sleep is called END two, when your breath and your heart rates slow down. Almost half of your night is spent in end two, but it's not terribly restorative. Now, what is with this N one? End Two's what are
the ends? They're short for non rem sleep, So all stages of sleep that aren't rem are called non rem which is like if you had four kids and you just named the best, most interesting one, Jeremy, and then all the rest were just like non Jeremy one, non Jeremy two, that one's non Jeremy three. Like, sure, they all have their place in this family. Your life wouldn't be the same without them, you know, but they're not
as interesting as Jeremy. Now let's totally switch metaphors. So think of light sleep as your day to day's shoe. Nothing fancy, but it works. Now another kind of shoe in your sleep closet. Let's say the ug of the shoes is deep sleep, now also called slow waves sleep or delta sleep or M three not REM three. This stage of deep sleep happens more at the beginning of the night, and during this deep sleep stage, our bodies repair and they heal themselves. We release human growth hormone,
which is dope for free. And the more of this deep sleep we get those first few hours in bed, usually around twenty five percent of the night, the more chipper and refreshed and not sleepy or grow or crawling toward a triple espresso we feel and.
Then remsleep has a lot more to do with focus, concentration, mood, even pain perception, So it's a little bit more of a finesse sort of situation, which is probably why it's second in the night. Your brain really needs the deep sleep to make the motor go to find the food to get through your day. The second half the night, it's a little bit more detail oriented.
So if light sleep is like an everyday sneaker and deep sleep is a comfortable ug, rem sleep is like the shimmering dress shoe, just full of dreams, increased breathing and heart rates, more blood in your brain, and our eyes are just like darting around like kittens under our eyelids. So in this state our brain is as active as when we're awake and remsleep they think is supposed to help with memory and concentration and also mood. So the dress shoes takes care of memory and mood, and it
happens for about twenty five percent of the night. Now the cushy come the ug deep sleep or N three also twenty five percent of the night repairs your bod and keeps you from feeling sleepy. So yes, that light sleep is the majority of the night. If fifty percent, but like what does it do? And then what is happening during light sleep?
So light sleep is important again, like I said, it's sort of the foundation of sleep. There are a lot of processes going on, not you know, it's I don't want to use the word filler, but it's a lot of sort of just the general rest of our body, our bodies being inactive for a period of time. And interesting about light sleep is for a lot of individuals who struggle with their sleep, they will misperceive light sleep as being wakefulness.
And I know this is still I feel like this is still such a basic question. But what is the big difference like in brain waves or whatever when we are awake and talking and functioning and like dodging things coming at our heads. But then the difference between that when we were stone cold out does that sometimes happen in the literally the blink of a night.
One of the things I always tell people is that sleep always wins. I mean, if you push yourself hard enough and get yourself sleepy enough. It's not something that you really have a lot of control over. So sleep can sleep, sleep happens. We're not in danger of not sleeping. I think that for a lot of when you look at sleep in terms of the wavelings like you're talking about.
What's interesting is when you look at somebody's brain activity when they're awake, it looks very different from somebody who's in deep sleep. Deep sleep, you can see the sort of the consciousness part of your brain taking a back seat to the more primitive parts of the brain we share, like with an.
Earthworm a worm.
But when you look at rem sleep, it's almost impossible to discern the brain activity of somebody dreaming versus the brain activity of somebody who's awake. Really, yes, which is why it's really interesting. People say, you know, it's remsleep or deep sleep. They could not be more different. In fact, one of the only ways you can tell that somebody's dreaming if you're just looking at their brain is to
look at their muscle tone. Because when we dream, we're paralyzed, so it's obvious from looking at a videotape, Oh, she's dreaming and she's awake, that's pretty obvious. But to purely look at the brain's activity, it's very difficult to discern, and not to mention there's eye movements, so these very unusual bold eye movements that happen when we're dreaming that
we don't see when we're awake. But really that muscle tone is the biggest way we differentiate somebody electrographically is to whether or not they're sleeping or they're awake, which is fascinating. So when you dream you're sitting there taking a test or whatever, you're being chased by wolves or whatever you like to dream about, you actually can't move when those things are happening, nor can we really regulate
our body temperature, which is kind of interesting too. One thing that's fun to think about is sleep is not a light switch, so we're not awake, and then the light switch goes off and when we're asleep like it's a state on off. It's really sleep is a mechanism in our brain. But then vigilance or wakefulness is too, so it's really too switches. So when you're a and we're sitting here talking, our wake switches turned on, our sweet sleep switch is turned off, and we sleep vice versa.
Now sleep broalysis is the wake and the sleep switch being turned on at the same time.
Oh my god, that is are these switches kind of like instead of binary switches. There are more like levers that go kind of absolutely down.
Like absolutely and they're affecting each other. So as the sleep switch gets turned on, it's like the I don't know if you've ever been like like a water park, Like an indoor water park often has this massive bucket in the middle of it. It's constantly getting filled with water, and every you know, seven minutes, it just dumps it on everybody. So that's kind of how sleep, you know,
sleeping wakefulness. As we are awake and talking, we're culating chemicals that are making that sleep bucket wanting to tip over more and more, which is why we are a lot sleepier at eleven PM than maybe eleven am.
And so what happens in sleep that is kind of like a janitorial system. Like I read something about how with all signs and other brain diseases that your brain kind of like rinses off plaques. Perhaps I don't know absolutely what kind of things are we cleaning. And I'm also asking you this as a way to get myself to sleep more.
So, Yes, when I was in medical school back in the late nineties, I remember the lecture on the lymphatic system with an l lymphatic, which is the cleaning janitorius A great word, janitorial system of our body. It's getting rid of waste products, kind of flushing it out. And I remember our lectures saying, but interestingly, the brain doesn't
have one. And then we went on to the next topic, and I remember sitting there thinking, wait a minute, the most important organ of our brain, our body does not have this genitori system. So it turns out that he and science was wrong. This fantastic researcher in Maryland, she discovered it. And I'm blanking on her name right now. Netterguard, I believe was her.
Name, Danish neuroscientist, doctor Mikan Nettergard in twenty for anyone who just wants to get a tattoo of a new science hero.
So she not only discovered it, she named it the glimpatic system with a G and realized very quickly that not only is it pumping out waste products, but it's ten times more active when we sleep at night, the more we're awake.
Now, what exactly what other things are we cleaning out other than the plaques? Like what how does that affect our memory and our motor coordination? And like our ability to think quickly by having a clure breeze.
Yeah, so all those things you mentioned are true, and you can look at science in one of two ways. You look at the science that either deprived or restricted sleep, or you can look at sort of newer science where you force people to sleep longer and even just rest longer. But even if you just restrict sleep, those things, to me are much more meaningful. I think most people believe that if you stay up all night, you don't work
that well the next day. But what if you got four or five hours of sleep for several days in a row.
So I use a fitbit, and this was actually me all last week averaged four hours a night for an entire week. I was so foggy that I confused my itinerary. I missed my first flight in ten years, and then I cried in an airport bathroom out of frustration at myself, like a big, weepy, cranky baby. So does lack of sleep make me a weak person?
Though?
Well physically yes.
It's been shown that you bench press drops by thirty you know, twenty to thirty pounds. We make three times more attention attention errors. We have a much more impaired ability to read the emotions and cues of others. Now, the flip side is what if you do sleep, What if you do spend more time in bed? What if you're forced to spend ten hours in bed? No matter what,
sleeping or resting. And it shows that people run faster, they swim faster, they react to things quicker, their accuracy in terms of aspects of their life improve, They're happier, they have better ideas. It's just amazing.
And yes, so you may know doctor Winter's first book, The Sleep Solution, but he since published another called The Rested Child. And I asked him if kids sleep tends to be an overlooked issue, and he said yes and sent me back an excerpt from The Rested Child, which he said I can read to you. So it says sleep disorders in children are on the rise, and all too often these disorders are undiagnosed. And it's been estimated that ten percent of children have a diagnosable sleep disorder.
But more than half of all the children who display signs of a sleep issue are not diagnosed properly. And every year children are treated for diseases like diabetes, learning disorders, and chronic pain when the root cause of their ailment may actually be a sleep disorder for which they're not being treated, and he writes, even if a child happens to be lucky enough to receive a proper diagnosis, only five percent of those with a recognized sleep problem or
disorder received any therapy for their condition. According to one study, for children struggling with mental health issues, the percentage of those dealing with sleep disorders balloons up to as much as seventy five percent, and often the sleep disorder is contributing to or masquerading as the psychiatric problem. He continues, The Nation's Sleep Foundation estimates that two out of every three children in the United States will experience some type
of sleep problem before they reach adulthood. So again, that was an excerpt from his book The Rested Child, which I'll link in the show notes in cases of interest. And we recorded the main interview from this episode in twenty eighteen, and since it aired it's now five years later. I've completely changed my relationship to sleep. I used to fall asleep on the couch with the lights on four or five times a week because I had no sleep hygiene. I never thought I deserved rest and so I just
dozed off in the middle of working late. But now bedtime is honestly my favorite time of day. I get great sleep. I've completely changed this really big problem in my life because of this episode and Doctor Winter. So what are better sleep habits? The CDC has some hot tips. Centers for Disease Control, who apparently considers not sleeping enough kind of a disease, says, be consistent. Go to bed
at the same time each night, including weekends. If you can make sure that your bedroom is quiet, dark, and relaxing and at a comfortable temperature. We've learned colder is better. Who knew? Remove TVs, computers, smartphones from the bedroom. The CDC says to throw them into the simmering caldera of a volcano if you have one. Also, avoid big meals and caffeine before bedtime. We all kind of know that
we're supposed to do those things. I'm trying to shift the way I'm thinking about sleep to thinking of it as a free thing you can do to make your brain sharper and your skin glowier and your future less addled with disease. So if sleep hygiene were a thing you could buy and just not do. We would all be so pumped for it, but really it's just a behavior, so we have to see value in the behavior. How much does sleep hygiene affect how much you actually sleep?
I would say that in terms of its ability to solve a problem, twenty percent. So I would say of the people out there who are struggling with their sleep, that twenty percent of people, if they did something related to sleep hygiene, could make their problem, you know, much better or solve it. So I think sleep hygiene is important. We want to set the stage for good sleep. We
want to have positive thoughts about sleep. So I think that we need to cultivate that attitude, but understand that it has its limitations.
And now, how dark and quiet should your room be?
Though? You know again, I think that if you're struggling with your sleep, really dark and really quiet.
And what if you're in a cool, dark, quiet room and you still can't catch an easys, well, your grandpad ma can help. But what's my mom's big insomnia trick?
Here?
It is? I feel like it deserves a soft drum roll. Okay, good, We're gonna call it the sleepy fancy nancy technique. My mom does this thing she taught me that works like a charm where you think of a category like fruits, or boys' names or electronics, and then you go, what's something that starts with a? Okay, apple, b BlackBerry? See, and then you go down and I never make it past like l I'm out. But do you have anything else like that?
I think that's awesome.
Some sample categories you can use for this alphabet game, types of fruit, boys names, girls' names, gender neutral names, cities, snacks, vacation activities, clothing brands, cereals, items you would keep in a purse, animals, really anything.
You've struck upon. Some it's very important give yourself a task that's not trying to sleep saying like well, I'm going to leave now, And it doesn't mean you don't love them or want to be with them. And ohife hates me being anywhere near her at night and for some reason kind of gravitate over to her side of the bed.
And she's like, get away.
You know, I just don't want that, And I don't mean I don't think it means she doesn't love me, But you know, I think that people just need to sleep and do what's right for their sleep and not necessarily have some you know guy hog breathing and hanging over top of you.
So yes, we have cars and antibiotics, but when it comes to sleep and not so good. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors, You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. So if you want to know where Ologies gives our money, you can go to Aliward dot com and look for the tab
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They get one day they birthed and or raised the people all over the planet, and they get one day for us to give them a handful of carnations and a blouse that was on sale. You know what, they really need sleep, They need some rest. Give them a nap, and they deserve something that they'll really cherish and appreciate. Not just one day a year, every day the gift a sleep made possible by a Sata luxury mattress. Take it for me. I sleep on one, I sit on one, I read on one. I cling to one when my
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Okay, your questions here we go.
So I'm just going to run through. Meghan Yance wants to know why do some people have different circadian rhythms?
So, Megan, Meghan, that is a genetic trait you probably inherited from your mother and father as either being a night owl or what we call delayed sleep phase or a morning person a morning larco. So probably the simple question is you acquired it from a parent. Now it is modifiable, so there may be aspects in your life that allowed you to change it, but it's kind of always there. And I'm a believer to sell it as in a side that our sleep need, How much sleep
do we need? And our timing is Megan's describing when do we like at night or late or early tends to push this into certain careers and very much.
I got a lot of questions. Corynavis, Sophia Garbo's, g X Barnett, Paula Hawk, Katie Spino, Maria Kumro, Abigail Campbell all asked how can some people sleep for five or six hours and feel fine and other people need eight or ten? Like why do some people seem to need less?
So that once again kind of goes back to the earlier question about how come some people are night oriented and some people are day oriented. So when you think about your sleep, everybody's listening to this has a certain amount of sleep that they need that's individual to them. Not only that, but it's also individual to you at that time. So if you're a twenty year old, that
time might change when you're a seventy year old. So not only do we have a time that we need or a duration we need, but we also have a timing. So those are the two variables I want you to think about. And so what the answer to the question is. There are some people out there who need eight hours of sleep, and we talk a lot about that in the media, being sort of an average. I think the average is probably closer to seven to seven and a half, but
we can agree to disagree. So whatever that average is, it is an average. We need to get outside of this idea that eight hours of sleep is somehow magical. It is if that's what you need, We're all different. So if you're getting six and a half hours of sleep and you feel great and you don't feel like falling asleep in movies or in meetings or things of that nature. Then you're probably doing exactly what your body needs to be healthy.
Okay, And what's your favorite thing about your job.
My favorite thing about my job is the idea that's sleep. Everybody likes to talk about sleep. Everybody's got a story to tell. People love it. It's fascinating, it's cool to talk about. The brain's awesome. So to me, it's just the diversity of different things you can do asleep, or so much fun. I get to talk to people like you and hang out and talk to a baseball pitcher. It's like every day is different, so much fun. Well, I'm so excited you did this. Thank you so so much.
It's my pleasure. Yeah.
Timez so ask smart people sleepy questions because they can help you rest easy with the right information. You just have to ask. And links to doctor Chris Winter's website or in the show notes, as well as links to his books The Rested Child and The Sleep Solution. He also has a podcast about sleep called Sleep Unplugged with Doctor Chris Winter, and those are all linked in the episode notes, as are more smologies episodes which are all kid friendly. You can find those also at aliword dot
com slash smologies. We're on social media at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Aliward on both, and in an effort to keep these episodes small, we have the full credits in the show notes, but huge thanks to mister Sleeper himself, Sharet Sleeper of mind Gem Media, and Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio for editing these smologies episodes. And if you stick around intil the end, you know I give you a piece of advice, and this week it's that when you have to be somewhere on time,
it can be really stressful. So instead kind of focusing on what time you need to be somewhere, think about how long it takes to get there, and focus on the time you need to leave your house, and then add on an extra ten or fifteen minute cushion because you might need the cushion, but if you don't, it's way better to be somewhere early and relaxed than on time and frazzled, or even worse, late and really anxious.
So just add ten to fifteen minutes on to the time that you have to leave the house and think of that as your deadline to get ready. Kind of think of it like a favor to future you just a super chill way to get from A to B. I've started doing that and it's helped a lot. Okay, until next time, smologites, Bye bye, good night, pol.
Hour Stology.
Yes, just one final word of thanks to our sole sponsor for the show, SATFA. They are our sleep crush. We love them and if you want to start prioritizing sleep and rest, please do as someone who used to think I was too tough for sleep and have learned that sleep is one of the best things you could do for yourself and it is worth the investment of time and the investment of a new mattress. You deserve a mattress that is top of the line without having
to take out a second mortgage. While you're at it, SATFA mattresses are for you, So visit satpa dot com slash ologies right now and you can save two hundred dollars when you purchase one thousand dollars or more. That's suba TVA dot com slash Ologies and thank you again, SATPA. Sweet dreams, Bye bye, bye bye