Somnology (SLEEP) Part 2 with Dr. W. Chris Winter

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Oh hey, it's still your little step brother who tries to trade you their calcified banana flavor now and Laters for your many rhes'ess pean and power cups. And you're like, dude, little dude, step all the way up.

How dare you?

That's not all life works? Ali Ward back for the second half of some Knowlogy. Did you listen to part one yet? Deep sleep versus rem versus ram versus light sleep? Which is the ug which is the glittery dress loafer. Do you regularly disco with the night Hag. How loocid is your property brothers experience to see D three po give you PTSD. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I've exposed you as having skipped part one, So go listen to part one.

Part two will be here for you.

When you're done, it will make way more sense. Come on, Okay, so part twurs. It's just us now we get it. We have the basics on how sleep works, what happens when we don't have enough of it, and what our brain waves do, and why insomnia is a product of fear and anxiety. But this episode answers Patreon questions to help you get better sleep and includes yes, this secret insomnia buster from your pod, dad's mom, your pod nana

Well for me.

Okay, but before we get to the episode, a few things we always do and you know it really quick, Los Angelinos if you happen to me in Alano. Member third, there is a comedy benefit for multiple maloma research if you listen to the hematology episode with doctor Brian Durry, which was all about blood and multiple maloma, which is a cancer that my dad has. This is a great way to support. It's a comedy benefit, so it's a

Thank you.

Okay, So Somenology Part two, let's get your questions with Virginia based neurologist Sleep Whisperer, author of the Sleep Solution, Why your Sleep is Broken and how to Fix It, and of course somenologist doctor W Chris Winter. Can we do a rapid fire around? Oh yeah, I'm absolutely okay. So I asked for questions on Patreon. As I do, I say, patrons, hit me with your questions, and typically I get fifty to eighty questions.

Maybe. Wow, I got two hundred and fifty five questions.

Wow, all right.

Twenty five pages worth of questions. Clearly we're not going to hit them all here we go.

So I'm just going to run through.

Megan Yonce wants to know why do some people have different circadian rhythms?

So, 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 to me, I think it's a trait like eye color that we can work to overcome.

But it's kind of always there and I'm a leave it. Just sell it as an aside 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 us into certain careers.

Teacher likes to.

Wake up early in the morning, maybe needs a little bit more sleep, more consistency in their life. So and night ouls tend to travel better, deal with jet lag better, and by some studies, are smarter and interesting.

Really, I didn't know that this kind of the follow up question to that.

Paul Hawk and a few other people asked, I was a lifelong night owl and I just woke up one morning a morning person.

How does that happen?

Well, Paul, that's interesting. I don't know. For me.

A lot of times things that I've involved in my life can push me one way or the other. One is like exercise first thing in the morning. I was training for like a trathlon a long time ago and meeting a group of people.

To do it really early, and I hated it. I dreaded it.

But after a few weeks I was waking up like at four point fifty five in the morning, an hour or five minutes before my longclock went off, and felt really good and was long asleep at ten o'clock at night. So it can be certain things in your life, or as our bodies mature, we tend to become less night

So side note, like Paul, I too have recently come to enjoy waking up early when I do it, and I thought this meant like I have finally gotten my shit together. It's happened. But Paul, it looks like it just means we're old and marching ever closer to death. So we win some we lose somebody. I don't know what to tell you.

Now.

The steely blue gloaming and the morning mist belongs to the old. So come join our wise wrinkle party Let's Little spoons at seven am over our third cup of percolated foltures. Tyler Ke wants to know is it possible to tell the exact point someone starts being asleep or is it just a gradual blurring of lines into unconsciousness.

So you can see it on a sleep study, and there is a sense of gradual. So when you look at the brain activity, what you start to see is a slowing of the brain activity. The eye movements that characterize wakefulness becomes slow and rolling. So the answer is generally over about a thirty second period. That's how we score sleep. We look at thirty seconds of sleep at a time, and when you start to see a predominance of that intermixing of sleep with the with the light wakefulness,

Yeah, thirty seconds is pretty short.

Yeah, and you could you could see it very clearly. It's not hard to find skype.

A scientist wants to know why do some people make weird noises as they're falling asleep and what can we do to stop them from doing it or what can they do to stop doing it.

That's a tough one.

So one of my favorite weird noises at night is a phenomenon called catithrinium, which is a prolonged expiratory moan.

Ps.

Thanks Jay Leidiker for creeping on your vulnerable sleeping boyfriend and putting it on YouTube. So thirty six thousand strangers and counting could enjoy what sounds like a constipated puppy or a very frustrated porcupine struggling to understand tax paperwork.

So for a lot of people when they go to bed, this is super super fun that you know, when you find out the person you've committed your life to does this, they will actually kind of take a b breath in and all the things that I go.

Kind of like a foghorn all night long.

So these can be There's also somemiloquy, which is sleep talking, which can be sort of gibberish or it can actually be, you know, fully formed sentences that people have no idea what they're talking about. These things can be treated. Often

Ps.

I tried to find a clip of this video, but googling quote woman obscenities in sleep only turned up a ton of gross tutorials about how to sleep with women. And scrolling through this deluge of pickup artist DIY videos made me too sad to keep looking.

So sorry, I had no recollection doing it the next day, and it turns out she was having seizures just at night and that was the manifestation of the seizure.

Oh my god.

Yeah, I just thought she was a rude girl.

Rude girl, that's right.

Yeah, she got that treated. But I also hope, like, let her be herself, you know what she's like.

You know what I'll learn from that.

To freak fagfly sister, that's right.

Bob Carlton asked, and we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier. I've heard that it used to be common for folks to wake in the middle of the night, do some reading, and then go back to sleep for the rest of the night, basically bisecting nightly sleep.

Is this something that really happened and we should bring it back?

It did happen, and if it's a bit of a denser read, but it is absolutely fascinating.

A guy named Roger Eric wrote this book.

It's like a Day's End or at Night's End or something like that. It's a journey into the history of sleep or something like that. I've always butchered the title. I really apologized because it's such a good book.

I shouldn't do that.

Okay, the real title is at Day's Close Night in Times Past by a Roger Eckerch. I'm going to admit it. That does not roll off the tongue. So I get why Doctor Winter could not figure that out. But it's all about what happened during nighttime in pre industrialized eras, from like masquerade balls to crime, to inns and taverns and brothels, yarns, spinning circles. And I feel like now I need an episode on nocturnology maybe to shine some light on the topic. Okay, Doctor Winter explains.

But he writes about sort of sleep throughout antiquity, and there was sort of this first sleep and second sleep. We would go to bed when the sun went down, we would sleep, we'd wake up. We'd walk around at night and greet neighbors and fall in holes that we didn't see in these passages that he's found during I think it took him years to write this book. And you read a page and you almost have to close the book and just think about, oh my god, it's

It's not the end of the world. Just your wait, go with it.

And it doesn't do the kind of damage that like a C three PO alarm clock on your butt would do.

Very different terrifying screaming We'll doomed, you know, going off over and over.

It made the craziest sounds. I'm like, God, I can't leave. We do that to people. C three P I always thought was funny.

I was like, if we had had R two D two probably been better, But this random robot and screaming at you at three in the morning was was often just what people needed to wake themselves from a deep sleep immediately.

Again, if you missed part one, the midnight terror of a mechanical C three PO does await you, But you got a lot of people who ended up not liking Star Wars after that.

To be honest, it's right this kind of visceral response to the nude movies.

LEVI like the jeans and Ron Smith both asked about shift work that it's awful for your health and what can you do to negate the negative effects of that?

Levi and the other individual are absolutely right, ron or right. The thing that terrifies me the most about sleep and sleep science is not insomnia. It's not the person who went eighteen months without sleeping. It's the person who is the shift worker who thinks that they're doing okay with the fact that they work a day job and also have a night job to make ends meet. And these are the conversation we have our clinic. I really think

Winner and no, I can't do that, Okay, then shut up.

So we do often get into a position of they almost feel like they don't have a choice. And the World Health Organization classifies shift work is a class two a carcynogen. Now, I think it's incredibly devastating to our health.

So real quick, what is shift work exactly? I wanted a clear definition, so I asked the internet. Now, according to the National Sleep Foundation, shift work is work that takes place on a schedule outside the traditional nine to five every day, so it can involve evening or night shifts, maybe early morning shifts, rotating shifts, And yes, the World Health Organization does classify shift work as a car synogen.

You look at individuals who are engaged in shift work, we know that they have much more difficulty with their weight, much more difficulty with the blood pressure, more heart attacks, more strokes, more mistwork, more GI issues, more psychological issues. I mean, it's just a very difficult thing to sustain. I remember when I was in residency, when we were talking about that, you know, a while back, that I felt that I was clearly at my most unhealthy point in my life and if this were my job, this

During that time. Thank god, we didn't have a lot of digital cameras around at that time.

But the pictures that we do have my kids are like, oh god, Dad looks terrible, pasty white, just looks really unhealthy. And I think it's because I was so If you're a shift worker, talked to a sleep specialist. There are medications that can help alleviate that, And I would say the other thing too is to talk to your employer about ways you can make the shift work more humane. I mean, hopefully you're working for somebody says, look, I don't care how you do it, we just need to

How ways to make that better.

The other thing, too, is you try to work towards not being a shift worker. I mean it sounds really flip by being very genuine and that even if you like it, and there's a lot of things to like about shift work, you know, working at night for some people, there's not a lot of administration around. You just show up and do your work. It's kind of quiet, and

Got It same for jobs that involve a lot of jet lag asking for a friend.

Yeah.

Absolutely, Again, there are things you can do to treat jet lag.

There's some really cool goggles that you can.

Wear that shine green light into your eyes that kind of your brain circadian rhythm, and a lot of them have these old jet like calculators associate with them. So if you're getting ready to go to Stalkholm for three days and then over to Brussels and then back home to New York, you can use these lights at certain times of the day to help you acclimate more quickly to that.

Oh yeah, I got a lot of questions. Corynavis, Sophia Garbo's, g X, Barnett, Paula Hawk, Katie Spino, Maria Kumro, Abigail Campbell, and Moore 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

That's what you need.

But if you're somebody who needs six and a half hours of sleep, seeking eight is going to create an hour and a half of dead time. That's going to be very unpleasant to you and might even be interpreted as being insomnia. Well, I'm trying to get my eight hours, doctor Winter. I go to bed at ten o'clock and it takes me like an hour to hour and a half to fall asleep every night.

Is driving me crazy.

My first question I always ask people like that is why have you chosen ten o'clock is your bedtime? And they look at you like I really never thought about that, sort of like saying, my lunch time is at ten thirty am. Wow, tell me about your lunch. Well, like ten thirty, I leave my office, I go to the restaurant, I sit down, the waitress comes, she says, what would you like? I say, I'm not that hungry, and she

Nobody does that. The waitress at some point it's gonna.

Say, honey, leave, why do you keep coming at ten thirty and just sitting there taking at my booth, like go shop or go do some work and come back when you are hungry. So you know, for the person who asked the question about sleep duration, 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, you're probably doing exactly what your body needs to be healthy.

Okay, that's good to know.

Travis carry, Julie Noble and others asked backsider stomach, which is best and why?

So it depends on how you define best. Most people would describe sleeping on your left side as being best because number one, our body's blood return comes mainly through the rights of our body if we're engineered correctly. So there's a thought that if you sleep predominant on your right side, you kind of compress that passive return of blood to your body, which can be especially important for

Okay, what about on your face?

Sleeping on your face is tough. I mean a lot of people sleep on their stomach. It's fairly rare to find somebody who's a stomach sleeper who likes their face into the pillow. It's a little dangerous. But they do make pillows that kind of are almost like the little massage. When you have a massage and your face down, you have your little face in a little doughnut hole or whatever.

Okay, good to know. Yeah, asking for a quote, friend, I'm pretty sure I sleep on my face. Okay, quick aside. Also on sleep apnea, there are a few different types with different causes. But how do you know if you might have it? Okay? Do any of these sound like you? Daytime sleepiness or fatigue, unrefreshing sleep insomnia, perhaps morning headaches.

Okay, here's what you do.

You throw a lavish slumber party and then over cereal the next morning, you just hand out questionnaires to your friends asking if they heard any loud or frequent snoring, silent pauses, and breathing or choking or gasping sounds. Or you could just request a sleep study. If the doc like, yep, you gots it, they might work out some treatment that involves lifestyle changes like ditching booze or cigarettes, maybe losing weight,

Oh you think dog loses your.

Allie Shannon has three questions, but I'm going to ask, well, they're all good.

Can you dive from sleep deprivation?

Yes or no?

Yes, but it's not something that you would be able to do yourself, meaning you'd have to employ friends with you know, stun.

Guns and cattle prods.

So, and the reason I'm saying that is because there are people out there who have insomnia who feel like they're not sleeping, that the fear of the situation creates the situation. So I would say to this person, you are in no danger of not sleeping. In fact, even people who come to our clinic and I said, well you have to have a sleep study. Why I can't sleep in my inn bed? How can I sleep in a sleep study? I always tell them why you go

To lie in bed. I do not want you to sleep.

Just lie there awake like you normally do, for seven or eight hours and we'll see what happens. Nobody ever does it. In fact, they actually sleep more, you know, than they do at home. They'll come back and say I told you I didn't sleep, and I'll hear you slept for six hours and thirteen minutes. Whenever I showed a judge her video, and she said, oh my god, I really thought that I was awake all night long.

Really it doesn't. It doesn't lead to plaques in the brain, and.

So sleep deprivation does not insomnia. Insomnia and sleep deprivation are two very different things. So, yes, if you're working your a nine to five job, you come home, sleep for two hours at seven o'clock, you go off to clean office buildings all through the night, and go right back to work the next day. Yes, you are putting yourself in position of having trouble. However, is that person

So think of sleep as being a vital resource that you don't even have to hunt or search for or gather. You could just make it yourself if you just chill out and let it happen. So imagine if you're like man, I could really go for a lobster roll. Well, I'll just sit really still and breathe, and it'll appear. Not sleeping enough is like being hungry all the time when we could just conjure lobster rolls. Now, why are we saying no to sleep but yes to scrolling for so

Ps.

If you hate lobster rolls and this analogy doesn't work for you, I don't care, because it was for me. I was talking to me this aside. Was a private moment between my heart and my brain and my mouth. Anyway, So sleep happens, so.

At some point it just takes the decision out of your hands and you fall asleep.

Huh. Shannon also wanted to know what does lack of sleep make you fat.

It does so sleep poor sleep in a lot of ways makes you fat. It makes you too tired to want to go to the gym. You're sitting around more, which creates a problem. We actually burn less calories when we're sleeping poorly. But the biggest thing is we start to create this biochemical cascade of chemicals that make us feel full go away, chemicals that make us crave really bad foods or in abundance.

I always tell people when I was in.

Residency and really struggling and sleep deprived, I would go to this little convenience store in the hospital and there were these little packages of Chipsway cookies, and then they had like the thirty three percent more family.

Size bag, and I would lie to the fill us.

This little woman who worked there'd be like, oh, yeah, some of the doctors are wanting some cookies. I want one or two, but no more than three. But I need the family size bag. And by the time I got out of the Communian Star, I'd eat in the entire sleeve, you know. And so I look back on those days, I think, oh God, it was so driven by something. I didn't want that many cookies. It makes me kind of sick to think about right now. But oh man, I could put a herding on those cookies at the time.

Then of course these cookie's put a herding right back on you. So why does this happen? Let's blame a trio of hormones, shall we. There's leptin, which tells your brain's hypothelmus like, nah, I'm good man, I'm not really hungry. So this appetite controlling hormone, leptin is supposed to peak while you're asleep, but if you've been snoozing weird, it

I think there are.

There are actually some studies that show that, and also some studies that kind of relate it to childbirth. You know, male of species going out to find food, female species protecting cubs and whatnot. So there are some studies that sort of look at that. So I think that that's that's not an unreasonable thing to think for sure.

What do you tell new parents who are like, I can't sleep, this baby's crying, but I cannot just ignore the baby.

What do you tell them?

Yeah?

I always tell parents, Look, you know, for the first few months of the child's existence, it's gorilla sleep, not grill like the animal like grill like the you know, freedom fighter in the jungle somewhere, meaning you just get it when you can, you know. I think it's very important for parents from the get go, even maybe even before the child is born, to start thinking about scheduling, not only in terms of the child, but your own schedule.

No, there's not.

Is there a baby out there who's sleeping so inconsistently and so unpredictably it's driving mom and dad crazy. Absolutely. So if you can predict your kids sleep or quiet times, you as a parent can get anything done. So to me, that's really the goal of those first few months of life is really being careful about the messages you're sending. Okay, naptime is from ten to eleven. What happens if the baby goes down screams? Is that off until ten forty five?

They hated that.

And when that didn't work and they were still falling asleep as I messed with their I would just take a wet washcloth and throw it in their lap, and they would get all upset about it, Oh God, now got this cold wet thing on my lap, or they'd play with it or suck on it. I didn't care as long as they weren't sleeping, because this is not the time we've determined to sleep. You had your time by an hour ago, and you screamed and rocked your your cage, your crib the entire time. So to me

Ps.

Doctor Winter is not alone in seeing this visual correlation. I found an article titled quote why cribs kind of looked like cages on fatherly dot com, and it said that cribs have evolved from the seventeen hundreds. There was an Italian practice of popping a slatted half shell of an old whiskey barrel over your wee one, kind of like a protective cage so you wouldn't roll over it

Like?

Is it not like a bank account?

So those are two different things. So you can.

And there's some really interesting new research that says individuals who might struggle to get the perfect amount of sleep from time to time as long as relatively quickly to try to make it up with the nap.

That's a good thing.

So you're got to catch a flight, it's delayed, and you don't get home until three o'clock in the morning, and you thought you're gonna get home at ten, and you got to go to work the next day. I think it's perfectly fine to make up for that lost sleep with a nap or some sort of supplement'll sleep here or sleeping in when we sleep an unusual time.

So I always like to.

Look at people's schedules, and college students are the worst. You know, Monday was a Friday, I'm organ at chemistry class it starts at eight, and get anything other than eight o'clock class.

It really was the pits.

And then Tuesday and Thursday, I don't have a class until noon, and then on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, I don't even go out until two in the morning, let alone you know, waffle house whatever the next morning. So when people have these schedules that are kind of all over the place, the brain adopts this position of what do you expect.

Of me at nine am?

On these days we're sound asleep, on these days we're already an hour into an organic chemistry lecture, and on these other days we've just gone out a couple hours ago. So your brain, I always say, this is my term makes no sense to a lot of people, but your brain, your brain just kind of goes gray. There's no black, there's no white. It just kind of adopts this. That's how people feel to live in Portland or Great Britain.

So unpredictable sleep patterns can give you a real case to the morisses.

And you know, so you're just kind of this kind of melancholy all the time. I think people feel that way. So to me, the answer to that is probably number one. There is this entity of sleep inertia. We try to sometimes make up our sleep, and we have these massive sleep blocks, so our brain doesn't exactly know how to feel when we wake up. So a lot of people will feel worse after a night of sleep or even

Oh okay, so.

It's a very difficult thing to get somebody to say, Look, you have the opportunity to sleep till noon. It'd still be better if you woke up at eight, had something to eat, went outside where the sunlight, walk the dog, all bit of physical activity, and then if you wanted to supplement your sleep, take a nap at a designated time. So that way we don't interrupt what your brain is sort of expecting. You know, we don't get hungry generally

Oh that's good to know.

So you can make up for a lack of sleep. So if you stayed up all last night doing some great project for work, as long as you can make it up pretty quickly, you'll you'll scientifically live just as long as the person who always gets the right amount of sleep.

Okay, boo yah to them.

Oooh yeah.

Corey Navis, Michael Saidampuga, Emily Mankis, Melissa Brewer, Janella Lindauer, John Worster all asked kind of about sleep supplements, about melatonin, about ambient about taking something to sleep?

Is that good or bad? What are we dealing with?

So I will my disclaimer will be I'm not a big fan of sleeping pills. I think that they certainly have up their place, and I guess I would think of a sleeping pill like an appetite stimulant. You probably don't know that many people who take appetite stimulants. They do exist, they're out there. But when we all go out to lunch and we're sitting around, everybody's ordering food and you don't feel hungry, what do you do. My guess is you don't say, oh, gosh, hey, guys, does

It looks terrible.

I don't want to do that, so please look around find something for me to take. So we don't think that way when it comes to our food. We think, huh, it's unfortunate because this food looks really good and I'd like to eat, but I'm not really not that hungry. But oh well, I'm sure i'll get hungry at some

Now.

The flip side of that is a shift worker. You work seven eight to seven p for four days, you have two days off, and you get back working seven p to seven A. So you're constantly moving backwards in four You're a traveler, you fly to Shanghai every two weeks to do business, and you have struggled to adapt. I think those are perfectly appropriate ways reasons to take medications. Melatonin in particular, because it's such a good drug at helping us adjust our circadian rhythm.

Okay, so quick aside. Melatonin is that hormone. It's produced by a tiny pie sized mid brain, little nugget called your pinial gland, and it makes you sleepy, it helps you dream. And for a long time we thought only animals made melotonin, but it turns out it's in a bunch of plants, you guys. So now we have melotonin supplements and gummy vitamins and over the counter access to it. But some experts worn against using the supplements long term

No?

One?

Fine? Okay?

So why else might someone take a sleeping pill or a supplement, death.

Of a loved one, you lost your job, some emotional upset to have a big problem with the sleeping pill. I don't, but the plan should be, Hey, here's a sleeping pill. I'm really sorry this thing happened to you. This will help you kind of get to this immediate know burn the of the situation. But then we're going to do things to move us away from it, you know. So maybe that many people have talked to Right, why do you take amby, Well, I can't sleep without it

Okay, So remember, blue light from our phones and TVs and laptops is just not something we've evolved to see at night. Our brains process blue light as like, okay, daytime orwakeness. Now, if blue light is the cock blocker of melatonin, then it might be helpful to block that cock block with cool blue blocker glasses. And by cool, I mean warm toned. Now, which brand of glasses should

I don't think we need to throw our phones into a landfill, although if you'd like to come to my house into my kids' phones into a landfill, I would not fight you on that one. I would actually disappoint it, but secretly be like, oh thank god Miles came over and through the phones in the landfill. So to me, I think it's just about managing our phones. Phones are great. They really help us kind of keep connected, they keep

Free Johnson wants to know what's the difference between hypersomnia and narcolepsy.

So that's a great question.

Brie. Hypersomnia you can think of as being sort of the umbrella term of the hypersomnia's narcolepsy, it would be a specific one. And asking that question because of this term idiopathic hypersomnia, weisk has thrown about in sleep, which is essentially your sleepy He don't seem to fit all the criteria of narclepsy, and the doctor has no idea what to do with you, so they call you idiopathic hypersomnia, which kind of drives me crazy. So lots of things

This literally happened to me in an art history class, in an auditorium of six hundred people. I sat in the front row to stay awake in a sleep. So either every person on earth has done this specifically in an art history class about double barrel vaulted stealing architecture in cluineal villages. Or I'm just more and more convinced that doctor Winter guessed this because there is a glitch in the simulation. We're all living in an alternative universe anyway, So some people get tired.

So these are individuals who are largely outside of control of their own sleepiness.

How do you know which you are?

So that would be something that would probably require visiting a sleep specialist, But we've talked about some things already that kind of indicate it. Number One, you're a hypersomnik. You're excessively sleepy, which is different from being fatigued. You're saying no, no, no, beyond fatigue. I can't read without falling asleep. I fall asleep watching shows. I don't go out on dates because always not off and it makes me feel uncomfortable. So you're expressing a lot of drive

Why were you in my under ad door.

He's like, I was not in your underwear drawer, and she's like, I'm certain that you were. He's like, honey, I would tell you if I were. I wasn't. And she came to understand over time she was having these very vivid hallucinations as she was waking up that really weren't real.

Oh wow.

So a lot of people with narclepsy struggle to discern reality and something that's not meaning. I thought I did a podcast with Ali, but I ran into her and she's like, no, we haven't done it yet. It's coming up next week. So you start to doubt, did I pay the bill? Did I have the conversation with my neighbor at about barring the lawnmower or did the podcast ever happen? They sort of live in this weird place in between reality and dreaming and have this difficulty understanding which was real.

Are there any movies about sleep that you love or hate?

I remember a movie called Insomnia. I think it was like with al Pacino and Robin Williams that we thought was really interesting because it was mainly filmed in Alaska when it was always dark. I always thought that was kind of interesting.

Are you don okay? I mean you haven't been sleeping much, Detective Dormer.

Now the night up like this and you're really gonna lose it. Don't worry. Well, you can sleep when you're dead.

So this movie seems kind of scary but very al PACINOI that's my official scholarly review. Also, his character's name is Detective Dormer and it's about sleep. Dormer literally means sleep in French. I only watched a trailer, but if there is not a scene in this movie where two cops are like eating apple fritters in a squad car, being like, it's so weird that this movie is about sleep and your name literally means sleep, then I refuse to see the film.

Generally, Hollywood tends to treat things like narcolepsy as almost comical. You know, it's a funny character that every time something happens, he falls over. Maybe the one that I would like the most is Inception because it sort of touches on this idea of lucid dreaming, which I thought was really cool and really took it to a neat place. I think lucid dreaming is a fascinating topic, So maybe that's the one that would choose.

Is lucid dreaming something you can choose to do.

It's something that you can, you can it's a skill. Now some people just do it if you've never had lucid dreams. So lucid dreaming is simply being aware that you're dreaming when you're dreaming.

As long as I'm so horny for entomology in this episode, Lucid comes from the root word for light or clear, and it was coined by Dutch psychiatrist Frederic van Eden in a nineteen thirteen paper called a Study of Dreams. So exploring free will in different states ofnsciousness was pretty progressive for an olden timey dude. But he also thought the demons cause nightmares, so.

You know, and then dream control is sort of the next step of oh wow, I'm dreaming that I'm doing this thing. I'm staying on top of a building. Dream control would mean you could actually just control yourself jump off the building and then fly. So you can do it, and the way to do it is to really start

I'm not dreaming, and that would put it back on.

So I could actually do that in my mind as I drove as I was talking to patients. And then what you start to do is you start to question reality in your dreams. And so what happened was I would have these dreams. I would one dream that I was going to a circus, and all of a sudden, I was like, wait a minute, and I would look at my hands and they were all distorted. I was like, Wit, this is a dream, I'm doing it, and that would

So side note, I look this up and there's this whole wiki site and forum on lucid dreaming wherein people shared their weird finger experiences. Here are two of my favorites. One is, I remembered to do a reality check, so I looked at my hands and realized that they're actually claws. Another person said, quote, my fingers appeared jumbled, as if

The other thing you can do is, like you know, pull your skin or push your finger into the palm of your hand. A lot of times it will pass through or your skin's very flexible. If you look down at your feet, your feet often don't touch the ground, which is probably where you're not to touch the earth. Your feet don't touch the ground. Our brain has trouble rendering our body in three dimensional space. It's really cool to look up at the ceiling of your house, which

Oh my god.

Yeah, it's cheaper than drugs too.

I would imagine, so yeah, and it's and you can get better at it. I had a swim coach when my son's swim coaches told me one time he was such a good lucid dreamer that he could actually plan out. He could use the time and his dreams constructively. He would think, Okay, well, we're going to swim this team next week. I'm going to construct my relays this way. I'm going to actually sacrifice this relay because I don't

Oh my gosh, visually interesting.

Yeah, that's billable hours.

That's good. That's exactly right.

And any flim flam you'd like to debunk anything, any myths that you want to dispel.

Alcohol is terrible for your sleep. Have as much as you want to have it with breakfast.

Do you want a mimosa?

In general, you always tell people look sedation and sleep or two different things.

Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger.

A lot of people figure these things out the hard way, and it's always upsetting to me that I know people like that, and people out there are going to people for help, and it just seems to be this arms race of how much sedation can we give somebody, So be very careful with that.

Ps.

So, speaking of alcohol specifically, it can help sedate you into light sleep. But do you remember how rams sleep in the second part of the night, and it's the one that's restorative for your memory, it's good for your mood and concentration. So alcohol disrupts that. It's kind of like the friend who leads you to a party and then ditches you there and the party sucks. Do not trust it. Alcohol can be kind of a dick that way.

I think the idea that if you in your dreams, if you you're falling and you hit the ground, you die, I don't think that's the way the case at all. That's not true.

I don't know.

There's so many great questions your I feel like we've covered everything.

About What about things too, like counting sheep or the method where you breathe seven in four out.

Absolutely so.

This breathing exercise was developed by doctor Andrew Wheel who kind of cribbed it off of pranayama, which is an ancient technique.

So that gist is you do this.

You exhale completely through your mouth and you make a whoosh kind of sound, and then you close your lips and hail through your nose as you count to four in.

Your head, so.

Four count, hold the breath in for seven seconds, and then over the next eight count in your head, make a wishing exhale from your mouth. So you practice this pattern for four full breaths. You inhale for four, hold for seven, exhale over eight. It's supposed to distract you from anxiety. And calm your nervous system. You're breathing, you're getting oxygen, you're doing math, You're not thinking about whether or not the thing you bought for the office gift

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, be BlackBerry? See, and then you go down and I never make it past like ll, 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. I've done so many of these. Let me know what some of your sleepy fancy nancy categories are. I'm here for them. I will probably use them. Next time I'm jet lagged in awake on the wrong coast, which will literally be tomorrow.

So to me, what you're hitting on is something very important and without getting too crazy into it, as you get back to the idea of what insomnia is, it's really not the inability to sleep. But when people who have insomnia really start to struggle, they really start to try to sleep. If I'm sitting out watching television, I'm finishing up watching you Bachelor in Paradise. I can never make it to the Rose finale because I always fall asleep.

Katie, I accidentally called out the wrong name, and I would like to extend to you the option of staying. We'll say and see how things go.

Sure, thank you, But then I wake up, I get into bed and I can't fall asleep. Why is that, doctor Winnis, Because when you're watching the Batchel, what are you trying to do? You're trying to figure out if Astrod is going to stick with this guy or she gonna dump him because he sets a dog or whatever like, that's what you're trying to do.

You're not trying to sleep.

When you go to bed and you turn the lights off, a lot of people suddenly really start to try to sleep. So you've struck upon something that's very important. Give yourself a task that's not trying to sleep. You're kind of giving yourself sort of a complicated task. You're trying to visualize the letter of the alphabet. Okay, B what's a fruit? Blueberry? Okay, great, see cherry?

I guess.

And so now you've decided you're not going to try to sleep. You're just going to relax and name fruit or named boyfriends. We tell our professional athletes all the time. Look, when you go to bed, professional pitcher, I want you to throw thirty perfect pitches before you fall asleep. Oh wow, Visualize the stadium around you, your favorite catcher, you're on the mound, everything, your coat, your pitching coach shows you

Once you do it thirty times, then you're allowed to fall asleep.

What's so funny is they'll come back and say, man, Doc, you know I'm trying to do that thing you asked me to do and shoot those free throws before I go to bed, or throw those pitch before we go to bed, and I can only throw about four or five pitches. The next thing, I m alarm clocks going off, right, so I don't tell them.

Well there.

That's the point is that you know that I'm trying to get you away from this idea of let me think about trying to sleep, but oh no, I'm not asleep yet.

What am I gonna do? And try to find something else.

The other cool thing is that when you pick an activity, so if you're somebody who is a pitcher or a basketball player, you like to do you like to run, or you do some sort of special skill, if you visualize yourself doing that at nine, your brain doesn't differentiate practicing something and actually visualizing it that well. So if you're somebody who likes to play basketball, visualizing yourself shooting

Is the form of like the sound of the rainforest.

So when you sit there at lunch time, you finish up your lunch, you put your little muse thing on,

Wow.

And the cool thing too, is I love this story you gave because you've got this little mechanism that gives you confidence, like you know what to do. I'm gonna get in bed, I'm gonn fall asleep usually no problem. But if I can't, I'll just do what you described. And what's funny is I was talking to a magazine editor one time. I was describing her the benefits of resting and how sleep's great, but resting is very good too. I just don't believe that, you know, even though you're

So I'm trying really.

Hard to be in a dark room with my eyes closed, but not sleep. And it's amazing how quickly sleep comes and you try not to do it.

Oh, that's a very good parting words, Let's repeat that.

And it's amazing how quickly sleep comes and you try not to do it.

Now, what's your least favorite thing about your job? What sucks the most?

What sucks the most about my job?

Is?

This is a great, great question. I'll step on my soapbox. I love treating patients. I love helping people sleep better. But in our current medical climate, it is very difficult. I'm not trying to paint a sob story here, but it is very difficult for doctors to spend time with patients and get enough money from insurances to keep the

So hopefully, you.

Know, we'll be able to kind of work around this and make healthcare affordable but also allow doctors to practice their craft in a way that they can help patients and not feel like they got to see thirty patients in a.

Day, right.

I don't think patients like it either.

They don't, and you know, and I talk pretty freely about it with my patients, like if I'm late or running behind or whatnot. You always try to make sure that every patient can say what they want to say, even if it means I'm going to be a little bit late. For most people, they're they're pretty patient.

They're pretty patient. So thanks for your patients, patients.

Fuck, do I have to do another etymology for this one?

I do?

I do? I can't not, Okay, So I just looked this up and the root for both patients and patients. Is the Latin for suffering. So next time someone thanks you for your patients, they're saying, literally, thank you for suffering for me, which is kind of endearingly emo. I like that patience and being able to suffer evidently is a virtue.

And what's your favorite thing about your job?

My favorite thing about my job is the idea that sleep. Everybody likes to talk about sleep, you know, sleep, and it's one of those things if I go to a party, introduce myself as a neurologist.

You know, I got a grandmother's got parkins or whatever.

But if you talk about sleep, everybody's got a story to tell. It's sort of this universal thing and I love to tease other doctors about. You know, I missed that article on Time magazine that said Mysteries of the spleen. You know, like in this poor guy's like devote his life to understanding the spleen. But you know, also, I mean there was a national geographic we subscribe to just recently there was back to back issues on athletic performance, which is near and dear to what I do, and

I'm telling you, I get it.

It is not fair that media does not pay as much attention to you and all the awesome things that you're doing. So to me, it's just the diversity of different things you can do as sleep.

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 anytime.

So what have we learned?

Ask smart people stupid questions because it just might change your whole life and your dreams. So once again, Doctor W. Chris Winters is at sportsleep Doc on Twitter W Chris Winter on Instagram. He runs the Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine Clinic in Charlottesville, Virginia, and his book is called The Sleep Solution, Why Your Sleep Is Broken and How to Fix It. So if you like his voice, he also reads his own audiobook. I have a copy of

He also makes the.

Podcasts The per Cast about cats and See Jurassic Wright about dinosaurs, so seek him out for sure. As long as we're on the topic of other podcasts, this week, I'm a guest on one called Wine and Crime. Now these are hilarious ladies, Lucy Kenyon and Amanda, They are olagites. They reached out. It was an honor to be on. I can't even see fake blood on TV without psychologically barfing, and they were kind enough to let me talk about

They are great.

If somehow you're like, what is this podcast? Here's a primer, Hay.

True crime fans, So have you listened to Wine and Crime Yet.

We're a true crime comedy podcast hosted by three childhood friends who chug wine, chat true crime, and unleash our worst Minnesotan accents.

Each week, U Scal's pick a true crime topic and pair it with the delicious wine before delving into the background in psychology behind the crime.

Then we share and speculate wildly about a couple of bonkers cases related to the topic.

Past episodes include necrophilia, cults, crimes of passion, cruise, ship disappearances, Exorcism's Gone Wrong, All This over a bottle of wine, or Let's be Real.

Three listen anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Wine and Crime Pod, and check out our website and blog at wineancrimepodcast dot com.

Cheers Okay. At the end of the show on ologies, I tell you a secret, And this week's secret is that this morning I found three imasks aka pinned socks behind my bed. And my other secret is I had this epiphany the other day. Then, when it comes to doing things we've never done or are too scared to do, being scared of doing them and not doing them is way more painful than doing them. Even if you get it a little bit wrong and it's not perfect, you can always do it again. So I started a page

Them sleep cool. Snooze in Okay, Bye.

Bye pacadermatology, homeiology, crypto zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, patology, ethnology, seriology, ethology.

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