The Snooze Button
In North America alone, there are about 100 million people with sleep issues. Maybe you’re one of them. Every week, veteran broadcaster Neil Hedley sits down with celebrities, high achievers and the world’s top neuroscientists to try and find answers to his own 30-year battle with sleep issues in the hope that he might find an answer that works for you, too.
Episodes
Could the lighting in your home or workplace be interfering with your sleep?
Chronobiologist Dr. Marijke Gordijn joins Neil Hedley to explore how light influences our biological clocks, why blue light isn't necessarily the enemy, and how changing our everyday lighting habits could improve our sleep.
Gordijn is the founder and director of Chrono@Work, a guest researcher at the University of Groningen, and a co-founder of the Good Ligh...
In This Episode
- Why Brian and his colleagues expected sleepy employees to “punch down” in the workplace
- The surprising result that conflict was strongest with higher-ranking people
- Why the U.S. Army provided an especially interesting environment for studying hierarchy
- What workplace conflict actually looked like in the research
- Neil’s highly scientific description of the problem as a failing “BS filt...
In this episode:
- Jesse Cook, Cathy Goldstein and Olivia Walch grade their own sleep
- Why the answer to “Do most people need granular sleep-stage data?” is no
- Clinical sleep definitions versus consumer wearable outputs
- Why an EEG headband has an advantage over a motion-only tracker — but still is not a polysomnogram
- Sleep sensitivity, wake specificity and the trap hidden inside a 90% accuracy claim
- Why REM and de...
In this episode:
- Why Jade Wu had just woken from a nap before the interview
- Why she thinks of naps as snacks
- What happens when trying to make sleep happen becomes the problem
- Why Wu wrote Hello Sleep
- The access problem surrounding Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia
- Who CBT-I is actually for — and what it does not treat
- Why an overnight sleep study is not routinely necessary for uncomplicated insomnia
- Neil's periodic...
In this episode:
- Why major changes in sleep science often take years to become visible
- How scientific knowledge becomes more nuanced instead of simply replacing “wrong” answers with “right” ones
- Why no single sleep stage should automatically be treated as the only stage that matters
- REM sleep, deep sleep and the brain's overnight fluid dynamics
- What p-values are trying to tell us about uncertainty
- Why rep...
In this episode
- Why Lawrence Gowan says he often sleeps better on a moving tour bus than almost anywhere else
- How sleep differs among members of Styx on the road
- Why trust in the tour-bus driver matters to Gowan's ability to switch off
- How touring fitness changes when musicians move through their 40s, 50s and beyond
- Gowan's transition from hockey to weights, yoga, walking and cycling
- Why performing more than 100 shows a...
In this episode
- Why sex and sleep are surprisingly difficult to study in a laboratory
- How at-home sleep technology may make naturalistic research more practical
- The difference between association, mechanism and an actual sleep intervention
- Why trying too hard can interfere with both sleep and sexual function
- Performance anxiety and the danger of turning intimacy into another sleep obligation
- Why "good sex" does not auto...
In this episode
- How Diane Macedo's years in overnight and early-morning news contributed to her sleep problems
- Why she stopped assuming she was simply a lifelong "bad sleeper"
- The myth that every adult must get exactly eight hours
- How circadian timing complicates sleep for shift workers
- Light, darkness, meals, exercise and properly timed melatonin
- Why anxiety about sleep can become a self-reinforcing insomnia loop
- How t...
In this episode
- Why total sleep time and sleep-stage percentages deserve different levels of confidence
- What a consumer sleep tracker can measure directly — and what it has to infer
- Why motionless wake is still difficult for wearable algorithms
- Wearables, nearables and the danger of assuming more sensors automatically mean better answers
- How longitudinal tracker data can point toward a problem without diagnosing i...
In this episode
- How Erin Davis went from morning-radio wakeups to bedtime stories
- Why she calls retirement “rewirement”
- How Drift was conceived and launched in 2021
- The original Drift format: breathing, story and waves
- Why bedtime narration requires a different broadcasting voice
- Public-domain stories, original stories and choosing material that will not keep listeners awake
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde,...
In this episode
- Why Season Three begins with children’s sleep
- How sleep problems can overlap with ADHD, depression, anxiety and learning difficulties
- Why screening for sleep problems should complement — not replace — appropriate diagnosis
- Sleep “crutches” versus optional sleep enhancements
- White noise as a household-noise buffer and the modern volume-safety caveat
- What structured behavioral...
In this episode
- Why injury can become an identity crisis for an elite athlete
- Marcus Stroman’s 2015 ACL comeback — and what the original episode got slightly wrong about the timeline
- Why younger and older athletes may value recovery differently
- How modern sports performance moved from “more work” toward specialized recovery
- Why preparation improves the odds without guaranteeing performance
- The ps...
In this episode
- Why this interview was recorded on the day Ingenuity first flew on Mars
- Nicole Stott’s 104 days in space and becoming the 10th woman to perform a spacewalk
- What 16 daily sunrises and sunsets mean for circadian timing aboard the ISS
- How adjustable LED lighting helps create stronger day-and-night signals
- Why Earth-gazing can make an astronaut lose track of bedtime
- How sleeping bags and private crew q...
In this episode
- Why Sara Mednick rated her previous night’s sleep a six out of ten
- Alcohol, sleep onset, REM sleep and fragmented sleep
- The China Jintan study of 3,819 children and midday napping
- Academic performance, happiness, grit, behavior and IQ — and what the study can and cannot prove
- Why daytime naps may tolerate more light and stimulation than nighttime sleep
- Sleep pressure, slow-wave sleep and the ...
In this episode
- How Stacey Plaskett usually sleeps — and why she says she has never been a great sleeper
- The effect of the 2017 Virgin Islands hurricanes on her nighttime stress
- Teeth grinding, a custom mouth guard and repeated awakenings
- What Plaskett did the night before presenting in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial
- Why cleaning and cooking function as therapy for her
- Warm showers, body temperature...
In this episode
- Why falling asleep instantly everywhere may indicate sleepiness rather than “great sleep”
- The middle ground between medical sleep disorders and self-inflicted sleep problems
- How expectations, culture and education shape insomnia
- Why subjective sleep and objective sleep do not always tell the same story
- Rare genetic natural short sleepers — and why most short sleepers are not one of them
- ...
In this episode
- Why sleep headlines and affiliate-driven product claims deserve more scrutiny
- What the evidence did — and did not — say about white noise in 2021
- Why a 5:30 a.m. productivity routine tells you almost nothing without bedtime and total sleep duration
- The corrected eight-year comparison from Adrian Owen’s sleep-and-cognition study
- How the pandemic interrupted Chilina Kennedy’s theatre wo...
In this episode
- Why Season Two shifts from learning about sleep to testing sleep interventions
- The role cognition was intended to play in judging whether a sleep experiment worked
- Why adolescent biology clashes with very early school start times
- Where the 16.5% teen-car-crash figure actually came from
- What later meta-analyses found about delayed school starts and sleep duration
- How sleep labs adapted to COVID with PAP precau...
In this episode
- What “COVIDsomnia” meant in 2020 — and why it was never one formal new sleep disorder
- Lynelle Schneeberg’s three drivers of children’s pandemic sleep problems: schedules, physical activity and anxiety
- Why family activity sometimes had to replace recess and school-based exercise
- How bedtime can become accidentally associated with worry
- The “worry jar” and schedule...
In this episode
- Eileen Leary’s Stanford dissertation on REM sleep and mortality
- The difference between association and causation
- The 13% higher all-cause mortality rate associated with each five-point reduction in REM percentage in MrOS
- Replication in the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort
- Why sleep apnea, depression, antidepressants and sleep duration did not explain away the central association
- The important nuance in the c...
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