The Snooze Button

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...

In this episode

• Why Neil abandoned Fitbit as the primary measurement tool for his sleep-experiment project
• Seema Khosla’s box of sleep technology
• AYO blue-light glasses and circadian timing
• Why the timing of bright light matters as much as the light itself
• Ravi Allada’s Major League Baseball jet-lag study — and the corrected 20-season dataset
• Forehead oximetry and the arrival of blood oxygen on Apple W...

In this episode

• Beth Wyatt’s “rest instead of sleep” approach when sleep will not come
• Breath awareness, racing thoughts and reducing pressure at bedtime
• Why chronic insomnia is rarely solved by another generic sleep-hygiene tip
• How Beth ended up with a mild sleep-apnea diagnosis when she expected narcolepsy or hypersomnia
• The first-night effect in polysomnography
• Neil’s repeat sleep-lab experien...