The Snooze Button

Dr. Alex Auerbach is the Director of Wellness and Development for the Toronto Raptors. He joins Neil to talk about all things "north of the neck" for elite athletes. They cover sleep, self-care, the drive that can lead athletes to incredible injury recoveries, and even  the psychology behind performance-enhancing drugs.

Sleeping in space is, quite possibly, one of the least glamorous parts of the entire astronaut experience. It’s rarely shown in space movies, unless the sleep leads to some kind of attack from alien baddies. Except that how to allow astronauts to sleep in orbit is quite possibly one of the more difficult things to consider about space travel.

Think about it: How do you train for something like that? Sleeping in space is completely ...

The nap is a completely foreign concept to our host, Neil Hedley. Because Neil typically takes an hour or so to fall asleep, intentional short-duration sleep has normally been beyond his grasp.

Then, he met Dr. Sara Mednick.

Sara is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience ...

When we say that Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett from The US Virgin Islands has a surprising sleep routine, we don't mean that she does anything strange or unusual. It's simply that like so many of us, sleep is something that shows up for Rep. Plaskett when she's run out of things to do. And like our friend Chilina Kennedy from a couple of episodes ago, she's stumbled upon a sleep solution that, according to Dr. Michael Grandner fro...

"High performance" is something that most of us share as a common goal, whether by design or by default. After all, no one thinks to themselves, "I really want to be mediocre today." Elite athletes are learning that the key to high performance is in the things they do when they're not playing. Sure, traditionally that has included things like nutrition and training, but tons of research has shown that an hour in the sheets might b...

Actress Chilina Kennedy had a night that most of us can only imagine: Portraying one of her heroes, on Broadway, while that hero sat in the audience watching. As the star of Beautiful: The Carole King Story, Chilina did hundreds of shows as the legendary singer/songwriter. However, our guess is that if you look up the word "pressure", there's probably a picture of Chilina the night before.

(Turns out we'd be wrong, according to ...

Cognition – specifically, cognitive decline – are at the heart of why The Snooze Button began in the first place. And it’s front and center as we officially kick off Season Two of the show, with not only a continuation, but an evolution as well.

We’re excited to welcome Dr. Adrian Owen, OBE back to the show – he was our first guest ever, and we talk not only about his massive study of sleep and cognition that led to conc...

COVIDsomnia is its own special brand of sleep disorder, brought on in one way or another by COVID-19. Sleep experts say it’s not only the physical toll the virus is taking on the people who’ve been infected. It’s also keeping people awake at night with worry about whether they or their loved ones will get sick, too.

We cover COVIDsomnia this week with a couple of experts dealing with very different groups of patients. First, Neil t...

Okay, we all know that REM sleep is important, so maybe the headline is a little sensationalized; but the data don't lie. Dr. Eileen Leary joins the show this week to talk about a fascinating look at nearly ten thousand people, that points to a reduction in REM sleep as a risk factor for mortality.

One of the things that's fascinating about this data is that Eileen tried - repeatedly - to come up with another way to explain what...

The sleep tracker has become the latest must-have tech gadget. I’ve gone through at least half a dozen myself as my efforts in tracking my sleep have gone through a number of iterations.

The obsession with the data sleep trackers spit out can cause its own special brand of insomnia – orthosomnia, the sleep nerds call it. (We discussed orthosomnia a couple of times on the show before. We’ve talked to Dr. Seema Khosla about it, and D...