October 21, 2022 • 26 mins
We may not think of gaming and eSports as physical events, but professional gamers like Will Wiggins, who goes by Black Oni on Twitch, condition themselves and their sleep as if they’re professional athletes to enhance performance and extend the longevity of their careers. Neurologist and sleep specialist Dr. Chris Winter, who works with professional sports teams, explains the science of sleep for performance, and how games may be tricking our brains to stay awake, with tips on how to avoid blue light.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
A few technologies have advanced as rapidly as video games.
The Nintendo Classics that many of us grew up playing
helped to pave the way for what today is a
juggernaut industry that gives players a virtual experience unlike any other,
and one that occurs right in our own living rooms
and can connect us to a global community. I have
(00:33):
been gaming since I was like maybefore when my dad
brought over the Second Genesis, so I would say thirty
years I've been gaming, which is crazy to say out
loud now. Will Wiggins is a gaming content creator, graphic artist,
and illustrator with a large Twitch following. Online. He goes
(00:55):
by the name black Owny, and he's heavily involved in
the professional gaming community. It's a little addicting, right because
it's something that I love doing and the people watching
loved experience, and I'm like, our apid, I just have
to do it more. I have to do it later.
I have to make sure I'm around to get these
big raids from all the other content creators were smart
and went to bed on time, like they'll send their
(01:17):
people over to me. I'm like, all right, and we've
got some viewers. We got some engage. We've got some action,
and as important as viewers are, uh your health, none
of that's going to matter if you're not there to
like keep them entertained. Viewers add a whole new element
to the gameplay, essentially turning a passive pastime into a
(01:38):
globally connected community. So for Will, what started as playing
a couple levels of Sonic the Hedgehog alone after school
has ballooned into all night raids and tournaments occurring across
different time zones with an untold number of players, all
of this happening in vast realities created by nothing more
(01:59):
than ones in zeros. There's something different about some of
these games and immersive experiences that activate our brains in
very different ways. I think when you get into these games,
it's very difficult to pull yourself out. You may sit
down and think I'm gonna play for an hour, get
(02:19):
something to eat, get some sleep, and four hours later
you're still involved with it. Dr Chris winter As an
aurologist and sleep specialist from Charlottesville, Virginia, um the author
of the book The Rest of Child Wire. Tired, wired,
or irritable child may have a sleep disorder and how
to help as well as the sleep solution, Why You're
(02:41):
sleep is broken and how to fix it. One of
the focuses of his career is the unique effects that
video games, screen time, and other related technology have on
our sleep. Sometimes I find myself going to sleep and
thinking about the game I was playing, Like man, I
can't wait to get up and play it some more.
That still happens even to me. So like if anyone
(03:02):
else experiences that like I get it. Will's experience navigating
this massive community of constantly changing technology is certainly unique,
and it created obstacles to getting and maintaining proper sleep,
something that Chris knows all about. Using Chris's expertise, Will
delve into Will's journey to find out what happens to
(03:24):
our sleep when we spend much of the night fighting aliens,
looting dragons, and exploring virtual worlds in a way that
previous generations never knew. Hi, I'm on a hut O'Connor,
and this is chasing sleep and I heart radio production
(03:45):
and partnership with Mattress Firm. I've spent much of my
career looking into the obstacles that prevent us from getting
good sleep. Most of these obstacles have been with human
(04:07):
beings since we first started walking up right, things like stress,
finding time to rest, and even the position of the sun.
But a uniquely modern problem we face comes from technology,
both from being bombarded by blue light from multiple screens
and also from the extremely recent phenomenon of video games,
(04:27):
pulling our brains into completely different worlds, often right before
we try to go to sleep at night. To our brains,
these developers and these games are so good that they
create real experience, like you feel like you were in
the deserted compound, surrounded by zombies trying to figure out
(04:48):
how to kill them and get to this next place
where all the other players are like, when in fact, no,
you're just sitting in a chair in your bedroom looking
at a box of light, a box of light with
profound effects. Many of us have fond memories of jumping
on turtles and saving princesses and those boxes of light,
(05:09):
And as the game's got more intricate, not only were
they more fun to play, but an entire audience started
to grow that liked watching people play. A gamer streaming
on Twitch like black Owny Cannet tens of thousands of
followers and views. Back when I was living in Boston, specifically,
I was working full time at least forty hours a week.
(05:32):
I was streaming at least three to four times a week.
I was writing articles and posting videos, I was podcasting,
and for a lot of the time, I was single,
so I was able to do a lot of this.
It's pretty amazing to me. So many of us have
watched the gaming industry evolved literally right before our eyes,
(05:54):
from these very un serious, blocky games where the main
goal was just to jump from platform to platform to
what we have today, these now ultra sophisticated storytelling medium
As you rode the wave of this changing technology, what
were some of the challenges that kept you from having
a healthy sleep routine. Yeah, it was. It was challenging,
(06:16):
especially to realize my limitations and realized like I needed
to do better about taking care of myself even though
I felt like I was. The sleep part was a
really big part of really buckling down, like, all right,
I just have to have to get more sleep or
else this is just going to keep happening to me.
I'm gonna keep suffering. It sounds like you were aware
(06:38):
of the challenges from pretty early on. Especially because so
much of the streaming traffic occurs at night. Yeah yeah,
so I did try to like squeeze in every little
bit of sleep I could, but it was mostly because
I was especially being on the East Coast and trying
to appease to the West Coast viewers as well. I
was staying up till at least two, maybe three sometimes
(07:01):
in the morning every time I streamed, and I was
for a while, I was streaming almost every weekday. During
some of this time where I was doing just all
this other stuff and only getting like five hours of sleep,
I definitely remember this distinct feeling of feeling like I
was like in this fog, where like I was just
so much slower, even though I was able to like
(07:23):
do so much during that time, I knew, I knew
when I back of my head that if I was
able to sleep more, I would be that much more efficient.
Like once I once I laid down and sit to
go on that bed, like I was out, that was it.
While falling asleep quickly allowed will to steal resting time
at every opportunity throughout the day. The ability to snooze
(07:47):
as soon as we hit the pillow is actually a
bug not a feature of our brains. According to Chris,
it's usually indicative of an unhealthy cycle of sleep. One
of the problems is if you ask most people what
is the sign of good sleep, they're going to tell
you how quickly you fall asleep. I always call it
(08:08):
speed to unconsciousness. If that's the if that's the thing.
And so when you're talking to two people, well, I'm
a good sleeper, but my roommate here he's a bad sleeper.
The good sleepers often defining themselves as a good sleeper
because they get in bed and fall asleep fast, and
the bad sleeper man he gets in bed sometimes takes
him thirty four if five minutes to fall asleep. So
(08:30):
it's interesting that Will recognizes that because the idea that
he's turning everything off getting in bed and immediately out cold. Great,
but that could very well be indicating that his brain
is looking for more sleep than it's actually getting. Yeah,
that's pretty unnerving. So you're saying people out there could
(08:51):
be suffering from something sleep related and not even realize it. Yeah,
because you again, they're the ones who fall asleep immediately.
You know, they're the ones who when their partner comes
to see me because he or she can't sleep, Like, well,
tell me about your partner. He's a great sleeper's he's asleep,
he can sleep anywhere. So I'm usually thinking as I'm
talking to partner A, I'm I'm more worried about partner B.
(09:14):
Might want to get partner being here because he's really sleeping.
That makes sense that if you can fall asleep quickly,
it just means that you're starved for sleep. And speaking
of partners, I find it interesting that sharing our sleep
space and time with someone else often forces us to
look at it in a different way. Being in a
(09:35):
relationship forced me to approach it differently. Uh, specifically being
in a relationship that I realized early on, like I
wanted to give more. For the reason I was single
for so long was because like I just wanted to.
There was always that tension of like, all right, do
(09:57):
I spend more time with her or do I spend
time focus sing on my business and focusing on you know,
getting my viewership up and getting more followers and blah
blah blah. If you can relate to being sleep starved,
and let's face it, most of us can, we tend
to exhibit more of these behaviors in our younger years.
I could have obviously been better about especially as a
younger guy, but I was just trying to fire on
(10:19):
all cylinders at all times, and it just drove a
wedge in between my health and like my ambition. When
we think about our sleepless youth, we might remember actually
being able to perform fairly well, or at least well enough.
There may have been late nights burning the midnight oil,
followed by early mornings cramming for finals or working double shifts.
(10:42):
It might even seem like we simply didn't need as
much sleep back then. But what's really the case is
that our bodies were just better at powering through without
And when you think about video gaming in in the
ages of people playing it, I have yet to encounter
a sixty seven year old who's crushing it in call
of duty. Every in some competition, it's they're young people.
(11:05):
And the good and bad thing about young people is
they can kind of abuse their bodies and still do Okay, Yeah,
because you're young. That's always tell the young athletes. So
like I go out and play video games and go
to bars all night long, and as long as I
get four or five hours sleep. I'm great, but that's
not gonna last. This is the time to really invest
in your sleep. Um. We see a lot of children
(11:26):
in our clinic. The rise of twenty four hour gaming
culture is definitely something that we've seen. In fact, one
of the case studies in my new book, The Rest
of Child was a family of a daughter who was
spending a tremendous amount of time between you know, after
school before she go to school the next day, on
(11:47):
platforms playing games where other people would pay her to
do it, you pay to watch her do it. So
it was a very unusual situation of had she been
in some sort of travel old soccer team, I guess
that her parents would be much more supportive of it.
You know, she's gonna be the next Carly Lloyd or whatever.
(12:08):
But they fundamentally did not like the fact that she
was just playing video games all the time. Number one
and the number two dramatically impairing her sleep. Bad sleep
will certainly take its toll eventually, no matter how young
you are, the world of e sports and professional gaming
is so new many are skeptical of its merits or
even the value we can hold as a full time
(12:29):
career and income source. But gaming is a gigantic industry,
one that breaks in over two hundred billion dollars a year,
with an audience that spans every corner of the entire world.
It's an audience that Will did everything he could to
reach and engage with early in his career. As Will
dove deeper into his passion, he found it more and
(12:50):
more difficult to perform at his best. There was a
constant struggle between getting more sleep or getting more done.
So that was always the constant like friction of like, oh,
I know a need more sleep, but I know I
need to have to do way more things than just
know that sleep would afford me at the time, it
seems like waking up and playing or gaming in the
middle of the day isn't really an option the majority
(13:13):
of this community games views or I guess you could
say enters the chat later in the day. Would you
say that's the case for your audience as well. Yeah,
I think that most people who are playing or specifically
playing together with other people are doing it in the
evenings because people are off of work, you've had their dinner,
(13:37):
looking for some way to kind of like vibe out
and play something with their friends or just get real
sweaty and competitive and do something really fun. Usually that
happens at night. So I'm a neurologist by training. So
everything boils down to the brain and real estate within
the brain. And when you look at sleep and what's
generating sleep and where that's happening in the brain, it's
(13:59):
sharing real estate that's very close to parts of our
brain that regulate body temperature and regulate immune modulation, strengthening
or weakening our immune system. Will can definitely attest to that.
He found himself wrestling with multiple debilitating bouts of sickness
every year. I used to get sick like three to
(14:19):
four times a year, um, just like the cold, like
or the flu or just like some random thing that
just completely takes me out. And it was because every night,
like every night, I was getting like five hours asleep.
And it's not just all night gamers that see this effect.
Any intrusion into healthy sleep has consequences. I remember when
(14:40):
I was in residency and doing all that call, I
was just constantly we were all constantly sick, you know,
we and we had no backup. So unless you were dying,
you had to come to like okay, well whatever. So
and as soon as I got outside of residency, all
that went away. Cold sores went away, sicknesses went a way,
(15:00):
because there's a big tie in. And so it's really
interesting to look at some of that work on the
immune system and how that works, because we've always known,
I mean, our grandmothers and great grandmothers could easily have
told us, hey, look, if you don't get sleep, you're
gonna get sick. As far as I know, the idea
that you could get sick from a lack of sleep
(15:23):
was just something people said that took a while to
be proven true by science. For a long time, it
was just an anecdotal observation that if you were sleep
deprived then you'd be more susceptible to flues and colds.
We've always known it, but it took a long time
for science to sort of catch up and sort of
prove it. And so there's a wealth of information now
(15:44):
that really shows that quality sleep through manipulations of you know,
cyit of kinds, and immune modulating inter lucan's in our brain,
not to mention the modulation of the chemical growth hormone,
which is instrumental in strengthening and bolts during our immune system.
All of those things rely on qualities sleep. So when
(16:05):
we get good sleep, we tend to shake illnesses much easier,
maybe never even manifest symptoms of them. It can't even
be contested or debated like how important sleep is, So
just not being sick alone proves worth it. We'll be
right back after a brief message from our partners at
(16:26):
Mattress Firm, and now back to chasing sleep. So we
have this fantastic community and platform for content creation, entertainment,
(16:46):
global connection, you name it. It's incredibly rewarding. We can
do it from the comfort of our homes. It unites
people from all over the world. But the downside is
that it forces us to be staring at these harmful
blue screens, these basically light boxes, for hours at a
time and often write up until bedtime. So there's gotta
(17:08):
be ways that you deal with this. What are some
techniques that you use to make all this screen time
easier on yourself? I do wear protective glasses whenever I
am playing, just because I know that based on studies,
that it has some type of impact on me. So
I have two pairs of protective glasses for gaming specifically
(17:33):
or for making art. One has an amber tint, so
these ones have a little bit of like a blue
light blocking filter in them, and the other one is
a crystalline one that has anti glare anti blue light,
but it's much more subtle. It's it's more clear. I
use that for when I'm designing, and then I wear
the glasses protective glasses pretty much all the time whenever
(17:55):
I'm creating content on Twitter, Facebook or whatever it is,
just because, like I know that does have an impact
on your eye strain, which has an impact on the
way you sleep, and and then introducing the blue light
into that as well. Yeah, I mean, it is a
box of light after all, and when you add in
late night hours and stressful gaming situations, it can be
(18:17):
pretty straining. But neutralizing that light may help to reduce
the damaging effects of late night gaming. Light in general
is problematic. In other words, our body sort of set
our circadian rhythm in a large part based upon available light.
So when there's lots of light out, your body understands
(18:38):
that it's daytime. We need to be awake, looking for food,
reproducing whatever whatever organisms do during the day. And then
as the light becomes diminished. It's a really strong trigger
through the chemical melotone and for us to get ready
to go to bed. But just the light in general,
being right there, you know, a foot and a half
(19:00):
from your face, really bright, very exciting, is interrupting your
brains natural signaling of telling you it's nighttime, it's time
to go to bed. In fact, your brain thinks very
differently when you're in front of that screen and you
see all that light, It's like, oh, it's lunchtime. This
is the time to be awake. So when you're done
(19:21):
with that session and turn your light out at midnight,
your brain doesn't necessarily quickly realize that it's nighttime and
will reminds us that when we're worrying about the big screen,
don't forget about that little screen that all of us
can easily look at too much. Trying not to be
on your phone too much when you're in the bed
is a is a big one too. Usually when I
(19:43):
am going to bed, like I am ready to sleep,
so I'll look at it so that I can set
my alarm, read any emails that may have come through
that I might have missed. Beyond that, I'm not really
on my phone too month when I'm in the bedroom,
just because like I know that you can stay up
much longer. You know. If it isn't because you're looking
at cat video on Instagram, is because the blue light
(20:05):
is keeping you awake. So I made that a priority
pretty long time ago to just like all right, every
once in a while, I'll wake up and like write
something down, but I have an idea about But beyond that,
I try to limit the amount of phone I'm using.
(20:27):
The light factor is so impactful that Chris says simply
taking down that brightness or wearing protective glasses could make
all the difference, because it's not just a box of light. Remember,
this tech is changing and changing fast. There are devices
that you can strap over your eyes that pull you
into a virtual realm. There's entire metaverses being created that
(20:49):
blur the lines between the game and real life. So
anything you can do to mitigate this bombardment of light
is helpful. This is always a difficult questions because it
butts up against reality. You know, I hear various sleep
experts speak, you know, well two hours, you know, we
just really shut everything off two hours before you go
to bed, and there's nothing wrong with that, But I'm
(21:11):
always like, well, what what are you doing for the
two hours? Just sit there in the dark for two
hours and think about life or something. So to me,
if somebody says, look, I can't stop playing this video
game at ten o'clock and wait around until midnight to
go to sleep, I think. And that's where you know
dimming the light? Can we make your monitor less bright?
(21:33):
Can we wear sunglasses or the blue block or glasses?
It wasn't easy, but Will built up a big following
and carved out an amazing path in the career of
his dreams. We'll Sleep is a lot better now, and
so is his overall health and performance in life and work.
It takes a lot to stay healthy, even in a
community that we don't usually associate with workplace hazards or
(21:56):
on the field injuries beyond you know, prioritize time to
make sure you sleep is find out what you like
with regards to how you sleep, and be conscious of
your health. So I'm gonna reference competitive fighting game player.
He goes by Tokyto, and he's an excellent gamer. Not
(22:20):
only is he like excels at the mechanical part of
being a gamer, but he is one of the people
who really pushed the narrative of why it's important to
take your health seriously when it comes to gaming, because
it's not always considered like a high impact or performance
based profession, right like not like being a basketball player.
(22:45):
Taking your health into consideration is just as important as
how you strategize within games to be better about them.
Having the immune system to be able to do those
late nights whenever you need to, like on rare occasions,
like having the mental and physical affortitude to be able
to do that without streaming yourself too much. All that
(23:06):
plays a part in you being able to do what
you love to do longer. And not just like in
a literal sense of like marathon sessions, but just LifeWise.
You know, things that you're doing to hurt yourself, uh
in this moment can have residual effects down the line
if you don't do things to kind of counterbalance it.
(23:29):
So gamer or not, What is something that our listeners
can control in their immediate future to improve their sleep?
Your bed, Like, think about like what you're sleeping on
and if it's really as good for your back and
for your body and for your sleeping patterns as you
(23:49):
think so being aware of your sleeping habits and how
you like to sleep, and you know if you're a
back sleeper or a side sleeper, the size of the bed,
the firmness of it, the softness of it. Having all
of those elements into play as well with your health
can make a big impact in how well you sleep.
(24:11):
So having some kind of priority on making sure your
bed is what you needed to be for you to
sleep your best is also a big part of your
overall health and some that will help you keep doing
what you love to do longer. There you have it,
our beds. Just as each gamer has their console or
(24:33):
PC of choice, their favorite controllers and hardware, each of
us should treat the thing we sleep on as a
tool for better rest. Gaming isn't the only industry that
evolves to challenge our sleep. As our world continues to
progress and modernize, we can face all sorts of challenges
that our hunter gatherer ancestors couldn't even dream of. I
(24:54):
was talking to the Money was a professor at one time,
and she said the hardest part about her job was
preparing people for jobs that don't exist now, meaning that
I'm talking to a student and in five years, they'll
be doing something that I didn't even know existed. And
I think that really speaks to the rapid evolution of
(25:16):
things that are happening right now, particularly within technology. And
if somebody said one of the biggest threat to a
younger person in terms of their sleep, I would say
it's technology. And if technology is the biggest challenge to sleep,
that puts people like Will Wiggins right in the thick
of it. That's all for this episode. Join me again
(25:39):
next week when I learned how a wildlife documentarian sleeps
in some of the most remote areas of the world,
all while being ready to record footage of some of
the most elusive animals. The Alaska Peninsula is one of
the densest populations of as in the world. I've spent
a lot of time with intent in the middle of
that country. The house and pound carnivals and your your
(26:02):
tent in the morning and that could be two, three
or full beds in view. We want to hear from you.
Leave a rating or review for our show on your
podcast player of choice. You can find me on Twitter
at on a hot O'Connor. Until next time, Hoping you're
living your best while sleeping your Best Chasing Sleep is
(26:27):
a production of I Heart Radio in partnership with Mattress Firm.
Our executive producer is Molly Sosha. Our EP of Post
is James Foster. Our supervising producer is Kia Swinton. Our
producer is Sierra Kaiser. This episode was written and researched
by Eric Leasia and Jessica Patia. This show is hosted
(26:47):
by me On a Hot O'Connor
A few technologies have advanced as rapidly as video games.
The Nintendo Classics that many of us grew up playing
helped to pave the way for what today is a
juggernaut industry that gives players a virtual experience unlike any other,
and one that occurs right in our own living rooms
and can connect us to a global community. I have
(00:33):
been gaming since I was like maybefore when my dad
brought over the Second Genesis, so I would say thirty
years I've been gaming, which is crazy to say out
loud now. Will Wiggins is a gaming content creator, graphic artist,
and illustrator with a large Twitch following. Online. He goes
(00:55):
by the name black Owny, and he's heavily involved in
the professional gaming community. It's a little addicting, right because
it's something that I love doing and the people watching
loved experience, and I'm like, our apid, I just have
to do it more. I have to do it later.
I have to make sure I'm around to get these
big raids from all the other content creators were smart
and went to bed on time, like they'll send their
(01:17):
people over to me. I'm like, all right, and we've
got some viewers. We got some engage. We've got some action,
and as important as viewers are, uh your health, none
of that's going to matter if you're not there to
like keep them entertained. Viewers add a whole new element
to the gameplay, essentially turning a passive pastime into a
(01:38):
globally connected community. So for Will, what started as playing
a couple levels of Sonic the Hedgehog alone after school
has ballooned into all night raids and tournaments occurring across
different time zones with an untold number of players, all
of this happening in vast realities created by nothing more
(01:59):
than ones in zeros. There's something different about some of
these games and immersive experiences that activate our brains in
very different ways. I think when you get into these games,
it's very difficult to pull yourself out. You may sit
down and think I'm gonna play for an hour, get
(02:19):
something to eat, get some sleep, and four hours later
you're still involved with it. Dr Chris winter As an
aurologist and sleep specialist from Charlottesville, Virginia, um the author
of the book The Rest of Child Wire. Tired, wired,
or irritable child may have a sleep disorder and how
to help as well as the sleep solution, Why You're
(02:41):
sleep is broken and how to fix it. One of
the focuses of his career is the unique effects that
video games, screen time, and other related technology have on
our sleep. Sometimes I find myself going to sleep and
thinking about the game I was playing, Like man, I
can't wait to get up and play it some more.
That still happens even to me. So like if anyone
(03:02):
else experiences that like I get it. Will's experience navigating
this massive community of constantly changing technology is certainly unique,
and it created obstacles to getting and maintaining proper sleep,
something that Chris knows all about. Using Chris's expertise, Will
delve into Will's journey to find out what happens to
(03:24):
our sleep when we spend much of the night fighting aliens,
looting dragons, and exploring virtual worlds in a way that
previous generations never knew. Hi, I'm on a hut O'Connor,
and this is chasing sleep and I heart radio production
(03:45):
and partnership with Mattress Firm. I've spent much of my
career looking into the obstacles that prevent us from getting
good sleep. Most of these obstacles have been with human
(04:07):
beings since we first started walking up right, things like stress,
finding time to rest, and even the position of the sun.
But a uniquely modern problem we face comes from technology,
both from being bombarded by blue light from multiple screens
and also from the extremely recent phenomenon of video games,
(04:27):
pulling our brains into completely different worlds, often right before
we try to go to sleep at night. To our brains,
these developers and these games are so good that they
create real experience, like you feel like you were in
the deserted compound, surrounded by zombies trying to figure out
(04:48):
how to kill them and get to this next place
where all the other players are like, when in fact, no,
you're just sitting in a chair in your bedroom looking
at a box of light, a box of light with
profound effects. Many of us have fond memories of jumping
on turtles and saving princesses and those boxes of light,
(05:09):
And as the game's got more intricate, not only were
they more fun to play, but an entire audience started
to grow that liked watching people play. A gamer streaming
on Twitch like black Owny Cannet tens of thousands of
followers and views. Back when I was living in Boston, specifically,
I was working full time at least forty hours a week.
(05:32):
I was streaming at least three to four times a week.
I was writing articles and posting videos, I was podcasting,
and for a lot of the time, I was single,
so I was able to do a lot of this.
It's pretty amazing to me. So many of us have
watched the gaming industry evolved literally right before our eyes,
(05:54):
from these very un serious, blocky games where the main
goal was just to jump from platform to platform to
what we have today, these now ultra sophisticated storytelling medium
As you rode the wave of this changing technology, what
were some of the challenges that kept you from having
a healthy sleep routine. Yeah, it was. It was challenging,
(06:16):
especially to realize my limitations and realized like I needed
to do better about taking care of myself even though
I felt like I was. The sleep part was a
really big part of really buckling down, like, all right,
I just have to have to get more sleep or
else this is just going to keep happening to me.
I'm gonna keep suffering. It sounds like you were aware
(06:38):
of the challenges from pretty early on. Especially because so
much of the streaming traffic occurs at night. Yeah yeah,
so I did try to like squeeze in every little
bit of sleep I could, but it was mostly because
I was especially being on the East Coast and trying
to appease to the West Coast viewers as well. I
was staying up till at least two, maybe three sometimes
(07:01):
in the morning every time I streamed, and I was
for a while, I was streaming almost every weekday. During
some of this time where I was doing just all
this other stuff and only getting like five hours of sleep,
I definitely remember this distinct feeling of feeling like I
was like in this fog, where like I was just
so much slower, even though I was able to like
(07:23):
do so much during that time, I knew, I knew
when I back of my head that if I was
able to sleep more, I would be that much more efficient.
Like once I once I laid down and sit to
go on that bed, like I was out, that was it.
While falling asleep quickly allowed will to steal resting time
at every opportunity throughout the day. The ability to snooze
(07:47):
as soon as we hit the pillow is actually a
bug not a feature of our brains. According to Chris,
it's usually indicative of an unhealthy cycle of sleep. One
of the problems is if you ask most people what
is the sign of good sleep, they're going to tell
you how quickly you fall asleep. I always call it
(08:08):
speed to unconsciousness. If that's the if that's the thing.
And so when you're talking to two people, well, I'm
a good sleeper, but my roommate here he's a bad sleeper.
The good sleepers often defining themselves as a good sleeper
because they get in bed and fall asleep fast, and
the bad sleeper man he gets in bed sometimes takes
him thirty four if five minutes to fall asleep. So
(08:30):
it's interesting that Will recognizes that because the idea that
he's turning everything off getting in bed and immediately out cold. Great,
but that could very well be indicating that his brain
is looking for more sleep than it's actually getting. Yeah,
that's pretty unnerving. So you're saying people out there could
(08:51):
be suffering from something sleep related and not even realize it. Yeah,
because you again, they're the ones who fall asleep immediately.
You know, they're the ones who when their partner comes
to see me because he or she can't sleep, Like, well,
tell me about your partner. He's a great sleeper's he's asleep,
he can sleep anywhere. So I'm usually thinking as I'm
talking to partner A, I'm I'm more worried about partner B.
(09:14):
Might want to get partner being here because he's really sleeping.
That makes sense that if you can fall asleep quickly,
it just means that you're starved for sleep. And speaking
of partners, I find it interesting that sharing our sleep
space and time with someone else often forces us to
look at it in a different way. Being in a
(09:35):
relationship forced me to approach it differently. Uh, specifically being
in a relationship that I realized early on, like I
wanted to give more. For the reason I was single
for so long was because like I just wanted to.
There was always that tension of like, all right, do
(09:57):
I spend more time with her or do I spend
time focus sing on my business and focusing on you know,
getting my viewership up and getting more followers and blah
blah blah. If you can relate to being sleep starved,
and let's face it, most of us can, we tend
to exhibit more of these behaviors in our younger years.
I could have obviously been better about especially as a
younger guy, but I was just trying to fire on
(10:19):
all cylinders at all times, and it just drove a
wedge in between my health and like my ambition. When
we think about our sleepless youth, we might remember actually
being able to perform fairly well, or at least well enough.
There may have been late nights burning the midnight oil,
followed by early mornings cramming for finals or working double shifts.
(10:42):
It might even seem like we simply didn't need as
much sleep back then. But what's really the case is
that our bodies were just better at powering through without
And when you think about video gaming in in the
ages of people playing it, I have yet to encounter
a sixty seven year old who's crushing it in call
of duty. Every in some competition, it's they're young people.
(11:05):
And the good and bad thing about young people is
they can kind of abuse their bodies and still do Okay, Yeah,
because you're young. That's always tell the young athletes. So
like I go out and play video games and go
to bars all night long, and as long as I
get four or five hours sleep. I'm great, but that's
not gonna last. This is the time to really invest
in your sleep. Um. We see a lot of children
(11:26):
in our clinic. The rise of twenty four hour gaming
culture is definitely something that we've seen. In fact, one
of the case studies in my new book, The Rest
of Child was a family of a daughter who was
spending a tremendous amount of time between you know, after
school before she go to school the next day, on
(11:47):
platforms playing games where other people would pay her to
do it, you pay to watch her do it. So
it was a very unusual situation of had she been
in some sort of travel old soccer team, I guess
that her parents would be much more supportive of it.
You know, she's gonna be the next Carly Lloyd or whatever.
(12:08):
But they fundamentally did not like the fact that she
was just playing video games all the time. Number one
and the number two dramatically impairing her sleep. Bad sleep
will certainly take its toll eventually, no matter how young
you are, the world of e sports and professional gaming
is so new many are skeptical of its merits or
even the value we can hold as a full time
(12:29):
career and income source. But gaming is a gigantic industry,
one that breaks in over two hundred billion dollars a year,
with an audience that spans every corner of the entire world.
It's an audience that Will did everything he could to
reach and engage with early in his career. As Will
dove deeper into his passion, he found it more and
(12:50):
more difficult to perform at his best. There was a
constant struggle between getting more sleep or getting more done.
So that was always the constant like friction of like, oh,
I know a need more sleep, but I know I
need to have to do way more things than just
know that sleep would afford me at the time, it
seems like waking up and playing or gaming in the
middle of the day isn't really an option the majority
(13:13):
of this community games views or I guess you could
say enters the chat later in the day. Would you
say that's the case for your audience as well. Yeah,
I think that most people who are playing or specifically
playing together with other people are doing it in the
evenings because people are off of work, you've had their dinner,
(13:37):
looking for some way to kind of like vibe out
and play something with their friends or just get real
sweaty and competitive and do something really fun. Usually that
happens at night. So I'm a neurologist by training. So
everything boils down to the brain and real estate within
the brain. And when you look at sleep and what's
generating sleep and where that's happening in the brain, it's
(13:59):
sharing real estate that's very close to parts of our
brain that regulate body temperature and regulate immune modulation, strengthening
or weakening our immune system. Will can definitely attest to that.
He found himself wrestling with multiple debilitating bouts of sickness
every year. I used to get sick like three to
(14:19):
four times a year, um, just like the cold, like
or the flu or just like some random thing that
just completely takes me out. And it was because every night,
like every night, I was getting like five hours asleep.
And it's not just all night gamers that see this effect.
Any intrusion into healthy sleep has consequences. I remember when
(14:40):
I was in residency and doing all that call, I
was just constantly we were all constantly sick, you know,
we and we had no backup. So unless you were dying,
you had to come to like okay, well whatever. So
and as soon as I got outside of residency, all
that went away. Cold sores went away, sicknesses went a way,
(15:00):
because there's a big tie in. And so it's really
interesting to look at some of that work on the
immune system and how that works, because we've always known,
I mean, our grandmothers and great grandmothers could easily have
told us, hey, look, if you don't get sleep, you're
gonna get sick. As far as I know, the idea
that you could get sick from a lack of sleep
(15:23):
was just something people said that took a while to
be proven true by science. For a long time, it
was just an anecdotal observation that if you were sleep
deprived then you'd be more susceptible to flues and colds.
We've always known it, but it took a long time
for science to sort of catch up and sort of
prove it. And so there's a wealth of information now
(15:44):
that really shows that quality sleep through manipulations of you know,
cyit of kinds, and immune modulating inter lucan's in our brain,
not to mention the modulation of the chemical growth hormone,
which is instrumental in strengthening and bolts during our immune system.
All of those things rely on qualities sleep. So when
(16:05):
we get good sleep, we tend to shake illnesses much easier,
maybe never even manifest symptoms of them. It can't even
be contested or debated like how important sleep is, So
just not being sick alone proves worth it. We'll be
right back after a brief message from our partners at
(16:26):
Mattress Firm, and now back to chasing sleep. So we
have this fantastic community and platform for content creation, entertainment,
(16:46):
global connection, you name it. It's incredibly rewarding. We can
do it from the comfort of our homes. It unites
people from all over the world. But the downside is
that it forces us to be staring at these harmful
blue screens, these basically light boxes, for hours at a
time and often write up until bedtime. So there's gotta
(17:08):
be ways that you deal with this. What are some
techniques that you use to make all this screen time
easier on yourself? I do wear protective glasses whenever I
am playing, just because I know that based on studies,
that it has some type of impact on me. So
I have two pairs of protective glasses for gaming specifically
(17:33):
or for making art. One has an amber tint, so
these ones have a little bit of like a blue
light blocking filter in them, and the other one is
a crystalline one that has anti glare anti blue light,
but it's much more subtle. It's it's more clear. I
use that for when I'm designing, and then I wear
the glasses protective glasses pretty much all the time whenever
(17:55):
I'm creating content on Twitter, Facebook or whatever it is,
just because, like I know that does have an impact
on your eye strain, which has an impact on the
way you sleep, and and then introducing the blue light
into that as well. Yeah, I mean, it is a
box of light after all, and when you add in
late night hours and stressful gaming situations, it can be
(18:17):
pretty straining. But neutralizing that light may help to reduce
the damaging effects of late night gaming. Light in general
is problematic. In other words, our body sort of set
our circadian rhythm in a large part based upon available light.
So when there's lots of light out, your body understands
(18:38):
that it's daytime. We need to be awake, looking for food,
reproducing whatever whatever organisms do during the day. And then
as the light becomes diminished. It's a really strong trigger
through the chemical melotone and for us to get ready
to go to bed. But just the light in general,
being right there, you know, a foot and a half
(19:00):
from your face, really bright, very exciting, is interrupting your
brains natural signaling of telling you it's nighttime, it's time
to go to bed. In fact, your brain thinks very
differently when you're in front of that screen and you
see all that light, It's like, oh, it's lunchtime. This
is the time to be awake. So when you're done
(19:21):
with that session and turn your light out at midnight,
your brain doesn't necessarily quickly realize that it's nighttime and
will reminds us that when we're worrying about the big screen,
don't forget about that little screen that all of us
can easily look at too much. Trying not to be
on your phone too much when you're in the bed
is a is a big one too. Usually when I
(19:43):
am going to bed, like I am ready to sleep,
so I'll look at it so that I can set
my alarm, read any emails that may have come through
that I might have missed. Beyond that, I'm not really
on my phone too month when I'm in the bedroom,
just because like I know that you can stay up
much longer. You know. If it isn't because you're looking
at cat video on Instagram, is because the blue light
(20:05):
is keeping you awake. So I made that a priority
pretty long time ago to just like all right, every
once in a while, I'll wake up and like write
something down, but I have an idea about But beyond that,
I try to limit the amount of phone I'm using.
(20:27):
The light factor is so impactful that Chris says simply
taking down that brightness or wearing protective glasses could make
all the difference, because it's not just a box of light. Remember,
this tech is changing and changing fast. There are devices
that you can strap over your eyes that pull you
into a virtual realm. There's entire metaverses being created that
(20:49):
blur the lines between the game and real life. So
anything you can do to mitigate this bombardment of light
is helpful. This is always a difficult questions because it
butts up against reality. You know, I hear various sleep
experts speak, you know, well two hours, you know, we
just really shut everything off two hours before you go
to bed, and there's nothing wrong with that, But I'm
(21:11):
always like, well, what what are you doing for the
two hours? Just sit there in the dark for two
hours and think about life or something. So to me,
if somebody says, look, I can't stop playing this video
game at ten o'clock and wait around until midnight to
go to sleep, I think. And that's where you know
dimming the light? Can we make your monitor less bright?
(21:33):
Can we wear sunglasses or the blue block or glasses?
It wasn't easy, but Will built up a big following
and carved out an amazing path in the career of
his dreams. We'll Sleep is a lot better now, and
so is his overall health and performance in life and work.
It takes a lot to stay healthy, even in a
community that we don't usually associate with workplace hazards or
(21:56):
on the field injuries beyond you know, prioritize time to
make sure you sleep is find out what you like
with regards to how you sleep, and be conscious of
your health. So I'm gonna reference competitive fighting game player.
He goes by Tokyto, and he's an excellent gamer. Not
(22:20):
only is he like excels at the mechanical part of
being a gamer, but he is one of the people
who really pushed the narrative of why it's important to
take your health seriously when it comes to gaming, because
it's not always considered like a high impact or performance
based profession, right like not like being a basketball player.
(22:45):
Taking your health into consideration is just as important as
how you strategize within games to be better about them.
Having the immune system to be able to do those
late nights whenever you need to, like on rare occasions,
like having the mental and physical affortitude to be able
to do that without streaming yourself too much. All that
(23:06):
plays a part in you being able to do what
you love to do longer. And not just like in
a literal sense of like marathon sessions, but just LifeWise.
You know, things that you're doing to hurt yourself, uh
in this moment can have residual effects down the line
if you don't do things to kind of counterbalance it.
(23:29):
So gamer or not, What is something that our listeners
can control in their immediate future to improve their sleep?
Your bed, Like, think about like what you're sleeping on
and if it's really as good for your back and
for your body and for your sleeping patterns as you
(23:49):
think so being aware of your sleeping habits and how
you like to sleep, and you know if you're a
back sleeper or a side sleeper, the size of the bed,
the firmness of it, the softness of it. Having all
of those elements into play as well with your health
can make a big impact in how well you sleep.
(24:11):
So having some kind of priority on making sure your
bed is what you needed to be for you to
sleep your best is also a big part of your
overall health and some that will help you keep doing
what you love to do longer. There you have it,
our beds. Just as each gamer has their console or
(24:33):
PC of choice, their favorite controllers and hardware, each of
us should treat the thing we sleep on as a
tool for better rest. Gaming isn't the only industry that
evolves to challenge our sleep. As our world continues to
progress and modernize, we can face all sorts of challenges
that our hunter gatherer ancestors couldn't even dream of. I
(24:54):
was talking to the Money was a professor at one time,
and she said the hardest part about her job was
preparing people for jobs that don't exist now, meaning that
I'm talking to a student and in five years, they'll
be doing something that I didn't even know existed. And
I think that really speaks to the rapid evolution of
(25:16):
things that are happening right now, particularly within technology. And
if somebody said one of the biggest threat to a
younger person in terms of their sleep, I would say
it's technology. And if technology is the biggest challenge to sleep,
that puts people like Will Wiggins right in the thick
of it. That's all for this episode. Join me again
(25:39):
next week when I learned how a wildlife documentarian sleeps
in some of the most remote areas of the world,
all while being ready to record footage of some of
the most elusive animals. The Alaska Peninsula is one of
the densest populations of as in the world. I've spent
a lot of time with intent in the middle of
that country. The house and pound carnivals and your your
(26:02):
tent in the morning and that could be two, three
or full beds in view. We want to hear from you.
Leave a rating or review for our show on your
podcast player of choice. You can find me on Twitter
at on a hot O'Connor. Until next time, Hoping you're
living your best while sleeping your Best Chasing Sleep is
(26:27):
a production of I Heart Radio in partnership with Mattress Firm.
Our executive producer is Molly Sosha. Our EP of Post
is James Foster. Our supervising producer is Kia Swinton. Our
producer is Sierra Kaiser. This episode was written and researched
by Eric Leasia and Jessica Patia. This show is hosted
(26:47):
by me On a Hot O'Connor
4 Things with Amy Brown News
Host
Amy Brown
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