The Snooze Button

In this episode

Dr. Ravi Allada and Dan Shulman join me for a baseball-themed look at sleep, travel and performance, including:

• why your biological clock can't change time zones as quickly as your watch can;
• why traveling east and traveling west aren't necessarily the same thing;
• how baseball's enormous statistical record creates an unusual opportunity for sleep researchers;
• the surprisingly specific piece of on-field performance that showed one of the clearest effects of jet lag;
• why even the home team can suffer from jet lag;
• how Major League schedules can help — or hurt — players trying to adjust;
• what the postseason does to some of those carefully designed travel patterns;
• whether sending a starting pitcher ahead of the rest of the team might actually make sense;
• Dan Shulman's transition from actuarial science and campus radio to calling some of the biggest games in sports;
• what it's like to work an itinerary that can put you in four cities in four nights;
• why Shulman says sleep has moved higher on his priority list as he's gotten older;
• the difference between being tired and sounding tired when you're performing for an audience;
• why teams increasingly cancel batting practice after brutal schedules;
• and what baseball calls “show and go.”

About Dr. Ravi Allada

At the time of this conversation, Dr. Ravi Allada was a professor and circadian-rhythm researcher at Northwestern University. His work examines the biological clocks governing sleep and wakefulness, and his love of baseball gave him a particularly interesting real-world dataset for studying what happens when those clocks are disrupted.

Allada is now Executive Director of the Michigan Neuroscience Institute at the University of Michigan.

Current University of Michigan profile

About Dan Shulman

Dan Shulman is one of Canada's most recognizable sports broadcasters. When we recorded this episode, he was the radio voice of Major League Baseball's postseason and World Series for ESPN Radio.

His route there was unusual: Shulman studied actuarial science at Western University before abandoning the actuarial world for radio and eventually becoming a play-by-play broadcaster.

Dan Shulman at ESPN

Dan Shulman with the Toronto Blue Jays

Mentioned in this episode

• How jet lag impairs Major League Baseball performance — the study at the center of my conversation with Dr. Allada. Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers analyzed Major League Baseball performance across roughly two decades of games to examine what happens after teams cross time zones.
• Read the study
• Northwestern: Jet lag impairs performance of Major League Baseball players — Northwestern's accessible overview of Allada's research.
• Read the Northwestern summary
• Dr. Ravi Allada — University of Michigan
• Current profile
• Dan Shulman — ESPN
• ESPN biography
• Dan Shulman — Toronto Blue Jays
• Blue Jays broadcaster biography

This is the full-length version of an episode that was previously released only to Premium Content subscribers.

One of America's leading sleep clinicians, Dr. Lynelle Schneeberg joins Neil to talk about her new book, "Become Your Child's Sleep Coach", and how helping THEM can help YOU, too.

LINKAPALOOZA:

Dr. Schneeberg on Twitter

"Become Your Child's Sleep Coach" on Amazon

Dr. Schneeberg's website

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

In this episode

Dr. Schneeberg and I get into:

• what a “sleep onset association” is — and why parents usually know it by another name;
• helping children learn to fall asleep independently;
• why sleep problems aren't necessarily baked in forever just because a child is no longer a baby;
• figuring out what's actually “normal” when it comes to sleep at different ages;
• phones, screens and the teenager who falls asleep with every light in the room turned on;
• what chronic insufficient sleep can look like in kids and teenagers;
• signs that a child's sleep problem may deserve the attention of a sleep specialist;
• why adolescence naturally pushes sleep later;
• the case for starting middle and high school later in the morning;
• why doctors and pediatricians may reach for melatonin before addressing sleep behavior;
• “callbacks and curtain calls” after bedtime;
• whether letting a child cry it out is the only way to teach independent sleep;
• and what parents can do to model healthier sleep habits themselves.

About Dr. Lynelle Schneeberg

At the time of this conversation, Dr. Lynelle Schneeberg was an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine and director of the Behavioral Sleep Program at Connecticut Children's Medical Center.

She specializes in behavioral sleep medicine and wrote Become Your Child's Sleep Coach: The Bedtime Doctor's 5-Step Guide, Ages 3–10 for parents dealing with sleep problems after the baby stage.

Visit Dr. Lynelle Schneeberg's website

Mentioned in this episode

• Become Your Child's Sleep Coach: The Bedtime Doctor's 5-Step Guide, Ages 3–10 — Lynelle Schneeberg
• Book information from the publisher
• National Sleep Foundation — Sleep Duration Recommendations
• Schneeberg recommends the Foundation's age-based sleep-duration information for parents wondering what's “normal.” The original 2019 resource has evolved, but the Foundation's current recommendations are here.
• Sleep Duration Recommendations
• SNOO Smart Sleeper
• The responsive bassinet we discuss when talking about my younger daughter's early sleep habits.
• SNOO at Happiest Baby
• Start School Later
• The advocacy organization Schneeberg mentions during our discussion of adolescent biology and school start times.
• Start School Later
• “The Conversation” — Mad About You, Season 6, Episode 9
• The episode in which Paul and Jamie sit outside baby Mabel's room while trying to let her fall asleep without them.
• View the episode on Apple TV
• How to Raise a Reader — Pamela Paul and Maria Russo
• Schneeberg recommends this near the end of our conversation while discussing one of the simplest sleep behaviors parents can model for their children: reading.
• Book information from the publisher
• Dr. Lynelle Schneeberg — Yale Medicine
• Current Yale Medicine profile
• Dr. Lynelle Schneeberg — Connecticut Children's
• Current Connecticut Children's profile

For Episode 4, Neil took his recording gear into an appointment with his sleep doctor to review the results of his sleep study at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto.

...and there are plenty of surprises to be had.

 

LINKAPALOOZA

Dr. Mark Boulos on Twitter

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center 

PSGNORMS - Sunnybrook's meta analysis of thousands of sleep studies to determine "what's normal in a sleep lab?"

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

In this episode

Dr. Boulos and I talk about:

• what a sleep lab can tell you that consumer sleep trackers can't;
• why sleeping from 3 a.m. until noon isn't necessarily “bad sleep” simply because the clock looks strange;
• morning larks, night owls and the biology behind our preferred sleep schedules;
• what happens during the different stages of sleep;
• slow-wave sleep and the brain's glymphatic system;
• why a night in a sleep laboratory may not be as abnormal, statistically, as it feels;
• the difference between time spent in bed and time actually asleep;
• how researchers establish normal sleep-lab values;
• what wearables such as Fitbit and Apple Watch can — and can't — reliably tell us;
• apnea, hypopnea, arousals and other pieces of the vocabulary that starts appearing when you look closely at a sleep study;
• and, finally, what my own overnight study actually found.

The last part is best heard rather than summarized.

About Dr. Mark Boulos

Dr. Mark Boulos is a stroke and sleep neurologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto whose research includes sleep disorders, neurological disease, home sleep monitoring and the development of normative sleep data.

Dr. Mark Boulos at Sunnybrook

Mentioned in this episode

• Normal Polysomnography Parameters in Healthy Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis — the 2019 Lancet Respiratory Medicine paper Dr. Boulos discusses, which combined data from thousands of healthy adults to establish reference values for sleep studies.
• Read the study
• PSG Norms — the interactive calculator based on that research. Enter age and sex to see reference ranges for a variety of polysomnography measurements.
• PSG Norms calculator
• Sunnybrook Sleep Medicine Clinic
• Sunnybrook Sleep Medicine Clinic

Roy Parvin was an award-winning author whose career was chugging along, until one night he couldn't sleep.

...which became two.

...which became three.

...which eventually led to Roy's book, My Year Of Sleeping Dangerously.

Roy walks us through the dangers of self-diagnosing your sleep issues, or trying to do it without the help of a sleep specialist.

LINKAPALOOZAYoga For The Inflexible Male (Roy writing as Yoga Matt)Roy Parvin on TwitterRoy Parvin on FacebookRoy's website

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

In this episode

Roy and I get into:

• how an apparently innocent sleepless night became something much bigger;
• why sleep trouble can become incredibly isolating;
• the temptation to diagnose and treat yourself when you don't know what's actually happening;
• what happens when the treatments become part of the problem;
• the surprising parallels between Roy's sleep story and my own;
• the difference between being unconscious for part of the night and actually getting good sleep;
• why people with sleep problems may spend far too long looking in the wrong place for answers;
• the unexpected role yoga played in Roy's story;
• and why one horrible year ultimately gave him material for two books.

This isn't a conversation with somebody who read a few studies about bad sleep.

Roy lived it.

And if you've ever spent a night staring at the ceiling wondering why something your body has done automatically your entire life has suddenly become impossible, parts of his story may feel uncomfortably familiar.

About Roy Parvin

Roy Parvin is an award-winning author whose work includes My Year of Sleeping Dangerously.

During the experience we discuss in this episode, he also discovered yoga — eventually developing material that became Yoga for the Inflexible Male.

Mentioned in this episode

• My Year of Sleeping Dangerously — Roy Parvin
• Yoga for the Inflexible Male — Roy Parvin (as Yoga Matt)

Dr. Adrian Owen has been named a member of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of his contributions to neuroscience.

Here, in an episode that is sadly fraught with technical issues (sorry, podcasting purists), he talks with Neil about a laundry list of topics about what's going wrong north of your neck when you're not getting enough sleep.

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Referred to by Neil as a "neuroscience rock star" - not because of his role as the lead singer / lead guitarist of an all-scientist rock band, but because this year, he was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his contributions to science - Dr. Adrian Owen brings perspective and wisdom gleaned from a career spent looking at brains.Neil and Dr. Owen cover a wide range of topics here, including:The Terri Schiavo case (and "persistent vegetative states")The relationship between

What if poor sleep is affecting your judgment long before you actually feel sleepy?

In this episode of The Snooze Button, Neil welcomes neuroscientist Dr. Adrian Owen for the show’s first official guest interview. Dr. Owen is best known for his groundbreaking work using brain imaging to detect signs of awareness in some patients who had been diagnosed as vegetative. But in this conversation, sleep becomes the doorway into a bigger question: what does consciousness look like when the brain is working differently?

Neil and Dr. Owen talk about insomnia, consciousness, sleep trackers, sleep labs, coma research, Terri Schiavo, and the surprising results of a large sleep-and-cognition study. One of the biggest takeaways: too little sleep — and possibly too much — may impair reasoning and decision-making even when memory seems mostly unaffected.

That matters because real life is made of decisions. Some are huge. Some are ordinary. And some, like whether to change lanes in traffic, only seem ordinary until they are not.

In this episode

• Why Dr. Owen says he is not strictly a sleep expert — and why sleep is so useful for studying consciousness
• What brain imaging has revealed about some patients diagnosed as vegetative
• Why the Terri Schiavo case became such a public flashpoint
• Why sleep is harder to study than people might assume
• What Dr. Owen’s large sleep-and-cognition study found about 7–8 hours of sleep
• Why too little and too much sleep may both be linked with poorer cognitive performance
• Why reasoning and decision-making may be affected more than memory
• Why “I don’t feel sleepy” is not the same as “I’m thinking clearly”
• What sleep trackers can and cannot tell us
• Why Neil’s own sleep numbers made Dr. Owen recommend a proper sleep study

Key takeaway

The scariest kind of sleep impairment may not be the kind you feel. It may be the kind that quietly affects your reasoning, planning, and decision-making while you still think you are fine.

Resources mentioned

• Dr. Adrian Owen — Western University profile
• Owen Lab
• Creyos — formerly Cambridge Brain Sciences
• Creyos online cognitive tasks
• Dissociable effects of self-reported daily sleep duration on high-level cognitive abilities
• Into the Gray Zone: A Neuroscientist Explores the Mysteries of the Brain and the Border Between Life and Death
• Dr. Adrian Owen on X/Twitter: @ComaDork

Note from the archive

This is one of the early foundation episodes of The Snooze Button, so it is a little more science-heavy than later episodes. That was deliberate. Before Neil could start testing fixes for his own sleep, he needed a clearer understanding of what was actually happening — and how much trust to place in consumer sleep trackers, lab sleep studies, and cognitive testing.

In the original episode, Cambridge Brain Sciences was mentioned by name. That platform is now Creyos. Some older support and rating links mentioned in the episode are no longer included here because they could not be reliably verified.

Follow The Snooze Button in your podcast app, and visit TheSnoozeButton.com for updates as the show returns.