The Snooze Button

• How Boring Books for Bedtime began with an eight-year-old, a bad dream and a book that turned out to be much too interesting
• Why Thomas Paine’s Common Sense succeeded where Black Beauty failed
• Turning a family bedtime trick into a weekly podcast
• Why Sharon deliberately reads in a calm, restrained, almost monotone style
• The difference between a boring book and a boring presentation
• How Sharon finds material through Project Gutenberg and other public-domain sources
• Why old manuals and forgotten nonfiction can become fascinating windows into another world
• The listeners who objected to calling Walden boring — but listened anyway
• Reading Apple’s media terms and conditions as a sleep aid
• Why some listeners use exactly the same episode every night
• Sharon’s unexpected hit: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Coming of the Fairies
• Mrs. Beeton and the surprisingly soothing duties of a Victorian butler
• Charles Darwin as bedtime listening
• Why Sharon can’t use her own sleep podcast when she can’t sleep
• The connection between menopause and insomnia
• Neil considers putting Boring Books for Bedtime through his own two-week sleep experiment
• How long it takes Sharon to record and edit an hour-long reading
• Toronto school start times, transportation savings and the conflict with sleep science

Sharon Handy is the creator, host and producer of Boring Books for Bedtime, a sleep podcast built around a wonderfully simple idea: give an active mind something mildly interesting to listen to so it has less room for the thoughts keeping you awake.

Each episode features Sharon calmly reading older, public-domain material ranging from science and history to household manuals, philosophy and wonderfully peculiar documents.

More than six years after this conversation was recorded, Boring Books for Bedtime is still releasing new episodes every week.

Boring Books for Bedtime

Sharon Handy’s weekly sleep podcast.

Boring Books for Bedtime official website

Project Gutenberg

The free digital library Sharon uses extensively to find older public-domain works for the show.

Project Gutenberg

On the Origin of Species — Charles Darwin

One of Sharon’s suggested starting points for Neil’s experiment.

Read On the Origin of Species at Project Gutenberg

The Coming of the Fairies — Arthur Conan Doyle

A surprisingly popular Boring Books for Bedtime selection in which the creator of Sherlock Holmes examines the famous Cottingley fairy photographs.

Read The Coming of the Fairies at Project Gutenberg

The Book of Household Management — Isabella Beeton

One of Sharon’s personal favorites, including the wonderfully sleep-compatible duties of a Victorian butler.

Read The Book of Household Management at Project Gutenberg

It's a stupid term - a loaded term that carries a ton of baggage and stigma with it.

Instead, let's think about it the same way Wendy Troxel did in her TEDx talk, "Sleep Like Your Relationship Depends On It".

This week, she talks with Neil about that and other sleep topics.  Plus, Dr. Guy Leschziner is back to answer a listener voice mail about sleep trackers.

LINKAPALOOZA

Wendy's TEDx talk about sleeping separately

Wendy's TEDx talk about delaying school start times

Wendy Troxel on Twitter

Wendy's RAND Corportation bio

• Why Wendy Troxel refuses to embrace the term “sleep divorce”
• “Sleep alliance,” “solo sleeping” and finding language without judgment
• Why there is no single correct sleeping arrangement for every couple
• How sleep quality and relationship quality influence each other
• The cultural baggage attached to separate beds
• Why communication matters more than the room you sleep in
• Sleep disorders, snoring and physical movement as reasons couples may sleep apart
• Neil’s own experiment with separate bedrooms after his sleep-lab diagnosis
• Whether separate sleeping has to hurt intimacy or sex
• How better sleep might actually improve a couple’s relationship
• Why Troxel says sleep should become a mutual relationship priority
• The science behind later school start times for adolescents
• Dr. Guy Leschziner on REM data, Apple Watches, sleep trackers and orthosomnia

Dr. Wendy Troxel is a sleep researcher, clinical psychologist and Senior Behavioral and Social Scientist at RAND, as well as an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses heavily on the intersection between sleep, relationships, social environments and health. Her current TED biography still lists those roles.

The central idea of this interview remains essentially the same one Troxel presents publicly today: there is no one-size-fits-all sleeping arrangement for couples; the priority should be finding a strategy that protects both sleep and the relationship.

Dr. Guy Leschziner returns to answer a listener who feels well rested but is worried because an Apple Watch reports insufficient REM sleep.

His answer becomes a compact explanation of what consumer sleep trackers can and cannot reliably tell us, and why bad or misunderstood data can sometimes create anxiety about otherwise normal sleep.

Wendy Troxel — “How to sleep like your relationship depends on it”

This is the TEDx talk Troxel refers to during the interview, filmed in November 2019 and published by TED in early 2020.

Watch Wendy Troxel’s TED Talk

Wendy Troxel — “Why school should start later for teens”

Her earlier TEDx talk makes the case that adolescent biology and early school schedules are fundamentally mismatched.

Watch the school start-time talk

California SB 328

Neil and Wendy discuss California’s then-new school start-time legislation. The final law required most non-rural California middle schools to start no earlier than 8:00 a.m. and high schools no earlier than 8:30 a.m., with implementation beginning by July 1, 2022.

California SB 328

Dr. Lynelle Schneeberg is back, Assistant Professor at Yale School of Medicine, and Director of the Behavioral Sleep Program at Connecticut Children's Medical Center with a sleep issue that affects both kids and adults.

Ever wonder why you (or your kids) wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble falling back asleep? Lynelle talks to Neil about sleep onset associations, or sleep crutches.

LINKAPALOOZA:

Dr. Schneeberg on Twitter

"Become Your Child's Sleep Coach" on Amazon

Dr. Schneeberg's website

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Dr. Lynelle Schneeberg returns to answer the first listener question in The Snooze Button's new Ask the Experts feature, including:

• why a child can fall asleep easily at bedtime yet still repeatedly wake during the night;
• what sleep specialists mean by a sleep onset association;
• why “sleep crutch” and “sleep prop” are sometimes used as simpler descriptions of the same basic idea;
• the difference between simply waking during the night and needing help to get back to sleep;
• parents, rocking, feeding, back rubbing, reading and other things that can become part of the conditions surrounding sleep;
• why some sleep associations may matter much more to a child than others;
• what can happen when something present at bedtime disappears later;
• the difference between a child who wakes briefly and one who needs a parent to recreate bedtime;
• my own daughter's history with the SNOO;
• a bedroom rearrangement, a seemingly irrelevant wipe warmer and the tiny nightlight we hadn't realized mattered;
• a white-noise machine that projected a moon and stars onto the ceiling;
• Ernie's “I Don't Want to Live on the Moon”;
• why my daughter could sometimes wake up, happily discuss the moon and stars with a stuffed animal for an astonishing length of time, and eventually put herself back to sleep;
• the night a Google Home lost its network connection at exactly the wrong moment;
• whether we'd somehow just gotten extraordinarily lucky with a good sleeper;
• whether sleep onset associations apply to adults too;
• and what kind of adult bedtime habit Schneeberg sees particularly often when people complain about waking in the middle of the night.

The episode is deliberately short. Rather than adding a conventional long-form guest interview, the show gives the new listener-question format room to establish itself.

Dr. Lynelle Schneeberg is a clinical psychologist specializing in pediatric sleep medicine. She remains Director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at Connecticut Children's Sleep Center and is also affiliated with Yale School of Medicine. Connecticut Children's describes her work as helping families improve sleep from infancy through adolescence.

She is also the author of Become Your Child's Sleep Coach: The Bedtime Doctor's 5-Step Guide, Ages 3–10, the book at the center of her earlier full-length Snooze Button appearance. Yale Medicine currently lists her as treating both children and adults.

Dr. Lynelle Schneeberg — Connecticut Children's

Dr. Lynelle Schneeberg — Yale Medicine

DrSchneeberg.com

• Sleep onset associations / behavioral insomnia of childhood — the terminology around pediatric insomnia has evolved, but the underlying problem Schneeberg is describing remains familiar in behavioral sleep medicine. Connecticut Children's currently describes behavioral insomnia of childhood as commonly involving difficulty falling asleep without parental assistance or extended bedtime routines.
• https://www.connecticutchildrens.org/specialties-conditions/sleep-center/sleep-psychology
• Behavioral treatment for childhood insomnia — the American Academy of Sleep Medicine continues to advise behavioral interventions as the first treatment option for otherwise healthy children struggling with bedtime resistance or nighttime awakenings, with specialist evaluation when problems persist or are medically complex.
• https://aasm.org/advocacy/position-statements/insomnia-children-sleep-health-advisory/
• Research on sleep-onset associations — published clinical research has specifically examined problematic sleep associations such as needing parental presence and found improvement following behavioral treatment in children with behavioral insomnia.
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21550589/
• SNOO — I refer back to using the smart bassinet during my daughter's infancy and my belief that it helped establish good sleep habits before she transitioned out of it. That's my personal historical experience in the episode, not a general recommendation.
• https://www.happiestbaby.com/products/snoo-smart-bassinet

Jade Wu is one of the heavyweights of the sleep world.  She's a sleep psychologist and clinical scientist at Duke University School of Medicine. She is also the host of the award-winning SAVVY PSYCHOLOGIST podcast.

She joins Neil to talk about a variety of sleep topics, including what pregnancy does to your sleep, delayed sleep phases, and the dangers of self-diagnosing and self-medicating.

She even weighs in on Neil's "sleep divorce".

LINKAPALOOZA:

Dr. Jade Wu's website

Jade Wu on Twitter

The Savvy Psychologist podcast

EVEN MORE LINKS:

Click here to email an entry to win Guy Leschziner's book

Click here to email a question for our Sleep Experts

Click here to Rate and/or Review The Snooze Button

Click here to send us feedback

Click here to support The Snooze Button with a donation

Dr. Jade Wu joins me for a conversation about why insomnia — and sleep in general — resists simple one-size-fits-all solutions, including:

• what happens when a sleep psychologist has a terrible night of insomnia herself;
• sleep during late pregnancy and why Wu's interest in pregnancy and postpartum sleep began with her patients before it became personal;
• what new parents might realistically expect from disrupted sleep;
• the developmental milestone that begins making day and night more meaningful to a baby's biological clock;
• the sleep-shift strategy Wu and her husband were considering for life with a newborn;
• why improving sleep isn't always as simple as adding another 45 or 60 minutes;
• the difference between inadequate sleep, chronic insomnia, sleep apnea, circadian problems and other fundamentally different sleep complaints;
• Wu's family experience with untreated sleep apnea;
• my own experiment with sleeping in a separate bedroom from my wife — and why both Wu and I hate the term “sleep divorce”;
• whether sharing a bed should automatically be treated as a requirement for a healthy relationship;
• chronotype and people whose bodies genuinely prefer later or earlier schedules;
• why being a night owl isn't the same thing as being biologically capable of functioning indefinitely on very little sleep;
• light and melatonin as tools that require considerably more individualized thinking than internet advice often suggests;
• why sleep is particularly vulnerable to misinformation, self-diagnosis and self-medication;
• what happens when good scientific information is applied to the wrong person;
• the pressure created by frightening headlines about sleep and long-term health;
• melatonin — or “Vitamin M” — and the dangers of treating it as the automatic answer to every sleep complaint;
• consumer sleep trackers and the phenomenon of orthosomnia;
• why apparently precise wearable numbers can create anxiety when people don't understand their limitations;
• whether we should occasionally put the numbers down and return to the extraordinarily sophisticated diagnostic instrument known as “How do I actually feel?”;
• and why meditation may support sleep very differently from using meditation as a nightly hammer with which to force yourself unconscious.

The conversation ends with something that feels particularly appropriate for The Snooze Button: Wu argues that sleep researchers have become extraordinarily good at talking to each other, but still have work to do translating all that science into information ordinary people can actually use.

At the time of this interview, Dr. Jade Wu was a sleep psychologist and clinical scientist at Duke University School of Medicine and host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast. She also describes research and clinical work involving sleep, chronic illness, pregnancy and postpartum mental health.

Wu hosted Savvy Psychologist from 2019 through 2021.

Today she is board-certified in behavioral sleep medicine, founder of the Thrive Sleep Clinic, and author of Hello Sleep: The Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications. Her current work continues the same basic theme that runs through this 2020 conversation: moving away from rigid sleep optimization and toward a more resilient relationship with sleep.

Dr. Jade Wu

Hello Sleep

• Savvy Psychologist — Wu was hosting the Quick and Dirty Tips psychology podcast when we recorded this conversation. Its archive still preserves her episodes from that period.
• Jade Wu’s Savvy Psychologist archive
• Orthosomnia — Wu uses the term for sleep-related anxiety that can develop around excessive reliance on tracker data. The term originated in a 2017 Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine paper describing patients whose pursuit of ideal wearable-generated sleep numbers was contributing to their sleep problems.
• Orthosomnia: Are Some Patients Taking the Quantified Self Too Far?
• Consumer sleep trackers — the caution in this episode has held up well. More recent international guidance continues to emphasize matching wearable data to the intended use and understanding the limitations of consumer-generated sleep measurements.
• World Sleep Society recommendations on consumer sleep trackers
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia — CBT-I — although we don't turn this episode into a CBT-I tutorial, the discussion repeatedly touches the core insomnia problem of trying harder to sleep and making sleep more effortful. Current AASM guidance continues to strongly recommend CBT-I for chronic insomnia.
• AASM guidance on behavioral treatment for insomnia
• Melatonin — Wu and I are notably skeptical of internet advice that treats melatonin as a universal insomnia remedy. Current AASM material likewise emphasizes that CBT-I is the recommended treatment for chronic insomnia and advises talking with a medical provider rather than simply self-treating with melatonin.
• AASM: Finding the best treatment for insomnia
• Pregnancy and sleep position — pregnancy provides the immediate context for the interview. Current ACOG guidance says side sleeping is generally preferable later in pregnancy; either the left or right side can be used.
• ACOG pregnancy sleep-position guidance

Neil is joined again by one of the giants in the sleep world, Behavioral Sleep Medicine specialist Dr. Michael Grandner, the Director of Sleep & Health at the University of Arizona, talking about the impact sleep can have on athletic performance, and a new paper he co-authored that gets into the specifics of performance in a number of sports at a number of levels.

Bottom line: You want the team you play for to win Sunday? Maybe take those extra hours in the gym and use some of that time to grab some ZZZs.

Dr. Michael Grandner returns for a fast-moving conversation about sleep and athletic performance, including:

• why athletes are particularly interesting subjects for sleep researchers;
• travel, unfamiliar hotel rooms and disrupted sleep schedules;
• how the earlier conversation with Dr. Ravi Allada and Dan Shulman about Major League Baseball fits into the larger athletic-performance picture;
• the difference between conducting a new experiment and reviewing what an entire body of research already tells us;
• Grandner's work with sleep-and-performance researcher Jonathan Charest;
• physical performance;
• cognitive and mental performance;
• injury risk and recovery;
• athlete mental health;
• the complicated relationship between sleep and concussion;
• why concussion can disrupt sleep — and the possibility that sleep problems may also identify athletes at greater future concussion risk;
• a University of Arizona study following Division I athletes over the course of a year;
• why daytime sleepiness and insomnia weren't simply measuring the same thing in that research;
• what sleep extension studies have found when athletes are given more opportunity to sleep;
• basketball shooting, sprinting, tennis accuracy and other sport-specific performance measures;
• why the advantages of better sleep aren't accompanied by the sort of side effects associated with conventional performance enhancement;
• why young athletes may be chronically underslept thanks to early practices, academics, travel and overloaded schedules;
• the NCAA's growing recognition of sleep as part of athlete health and performance;
• the International Olympic Committee's recognition of sleep as part of athlete mental health;
• the old sports mentality that sleeping means your opponent is somewhere getting better;
• whether convincing athletes to prioritize sleep is partly a cultural problem;
• why Grandner finds athletes easier to persuade than some people in corporate environments;
• athletes as potential role models for making sleep look like performance behaviour rather than weakness;
• what might be going through the minds of two starting quarterbacks the night before the Super Bowl;
• and why preparing with good sleep beforehand may matter more than achieving one perfect night immediately before a huge event.

Dr. Michael Grandner is a behavioral sleep medicine specialist and Director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the University of Arizona.

He is currently Professor of Psychiatry and Director of both the Sleep and Health Research Program and the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Clinic at Banner – University Medical Center.

https://medicine.arizona.edu/psychiatry/leadership

• Sleep and Athletic Performance: Impacts on Physical Performance, Mental Performance, Injury Risk and Recovery, and Mental Health — the review by Jonathan Charest and Michael Grandner at the centre of this episode. It was published in Sleep Medicine Clinics in 2020.
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32005349/
• Insomnia and daytime sleepiness: risk factors for sports-related concussion — the University of Arizona study Grandner discusses. Researchers followed 190 NCAA Division I athletes and found that insomnia symptoms and daytime sleepiness were independently associated with subsequent concussion risk. Importantly, this was an observational association, not proof that poor sleep directly causes concussions.
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31132574/
• The effects of sleep extension on the athletic performance of collegiate basketball players — the Stanford study Grandner references when discussing shooting accuracy, sprint performance, reaction time and mood after players increased their sleep opportunity.
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21731144/
• Wake up call for collegiate athlete sleep — the NCAA Interassociation Task Force on Sleep and Wellness consensus recommendations discussed by Grandner. The paper addressed athlete sleep, performance, screening and institutional strategies for improving sleep. Grandner was one of its authors.
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31097460/
• International Olympic Committee consensus statement on mental health in elite athletes — the 2019 IOC statement Grandner mentions. It includes a substantial section on sleep disorders and sleep concerns in elite athletes and identifies sleep as part of athlete health, performance and mental well-being.
• https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/53/11/667

Major General Melvin Spiese (RET, USMC) has had more to do with how the men and women of the US Marine Corps are trained than perhaps anyone else.

Here, he talks with Neil about how training our fighting forces has evolved over the years, how the training has shifted to the area above the neck, and how sleep impacts our soldiers.