Stuff You Should KnowInsomnia is rough stuff. Listen in and learn all about why you can't fall asleep and what you can do about that.
Hey, everybody, we're going on tour and you can come out and see us in Orlando on August twelfth, Nashville on September sixth, and we're gonna wrap it all up on September ninth in our hometown of Atlanta, GA.
That's right, And these are the last shows of the year. This has been a really good show this year. We're super excited about it, and this is going to be your only chance to be in the theater with us, and you know, like fifteen sixteen hundred of your closest pals.
So go to stuff youshould know dot com and check out our tour page for links and information, and you can also go to link tree slash sysk for the same stuff. We'll see you guys this August and September.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and jerryse here. We're all feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed in chipperd. Why aren't you not me?
I'm sleepy.
Are you really sleepy?
Yeah?
How do you sleep?
Uh, like side sleeper or just generally? Yeah, Uh, my sleep is pretty good. I get up a lot to go potty too, but I've gotten way better, probably since I've had a kid, of being able to fall back asleep pretty easily, whereas I used to not be so good at that. And that's a real key to getting good sleep is because very few people I think adults are I mean some are, but are just so sound that they're just rocks through the night. You gotta be able to get back to sleep. If you start thinking about stuff, then your toast.
Yeah, some people have trouble falling back asleep. Some people, chuck, get this, have trouble falling asleep initially.
Even I have a lot of empathy for people with chronic insomnia, which we're talking about insomnia. It just sounds like a terrible thing. Uh. We've talked about fatal familie insomnia. Yeah, and we've talked about like how much sleep do people need? That was one of the early early ones.
And is science phasing out sleep? That was about new tropics.
Yeah, but I was really surprised that we hadn't just done a regular old insomnia. But big thanks to the National Institute of Health and Sleep Foundation. Yes, our old friends at houstuffworks dot com Okay, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard. I got a lot of different sources for this one. And here we go with insomnia.
Okay, I guess we're starting, everybody. It was a pre amble, so I thought that this definition of insomnia was about as succinct as it can be. It's a sleep disorder characterized by difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or both. This is very important, even if you have ample time to fall asleep or sleep, even if you have a bedroom environment conducive to RESTful sleep. So you, guys, are everything you need to sleep, and you still can't sleep, you still can't stay asleep or both.
Yeah, if you, and we'll get to all the different kinds. It gets a little confusing. Actually, I'm still not one hundred percent sure how to classify the different types of insomnia.
I think they rolled it all together.
Well yeah, true, But if you you know, if you live next door to or above an apartment above like a loud club, or if you recently had like a big shift in your work hours like these are all reasons that you might not be able to get to sleep and you may have insomnia. But and again we'll go over all these and more detail. But that is like a temporary or transient insomnia. Transient if it's if it's really just a few days, like if you have jet lag or something, and then if it's a few days into it, like a week or two, then it can then it travels to what's the other gun n no no, no, acute insomnia and then chronic is the the really really tough one.
Right, Well, we'll break all that out, but we should talk talk a little more about what happens with insomnia and like what's required to actually get a diagnosis, because it's not enough to show up and say like I'm having trouble sleeping that you have to say I'm having trouble sleeping and I can't finish the sentence during the day because I'm so tired.
Yeah, and you also, the first thing your doctor is going to say is like how much sleep you're getting, because as we went over in are do you.
Really say sleep none?
Do you really need to sleep? Episode? And it's a big swath. It's interesting when you look at the breakdown of how much sleep you need as you age. I can't remember what it was for preteen.
It's like a million hours a day, it was.
A lot, but thirteen to eighteen it's eight to ten hours. And then they say between eighteen, once you hit eighteen, all the way up into sixty four years of age, you need about six to eight hours. No, no, no, I'm sorry, seven to nine hours, right, and then once you get a little bit older than sixty, that actually goes down to seven to eight instead of seven to nine.
You know what sucks, though, is I saw not necessarily that you need less sleep as you age, but that you get less sleep as you age, whether you want to or not, because your sleep deteriorates, your ability to sleep deteriorates because your brain should over time.
Yeah, and you and I know that you can testify to this, but as you get older, the ability for most people to sleep in is really what goes.
I'm glad for that. I've actually started getting up earlier and earlier. And I like, no kidding, yeah, why I know some of the time stamps on emails I've sent you.
Yeah, it's not like I get alerts or anything. It's not like you're waking me up. But I'll see emails from you in like the six o four range. I'm like, all right, Josh, is at it man.
Yeah, yeah, I've already had my coffee and gone for a jog by then.
I get up early too, and I am glad for it because I like mornings and I think a lot of good work is done in the morning.
And that's what I say.
If I can sleep until eight am, that's ah, that's a.
I would feel like I wasted the entire day if I slept till eight.
I would feel like I.
Must have raved all night if I if I woke up at eight.
But sometimes I'm the earliest riser in my house, like on weekends. Emily can still sleep. I mean, she has bouts of insomnia for sure, but when she sleeps, she can she can rocket. Man, that's awesome. Yeah, ten o'clock or so if I if it happens.
Pretty enviable, No kidding, Yeah, I haven't done that in a really long long time.
How does um sleep?
She sleeps fine, I mean.
But does she get up earlier? Does she sleep a little later?
She gets up, She's awake earlier then she gets up because Momo sleeps in later.
So there's just like morning bed relaxation.
Yeah, and you doesn't want to disturb Mo because MO will follow her out and like it'll it'll affect her last like hour of sleep. So yeah, she hangs out with mo and does less stuff.
Amen. Uh that that that weekend spend that first hour in bed doing stuff is very nice and relaxing totally.
You mean like you mean barbecue.
All right, So insomnia in Latin literally means no sleep, and they had to settle on a number. You know, it really varies on how long it takes people to fall asleep, obviously, but they had to get together finally and say, we got to come up with a number everybody for what you should shoot for. And what they eventually landed on was twenty minutes to fall asleep is what they consider sort of the quote unquote normal range, and if you're going well well beyond that, then you may have insomnia.
Yes, yeah, that's weird. Like I think that you usually need thirty to forty five minutes to fall asleep, and I don't know if that's just on the nights where you get sleep, or if that alone qualifies you for insomnia, because.
Because thirty didn't, I mean, that's only ten minute, it's more.
No, but that would qualify as difficulty falling asleep, which The term for that is sleep on set insomnia.
And that's if you're really trying to go to sleep, you're not laying there scrolling through your social medis.
Right, and we'll see that trying to go to sleep can have like the a counterproductive effect on people with insomnia, because there's a type of insomnia where you are worried you're not going to get sleep so much that you can't fall asleep.
Yeah, and that's one of the biggest I think things about insomnia if you really have bad insomnia, is the worry and even the in the hours before bedtime, people will start to worry. And that's just such a sad way to live, you know.
Yeah, the idea of thinking about your bedroom is a place of dread in Anxietymy is really really sad to me. And I love my bedroom, Yes, me too. And I hope that everyone with insomnia gets over it eventually because everyone deserves good sleep.
Yeah, And you know, it goes out saying that lack of sleep can cause all sorts of medical health issues because your body needs sleep, not to mention accidents that can happen when you're too sleepy, whether it's falling asleep at the wheels or if you you know, work a chip job and you're running machinery stuff like that, all kinds of bad things have happened because you haven't had been asleep.
Yes, and so you say, okay, well, this is a disorder that affects a lot of people. Did you say how many people have it?
I didn't. We didn't go with the stats. Why don't you hit them with some.
Okay, I'm taking the statman role for today.
All Right, I'm gonna take a quick little micro sleep.
As many as seventy million Americans have some sort of sleep disorder, which would include insomnia, and that at any given night, there's ten percent of people in the United States are having trouble sleeping. There's a lot of people. That's twenty five million something like that, and that eventually about two thirds of people will experience insomnia to some degree or another.
Yeah. I also saw some worldwide statistics that said that, and this wasn't necessarily just insomnia, but sixty two percent of people all around the world say they don't get enough sleep. Yeah, that's a lot, that's you know, in the majority.
Yeah, that's sad.
People aren't sleeping enough.
And it's supposedly a pretty modern problem because I saw some sleep doctor I think he was a neurologist, and he was saying, like, you know, we have ways of storing up energy later on, because humans as a species have encountered you know, feast or famine cycles before, so our bodies evolved to like store food for a while in times of leanness, right, don't have that with sleep, Like we don't have a way to store like a wakefulness or something like that, or energy in our brain for times when we don't get And he was saying, that's evidence right there that we've never as a species encountered difficulty sleeping before. That that is a very new thing.
That's really interesting.
Yeah, I thought so too.
And not surprising. There is not a like a single you can't point to a single cause. Or are all kinds of reasons someone might have insomnia, but most of them boiled down as far as like not non psychological causes. There are many, many, many physiological arousals that might keep you awake, and it's you know, it's at bedtime. It's not when you want them. So like your body temperature might be up, or your heart rate might be up, or your cortisol levels or other hormones might be jumping around, and this is happening at bedtime, which is not when you want that stuff to happen. You may have also gotten it from It could be genetic, It might have something to do with your age. I think women are more likely to have bouts of insomnia.
Than men, especially if they are pregnant.
A big time. It's like eighty something percent, right, yes, yeah, and if you it can also be comorbid with a lot of different kinds of mental health disorders, especially things like depression and anxiety. I think it was something like eighty eighty five percent of people with depression like also have insomnia.
So let's take in a little more to these categories, these baffling, confusing categories. Okay, sure you mentioned transient insomnia. Let's say just a day or two or a couple of days. Say you have, like a good example as an upcoming deadline at work, right, Okay, totally makes sense. But once the deadline comes and goes, no matter what, you're probably going to be able to sleep again. If you have a longer term, say if you have a much bigger problem or a much more extended thing, that's making you upset. That would probably translate into that acute insomnia and then anything over. I saw three months, I saw a month. But if you have trouble sleeping at least three days a week for longer than three months, you, my friend, have skated, unfortunately, into chronic insomnia.
Yeah. And I think part of the diagnosis too, is that it has to it has to be affecting your daily your your wake time as well. Right, Yes, so you're not able to concentrate at work, maybe your relationships are suffering, like it's it's really kind of wrecking your daytime hours as well.
Yeah, you turn into Edward Norton in fight club.
So here's my question. Because I thought I had it sorted. Now I'm not really sure because the DSM and then the what's the official sleep manual called I can't remember sleep Bible. Yeah, sure, let's call it that. But they've they've kind of changed things over the years just to confuse people. But there's also primary and secondary insomnia, right.
Yes, I don't believe this is the case anymore. I think they used to divide it up until very recently. But primary insomnia was where the insomnia itself is the disorder. There's not another cause, it's not comorbid with something, it's the problem itself. And they further broke it down into three subcategories of primary insomnia, psycho psycho's physiological, idiopathic, and paradoxical.
Yeah, idiopathic literally means there's no cause, and that's the one that they've basically gotten rid of completely. Yes, although I did see that there was still some debate going on. I'm sure there's still some people like that don't want to give that up for some reason. Yeah, they love the name. They basically said though, that like that there is a reason behind I think idiopathic was like, you know, you're sort of a kid that can't sleep, and then you're an adult who can't sleep and there just never is any reason. And they're basically saying, like, that's really not true.
You're convinced throughout your life that there really is a monster in your closet. You just can't shake it.
That's right.
There's also that psychophysiological one I said, where this is the one where you're worried about sleep and supposedly all it takes is one night where there's trouble sleeping. For somebody with psycho physiological insomnia to start worrying that they're not going to get sleep, and then that worry leads them to not get sleep. It's like a self fulfilling prophecy, and that's its own subtype. And then there's that paradoxical one. Right.
Paradoxical is sort of confusing because it is a paradox and I guess those are confusing. But that means you have you experience sleeplessness, but you don't have the bad effects during the day somehow.
Yeah, that's just strange.
Yeah.
And then there's secondary insomnia, and that's where the insomnia is a it comes, it arises from a disorder. It's secondary to the actual real issue, where if you solve the first issue, the insomnia should reasonably be expected to go away.
Yeah, and that's always been sort of the line share of cases, like eighty percent or more. And I think I read that they basically combined everything because they were like, the treatment's not going to be that wildly different because there are only certain things you can try, and we should try these for everyone that has insomnia.
Plus, it's not a good look for psychology as a feel that there is an entire category of we don't know insomnia.
Yeah. True.
So some of the things that can trigger secondary insomnia. You mentioned some people at risk, like pregnant people or the elderly as you age, but also people with depression, anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder. Apparently eighty five percent of people who have clinical depression also have insomnia. And there's also a lot of drugs that can keep you up as well. Ironically, those same people who have depression, their treatment for depression SSRIs can actually keep them up and give them insomnia as well, so they could they would have double secondary insomnia.
It sounds like, yeah, there are all kinds of and these are drugs that people you know, are very popular for a lot of things like cardiovascular disease and asthma and allergies and beta blockers and alpha blockers, like all kinds of very common drugs. One of these side effects oftentimes is sleeplessness, so you know, you always have to take that into consideration for the picture of your overall health.
Right, Chuck, I think it's high time we took a break.
Let's do it.
Okay, Hey, I have another stat for you before we get started again.
Let's hear it, stat Man, So Statman, brothers.
I saw that your sleep deteriorates with your age, is what I was saying earlier, right, h They apparently quantified it that you you lose about twenty seven minutes per night each decade from middle age.
M middle aged, meaning in your forties.
That's what I'm guessing is I think it was the beginning of middle age and middle aged.
So in your fifties about a half hour less. In your sixties that would be about an hour less.
Yep, seventies hour and a half, seventies hour and a half, eighties. Let's not even talk about.
It, no man, And it's again dressing.
That's not where you're like, oh, I don't need any sleep. I'm a senior citizen. It's it's like my sleep sucks now compared to how it was when I was younger.
Yeah, yeah, that's no good. I saw some other low risk categories, or i'm sorry, high risk categories that are not surprising but maybe often overlooked, And one was low income households, and people oftentimes have insomnia because of that stuff. Something you might not think about much.
Yeah, worrying about things like bills or paying rent, or yeah, absolutely issues and all that stuff that's that will keep you up at night, and that is that qualifies as insomnia obviously.
Any anyone suffering chronic pain. Diabetes is another one. And then the you know, sort of the sleep apnea and like restless leg syndrome and the Jimmy legs stuff like that.
I knew you were gonna say it. If you didn't say it, I was going to say it.
Yeah, that's all going to keep you up more. And again, something like restless leg syndrome might wake you up, but it's that ability to get back to sleep is when it becomes a big problem.
Yeah, so an inability to fall back asleep is sleep maintenance, insomnia. I don't know, it's all these great terms associated.
Yeah, they get really specific. Sleep is one of the more studied things.
You bet your sweep bippy, it is chuck.
As far as the diagnosis, like you were talking about, you can't just stroll in and say like, I can't sleep and they say here's some drugs to help you. Well they might they yeah, actually might, So forget I said that. Scratch that. But it does start with you telling your doctor because they're not with you in the bedroom. So unless you're married to a doctor, So you do go in and say I can't sleep, and what they're probably gonna do is say, well, really describe that, and they may give you something right away, or they may say, well, why don't you keep a sleep diary for a week, because someone might just say like, I don't really know. I just know that I wake up a lot and stuff. And the sleep diary is what makes the patient really kind of track what's going on to help both you and the doctor, like helping you help yourself.
Yeah, and they're not just gonna say I don't know. They're gonna be like, I don't know, Okay, I haven't slept in two weeks, Okay, get off my back.
Yeah, you see these bags under my eyes.
So with a sleep diary, it's pretty straightforward stuff. You know, how much how much did you drink that day? What'd you eat that day? Did you exercise that day? What time? What time did you go to bed, how long did it take for you to get to sleep. Just little details like that that you take for granted when your sleep isn't problematic, right, but that you can really kind of observe and come up with some real easy things that you can change in your life that might help you go to sleep. There's something called sleep hygiene.
Yeah, I mean that's what you're describing, basically, is someone's sleep hygiene, whether it's good or bad.
Right, So what is sleep hygiene? Chuck? Which is better than hygienic utensil but still not great.
Well, it's exactly what you were saying, which is, do you exercise too close to your sleep? Were you looking at a screen that emits blue lights? Like? Right? But it's a huge one these days of course. Like right before you go to sleep, how you know, did you eat?
What?
What did you drink? Had you had any kind of stimulant? And alcohol is really bad as well, like drinking alcohol even though this not something you might think of as a stimulant.
Did you do a big hog's leg of cocaine right before you went to bed?
Sure? The sleep hygiene, it's sort of all the things that go into you know, do you have good good light blocking in your room, sound blocking? Like all of the stuff that goes into a good night's sleep is sleep hygiene.
Right, And so all those things you don't want to do, like actually you'd think exercising would be a good thing to do. No, it's actually it really energizes you. If you've ever paid attention after you you exercise, like, yes, your body is so or sore and you're kind of slow, but you feel good. You don't want to do that. Actually want to take up yoga before you sleep?
It makes me sleepy.
Yeah, it's like, especially if you do specifically yoga designed for bedtime, which is basically just some like kind of light stretches ten to fifteen minutes. If you're having trouble sleeping and you don't try bedtime yoga, you're welcome.
Yeah. Yeah, I do morning yoga and I find that I want to take a nap after.
Yeah, it really feels kid though.
I love that it does. They also say, as far as your sleep hygiene, that you want to have a regular I mean, if you're doing it right. I know it's hard for people, but you try to have a regular bedtime and wake time, and that includes weekends. So if you're having trouble sleeping and you're doing that thing where you're like, you know, you're staying up on the weekends and stuff like that, you're not doing yourselves any favors.
No, Also, you want your bedroom to be conducive to sleep. Remember that was one of the things that insomnia had to call it. You had to have enough time and a place to sleep. That was great. And they say your bedroom should be only used for sleeping and sex. That's it, and only if you're only if you're consenting adult above eighteen and you're in a loving relationship.
Okay, dad, So which.
Makes a lot of sense because you come to train yourself, you associate your bed with sleeping, so that when you go to bed and you see your bed and you're in your bedroom, you fall asleep much more quickly because you've trained yourself to think of that's the place that I sleep. That's not for doing taxes, snorting a lot of cocaine. It's it's where I sleep.
Yeah, you know, our buddy John Hodgman has long established precedent that he feels very strongly that you should have the if you're in a partnered relationship, have the very largest bed that you can afford without it being like a financial burden, right, and that we'll fit even if it doesn't fit that good. He says, you should get one if if you can afford it, like just squeeze it in there. And he says the ideal coupled sleep situation is too completely separate bedrooms separated by a courtyard with a fountain in the middle of right, and that's how you get the best sleep.
Yeah. Yeah, that people.
People weren't meant to sleep together.
It's it's definitely a thing that I think people are finally like, Okay, this might not be the best idea, Like, we might need to find some other way around. People have come up with workarounds. Apparently, more and more architects are being asked to create two primary bedrooms rather than just the one.
Hey, man, if you can pull that off, I say, go for it. It doesn't doesn't mean anything about your marriage that you want to have good sleep, So it doesn't just get ready. You can even cuddle together and then say and good night and then get up and go to your separate places. Yeah, and in the morning you can scarry on in there and jump into bed and cuddle in the morning if you want. I say this as someone who does this. We're not smart enough we sleep together and keep each other up all night?
Do you really not?
Really? I mean our animals will keep us up. Yeah, I feel bad for Emily. The cats literally lay on top of her body. Two cats laying on top of her body.
Yeah, you me does not.
She has a dog in the foot space. It's problematic.
Yeah, so Mama will will tap you me to roll over and yeah, spooner, and or she'll say like, I want to get on the other side of you, and rather than just climb over, you mean, she'll wake her up to let her know she's about to climb over. Yeah, you mean's not the best at sleep maintenance, so it takes her a while to get back to sleep. So yeah, and then other times I snore, apparently, I'm told. So there'll be times where I'm just like, okay, you you need some sleep. I'm going to sleep out on the couch tonight.
Heard you snore before? Really Guatemala, baby, So I do snore. I mean, hey, you snored in Guatemala. That's all I know. I don't know if it was country specific. That's the only time we've betted down together. I know everyone thinks we sleep in our own bunk. But getting back to U, me and Momo, that's like proof that you can be a small dog and still disrupt sleep. Oh yes, it's not like size necessarily.
And then also don't forget Umy stays in bed to let Momo sleep in. That's how that's how kind and generous Yumi is Tomo man, and how much Mo takes advantage of me.
I'd be elbowing that dog remember the spoon last night.
You couldn't because she'd just look at you and like believe times and you'd be like, do whatever you.
Want, dooey eyes, I love it. Uh. We talked about TV. Yeah, you definitely shouldn't watch I mean everyone, that's generally when people watch TV, or at least you should. If you're sitting around watching TV all day, then that's that's a problem in and of itself. But people I think generally watch TV at night is in their evening viewing. But try and cut it, cut it off and give yourself a transition period before you actually try to fall asleep.
Or and this is easy if you are on like a device or a laptop or something, there's you can switch over from blue light to a warmer light and it will have less of an effect on you. If your TV can do that, bully for you. One of the other things that if you have trouble sleeping is getting get your TV out of your bedroom. Remember, like the bed is for sleeping, it's not for watching TV.
It is for me.
I'm just saying, if you have trouble sleeping, this is an easy fix for you. You watch TV and then you go to bed. You don't go to bed and watch TV. If you have trouble sleeping, do what you want. I mean, but yeah, that's that's just an easy solution if you're having trouble sleeping.
Oh no, for sure. If I had trouble sleeping, then I would get that TV out of there for sure. And I think sort of one of the takeaways there is is to make going to bed like a transition from doing something to doing something else. However, as we'll see, and we'll talk about this in a little bit, like sometimes that transition can bring on the panic of like, oh crap, like I have insomnia and now I'm going to the dreaded place and we'll, you know, we'll talk about workarounds there. Should we take another break or should we wait?
I think we should take a break.
Okay, let's take a break and we'll take another little nap and we'll be right back. So Are we at the place where we talk about fixing it and not fixing it and not just in ways of improving sleep hygiene.
Yeah, I think so, because the other.
Ways are basically a few it's drugs, which we'll talk about, and then a couple of different therapies, and like sleep retraining.
Yeah, there's some They almost sound mean, but apparently they're really effective, some of the retraining. Yeah, well let's talk about it, Chuck.
All right, Well, obviously relaxation techniques, meditation, controlled breathing, all these sort of low level relaxing behavior with therapies can really help you out if you can get in that kind of mind space.
Yes, And then we talked about how just the idea of not being able to go to sleep can make you lose sleep and cause insomnia, just the fear of that. So there's a technique called remaining passively awake, where you're like, I don't care if I go to sleep or not. I'm just staying up. It doesn't matter, and if I fall asleep then great, if I don't, whatever, It's like you're changing your mindset so that you're not worried about it. You're just kind of taking a more casual approach to it, and apparently that can have the effect of removing the anxiety enough that you will fall asleep, kind of whether you mean to or not.
Yeah, I just man, I can think. I can't imagine what it's like to be so desperate that you're trying all these different things, and imagine even trying these things will bring on anxiety. I have seen a thing where the bedroom can be such a like they recommend that you just once you leave your bed in the morning if you can, if you're in a studio apartment or something, then that really stinks. But like close that bedroom door and do not go in there at all all day long. Put it on it like it's not there. Yeah, exactly, put a lock on the door. What else?
What about supplements, Well, one of the ones that people use a lot, chuck is melatonin, and it's a natural supplement. They as a matter of fact, they make it. Some of it from the pineal glands of animals. Did you know that.
I did. I think most of it's synthesized, but I did know that some of it came from animals, And.
You don't want those. You want the synthetic ones or maybe ones from microorganisms. But they say, like, yeah, you can take melatonin. If you have like maybe jet lag, you can take it for a night or two. Or if you're if you have transient insomnia or your ship has just changed, you're doing shift work, and it's just melatonin can't help. It does it's our brains produce it in response to darkness, and it does help us sleep. The thing is is over time prolonged juice. Like if you have chronic insomnia, you do not want to use melatonin because it can have all sorts of dileterious effects, like because it controls not just how you sleep, but also your blood vessel tone, your body temperature, your blood sugar, and you can mess with those things inadvertently over time by taking melatonin.
Yeah, and that goes, it goes. For parents, you know they have the kids sleepy gummies.
Yeah, and.
We will use those very like half of one, very judiciously. But you don't wanna you know, the jury's kind of still out, but I don't know for me, you don't want to be given your kid like a sleep aid every single night.
There's a lot of legal metaphors you just used.
Well, I just you know, I have seen like all kinds. Like, I don't think all the evidence is in on like kids taking melatonin. Yeah, but to me that's reason enough to where like you wouldn't want to give your kid a meloton and gummy every night even though, yeah, you know, you can be desperate as a parent when your kid won't go to sleep.
I mean they used to use and probably still use, like benadryl. Right, didn't that knock kids out?
I don't know.
I'm pretty sure some parents do use that really all right, Yeah, and then cough syrup if you're really desperate. I'm sure.
The there're other, you know, supplements. There's not a ton of like scientific evidence for stuff like aromatherapy to fall asleep and stuff like that and other supplements. But like, you know, if it's if it's safe to try, then you can give it a whirl, is what I think as far as that stuff goes, Like, try some aromatherapy. It might work for you. I don't think it's gonna hurt.
Probably not unless it like catches your curtains on fire.
Like tripp a fan is another one, and Valerian over the counter seth.
I don't know if it was. I've never taken it as a pill. I've always made tea from Valerian root. Yeah, and it's an acquired taste for sure, and acquired smell, but it does have a very mellowing effect on me for sure.
Yeah. And CBD. You know what, I'd meant to look into this because there are all kinds of CBD gummies and things like that, like sleep gummies.
So have you ever have you taken CBD gummies and been able to like, no, noticed any difference in your sleep or anything.
Well, I don't need them for sleep, so I haven't tried it, Okay, but I know people who.
Do and they report good things from it.
Yeah, but you know who knows we should do one on CBD because it's sort of the wild West it is.
Did you see Woody Harrelson's brother has his.
Own line of it, Matthew McConaughey.
And he doesn't say he's Woody Harrelson's brother, but his last name is Harrelson. And if he's not Woody Harrelson's brother, I will eat a hat. I have a few of them.
You saw that thing about he McConaughey maybe being brothers for real? No, Yeah, that was recent. They discovered. I can't remember, so I'm not going to try and act like I remember the exact terms. But it was something about some they found some possible family link. Wow, And there's a lot of similarities with them, and they're very very very close friends and a lot of like and they were both kind of like, Man, I wonder if this is true. So I'm not sure if they're looking into it or not. So I I think her mom while her while McConaughey's mom was divorced from his dad and they eventually got remarried at least once. I think that she knew Woody Harrelson's dad and was like in the same town at the same time, like nine months before one of them was conceived or something. I think it was something like that.
Yeah, so we can't mention Woody Harrelson's dad and not remind everybody that he was a suspect in the JFK assassination at one point, the very famous three tramps who were jacked up by the cops right afterward, one of them was Woody Harrelson's dad.
It's right, And didn't Donald Trump say Ted Cruz's dad was in on it or something?
I think yeah, I think so. And then the internet made Ted Cruz say that he's not the Zodiac Killer. You remember that. Oh yeah, he's like I wasn't even boyed he was killing people or I was like five years old, like they made him say it.
Oh boy.
So you talked about prescriptions and you know that.
May like real drugs, Yes, those.
Can help apparently, but they're they're meant for short periods of time because you can very quickly develop a dependence on them.
Yeah, most of them, like ambien we've talked about, uh, and then lu Nesta and these are of course the brand names of zolpidem and etso py clone. I think, uh, those are those are kind of known to be habit forming and for short periods. But I think I looked up that ramelteon that was in the in the stuff that was in our article, but that I think is supposed to be non habit forming and has fewer side effects as something like ambient.
Ramelte I know, I didn't see that anywhere. Yeah, okay, yes, okay, it's.
A benzodiazepine receptor antagonists.
Right, and but I think it's a melatonin receptor antagonists or agonist. It makes melotonin like crazy.
It makes an ag They.
Also might prescribe any depressants in low dosages, especially if you have anxiety over not sleeping, which can help as well, but in particular with ambient and lunesta and those sedative hypnotics. Those are the ones where like they come with warnings saying like be aware, like you may drive your car while you're sleeping. Yeah, you may like have sex or do all sorts of risky behavior. Yeah, eat a stick of butters like that, that perennial one, but it really does happen.
What if someone read that is like eat a stick of butter and they're like, yeah, so what's the problem, right?
I do that while I'm wide awake.
I used to catch Ruby when she was younger, just getting into the butter.
Oh yeah, do you guys keep get butter around?
I don't remember, of course. And she'll see her with a big piece of butter on a fork and like what are you doing? Just like it's so good, it is good, but you keep this assaulted? Well, we have both, but you know, I said you probably shouldn't do that, but it's like, you know, you're also five years old and a pad of Butter. It's not going to kill you right now. Just watch out. That's how they hook you.
Yeah, exactly, big Butter.
Should we talk about this world record stuff?
I think so. So.
There have been a lot of people over the years. It used to be a thing where people would test the limits of human sleeplessness and enter contests or vie for the world record and stuff like that, and through the decades there have been many, many records broken until they basically the Guinness Company stopped in nineteen ninety seven said we're going to stop monitoring this because it's like straight up dangerous.
Yeah. But by the time they stopped, someone had gotten to eighteen days. He's twenty one hours and forty minutes, four hundred and fifty three hours. A guy named Robert MacDonald from I think Modesto, California in nineteen eighty six.
Yeah, he was a twenty seven year old stunt man. Yeah, and that's four hundred and fifty three and change hours. And this was a rocking chair marathon, which was another one of the ladies from the UK, Maureen Weston, who was a record holder at one point, she was also in a rocking chair marathon.
The guy who gets the most press though for having stayed up the longest actually came in like fourth or fifth by now. But his name is Randy Gardner, and back in nineteen sixty three, he was a seventeen year old who was looking to win a science experiment contest, right, so he decided to stay up as long as he could and break the record, which I think his record that he set was eleven days and twenty five minutes, which was longer than the record at the time, and at that time, I think in the nineteenth sixties, it was like a thing that DJs did. They would just stay yeah, for as long as they could. And if I'm not mistaken before Randy Gardner, like the limit was around eight or nine days, so he really shattered the record. But other people had taken stimulants and really lost their poop as a result. They basically took stimulants for eight days in a row and didn't sleep. Of course, it's going to mess with you, so he learned not to do that, but instead he was distracted. He had two friends that stayed with him, and eventually a doctor named doctor William Dement who would take Randy Gardner to go play like pinball to keep them awake sometimes.
Yeah, And I think that one is one of the most well known because because of that doctor and the fact that he hung out and sort of quote unquote studied him and you know, he experienced what you would think, which is hallucinations, delusions, memory problems, perception issues, motor control issues PCP. Yeah, all the stuff that would expect when you can't get sleep yep.
But he also said that he believes that it had lasting damage. He developed Alzheimer's in his sixties. He attributes to that he also developed insomnia later on in life too. Oh really yeah, oh yeah, he couldn't sleep six hours a night.
Geez. All right, so maybe we should finish on the long promised cognitive behavioral therapy routine aka sleep boot camp. And then what was the other one called.
SCT stimulus therapy stimulus.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because those used in conjunction seem to be sort of the gold standard.
Yeah, there was an Australian study that found out that if you put those two together over the course of five weeks, say goodbye insomnia.
Right. So there are different ways to do, you know, all kinds of cognitive behavioral therapy, but one common sleep boot camp would be something where you go into this program. You're supposed to I believe, the night before you're supposed to sleep no more than five hours, so you go in sort of sleepy, and then when you go in, you go to a sleep lab around bedtime, and then you spend the next twenty five hours basically in little thirty minute fifty different thirty minute sessions trying to fall asleep.
You spend the next twenty five hours in hell.
Essentially, it sounds pretty bad because the goal here is they want you to know that you can fall asleep quicker than you usually do and what that feels like. And they do that by like saying, all right, try and fall asleep, and you try and fall asleep, and if they do fall asleep, after three minutes, they wake you up and say, hey, do you think were you asleep just now? And if you say no, then they say, well, guess what you were Or you say yes, they'll say congratulations, you were, and then they just keep doing that over and over, so you're getting really, really more and more tired, so that sleep deprivation builds up until you kind of train yourself to fall asleep.
Yeah, and then just to really mess with you. Every time you do fall asleep, they change their clothes real quick, so you're really disoriented when you wake up put on a wig. Yeah, but so apparently in twenty five hours this works, like that boot camp will will help cure you. And like you said, it shows people, yes, you can fall asleep and that the sleep deprivation that's generated doesn't hurt.
Either, Right, So that's that. Then the set stimulus control therapy is when they say, go to your this is not at a sleep place or whatever, it's just in your regular house. Go to bed, and then after twenty minutes, if you're not asleep, get up and get out of that room and go to another room of your house and like read or meditate or do something that you know will relax, to use something that has proven to relax you, and then go back and try again. And if that doesn't work in twenty minutes, get up and leave the room again. But don't lay there in bed essentially for an hour or two, tossing and turning and stressing.
Yeah, at the very least, you're distracting yourself from worrying laying in bed worrying by going and doing something relaxing like reading a book. How else all listen to a podcast that's a good one and you just repeat is necessary until you fall asleep. And apparently five weeks of stimulus control therapy following a sleep boot camp program of twenty five hours, this Australian study found that that is a really great way to get past chronic consomnia without any drugs.
Yeah, and like that's the good good news is I roundly found everywhere I looked that most people can cure their ensomn. That is the good news. And a lot of the people who a lot of people never try. I think I saw or I just did the math that was something like sixty something percent of people. No, no, it was like eighty something percent say that they should get more sleep or they don't sleep well, I think was the stat but only like sixty percent do something about it, so or maybe it was even less. It ended up being like twenty or thirty percent of people like have insomnia and don't seek help.
Yeah, I think a lot of them are like, well, wait a minute. To cure my insomnia, I need to stop looking at my phone right before bed. Then forget it. I'll just deal with the insomnia.
Yeah, or just you know, struggle through it. And I think the same goes with any mental health issue, like so many people just don't seek help and try and figure it out for themselves, and that it's oftentimes the very first step to solving your problem.
There's one other thing, too, Chuck, that I want to talk about before we sign off. Here.
Let's do it counting cheap apparently, actually I didn't get to read the case, so teach me this up.
It not only doesn't work, it can actually keep you up longer.
I could see that.
They think that it originated with medieval shepherds who devised the counting system to keep track of their flock. And the upshot of it is that it's so boring that it would put anybody to sleep, even somebody who had trouble sleeping. But that's not actually the case, And instead, researchers suggest, if you're at the point where you're trying to count sheep, instead envision a really relaxing place like a beach or a mountain cabin or whatever whatever relaxes you. Yeah, exactly on Black Friday, And that concentrating on that and it being kind of engrossing is what will help you drift off to sleep, or at the very least, it will distract you from worrying about not sleeping enough that you might fall asleep.
You know that cheap counting thing we may have talked about that that sounds for.
Micro Yeah, it's an understanding trope. Yeah. Well, since Chuck said yeah, everybody, that means it's time for a listener mail.
I'm going to call this longtime listener. Hey, guys and Jerry. I don't know what counts as a longtime listener, but I have been listening for over half my life. I think that counts Nova. This is from Nova. That counts Nova. I can't even remember when I first started listening. I remember I first remember listening when I was ten or eleven maybe, and I used to listen to back to back episodes in spare free time while playing Minecraft. I just graduated college with a degree in mechanical engineering, and I'm often working an awesome job where I get to work with planes. I just want to give you guys a big thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you do. I consider you guys role models in my life, and I strive have your genuine curiosity and open mindedness every day. Your podcast got me through some tough times, and I always knew that I could turn on some stuff you should Know and feel better. Thanks for all the young minds that you have sharpened, and thank you from a big NERD for giving me so many fun facts, a curious nature, and a huge love of learning. I would never have even considered or finished an engineering degree without the tools that you gave me. And I hope to inspire other engineers the way you inspired me, and I hope to be an even longer term listener. And that's from Nova. Nova. That stuff makes us feel good.
Yeah, that was a great email, full stop, exactly, no pity comments, no, no, thanks for letting us know. Nova, that's really cool. And if you want to be like Nova and let us know how we impacted your life, hopefully in a positive way. We love hearing that stuff. You can send us an email at stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
