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Understanding Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia with Andrew Colsky
28 Plays1 year ago
Treat insomnia — without taking pills. Insomnia is the most prevalent sleep disorder in America, and often it's a person's behavioral habits that inadvertently reinforce it. Discover the psychology of behavioral sleep medicine and the proven techniques that help people rest better. Plus, we talk about why sleep tests aren't as scary as they seem.
Andrew Colsky is a behavioral sleep medicine clinician and founder of the National Sleep Center. He's also the host of the Sleep Science Today podcast. Find out more at https://www.nationalsleepcenter.com/.
In this episode:
- Defining insomnia: How do you know you have it?
- The bad habits that make sleeping difficult
- Understanding the sleep pressure build-up
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I)
- Recognizing sleep apnea symptoms
- Modern sleep tests
- What it's like to see a sleep medicine clinician
- Resources for learning more sleep science
Connect with us at SuenoLabs.com. We're currently looking for contributors and podcast guests!
Disclaimer: This show is for informational purposes only. Sueño Labs does not provide medical advice.
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Transcript
Prevalence and Impact of Sleep Disorders
00:00:00
Speaker
According to information from the National Council on Aging, about 30% of U.S. adults have symptoms of insomnia, with 10% saying insomnia impacts their daily activities. Meanwhile, approximately 39 million U.S. adults have obstructive sleep apnea.
00:00:19
Speaker
These are two of the most common sleep disorders in America, and if you clicked on this podcast because you are living with insomnia or sleep apnea or maybe because you want to learn more about these because you have a loved one who is affected or you think that you may have the symptoms, first of all, I commend you for learning more. And if you're like most people I talk to, you you've probably had the frustrating experience of feeling like for insomnia in particular, the only treatment options available are to medicate. Well, tonight's guest is a specialist who works on the behaviors that contribute to insomnia and helps patients find better, more restful, more regular sleep without having to take a pill.
00:01:04
Speaker
You'll hear his expertise and experience, and if you've never been before, you'll also learn what it's like to actually see a sleep specialist. It's maybe not as scary as it seems. And there are real options to get help.
Meet the Expert: Andrew Kolsky
00:01:21
Speaker
Tonight, I talk with behavioral sleep medicine clinician Andrew Kolsky. He's also the host of the Sleep Science Today podcast. We discuss the symptoms and effects of insomnia and sleep apnea and what it's actually like to see a sleep medicine clinician get tested and find treatments that don't resort to taking a pill. I'm Jimmy Leonard. This is Swenio Labs.
00:01:49
Speaker
Andrew Kolski, welcome to Swenio Labs. How are you today? I'm doing great. Very nice to meet you, Jimmy. I really appreciate you having me on. Yeah, likewise. Really excited to get to have this conversation today. So we've got so many different things that we can cover, but I want to start with a little bit of your
Evolution of Sleep Medicine
00:02:10
Speaker
background. So among many other things, you are the founder of the National Sleep Center. So tell me a little bit about that. What's that about?
00:02:21
Speaker
So yeah, you know, here we are in 2024 and the concept of sleep is really starting to become noticed. And the whole concept of sleep medicine really only started in the seventies, basically. So it's a very new type of area that that people are getting into.
Sleep, Mental Health, and Technology
00:02:42
Speaker
So now that people are becoming more aware of their own sleep and how it impacts their mental health, their physical health,
00:02:49
Speaker
their daily life, et cetera, people are recognizing that there's some help they may need and sometimes just popping a pill doesn't do the trick. Yeah, I completely agree with that. Kind of in in line with so much that people talk about with the mental health crisis as a whole, I think there is a growing openness to get help, whether that's seeing a therapist or a counselor, but even just thinking about sleep in general too, there's got to be something better than drugging yourself up just to be able to rest. You look at the technology that we have out there today and just even, you know, look back six months and six months before that and six months before that. And you start to see changes in rapid growth and everything from the Apple watches and Fitbits, which are making people more aware of their sleep situation to different apps and
00:03:43
Speaker
you know, now people like me and you and others talking about it. So it's really becoming part of the forefront of what people are thinking about.
Andrew Kolsky's Journey into Sleep Medicine
00:03:51
Speaker
So how did you personally get interested in sleep medicine? I tend to have a very interesting background, but um from the mental health perspective,
00:04:02
Speaker
I've always been interested in what i I personally refer to as sort of these you know orphan issues, the ones that they don't teach you anything about in school. So when you get your license as a mental health counselor or many of the other professions, you don't learn anything about sleep or some of the other things that I focus on.
00:04:24
Speaker
And so I like to to go for the challenge, but the other part about it that I like is that the things that I treat would be, for example, obsessive compulsive disorder, ah tick disorder, sleep disorders, and why, what's the connection with those? The connection to me is that all of those things are things that are not taught in school. So you have to figure it out on your own and people are in need.
00:04:50
Speaker
But they also all have therapies that are evidence-based, well-proven, that actually, if used correctly by someone who's properly trained, can bring you results that are sort of night and day. you You come in as a patient with these serious problems that you just don't know how to address and you've tried everything that you can think of, and then you know We diagnose you, we get you the proper treatment, and in a relatively short period, and when I say relatively short, I mean typically three months or less, we can address these issues to a point that you see a significant change.
00:05:31
Speaker
I'm so glad you said that. That's something that I personally have a bit of a soapbox around is this idea that nobody ever talks about this in education, whether it's secondary education or even primary
Sleep Education Gaps
00:05:44
Speaker
education too. I mean, think back to all of the different classes or teachers you had that talk to you about eating right. you know Whether or not you actually eat your fruits and vegetables is a different story, but people talk about it. They talk about how important it is to exercise. They talk about these other things, but it's so rare that I meet somebody who says, yeah, when I was in middle school, high school, college, people talked to me and taught me about how important it is to sleep. Almost no one has that experience.
00:06:13
Speaker
Unless you actually were studying something very specific to the discipline, but just general knowledge, very few people can say that that was their experience. Yeah, you know, and and and the other piece to that, which is kind of comes right off of what you were saying there, is that our sleep and our sleep needs change throughout our life.
Sleep Needs Across Life Stages
00:06:35
Speaker
So that the the sleep times and the amount of sleep and things that a teenager may need are very different from a senior citizen or a baby, you know, at the different stages of life, your sleep needs and things are going to change.
00:06:49
Speaker
Yeah. We have a, well, he's not a newborn anymore. He's eight months old now. We have an eight month old baby and it is funny sometimes because with the baby, you're so concerned about the baby sleeping and the baby getting naps and the baby getting enough sleep. And then I have to stop and look in the mirror and say, do I take care of myself in the same way where I have that same importance on you need to go to sleep. You need to get enough sleep because It's different, but at the same time, it is still important. Yeah. Yeah. And look, the first off, congratulations on on being a new parent, but thank you but you know, certainly, you know, from a mental health perspective.
00:07:29
Speaker
You have that particular need to make sure that your child is safe, that your child is cared for, that you're doing the best you can for your child. And sometimes that means, or pretty much all the time with a baby, it means you're going to sacrifice your sleep because there's feedings and changes and all those types of things that have to be done.
00:07:46
Speaker
You know, but they're being done for a reason. And so, you know, you can talk about someone who says, oh, I have trouble sleeping. Well, if you have trouble sleeping because you have to be able to take care of the baby, that's different from someone who has trouble sleeping that doesn't have those concerns and they're just not able to sleep. So.
00:08:05
Speaker
You know, a lot of different factors come in when you talk about sleep issues.
Understanding Sleep Disturbances vs. Insomnia
00:08:10
Speaker
So let's get into that a little bit. I think that is sometimes where things get tricky is when we start to think about what actually qualifies as a sleep issue because there's so many different.
00:08:23
Speaker
things that we can point to. I mean, someone who's listening to this, if you're like me, there's probably so many things you do after 2, 3 p.m. where you could just say, oh, it's because I had a cup of coffee at 2 p.m. and that's why I did sleep. Or oh, it's because I went out and had a drink and and that affected my sleep. Or oh, it's because I was doing this. but But at what point can we actually say,
00:08:45
Speaker
There's a recurrent issue here where different circumstances doesn't really seem to matter over and over again. You are experiencing disrupted sleep and maybe it's time to actually pay attention to this.
00:08:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's a ah great question. And I think the answer is ah has a couple pieces to it. The first part of the answer is sort of doing ah an analysis and you're trying to figure out, so if if there's a particular reason that you can point to that is impacting your sleep, like having a new baby and having to wake up to care for it, that's that's going to be one thing.
00:09:23
Speaker
If there's something where you tend to be a person who is highly anxious, like I have some clients who are very anxious people and they have a lot of anxiety around politics, which is a big issue in the news today because the election's coming up and so we're seeing more and more stuff about politics. impossible to avoid right now it's impossible to avoid and so they The anxiety that they have, if they happen to see a certain news story or something, that's going to impact their sleep. Those are things that we can point to a specific reason, or maybe you're taking a certain medication or something that causes you to have sleep issues, or maybe you have a different co-occurring disorder, a mental health disorder, or a physical health disorder that impacts your sleep. So you got to look at all those things first.
00:10:13
Speaker
And then if you say, okay, well, none of those really apply to me. I just have trouble sleeping. Then we start thinking about insomnia, for example, there's other things that it could be as well, but the most common would be insomnia. And so how do you know if you have insomnia? So there's two types of insomnia.
00:10:31
Speaker
There's acute insomnia and there's chronic insomnia. Now, everybody's going to have acute insomnia, which means at some point there's going to be a night where you just didn't sleep well. We all have them. They may not happen that often, but they're going to happen at times. That's something that we just have to expect as part of life.
00:10:53
Speaker
The real issue becomes when we start talking about chronic insomnia.
Diagnosing Chronic Insomnia
00:10:57
Speaker
And so what is that? So chronic insomnia is basically defined by number one, you have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep or waking too early or any combination thereof. It happens at least three times a week for at least three months.
00:11:18
Speaker
And typically they throw in and you're tired during the day. Now I don't find that last one to be true in all cases. Um, there are people that are not tired during the day, but they still have the other parts. So that's your basic chronic insomnia. So Andrew, you said trouble falling asleep. What's a benchmark there? You know, I i hate saying normal, but what how long should a normal person take to fall asleep? Right.
00:11:45
Speaker
Well, so there's no correct answer there, but basically it's kind of like this. The the saying in in the industry is beds are made for sleep and sex period. So if you're getting into bed, you should be feeling like, Oh my God, I am just ready to fall asleep. So by the time you get into bed, probably within a few minutes, you're out because you were ready for sleep.
00:12:12
Speaker
someone who has chronic insomnia and has trouble falling asleep, they will get into bed and they'll be laying there and staring at the ceiling and trying to figure out how to make themselves go to sleep and, you know, tossing and turning. That's a very different story. Got it. So it's that desire. I want to be going to sleep right now. I'm in bed, should be going to sleep right now, but it's just not happening.
00:12:40
Speaker
And you start getting to that mental state of trying to will yourself to sleep, which always seems to make it worse, doesn't it? Yeah, i i I, to this day, I can't quite understand that one. It's like, so if I think about it harder or worry about it more, is that going to make me sleep better?
00:12:56
Speaker
ah You know the solution we try to put in place is counterproductive or trying to achieve we call it sleep pressure so a person builds up sleep pressure during the day and if you look at the normal circadian rhythm which is basically if we got rid of all electric light.
00:13:13
Speaker
And we just looked at the sunrise and the sunset. What happens is our body is set to wake when it gets light and go to bed when it gets dark. And the reason it does that is because we have what's called a circadian rhythm, and that is modified in the body based upon melatonin. So as it becomes closer towards the ending of the day where the sun might start to go down, our body starts to produce more melatonin. And then as the light starts to come up and we've gotten through the main part of the night, we start to decrease the amount of melatonin so that we start to become more awake. So that's sort of the natural wake cycle. Now.
00:13:54
Speaker
We have invented electric lights and that completely changes the game. ah Normally, as that melatonin starts to increase in the body, the sleep pressure increases as well so that by time you lay down in your bed, there's enough pressure that you're ready to fall asleep.
00:14:14
Speaker
but people with chronic insomnia don't have that same sleep pressure that way. They have different things going on. Could we maybe compare sleep pressure to hunger or thirst where it's just this instinctual feeling? In a way, let me let me give you a different analogy that I think is even even easier to understand. if If I were to say to you, Jimmy, I want you to hold your breath.
00:14:42
Speaker
And you sit there and you hold your breath. And I just keep waiting to see what happens. Now, normally you would think, oh, my God, if I don't breathe, I'm going to die. But the reality is your body gets to a certain point where it says, I need to take a breath. I am going to take a breath and it will take a breath. I see. Even if you tried to not breathe, your body's going to breathe. The same thing happens with sleep, which is your body knows that it needs sleep. So you You'll hear people say, oh, I've been up for X number of days and I haven't slept in so many days, whatever. And it's possible that they can be up for two, three days and haven't slept in whatever, but that sleep pressure is going to be building just like your, your need to take a breath is going to be building. The thing with chronic insomnia is those people at some point are getting sleep.
00:15:35
Speaker
but not necessarily meaning that they're going into bed and falling asleep throughout the entire night and waking up the next morning. They may be getting micro sleeps. They may take naps. They may sleep longer, at a different day. This becomes a real problem with driving because sleepy driving is really more dangerous than drunken driving.
00:15:58
Speaker
Because if you're sleepy and you're driving you kinda get to that point where you just not offer a second. Well that second your car has traveled you know depending on your speed potentially into the car friendly so the real issue there is.
00:16:13
Speaker
people are going to sleep. you're You're not going to never sleep. You know, I think you're never going to sleep, but you're not going to never sleep. You're going to sleep. It's just how you're sleeping. And with insomnia, you're sleeping in all these random ways. That's the problem you run into. You've described the symptoms really well. I'm curious about the causes. Someone's thinking, all right, I think I might have diagnosable insomnia. Is this a hereditary thing? Is this a lifestyle thing?
00:16:42
Speaker
something you ate? Good question. And there's a couple parts to that answer as well, because clearly you can imagine if somebody is, you know, filling themselves with lots of caffeine throughout the day, now they're artificially impacting their sleep, right? Because they got this drug that is causing them to be wired and and up. So thats that's one thing that could be going on.
00:17:04
Speaker
Same thing with nicotine. Nicotine can get them kind of wired and make it harder for them to sleep. The real thing here is that when we look at treating insomnia, because that'll kind of answer your question, the gold standard treatment is called CVTI, which is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. Now, why do I say that? I'll answer your question because CVTI works and why does it work?
00:17:30
Speaker
because it addresses a cognitive element as well as a behavioral element. And when we talk about sleep and treatment for sleep, we say the B is bigger than the C. The behavior is more of the issue than the cognition. Cognition typically can be these negative thoughts. Oh my God, I'm never going to sleep again. Wow, you know, I had my friend's chocolate cake and I know that always keeps me awake, you know, whatever it may be. So those are the thoughts.
00:17:58
Speaker
But it's really the behavior. And here's what I mean by that. Just like I said, you know, before the electric light and everything, we would kind of go to bed and wake with the sunset and sunrise. And that was just how it worked. Now we get into these situations where we've got people who have shift work. So maybe they work at night and sleep during the day. We have people who work late, kind of like, you know, you and I are doing this relatively late at night and we've got lights on and everything so we can work with each other.
00:18:27
Speaker
Normally in the olden days you know we might have been asleep at this at this point we also do things like have horrible what i'll call sleep hygiene so people have learned to turn their beds into sort of a nest so it's not just sleeping.
00:18:45
Speaker
They watch TV, they read a book, they scroll the internet, they talk to their friends on the phone. So the bed becomes like this office and playground and everything. We have created these behaviors that getting into bed doesn't mean we're going to sleep. It means, oh, maybe we're going to scroll the internet for an hour now, or maybe we're going to play a video game or or play with an app on our phone or yeah whatever it may be.
00:19:13
Speaker
So we create these habits that put our sleep all over the board. And so slowly, but surely we don't recognize it happening, but slowly, but surely all of these habits kind of build and build and build and build to the point that we don't have a real sleep time anymore.
00:19:29
Speaker
So when we get into bed, we can't fall asleep because our body is behaviorally, it's ready to be doing something else or something different. And then we start making up for the sleep that we're not getting by these micro sleeps or napping or doing something else. So now when we get in bed, we don't have the sleep pressure built up because we micro napped or we napped or we did something else. And so we throw everything out of whack.
00:19:54
Speaker
So primarily it's behavior. If you're in bed and you're having trouble sleeping, that's the sign for you to get out of bed. Don't lay in bed trying to figure out how you're going to make yourself sleep because all you're doing is raising your anxiety and making you not sleep.
00:20:12
Speaker
more More so the the number one golden rule is if you're not sleeping, get out of bed. Then people are like, well, what do I do in the middle of the night? If I get out of bed, there's things to do. You got friends in different time zones. You can call. There's things on TV. There's dishes that need to be done. There's laundry that has to be done. There's things that you can do, but if you're not sleeping, you shouldn't be in your bed and that will go a long way in helping you to improve your sleep quality.
00:20:38
Speaker
You talked about CBT. I, some people might be familiar with the acronym CBT from a counseling setting from treating anxiety or something like that. And one of the things that comes up with that is often not so much about the origin of the anxiety because sometimes that is is almost irrelevant to the point, but it's really just acknowledging, okay, anxiety is there. We recognize it, but now let's focus on what are we going to do with it?
00:21:02
Speaker
So maybe what I'm hearing you say is we could explore where the insomnia is coming from, but it's helpful to just say, okay, insomnia is here, but now let's think about the behavior and let's think about what we're going to do to make sure that it's not perpetuating.
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah, actually they they've done studies and what they have found that is even if a person who has chronic insomnia also has anxiety or trauma or any of these others co-occurring type of disorders.
00:21:32
Speaker
If you treat the insomnia and you don't treat the other things you're still going to get the benefit of the insomnia treatment now. Of course you probably want to treat the other things but you don't have to wait.
00:21:49
Speaker
to treat the insomnia to solve the other things first. it's It's not necessary because they work differently. So CBT, which is cognitive behavioral therapy, primarily is focused upon, we have these cognitions which are often faulty cognitions. We have these beliefs that are faulty. As a result of those faulty beliefs, we do a behavior. So I may have this faulty belief that, oh my God, if I go to a cocktail party of strangers, I just know that everybody's going to look down upon me and hate me. And then I do the behavior of either not going, or if I go there, I'm kind of like slinking around and hiding in the corner because I don't want anybody to talk to me because I created these behaviors based on these negative or inappropriate or improper thoughts.
00:22:37
Speaker
that are not true, but it's what I created. So cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on, let's fix the cognition, the thought. so that the behavior that you tie to the thought is a different behavior. So that's more of the C than the B, whereas CBTI is more of the B than the C because it's more behavioral than cognitive. But there's, you know, there's elements of both in there. Sure. Especially because a cocktail party it might not happen to you every night, but sleep is something that we do have to contend with whether we like it or not.
00:23:15
Speaker
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00:23:31
Speaker
We're talking about treating insomnia. I think one of the things that people are starting to become more aware of than maybe they were 10, 15, 20 years ago are some of the longterm effects. Like I said, sleep medicine is really starting to to catch hold right now. And so a lot of studies are being done and a lot of things are being learned. And here's some of the more recent things we've learned. It used to be the thought that if somebody had anxiety or depression or something like that, then that would impact their sleep. Now we're finding that if we improve their sleep, it improves their depression and anxiety. So in in reverse, so it's probably both depending on the person and how they're dealing with it. But we didn't recognize before that if we solve the sleep issue, we will have a positive impact on some of the mental health issues.
00:24:24
Speaker
Same thing with physical. In this country, in the US, s you go to the doctor and it's relatively rare that they're going to ask you about your sleep. In the UK, you go to the doctor and it's guaranteed they're going to ask you about your sleep. It's just a different type of training thing. And what we've learned is that if there are sleep issues and we address them, then that can have a positive impact on our physical health.
00:24:50
Speaker
The other piece that we've also learned is you know dementia and and and similar disorders are now more prevalent in the news, probably because the baby boomers are moving to those ages where it becomes more relevant.
00:25:05
Speaker
And we've seen that people can do things to actually, if they are starting to see some signs of early dementia, they can actually, by changing their behaviors, changing their diet, changing their sleep, changing their exercise, they can actually There's been stories of it being sort of stalled or reversed or, you know, there's a lot of things. Sleep can really positively impact your mental health, your physical health, has so many positive aspects. And it's probably one of the easier things to fix. Now, when I say that, what I do not mean is taking a pill.
00:25:46
Speaker
because there is no pill on the market, whether it be prescription, whether it be over the counter that will give you restful sleep. The only thing that a pill can do and pick, pick your pill or cocktail of pills that you choose is they can knock you out for a little bit. So you have the illusion that you were sleeping.
00:26:06
Speaker
but you did not get restful sleep. So people who are reliant upon sleeping pills, they'll swear by them, but they don't give them sleep. So those people are also always miserable about their sleep because they're not well rested and they're feeling the effects of walking around, having not truly gotten restful sleep. In some ways, if we compare it to exercise, it makes sense. You'll find all of these videos online that say,
00:26:36
Speaker
Hey, if you do this for five minutes every day, you, you won't sweat, your muscles won't hurt, but at the end of six weeks, you'll have ripped abs. We, we know it doesn't work like that. We know that you can't just take this easy way out and all of a sudden you're going to see different results through your body. So it makes sense. That was sleep.
00:26:56
Speaker
There is no magic pill where all of a sudden your body and your brain is going to get what it needs. You know, our culture is such that, oh, I just take a pill and everything will be fine. I can continue doing my bad habits and I can continue doing all the things that are negative and I'll just take this pill and everything will be fine.
00:27:17
Speaker
Well, you know, we sell a lot of pills. I don't know that we get too many results for people, but we sell a lot of pills. Andrew, you said something that stood out to me a second ago. You mentioned that when you go to the doctor in the US, it's very rare that somebody asks you about your sleep and I wonder if that plays a part here is that at just as I said earlier, we don't have a lot of experience learning about sleep in school, we don't necessarily have a lot of experience talking about sleep with our healthcare care providers either, because it doesn't come up very often. So I wonder if
00:27:49
Speaker
Somebody is is thinking about this, okay, I heard you mentioned CBTIs and these other things. If someone has never seen a sleep con condition or a sleep doctor, what's that experience like? Well, so great question and think about it.
00:28:09
Speaker
The reason that a person is going to be seeing the sleep doctor in the first place is because they suspect that something might be going on with their sleep. Now, how do they suspect that? So let's talk about sort of the the two most common things that someone will deal with, sleep apnea and insomnia. And now there's a thing we call commissar, which is comorbid insomnia and sleep apnea, because a lot of people will have both. Sounds like a a mutated monster. and Basically, yes.
00:28:38
Speaker
But, you know, I i was just doing ah a podcast of my own just a little while ago with ah a sleep doctor. We were talking about ah obstructive sleep apnea and we were talking about this issue. And he was describing how some patients will see a regular doctor for some other physical malady and they will recognize that there's certain like heart disease and there's certain things that are results of sleep apnea or poor sleep potentially. So in that case, the doctor is looking at a particular thing and may say, I want you to see a sleep specialist because they know there's a potential tie-in.
00:29:15
Speaker
So that's one way you would get to a sleep doctor. Another way you would get to a sleep doctor is if you have a bed partner who says to you, oh, my God, you have been snoring so loud or I was so scared because you were gasping for air in the middle of the night. Now, you don't know you're doing this because you're asleep. Then you go in and you find out you know through a sleep test that you actually have sleep apnea, which needs to be treated because there's lots of negative effects, primarily heart ah related effects. I did my own podcast with another person who had a friend who was in his, I forget how old he was, but he was young. He was maybe in his thirties, let's say, and he had sleep apnea untreated. He didn't know it. He went to bed and had a heart attack in the middle of the night and died. And so the guy on my podcast was his friend who then developed technology
00:30:09
Speaker
that people can wear to sleep that will set off an alarm if they stop breathing and, you know, have negative effects from this. So there's something that you'll go because someone has said to you, you need to go. Now I have sleep apnea myself, the way that I learned that I had sleep apnea.
00:30:26
Speaker
is I had gone on a trip with some friends. And so there were several of us sharing a hotel room. And I woke up in the morning and a couple of them are like standing there looking at me. I'm like, what? Yeah. They're like, did did you know how many times you stopped breathing last night? I'm like, what are you talking about? No, I don't know.
00:30:47
Speaker
And then I went and I got tested and sure enough, you know, there's going to be something that typically gets someone to go because they realize there's something going on. So when you say get tested, maybe that's what scares people away. They've got this picture that you're in this metallic tube or something and all of this cords and apparatus hooked up to your body. What, what's that like? So here's the good news.
00:31:12
Speaker
So if we're talking insomnia, the test is really just a conversation. That's all we really need to do. If we're talking sleep apnea. It used to be that you would go in for a sleep study, which means you'd go to an office. You'd have a little bed of your own. You'd get hooked up to all these wires, not no needles, nothing invasive, but just sticking to your head and your skin. And you'd wear a a belt around your chest to measure your respiration. So you had all these wires and things hooked to you.
00:31:45
Speaker
And they would monitor you all night and they would monitor all these signs and symptoms, which they still do today. And that's the most effective sleep test you can get. And that's not just for sleep apnea. It's for narcolepsy. It's for for so many other sleep disorders, restless leg syndrome. There's there's a lot of things that you you can find out by doing that type of a test.
00:32:05
Speaker
But the good news is about technology because it's been advancing so rapidly over the last several years. Now you can do a home sleep apnea test and it's administered by a medical doctor.
00:32:18
Speaker
And they will send you home with this thing that kind of looks like a wristwatch, maybe an oversized wristwatch. And it'll have a little lead that leads to your finger that you stick on your finger to measure your, your pulse and things. And some of them may have one other wire that you put on your, just stick to your chest. So very, very minor stuff. And you wear it for a night and it gathers all this data. And then the the data gets sent to the doctor. The doctor reviews it and they're pretty effective. Now you can get some false readings and sometimes you may want to get it confirmed with a full sleep study, but most of the time you don't need to. So sleep testing these days is very non-invasive, very simple, very minor. There's no needles, you know, there's no drugs. There's none of that. It's, it's, it's pretty simple.
00:33:11
Speaker
Especially if the alternative is continued nights of your breath stopping and really being in danger, getting a test where you can get some information certainly it could be well worth it. I mean, it is, if you have sleep apnea and you don't know it and it goes untreated, you're putting tremendous pressure on your heart. People in that case, typically, again, based on the research, they die earlier than people who are treating their sleep apnea so that they don't have the negative effects.
00:33:40
Speaker
So there's a lot of very negative physical health things that can occur if you're not treating your sleep apnea. I'll throw in one other interesting little factoid for you that is probably interesting to your audience. And there's this thing called orthosomnia.
00:33:57
Speaker
And what is orthosomnia? Well, so, so many people these days have Fitbits and Apple watches and smart watches and those types of things. And a lot of them now incorporate these sleep scores. Now they all have their own private proprietary technology and algorithm as to how they calculate their sleep score. They don't even tell the sleep researchers. So nobody knows exactly how they're measuring it. Each one of them obviously is different because they're different companies with different proprietary information and they come up with this and say, Oh, your sleep score was 75 or 82 or 93 or whatever. And then you have people who are watching that, you know, religiously trying to improve their sleep score. I gotta get a hundred. I gotta, you know, imagine your type A's, you know, I gotta have a hundred sleep score.
00:34:47
Speaker
And that causes orthosomnia, which is the fear and concern about not having a perfect sleep score. So you actually sleep worse because now you have all this added anxiety and pressure to try to sleep better, which makes you sleep worse. When we do like treatment for insomnia, generally we say, get rid of the devices. We we don't need them. Now you can use them for certain things. So,
00:35:13
Speaker
You know, we can debate that all day long, but generally the idea is to avoid orthosomnia. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think when the fitness tracking craze first started, it was all about getting 10,000 steps and getting a perfect sleep score is really just the next level of that. It's supposed to be a ah tool that helps you, not something that enslaves you to what ultimately is a pretty arbitrary metric. Yeah, we we don't even know how they're calculating it. We don't know what that means. They don't tell us. So you, you mentioned your podcast. I wanted to make sure we give that a plug a little bit. So this is sleep science today.
00:35:48
Speaker
Did I get that right? You you did indeed. i I have been doing other podcasts on my YouTube channel and things, and then I was offered a position. It's ah it's a radio show on UK Health Network, which is actually worldwide. It's an internet-based health radio network, so all sorts of shows about health. And they didn't have anything for sleep, because like I said, sleep is sort of coming onto the scene now as the new kid on the block.
00:36:16
Speaker
So I created Sleep Science today and we are going to be talking with some, you know, highly qualified experts about all sorts of sleep issues. Everything from what you and I are talking about here to other types of sleep disorders to What's the best mattress to buy and why, or what, you know, my team can't sleep. What do I do about it? You know, what are the issues? So anything and everything related to sleep, because it's been in the background to, you know, for too many years and it is so important. So we're bringing all that to light. So I tell people it's time to wake to sleep. You know, we got to wake up and be aware of what's going on with our sleep. So that's, that's what it's all about. Yeah. Sleep science today dot.com.
00:37:02
Speaker
Well, speaking of resources and learning more, Andrew, if someone is interested in learning more about you, your work, some of your different projects, where can they go to learn more about you? One website is nationalsleepcenter.com. And that's where I do the actual clinical work ah with sleep patients.
00:37:25
Speaker
The other, like I said, is the podcast, which is sleep science today. um And we're going to be building that out i'm in the process of actually building it now. We're going to be building that out with all sorts of resources, reviews of different sleep products, reviews of different Hotels you know what what is it like when you go to tell what's what's the sound level in the room what's the temperature in the room is the mattress old and collapsed or is it new and and so we're looking at scientific measurements of these things to make comparisons. ah For people and then we're gonna be putting out a lot of additional sort of. ah Sleep related information based on issues that people are interested in at the time so those are those are two places you can go to learn more about me.
00:38:11
Speaker
Well, Andrew Kolsky, thank you so much for joining us on Swinier Labs. Well, Jimmy, I really appreciate you taking the time to have me and I appreciate your questions and I hope your audience is able to benefit from some of the information that we've discussed.
00:38:29
Speaker
Swinyolabs is a show about sleep, memory, and dreams. For more content, visit our blog at Swinyolabs.com and connect with us to learn more about how you can share your story related to brain health and the daily habits that help us to rest and live better.
00:38:47
Speaker
Thanks for joining. We'll be back soon.