The Future of Wellness
Welcome to The Future of Wellness - a podcast exploring energy healing, consciousness, trauma recovery, and somatic transformation with world-class experts.
Hosted by Christabel Armsden and Keith Parker, founders of Field Dynamics, this series bridges science and spirit through meaningful conversations at the edge of subtle energetics, neuroscience, embodiment, and human potential. From Ayurveda to energy medicine, meditation to somatic therapies, we uncover timeless tools and emerging insights to support healing, presence, and inner growth.
Whether you're a practitioner, seeker, or simply curious about how wellness is evolving, The Future of Wellness invites you into a deeper dialogue - one that reconnects you to the field of who you truly are.
The Future of Wellness
Revolutionize Your Rest - Expert Sleep Science Revealed with Dr. W Chris Winter
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Revolutionize Your Rest — The Science of Sleep & the Art of Recovery with Dr. W. Chris Winter
Discover how to truly rest, recover, and rejuvenate with Dr. W. Chris Winter—neurologist, sleep medicine expert, and author of The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child. In this fascinating conversation, Dr. Winter dispels the myths of sleep optimization and offers practical, science-based strategies for improving your nightly rest.
We explore how the quality, consistency, and rhythm of sleep are deeply intertwined with health, mood, and performance. Learn how to optimize your rest cycles, understand your body’s natural timing, and work with your biology—not against it.
In this episode, we discuss:
- How sleep stages rejuvenate body, brain, and mood
- REM vs. deep sleep—and why dreaming matters
- The difference between insomnia and sleep deprivation
- The truth about melatonin and sleep supplements
- How nutrition timing influences circadian rhythm (chrononutrition)
- Why biphasic sleep and structured rest can improve recovery
- The synergy between meditation and sleep
Dr. Winter’s insights blend neuroscience and practical wisdom, helping you redefine rest—not as a luxury, but as a foundation for wellbeing.
Enjoyed the episode?
Rate & review on Apple Podcasts
Follow on Spotify or YouTube
Train in Energy Healing
Step into your mastery. Learn to facilitate deep, precise, and truly transformative healing experiences.
Registration now open - our next EHT-100 Training begins March 2026, live and online. Discover the training →
Find Your Energetic Blueprint
Not sure where to start? Take the quiz: What’s Your Field Type?
Reveal your strengths and learn how your energy field shapes your life and relationships.
💌 info@fielddynamicshealing.com | Website
We’d love to hear your thoughts — reply or reach out anytime.
Thanks for tuning in and connecting to the field.
Welcome to the Future of Wellness, exploring self-transformation and holistic healing to unlock your inner potential. Hosted by Christabel Armston and Keith Parker.
Speaker 2Hello and welcome to this episode of the Future of Wellness. Today we're joined by Dr Christopher Winter, an international expert on sleep who has helped more than 10,000 patients rest better at night, including countless professional athletes. A dynamic speaker and researcher on the science of sleep, he's the author of two acclaimed books, the Sleep Solution and the Rested Child. His current research focuses on sleep and athletic performance and he has served as a consultant across professional sports, for the MLB and the NFL, amongst others. As founder of Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine, cnsm Consulting and the medical director of the Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center.
Speaker 2Dr Winter has been involved with sleep medicine and sleep research for over 30 years. An Eccles Scholar graduate of the University of Virginia, he received his medical degree from Emory University. He is board certified in sleep medicine by both the American Board of Sleep Medicine and by the American Board of Internal Medicine. He is also board certified in neurology by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Dr Winter, it is a pleasure to have you with us today. Let's get to some of the basics here. You know sleep in recent years has become a hot topic in the fields of wellness and optimization. Could you give us a snapshot of what has happened in the past decade or so in our understanding of how sleep and health are connected.
Speaker 3Yeah, I think that it's gotten a lot of attention. I think it's changed from something we think of being static, like hair color or your height. Sleep was just kind of the thing it was. The sun came up, the sun went down, you tended your crops, you went to sleep, you woke up, you didn't think much of it.
Speaker 3I think as our society has become more geared towards a 24-hour culture, choice sort of entered into the mix. I think before the light bulb, if you're burning a whale fat lantern, it wasn't a whole lot to do besides go to sleep. When the sun went down, there wasn't a whole lot of light, it was dangerous to walk around. Went down, there wasn't a whole lot of light, it was dangerous to walk around. So I think that you know, as choice, as 24-hour culture has crept in, as there's things to watch on TV at any moment of the day, I think more and more people are looking at it like they look at nutrition or exercise or hydration, as, hey, there is choice to be made here and massive consequence if I choose incorrectly. So I think it's kind of created almost a. I always call it like a wild west.
Speaker 3Now it's sleep optimization and hacking your brain and some Yahoo with a lot of money, thinks he can live to be 200 and has hacked his body to the point of eternal light. So there's a lot of positives to it. We're in that sort of carnival situation now where I think over the next few years it'll kind of get pared down to some very simple actionable items. Simple actionable items, but the fact that sleep is on people's minds now as hey, I need to think a little bit about this if I want to lead a healthy and emotionally sound life is is all a good thing really appreciate you elaborating further on this idea of the, the biohacking and this sort of ultimate optimization, because you you've said previously that the concept of sleep is not something that one does, but instead something that happens to you.
Speaker 1So can you elaborate a little bit on this?
Speaker 3I think of everything as a spectrum. I don't want people to disregard sleep and there are plenty of people who do that think that as long as they get an hour or two of sleep at night and their schedule is a disaster and you know they're okay. As long as I get a little sleep, I'm fine. I can do it because we can do it under all kinds of negative circumstances. I can go a day without eating. I can have a day where my hydration isn't optimized or skip exercise for a few days. I can stay up all night and paint a basement. If my wife says I need to do that. I can do those things and have done all of those things.
Speaker 3I think frequently throughout my life. The idea that I'm doing something that's positive for my health in the future is very different, and sleep is a long pendulum. If you're judging on Tuesday your sleep from Monday, that's very short-sighted. It's really more about how am I going to look when I'm in my 60s and 70s and things of that nature. So I think that this biohacking to me, if you think about the spectrum, is all the way. On the other end, it's too much thought. Can you bio-hack a city bus? No, they're going to take somebody out today. So to me it's all about let's make smart choices about our food, our exercise, our mental health, our nutrition, our sleep and then let it go, you know, get off the chat room and the Reddit thread and buying the expensive supplement that doesn't really have a lot of information behind it. Just let's just do the basics and be happy and maybe spend your time and resources doing something else for other people might be a good idea.
Speaker 2What inspired you to study sleep science, you know. Is there a personal experience or challenge with sleeping that led you to focus on this particular area? Or is it just a branch out of neurology studies? What was that like for you? How'd you come to this particular specialization?
Speaker 3Yeah, it was very accidental. It was sort of born out of going to college and having told everybody up into that point that I was going to be a doctor. Both my parents were school teachers. I think they were both the first in their families to go to college. And so a feedback loop gets established very quickly in terms of you tell a family member you're going, or a friend or whatever, you're going to be a doctor or a teacher, and there's a lot of positivity I would argue, unfounded positivity, but there's a lot of positivity comes back at you oh, he's going to be a doctor. Oh, let's give, you know, let's give Chrissy a dollar and a piece of hard candy, because he's going to be a little doctor one day, you know. And so so you know, I just kind of got to college and was sort of realizing the fact that I didn't really know what that meant. You know, I liked thinking about the human body and learning the names of the muscles and how the heart pumps blood. But I, you know, I don't think a lot of people who decide to be a doctor know anything about being a doctor, maybe for the kid of a doctor or something like that.
Speaker 3And you grew up going to your mom's trauma surgery. Oh, I have. No, I don't know. So anyway, I started doing research. I reached out to my biology advisor. He said you know, there's doctors who need help with their research. Maybe you could get on with one of them and maybe even get paid. And I did. I found a doctor who was doing research on sleep and I just thought it was kind of cool. Like I had no idea that a medical doctor would research sleep, let alone be the director of the university of Virginia sleep lab. So you know, it just kind of it was a way to get biology credits and experience and money to buy beer, you know whatever.
Speaker 3And then I just never left the field. It was so positive and uplifting. The people were so nice and supportive. It was a relatively small.
Speaker 3I remember going to my very first conference in sleep back in like the early nineties, like seven guys there are seven old white men sitting around talking about sleep and I was like this is awesome, this is kind of fun. Like you felt like you were one of some sort of club and and I've just loved the way the field has grown. It's so diverse Now. Women kick ass. It's just awesome to kind of sit back and just sort of let the field leave me in the dust.
Speaker 3In some ways I've kind of resigned myself to that, like, oh there's Chris, he's that old guy that used to be really involved in sleep and now he comes to the meetings and growls at people and, you know, walks around with his little meeting tote bag and nobody talks to him and you know, he used to be great back in the day, but you know the field has passed him by. I'm kind of excited to be that guy. You know I want to be described as being mercurial. That's my goal in life. Who is a mercurial guy? So yeah, it was all accidental and just kind of one thing led to another. You know I did a little research on Major League Baseball just for fun and it turned into some work that I did for a team, which turned into some other stuff.
Speaker 1And so it's just. My entire life's been just accident after accident, but good accident so far. No city bus yet. That's good. It's a good way to approach things. I'd love to start with just a little bit of background to some of the other questions we're going to be asking going forward, which are can you give us a little bit of a rundown on the stages of sleep? You know what is sleep. How is REM and deep sleep alternating? How does that relate to neurological, physiological changes? You know what are we actually talking about when we talk about sleep.
Stages and Functions of Sleep
Speaker 3Yeah, that's a great question. A lot of this sort of started off with just kind of observational data. Let's hook wires up to people and measure electrical changes that we see in their brains and so you can teach an individual to sort of differentiate sleep stages, probably in about 20 minutes. That's what we do when we read a sleep study, so you sort of hit the highlights, you know you're awake, we're all awake now and talking podcast things and that's fun. And then we fall asleep and we spend most of our night in sort of a lighter sleep, which is called light sleep massively creative title.
Speaker 3And then there's deep sleep and dream sleep. And deep sleep is exactly kind of what it's kind of what it sounds like. It's an individual who is that consciousness part of their brain is really turned off and we spend about a quarter of our night in that sleep and it kind of restores us. It's why we feel energetic the next day. It keeps us young looking, it makes us perform well if we're a baseball player, you know all those good things. And then REM sleep, or dream sleep, is more related to concentration, focus. It's a bit more.
Speaker 3The effects that people see are a little bit more indirect and so understanding that's important.
Speaker 3If you wear a fitness monitor and you're upset that you're only getting 20% deep sleep, don't be because that's exactly what you should be getting.
Speaker 3And if you're like, wow, then second half of my night really doesn't have any deep sleep, it probably shouldn't. Most of our deep sleep happens in the first half of the night. So you know, a lot of this is sort of academic, but when you actually look at an individual and what's happening in their brain during REM sleep versus what's happening during deep sleep, they're very different things that are going on, chemicals that are being released, things that are being suppressed, things that are being enhanced and sleep is a very dynamic process. So understanding that can be kind of helpful in terms of when you take this medication maybe even a medication has been given to you to help your sleep it's actually suppressing deep sleep or it's actually having a negative effect on REM sleep. So I do think there's utility for people having an understanding of what these stages are and what they should look like in a normal child or a normal adult or a normal senior citizen.
Speaker 2So what would you say is the function or reason behind sleep? And maybe there's some obvious low-hanging fruit, but also there's kind of more, maybe abstract territory, like dreams, like what's the function of dreaming, for instance, a significant thing that does happen.
Speaker 3Yeah, it's a great question and to some degree, largely unknown, although when you take away sleep, you see all kinds of processes in your body just deteriorate. So I suspect sleep has a lot to do with resetting our body. You know it's a time where we're, you know, sort of micro healing. You know, when you look at performance and recovery, that's a big part of what sleep does that. Or you do the opposite. Look at somebody who's sort of experienced bad sleep, disruptive sleep, terrible shift work, all their life. They look old.
Speaker 3I mean, I have this weird thing where I try to guess people's ages and weights when I see them in clinic. You know, just just a little exercise I've done ever since I was a medical student. When somebody sits down okay well, it takes me hours to fall asleep my first thought is you look like you're about 175 and I bet you're 5'8" and I bet your age is 43. So I always write it down on the piece of paper and then, as those things are revealed during the interview, I'm usually really good at nailing it. The people I am not good at are smokers, because they always look way older than they really are, because smoking damages a lot of the parts of your skin that create youthfulness, and people who have really disrupted sleep shift workers.
Speaker 3I've been working at the power plant for 30 years and my sleep schedule is so convoluted I couldn't describe it to you if I had a PowerPoint presentation in 30 minutes shift work, nurses, things like that because we know that it's not only quality of sleep and quantity of sleep that's important, it's consistency, which is really important. So I think we can learn a lot about the effects of sleep and the reason that we sleep. When we see the absence of it, it really, to me, is a process that is helpful in terms of sort of resetting all the scheduling of the body. To me, sleep is the conductor of a symphony, and when the conductor is drunk or when the conductor is only present for half the symphony, the entire orchestral movement starts to break down because nobody's really leading the show. And to me, sleep is truly that central to health and prosperity.
Speaker 1I like that analogy. It really helps to ground us in the fact that sleep is sort of this very nurturing space because we're working a lot with clients holistically in which sort of mind, body and, you know, even spirit are somehow held in a container for optimum. Really, we're optimizing not our sleep, but we're using our sleep to optimize our day right Our lifestyle, our choices, our functioning in a waking state. You spoke there a little bit about absence of sleep, functioning in a waking state. You spoke there a little bit about absence of sleep For people who maybe are struggling with insomnia, or if they're having sleep disorder, as it were, what are the sort of first steps you're recommending that they're taking to improve their sleep?
Speaker 3Education is the first step with sleep. Insomnia is not sleep deprivation. There's step number one, because that is the fuel for the insomnia engine. A lot of times it's a slightly type A anxious person who gets into bed and sleep doesn't go the way they want it to, takes them an hour to fall asleep. They wake up at three o'clock in the morning, they can't get back to sleep, and there is a response to that.
Speaker 3I always define insomnia. Insomnia is not an individual who can't sleep. That doesn't exist in nature. You know. It can be wildly freeing to tell a patient look, you couldn't not sleep if you tried. That doesn't exist. That's like a person saying you know what? I've decided to stop breathing oxygen. That's not going to go well for you. In fact, I don't think you could do it voluntarily. As soon as you pass out from holding your breath, you'd start breathing again. So so to me, insomnia is just a. It's an amalgam of bad educations out there.
Speaker 3Pull a hundred articles, interviews, podcasts, tv, whatever about sleep. 99 of them are going to be ways that you can fall asleep faster or get back to sleep If you wake up during the night. It's the only thing we ever talk about. Who cares how long it takes you to fall asleep? Who cares if you wake up in the middle of the night and have to go to the bathroom to go back to sleep right away? It's like how many articles are dedicated to people who don't feel hungry for lunch. Who cares? Like you skip lunch, move on with your life. You don't even give it a thought because in the back of your mind you think well, I'll eat at some point. Weird, I'm usually very hungry for lunch, but today I'm not, so I'm moving on with my life. You would never call your doctor and say I think I'm on the verge of starving. I need a pill to make sure I eat my chicken sandwich. No, but we put so much emphasis on sleep. This is part of that wild west. We're actually finding more out about sleep.
Speaker 3Hey, did you know? If you don't sleep or you have bad sleep, you have a higher chance of risk dementia and heart attack and stroke and high blood pressure and looking old and having diabetes, and you name it? It's linked to poor sleep. But that's not insomnia. That's a completely different entity. But we never talk about what insomnia is, which is a person not sleeping the way they want to sleep. That's part A. Part B is you're upset about part A, meaning.
Speaker 3If I meet somebody at a dinner party and they say it takes me two hours to fall asleep, my first question is how does that make you feel? The answer is, well, I don't care. Then you'll never have insomnia because you don't care, like I'll just sit there. I mean, eventually I'm going to fall asleep, doesn't really matter to me. I kind of like being in bed. Chris Awake, great.
Speaker 3So the first step with sleep problems is getting good information and I'm sorry you're probably not finding it on TikTok or your social media platform or your sleep coach influencer that when you look up their credentials, they have a bachelor's in American history. I love American history, but it doesn't qualify me to teach an American history class. I'm not sure your history degree qualifies you to give great sleep advice. So seek out good sources of advice. If you don't, if I'm not your cup of tea which I'm not everybody's cup of tea I fully accept that I can find a cup of tea that works for you and it's really empowering once you start to understand how sleep really works, how it functions within body, the misperceptions that people have about sleep, the idea that everybody doesn't require eight hours of sleep.
Speaker 3That alone can be really freeing. Chris, I'm trying to get eight, nine hours of sleep because I want to be super healthy, hack my brain, live to be 200. But God, I just can't sleep past seven hours. Then great sleep seven hours, that's probably what you're genetically designed to do. Hours that's probably what you're genetically designed to do. So you know, to me it's just. It's just one bad myth and perpetuated falsehood after another in sleep, and once you start to get through those things, it really kind of creates a sort of bulletproof sleep that anybody can attain. It's not that hard. You're already probably a lot better at sleeping than you think you are.
Speaker 2So, in terms of working with clients, could you describe to us how you kind of diagnose or work with a client based on their profile? And, you know, does this inevitably mean somebody comes to you with issues regarding sleep but then you wind up working with, you know, diet, exercise, relationships, the environment, et cetera, like everything that's not sleep, which is really an ironic kind of situation.
Speaker 3Yeah, I think that's. I mean you diagnose sleep disorders by talking to people.
Misconceptions About Sleep Disorders
Speaker 3You know, most of the people that we see do not end up having a sleep study. It's not even necessary or appropriate in a lot of patients. So it's it's understanding what's going on with a patient and talking to them is really how you find out. And you're exactly right, it's. It does involve relationships. It does involve hey, do you exercise? Hey, what is your job schedule Like what? Where did this problem start? You know how. You know this has been going on for 20 years. What? You were a good sleeper, whatever that means, until this point, and then what happened. And so these are typically long interactions.
Speaker 3This is not a flu shot kind of thing and for most people that end up seeing me or that I'm working with, this has been going on a long time. I mean, sleep disorders are some of the most chronic, undiagnosed, misdiagnosed disorders out there. So there's, you know the patient comes in with the black binder. You know what the black binder is. The black binder is a list of all the stuff that they've gotten or dealt with testing, mris, sleep studies that they've had through all the other doctors and specialists. They've seen up into the point where they see you. So there's often a lot to sort of sort through when you're dealing with these patients. But it's listening. It's listening to the patient, hearing their story and then sort of helping them start to understand what the nature of their problem actually is. I mean, that's a big thing what we do. You know, a patient comes and says I haven't slept in six months. That's not physiologically possible. That doesn't. That's not real. It's like Michael Jackson couldn't sleep. None of the pills work. Well, michael Jackson not being able to sleep was never the problem. So it's not about telling people they don't have a problem. It's about telling people the problem you think you have is not the problem you actually have, and helping them understand that. Because when you understand the problem that's really going on, you can fix it a whole lot better than trying to deal with an imaginary problem, so to speak. What are these problems? Yeah, I mean you divide people that I see into two camps. They're the I can't sleep camp, which is my least favorite phrase in the English language, because, again, it does not exist.
Speaker 3I've been in this field for 30 years, been practicing for 20. I've never seen a person who can't sleep, and not only that, not even close. That, not even close. Now, how often do I see people who tell me they can't sleep Weekly easily, weekly, so I'm waiting. I mean maybe that person exists out there, but sure enough, when we put them in a sleep center or put something on their body to measure their sleep, they're sleeping a lot.
Speaker 3So one of the hard things, particularly within primary care, is perception of sleep and reality are two very different things. I mean, just the other night we were watching God, I don't know a shrinking on Apple TV and my wife fell asleep and so I said you know, the next time we watched, I said, hey, we need to watch that episode again. A lot of important things happened there. You fell asleep and so we did. We started again, started watching it. There was like 25 minutes of the show I didn't remember and I thought to myself damn, I fell asleep too. Now, if you had asked me before, I would say no, I saw the whole episode. I started, I was the one who played it and I turned it off when the credits rolled. But I clearly fell asleep in the middle of the episode because it was a big chunk. I didn't realize that I was sleeping. So had the doctor said Chris, did you ever fall asleep watching TV? I would say no, but the reality is sure I did. I fell asleep for half the show, pretty much.
Speaker 3So we have to understand as providers of healthcare. Our patients aren't lying to us. They're coming in and telling us what their experience is. But if we're going to take it at face value the person who comes in and says I'm only sleeping an hour a night you're going to make bad decisions about that person's healthcare because you believe that they're actually only sleeping an hour a night. I just talked to a patient the other day who was on unbelievable amounts of sleeping pills bad sleeping pills all because they're telling their psychiatric provider they can't sleep. So when we don't understand sleep, we make bad decisions.
Speaker 3It's like, you know, some guy walking to my clinic saying you know, I've been gaining a lot of weight, I think I'm pregnant. I'm like okay, great, here's some prenatal vitamins. No, chris, you don't understand how pregnancy works. That's not probably what's going on here. He's a XY chromosome. He does not possess a uterus. He can't be pregnant. Why did you give him prenatal vitamins? Is it making sense? Well, his belly was sticking out. Well, that doesn't mean he's pregnant.
Speaker 3And just because somebody says they're only sleeping an hour a night doesn't mean they're sleeping. So that's the big camp can't sleep. Then the other camp is can't stay awake, fall asleep, crash your car, fall asleep at a stoplight, getting fired from your job because you nod off and people film you with their phones asleep at your desk. So it's either hypersomnia or non-somnia, and the people who are more at risk for health consequences are the hypersomnia, and what's unfortunate is they're the ones that everybody wants to be.
Speaker 3Oh my gosh, I wish I could be like Carl. Carl can sleep anywhere. He's asleep before his head hits the pillow. I've never seen somebody fall asleep as fast as Carl. I pray to God every night that I could be like Carl. No, carl's got a big problem. Why is he so excessively sleep? It's like looking at somebody eating food out of a trash can. Ooh, I wish I could be like that guy. He's a great eater. No, he's not. He's starving to death and because of that he's so driven to eat food that he'll eat food out of a trash can. You do not want to be like that person, but we covet falling asleep fast.
Speaker 3Ask a hundred people if they're a good sleeper or not. The people who raise their hand and say they're not good sleepers. You ask them why. They'll tell you because it takes me a long time to fall asleep. That's generally not an indication of bad sleep. It's an indication that you've gotten sleep of reasonable quality and quantity and your brain doesn't want it. Do you want a brownie? Want a sandwich? Want a piece of steak? Want a piece of steak? Want a cupcake? Want an apple? Oh, you don't. Then I'm guessing you're not hungry, and if you're not hungry, you've eaten recently.
Speaker 3But we have the complete opposite views of sleep. If we get in bed and 20 minutes have passed and we haven't fallen asleep, it's a big emergency and understanding that it's okay to not fall asleep when you go to bed at night, that's not a big deal at all, maybe. I just talked to a patient the other day. I said when do you go to bed? She said eight o'clock. I said you're 23 years old. Why do you go to bed at eight o'clock? Well, that's what I've done ever since I was a kid. Then go to bed at 11 later. So there's a lot of things like that that you know. When you dig into it you're like this doesn't make any sense. I've got nine-year-olds in my house that go to bed later than you do.
Speaker 3What is going on here? Well, I just don't feel great, well, okay, well, don't feel great in your living room watching shrinking. It's a great show. Don't go to bed and sit there for three hours unless you want to. Somebody says, look, I like being in bed for three hours before I fall asleep. Then great, do it. But that's not. I mean that person had been on sleeping pills, because I guess they went to the doctor and said I can't fall asleep. It takes me three hours to fall asleep.
Speaker 3The doctor never asked well, when do you go to bed? Like that's a? That's important, right? Hey, doc, I'm having appetite problems. I can never finish my dinner. Okay, here's appetite stimulants. No, the doctor said tell me about your dinner, chris, I don't know. Three extra large pizzas, just can't finish them. Well, chris, you're a little man. Why do you think you can eat three extra large pizzas? Well, I don't know. I was with some football players and that's what they eat for dinner, so I thought I'd like is wrong. You have no problem with your eating. It's your expectation of what you can eat. So eat a half a piece of pizza and move on with your life.
Speaker 2Find out how we can support you with our popular energy healing training, one-to-one private sessions, free resources and more. Visit energyfielddynamicscom to learn more. You're bringing up a number of really great things here that we could follow. One thing you've mentioned there is supplementation. I'm curious about your thoughts on the use of melatonin. Now, in the UK it requires a prescription. In the US it's freely available and found on shelves all over the place, all the way to the degree that there are gummies for children to be taking melatonin. What are your thoughts on that? Specifically, and then in general, are there reasons to be using any kind of supplementation, particularly, let's say, natural, herbal supplementation for eating and sleep?
Sleep and Melatonin
Speaker 3Yeah, this is a complicated problem because the setup of the question is everything For melatonin specifically. Melatonin is a chemical that we make in our brain. Naturally. We make it as the sun goes down or we enter into an environment that's dark. That darkness triggers the release of melatonin, which is trying to align our sleep with the day-night cycle. So if you want melatonin, you don't need to buy it in a gummy bear. Just dim the lights after dinner and expose yourself to really bright lights when you wake up in the morning and have that natural flow of light, paying attention, blue blocking glasses or light alarm clocks in the morning lots of ways you can do it. So when you look at melatonin, there was a big Canadian study and a big United States study that said basically, you have no idea what you're consuming when you take melatonin in the United States or in Canada. The gummy bear you have may have nothing in it. It may have three times the amount of melatonin that says on the label. There was one pediatric brand that had no melatonin but it did have CBD in it.
Speaker 3So just understand why are you using this? Is it because you're a shift worker or you're traveling around the world, back and forth to Malaysia for your business and you're trying to align your circadian rhythm? Great, knock yourself out. That's a really good use for it. If it's no, I've got a nine-year-old that has trouble falling asleep. So we give melatonin to them to make them sleep, because without it he can't sleep. No, ain't wrong? Impossible. You do not have a nine-year-old who's incapable of sleep without taking a melatonin. Gummy bear, that's a construction of your imagination. It might take him a while to fall asleep, but trust me, if he's human and we're only talking about human babies if you have robot babies or alien babies, you can do something else right now, because I'm not talking to you. But if you have a human child, it's absolutely going to sleep. It's impossible not to sleep. So what are we doing with the melatonin? Plus, you're giving them a chemical that's going to interfere with the timing of their sleep.
Speaker 3So the idea of supplementation becomes very important. But what are we asking here, chris? What about magnesium? Well, are you talking about taking some magnesium to make sure your brain has the necessary constituents it needs to create all the different reactions and pathway doings that a brain does when one neurotransmitter gets transformed into another with this cofactor and this enzyme, sure, then take magnesium. So people are always like does it work? Well, yeah, I mean, we need magnesium to do all kinds of things, so sure it works, in that, if you're saying it takes you four hours to fall asleep, does it work? You mean, if you take a magnesium pill you buy off the shelf of a CVS, is it going to knock you out? No, no, it's not going to work at all.
Speaker 3So the analogy I always have is, I think about, like Sidney McLaughlin, that hurdler from the Olympics, it's just a beast. And Sydney McLaughlin, that hurdler from the Olympics, it's just a beast. My guess is, at some point a coach said to her hey, sydney, you know, if you were to wear these special spikes, I think it would increase the grip you have on the turf in this stadium. You're going to run in and I bet it would shave 0.03 seconds off your time. I'm making this up. I have no idea what I'm talking about. So question do the spikes work? Yes, they help Sydney McLaughlin shave off 0.3 seconds from her time that using the standard spikes would not have.
Speaker 3Okay, take me out to a track and put some hurdles up. Would using the spikes help me run like Sidney? No, no, I have no idea what I'm doing in terms of running hurdles. So I could wear Timberland boots, barefoot flip-flops, but it doesn't matter. I have so much. I need to fix and adjust and learn before I ever get to the point where those spikes are making a difference. So 99% of people who are asking me the question, what about supplements? Do they work? Are asking from the perspective of I can't sleep and nothing works, and I've seen 20 different doctors. Would the magnesium work? Do you think magnesium theanate or glycinate? It doesn't matter. Do you think magnesium theanate or glycinate? It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1This has nothing to do with your problem. This sounds very much as we are outlining it as a contemporary problem, like a kind of contemporary obsessiveness, a promotion in the media and wellness press. You know, hack this, do this, tweak that, five top tips. That kind of mentality. What should people be caring about? From your perspective, what's the real problem? Is there a problem? You're spending your time and energy and effort in this area. What is it that people aren't hearing, aren't doing?
Speaker 3I think what you should pay attention to is getting enough sleep and that range. Look up the National Sleep Foundation sleep need per age. It's going to give you this great chart and you can figure out how old you are, how old your kid is and you can see the range of what we consider to be normal sleep. It's not an eight hour, it's five to nine, you know, five to 10 hours. So understanding that sleep is a range and it's genetically determined is really important. I want you to get the amount of sleep that you need as an individual, not more, because that's just sitting in bed twiddling your thumbs, quote unquote can't sleep. Not less either. That's sleep deprivation. That's every time I sit down I fall asleep. So, number one get the sleep you need. Number two make sure your sleep's healthy. Do you snore? Do you kick your legs? Do you fight imaginary people at night? Do you exhibit seizure activity? Wet the bed, have acid reflux at night, choke? I can give you a million things 88 diagnosable sleep disorders. So if you're exhibiting something that seems strange, look into it because it's probably affecting the nature of your sleep, even if you're saying to me well, yeah, I fight imaginary people, but, chris, as soon as I get in bed, I fall right to sleep. That is not a great measure of good sleep.
Speaker 3How do you feel at two o'clock in the afternoon? That, to me, is the only thing that matters. Two o'clock in the afternoon you're sitting in kind of a boring meeting and your coworker who does not know how to put together a PowerPoint slide that is compelling is sitting there droning on and on about quarterly sales. How are you feeling, is it? I cannot be in that situation without falling asleep. I have to eat to stay awake. I'm generally pacing around the room so I can stay awake. Then that's a good indication that maybe there's something wrong with the quality of quantity of sleep. Finally, sleep consistency is everything. It's not just about eight hours. It's not just about eight good hours. It's about the same eight hours every night. So to me that's important.
Speaker 3And the other thing is stop ignoring hypersomnia. Your kid loves to sleep. He's 13 years old. That's weird, right? Your kid should love I don't know the Los Angeles Dodgers and Freddie Freeman and cool video games and what their friends are up to at the mall or whatever. I don't know the new installation of Fast and Furious. That's what your 13-year-old should be interested in. Not I'm tired, I wanna't know some. You know the new installation of Fast and Furious. That's what your 13 year old should be interested in. Not I'm tired, I want to go to sleep, I want to take a nap. I'm falling asleep in school Like those. Things are sneaky, and hypersomnia to me is the biggest red flag that there is something wrong with your sleep. So do not treat people who can fall asleep quickly in any situation as a superpower. It is a problem that needs to be dealt with.
Speaker 1I want to just drill down on that consistency point. You mentioned that. I'm assuming you're talking there about consistent sleep time, wake time. Why is that important?
Speaker 3Our brains love a schedule. You want to. You know you want to do something healthy for yourself. Enlist. You know you want to do something healthy for yourself. Enlist. There's a military organization ready to take you that will perfectly plan your day every day no napping, no sleeping in, you know. So lots of exercise, lots of outdoor exposure, cool things that you can shoot, if you're into that kind of thing. I'm kidding, of course, but that militaristic schedule is awesome. We get up every day at 0600 hours, breakfast 0700 hours. We exercise first thing in the morning outside. We have lunch at 1200 hours. We typically hit the barracks at this point, start it all over again. It's always the same. Our brains love that kind of scheduling because when your brain can anticipate sleep, you get the most out of it. It's like everything else and it's not just the schedule. Right before you go to bed, okay, I like to read a book and take a shower and then turn my lights out and go to bed. It's 24 hours, it's. Can you eat breakfast every day at the same time? Can you exercise every day at the same time? Can you expose yourself to light and the dark every day at the same time? Like the more you can create a schedule that doesn't change day to day, the healthier you will be, because your brains do nothing accidentally.
Speaker 3We did a great study where they gave somebody a candy bar. You know, subjects were given a candy bar, either like every day at 3 pm, or same candy bar, but just at random times during the day, and the metabolic consequences to the people who were getting the candy bar at random times were much more dramatic than the person who always got the candy bar at 3 pm. You always get the candy bar at 3 pm. Your brain knows it's coming. Okay, here comes the Kit Kat 3 pm. Every day we have this little KitKat, so your brain's kind of ready for dealing with it metabolically. Your pancreas is ready, everything's ready to deal with this. So our brains love that kind of anticipatory guidance and the worst thing that you could be doing for your sleep right now is that job. And they exist and we see them all the time. Well, chris, I'm 7A to 7P for 14 days and then I switch over to the 7P, 7a and they exercise and they eat great. But every 14 days they are 180 degrees, flip-flopping their schedule. It takes about one day to adjust a time zone. So that individual, when they flip-flop, it's going to take them an average of about 12 days to settle in to that new schedule. Two days later they're switching back, so their body's in a constant state of I have no idea what is going on.
Speaker 3Ever fly to Bangkok? How do you feel that first day you're there Pretty miserable because you're eating food that you're not used to. You're on a totally different schedule. Your body has no idea what's coming. It's just reacting now, it's not anticipating. And so that schedule, when you look at dietary research, sleep research, exercise research, all of it is kind of looking at chrono date, like chrono nutrition. Is it what you eat, is it how much you eat, or is it when you're eating that makes the difference? And all those things are probably true. But if you're ignoring the win in the equation, you're really, really missing the boat. I think with sleep.
Speaker 2Fascinating to consider the timing of things and the value you're putting there on the consistency in the specific time. You mentioned 2 pm there as a good question mark period, like what's going on at 2 pm. I'm wondering why you highlight that and does it relate to why some cultures are investing in siestas or midday kind of napping? So general question there and how it might relate to the value of napping if that's a valuable thing to be doing Everything you said is exactly right.
Monophasic Sleep and Nap Scheduling
Speaker 3I think 2 pm. I just popped out of my mouth. But when you actually look at cultures, that nap, I think it's a real positive. There's a lot of interesting research.
Speaker 3There's a book that came out several years ago At Day's Close A Journey into Night's Past, or Sleeping Past. It's written by a guy named Roger Eckert, who is a period of time wake up in the middle of the night, mess around, say some prayers to get rid of demons from our chimneys and visit friends and weird stuff you do at night. There's all kinds of sayings I remember from that book that related to that time of night and then we would go back to bed for second sleep and then wake up. So his argument was we probably sleep better in a biphasic period and when you look at other animals in the world we're probably about the only ones that have a monophasic sleep period. At least try to have one. So his thought was we'll have a monophasic sleep period if you want. But if somebody comes to me and says, look, chris, I wake up in the middle of the night, I have trouble getting back to sleep. Should we pathologize that, or is maybe that? Hey, it's okay. That's kind of what you were designed to do anyway, and I think you could say the same thing about a biphasic wake period. You know, I think it's amazing when people actually nap for a short period of time and later in the afternoon, just how better they feel, how more productive they are. So, yeah, you lost 25 minutes with your nap, so you have 25 fewer minutes to get some stuff done. But my guess is you'll get stuff done faster and better at the end of the day having taken that nap.
Speaker 3And the middle of the day is sort of a natural time when circumstances in our brain are creating sleepiness. There's a natural lull there that a lot of scientists, I would say, would say that's what we're supposed to do. That natural lull. We're supposed to respond to it by a little period of rest or siesta. So I'm a fan of it. I think that siesta works even better when it's scheduled. Not just.
Speaker 3I take a, a nap when I can. It's every day from 1.45 to 2.05,. I turn off the lights in my office, I lean back, put a little sleep mask on in a noise machine and I set an alarm and I just relax. And what I always tell people is don't seek sleep. Just rest. Turn the lights out, put your little eye mask on, spray some lavender spray in the air, put a little blanket over your body, lean back, close your eyes and set an alarm, and for the next 15, 20 minutes, I just want you to close your eyes and think about people that are important to you, or the ending of a show that you would have written totally differently, or things you can get your partner for their anniversary, or whatever you. Or think of nothing you know. Try to clear your mind.
Speaker 3If you're a meditator which I'm a big believer in meditate that's a great time to do it. If you fall asleep, awesome. If you don't, it's still wildly restorative. There's all kinds of resources, people who rest effectively. They're doing really positive things for your body.
Speaker 3So every day, you establish the idea that I'm going to take 15 minutes out of my day and rest. You establish the idea that I'm going to take 15 minutes out of my day and rest. Close my eyes, turn off the computer, turn off the screen, just check out for a bit. If you fall asleep, wonderful. If you don't, it's no big deal.
Speaker 3I tell every one of the major league baseball teams that I work for your job starting today in spring training is you absolutely have to find 15 minutes every day to rest.
Speaker 3I don't care how you feel, I don't care how busy you are. I 15 minutes every day to rest, I don't care how you feel, I don't care how busy you are, I know you're really busy and people want all kinds of stuff from you, but you got to do it and if you do it, when October rolls around you will be a better player, because you've taken this 15 minutes every day the entire season to rest, and I'm going to guess your opponent didn't. So when it comes down to this final game in the world series or this, you know who's got what they need at the end of a game to make that difference and win a game. I'll tell you who had it, as the Dodgers had it, um, so I'm really excited about that. So, um, uh, very, very. And the Yankees didn't, because they're terrible sleepers and everybody knows in New York Yankees do not value sleep.
Speaker 2I'm kidding, I know nothing about the organization New York Yankees but you know, New York is the city that never sleeps, of course. Oh, that's good.
Speaker 3I've already made. I've mentally made a slide for a future presentation. This is what happens when you live in the city that never sleeps, so I will definitely credit you, Keith. That was fantastic.
Speaker 1We mentioned there in the bio that you're currently working with a number of professional sports teams. We'd love to hear a little bit more about your work with athletes in this area of sleep research and performance.
Speaker 3So I'm not a big sports fan. I don't really watch a lot of sports. In fact, the only reason I was watching these Dodger games was because my son was visiting and he wanted to watch them and so I kind of, you know, I just I don't enjoy it, I kind of get anxious. It's not because I, you know, I care that much, I just want sleep to win. So when I work with a team and I know they really care about sleep, like it's sort of you're cheering for sleep and maybe not the organization so much. But I think that even if you're kind of like me and you're sort of passively interested in sports, I think you can learn a lot from hey, this is an organization that has the best food for their athletes, the best training, the best ways of dealing with injury, and these clubs pay a lot of attention to sleep and I think that's really important.
Speaker 3I can affect what you eat, I can affect the way you mentally prepare yourself, I can affect the way you train and how you deal with injuries or work towards preventing them, and I can help you with your sleep. So I think of them as four corners of a table, you know, four legs on the ground and if you take one away, the table can still stand up. It's a little wobbly. If you take two away, it's going to fall. So I love the idea that you know I give biohackers and all those people a bad rap. It's not a bad rap. They care. They just might care a little too much. So I'm all for caring for the things that are in your control and working on gracefully letting go of the things that you can't control. This is something outside of your control. All you can control is your response to it. But we can make your sleep better. You can control that.
Speaker 2You can decide golden bachelorette tonight or actually get the sleep that I need, because I think you're going to feel better over time with it there's a model in the yoga tradition that says there's a waking dream and deep sleep and that meditation, uh, as you develop and become more advanced, basically um gives you access to being awake during or through the same kind of brainwave states and um states of consciousness in dream and deep sleep. Uh, what do you think of this model in general and how that relates to um, how quality meditation translates to improved sleep and access to deeper aspects of the mind and consciousness?
Speaker 3Yeah, I can tell you exactly what I think about it, but first I'll tell you what William Winter, sleep doctor from 20 years ago, thought about it Meaningless, Do you know what I mean? Like no, I mean, this isn't real medicine, this is not what I learned. Like, oh no, I mean, this isn't real medicine, this is. You know, this is not what I learned in my fellowship or whatever.
Speaker 3The William Winter of today truly understands that what you've said might be the most powerful tool we have at our disposal when it comes to good sleep. In fact, there's a really interesting study that somebody did where they hooked up a monk, a Buddhist monk, to an EEG device as they were sitting there meditating and praying and it's important to note that they were praying, meaning out loud, they were speaking. You could hear them talking. So they were not asleep. They were going through some sort of chant or some sort of mantra. Forgive me if you're a Buddhist monk paying attention to this podcast. I'm not getting the terminology right but we knew that they were not asleep Yet when you looked at their EEG of their brain activity and you passed it around to a bunch of neurologists like me and said what's going on here, I'd say I don't know, it's adult sleeping. What's the big deal? No, they're not sleeping. Take a look at the motor activity Like, oh yeah, you're right, Are they chewing? Are they having acid reflux? No, they're praying.
Speaker 3And so the idea that and this is why I called my second book the Rested Child it's such a profound thing to me that I really wanted to get away from the term sleep and move more towards the term rest, because there's because it's such a powerful state when an individual sits down and meditates and becomes good at that skill. It's like a baseball player good at hitting a curveball. One can become very good at meditating. And when you achieve that place, I think that the differentiation between your brain state sleeping and all the good things that happen that we've talked about in this podcast from sleeping and the good things that happen when we rest in our brain are almost indistinguishable. In fact, there are studies that show people who rest effectively they're indistinguishable physically and cognitively from the people who sleep effectively and cognitively from the people who sleep effectively and when. The great thing about rest is if your clients or your patients or the people you work with pay attention to you and they hear what you're saying, and they learn rest. Resting is different than sleep because it's always under our volitional control. The three of us right now could close our eyes, sit back and meditate in the way that we feel most comfortable, and we're restoring our bodies when we do that.
Speaker 3I'm not a yoga teacher. I don't have that kind of deeper understanding of it outside of reading research about it, but it's a wonderful way to access sleep. It's a wonderful way to prepare yourself for sleep at night. In fact, my daughter is a yoga instructor in New York and she does a yoga class that's virtual for people who want to prepare for sleep. I think it's such a great idea. It's such a lovely way to set the stage for sleep.
Speaker 3Forget the magnesium and the melatonin, it's just meditate. Meditate with your child, Learn these techniques and then, even if you get into bed and you do everything right, it's a perfect meditation. But you don't fall asleep and continue just to kind of meditate. You're still doing something so remarkably positive for your body that it just it couldn't be better. So it's like either way you win. I'm going to meditate and I'm going to drift off into a great sleep Awesome. Well, I meditated last night, but I didn't fall asleep right away. So I ended up meditating an hour before sleep finally came. What a positive. This is why I hate the advice that people get. Well, if you get in bed and you can't fall asleep right away, get out, go do something Like what? Like clean your garage, or I mean I guess that's fine If you're so upset about being in bed and you're not falling asleep, great, Go clean your garage. Go pull a drawer out of a desk and throw away batteries and old receipts and get that all organized and cleaned up and weird paper clips and things you know put where they need to go. If you want to do that, that's fine. But you could also just stay in bed and do exactly what you just talked about. You know, which is what I would do.
Speaker 3I love being in bed, awake, and somebody asked me one time what's the secret to great sleep? In a sentence I said it's it's enjoying being awake in bed. So I like sleep. I'm looking forward to sleeping tonight and every other night, but also kind of like being awake in bed too. It's quiet, it's personal, it's like my own little club, you know. I get to be in bed with myself and think whatever thoughts I want to. You mentioned earlier. Why do we dream? Some people think dreaming is like a sandbox. It's a way to test out certain things that we've experienced or things we might experience. In a way, I kind of think of sleep, being awake in bed, like that, and when you enjoy or run towards being in bed and oh, I can't wait to go to bed at night and meditate and pray or whatever you like to do Think about people that have been in your life, that you've lost.
Speaker 3I just lost my father-in-law and I've been thinking about him a lot at night, Like almost like I'm trying to think of as many memories as I can about him and collect them. I don't want to forget anything. So it's almost like what was my first memory of him and thinking about going to a ball game with him. He was always obsessed. I would get him tickets. I work all these teams. Like, hey Ray, I got tickets to go see the Yankees play the Rays down there in Tampa. Does the seat have a cup holder? That was all he would always say. He thought that was the best thing. Like if the seat had a cup holder for his beer. You know, like he thought that was just awesome. So like I want to put that in a little case and keep that memory. I don't want I don't want ever to lose that, and so I find that the night is the only time I ever have to do those kinds of things.
Speaker 3So learn about meditation and you can be good at it. Everybody gets frustrated. I don't know if I'm doing it right, I don't know if there's a right way to do it, but people like you, that is a powerful tool in your tool belt, and if you're a sleep researcher or a sleep scientist or a sleep clinician who doesn't believe in that, you're really missing the boat. If you're like all in on the sleeping pills, no, that's not the way you create meaningful sleep change with somebody. It's being able to approach the bed at night knowing that sleep might not come right away, and you're perfectly okay with that.
Speaker 1Is there something that you'd like to share with the audience today that we haven't asked about, that you see as being important, vital, pertinent with regards to sleep and sleep health?
Speaker 3You know I think we've probably covered it. I just think people need to stop focusing on so much on this idea. You can't sleep and I hate sleeping pills. I just abhor sleeping pills. If you're somebody who's taking a sleeping pill because you think it makes you perform better at whatever you do, I want you to talk to the provider that's giving you the sleeping pills and say could you just give me one piece of any kind of research that shows that me taking this pill you're prescribing is actually improving the quality of my sleep and the way I'm performing better? And while you're looking for it, if you happen to find articles that would suggest that this pill is actually making my sleep worse and my performance or health worse, I would love it if you would share that with me. I mean, I have patients all the time. I'm like look, just go to the website of the sleeping pill that Lindsey Vonn you to take, because it's the reason why she won all these gold medals in downhill skiing, which is absurd. Just go to the website and at the top it'll say for providers, pretend like your provider. Click it and find the research about that pill that allowed it to be approved by the FDA, and look at it. How did that pill perform compared to placebos, in terms of how long it took you to fall asleep? Did it even separate from placebo and how much more sleep you got during the night? And did it talk anything about sleeping better, more deep sleep, more, you know, more effective. Whatever the next day I think you'll be I'm not going to tell you what it's going to show because I want you to look at it yourself. I think you're going to be shocked by the minimal nature of what you see in that paper and might ask the question well, how did this ever get approved for sleep, given what I'm seeing here? It's a very valid question and it really lends itself to.
Speaker 3Statistically significant is very different from sometimes from meaningful Meaning. There are two neighborhoods. One statistically has more money than the other neighborhood, but when you actually look down at they only have $5 more. Is that meaningful? Probably not, but yes, statistically this neighborhood does seem to only have $5 more. Is that meaningful? Probably not, but yes, statistically this neighborhood does seem to have about $5 more to their name than this other neighborhood. So you have to be very careful when somebody says well, this neighborhood is much richer, is statistically richer than the other one, sure by $5. This pill, statistically, will help you sleep more. Three minutes a night, seven minutes a night. Is that what you're looking for, because that's what it's given you? My guess is you're looking for something that allows you to sleep. You can't sleep without the pill. No, that's not at all what's happening, and the research that they provide is going to tell you that story.
Speaker 1If people are looking to learn more about you, the works you offer, your books, et cetera, what are some good resources for them?
Speaker 3Yeah, I do a podcast called Sleep Unplugged. I do it once a week. Some topic related to sleep. We did sleep and yoga. We've done all kinds of stuff like sleep and mindfulness, but we also do things like narcolepsy and why nobody cares your kid is sleepy, and all kinds of stuff. So things like narcolepsy and why nobody cares your kid is sleepy, and all kinds of stuff. So we do it once a week. It's called Sleep Unplugged with Chris Winter. I'm probably most active on Twitter and Instagram. It's drchriswinter, so Dr Chris Winter, all lowercase. We have a YouTube page At the beginning of each podcast episode.
Speaker 3The title of the podcast is always some sort of lyric from a song. So we always talk about okay, well, that's from a Bob Dylan song, whatever. And then we put all the songs that we talk about on a Spotify playlist. So I don't know, we have fun with it. But I've written two books. One's called the Sleep Solution why your Sleep's Broken, how to Fix it. Another book called the Rested Child. So those things are out there if you're interested in that kind of stuff. But there's so much great sleep information out there and there's no reason why you can't find what you're looking for. So educate yourself first and foremost.
Speaker 2Thank you so much for your time today, your candor and passion as well regarding this subject, which I think you distilled. A lot of great knowledge and experiential wisdom on this subject that might be cast in the hot topic trending category sometimes, and yet you pointed people in the direction of whittling things down to a lot of common sense, simplicity, as well as an informed understanding. So thank you so much. I think this is really relevant and valuable.
Speaker 3Yeah, beware of the hot sleep topic, because it's probably nothing We've known about what we need to do for a long time and it's pretty rote but still important. But thank you very much, keith, and thank you, christabel, appreciate your platform.
Speaker 1Really appreciate the time today. Thanks so much. Really appreciate the time today. Thanks so much. Thanks for being a part of the future of wellness. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review. It helps us reach more people and to make great episodes like this one. Learn more about field dynamics and why we think the future of wellness matters. Check us out at energyfielddynamicscom. See you next time.
