Dr. Matt Walker

And it's certainly not necessarily for the participant.

But putting that aside for a second, we can measure your core body temperature and we can measure using temperature sensors all over your body.

exactly what's going on with the blood flow.

And we can measure how the brain is starting to dissipate the heat because one of the principal ways that we dissipate heat from our body is by moving blood around the body.

When we bring blood into the core of our body, we're trapping it in the core and our core body temperature increases.

When we push that blood out to the surface,

It goes to these thin sort of capillaries and vessels on the surface of your skin and you start to dissipate that heat and you dissipate it more quickly so your core body temperature drops.

And the body's sort of vasoactive capacity for distributing that blood and then releasing that trapped heat from the core of the body is superior when you are lying down

And therefore, your body temperature can drop more quickly, which is one of the many reasons why it's not as easy to fall asleep when you're sort of at a 45 degree angle and why the quality of your sleep won't be as good.

Now, there are other reasons too, just as you mentioned.

But coming back to position, I would say that there are maybe...

there's perhaps at least two pieces of evidence that would recommend positional differences or positional changes.

The first is very obvious.

If you are someone who is snoring and you have, certainly if you have untreated sleep apnea, which is where you're not just snoring, but you'll have an absence of breath.

That's what the word apnea means.

Here's another one with an A in front of it.

Pnea, sort of, you know, you've had a...

And this is about breath.

And apnea is about an absence of that breath.

And with sleep apnea, not only do you start to have an airway collapsing partially, and that's where you get that flutter.