Philip Gehrman, PhD

speaker

228 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Jul

Philip Gehrman, PhD’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Speaking of Psychology · Rethinking sleep and mental health, with Philip Gehrman, PhD · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

And so we're often, you know, using certain kind of treatment approaches to try to resynchronize their rhythms to a day schedule.

It's a difficult question to answer for a couple of reasons.

One, um, most of the research we have is based on people's reports of how many hours of sleep that they get.

And we know that we're actually pretty bad at judging how much we've slept at night sometimes.

And but it is certainly the case that based on epidemiologic research and and experimental research, that seven to eight hours seems to be optimal.

For most people, although some need less and some need more.

But the other problem is that we've developed almost, I often say it's almost an obsessive focus on sleep quantity.

Everybody thought, oh, how many hours did you sleep last night?

In my opinion, we don't pay enough attention to the quality of sleep that people are getting.

And so you can get eight or nine hours of sleep at night, but if it's poor quality sleep, you're still not going to feel rested during the day.

So it's a matter of finding the right combination of quantity and quality.

For some people, absolutely.

Uh, you know, one of the most common questions I get that I can't answer very well is how accurate are these devices?

Because you know, we've been using these devices for, I mean, I f I first got involved in sleep research in, I guess it was 1995, and we were already using these devices.

But we use research grade devices where uh there are published validation studies, the algorithms.

algorithms they're using to estimate sleep and wake are published so we know exactly what they're doing.

What most people have is now this proliferation of these what we call consumer wearables, where um the companies typically don't publish validation studies, they don't publish their algorithms, and of course they're always tweaking their algorithms.

So we really don't know how accurate they are.

What does seem to be the case for the consumer wearables is that they may have the same pattern as the research devices, which is that they tend to be more accurate in people who sleep well.

Because if you think about what happens when people have insomnia, I mean, one of the main sensors that these devices is using is they're measuring movement.

Showing 101–120 of 228 · page 6 of 12