Full Episode
Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're taking a deep dive into sleep, one of the most critical yet often misunderstood pillars of health, cognition, and performance. Joining me today is Dr. Michael Grandner, a renowned sleep expert and researcher whose work bridges academia and real-world applications in optimizing sleep for peak health and performance.
Dr. Grandner serves as the director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the University of Arizona, where he's also an associate professor in the departments of psychiatry, medicine, and nutritional sciences.
Beyond academia, Dr. Grandner consults with professional athletes, elite performers, and high-level organizations to implement sleep strategies that directly improve athletic performance, cognitive function, and overall health.
In today's episode, Michael and I cover an extensive range of critical topics, including differentiating clinical insomnia from common sleep disruptions and the subtle yet significant signals used to identify underlying causes like hyperarousal, circadian misalignment, insufficient sleep drive.
We discuss why cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, CBTI, is the gold standard treatment, its most potent mechanisms, and we also discuss key interventions that yield the greatest improvements in sleep quality. We discuss practical protocols for addressing common sleep disturbances like stimulus control, strategies for nighttime awakenings, and personalized sleep restriction methods.
We also discuss recognizing and addressing sleep apnea, including non-obvious symptoms, data-driven red flags from wearable devices and effective non-CPAP interventions like oral appliances, positional therapy, breathing training and more.
We discuss advanced evidence-based sleep hygiene practices, including actionable protocols involving temperature modulation, breathable techniques and also precise timing of light exposure.
We also evaluate popular sleep supplements and substances from melatonin dosing and timing of magnesium, lavender, glycine, as well as nuanced impacts of THC, CBD, alcohol, caffeine, and late night eating on sleep architecture. We also discuss actionable strategies to manage unavoidable disruptions of sleep like shift work and jet lag.
the accuracy and limitations of best practices for interpreting and acting on data from consumer sleep tracking devices like the Oura Ring, Whoop, Apple Watch, Fitbit. And we talk about practical insights on how sleep consistency and strategic napping directly impact cognitive performance, athletic outcomes, injury prevention, and recovery.
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