Noctohabitology (SLEEP PROCRASTINATION) with Vanessa “Nessy” Hill

Late night scrolling. Couchlock. Habitual insomnia. You want to sleep — so why won’t you turn off the light, dumplin’? We’ve got someone for that: sleep scientist, globally known PBS correspondent, host of the series Braincraft, and Noctohabitologist, Dr. Vanessa “Nessy” Hill. So let’s chat about what amount of sleep is “normal,” if farmers had two sleeps, electricity, blue blockers, “me time,” proof that Dolly Parton is an alien from an angel planet, the populations most prone to sleep procrastination, which of 93 scientifically-proven habit-changers are the easiest to implement, and how this expert and I have both personally battled the agony between wanting to rest but avoiding it. Come. Gather. Get mad. Be healed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey. It's your 2002 sedan on hospice gulping down Pennzoil, Alie Ward, and I hope you are sleepy because we're going to fix our lives. All right? Plaguing me most of my life is this variology. Somehow, I am friends with a researcher who tackles it. So they did their psychology undergrad at the University of New South Wales, got a master's from Australian National University and a PhD in behavioral psychology with a focus on sleep studies at TQ University. You may have already seen them on their PBS series, Brain Craft, via YouTube or other news sources. They are highly lauded for their science communication work. They're famous for it.

• 0:41Alie Ward?

  They're also my longtime friend. So picture, if you will, a brilliant and a funny scientist with an air of like a young Winona Ryder in a gossamer sundress. As a fellow Angelino and a friend, I made them come to my home studio, where we did not record in my home studio, but rather we flopped on the couch with my 14-year-old stinky gremlin snoozing between us. We literally talked for hours. It was very hard to edit this episode down. We were just gabbing about why sleeping feels so good, but why sometimes we are like cats resisting a bath about it. So we're going to address that in a moment, but first, thanks to patrons who make the show possible and good for supporting with a dollar or more a month and submitting questions for the ologists.

• 1:25Alie Ward?

  If anyone needs non-swearing episodes, we have kid-friendly, classroom-safe versions. They're in their own feed. It's called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. Get them wherever you get podcasts. Tell your friends. Find other ologites in the wild via Ologies merch, which is available at ologiesmerch.com. And for $0, you can spread the word just by leaving us a review. And to prove how much they matter, I read them all and I pick a still-wet one, such as this one from LemonLet'sGo, who wrote, "Thank you, Ologies, for keeping me company while I'm up in the middle of the night with my nocturnal baby and for fueling my early morning conversations with my fam.

• 2:05Alie Ward?

  I lost count of the amount of times I said 'and another thing about hyenas' over breakfast this morning." LemonLet'sGo, you wrote that for the right episode. Say hi to the moon and your baby. As soon as that little one knows words, tell them that sleep hygiene is cool. Lastly, thank you to sponsors of Ologies who make it possible for us to donate to a cause of the ologist choosing every week. This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time award-winning probiotic clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas, so you can move and eat more freely.

• 2:50Alie Ward?

  Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code 25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. Father Ward, you say, "There's no way you would need a career coach. You have it all together." That's a lie, and you know it. I actually hired a career coach, and without them, I wouldn't have started Ologies. It was one of the best investments I've ever made. And if you're like, "I don't know where to find a career coach," I can help you. You need an experienced pro who asks the right questions, sets you down a path where you're most likely to succeed. And that's what you can expect from a coach at today's sponsor, strawberry.me.

• 3:33Alie Ward?

  This is so cool. They match you with a certified coach who's been vetted to work closely with company founders. And yeah, sometimes I'm like, "Oh, wait, that's right. I am one." And if you're founding a business, even if you're along the way and you're maybe stuck in a rut, or you have to make a decision about expansion, or what direction you want to take your company, that's what I did. I went to strawberry.me and I was like, "Okay, can you help me pare down some stuff? I think I have too much on my plate. I'm not sure what to say yes to and want to say no to." And they were super helpful in helping me streamline, and now I get to sleep more, and I enjoy that. So get the help every entrepreneur needs. Go to strawberry.me/ologies. That's strawberry.me/ologies. You're the boss.

• 4:16Alie Ward?

  Okay, nocto-habitology. Nocto comes from the Latin nocturnalus. Of course, you know that. But it means belonging to the night. And habitology is a real study. It's about how the brain forms routines. But habit comes from the Latin for "to dwell or remain." So if something is habitable, you can live in it. Habits are something that you could move into, and they provide shelter. I never realized that. They can also be a flop house. It's up to us how we live in them. So let's chat about what amount of sleep is normal, proof that Dolly Parton is an alien from an angel planet, why couch feels nice, stealing focus from tomorrow,

• 4:57Alie Ward?

  if farmers really had two sleeps, electricity, blue blockers, me time, which populations are more prone to sleep procrastination? Which of 93 scientifically proven habit changers are the easiest to implement? Sleep timing changing as we age? And how this expert and I have both personally battled the agony between wanting to rest but avoiding it with sleep scientist, globally-known correspondent, and nocto-habitologist, Dr. Vanessa, but you can call her Nessy, Hill.

• 5:47Alie Ward?

  Good. We have 17 hours left on this SD card.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  What if we use it all?

• 5:50Alie Ward?

  We might. If you wouldn't mind, could you say your first and last name and the pronouns you use?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, Vanessa Hill, she/her?

• 5:58Alie Ward?

  Dr. Hill. You are now Dr. Vanessa Hill.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  I am.

• 6:03Alie Ward?

  Well, how long were you interested in sleep? Because I've known you for years.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  I have been interested in sleep the whole time that you've known me. So I had a very specific life change, probably 12 years ago now, actually, where I moved from Australia to the US. I went from being employed by the government in Australia, having a very stable job that had stable working hours, to essentially being a creative in New York City and running my own business and having a YouTube channel and leaning into my night owl tendencies in a way that I never had before. And my sleep became awful. I had short-term insomnia. I had a lot of stresses that I had never had before in my life. And I was making a lot of content that was about psychology and health.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  So I tried to fix my own sleep because I was staying up late. I had radically different bedtimes day to day. I was out drinking. You know, I was doing all of the things that sleep scientists say you shouldn't do, right? So I went through this process of looking into sleep, thinking about sleep, understanding what's happening in our brain while we're sleeping, and then trying to get better sleep myself. And at the beginning of that time, I was making a web series for PBS, and I made an episode on sleep deprivation and the effects of sleep deprivation in your body.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Throughout the 10 days of not sleeping, his pulse, blood pressure, and the chemicals in his pee all stayed the same. He did a bunch of intelligence tests every day, and his marks barely changed. But his typing speed declined, and after day four, Z couldn't type anymore.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  And I had this experience that a lot of up-and-coming YouTube creators dream of, where I published a video on this. I went to bed, and when I woke up, it had 500,000 views. I think we're at a point in society where we know the effects of sleep deprivation. We know that sleep is good for us. And then if you just go and talk about how lack of sleep is going to kill you or give you Alzheimer's or cancer or heart disease or whatever it may be, that just makes people stressed. So I don't love that video now, but that was the first piece of content that I ever made about sleep. And I started making a lot more after that.

• 8:26Alie Ward?

  And back in the early YouTube days, when she was making her first videos, the term "sleep hygiene" was not really in the zeitgeist at all. But she says people were somewhat aware of the do's and don'ts.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Like, don't use the screen 30 minutes before sleep, 60 minutes before sleep. Don't eat three hours before you go to bed. Cut out caffeine in the afternoon and evening. And don't drink an hour or so before you go to bed. You know, all of these things that we kind of know we should do, but we probably don't do in reality and day-to-day life. And we listed out all of these because that's what the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends. And I got all of these comments from people saying, "It's impossible to do all of these things. I can't do all of these things. What kind of people do these things? And how do you actually change your behavior? Like, I want to do that, but I just find that I can't, and it's really hard. And what do you recommend?"

• 9:23Speaker 02

  And I started looking into it, and I got really interested in this idea of behavior change and how can we change our sleep habits? And there wasn't a lot of information on it. A lot of the information on sleep really relies on self-control and discipline and willpower. And that prompted me to go down the biggest rabbit hole of my life

• 9:49Speaker 02

  and actually do a PhD and become a researcher and research sleep and behavior change.

• 9:56Alie Ward?

  It's so fascinating, and it applies to everyone. It also feels like it's getting worse all the time. But I have been... So absolutely gobsmacked, fascinated, giddy about sleep hygiene and how it works. And I think you have to be shitty at it to care a lot. You know what I mean? Like, is there a consensus on how much sleep is a good amount? Apparently Dolly Parton sleeps like four hours a night.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Oh, is she a short sleeper?

• 10:32Alie Ward?

  She just wakes up at like four in the morning, writes two songs every morning.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  An angel.

• 10:40Alie Ward?

  I know. She's an angel, but she's built different. She's just better.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is such a thing as short sleepers, people who genetically just have a very low sleep need. And that doesn't seem to grossly affect their health in different ways. But it is an incredibly, incredibly small amount of the population. The recommended number is seven to nine hours a night for a midlife adult. People who are in their early twenties or adolescence may need more sleep. And then when you're older, say over sixty or sixty-five, you may need a bit less. Like six hours might be enough for those groups. So you kind of start off, if you think about babies sleeping like twenty hours a day

• 11:29Speaker 02

  and then someone who's ninety years old, sleeping like four and a half hours a night. Like you kind of throughout your lifespan, go from needing a lot of sleep to needing not so much. So I think it's important to say that seven to nine hours is the recommended amount because there's a kind of myth that I see on social media, or just in popular discourse, that you need eight hours. And what I think happens is that a lot of people get seven or in between seven and eight. And then people feel bad that they didn't get eight.

• 11:58Alie Ward?

  And is it harder with someone with ADHD? Is it harder with someone who?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  I mean, definitely. I think that I would think about it less culturally. Occupations, I think, definitely matter, particularly when you're talking about shift workers or people in high-stress jobs that either have variable work schedules or are just carrying a great deal of stress in their daily lives. I think definitely that has to do with it. Your personality can affect sleep as well. And I think definitely things like ADHD can affect it.

• 12:34Alie Ward?

  Mind blowing. I am gagged. Sleep procrastination, which relies almost entirely on executive function and resisting impulsivity, is affected by ADHD stop. You can see the 2024 paper in the journal Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders titled "Associations of Sleep Disturbance with ADHD: Implications for Treatment", which notes that ADHD is commonly associated with disordered sleep. We knew that. You knew that. We all knew that. But what you may not know is that research came out in December 2025, just came out via a paper in Frontiers in Psychiatry, and it was titled "ADHD as a Circadian Rhythm Disorder: Evidence and Implications for Chronotherapy."

• 13:19Alie Ward?

  So this blasts out of the gate that accumulating evidence demonstrates strong associations between ADHD and an evening chronotype, AKA night owls. And the disturbances are profound, with delayed sleeping and waking in nearly eighty percent of ADHDers. I get it, though. You gotta go to work. You gotta go to school. Whatever. Don't despair. The study notes that the circadian phase can be successfully advanced in ADHD populations. It recommends fixed wake-up times, so same alarm seven days a week, adding morning bright light exposure, evening light restriction with screen hygiene,

• 14:03Alie Ward?

  and selective low-dose melatonin. And for much more on ADHD, we have a three-part episode with the godfather of ADHD science, Dr. Russell Barkley. And that's accompanied by two episodes on the lived experience of having ADHD, as well as another one on life tips for it. We're going to link all of those in the show notes. They're the most popular episodes we've ever done. Super helpful. Send them to everyone who gives you shit.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  There are all of these things that there is correlational evidence of, that it does affect sleep health. And a lot of them are kind of outside of our control.

• 14:40Alie Ward?

  What are some of the factors? Why are some of us putting off going to sleep? I mean, that's, it's been a problem for me like my whole life. I've just recently.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like there are two questions within your question, right?

• 14:56Alie Ward?

  Sorry.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  So there's the question of just what are the factors that affect our sleep health in general? And then why do some people have trouble going to bed? Do they sound like the same question to you? Am I just being a mega racist?

• 15:08Alie Ward?

  No, no, no, no, no. I appreciate your disavowation. They are. My main question is more of an aperitif where it's just like, fix me.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we'll definitely get to that. I think one of the biggest factors that can affect our sleep today is stress and anxiety. So I think to your point of there are some people who are just in bed reading their book and lights off, and then they're done. And then there's people like you and me who are just up fretting and doing different things. I mean, stress and anxiety plays a big role in that. Some of that can be more of a trait thing, like from a personality perspective. If you are more of a neurotic person, and sometimes I like to say higher in neuroticism because I feel like neurotic has a lot of negative connotations. But neuroticism is just one of the personality traits that we measure, and people are just higher or lower in it.

• 16:03Alie Ward?

  Heck, yeah, we got a personality psychology episode. And in it, we go over the official big five personality traits. And yeah, number five, neuroticism. It's defined as personality traits of depression and irritability and anxiety tendencies.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  So if you are higher in neuroticism, then that can affect your ability to wind down and de-stress and go to sleep. That is a big one. Then there are other things, like you mentioned ADHD, right? And something about ADHD is that it affects your perception of time. So you just have more difficulty with estimating how long it takes to do a task, right? Like you have this kind of time discrepancy. So you could be getting ready to go to bed and you're just like, oh, I just need to like send this one email before I go to bed. Only take me five minutes.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  And thirty-five minutes later, you're still on your computer and you've forgotten all sense of time. And you're like, wait, what's going on? Oh, I just need to go brush my teeth. And then you're like putting on a face mask for another twenty-five minutes. Like, that is more common in people who have ADHD because there is this time perception that can be a problem for people. And that can really affect your nighttime routine in a way that doesn't for people who do not have ADHD. So that's definitely a thing. So there are all of these different factors that some of them are somewhat internal, right? Like your personality, ADHD, things like that.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  But then some of them are external as well. And this is all correlational evidence. But there's a correlation with how close you live to the freeway and impaired sleep quality. Yeah, because if there's a lot of environmental noise outside that affects your sleep, there's evidence that for people of color, they have more sleep difficulties. And I like to remind people of that because I think that when we get a poor night's sleep, if we continually have problems with sleep, we often blame ourselves. And a lot of it is external. And I think it's really important for people to remember that.

• 18:27Alie Ward?

  And those external pressures affect sleep, especially in marginalized communities. And this is well documented. A UC Irvine research paper by occupational health professor Dr. Karen Lincoln, which was published in 2023 called "Impact of Racism and Inequities on African-Americans' Sleep and Wellbeing", explains that sleep tends to be socially patterned. And disrupted sleep patterns are seen among lower socioeconomic positions. And factors like shift work and long hours contribute to really chaotic and irregular sleeping conditions. And Dr. Lincoln continues that, quote, "African-Americans are often concentrated in lower-paying jobs with very little control and flexibility in their schedules.

• 19:11Alie Ward?

  Plus, there are external effects like noise and light and traffic and air pollution and crime and discrimination. And those have big effects on sleep outcomes." And this paper continues that more money and degrees aren't even protective of sleep because people of color are still subjected to stressors linked to law enforcement and racism, no matter what job or neighborhood you're in. And succinctly, Dr. Lincoln concludes that racism, rather than race, is a marker of risk for sleep problems. And there was another 2020 study titled "A Workshop Report on the Causes and Consequences of Sleep Health Disparities" in the journal Sleep. And it echoes this. It says, "People of color are less likely than their white counterparts

• 19:54Alie Ward?

  to report motivation to make time for sleep. And they're less likely to have access to information about sleepiness and the relationship between sleep and health." There's a nonprofit, Project Sleep, and it adds that "in addition to racial and ethnic minority communities, LGBTQIA+ folks also experience disproportionate levels of sleep disturbance." So this notion that rest is a luxury, that alone time or post-work pleasure of any kind should come at the cost of your tomorrow. I'm doing this episode, it's now something that is like, as my dad would have said,

• 20:34Alie Ward?

  it fries my legs, which is Larry Ward speak for that pisses me off. So try to think of bedtime as kind of an act of defiance. You're stealing back the rest that your ancestors evolved for you. Just rip the system. Go to bed. Do you find any evidence that human beings should kind of be naturally on a schedule of like, waking up when it's coldest and the sun is rising and going to sleep when it's clearly dark? I can't imagine being out in the bush at 2:00 in the morning, looking at sticks and carving something just out of fun, you know?

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:20Alie Ward?

  Is there something like we've evolved physiologically to try to go to bed at certain times and we're just fighting it?

• 21:28Speaker 02

  There is actually some really interesting evidence out of UC Boulder where they have done these studies where essentially they take people and put them in the Rockies for a week without electricity and without technology. And I find this so fascinating because I want to pay thousands of dollars to just be a part of this experiment.

• 21:51Alie Ward?

  Yeah, honestly.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Please, take me out of my lifestyle and just put me in the mountains for a week without any of my things.

• 21:58Alie Ward?

  Just Siberia.

• 22:01Alie Ward?

  No contact.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  And what they find is that people's bedtime shift earlier, so they are more naturally at sunset and waking up at sunrise. And that is more in line with what a circadian rhythm without the influence of electronic lighting and screens would be, I suppose.

• 22:21Alie Ward?

  You can see the 2018 study, circadian entrainment to the natural light/dark cycle across seasons and the weekend, which whispers me these facts. It says that less sunlight and more electrical lighting at night leads to later sleep timing. You knew that. But the good news is, this is nuts, researchers found that earlier circadian timing can be rapidly achieved through natural light exposure during a weekend spent camping. So, prescription vacation, outside. Your homo sapien bones and brains yearn for the darkness. Also, this

• 23:02Alie Ward?

  study is so Boulder, Colorado, where, correct me if I'm wrong, I think like at least 40% of every citizen's wardrobe is required by a lot of B from REI. So, go camping, dim your phone, fix your sleep.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  So I find these experiments really fascinating when people do this.

• 23:23Alie Ward?

  Do you think that things have gotten so much worse with screens? Or did people stay up, burn in the midnight oil, as they say, reading manuscripts on phalanx, you know, 500 years ago?

• 23:36Speaker 02

  So, in the context of bedtime procrastination, which is what I did all of my PhD research on, there is a clip from Seinfeld, the TV show, from 1993. And I know the year of this because I cited it in one of my research papers. I love trying to bring pop culture references into peer-reviewed journal articles. And when no one comments on it, when you get the reviewer comments back and no one's like, highlighted your Seinfeld reference, you're like, yes, I got it through the establishment. But Seinfeld did this stand-up bit at the beginning of the episode where he spoke about Night Guy and Morning Guy. And he said, I mean, you can find the exact language.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  I stay up late at night because I'm Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. What about getting up after five hours sleep? Oh, that's Morning Guy's problem. That's not my problem. I'm Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Night Guy just wants to stay up late and do all of his Night Guy things. And he doesn't care how he's going to feel tomorrow. And I just loved this clip because it's from 1993. It's before we had smartphones. It's before we had gaming consoles that connected to the internet where we could play with our friends. It's before the news cycles that we're in now. And yeah, people still procrastinated their bedtimes. There was Night Guy in 1993. And I don't know what Night Guy was doing. He was probably just watching cable TV or reading a book or whatever it may be.

• 25:07Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  I really love this because something that I have come to believe through my research is that we really have this night brain that is different from our day brains in some regard. And he was really on to that.

• 25:24Alie Ward?

  Mention of Night Guy is not an endorsement of the actions or beliefs of Jerry Seinfeld.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  I find it fascinating how often comedians have this insight into the human condition that it took scientists more than 20 years to catch up to. Bedtime procrastination wasn't mentioned in the scientific literature until 2014.

• 25:44Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  It really exploded in the pandemic, both in the popular discourse and in science.

• 25:49Alie Ward?

  Do you think the pandemic and quarantine had an effect where we were so disconnected? We were, we were looking for connection or we were looking for ways to wind down? Or?

• 25:59Speaker 02

  I think there's definitely an element of connection, but I think a lot of it came back to what you mentioned about routine, where all of a sudden, people were out of their routines. They were working from home when they would normally leave the house. They used to do things that suddenly they couldn't do for a year or two. So I think there was an element of just being completely disconnected from what your day looked like previously. And then the element of loneliness or disconnection from your social circles. And then also the added stress of everything that was going on. So it was kind of this perfect storm for everyone's sleep to be really messed up.

• 26:37Alie Ward?

  What does happen in your brain? Is it that you're fighting for some sort of like relaxation or solitude?

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:46Alie Ward?

  Or just some time alive where you're not working?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  You know? Just some time to live.

• 26:52Alie Ward?

  Yeah, some actual existence.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. We did this study a few years ago where we actually just asked people why they procrastinate their bedtime. So we did a qualitative study. And the thing about these interview-based studies is that they are still rigorous. So when you do an interview-based study, you'll take all the transcripts and you'll analyze them. And some themes will just emerge. I just think it's really crazy that we're all so different but so similar at the same time. A big reason was me time, because people just felt they didn't have enough time for themselves during the day. A lot of the people that we spoke with were new career starters. So they had just started a new job. They'd kind of gone through this transition from university to the workforce. And something that I had kind of forgot about

• 27:39Speaker 02

  when I was doing this is that entry-level jobs are just kind of shitty.

• 27:42Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  So, I mean, a lot of jobs are like this, but particularly for people who are just starting out in the workforce, they don't have a lot of autonomy.

• 27:50Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  They don't have a lot of say over the work that they're doing. And they just found that these nighttime hours were when they had agency in their life.

• 27:59Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  You will find that theme in different populations. So people who are new parents, people who are caregivers to their parents, to other family members, to pets, whatever it may be, a lot of them find that in these evening hours is the only time that they have autonomy in their lives and they have agency and they can actually just do whatever they want to find fulfillment in different areas. A lot of people tell me that the night was the only time they had to explore their identity.

• 28:29Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Or niche interests. And it was just so funny when I was talking to all these different people. And they're like, you know, it was 10 o'clock and I just started wondering, how did they build the pyramids?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Or someone else was like, what happens to bees in winter? You know?

• 28:48Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  All of these questions that just pop into our night brain in a way that doesn't happen with our day brain because we're busy and we're at work and we're thinking of other things. There's something about the silence of the night and the freedom of the night that give way to these niche interests. And people would just want to watch YouTube videos or TikToks or read Wikipedia articles about just this thing that they were wondering.

• 29:14Alie Ward?

  Dr. Hill's Night Guy also has her Google and weird stuff.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Can you introduce spicy foods to kids? When can kids start eating raw fish? What's the biggest airline in the world?

• 29:23Alie Ward?

  And getting a PhD in sleep procrastination.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  There were a couple of people who I interviewed who identified as queer and said that in their day jobs, this wasn't an identity that they could really express or lean into. And at night, late at night, they could message with other people. They could watch videos on YouTube. They could be part of those communities in different ways that they didn't have the opportunity to throughout the day. So that's a big part of it.

• 29:50Alie Ward?

  Which explains a little why the quarantine era could have started or spiked these habits.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Another part was people want to wind down.

• 30:03Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  And use technology, paper books, whatever it may be. But they wind down and then they just kind of keep going. They put off going to bed because they're enjoying winding down. Night brain likes to have fun and likes to be entertained, right? And so a lot of people just want to do something fun in their day. And that is the opportunity when they can do that. There was this other really interesting thing that came out of both people we spoke to and the existing literature base that is called tomorrow aversion. Which is, as Ian, you know, it's like such a scientific term, but you, you know what I mean? Which is when you just don't want this day to end and the next day to begin.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  You're, you're relating to this so hard right now.

• 30:53Alie Ward?

  Yeah, that hurts. It hurts.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:58Alie Ward?

  So real.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  And you don't even have a nine to five job where you're going into an office that you kind of don't want to be in that much.

• 31:03Alie Ward?

  I know.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:04Alie Ward?

  But I, this, it especially happens when you've got a flight to catch early and you know.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  It's going to be rough.

• 31:11Alie Ward?

  You know it's going to be rough and you're like, the sooner I close my eyes, the sooner I'm going to wake up at four in the morning.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. So your night brain or night guy optimizes for now because it's fun and we can just keep enjoying this day. I had such an interesting reaction within myself to this evidence from this study. Because as a sleep researcher, you come in and you're like, sleep is important. Everybody needs to be sleeping. How can we stop bedtime procrastination? Because you should all be sleeping instead. And then what emerged from all of this evidence was that people have this psychological need to do these things at night. And they're important to their stress levels, their sense of identity, their sense of connection

• 32:02Speaker 02

  and all of these things. And then I started feeling kind of bad about telling people that they should stop doing these things at night. And I really had this kind of internal conflict that I still have now. Because I think that you have this concept of sleep and the concept of rest. And they're definitely related, but they're not identical. And a lot of things that people do at night to help them wind down are forms of rest.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  But they're not sleep and sometimes they get in the way of sleep. So I think there's this conflict between rest and sleep and our psychological needs that I'm still working out.

• 32:47Alie Ward?

  Well, do some of these ways of procrastinating, like say, screen time or going down rabbit holes or scrolling and just having the algo sort of like roll the dice for you? Do any of those activate the sympathetic nervous system instead of the parasympathetic? So the sympathetic nervous system is the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, the like, oh no, part of your brain. And the parasympathetic involves the rest and digest. That's the reset. That's the cleanup crew. So does your phone or that dive into a news story poke the scary bear? And is that bear low key ruining your life?

• 33:29Speaker 02

  They definitely can. I mean, depending on what you see, particularly when you're just relying on the algorithm or a scroll, you're not really in control of that. And if you see something that's quite triggering for you in a certain way, that could put you in fight or flight when you want to be winding down.

• 33:47Alie Ward?

  Yeah. When does it become compulsive and when is it by choice?

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Something that I've gone deep into is habit. In science, habit is this invisible force that drives our behaviour in a way. We use examples in research that I think are just so on the nose. But in a research paper, I'd be like, are you ordering the donut? Or are you ordering a salad? And you sit there debating the, do I want to eat the donut? No, I should have the salad. Wait, maybe I'll just have the donut, you know? And anyway, these things use a lot of self regulatory resources. It requires a lot of effort for your brain. And this is a slow process because you really have to think hard

• 34:35Speaker 02

  about every decision that you make. Now, there's a theory of self-control that by the end of the day, we're kind of burnt out on self-control. So self-control is a muscle that we exercise throughout the day in all of these different ways. It's a finite resource. And by the end of the day, our brains are just kind of done. They have run out of energy. And I think the donut and the salad thing is one example. But I think that you use self-control in all different ways throughout the day that you might not even realise.

• 35:09Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Just today, my taxed brain dealt with, should I eat a bunch of these free Starbursts from the bowl in the office kitchen? Should I walk or just drive down the street? Should I wash my hair or can I get away with another day because I'm running late and a slob? What should I watch on TV? What should we do for dinner? Is it time to clip my dog's nails or will she hate me for that? All day, every day.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  What do you want?

• 35:34Speaker 04

  What do you want?

• 35:35Speaker 02

  It's not that simple. By the time it gets to the evening, your self-control has just had it. And what the research shows is that we rely on habit a lot more in the evening than we do at any other time of day. So our evening behaviours are largely driven by habit. So driven by that invisible force where we're taking the low effort option. We're doing what we find pleasurable and we are easily losing track of time compared to morning guy. And there are some fascinating studies with this. Some European researchers led a study where they wanted people to form a stretching habit. So a 10 minute stretching habit that you do every day. They split participants into two groups.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  So we had morning people and night people. The morning people formed this new habit a month and a half before the night people. It is more difficult to learn in the evening as well. To form new habits in the evening, to change your behaviour in the evening compared to the morning. So in the study with the stretching habit, what the researchers found is that your cortisol levels predict how quickly you form a new habit. So we often talk about cortisol like it's this really evil hormone that's keeping us in fight or flight and we need to minimise it at all times.

• 36:59Alie Ward?

  There's so many pop up ads that are like, do you have belly fat? Blame cortisol.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Do you need to do a cortisol detox?

• 37:06Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah. I see these pop up ads that are like, shut up. What? Get out of here.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  But your hormones have a natural circadian rhythm to them. So they're higher at certain times of day and lower at other times. And your cortisol is higher in the morning. And cortisol supports memory and learning. So at the time when you have more cortisol naturally, you can learn things more easily. You can form habit, new habits and behaviours more easily than at different times of the day. So your hormones actually support how you remember things and learn and behave in different ways, where it's easier to do that in the morning than it is at night.

• 37:49Alie Ward?

  Is there a difference in people's behaviour where like, as soon as they get home, they're getting ready for bed so that they can just get into bed whenever? Versus trying to do that when you're already out of energy and trying to have a routine for bed?

• 38:03Speaker 02

  So basically when you're sleepy or more fatigued, your perception of effort changes. So things that you would have perceived as easier earlier in the day, suddenly you perceive as more difficult. So brushing your teeth at night can feel so much more effortful than brushing your teeth in the morning, simply because you are sleepy. And this has come through in, in the literature base. And I find that so interesting that your perception of things changes. So I think that for some people who have a nighttime routine, like I would say just brushing your teeth and putting on your pyjamas is a nighttime routine.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  But people just find that so difficult sometimes because they are fatigued or sleepy. It's funny, tired actually isn't a word that is used in sleep science.

• 38:58Alie Ward?

  Wait, is it really? Yeah. Why is that?

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Well, because tired is too vague. Yeah. Scientists love precision in definitions. So you can be sleepy and there's a scale of sleepiness. It's called the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale, the KSS. I've used it in a lot of my research. It's just a question of how sleepy are you? Ellie, are you about to fall asleep where you're sitting right now? So sleepy is when your, it measures basically how close you are to actually falling asleep. And then fatigued is more of a measure that we use during the day.

• 39:33Alie Ward?

  And surprise, according to science itself, people tend to get more fatigued as the day wears on.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  So you have this perception of effort that changes. You have your hormonal changes. You are operating from this place of habit instead of self-control. That changes. There is some evidence that mood can change at night. Like literally when the sun sets, the light is daylight is so important in regulating your mood. You can be susceptible to more of a negative mood in the evening, which in turn can lead to those like worried thoughts that people get late at night and catastrophising. I'm so awful at catastrophising everything at 10pm, right? I have period pain at nine 45pm. I'm like, oh my God, I have cancer, you know?

• 40:22Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  These things are just more susceptible for our night brain. It's this different state of being compared to our day brain. And it's important for people to understand that. So you can just have a little bit more empathy for yourself at night. And you can just work with your night brain a little bit more closely to give it what it wants in a way that can also support your sleep, right? So I, I am just a over ambitious person sometimes where I just make goals that I never reach. And I think we just need to be a bit kinder about what we're planning on doing in the evening.

• 41:00Alie Ward?

  Well, that was going to be my next question. Something I struggled with for the longest time that I still struggle with is, do I deserve to rest? Have I done enough today to warrant?

• 41:14Alie Ward?

  Closing the books on today and dealing with that like tomorrow aversion. Do you find in early career folks, or maybe again, it's just the hustle culture of America, where there's like not a safety net at all, that it's just difficult for some people to provide themselves with that kind of rest? I would never do that to my dog. I'd never be like, do you sniff enough lizards today? I get out there, I think you could pee on a little more grass before you take a nap, you know? But I think some people, especially like high achievers or people who have high neuroticism. But is there a self-care that people withhold?

• 41:54Speaker 02

  There are two interesting thoughts I had floating around in my head when you were saying that. One is that from sleep trackers, so smartwatches and rings and, and things where we can all of a sudden in science, go and have a look at the sleep data of like 500,000 people. It's kind of crazy.

• 42:13Alie Ward?

  Wow, that's nuts.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  One of the most fascinating things that I have seen repeated with these high level statistics is that the best sleep health in the world is in Scandinavia.

• 42:24Alie Ward?

  Of course, of course.

• 42:28Alie Ward?

  Shocker.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Shock. And they list the individual countries. It's like number one, Sweden, number two, Norway, number three, Germany, number four, Denmark. Like it's just kind of going.

• 42:38Alie Ward?

  Iceland, Iceland, it's just like.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  And then it's like number six, New Zealand.

• 42:42Alie Ward?

  Yeah, they're like, they have socialized medicine. They have like more vacation time.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  More regular working hours or the rest of it. So I think that speaks to what you were saying from a very high level. Like, yeah, the countries that perform higher on the happiness indexes and that have socialized medicine and free education and all the rest of it also perform better in sleep health measures. So we did this review and what we found was there was a link between higher bedtime procrastination, lower sleep duration, lower sleep quality and higher daytime fatigue. So what you asked about kind of falls into that daytime fatigue category.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  And if there's anyone who is a health researcher listening to this, they may laugh because it's at the end of every study, they will say, we need interventions. And people talk a lot about interventions is the term that is used, but it's really just like a program or a technique or strategies or whatever for people to try to stop this behavior or fix this behavior.

• 43:53Alie Ward?

  So what are those interventions? Okay, first, you have to identify what's wrong.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  And then what we did was a type of study that's called an ecological momentary assessment, so an EMA study, which is a really good type of study when it comes to normal everyday habits. So procrastination is one of them.

• 44:16Speaker 05

  However.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  You can't really measure bedtime procrastination in a lab.

• 44:21Alie Ward?

  Unlike the sleep studies that measure brainwaves and those diagnose clinical narcolepsy and sleep apnea, behavior choices, those are hard to spot in captivity. No way I'm going to be a night goblin if I'm behind one-way glass being observed by a grad student.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  So what an EMA study does is it pings your phone at many different times throughout the day and you will just fill in a quick survey of a text message or you'll do a text response or whatever. So we did this for bedtime procrastination where I would ping people's phones at certain times of days based on when they told me they got up and when they went to bed. And that was how we actually measured how much people were procrastinating their bedtime day to day, how they were feeling, et cetera. I did two different studies and one we did it for seven days and then in the other we did it for 14 days. And I just want to say thank you to everyone who for 14 days, let me send them text messages

• 45:25Speaker 02

  and responded to them all that many times. So keep in mind, these are people who signed up to a study that was designed to reduce their bedtime procrastination. So I designed one of these intervention programs. They did the program and the study, but this was the first week of the program. So they weren't doing anything other than just reporting on what they were currently doing.

• 45:48Speaker 05

  Any further results of those tests?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Basically, everyone told us that they were using their screens to procrastinate.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  The majority of people in this study are clustered between zero and 30, maybe 35 minutes a night of procrastinating their bedtime. There's another smaller bump around 60 minutes. And then there are a smaller number of extreme outliers. So people who are delaying the bedtime by 125 minutes a night, 175 minutes a night.

• 46:22Alie Ward?

  Two to three hours. That's, that's my neighborhood.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  But this really changed how I thought about the story of bedtime procrastination because you can see that a lot of people who signed up to a study and said, yes, I procrastinate my bedtime, I want to change my behavior. Like half of them are procrastinating their bedtime by 30 minutes or less every day. And I think that in terms of bedtime procrastination impacting our sleep and impacting our health, yes, it can be bad. I do want to go on the record of just saying that it can be bad because yeah, we have people here who are delaying bedtime by two hours a night, three, almost three hours a night in, in some cases. And that is going to have a pretty significant impact on your health, particularly if you're

• 47:09Speaker 02

  doing it one night and not the other night. So you have this variation in your bedtime by hours every single day. But I started to wonder when I was looking at this data, are we just being influenced by this perfectionism culture of the internet where people have a 20-minute variation in bedtime day to day? And people are like, oh my God, I'm on my phone for 20 minutes before I go to bed.

• 47:35Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  How awful I have a problem. I, I don't know if I would consider that very much of a problem. And I say this because sleep regularity is a huge area of research and some super interesting findings about how important it is to have a regular bedtime every night for our longevity and long-term health. But when you look at that research, 30 minutes variation is considered normal. And I was like, most of you guys are using your phone for 25 minutes before you go to bed. I don't think that's a crisis.

• 48:16Alie Ward?

  Yeah, cut yourself some slack.

• 48:19Alie Ward?

  And not to mention that your phone has every friend you've ever had, all the news in the world and every curiosity about infants having jalapenos that you could possibly, you know? So the idea that you have a portal to omniscience and that you're like, I don't know, I spent 25 minutes. Like that's not bad, you know? Like imagine that in like Lord of the Rings where they're like, if you open this door, there's every thought anyone's ever had.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:49Alie Ward?

  But good luck self-regulating.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I mean, again, this is just a snippet of the population that we had in this study. But it really made me consider the language that we use around screen use and sleep and how people actually said, I feel really guilty using my phone before I go to bed. But I think that there's definitely an avenue where we can do that in a way that supports a wind down. And maybe it's not your phone, maybe it's a different screen, maybe it's your TV and you're just watching some show that you find relaxing.

• 49:28Alie Ward?

  Why is it soggy? Oh, okay.

• 49:33Alie Ward?

  I've got a soggy bottom.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  There isn't really a need for adults to feel guilty about that. I say adults because there is evidence that in adolescents and kids, screen use can have a, an effect on sleep. They are much more sensitive to the effects of bright screens and blue light and things like that. The evidence becomes a lot more negligible in adulthood.

• 49:59Alie Ward?

  And on that topic of kiddo sleep, that nonprofit Project Sleep notes that not enough sleep can have so many downstream effects on kids. Anyone who's seen a cranky kid will know that. But it says that surprisingly, many children are referred to behavioral problems when they should be referred to a sleep specialist. I did not know that. Now, what about the pale glow of the internet though? So in terms of blue blocking glasses, all are not created equal. There was a 2025 study published in the journal Translational Vision Science and Technology. It was titled Optimizing the Potential Utility of Blue-Blocking Glasses for Sleep and Circadian Health. And it explains that these lenses knock down the shorter wavelengths on the visible light spectrum.

• 50:43Alie Ward?

  However, it continues, their effectiveness depends on their filtering properties, their application, when and how often are you using them, and timing. And the wrong glasses or the haphazard use of them, quote, "may be entirely counterproductive, leading to worse sleep patterns or grogginess, causing more accidents and illness." So what do you get? What do you, uh? So the research in this paper says that ones you should look for are melanopic daylight filtering density, or MDFD, above one, just in case you like Googling letters and numbers. If you don't like that, Consumer Reports did the work for you. They tested three different brands, ranged from $8 to $55.

• 51:26Alie Ward?

  And the ones that cut the most blue light, they found were the cheap ones. A brand called UVEX Skiper rated the highest. But the problem. It may not even be the light itself, but the habit of just putting off closing your eyes in favor of doing other awakey things. And we have a two-part someology episode with research legend and author, Dr. Chris Winters, who's awesome. But if you need your science to be like a little more goth, you can check out our 2019 chronobiology episode on circadian rhythms with Dr. Catherine Hatcher. And in it, I found this Turkish study entitled, "Life is Short. Stay Awake: Death Anxiety and Bedtime

• 52:08Alie Ward?

  Procrastination," which explains that one cause of sleep procrastination is just the fear of being a corpse eventually. So instead of not existing for eight hours, reminding us of disintegrating back into the earth, you just continue to experience life's rich pleasures, such as watching donkey rescue videos and going down social media rabbit holes to see where your ex-boyfriend went on vacation. So the prevailing advice is to take a nice bath at night. You can give yourself an hour window to get ready for bed. Or at the beginning of the day, you just arm your to-do list with a bedtime and

• 52:48Alie Ward?

  then work backwards from that. In essence, scientists say, suck it up, knock it off, but do it gently. So the glasses may not fix everything if you are your own worst enemy. Sweet, sweet, sweet babies.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  If you're using your phone for 30 minutes before bed, the blue light is not really going to have that much of an impact on your sleep, but the content might, right?

• 53:11Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  So I think that we really need to absolve ourselves of the guilt that we feel using our phone to do the crossword or the spelling bee or something like that for 20 minutes or 30 minutes before we go to sleep?

• 53:30Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Well, I have questions from listeners.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 53:32Alie Ward?

  Can I lightning round you with some of them? But as always, first we'll toss some money at a worthy cause. And this week, Dr. Nessie Hill chose Project Sleep, which is a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness and bridging the gaps between sleep health, sleep equity, and sleep disorders. You can learn more at project-sleep.com, or we put a link in the show notes. And thank you to our Ologies sponsors for making these donations possible every week. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can

• 54:15Alie Ward?

  update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up, or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, do it Squarespace. So head to squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it.

• 54:57Alie Ward?

  The other day, your pod mother, Jarrett, was like, why do we have to eat every day, like, three times a day? But Hungry Root, they get it. And they get to know your likes and your dislikes, your goals nutritionally, what works with your lifestyle, and then they recommend groceries and recipes just for you. They help you discover new meals, ingredients you may not have chosen for yourself, but could end up being like, this is my new favorite. Hungry Root, they just help you spend less mental energy planning meals, shopping for groceries, and cooking, so you can just put that time towards what matters to you. And I teamed up with Hungry Root to create an online cookbook. It's called Pod Mom and Dad's High Protein and Low Dairy Menu. And we have a protein-packed chicken

• 55:39Alie Ward?

  avocado rice bowl, sweet potato and Chipotle salad. They also have some really great veggie options, too, like this Moroccan vegetable tajine. That's hecka good. You can explore my digital cookbook, Pod Mom and Dad's High Protein Low Dairy Menu, for free at hungryroot.com/ologies. And for a limited time, get 40% off your first order, plus a free item in every box for life with code OLOGIES. Oh, trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if

• 56:20Alie Ward?

  what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy. We're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details. Here's some things that I love to wear, okay? I like wearing all black because it matches. Also, a sleeveless Mongolian cashmere sweater. Those are some things that I find myself reaching for all the time. And they have a permanent place in my wardrobe, and they are Quince. That's exactly what Quince does so well. They make these elevated essentials.

• 57:02Alie Ward?

  They use premium materials and designs that are just timeless. They're made to be worn again and again. They're those quality pieces that are there to stay in your closet. And as the weather gets a little more crisp, Quince, they've got everything you need to round out that wardrobe. They got warm, responsibly sourced down jackets, cozy cashmere scarves. And because they cut out the middlemen, you get very high-quality stuff for a lot less money. So find the fall pieces that you will reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. You can get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And then when Quince asks

• 57:44Alie Ward?

  where you heard about them, just let them know it was Ologies' Ally Ward, because she loves them. It's the best way to support the show, too.

• 57:51Speaker 06

  Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did, and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com/switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required.

• 58:15Alie Ward?

  Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Okay, so let's cozy up to 37 pages of your questions, listeners. If you would ever like to submit some, you can support Ologies just by signing up for $1 a month or more at patreon.com/ologies. We also have discussion threads of each episode every week, so go ahead and go to that on your desktop or your mobile device. Maybe not at 3:00 AM, though. On that note, okay, screen time. Goblin Prince, Jessica Swanson, first-time question asker, says, "Kindles and e-readers before bed, do they limit blue light and mimic a paperback book? Is it all marketing?" And Flim Flam Goblin Prince said, "I've heard

• 58:59Alie Ward?

  screens are bad before bed because the blue light they emit. Does night mode on phones, does it actually make a difference?" A lot of people wanted to know that that light filter and the blue light, does it help?

• 59:13Speaker 02

  So to answer that very briefly, I would say the blue light from your devices probably is not affecting your sleep that much. What affects your sleep more are the lights in your house. So consider how bright your ceiling lights are compared to how bright your phone is, or your tablet is, or your TV is. All you need to do is turn off all of your lights, and you can see how bright they are compared to your devices, right? And there's a really interesting research group out of Monash University in Melbourne, where they have done a lot of studies on ceiling light and how that affects people's melatonin suppression. And they clip light meters onto people's pants and wear them around their house and

• 59:58Speaker 02

  things like that. And they found in one study that Sean Kane and his colleagues published in 2020, they found that about half of the households had lights so bright that it suppressed 50% of their melatonin production in the evening.

• 1:00:14Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  And this is also why, when they do studies, like throwing people in the Rockies for seven days without any devices or electricity, one of the reasons why the circadian rhythm shifts so much is because of house lights, not so much your devices. So I am a big advocate for lamps. If there was big lamp industry, I would be shilling their products. Ally?

• 1:00:44Alie Ward?

  You know what I love? We've recently started doing, and you can kind of see it.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Oh, you have very warm light bulbs.

• 1:00:50Alie Ward?

  We have those Hue lights.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Alie Ward?

  Yeah, we have smart bulbs, and we've set them to candle flicker.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Oh, you have. I didn't even know you could do that.

• 1:00:58Alie Ward?

  At night, you have, like, we have this, like, really warm, very gentle, like, candle flicker. And it's so cozy. We also have, like, a digital fireplace going.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  I love, I've been admiring your digital fireplace and wondering if I should get one for my own home.

• 1:01:12Alie Ward?

  I love it. It's so cozy. Okay, I know you're wondering. I would be, too. So these are these LED panels. They're made by Twinkly, who is giving me no money for this. I got nine of them to form a grid of squares. And then they have this app where you can upload a picture, or a GIF, or a pattern, or colors, and it looks like 8-bit animation. And I uploaded a fireplace GIF, and it's on our wall where a fireplace would be, because we don't know how to install fireplaces. So imagine, like, a life-size 1983 video game version of a hearth. "The heart craves the flicker of fire. The brain says, no open flames." Okay? But we've, we've kind of done that, and not because we're good at sleep hygiene,

• 1:01:56Alie Ward?

  but just because for vibes.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  This would suggest that you are good at sleep hygiene.

• 1:02:00Alie Ward?

  I've gotten better.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Alie Ward?

  I've gotten better.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  So, so this is something that I would say about the lights in your house, potentially doing more to suppress your melatonin than the devices that you use. But you will see a lot of people on social media in particular, be like, no screens an hour before sleep or something. And- What I have found in my research is that people just do it anyway. So I think rather than saying, don't do it, when there isn't evidence that suggests that it's awful for our sleep. How can we do it in a way that supports our wind down, that gives us a bit of me

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  time and helps us de-stress, but not go on autopilot for two hours on our phones, right? It's like, how can we have more of a routine in place where we do it, but we end at a certain time? If you have smart lights, like can you watch TV, but have the lights go out at 11:30 every night and you know that that's your cue, that you need to get up and go and get changed or whatever? Like, how can we actually build it into our routine in a way that can be healthy and can affect our sleep?

• 1:03:14Alie Ward?

  So in general, while I want to climb up flock camera poles and I want to bite them broken, I do wear fitness and sleep trackers that measure my every move, even during sleep. And it has been really helpful for me to see trends like, oh, maybe I did sleep 12 hours on Saturday because I only slept four to catch a flight the night before. Hmm. How about that? That's not very surprising now. You cannot cheat Mr. Sandman. He will come and he will collect debt. And a sleep tracker, like one of those rings, gives you the evidence. Vanessa Nessy, I noticed, also wears a fitness tracker ring.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  It was really interesting when I went to my first big sleep conference, everyone was really shitting on sleep trackers and consumer sleep trackers. But I went last year to the same conference and it was like night and day, how scientists were talking about them. And they were more like, let's just work with the companies to get the data to use in our research. It was just so remarkable, this was in like a five year period, how much the discourse on it changed in the research community. And that is because they got a little bit more accurate.

• 1:04:30Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Alie Ward?

  I love mine.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  I think that for people who use them, it's always best to just look at the data over a period of time as a pattern, more than obsess about it day to day.

• 1:04:44Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  It is there to give you a picture of your health, rather than a minute by minute accounting, you know?

• 1:04:52Alie Ward?

  You're not Brian Johnson trying to live forever, right? Isn't that his name? The guy that gets like blood transfusions from his own son. Yeah.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  I am just so tired by that corner of the internet. I couldn't be more different in my philosophy around health compared to everyone in the longevity space. And we still talk about sleep in black and white a lot of the time, where we're like, oh, you have to get seven hours a night, you have to go to bed at the same time, you have to wake up at the same time. And when you have a lot of guilt and shame about your sleep behaviours, that affects your sleep and it affects your overall health.

• 1:05:33Alie Ward?

  Oh, wise words. Amanda Acton said,

• 1:05:37Speaker 06

  Hi, Ally. My name is Amanda. I live in Iowa. I love reading at bedtime to avoid sleep procrastination, but I use a Kindle. Is that okay? Does that have the same effects as if I were to be reading or scrolling on my phone with the blue light and such? Or are Kindles practically books? Thanks.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  Kindles, I think Kindles are great. And I have a Kindle, I use that a lot of nights. And I like them because you can't swipe away and go into another app, right? Like you have your book and, and that's it. So it kind of forces your brain to wind down in that way.

• 1:06:18Alie Ward?

  Yeah. I have a, one of the smaller Kindles. And if it's in my purse and I find myself like, I went out to go eat alone and I went to go scroll and I was like, I got a book in my purse?

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Alie Ward?

  I have several books in my purse, if I'm being honest. Magda from India says, Hello. My question is, why does listening to podcasts make you fall asleep within the first five minutes of the podcast beginning? Staring at the ceiling doesn't work, meditation doesn't work, nothing works, but turn on a podcast, I'm out within five minutes. Wow. Uh, insulting.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  They didn't even make it this far in.

• 1:06:55Alie Ward?

  They're never gonna hear their question, which is funny because I was thinking, since you have a child, bedtime procrastination starts so early when it's like, read me one more, read me one more. Like that's bedtime procrastination.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  What is so funny is that my kid loves books.

• 1:07:10Alie Ward?

  Uh huh.

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  It's so sweet and funny at the same time, but she actually cries now when she goes to bed because she wants to keep reading.

• 1:07:18Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  It is bedtime procrastination. I hadn't even thought of it like that.

• 1:07:22Alie Ward?

  Genetic.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Wow. And I have to put all of these stuffed toys in her cart. So I can be like, but look, doggy is waiting for you to go to bed. We can read more books tomorrow when you wake up. I'm like already negotiating with her.

• 1:07:37Alie Ward?

  Her night guys, like, I don't think so.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  What I find is that when I try to use sleep stories or meditations or listen to music, my internal monologue is just so loud that it overpowers those things. They're almost too gentle or too slow paced where I have my internal to do list or I have something that is worrying me and I just have that obsessive thought and the sleep story can't overpower it. But when I turn on an audiobook or a podcast or something that just has more of a narrative focus, it has just the right amount of noise to drown out my internal monologue. And I also fall asleep within five minutes of listening to podcasts or audiobooks.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  I've actually been listening to the same audiobook for five months.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  And I've slept through 90% of the book.

• 1:08:30Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  And I've, actually I've never done this, but I've thought about starting a boring book club where I share these book recommendations. And I'm like, hey guys, this one knocked me right out. It's a 16 hour audiobook about the Berlin Wall, which is the one I just finished.

• 1:08:47Alie Ward?

  Was it really?

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's, it's like interesting enough where it talks about the history of Berlin in the sixties and things like that. And it's pretty fascinating.

• 1:08:57Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  But it's also not that interesting at the same time, right? I don't know. It's like, it is interesting, but it's also slow because it's a historical book. And the guy who narrates it has this really slow British cadence.

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  Through deceit, bribery and blackmail, West German government bodies and military interests induce certain unstable elements in the German Democratic Republic. To leave for West Germany, the Warsaw Pact member states must take

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  All the ingredients I need to fall asleep.

• 1:09:32Alie Ward?

  Just chef's kiss. Jared has these headphones that are like a headband that are rechargeable. So he can sleep in it. So it's, it's like a sweatband essentially.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  And it's an eye mask as well.

• 1:09:43Alie Ward?

  He can use it as an eye mask, goes over his ears every single night. If he doesn't have it, he cannot fall asleep. He sets a timer for the audiobook to play for like 30 minutes and shut off. That way he knows where he's at and he goes back to the next.

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do the same thing.

• 1:09:56Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Those sleepy headphones are called sleep phones and no, they are not sponsoring me either. My mom has this trick and we've talked about it in a different sleep episode. We call it the fancy Nancy. And you pick a category, like let's say band names or desserts or types of clothing. And then you think of one that starts with A, one that starts with B.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's this technique called cognitive shuffling, where you just kind of go through things like that. I think that's really good for when people wake up in the middle of the night, maybe you need to use the bathroom or whatever, but you then have trouble falling back asleep. And I think doing things like that are really good.

• 1:10:34Alie Ward?

  It gets me out every time, despite jet lag, despite anxiety. It's so funny. I have also done desserts so many times, for some reason, I'm just like,

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  You just wake up wanting tiramisu and toffee.

• 1:10:48Alie Ward?

  Yeah. I never make it that far.

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  Everything that starts with T.

• 1:10:51Alie Ward?

  I never make it that, I'm like apple cobbler, butterscotch, budino, and then just out. Um, let me see. Now, what if in the category of things that go in your mouth, you get to M? Medication? Patrons David, Vanessa Adams and Dr. Lena Carpenter wanted to know about that. And while we do discuss medication in much more depth in the two-part somnology episode with Dr. Chris Winter, Dr. Nessy Hill had an important PSA.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  An interesting note on medication generally is it continues to blow my mind how many people ask me about their sleep. And one of the first questions I'll ask, like honestly, no judgment, I'm just curious to help shape whatever I'm going to reply to you with, is I ask, have you spoken to your doctor about it? And the majority of people will be like, oh, no. And I just find that so crazy. Like if you had a rash, you would be at the dermatologist in like a week, like as soon, as soon as you could get an appointment, right? And people just tolerate sleeping badly for so long. I think because we just assume it's something that is a natural biological process and we should be able to do.

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  But I mean, if you're having trouble with it, there are so many amazing qualified people, including your primary care physician or GP or whatever is always a really good place to start. But a lot of people avoid or just don't bring it up with their doctor.

• 1:12:22Alie Ward?

  Yeah. I think also cost.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  Cost and then access as well.

• 1:12:26Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  I will just say, this is a really low key plug for something called CBTI, which is cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia. It's the gold standard treatment for insomnia beyond any kind of medication, but it has a marketing problem. It is a therapy. People, a lot of people just don't want to do something that is a therapy. These programs go for six weeks or eight weeks. A lot of people don't want to commit to doing something for that long. They just want a quick fix. But it has really good long-term efficacy in helping people with different types of insomnia.

• 1:13:08Alie Ward?

  And this was on the mind of patron Eleanor Wall, who asked, It would be good to know what a person can do if they sincerely dread going to sleep, whether because Of chronic pain that worsens in bed or because of night terrors or because of past traumas. And so in terms of chronic pain, we have an excellent Dolorology episode with Dr. Rachel Zoffnis, who also just came out with a book, Tell Me Where It Hurts: The New Science of Pain and How to Heal. And we'll also link to that Dolorology episode in the show notes. It's also one of our most downloaded episodes in Ologies' history. Super helpful. But the therapy Dr. Hill mentioned specifically is called CBTI.

• 1:13:46Alie Ward?

  It's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia. So yes, this exists. It's maybe just for you out there, my little bleary-eyed little pumpkin. So according to Stanford Health Resources, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia addresses three factors that contribute to persistent insomnia. So this kind of therapy figures out why you're having conditioned arousal, not the sexy kind of arousal, rather the, oh, no, why am I awake? Why am I still awake kind? And it identifies and works to eliminate the habits you developed around sleep that actually suck. And CBTI also reduces the sleep-related worry and those other sources of heightened arousal.

• 1:14:29Alie Ward?

  So a therapist focuses on those factors and can dig into the beliefs about sleep that might be freaking you out. And I was like, okay, does this work? And I was delighted to read the Stanford reports that the majority of patients respond to this treatment fairly quickly. Some significantly after just two therapy sessions. Others may need four or more sessions. And therapy can be group or individual. So for patrons like Chronic Insomniac Elizabeth Westner, this might help. And for the extremely relatable listeners, Mish the Fish and Ella Sugarman, who asked, where is the boundary between bedtime procrastination and insomnia? I ask for my bed where I began the night procrastinating and now can't seem to wind down enough to sleep.

• 1:15:15Alie Ward?

  Look for someone who practices cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. Erica G., Tiger Goodie, Georgia Kiran H., Phaser Phalon, Beck Piper, Mom of Eight, and Anna Corral. Anna asked, why do I get the zoomies right before bedtime?

• 1:15:33Alie Ward?

  Faze Phaser wanted to know about second winds. Like, yeah, what's going on there?

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  How do you imagine a human adult has the zoomies?

• 1:15:46Alie Ward?

  I guess I'd just be like so stoked to work on a craft project. And then also just like, you know what? I need to organize the sock drawer. I'm gonna do it right now. You know, I should unpack the thing that is in my suitcase that's sitting in. Yeah, I would think like, oh, I'm suddenly productive, you know, like midnight.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  There are many different reasons for this. One of them could be if this person is naturally a night owl or what we would call an evening chronotype. Something I find really interesting is you see a lot of things on social media, et cetera, that are like, are you an early bird or a night owl?

• 1:16:23Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  But actually, most people, like up to perhaps 60% of people are neither. Like, the majority of people are just kind of in between.

• 1:16:33Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the latest estimate that I've seen suggests that between 10% to 15% of people either fall into the early bird or night owl categories.

• 1:16:47Alie Ward?

  Wow. I had no idea.

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. But if you are naturally a night owl and you are forced to live on society's schedule where you need to wake up to go to work at 8 o'clock in the morning or whatever it may be, then you could just naturally have more energy in the evening. It could be something related to some of the things we were talking about before, where this is finally the time that you have to do things and there is just a second wind that comes with that. Could definitely be something like that.

• 1:17:19Alie Ward?

  And it's funny, too. During the daytime, you're like, my emails could go off any second. I could have forgotten I had an appointment. But at night, too, you're like, I'm pretty sure everyone's asleep. So I can finally like chill and do my own stuff. But I sometimes find that I get better writing done because I'm not getting any texts. I'm not worried about, you know, yeah, is there something that I'm not tending to? I love that while we're recording this, too, Grammy is just passed out.

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  Grammy's been having the nap of her life. Grammy is not procrastinating her bedtime. She's like, no time for that. I'm asleep.

• 1:17:54Alie Ward?

  She's like, you want me to be gorgeous? I'm gonna need to nap.

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  I know a lot of people who are creatives because I have a YouTube channel. I know a lot of people who make videos and who write and whatever. And they are getting into their creative rhythm at midnight.

• 1:18:11Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:12Alie Ward?

  I thought this was interesting in terms of bedtime procrastination. Lindsay Bartholomew said, why, when I'm struggling to stay awake and I fall asleep on the couch, do I have a hard time falling back asleep once I've completed my night routine and crawled into bed? Maddox and Sheridan Kelly all asked about this. Tip the Turtle said, I will often get cozy on the couch, knowing I'm tired and will fall asleep and should just go to bed, but I don't want to for some reason, and end up passing out on the couch. But I have to admit, literally, I did this last night. It slipped. Me and Jared both slept the entire night on the couch.

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 1:18:45Alie Ward?

  Love sleeping on the couch. Our bed is 20 feet away. But what is it about couch time, couch time that feels so different?

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  Sometimes this has to do with the associations that people have with sleep. So it's something that gets covered a lot if you do something like CBTI, the sleep therapy that I mentioned, or if you just kind of go through a lot of sleep hygiene, where a lot of people have these different psychological associations with their bed if they have trouble sleeping, where they have this association with it that is bad. There is this recommendation that you should only use your bed for sleep and sex. Because if you're lying in your bed scrolling on your phone, if you're eating lunch on your bed, if you're doing all of these other things, your brain associates your bed with being awake.

• 1:19:38Speaker 02

  So that's part of it, for sure. I think the other part of it is that when you're on the couch, oh, my God, I love sleeping on the couch, Charlie. Like, I love it because I'm a sleep scientist. A lot of people think that I must have this perfect evening routine and that I am just a model citizen when it comes to sleep health. And I will say, my sleep has improved a great deal compared to where it was 10 years ago. But I still love staying up late from time to time. I love falling asleep on the couch. I think part of it is that you're often doing something on the couch, like you're watching TV, and you have that distraction, right? That can just take your brain a little bit out of that fixation mode

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  where you're stressed or you're thinking about work or whatever you have to do. And it just sets your brain free in a way. And you can just be under a blanket and you can be so cozy. And it often is the first thing that you go to do to relax, rather than just doing your bedtime routine and getting into bed, that it just creates these perfect conditions to just slip away.

• 1:20:46Alie Ward?

  That makes me feel so much better. Are there such a thing as second sleep, where farmers would get up in the middle of the night, or is that a myth?

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  There are records of this, definitely, before the nine to five work schedule or before really the widespread nature of electricity, where there was this thing called polyphasic sleep, where people would have a first sleep and a second sleep and get up and do things in the middle of the night. I question how common it is because there's been a number of papers and books written about this and media interviews. They're all done by the same guy.

• 1:21:22Alie Ward?

  And here, I must shout him out, Roger Ekrich, who authored the 2006 banger, At Days Close: Night in Times Past. The very first words of this book are the, quote, "Never greet a stranger in the night, for he may be a demon." And that's from the Talmud. Now, chapters in this juicy historical work include, "In the Shadow of Death," "Terrors of the Night," "Plunder, Violence, and Fire," and "The Passages That Launched Modern Polyphasic Sleep Curiosities," "Sleep We Have Lost," "Rhythms and Revelations." And I've read parts of this book. It is an absolutely lovely romp through medieval peasant ale houses,

• 1:22:07Alie Ward?

  DTF messaging via snuffed candles, lanterns shooed away past fornicating Romans.

• 1:22:15Alie Ward?

  Just 10 out of 10 for the gossip. But if you are not in the mood for the porn of your, you can skip straight to Roger Eckert's views on second sleep. He also has a seminal 2001 scholarly paper, Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber. He's a second sleeper.

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  He's an academic. And, you know, he's done some good work, but he loves to say that everyone did this. And I think that certainly some people did it, but I'm sure that it was a thing that some people did and some people did not.

• 1:22:48Alie Ward?

  So funny. He's like, I'm a poly physics sleep influencer. The biggest question so many people had is, how do I stop? I just want to shout out the listeners specifically whose questions involved the caps lock button, including Stacy Pinkowitz, Natalie J., longtime listener Victoria Clifton, Katie, who feels attacked, Margot Hayes, as well as Thistleboo singer Melissa, Ariel Van Sant, Sydney Gazebeek, Valby Listening, Janganator, first timer Jessica, Erica G., Mariana Alvarez, Kirat Singh, and Detritavor Dragon Killer, who begged, please, followed by five ellipses. Is it important to stop? Like if someone is like, this is ruining my life.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Alie Ward?

  How do you stop?

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Some people come to me and they say, this is ruining my life and I can't do my job and I'm not a good partner and how do I stop? And it can be really hard to stop because what you find is that people have this habit strength and it is so hard to change our behavior and essentially break our habits and even harder to do it at night than it is at different times of day. What I have encouraged people to do in interventions that I have developed, which is basically programs for people to reduce their procrastination, is to look at it from a habit perspective. So if you think about how we form a habit, it's through cues and repetition and reward, right?

• 1:24:15Speaker 02

  So if you think about the cues for why you are procrastinating your bedtime, and sometimes this is really hard, okay? You might have to keep a journal and do this over the course of a week, two weeks, a month, whatever. But I want people who ask this question and who are trying to change to think about why you start procrastinating your bedtime. The answer could be, you don't know, but just try to figure it out. Cause a cue, I'll give you some examples of some cues. A cue could be the time of day. So it could just be 11 o'clock every night and you just start doing whatever you're doing. It could be an emotion, like you could feel dread at going to sleep

• 1:24:59Speaker 02

  because you don't want to wake up the next day. It could be a specific place, like it actually could be your couch. You could just lie down on your couch and just never be able to get up. Okay. And go to bed because it is so effortful for you to do that, that you just can't even contemplate it at midnight.

• 1:25:19Alie Ward?

  Yeah. My couch is out to get me. That's one thing. And another force field between me and rest is the sensory agony of washing my face. Water down my sleeves, cold on my neck, scratchy towel, get fucked. I don't want it. I avoid it. So some fixes I have found are using like a gentle cleanser, like Cetaphil. It requires no Noxzema commercial face splashing. You can just wipe it off with a soft towel or a cotton pad and your moisture barrier loves it. I have also chopped up a sock and used it as two wristbands so that water can't drip down to my elbows. Now, other cues that might keep you from sleeping

• 1:26:03Alie Ward?

  might be just the decision to floss or not to floss, or looking for comfort by scrolling. But your content is literally designed to keep you engaged, enraged, or unsatisfied. And I will say that the 50 bucks I spent on something called a brick, that you have to physically go tap your phone against to unlock certain apps, honestly, life changing. Thank you to Simone Yach for telling me about it. Brick paying me zero money, but I love you. So I'm going to tell you that if scrolling is ruining your life, you can go to getbrick.com. It's the only thing that stops me from scrolling. But yes, soul search why you're doing it.

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  So having really hard think about what the cue is, and then think about the reward. So what are you actually getting out of whatever you're doing? Do you like watching YouTube videos because they're funny? Because you're exploring a niche interest? Because you just need a bit of me time? Because they help you de-stress? Like, think about whatever that reward is. Because you can try to stop and you can try to use all of your willpower. It probably won't work because your self-control is just out the fucking window at 12 o'clock at night, right? So you really have to come from this behavior or habit perspective to essentially try to hack your habits to be different at that time.

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  There are all of these things that we call behavior change techniques in science. So actually, habit science is like super rigorous and scientific. Basically about 15 years ago, all of the behavioral science scientists got together and essentially came up with this list of 93 different behavior change techniques that you can use to help you change different behaviors.

• 1:27:56Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  But of those 93, some of them are more effective for different behaviors than others.

• 1:28:01Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I looked them up and I read all 93. And you can too, by pulling up the 2015 216-page report compiled from over 400 different behavioral change experts. And it's titled, Behavior Change Techniques: The Development and Evaluation of a Taxonomic Method for Reporting and Describing Behavior Change Interventions, A Suite of Five Studies Involving Consensus Methods, Randomized Controlled Trials, and Analysis of Qualitative Data. So these 93 methods of behavior modifications are sorted into 16 different categories. And that title was already long enough. People would be so mad if I read the whole thing to you. So I'm going to tell you my two least favorite, okay? Scheduled Consequences, if behavior is not changed.

• 1:28:46Alie Ward?

  I don't like that. And Inducing or Raising Awareness of Your Future Regret. But Nessy will endorse her faves.

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  One of them is actually called behavioral monitoring, which is actually what I just described. So like you're keeping a journal, you're trying to figure out what's causing your behavior. Sometimes that is enough to actually inspire change, where you might figure out that your cue is the couch. And you're like, okay, I actually just need to not sit down on the couch at night. And I, maybe I just need to sit in a chair at the dining table, do this thing for 10 minutes and then go and go to bed.

• 1:29:23Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Right? And maybe I read in bed for 20 minutes and then I fall asleep because I just, once I sit on the couch, it's all over for me.

• 1:29:29Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  So sometimes behavioral monitoring can actually be really helpful. I ran a clinical trial using a bunch of these different techniques. One of the other ones was called behavioral substitution, which is basically you're just trying to replace one habit or one behavior with another. So if you are scrolling on your phone because you just need to wind down and you just find it relaxing and that's it, what's something else you can do that would be relaxing? That has more of a finite endpoint? So could you replace your evening scroll on the couch with watching a 30-minute episode of something on Netflix in your bed?

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  And then you just put the sleep timer on your TV and you can just fall asleep. And a lot of people think that, oh, I shouldn't do that because it's a screen and I'm going to be in bed. But like, it's a lot better than what you're doing scrolling your phone on the couch because you can't stop doing that and you can stop doing the other things. So I think that this kind of substitution, which is just trying to find another behavior where you get the same reward out of it. But it's just something that has a set endpoint and all of a sudden that just becomes more of a habit for you.

• 1:30:43Alie Ward?

  You know, I was thinking about maybe, just because the death of print media makes me sad as a former newspaper reporter, but I was thinking about maybe just subscribing to some magazines.

• 1:30:51Speaker 02

  I've started getting magazines.

• 1:30:53Alie Ward?

  Have you?

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:54Alie Ward?

  Because it's the same itch as like little bits and it's interesting and it's pretty. Just a side note, I looked this up out of rage and roughly one in three posts and reels on Instagram are just ads. And recent users of Pinterest have been estimating between 50 to 70% of the mobile feeds are now just straight up advertisements. You are making billions of dollars for Mark Zuckerberg, who is using manipulation and addiction models to reach into your brain and steal sleep, peace, creativity, your identity, and data. Now, magazines, at least they're not tracking my eye movements. What do you subscribe to? I need some recommendations.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  Oh, I, I don't know if they're good recommendations. I actually have just been buying them.

• 1:31:42Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  I bought Harper's Bazaar.

• 1:31:45Alie Ward?

  Love.

• 1:31:45Speaker 02

  I bought Architectural Digest, which I find so funny because every article is like, these people spent $700,000 renovating their farmhouse, backyard.

• 1:31:59Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:01Speaker 02

  And they're like, we didn't think we were those kinds of people and we're not those kinds of people, but we installed this theater room. And you're like, you are those kinds of people.

• 1:32:12Alie Ward?

  But you know what? We'd be looking at, we'd be force fed the Kardashians' new backyard anyway, so might as well read it in small bits on paper.

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, the thing I have found is that I was too ambitious, where I was like, maybe I'll get the New Yorker, the Atlantic, or something with an interesting long read. And like, who is long reading when your toddler is a meter away?

• 1:32:31Alie Ward?

  Right, right. Like you're not deep in The Economist or something.

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  I just need like Vogue, where I can just look at different hats or something.

• 1:32:40Alie Ward?

  That's sometimes what we need. What about the hardest thing about what you do?

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  About my research?

• 1:32:45Alie Ward?

  Yeah, like what sucks about your research? I'll ask the best too.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Wow, what sucks about it? That's a really difficult question. For me, it's that I work from home, so I am still an adjunct research fellow and I still do some research, but I'm always alone in my house. And I love working from home, but sometimes I feel like I would be more abreast of what other people are working on, or just have more of a connection to colleagues and things like that, if I was actually working day to day at a university. And we have a lot of Zoom calls and things like that, but I think part of it would be more fulfilling if I was doing it in person.

• 1:33:30Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I've had to start going to cafes.

• 1:33:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:33Alie Ward?

  Go to the library. I mean, I, but I don't have a toddler, but I definitely, I certainly have to go lay eyes on other people.

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Alie Ward?

  It's good to get outside. What do you love the most about studying? Sleep?

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  I, this, maybe this sounds weird. I had a YouTube channel before I became an academic researcher, and I think that being a YouTuber made me a better researcher.

• 1:34:01Alie Ward?

  That.

• 1:34:02Speaker 02

  And it still does, because I read all the comments. And I think that YouTube comments have a really bad reputation for being awful. And yes, some of them are mean, but in the little educational pocket of YouTube that I exist in, people are super smart and mostly respectful, not always, but have really valid things to say. And I think it's just a touch point that a lot of academics don't have. And this is where and how I've developed this opinion that I think sleep science needs to have more humanity to it and just be a lot more human and talk to people more about the day to day things that they do in their life that are necessary and kind of prevent them from getting good sleep. And I think

• 1:34:47Speaker 02

  it's shaped how I approach my research, because I'm always thinking of those comments and those people and how people find this really tough. And I think a lot of academics are like, oh yeah, this is the formula that you need to change your behavior. And it just doesn't always work for people.

• 1:35:08Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, it's good to know. I feel better about my sleep than I did before. I think everyone's like secretly, yeah, ashamed of it. Like if you asked

• 1:35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16Alie Ward?

  10 people, how's your sleep? Nine of them would go, you know what I mean?

• 1:35:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:22Alie Ward?

  Just about their own habits. There is a lot of shame of like.

• 1:35:25Speaker 02

  There's so much shame. A lot of it is around technology and using screens. Some of it is around our schedules. And I think it is normal to wake up in the middle of the night. It's normal to feel tired at different points of the day. I think there are these different types of rest as well, right? Sleep is just one of them. But I think it's also important to take moments to reduce stimulation, to maybe listen to a meditation or a podcast, or just kind of chill out and manage your daily stress in different ways.

• 1:36:02Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm. Best advice I ever got was from a career coach who was like, work until six?

• 1:36:09Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:10Alie Ward?

  Eat from like seven to eight, eight to nine, do something that has nothing to do with work that you enjoy. Nine to 10, get ready for bed and tidy up. 10, you're in bed.

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:19Alie Ward?

  But it was like helpful to have it built in where it's like, do something you like doing for an hour.

• 1:36:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:24Alie Ward?

  Before you go to bed. And I was like, oh, nice. That helped my revenge bedtime procrastination a lot.

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:36:31Alie Ward?

  I didn't get into bed being like, you guys don't want to hang out?

• 1:36:36Alie Ward?

  So if you don't build in relaxing, night guy is going to rob it from morning guy. And in her 2025 clinical trial, Dr. Hill experimented with having subjects look for me time during the day, like listening to a podcast, or reading, or watching a TV show.

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  We tried to help them find opportunities to do this during their lunch break, during their work break, during their commute, straight after dinner, whatever it may be, to see if that would reduce the amount of time they spend procrastinating their bedtime. It did not work. You're so upset about this. It did not work, which is interesting in itself, right? Like this is why in science, we encourage people to publish negative results, because they still tell you something.

• 1:37:21Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  And the story that that told us is that there is something about this time before people go to bed, where they need to wind down at that time, not at 12:00 PM when they're eating lunch, not at 5:00 PM when they're coming home from work. They need to do it at night when it's dark and when it's quiet, before they go to sleep. And I just found that so fascinating.

• 1:37:46Alie Ward?

  It's a good off ramp. This is inspiring to me to look at and ask myself, what are we doing here? And are we getting the me time we need? Am I working on a puzzle? Am I reading a book I want to read?

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:59Alie Ward?

  Because a lot of times I say, no, you don't get that. And then I just procrastinate doing something that I don't like as much.

• 1:38:04Speaker 02

  Right. I just checked my phone because I kept a note of things that I thought of this week, where I was like, oh, we could talk about that with Ellie. And it was just the most random note, because I just had one thing on it, which said, what does it mean to be human?

• 1:38:19Alie Ward?

  Pretty big question.

• 1:38:24Speaker 02

  The reason why I put that down is that I think we can really obsess over statistics and over numbers that we get from our sleep trackers, over the numbers that we see in sleep guidelines and on social media or whatever, where we're just all stressing about getting eight hours sleep and getting to bed. And yes, that is all important in a way, except some of these things that we are doing at night help us connect with other people, help us have a social life, help us find identity, help us live in different ways. And I think that it's important to protect that. Yes, we do need sleep for our mental health and for our mood, and it helps strengthen our relationships and how we feel about ourselves

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  and all the rest of it. But it's important that people are kind to themselves when they think about their sleep. There is a lot of research that self compassion is linked to greater sleep quality, because when we find ways to be kind to ourselves and give ourselves a break, it helps us sleep better the next night. We all will have bad nights of sleep. We all will procrastinate our bedtime from time to time. But if you can come back and say, hey, that was just one night, and tomorrow it's a new day, it helps you get back into the rhythm of sleep health.

• 1:39:42Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm. Oh, that's so good to know. This makes me excited to just like go to bed with a book.

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm so happy to hear that. Yeah. I'm here for all of your questions. Every, all of the 37 pages of questions you have. People can ask me on Instagram and I'll reply.

• 1:40:00Alie Ward?

  You'll reply at like midnight from bed?

• 1:40:02Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:40:03Alie Ward?

  Thank you so much for being here.

• 1:40:05Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:40:07Alie Ward?

  So ask smart people sleep deprived questions and go to sleep. You deserve it. Evil billionaires don't want you to. Take a shower, get in jammies, close your eyes, think of the good things that happened today, even if it was a shitty day, maybe you saw a butterfly. Read a book for five minutes before you drift off. Use the Fancy Nancy. Rich ghouls don't want you to be rested and stronger. That sucks. So thank you so, so much to Dr. Vanessa Nessy Hill for the work you do, the lives you change, and letting us know that like 15, 30 minutes isn't too big deal. More than that, you might be getting screwed by hustle culture, in my

• 1:40:52Alie Ward?

  opinion. So you can follow Nessie Hill via her Substack, Nessie Hill, or her Instagram, at Nessie Hill. She's on TikTok and YouTube under Braincraft. You can like, subscribe, et cetera. We are at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky, and I'm at Ally Ward on both. I'm also pleased to report that my sleep procrastination plagued me again decades. It's pretty much nil these days. The brick, the showers before bed, fake candlelight, and just straight up indignation have made me fall in love with sleep hygiene. So thank you to all the researchers in the past. I'm going to link their episodes in the show notes if this is something you want to fix in your life. Also, thank you to everyone at patreon.com/ologies

• 1:41:34Alie Ward?

  for supporting the show since before day one. You too can join for a dollar a month. Come and join our discussion chats when the episodes go up. I love commenting back and chatting with you guys. Smologies are shorter, kid-friendly versions of Ologies that are cut down and G-rated. You can find them by Googling S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S, Smologies. Ologies merch is at ologiesmerch.com. Erin Talbert admin's the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. We have been having slumber parties since we met at the age of four. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer is the website. Our bedtime is set by scheduling producer, Noelle Dilworth. Our executive function is administered by managing director, Susan Hale, and our sun and moon are editors, Jake Chaffee and lead editor Mercedes Maitland

• 1:42:16Alie Ward?

  of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote the Ologies theme lullaby. And if you stick around until the very end, you know, I may tell you a secret. Okay, I went to see the lovely Fancy Nancy this weekend, and my sister Celeste and I were hunting for blackberries in my sister Janelle's yard. But they seemed to have peaked early this year, so most of the bushes just had like shriveled blackberry raisins. But we picked them anyway. Honestly, I give them a nine out of 10. They were chewy, sweet, high fiber, and I think they would make a great addition to scones or pancakes or like baked goods. And I was so wishing I had a trash picker, like a clean trash grabber to get the clusters that were too far in

• 1:42:58Alie Ward?

  the brambles. Also, I wish I'd done a batology episode earlier this season, because batology is a real thing. And it's about brambles and berries. You can look it up. So if you've got dried out bushes, pick them anyway. They're pretty chewy and good. Okay. Night, night, little sweetie. Bye bye.