Sleep Unplugged with Dr. Chris Winter podcast

#228 - The Insomnia Dojo: You Bet Your Life There's Gonna Be A Fight

Show notes

What if treating insomnia were less like fixing a medical problem and more like earning a black belt in karate? Welcome to the Insomnia Dojo, a six-belt journey from the frightened white belt who desperately wants to control sleep to the enlightened black belt who realizes that sleep never needed controlling in the first place. Along the way, we'll draw inspiration from Bruce Lee, Mr. Miyagi, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and even Pai Mei from Kill Bill. Wax on, wax off, Grasshopper. Your insomnia training begins now. In this episode we will:

• Explore the six belts of insomnia treatment, from white to black, and what each represents.
• Define the fundamental lessons of sleep science that every insomnia student must master.
• Examine how sleep hygiene, medications, audiobooks, and relaxation techniques can help patients while sometimes creating new dependencies.
• Discuss why confidence, flexibility, and resilience are more important than achieving perfect sleep.
• Review the role of CBT-I, acceptance, and cognitive strategies in progressing toward insomnia mastery.
• Reveal the ultimate secret of the insomnia black belt: sometimes the greatest mastery comes from letting go of control entirely.

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Sleep Reset, please use the following link: http://thesleepreset.com/podcast

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Nov 2, 2026 39 min

#227 - Top 10 Sleep Threat Power Rankings: Take You To The Top

Show notes

Dr. Saema Tahir (@thenycsleepdoctor) joins me for another countdown of the Top 10 Sleep Threats. From social media sleep hacks and nightly Benadryl to the dangers of relying on sleep trackers and chatbots for medical advice, Dr. Tahir takes aim at some of the most common misconceptions in sleep medicine. In this episode we will:

• Explore why AI and social media aren't substitutes for proper sleep evaluations.
• Discuss the risks of nightly Benadryl and the myth of the relaxing nightcap.
• Examine the consequences of weekend sleep-ins and irregular sleep schedules.
• Explain why sleep hygiene alone isn't an effective treatment for chronic insomnia.
• Investigate how insufficient sleep can mimic ADHD symptoms.

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Halo by screen Zen, please use the following link: https://screenzen.co/products/halo

Use the discount code DRWINTER for 20% off

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Oct 26, 2026 46 min

#226 - Peptides and Sleep: Sights So High

Show notes

“What do you think about peptides?” is one of the most common questions in the sleep clinic right now, and it’s about as answerable as “What do you think about sandwiches?” Insulin, Zepbound and a gray-market vial of BPC-157 are all peptides, but the word tells you nothing about what a molecule does or how well it’s been tested. In this episode we put the most popular “sleep peptides” to the test, including the one named after deep sleep that an FDA advisory panel rejected this summer while backing nearly everything else. In this episode we will:

• Define what a peptide is, including the FDA’s somewhat arbitrary 40-amino-acid line, and why most have to be injected
• Sort out supplements, FDA-approved drugs, compounded drugs and “research use only” vials, and walk through 2026’s regulatory saga
• List the risks posed by unregulated peptides
• Rank the sleep evidence, from tirzepatide’s sleep apnea trials to the stories behind DSIP, epitalon and the growth-hormone peptides
• Leave you with five questions to ask anyone recommending “peptides"

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Oct 19, 2026 36 min

#225 - Orexin Agonist Update: The Big Reward is Here (Lifting Humanity Higher)

Show notes

Last November on Episode 178, we talked about three companies racing to bring orexin agonists to people with narcolepsy. In less than a year, one of those drugs has been approved, another company has been bought for billions, and the race now runs from the lab to the insurance company. In this episode we will:

• Break down the latest data from the SLEEP 2026 meeting in Baltimore, where each drug stands and when the rest might reach patients.
• Tackle the questions patients are already asking: will these be controlled substances, what will they cost, and will insurance cover them?
• Highlight Orzeyful (oveporexton), its FDA approval, and what to expect from the DEA
• Revisit alixorexton and its phase 3 push into narcolepsy type 1, type 2 and idiopathic hypersomnia
• Touch on cleminorexton (formerly ORX750) and why Eli Lilly paid $6.3 billion for its developer Centessa
• Introduce the rest of the field: including products from Eisai and Harmony Bioscience

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Oct 12, 2026 47 min

#224 - Why Do All Insomnia Therapies “Work”?: Tryin So Hard To Make the Grade

Show notes

Imagine a sleep study where picturing yourself diving in a submarine boosted deep sleep by 81%, yet nobody slept a minute longer. It's a real result, and it points to an uncomfortable idea: with the right design, almost anything can be shown to "improve sleep." From free habits to FDA-approved pills to neurotech headbands, every claim has a study behind it, and how that study was built often matters more than the product being sold. In this episode we will

• Use that submarine study as a yardstick for judging every sleep claim that follows
• Trace the research behind Ambien's 1992 FDA approval, from its 4-5 week trials to the 2013 dose cut for women
• Look at suvorexant, where the doses that were tested and the doses that were approved weren't the same
• Break down eight ways a sleep study gets steered toward a positive headline, each with a real insomnia example
• Put devices and supplements like Somnee, Evolv28, Moonbird and magnesium through the same lens
• Leave you with a checklist for reading past the webpage and finding out who paid, who was tested, and for how long

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Sleep Reset, please use the following link: http://thesleepreset.com/podcast

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Oct 5, 2026 43 min

#223 - Top 10 Sleep Threat Power Rankings: Ain’t Nobody Worried

Show notes

Dr. Valerie Cacho (@drvalsleepgal) joins me for another countdown of the Top 10 Sleep Threats, and her list asks a question we should all be asking more often: Have we actually figured out what is disrupting someone’s sleep? From peptides marketed as cures to the assumption that a woman’s fatigue is simply part of being a working mom, Valerie takes aim at the shortcuts that can delay an accurate diagnosis. In this episode we will:

• Examine what the research does—and does not—say about peptides for insomnia and hypersomnia
• Discuss why morning sunlight and sleep hygiene are not complete treatments for chronic insomnia
• Explore how BMI, menopause, and the absence of daytime sleepiness can lead clinicians to overlook sleep apnea
• Talk about why sleep health deserves attention now, rather than after retirement

Find out more about Dr. Val's free community for peri-menopause sleep education at http://www.skool.com/sleephoria

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Sep 28, 2026 50 min

#222 - How Much Is A Night of Sleep Worth: Break It On Down

Show notes

A courtroom, an insurance formula, and a supermarket receipt don't usually belong in the same sentence — but together they answer the question this episode is built around: what does a bad night's sleep actually cost, in dollars, tonight? Not the economy. You. We take the number everyone quotes and can't act on — sleep deprivation costs the U.S. $411 billion a year — and rebuild it from the ground up using the data that was actually measured on individuals, not GDP models. In this episode we will:

• Break down a landmark employer study of four U.S. companies that priced lost productivity per employee per year, showing the "insufficient sleep" bracket runs about $1,500 more than a well-rested peer, and the insomnia bracket nearly $1,900 more
• Walk through a controlled supermarket experiment where one night of total sleep deprivation alone drove men to buy 9% more calories and 18% more food by weight the next morning, and tie it to a listener's own "revenge bedtime procrastination"
• Lay out AAA's crash-risk data by hour of sleep lost, including the finding that a driver on under five hours of sleep carries a crash risk comparable to driving drunk, and drowsy driving factors into more than one in five fatal crashes nationally
• Reconcile two independent methods with one built bottom-up from workplace data, and one built top-down from RAND's national economic modeling, and see they converge at roughly $10 to $20 for one ordinary short night
• Get into the neuroscience of why the tired brain is the wrong tool to fight its own bad decisions, from impaired prefrontal-cortex judgment to a reward system that starts favoring one more episode over tomorrow's rested self

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor NOCTEM Health, please use the following link: https://noctemhealth.com/

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Sep 21, 2026 36 min

Bonus - The AI Interview Experiment...UNHINGED: Wish I Knew What You Were Looking For

Show notes

A few days ago, we did an experiment to see how well AI could interview me about sleep. In this bonus episode, I reveal the original attempt which was a bit all over the place. The interview was much more personal and strange which we corrected by adjusting the prompt in the "official" episode, but I thought it might be funny to share the trial run. In this episode we will:

-Debate how much of my career success can reasonably be attributed to my looks
-Discuss my questionable resemblance to Tom Hiddleston
-Ask which voices in the sleep world I occasionally wish were a little quieter
-Revisit the strangest place I have ever slept
-Explore the difference between believing something works and believing it works very much
-Talk about the irrational fear that someday the phone simply stops ringing
-Consider who I am when sleep medicine, sports, speaking, and podcasting are stripped away
-Get unexpectedly personal about work, family, friendship, and the things we sacrifice while building a career
-Ask what I hope my children do—and don't—inherit from me

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Sep 16, 2026 32 min

#221 - The AI Interview Experiment: Wish I Knew What You Were Looking For

Show notes

What happens when the interviewer knows nearly everything you have said publicly and has zero fear of challenging or offending you? In this unusual episode of Sleep Unplugged, I turn over all control of the podcast to AI and let it ask the questions and dictate the program. The result is a surprisingly candid conversation about certainty, contradiction, expertise, and what an algorithm might see when it examines a career devoted to sleep. In this episode I (or we?) will:

• Turn the microphone around and let artificial intelligence interview the interviewer
• Examine the tension between scientific authority and intellectual humility
• Discuss why sleep medicine sometimes rewards certainty when the evidence demands nuance
• Revisit ideas and opinions I have expressed publicly—and allow the AI to challenge them
• Consider what patients, athletes, and listeners actually need from a sleep expert
• Ask whether an algorithm can recognize contradictions, vulnerabilities, and blind spots

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Sep 14, 2026 29 min

#220 - The Lindsay Clancy Tragedy: Insomnia, Overmedication, and the Psychiatric Safety Net

Show notes

A Massachusetts courtroom just produced something that almost never survives into public record: a near-complete paper trail of one woman's psychiatric care in the three months before catastrophe. Her diary, her phone notes, and the testimony of every provider who tried to help her sleep all lead to a central question: what actually happens when insomnia and psychiatric illness feed each other, and how thin is the system supposed to catch it before it breaks? In this episode we will:

• Walk through the documented timeline od initial depression, an SSRI, a reported 48 hours without sleep, and a rapid cascade through a benzodiazepine, an antihistamine, and eventually an antipsychotic, across three different providers in three months
• Break down SSRI-induced activation syndrome and why it can look clinically identical to an antidepressant unmasking bipolar disorder
• Bring in the hard data on sleep loss as a trigger, not just a symptom, including a study of 870 women with bipolar disorder showing one lost night of sleep around delivery raised postpartum psychosis odds roughly fivefold
• Draw the same throughline through Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, and Brittany Murphy, three deaths where a real, unresolved insomnia complaint met multiple prescribers without a shared picture
• Evaluate national data putting mental-health ED visits at over 35,000 a day, and a 2013 survey showing a third of psychiatry residencies don't even offer an elective in sleep medicine

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Sleep Reset, please use the following link: http://thesleepreset.com/podcast

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Sep 7, 2026 49 min

#219 - Top 10 Sleep Threat Power Rankings: Trapped Inside Disillusion

Show notes

Dr. Alison Kole is taking on sleepmaxxing, ChatGPT, and the sleep-industrial complex in her Top 10 Sleep Threat list. In this episode we will:

• Explore why patients sometimes arrive at the sleep clinic with their story and diagnosis already written
• Look at the fear of sleep studies, sleep apnea diagnoses, and outdated ideas about CPAP
• Ask why CBT-I remains underused despite being the gold-standard first-line treatment for chronic insomnia
• Consider why better sleep requires thinking beyond the bedroom to exercise, nutrition, mental health, and the entire 24-hour day

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Fitnexa and their SomniPods 3, please use the following link https://go.fitnexa.com/egVvZ9 and use the code DRCHRIS10 for $10 dollars off your order.

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Aug 31, 2026 43 min

#218 - Medication Deprescribing: Get Off This

Show notes

Nobody blinks when a doctor says you'll be on blood pressure medication for the rest of your life. Say the same sentence about an antidepressant, or Zepbound, and responses are quite different. This episode digs into deprescribing, the fast-growing clinical movement around when and how to stop medications, and asks why some "forever drugs" get a cultural pass while others get moralized. In this episode we will:

• Separate the real clinical debate around antidepressant tapering from the online discourse
• Take on the GLP-1 stigma directly, with two 2024 JAMA Internal Medicine studies that found no elevated depression or suicidality risk, and ask why "you may need this forever" reads as scandal here but shrug everywhere else
• Sit with the RLS story, where the science just ran the opposite direction: 2025 AASM guidelines downgraded dopamine agonists after mounting evidence of augmentation, a drug-induced worsening of symptoms, making deprescribing here the conservative, evidence-driven move, not the fringe one
• Ask why hypersomnia drugs generate almost zero cultural friction at all, and what that quiet exception reveals about the other three
• Land on what actually predicts whether a "forever medication" gets treated as a fact of chronic disease or a personal failing — and why RLS should make you distrust any tidy answer to that question, including this episode's

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Fitnexa and their SomniPods 3, please use the following link https://go.fitnexa.com/egVvZ9 and use the code DRCHRIS10 for $10 dollars off your order.

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Aug 24, 2026 44 min

#217 - Modern Night Shift and Circadian Adaptation: Up All Night

Show notes

Our current gig economy did not just create new jobs, it expanded a whole new category of night worker, from rideshare drivers to online freelancers to overnight fulfillment teams. Today (or tonight rather), our bodies are struggling to make the switch. In this episode we dig into what that circadian resistance actually costs your heart and metabolism long-term, and the handful of interventions that can actually shift it. In this episode we will:

• Break down why 22 of 30 permanent night nurses still had daytime-oriented melatonin rhythms and why that's not a willpower problem, it's a light-exposure problem
• Get into the real stakes: a 2025 meta-analysis linking night shift work to 13% higher cardiovascular disease incidence and 27% higher CVD mortality
• Take on the meal-timing question head-on and look at new data suggesting fasting at night preserves glucose tolerance better than eating, without pretending the evidence justifies one universal rule
• Review how light and schedule consistency can help improve these situations

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor SideSleeperZ, please use the following link: https://sidesleeperz.com/

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Aug 17, 2026 32 min

#216 - Nasal Strips and Sleep: Leave Me Breathless

Show notes

Nasal strips have been a fixture in pharmacy aisles and on athletes' faces for decades, sold on the promise of easier breathing, but the peer-reviewed evidence often tells a different story than the packaging does. We put nasal strips and internal dilators through the RCT wringer and sort out what these devices can and can't actually do, from your bedroom to the finish line. In this episode we will:

• Break down what the highest-quality evidence — a 2026 meta-analysis of 17 studies and nearly 500 patients — actually found for AHI, oxygen saturation, and sleep architecture across all nasal dilator types
• Sit with the placebo-strip finding out of the University of São Paulo, and what it reveals about the gap between subjective "I slept better" and objective, PSG-measured outcomes
• Compare internal dilators like Mute against external strips, and call out where manufacturer-cited stats diverge from the independent literature
• Head onto the field and track: two competing systematic reviews on whether strips help runners and athletes, and why "very low certainty" evidence still shapes what gets marketed to you

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor BreatheUp, please use the following link: https://breatheup.com/

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Aug 10, 2026 25 min

#215 - Seqoquel and Insomnia: Same Thing From The Same Old Cause

Show notes

Ten million prescriptions a year, and most of them aren't for what the drug was built to treat. Seroquel started life as an antipsychotic — engineered to quiet psychosis, not close your eyes. Somewhere along the way it became one of the most common "off the record" sleep aids in America, riding on a side effect nobody set out to sell. The evidence behind that shift is thinner than most people assume — and Seroquel isn't the only drug doing this. In this episode we will:

• Trace quetiapine from its 1997 approval for schizophrenia through its quiet migration onto millions of nightstands, and unpack the receptor science that explains why a psychosis drug puts you to sleep at all
• Spotlight the actual clinical trials behind quetiapine-for-insomnia — including the 13-patient study nearly the entire off-label practice rests on — and the newer data linking it to cardiovascular events, dementia, and falls
• Break down what the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's guideline really says about quetiapine (it's not what most people assume), and why that gap in the data is its own kind of red flag
• Draw the parallel to trazodone — a different drug, a different original disease, and somehow the exact same story

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Sleep Reset, please use the following link: http://thesleepreset.com/podcast

Audio Engineer: Bradley Bransly Barker

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Aug 3, 2026 41 min

#214 - Top 10 Sleep Threat Power Rankings: They Couldn’t See It

Show notes

Most "top sleep threats" lists stick to one lane — pediatric or adult, clinical or cultural. Dr. Funke Afolabi-Brown's list refuses to. It jumps from kids' airways to menopause to AI chatbots, and by the end a pattern emerges: the same symptom, in different bodies, keeps getting waved off as normal. In this episode we will:

• Work through pediatric snoring dismissed as harmless and untreated mouth breathing, and why both are often lead to the same airway problem
• Get into exhaustion worn as a badge of honor
• Look closer at supplement use and the underappreciated risk of leaning on antihistamine sleep aids night after night
• Sit with three women's-health items back to back: 3 a.m. wake-ups blamed on "just hormones," menopause-related insomnia going undiagnosed, and the mechanisms actually behind both
• Think about why women's sleep apnea symptoms are getting written off as stress or anxiety

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Flexispot, please use the following link: Flexispot Hako G1 Bed and use the discount code FLEXISPOTG1 for an extra 5% off.

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Jul 27, 2026 41 min

#213 - Research from the 2026 SLEEP Scientific Conference: Something New

Show notes

Every June, thousands of sleep researchers descend on one city and quietly rewrite what we think we know about a third of our lives. This year it was Baltimore's turn, for the 40th annual SLEEP meeting — and the data that came out of it hits closer to home than usual: blood pressure, diabetes, teenage phones, and why "night owl" might really mean "lonely." Here are my Top 10 studies from SLEEP 2026 most likely to actually change how you sleep. In this episode we will:

• Break down why being sleepy and wired at night is a uniquely dangerous combination for blood pressure — and why either symptom alone barely moves the needle
• Sit with a staggering number out of Yale: veterans with both insomnia and sleep apnea face six times the risk of developing type 2 diabetes
• Revisit the "regularity beats duration" thread from Episode 209 with two brand-new studies — one in preschoolers, one tracking teens all the way to age 22
• Unpack why women's sleep apnea can look identical to men's on paper and feel completely different in the body, and why that's delaying diagnoses
• Get into the psychology of sleep: why night owls' anxiety may really be about nighttime loneliness, and why expecting bad postpartum sleep can help create it

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Flexispot, please use the following link: Flexispot Hako G1 Bed and use the discount code FLEXISPOTG1 for an extra 5% off.

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Jul 20, 2026 48 min

#212 - Deep Sleep and REM Sleep: A Deeper Understanding, Lost In A Dream

Show notes

Deep sleep and REM sleep get lumped together as "good sleep," but they're almost opposite states — one is the quietest your brain gets all night, the other is nearly as active as being awake. In this episode we pull the two apart: how we stumbled onto each of them, what's happening chemically while they run, and why one of them quietly shrinks as we age while the other holds steadier. In this episode we will:

• Break down what's actually happening in slow-wave sleep versus REM — brainwaves, muscle tone, and why one is a "quiet body, quiet brain" state and the other is "quiet body, active brain"
• Trace the history back to 1953, when a University of Chicago graduate student stumbled onto REM sleep almost by accident
• Get basic on the neurochemistry: the GABA-driven shutdown that produces deep sleep, and the acetylcholine surge that flips REM on
• Bring in new data from SLEEP 2026 in Baltimore, including a 22-million-night wearable dataset showing how deep sleep changes across adulthood, and a mattress-temperature study that moved the needle on restful sleep by nearly 20 minutes a night
• Cover what actually protects deep sleep — and what quietly wrecks it, from alcohol to late caffeine to a bedroom that's too warm

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor SideSleeperZ, please use the following link: https://sidesleeperz.com/

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Jul 13, 2026 42 min

#211 - Insomnia and Sleep Apnea: Just Don’t Know

Show notes

We tend to think of insomnia and sleep apnea as two completely different sleep disorders. One means you can't sleep. The other means you stop breathing. Simple, right? Not so fast. In reality, many people with sleep apnea don't complain about snoring or excessive daytime sleepiness. Instead, they complain that they wake up repeatedly throughout the night and can't stay asleep. In this episode we will:

• Explain why sleep apnea often causes insomnia-like symptoms rather than daytime sleepiness
• Explore the growing recognition of COMISA (comorbid insomnia and sleep apnea)
• Discuss why women and non-traditional sleep apnea patients are especially likely to be misdiagnosed
• Review the latest research on treating insomnia and sleep apnea together

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Sleep Reset, please use the following link: https://www.thesleepreset.com/podcast

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Jul 6, 2026 37 min

#210 - Top 10 Sleep Threat Power Rankings: Stop Right Now, Thank You Very Much

Show notes

This week marks the 12th month we have put out the Top 10 Sleep Threats Power Rankings, and this week, we have a special guest assessor, Upneet Chawla, MD (@sleeping.beauty_md). Upneet is an internist and board-certified sleep specialist. In this episode, she has graciously provided us her list. In this episode we will:

• Find out what Dr. Chawla thinks are the top threats to your sleep
• Incorporate abstracts from the 2026 Sleep meeting to illustrate her points

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Jun 29, 2026 38 min

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