Sleep Unplugged with Dr. Chris Winter

Latest Episodes:

#222 - How Much Is A Night of Sleep Worth: Break It On Down Sep 21, 2026

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

Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child

Thanks for listening and sleep well!

Bonus - The AI Interview Experiment...UNHINGED: Wish I Knew What You Were Looking For Sep 16, 2026

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

Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child

Thanks for listening and sleep well!

#221 - The AI Interview Experiment: Wish I Knew What You Were Looking For Sep 14, 2026

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

Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child

Thanks for listening and sleep well!

#220 - The Lindsay Clancy Tragedy: Insomnia, Overmedication, and the Psychiatric Safety Net Sep 07, 2026

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

Produced by: Maeve Winter

Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child

Thanks for listening and sleep well!

#219 - Top 10 Sleep Threat Power Rankings: Trapped Inside Disillusion Aug 31, 2026

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

Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child

Thanks for listening and sleep well!

#218 - Medication Deprescribing: Get Off This Aug 24, 2026

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

Produced by: Maeve Winter

Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child

Thanks for listening and sleep well!

#217 - Modern Night Shift and Circadian Adaptation: Up All Night Aug 17, 2026

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

Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child

Thanks for listening and sleep well!

#216 - Nasal Strips and Sleep: Leave Me Breathless Aug 10, 2026

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

Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child

Thanks for listening and sleep well!

#215 - Seqoquel and Insomnia: Same Thing From The Same Old Cause Aug 03, 2026

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

Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child

Thanks for listening and sleep well!

#214 - Top 10 Sleep Threat Power Rankings: They Couldn’t See It Jul 27, 2026

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

Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child

Thanks for listening and sleep well!

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