009 Dr W. Chris Winter – The Sleep Whisperer - Unstress with Dr Ron Ehrlich



Dr. W. Chris Winter, neurologist and sleep physician joins me to explain why do we sleep, the different understandings of tired, common sleep disorders such as insomnia, snoring, sleep apnea. The importance of a consistently good night sleep and what the individual needs to feel rested. The one question to ask yourself that can evaluate your sleep and how to improve it. Because at the end of the day you can only control what you can control.
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Dr Ron Ehrlich:                           Hello and welcome to Unstress. My name is Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Today my guest is Dr. Chris Winter. He has been dubbed the Sleep Whisperer by Arianna Huffington from The Huffington Post.

Now this emerging field of sleep medicine, it cuts across every specialty because it affects every part of the body. Of course, I can't resist but ask why do we sleep. I mean it's something we take for granted. It's a question you'd think that there'd be a very simple answer. I love Chris' explanation for it, which basically looks at the way nerves work.

When you think the whole body's connected by nerves, it makes total sense. It's worth listening to. The keyword, I think we both ended up agreeing on, is consistently a good night's sleep. We talk a lot about that and how important it is.

Start there and we'd go into some sleep problems as well. There's a question right at the end of the first part of the interview which I love to ask, and that is what is the biggest challenge, in his opinion, people face on their health journey in our modern world? His answers are such great insights. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Chris Winter. Welcome to the show, Chris.

Dr W. Chris Winter:                        Thank you very much, Dr. Ron. How should I address you?

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                           Well, Ron's fine, but if we want to get formal, Dr. Ron's okay, too.

Dr W. Chris Winter:                      I like Dr. Ron. You did not the doctor, but Dr. Ron sounds great.

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                           Okay, okay. That'll do. But, listen, I've been working with sleep specialists for 15 years, and I don't know. They tend to be some people, but you're a neurologist. Is that typical of sleep physicians?

Dr W. Chris Winter:                       It's changed over the years. In the United States, the original sleep doctors were really in the psychiatric world, dream interpretation, trying to work out some of the early stages of sleep. Then in the '80s, with the advent of the treatment of sleep apnea and Sullivan's jacuzzi-turned-CPAP, it really took a pretty dramatic swing towards the pulmonary doctor or the pulmonologist.

But in the last decade or so, with as much focus as has been put on the brain, I think it's really becoming universally accepted that sleep is a neural process, but what I like about sleep is there's room for everybody at the table. There's neurologists and pediatricians and dentists and surgeons. It's such a great inclusive field, multidisciplinary, that ... Yeah, so I would say that there's a lot of neurology sleep here in the United States, but everybody's got something to give.

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                           Yeah. I think sleep is one of those things that a lot of people give very little thought to. Although when they don't sleep well, they know it. Can we just go back to a real basic question here, and that is why do we sleep? What's the purpose of sleep?

Dr W. Chris Winter:                        It's surprising how poorly we can answer that question in 2017. I mean I think that most people believe that sleep is doing something within the brain to reset it. I think as a leading theory now is really almost at the synaptic junction where two neurons come together that sleep really restores that connection between them, so that when people are not sleeping over long periods of time or sleeping poorly, there is a definite degradation of cognitive healt...