The Project Sleep Podcast Project Sleep

If you’ve ever spent time around teenagers, you probably know that many teens are struggling with sleep. In fact, nearly 70 percent of high school students sleep less than the recommended 8-9 hours a night. In this podcast, we talk to Dr. Funke Afolabi-Brown about how we can make sleep cool to teens and their parents too!
 
Dr. Afolabi-Brown is board-certified in pediatric pulmonary medicine and pediatric sleep disorders. As a double board-certified pediatric respiratory sleep medicine physician, Dr. Brown helps her patients breathe better and sleep better. By extension, she helps improve the sleep of their parents. Dr. Brown is a speaker, an educator, a writer, and the founder of Restful Sleep MD and also a member of Project Sleep's Expert Advisory Board. Find her on Instagram: @restfulsleepmd or her website: https://www.restfulsleepmd.com/
 
This conversation was recorded in March 2022, during Project Sleep’s annual Sleep In event to help society make peace with sleep. Learn more: https://project-sleep.com/sleepin/

What is the connection between sleep, race, ethnicity, and health disparities? What is being done to reduce these disparities? In this episode, Dr. Michael Grandner provides an overview of sleep health disparities research. Next, Dr. Carmela Alcántara highlights a community engagement sleep intervention in the Spanish-speaking LatinX population.
 
Dr. Michael Grandner is a licensed clinical psychologist, Director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the University of Arizona, and Director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Clinic at the Banner-University Medical Center in Tucson, AZ. His work focuses on translational sleep research and Behavioral Sleep Medicine.
 
Dr. Carmela Alcántara is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Columbia School of Social Work. She is a clinical psychological scientist with additional expertise in social epidemiology and behavioral medicine.
 
This discussion was recorded in October 2020, during Project Sleep’s Sleep Advocacy Forum. Learn more: project-sleep.com/watch-now-highlights-from-inaugural-sleep-advocacy-forum-2020/

When talking about creating a healthy sleep environment, we often assume that things like light, temperature, safety, and our sleep schedules are all within our personal control. In this episode, Dr. Dayna Johnson talks about important and under-discussed factors influencing people’s ability to get a good night’s sleep and how policies can shape our individual behaviors, sleep, and overall health.
 
Dr. Dayna Johnson, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Johnson’s research has uncovered much about the social contributors to racial and gender disparities in sleep by assessing the effects of social, household-level and neighborhood-level factors in correlation with insufficient sleep.
 
This discussion was originally recorded as part of Project Sleep's annual Sleep In 2021 event in March 2021. Learn more: https://project-sleep.com/sleepin/

How much light did you get today? In this fascinating episode, we speak with Dr. Till Roenneberg, a Professor of Chronobiology for the Institute of Medical Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. Dr. Roenneberg explains how powerful light and darkness are in setting our internal clocks and how industrialization has shifted how we use light. We discuss how variable our internal clocks can be and the importance of figuring out if you’re a lark, owl, dove, or peacock.
 
This discussion was originally recorded as part of Project Sleep's annual Sleep In 2021 event in March 2021. Learn more: https://project-sleep.com/sleepin/

If you tell your doctor that you’re tired all the time, would they take you seriously? What if you said you’re snoring? In this podcast, we talk to Alida Abdullah about finding her sleep apnea diagnosis, getting treatment, and what she wishes she’d known earlier in her journey. We also discuss a challenge many of us face: how to balance a busy lifestyle as a mom and teacher while also prioritizing her treatment and sleep.
 
Alida Abdullah is a wife, mother of four, and teacher living in the Atlanta area. She was initially diagnosed with sleep apnea over 10 years ago, but didn’t understand the severity of the disorder until more recently, when she learned of the many other health issues that sleep apnea can cause. Alida is sharing her story to help raise awareness of under-diagnosed but serious sleep conditions like sleep apnea and how they can affect other areas of people’s lives.
 
This discussion was originally recorded in July 2020. 

Navigating narcolepsy doesn’t come with a roadmap, but it should. What do you wish you’d known at diagnosis? In this episode, we break down the narcolepsy journey into the medical experience, social experience and internal experience.
Download the Narcolepsy Roadmap Toolkit: https://bit.ly/narcolepsy-roadmap-toolkit

 
The Narcolepsy Nerd Alert series invites listeners to dive deeper into specific topics relevant to living with narcolepsy. https://project-sleep.com/narcolepsy-nerd-alert/