Something You Should Know - How We Play: They Story of Fun and Games & The Cost of Not Sleeping Well

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

Since you were a child you have heard that it is important to wash your hands. But even if you do, you may not be doing it correctly and you may be missing some key spots. This episode begins by explaining some often overlooked details of washing your hands. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/hand-washing/art-20046253 There is a human need for fun. And there are a million ways to indulge yourself including amusement parks, board games, sports, toys, festivals, video games or whatever else you can think of. How these fun things came to be makes for a very interesting story. Here to tell it is Russ Frushtick who has written about games and technology for over a decade. Russ is co-founder of Vox Media’s gaming site called Polygon (www.polygon.com) and he is author of The Book of Fun: An illustrated History of Having a Good Time (https://amzn.to/3H2nBdn). A lot has been learned in recent years about sleep – how getting enough of it is crucial and how lack of sleep has some significant negative consequences. Here to explain some important intel on sleep and why it is so important is neurologist Dr. Guy Leschziner, who is head of The Sleep Disorders Centre in London and author of the book, The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience and the Secret World of Sleep (https://amzn.to/2lSckr0). If you care to understand just how important sleep is for your health, you need to listen to this important discussion. If you don’t like where you work, is it better to quit now or stay at least until you find another job? The answer seems to depend on just how much you hate your job. Listen as I reveal the negative consequences of staying at a job that you hate. They are probably worse than you imagined. https://news.osu.edu/lousy-jobs-hurt-your-health-by-the-time-youre-in-your-40s/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Anne Foster, host of the feminist women's history comedy podcast, Vulgar History. And every week I share the saga of a woman from history whose story you probably didn't already know and you will never forget after you hear it. Sometimes we reexamine well known people like Cleopatra or Pocahontas sharing the truth behind their legends. Sometimes we look at the scandalous women you'll never find in a history textbook. If you can hear my cat purring, she is often on the podcast as well. Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, do you really wash your hands as good as you should?

Then the history of fun, the fascinating backstories of board games, amusement parks, and toys like Legos. The fascinating thing about Lego is today, the largest manufacturer of tires is Lego. They make the most tires in the world because of those little tiny rubber tires they put on the cars in Lego boxes. Also, if you hate your job job you should probably quit as soon as possible. And how well and how much do you sleep? It's important. We know that sleeping very little is associated with a range of negative health consequences,

including mortality. People who sleep a very short period certainly have an increased risk of mortality compared to those who sleep seven or eight hours. All this today on Something You Should Know. Okay, Martin, let's try one. Remember, big. You got it. The Ford It's a Big Deal event is on.

How's that? A little bigger. The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Nice. Now the offer? Lease a 2025 Escape Active all-wheel drive from 198 bi-weekly at 1.99% APR for 36 months with 27.55 down. Wow, that's like $99 a week. Yeah, it's a big deal.

The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or dot C a today. Something you should know fascinating Intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers. You know, it's not just how often you wash your hands that's important. It's how you wash your hands. Hi, and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know. I try to wash my hands a lot because I remember we did a segment here quite a while ago about how we don't realize how many times

we touch our own face throughout the day. And if there are germs on your hands, on your fingers that you picked up from some surface somewhere, and those germs can cause a cold, and then you touch your eye or your mouth or your nose, well those germs can get into your system and you can get sick from that. Now I don't know if that's exactly how it works, but I remembered it. It sounded right. So I try to wash my hands a lot, but I admit I'm impatient and probably don't wash them long enough. According to the CDC, 80% of all infectious diseases are spread by touch. The Center for Disease Control recommends that you wash your hands for at least 15 seconds.

However, studies show that the reduction of skin bacteria is nearly 10 times greater if you wash your hands with soap for 30 seconds rather than 15 seconds. When people wash their hands, the most commonly missed areas are fingertips and fingernails. Here's something else important to consider. Hot or warm water is no more effective than cold water when you wash your hands. It may feel better, but it doesn't help you clean your hands any better. And that is something you should know. People need fun.

Kids like to play. Grown-ups like to play. We like our fun and have throughout the ages. Toys, games, sports, amusement parks, festivals. They have all been fun parts of our lives. And some of the stories of how this fun was created are interesting and worth telling. And here to tell them is Russ Freshstick. Russ has written about games and technology for over a decade. He's co-founder of Vox Media's gaming site Polygon and he is author of a book called The Book of Fun, An Illustrated History of Having a Good Time.

Hi Russ, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for having me. So let's start with board games. I imagine board games have been around for a long time in in some form or another, right? So board games are extremely old. We're talking about like ancient Egypt 3100 BCE is the general approximation of where we think board games started The earliest known one is called Senate. We have no idea how this game was played precisely It seems like it kind of mixed the rules depending on where you were, but they go back a long ways. And why is it that you think that board games stick? Why is it that they have just transcended

time and people still play them? I mean, what is it? Yeah, I think board games just don't have a limitation on technology, right? The technology to play chess hasn't changed in thousands of years. So the idea that someone could play the same game today that you could back then is amazing. And I think people really are enraptured by that. When I hear the term board game,

my mind immediately goes to monopoly. And I think it's true for a lot of people. What is it about monopoly that, I mean, it's popular around the world that what is it that makes it so enduring? I think there are some people that find monopoly a little bit taxing, but I think it is, the core of it is people like taking financial risks without any actual stakes beyond, you know, wasting time for three hours. So I think that's why people love it. But Monopoly in particular has a very fascinating origin story where this woman created a game called the Landlord's Game. And then other sort of profiteers, if you will, took the idea, called it Monopoly, and it kind of got usurped.

So she in later years got credit for it. But delving into that history is really fascinating. Well, speaking of Monopoly, talk about the scandal. I guess I guess it's a scandal that McDonald's had with their Monopoly game. So basically, the head of security who was running the game, he was in charge of making sure that the game was secure for McDonald's, decided, hey, I could just funnel these few winning game pieces

to people that I know, and kind of launder the winning game pieces that way. And they ended up making a ton of money until they were caught by the FBI and spent some time in jail. So unfortunately it didn't work out for them in the long run but it was pretty fascinating. When I think of toys for children,

certainly dolls are about the simplest and most enduring toy that I can think of. How far back do we know dolls go? The belief is that we're looking at like kind of corn husk dolls, stuff like that. Very simple. Again, we're talking about thousands of years ago. No one really knows for sure the very first quote toy or doll. But because the technology was so simple back then that all you really needed was like a piece of string twine whatever that you bundled together and then suddenly some kid has this Device in their hands that they could have some fun with I

Remember reading that there were several toys that became very popular that were really the result of something else. They were kind of accidental discoveries. Like the Slinky is one of them. So where did the Slinky come from? The guy who created it was a naval engineer, and he was working on submarines, actually, and found the Slinky, just like in his development of various engines

and other mechanics that had to exist in the submarines. It was just sort of like on his desk and he accidentally knocked it over. And suddenly it did its, you know, classic slinky thing. And he's like, I could probably sell this. And that's a lot of these classic toys kind of come out from that, just like as accidents, like total mistake. Since we're talking about fun, I think Legos have to be part of the conversation because anyone with kids, maybe people without kids, spend hours building Lego things. They're just,

they're almost addictive. So tell the Lego story. They started pretty simply. The guy who created Legos in the first place was just kind of making wooden toys. And he kept at that until his toy factory actually burned down. And he decided maybe we'll try this plastic thing. In the 1950s and 60s, he sort of evolved his work into including more plastic devices and toys and came up with this idea of having these kind of bricks

that snap together. Unfortunately, his factory burned down again, separate factory also burned down. He rebuilt again. Thankfully, the next factory actually stuck around for a while and he was able to build this sort of conglomerate of Lego. And now the fascinating thing about Lego is today, the largest manufacturer of tires is Lego. They make the most tires in the world because of those little tiny rubber tires that they put on the cars in Lego boxes.

because of those little tiny rubber tires they put on the cars in Lego boxes. One toy that that escaped me completely. I didn't get the fascination is the Rubik's Cube. Well, I guess I get the fascination. I I just couldn't do it. And I didn't have the patience to keep trying. Who's Rubik? So Rubik, after the classic Rubik's Cube is Erno Rubik. He was Hungarian. And in 1974, he kind of created the cube that we know of.

He was a toy maker, but he just came up with this idea of these blocks that you can kind of twist and rotate independently of one another. And out of that came this kind of puzzle box that just took the world by storm. Today, actually, there is a concept called speed cubing where people try to solve the Rubik's Cube as quickly as possible I think the latest record as of right now is three point four seven seconds which is much much shorter than I am capable of doing it. Well I've never been capable of doing it one toy that's been around for a long time that people have tons of fun with and always have is the squirt gun. So how old is that? So people don't precisely know exactly when squirt guns or water guns were invented.

The earliest record of them even being mentioned was in 1858 at Amherst College. It seems that students were having a bit of a war They called it the squirt gun riot and they were kind of firing water guns at each other throughout the college So that was kind of like not exactly You know the birth of them because obviously they existed before that but no one really knows when or where they started Um, but it wasn't until the late 1800s that it actually got like patented and officially sold The first one was called the usa liquid pistol and then people started making money on them. But before that Yeah, it was very much like uh kind of a total mystery I remember

That water guns water pistols were so small and you constantly had to keep refilling it until somebody came along and figured out we could put this big tank, this big storage tank on it and call it a super soaker. And it seems like that was the next big evolution in squirt guns. Yeah, it's amazing because the water gun did not change for like 150 years. And then this guy, Lonnie Johnson came around, this was in 1989 and he invented the super soaker and he came up with the idea we could just use water pressure to fill this giant tank and get all sorts of range that you couldn't previously get if you were just like a little plastic, junky squirt gun.

And he just revolutionized the entire water gun industry. Pretty amazing. Ask pretty much any teenage boy what they like to do for fun and video games are going to be pretty close, if not at the top of the list. So what is considered the beginning of the modern video game? So there's a little bit of debate, but the general consensus is that the very first video game was called Tennis

for Two. It came out in 1958. And if you wanted to run it in your home, you couldn't because it basically needed nuclear powered computers to run it. The guy who created it was named William Higginbottom, and he actually used the computers in his nuclear power plant to engineer and create this piece of software just for fun. They would have an annual event where they would basically invite people from the public to come into the plant and see what they were working on. And just as a demonstration of their computers, he created this game called Tennis for Two.

Well, that's really surprising. 1958, there were video games. I had no idea. I thought Pong was probably, I thought Pong was the first video game. And so if it was in 1958, it must have been a pretty primitive game. It's kind of great, surprisingly, for being the very first video game. It's a very complicated physics based recreation of tennis. You actually see the ball bouncing realistically from left to right. It's much more involved than Pong, which I'm sure everyone is more familiar with. But yeah, it was pretty amazing and is still very playable today.

If you manage to find a machine that can run it. Are there machines that are hooked up to run it? I believe the last time that I played it was at the Museum of the Moving Image, which is in Queens, New York. They had a version of Tennis for Two that you could actually play. We're talking about fun and all the things we do to have fun. Russ Frushtick is my guest. The name of his book is The Book of Fun, an illustrated history of having a good time.

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So Russ, my sense of video games, and I'm not a big gamer, is that the improvements were pretty incremental, but maybe not. I mean, it seems like there was Pong, and then it got a little better and a little better, and look at what we have now. But were there big milestones along the way, or was it just a little bit of improvement

every step of the way? Well, I mean, the big milestones that people think of are probably the jump from 2D to 3D. So in the mid-90s, you had the original Super Mario Brothers and then Super Mario 64 comes out. And that's the first time you see that game in three dimensions. So that was a pretty big leap. And then obviously these days, you know, you mentioned the

difference between tennis for two and Fortnite, for example, is night and day. It's amazing the level of fidelity and realism that you could find in video games today. But you're right, a lot of it is just small, incremental improvements year after year after year. Something I've always wanted to know, because we've talked about the addictive quality

of video games and how so many young people, boys in particular, it seems, just can't stop. And people say it's like a drug and it releases this dopamine. Do you think that, and you wouldn't probably have a good opinion on this, is that purposeful or is that a side effect? Is the is it purposeful to like make a game addicting? Yes.

My general attitude is that I think games are made to be fun and as fun as possible. And frequently to create something that is as fun as possible, you want to make something that someone does not want to put down, does not want to stop playing. And obviously, people with impulse control issues might play way too much and all their days playing the same game over and over and over again. That's not ideal. But certainly in a capitalist society where people are trying to make money

selling video games, that is somewhat of the end goal, right, is to just get people playing the game a lot a lot a lot When it comes to having fun one destination one place people go for the express purpose of having fun are Amusement parks, but when I think of amusement parks I think of things that run on electricity rides and Games and things that that are light up and so how far back can amusement parks go? before electricity because if you don't have electricity What do you have?

Well, you have gravity which is a key component to amusement parks back then some of the earliest amusement parks were just cars that were placed on tracks and just kind of shoved down a hill at a very fast speed. I have early examples of some roller coasters that were looping roller coasters without electricity, which is about as dangerous and horrifying as you can imagine. And yet people were just pushing the boundaries of that. So there's always been a desire, I think, to kind of cheat death in a somewhat safe way, but looking at these photos, not that safe.

I've heard that amusement parks before Disney were, you know, tended to be kind of seedy and unsafe and kind of, and that he was the game changer. Is that true? Absolutely. Yeah, Disneyland, when it opened was a major shift in terms of how people kind of approach theme parks, amusement parks. Ironically, even though it ended up being an enormous success, the first day of Disneyland was a total disaster. They handed out tickets for people to come, they sold tickets, and all of the tickets that they sold ended up getting counterfeited and scalped such that they were about four or five times more tickets than could actually be allowed in the park,

which resulted in giant traffic lineups for miles on end. And then when people came to the park, it was an extraordinarily hot day that first day at Disneyland, and people's shoes were actually melting into the asphalt because it hadn't fully set yet. And there was a plumbing strike, and the plumbing was not functioning, so people looking to get water to kind of cool down were totally out of luck.

So it was a very unlucky day But obviously we know what Disney came out. Okay in the long run the amusement parks before Disney Was my description accurate or is there more to it than that? I mean they were pretty spectacular amusement parks before Disneyland, you know, we looked to Luna Park and Coney Island obviously had their heyday in the early 1900s and They were astonishing. I mean just enormous light shows and Various rides of complexity people would really come from all around to experience that I think later on as the interest in amusement parks

kind of waned, places like Coney Island did develop a seedier reputation. But when they first started, they were really just the height of entertainment for people. You often hear about these, you know, odd, weird kind of festivals or amusement parks. What did you find? Was there a weird one that you thought was particularly interesting? Yes. So there's a place called Wonderland Kalkar in Germany. This is an amusement park you can go to today. It's open and it is set in a nuclear power plant. Not an active one, it is off, but it was actually built as a nuclear power plant, not an active one. It is off. But it was actually built as a nuclear power plant, but never functioned because Germany pulled the plug, literally, right after it was built.

So you have the giant cooling towers. You have everything you would need for a nuclear power plant. But inside of it is this wild amusement park. There's actually a giant swing within the cooling towers. So if you've ever wanted to experience that Uh, there's really only one place in the world you can do that So in the category of fun since you look at the history of fun What did you find anything that you found that people do for fun?

The it seems kind of weird strange odd So there's a small town in spain that actually hosts an annual baby jumping festival. It is as weird as it sounds, but it is a traditional festival. And the idea is that in order to ensure the health and luck of newborn babies, the parents of the town will place their children on the street in the middle of the street. They clear it out. There's obviously no traffic or anything. And then people dressed up as devils will leap over the babies and sort of rattle their they've got some noise making devices and make a whole scene.

And because of that, I guess it shows that these babies experienced a very near close call if you will, to having a demon curse them. And by jumping right over them, the babies are forever safe from any illness or bad luck. So it kind of really made me want to visit. Spain obviously has the classic tomato festival, which is also pretty spectacular So maybe I'll do a two for one day. That is my dream It was interesting because I haven't really thought about it much before but a lot of the fun people have is accompanied by dressing up costumes pretending to be someone else

You know from Halloween to some of these festivals, renaissance fairs, those kind of things. There's a lot of dressing up going on that I guess adds to the fun. Yeah, I think the modern version of that is cosplay, which is short for costume play. And it's basically people dressing up as their favorite characters at events like Comic-Con But what's really cool about cosplay is that people have started coming up with kind of mashups between the characters You know, there's so many people dressing up as Wolverine for example, so people have started Mashing it up with so there's like a Jedi Wolverine for example Well before you go, I want you to tell the story about, that I saw in your book, about

the video game GoldenEye that came out in the mid-90s. It's a pretty interesting story. It was very successful. It was based on a James Bond movie of the same name. And they decided to make a video game based on it. And they wanted to release it on Nintendo's system, which was the Nintendo 64 now Nintendo Traditionally known as this family-friendly happy-go-lucky company that really didn't have a lot of violence a lot of guns in their game and

They didn't know for sure that it was gonna be the right fit In fact the creator of Super Mario Brothers, Shigeru Miyamoto Said I will let you release this game on the Nintendo 64, but only if you add one scene to it. And the scene he wanted to add was James Bond approaching all of the people that he shot throughout the game in a hospital and shaking their hand at the end of the game, just to hammer home that no one was actually injured in the making of the game. How'd that game do? It did amazingly well. It's one of the most well-known games that came out on the Nintendo 64.

Well, this has been fun. And well, I guess it should be fun because it's the history of fun. And I really appreciate you sharing all these stories. Rush Frustick has been my guest. And the name of the book is The Book of Fun, an illustrated history of having a good time. And you will find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Russ. Great, thank you. I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times. And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director.

You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters. We come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-sees, and in case you missed them. We're talking Parasite the Home Alone. From Grease to the Dark Knight. So if you love movies like we do,

come along on our cinematic adventure. Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to hit the follow button. From the podcast that brought you to each of the last lesbian bars in the country and back in time through the sapphic history that shaped them comes a brand new season of Cruising Beyond the Bars.

This is your host, Sarah Gabrielli, and I've spent the past year interviewing history-making lesbians and queer folks about all kinds of queer spaces, from bookstores to farms to line dancing and much more. You can listen to Cruising on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes air every other Tuesday starting February 4th. There is not a person alive, I suspect, who hasn't at some point in their life struggled

with sleep. You can't fall asleep. You can't stay asleep. You sleep but you're still tired all the time. You sleep too much or you sleep too little. Sleep can be a real problem for virtually everyone. And here with the latest research, techniques, and advice on the subject is Dr. Guy Leschzner. He is a neurologist in London where he leads the Sleep Disorder Center, which is one of

the largest sleep services in Europe. He's also author of the book The Nocturnal Brain, Nightmares, Neuroscience and the Secret World of Sleep. Hi Guy, thanks for joining me from London. Thanks very much for having me on. So I must tell you that I love the subject of sleep. We've talked about it a couple of times on this podcast and one of the things that I love about it is that you know it obviously affects everyone. Everyone has different experiences with sleep. Everyone has a different relationship

with sleep and what is your relationship with sleep. Everyone has a different relationship with sleep. And what is your relationship with sleep? Well, I've always been fascinated with sleep. Really, even as a schoolboy, I was fascinated with neuroscience and read the books of Oliver Sacks. And it was really reading those stories that got me fascinated by the world of neurology and as an undergraduate although historically in the UK and pretty much everywhere in the

world sleep has been very very poorly taught it's been largely ignored but as an undergraduate when I was at Oxford I was asked to go away and write a thesis on why we dream. And what occurred to me at that point was, first of all, how little we knew about sleep and the fact that despite us doing this for eight hours a day, we have no real understanding of why we do what we do. It was a really fascinating area that subsequently has taken me into all sorts of areas of medicine, because we now understand that sleep and sleep medicine has links with every aspect of human physiology and human medicine. It is so interesting that sleep is such a dominant part of our lives.

We spend a lot of time doing it and when we don't do it well it screws up the other time when we're not doing it. And yet yeah, as you say, it's just, it's kind of an almost a nuisance. Like, well you have to do that and you have to sleep and yeah, I guess it's important. But nobody really spends a lot of time thinking a whole lot about it, but it's so critical. Well, it's staggering really, if you think about it. If somebody were to ask you, well, why do we eat or why do we drink? And you turned around to them and said, well, you know, I don't know. It would be laughable. Yet this fundamental aspect of our lives that's absolutely crucial to every aspect of our

being, we really understand incredibly poorly. So why do we sleep? What happens when we sleep? What does it do for us beyond the obvious, you know, then we're not so tired the next day. But what is going on there? I think the answer is that there's no one function of sleep, that sleep has a multitude of functions.

So we know that it is primarily controlled by the brain and many of its functions are for regulation of brain, function of normal brain functioning. So that sleep is part of the housekeeping that is required to maintain our brain, which is the most metabolically active organ in our bodies in fighting shape. We know that sleep has important functions in terms of making connections between different cells within our brain, sometimes actually pruning those connections, but it's also involved in, for example, flushing out toxins or metabolites, substances that have built up over the course of the day out of our brains and back into

the rest of our systems. But it goes well beyond the brain in that we now understand that sleep is absolutely vital for regulation of cardiovascular function, for kidney function, for healing and restoration of various aspects of our bodies, regulation of our immune system, and so on. So an absolute array of functions. When we talk about quality of sleep, is not all sleep is the same

in that you could sleep eight hours and maybe feel really rested and somebody else could sleep the same eight hours and not feel so rested, yes? Yes, that's absolutely right. I think that some of that is related to the fact that sleep is not a single state. So we often think of sleep and wake as being binary states. So either you're awake or either you're asleep. But actually what we know is that sleep consists of multiple different stages. So at its most basic level, we divide sleep up into REM sleep or rapid eye movement sleep where the brain appears to be very active when we monitor the activity of the brain using electrodes on the scalp, actually it looks rather similar to wake on that

basis. And then non REM sleep which is where the brain activity slows down and becomes a little bit more quiescent. But even within those categories we know that in non REM sleep which is the stage of sleep that we most associate with restorative sleep or sleep that makes you feel better when you wake up. There are different stages of sleep and it seems that our experience of sleep, you know, how we subjectively feel our night has gone,

sometimes bears relatively little relationship to the objective measurement of sleep that we can record when you come in for a sleep test in a sleep laboratory. What about people's sleep requirement? You hear people say I can get by on a couple hours of sleep. I'm one of those people that if I don't get a good night sleep I feel the effects. It's I suffer the next day. And some people seem to skip by on very little. What's the science say? Well, I think on a population basis, we know that sleeping very little or sleeping a lot is associated with a range of negative health consequences, including mortality, the most

negative health consequence. So people who sleep a very short period, you mortality, the most negative health consequence. So people who sleep a very short period, you know usually less than about six hours, certainly have an increased risk of mortality compared to those who sleep seven or eight hours. But it's important to understand that that is on a population basis and that for each individual what is seen as a normal sleep requirement is perhaps slightly different and that's each individual what is seen as a normal sleep requirement is perhaps slightly different and that's a function of the quality of your sleep so whether or not you've got anything else going on with your sleep like for example sleep apnea this breathing condition that disrupts

the quality of your sleep because your airway is constantly collapsing but it's also a function of your genes in that we know that there are a number of genes that influence our sleep requirements. So for example, I have a few families that I've seen in whom everybody in that family sleeps a very short duration and doesn't seem to have any negative effects of sleeping, say four or five hours a night. But it's also important to understand that some people are resistant to the effects of sleep

deprivation in terms of how sleepy they feel but not necessarily resistant to the effects of sleep deprivation in terms of for example their cognitive function, how easy they find to perform particular tasks or how good their memory is, for example. Just because you don't necessarily feel sleepy when you're sleep deprived doesn't mean that you don't have any consequences of that sleep disruption per se. Can you quote make up sleep? In other words, you have trouble sleeping and so you add extra

hours on the weekend and it all evens out. Well, the evidence suggests that if you sustain a significant sleep debt, which is how we term it, that if you're losing quite a lot of sleep during the week, then actually it's quite difficult to make that up by lying in at the weekends. And that some of those cognitive effects of being sleep deprived during the week persist on a Monday morning.

So the answer to that is if you really are burning the candle at both ends, then actually catching up at the weekend is very difficult. In terms of, and I've heard the expression, you know, sleep hygiene, that how we create our sleep environment, what we, the rituals we go through, those kinds of things can have a real impact on our sleep. Yeah, sleep hygiene is a horrible term. It really conjures up images of, you know, sleeping in a dirty bed.

Essentially what we mean by sleep hygiene, as you say, is those behaviors that are conducive to a good night's sleep. And some of those are really obvious, like not drinking several cups of coffee before you go to bed, not smoking immediately before you go to bed or consuming other nicotine containing substances,

sleeping in a quiet environment. Some of them are becoming increasingly well known like avoiding bright light in the evening so there is some evidence to suggest that what we do by exposing ourselves to bright light in the evenings is suppress our natural secretion of melatonin. So melatonin is this substance that an area of the brain called the pineal gland puts out that is the chemical signal to the brain and indeed the rest of the body that it's time to go to sleep. So by exposing yourself to bright light in the evenings what you may actually be doing is having a negative effect both on sleep quality but also making it more difficult for you to get off to sleep in the evenings, what you may actually be doing is having a negative effect both on sleep quality but also making it more difficult for you to get off to sleep in the first instance. When people have trouble sleeping, are there a million different reasons depending on the person

or is there typically a reason or two why? We know that one of the major causes of difficulty sleeping, insomnia, is actually a condition called psychophysiological insomnia, where psychological factors largely surrounding your association, your conscious and unconscious association with being in the bed and drifting off to sleep are replaced by negative associations. So rather than associating bed with being a comfortable sleeping environment where you feel cozy and you feel the warmth of and the security of knowing that you're going to drift off to sleep, it's replaced by that stress, that agitation, that anxiety that you're actually not going to drift off to sleep and that you're going to lie there awake for prolonged periods of time. So rather than the bed being an inviting place of comfort, it often gets that psychological

association is replaced by a feeling that your bed is an instrument of torture, that it's the place where you go to where you will have difficulties dropping off to sleep and will stay awake for prolonged periods of time. And for many people it's addressing those psychological factors that is actually the solution to actually treating their insomnia. For other people however there are many biological factors that result in poor sleep, be that medication you're prescribed for something else, be it a range of sleep disorders like obstructive sleep apnea or a condition called restless leg syndrome. So there are many different reasons but we know that by far the commonest is insomnia which affects about one in three adults

at some point every year and about one in ten adults on a regular long-term basis. So sometimes I'll have trouble sleeping because you know something exciting happened or is about to happen or you know anticipating tomorrow and is that just is that insomnia or is that just something exciting is happening? Well that's just. That's a normal response to what's going on in your life. I think that one of the things that's underappreciated is that the range of normal when it comes to sleep is actually quite large.

And just because you have a few nights where you don't sleep particularly well that doesn't constitute insomnia, it doesn't constitute an ailment, it is part of normal life. Are there things that people either don't know that if they did know would help them sleep better or perhaps some things people think they know that by not knowing the truth are helping them sleep worse? You know people don't appreciate that caffeine hangs around

for a very long time, particularly if you consume a lot of it. People, especially nowadays, are very used to using gadgets, you know, their cell phones or laptops in bed, and that's not very conducive, firstly because of the issue of light exposure, but secondly also that's quite a mentally stimulating activity. You know, one of the issues is that there are a range of sleep disorders that are very poorly known about not just by the general population but also by physicians

and in many cases we often see individuals who clearly have had a problem with a sleep disorder for many years that has gone unrecognized so it's knowing about these sleep disorders, recognizing them as sleep disorders that is really the first step to getting appropriate treatment. When people are diagnosed with a true sleep disorder, it's not just that they're having some trouble sleeping

now and again, but they have something really wrong. Are these sleep disorders generally based in biology or psychology or what? Both really because the psychological and the physical entract quite a lot. There are some sleep disorders that are clearly purely biological. Things like obstructive sleep apnea which is you know people who are snoring and collapsing their airway in the middle of the night, things like restless leg syndrome, which is physical, things like narcolepsy, which is a very pure neurological disorder that results in damage to a very small part of the brain.

But for some individuals, there are sleep disorders that have inputs from both. So for example, people who sleepwalk. We know that actually the basis of sleepwalking is purely biological. It's as a result of different parts of the brain being asleep whilst other parts of the brain are awake. But obviously those events can be influenced by daytime stress, sleep deprivation, poor sleep hygiene. So this is a good example of an interaction of the psychological and the behavioral and the environmental and the physical. What about dreaming? Why do we dream? Is it just the brain's got to do something while you're sleeping so it does that and it plays little movies? Or is there more to it or what? Well, I think I mentioned at the start of this interview that one of the essays that I was sent off to write

was Why Do We Dream? And I'm not sure that we have any better inkling now than when I was writing that essay over 25 years ago. I think we know that dreaming probably has more than one function and it probably has different functions at different stages of our lives. So there are lots of theories but none have been definitively proven. One of the theories is that dreaming is absolutely crucial to the development of consciousness in early life, so what differentiates us from other animals. But it also appears that dreaming is of significant importance

in terms of memory, in terms of emotional processing, in terms of learning something about our environment. And one of the popular theories about dreaming is that actually it creates a virtual environment in which we can tweak our model of the world around us so that we're integrating the sum of all our past experiences to tweak what we understand about the world around us. What do you think? I mean, people have theorized that, you know, dreaming predicts the future, that dreaming helps you

solve problems that you can't solve while you're awake. What's your sense? I think to argue that it predicts the future is very difficult from a scientific rationalist perspective. But certainly there is some evidence that REM is linked to creativity. So REM sleep being the stage of sleep that we most associate with dreaming. You know there are many many examples of people who have dreamt particular songs or particular works of literature. I think it was Paul McCartney and yesterday is often used as an example of that. He said that that came to him in a dream.

So, you know, clearly there is potentially something in the fact that REM is about creating links between different parts of the brain which facilitates creativity. This idea that, you know, if you dream about this, it must mean that, that's a pretty weak connection. I think that has largely fallen away as a popular idea in the world of neuroscience I've read and heard it said that one of the ways if you're having trouble sleeping One of the ways to improve your sleep is to go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same Time every morning seven days a week, do it regularly, and that that consistency will help improve pretty much

anybody's sleep. Yes? Yes, the brain is a creature of habit. And sleep is a learned habit, and as such, can be unlearned. I think the exception to that is that occasionally I see people who have become so obsessed by their sleep that they actually if they don't meet that rigid schedule they become very very stressed and then don't sleep at all as a result so so there is a line to be trodden balancing your habits but making sure that it doesn't become an obsession. What is that thing that I have?

And I know a lot of other people have that ability to, if I say I'm going to wake up tomorrow at five o'clock in the morning and I set the alarm for five o'clock in the morning, I'll wake up about two minutes before five, just before the alarm gets off. I don't know how I do that. How do, what is that? It is important to stress that we all within our brains have a clock. We have a circadian rhythm. There's a part of the brain called the super-chiasmatic nucleus that, um,

that regulates our circadian rhythms throughout our bodies. It's also important to understand that sleep, as I said, is not continuous state. So people are constantly having brief awakenings or having very, very light sleep. And so it's quite possible that there are some circuits within the brain that maintain a degree of awareness or a degree of consciousness. In fact, that's what we think is happening during lucid dreaming, which is when people have an awareness of the fact that they're in a dream and can actually sometimes exert conscious control over their dream. These are networks that are responsible

for consciousness that are firing during our dreaming sleep and they probably fire in different stages of sleep as well. So, you know, to think of the brain as being switched off during sleep is quite incorrect. There are a lot of electronic devices, sleep trackers that people wear that to kind of track how much they sleep, how much they move around when they sleep, how often they wake up, that kind of thing. What do you think about those sleep trackers? The answer to that is mixed. The difficulty that I have with sleep trackers is that first of all, they sometimes engender a degree of obsessionality about sleep.

But also people may be drawing very wrong conclusions about the nature of their sleep and that we know that sleep trackers do have issues in terms of their accuracy. They're good at telling us how long we spend in bed. They're okay at telling us how much sleep we get, but they're not very good at telling us what stages of sleep we're in. And people often become quite obsessed about, you know,

the fact that they're not getting as much deep sleep as they feel they should or that their sleep tracker shows that they're waking up multiple times a night. That can actually drive the insomnia and can make things worse. Actually when you talk to people with significant insomnia, they will often say, when I'm sitting on the sofa watching television or listening to music or reading a book, I will doze. And once I get into bed, I find it incredibly difficult. So it's when they're not thinking about the process of going to sleep, when they're not in bed thinking about sleep, that they're actually far more able to fall asleep.

Well, this is really helpful because as I said, so many people, pretty much everybody at some point in their life has trouble with their sleep. And this is some excellent information that can really help everybody. people, pretty much everybody, at some point in their life has trouble with their sleep. And this is some excellent information that can really help everybody. Dr. Guy Leschzner has been my guest. He is a neurologist in London and he is author of the book, The Nocturnal Brain, Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep. You'll find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes for this episode.

Thanks, doctor. Okay. Bye bye If you hate your job, you should probably leave as soon as possible It turns out that job dissatisfaction has real consequences in a study at Ohio State people who reported greater levels of dissatisfaction with their jobs when they were in their 20s and 30s scored lower on measures of overall mental health by the time they hit their 40s, compared to those who had been consistently happy with their work. While the study started analyzing guys when they were in their 20s, it's likely that older men, dissatisfied with their jobs, face similar effects as well. It turns out that being unhappy at work also takes a physical toll. Those people with low job satisfaction were more likely to suffer from 13 different health complications, including frequent colds and sinus problems, than those who enjoyed their

work. The good news is that if you leave a job you hate for one that is more satisfying, many of these problems just disappear. And that is Something You Should Know. And now I will simply disappear after I ask you to please share this podcast with someone you know. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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