Stuff You Should Know - Naps: Chuck's Secret Talent

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

Naps are great if you can manage to find the space to take them. The trick is to do it for the right amount of time. We get into all in the ins and outs of Chuck's favorite time of day. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I am Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who

have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, lingering, which makes this Stuff You Should Know. Right. Can we quickly just say a brief thank you to everyone that came out on the first three-show leg of our nine-show tour? Yeah. Thank you to everybody in Seattle. Thank you to everyone in Portland. Yay. Thank you to everyone in San Francisco. Yeah. And that's the three so far. Yeah,

and they went great. I think we were both a little nervous because it's been a while. A little rusty. And it was like putting on an old shirt. Right, with a bunch of moth holes in it. Everyone was awesome. Perfectly placed, so just one nipple sticks out through one of those moths. Oh, wow. That's what it felt like to me. I thought it was funny. And then going out on stage in that shirt. You did so good, my friend. I was very proud of you. You were funny and engaging and doled out the information. It was just vintage, Josh. Well, I have to say that is great to hear because I feel the same way about your performance, which you delivered. Chuck, you did great too.

Yeah. Well, Sidney, you didn't want to have screwed it up. I don't think so, no. I mean, yes, both of us screwed up plenty of times, but not the whole shebang. You know what I mean? Yeah, I agree. So I feel like we're really kind of overselling things. I don't want everybody to come out expecting a lot based on what we just said for the next six shows. But we are going to be touring some more this year. So heads up, keep an ear out for where we're going to be. I think we've already kind of said mostly, right? Yeah. And big thanks to everyone for, as always, doing their best to keep a lid on the topic. Yes. Because it's not like the front door combination to Fort Knox or anything.

But it's always nice, I think, to be surprised when you show up. Yeah. To see the look on people's faces and they're like, oh my God, I was not expecting this. Oh my God. That's great. The pinto? What's that? Never even heard of it. All right. So on with the naps, eh? Oh yeah, naps. So I have to say, Chuck, when I was researching this, I got very, very tired. And I still didn't nap. As you know, I am a non-napper. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's funny we were talking about the tour because on tour,

you probably just adrenaline and nerves and all that stuff. You had some trouble sleeping and then could not nap to catch up. And you know, my deal, and we'll talk about it through the episode. But I started taking a daily nap about probably about a year ago. I used to, you know, I call it sneaking a nap every now and then. My whole life I've enjoyed a nap. But then I was, I started to own it. And, which means basically letting Emily know like, hey, I'm going to nap and I'm not going to feel bad about it. Nice.

And she got behind it and was like, you know what? You do better. She said, you don't get as much sleep as I do. You do better with like a 45 minute lay down in the afternoon and like go for it. It's great. That's awesome. So I felt like there was something wrong with me because I couldn't nap. Because it does seem like that's something that everybody should be able to do, especially as beneficial as it is. But after reading this article and doing research, Ed helped us with this one, by the way. So thanks, Ed. I've come to realize like I'm just a non-napper, probably on a genetic level.

Yeah. Some people just don't nap and some people do. And there doesn't mean anyone's right or wrong. I am good at it. I get a lot out of it. And you're not great at it. And who knows if you would get anything out of it. Yeah. No, who knows? I mean, yeah, I don't know who knows. I might just wake up even worse off than I have been before. But I really, really can try and it just does not happen. So. Is this, have you ever, I mean, I know obviously kids nap and stuff, but

like as an adult, have you ever, ever napped? Or not really? I'm sure I have, but I can't remember when, if ever. And if I ever, like my, my propensity is to just stay up, keep staying up and then go to bed at your normal bed time and just try to reset everything. To me, taking a nap is like, now everything's even more out of whack than it was before. You know, like if you, if you've missed out on a bunch of sleep the night before, rather than taking a nap, I just stay awake until the next sleep time. And then hope that everything gets back to normal. Yeah.

Yeah. My, I just remember my brother-in-law, the Marine Corps General is, has a, as you would imagine, a pretty revved up motor as a human in life, just to accomplish things. And I lived with him in Arizona for a year and I saw him take a nap one day. And I was worried. Oh yeah. I went up to my sister, I was like, Michelle, is this cartoon okay? I was like, I think we need to call somebody. Does he take them regularly? No, not at all. So it was, it was really disconcerting to see him not awake and like building a new deck

or a swing set or cleaning, cleaning something curiously. Especially since when you lean closer, you could hear him go, this is my rifle. What a great Stanley Kubrick joke. So let's, let's talk napping. We could just sit here and share napping anecdotes for the rest of the episode. Yeah, we could. I suspect most people would be turned off by a significant portion would. A lot of people come for the science, the statistics, the explanation, me screwing up the word statistics, all that stuff combined.

That's a tough word. It is. Yeah, but we should talk a little bit about sleep. We have a, quite a few episodes on sleep, but one just on sleep and kind of the different phases. So if you want a full deep dive into that, go check that one out. But briefly, we'll go over the stages of sleep again, right? Yeah. I mean, you basically have to, to talk about napping because spoiler alert, napping is a type of sleep. It's just abbreviated. And there's actually a clinical definition agreed upon definition of a nap.

A funny one. I think you should take this one. A nap is any sleep period where the duration, with a duration of less than 50% of the average major sleep period of an individual. So if you sleep eight hours a night, and you took a three hour and 45 minute sleep during the afternoon, that would be considered a nap. That's a nap. Isn't that a weird one? A big one. It's odd that there's a definition out there, but it makes sense,

even though everyone knows what a nap is. Yeah. So yeah, we need to talk about sleep because we don't actually understand why we sleep still. It's one of the great, fascinating things about humans. And we've talked about it plenty of times, more than just some of our sleep episodes. But there's theories that your brain is clearing out like detritus and junk, that you are consolidating memories and making new connections between memories. Like remember our sleeping on it short stuff that we released recently?

Yep. We talked a lot about that. There's basically forcing your body to lay still so that it can repair and grow and do all sorts of stuff. And then another theory is that we're actually saving energy. We have less energy needs or fewer energy needs because we sleep about six to eight or six to nine hours a day. Yeah.

And what do you get these days, sleep-wise? I get usually on the nose eight hours, maybe nine sometimes. But you're an early riser, so you're going to bed at ten-ish? Ten-ish, nine-ish. Okay. Oh, wow. All right. If the bed's sounding really like comforting, eight, eight-thirty.

I don't care. I have nothing to prove to anyone. No. My life is into it too, so. No, no, no. The older you get, the less shame you have about just saying like, I'm going to bed, everybody. Good.

Exactly. Yeah, because as you get older, when you say it at like eight, you like raise your fists and triumph. I completed everything I needed to complete today, and now I get to go to bed at eight-thirty. Right, right, right. I generally stay up later and still get up kind of early. That's why the nap really helps me out.

Because I feel like I get probably seven and under every night. I go to bed at 11 or 12, and I usually get up around six-thirty or seven. Yeah, that's the best time to do it, to get up really early. I've not been much of a night owl for many, many years. But the early rising thing, I really, I can dig on for sure. Yeah, I was in San Francisco actually on sort of the big night out, which was after our Friday show when we were completely done. I sort of got into it with some old friends, Hodgman and some guys,

and Adam Pranicka and Ben Harrison and our buddies. And I was up, Adam and I were the last ones up, and I looked at my watch, fully expecting it to be maybe 12-45 or 115 at the latest, and it was like 245. Wow. And I was like, oh boy, I'm in trouble. I haven't done that in a long time. Yeah, I know.

That's a feeling of dread when you go to bed like that. And I took a legit three-hour nap the next day. Nice. Well, we'll get to why that probably helped. I'm sure when you woke up after that three-hour nap, you felt good? I felt good in that I had given my body what it needed, but it was definitely like waking up from real sleep. Like I was pretty groggy.

And again, we'll get into all that. Okay. So we were talking about the stages of sleep or explaining sleep, and sleep is divided into stages. There's really two big ones, and then one of the big ones can be subdivided. But you've got rapid eye movement, REM sleep, or REM sleep, if you're in the sleep biz.

And then you've got non-REM sleep, or NREM. And NREM is what you can divide into further subsections. There's stage N1, N2, and N3. And I didn't know this, Chuck, but you put N1, N2, N3, followed by REM sleep. You've got a full sleep cycle. And that you cycle through those multiple times, five, six times, during a night's sleep.

Did you know that? You knew that, because we've talked about it. You just forgot it. I plum-forgot, because yeah, it seemed like brand new info to me. Yeah, you go through the complete cycle five or six times. And when you start looking at the breakdown of the minutes, it makes sense, because N1 is that first little light sleep stage. It's only about five minutes per cycle.

So again, you will go through that five minute stage five or six times in a night. And this one, you'll wake up very easily from N1, whereas N2, obviously, is a bit deeper. Your body is going to be pretty much completely relaxed in N2. Your body temp drops. Your heart rate drops. Your respiration drops a bit.

Arousal threshold, or the words ed use, that sounds both like a band and like something dirty. It's an album to me, not a band. Okay, well, the band would be sleep architecture then, right? It sounds like a Roxy Music album. Yeah, I guess the band would be sleep architecture. That's a good name for anything, really. Yeah, that's a term that comes up later.

But this, I'm sorry, the N2 cycle is about 10 to 20 minutes on the first run, or the N2 stage in the first cycle is 10 to 20 minutes. And then each successive cycle, it gets a little bit longer. Yeah, 11 to 21, 12 to 22, probably more than that. 13 to 23, right? Yeah. And then after that, you've got N3 sleep, slow wave sleep. Yeah.

Your arousal threshold is very high, meaning it's very difficult to wake you up. I saw that people will commonly sleep through 100 decibel noises in N3 sleep. You're just out. Yeah. And that's great, N3 sleep, you're getting all sorts of, like, your cells are repairing themselves. You're actually literally growing, especially if you're a younger human.

And you'll stay in it for anywhere between 20 to 40 minutes, but it's the opposite of N2. It gets shorter with each cycle. Right. There's a problem with N3 sleep in that if you wake up from N3 sleep, you are extraordinarily groggy. That groggyness can last like two to four hours. We're like, you're essentially suffering a temporary cognitive impairment.

And they call it sleep inertia. It's another way to put it is just the groggyness from waking up at the wrong time. And that is what happens when you don't complete an N3 cycle, but you wake up in the N3 cycle. That's where you're groggyest. Yeah. What I'm curious about, and we've even had one of these as a sponsor. I can't remember which one, but where you'll wear like sleep bands to kind of

log how your sleep cycles are working. Yeah. Do any and the one that we use may have even had this. I don't remember, but do any of them have an alarm integrated? Well, they where they can wake you up in the best part of your sleep. You know what I'm saying? I would guess so. They're probably I don't think this is like new research here.

So I'm guessing that yeah, if you're going to make something like that, you would have to make it so that you wake up at the best optimal time. I'm curious. And then the last one is the REM sleep. This is where you're dreaming. Of course, your brain is going to be obviously a little more active. Your arousal threshold is even higher than N3, but it's a bit of a paradox because if you don't have an alarm or whatever and you just awake from a dream

spontaneously and you've had a regular good night's sleep, then it doesn't have the kind of sleep inertia as N3. So you wake up easier. Right. And I've found this to be kind of both when I wake up from an intense dream. Sometimes I am really out of it. But that's rare because I'm generally a very awake waker.

Right. You sit up like, oh my God, no. Not quite like that. But I've never been one that's just like, what? I'm always just like, OK, I'm awake. So when you watch movies where people wake up, you're like, that is so fake. It's fake for me. OK. So yeah, I didn't realize that you naturally,

if when you wake up without an alarm, which I guess is called awakening spontaneously, which makes sense. I've actually, Chuck, I've got a talent here where, so I'm still like logie from the jet, like for some reason the jet just killed me on this West Coast trip. Like I've never had it before. We might as well have gone to Japan and come back over the weekend. It was like pretty bad.

So I'm still suffering from it, so I woke up to my alarm. But normally when I have like a good level of sleep going, I can calculate how long I have to sleep and what time I need to wake up. And I will wake up every time, a couple minutes before my alarm goes off. Dude, me too. I talked about this on our sleep app. I have a natural alarm. If I tell myself the night before what time I have to wake up,

I'm within like five minutes of that. That's just so cool. And that's one of the circadian rhythms or one of the biological rhythms that we have. We have like a several inner clocks of different types. And apparently one just sits there and counts the seconds. What a terrible job that would be. Yeah. I mean, I haven't used, I don't think, and maybe some real weird outlier nights,

but I had no for a fact. I haven't really used an alarm since we did the TV show. Wow. Never. And generally never use an alarm because I just, I wake up. I'm not one of those who will just sleep the day away. I still set my alarm on days where we're studying, recording days where I have to get up early,

but I still usually wake up before it. So. Well, pets and human children also serve as natural alarms, either from a pet usually like, it's time to get that morning feeding or let me out and go pee or whatever. Right. But yeah, once you, once you have a human kid, you're, you're waking when they wake. Right.

Okay. So we basically just explain sleep again. And the reason we did that is because now that we know the different stages of sleep and how long each one lasts and when you want to wake up or don't want to wake up, you can actually use this information to optimize your nap. And I think we should take a break and then come back and teach everybody how to optimize their naps. Let's do it.

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All right, so how to nap better is how Ed titled this section, which I just love that the way that sounds in my ears. Yeah. And Ed made up a couple of terms that he didn't tell us until after this section that he had made up because they sound right on the money to me. And so we're going to go ahead and use his terminology. And that is partial cycle naps and full cycle naps. Yep. A partial cycle nap being the power nap, what people call a disco nap or a power nap. Or a cat nap. Or a cat nap. And that's at 10 or 20 minute nap where officially you will, or scientifically you'll be entering into sleep, but you're waking up before that n3 sleep or the REM sleep. Right. So you're not going through a

full sleep cycle, but you still get the n1 and the n2 sleep. And this seems to be as we'll see like the nap that you want to take, depending on what you're trying to do. If you're catching up on sleep, a longer nap is typically recommended. But if you're trying to be like the most productive worker possible, then this is what you want to do is a partial cycle nap as Ed calls it. And in his defense, I looked up to see if there were any and strangely there isn't. So there was actually a lot of room for him to make up these terms. There was a void for him to fill. Yeah. I think I could see the industry jumping on this. Sure. Partial cycle nap, full cycle nap. It sounds very scientific. He should trademark that stuff. Definitely.

We'll email him before this comes out so we can get it in the works. Make some money off a big mattress. So there are some studies here and there we're going to mention. There are lots of nap studies and sleep studies, and they're not the most consistent across the board. So kind of the net net of all of this is like we kind of mentioned at the beginning, we tease it out, you know, some people can nap and get a lot out of it and some people don't. And there isn't a definitive study that says like everyone should do this or not do that. Right. It can help certain people for sure. It seems like study-wise and data-wise, the partial cycle nap, the 20-minute or so nap is the one with the most measurable benefits.

Yeah. There was one study I didn't see where it was from, but they found that the 10-minute nap is actually ideal. Get out of my face with that. What is that? 10 minutes. That's not even a nap. I know, but apparently the 10-minute nap showed that there was reduced sleepiness, increased mental ability, and that people tended to have better memory consolidation just after a 10-minute nap, and that it was even better than a 20-minute nap in this one study. Here's the thing. There are a lot of sleep stays out there and a lot of them contradict one another's findings, but there does seem to be enough studies that some fairly definitive answers have risen to the top. And it seems to be that 10 minutes is a pretty sweet spot, 20 minutes sometimes.

I will say this. I have worked in, I've developed the ability to take a super, super short nap if that's the only thing I can do that day, because some days you just can't do it. You know, I try to build it into my schedule and I pretty much successfully have, but sometimes life happens and you just can't do it, and I'm really tired in the afternoon. And I've developed the ability to lay down and sleep for like eight or 10 minutes, and I do feel super refreshed. So you lay down. You're not one of those people that can just nap anywhere. I mean, I can nap on a plane, but I don't like, I'm not at the old man stage yet where I'm sitting up right in a chair, like I get horizontal. You reminded me of Japanese school kids in Japan.

If you ride the subway, like almost all of them will just fall asleep sitting up and just be on the subway. And then all of a sudden it's their stop and they just stand up and walk off the subway. Like just they're sleeping and now they're not. They're walking off the subway. It's really impressive, but they apparently can sleep absolutely anywhere. Well, if you can sleep on the subway and at like 10 in the morning, you can sleep anywhere, you know? Well, I was going to say trains and boats and modes of transport can kind of low people to sleep, but I think Japanese subways are known for being fairly crowded. They are crowded, very loud, but I mean, also like, how do they know it's their stop? Like that's just amazing. That is pretty great. I love that.

Yeah, me too. So next we've got the full cycle nap, Chuck, and that's one that's, I mean, basically not a partial cycle nap. The goal here is to make it through N1, N2, and N3, and then into REM sleep. Because remember, REM sleep is where we normally naturally wake up. So you're not nearly as groggy as if you woke up at N3 sleep. The problem is it's really difficult to pinpoint your individual sleep cycles. Like even if you did a sleep study, if you start new medication, if you age, as most people do, there's all sorts of different factors, how much sleep you had the night before. You put all that together and whatever that sleep study said your sleep cycles go through, like the time or length of each one, that can be altered.

But you're trying to guess essentially what it takes you to go through a full cycle, one sleep cycle. And Ed suggests starting with 60 minutes and then depending on whether you're groggy or not when you wake up, like moving it downward or upward. But usually they're between 45 and 90 minutes. Yeah. And this is what I shoot for, but it's never over an hour. It's what I'll usually do is set the timer for an hour and I will wake up naturally about 45 minutes later. That's pretty neat. Yeah. I rarely make it, well, that's not true. Sometimes I make it to that full hour, but never be on that because I just, there's too much going on in life for me to go longer than an hour. Yeah. But if you need that 90 minutes, I mean,

they say that if you can get to that REM stage, you know, you're going to have the benefits of waking up without the grogginess. But like you said, it's complicated unless you really have either done a sleep study or just super in sync with where you think your cycles are. Yeah. But I mean, if you really want to become like a pro napper, you could do worse than saying, like, I'm going to take this week or the next two weeks to study my sleep cycles and yeah, start with 60 minutes and adjust it from there. Yeah. I think that's respectable. Anybody who takes themselves that, I guess seriously, I don't know where they're like, I'm going to improve my life and I'm going to do it scientifically. I appreciate that. I think that's cool. Well,

I talked to my friend, Eddie, into napping. Semi recently, huh? With you? Like that one friends episode? Come over and have a cuddle. I would do that. I'm sure Eddie's a great spooner, but he got on board and the last I heard from him, he was like, I'm doing it now, built it into my day and it's like made a huge difference. Wow. Yeah. So yeah, even though I know I'm not a napper, I'm still a little envious. I know. So please stop talking about how great it is. Okay. It's so great. So there's another nap you can take too that supposedly from what I can tell the ideal nap. Yeah. It's called a coffee nap and it's not a 10 minute nap. It's not a 90 minute nap. It's a 20 minute nap and it sounds kind of awesome, but basically you drink a cup

of coffee. Ostensibly, this is the only coffee you've drank or at least your morning coffee has long worn off by now. Right. So you're basically at your set point for caffeine intake. You drink a cup of coffee, you go lay down and you go to sleep and then 20 minutes later after the caffeine has entered your bloodstream and started to take effect, you wake up. But not only do you just wake up like, oh, I've got some caffeine. Like there's a whole bunch of neurochemistry going on that really makes this coffee nap something special. Yeah. This sounds like a great nap for if you're doing a long road trip and you're smart enough to pull over and take a little rest stop nap. Drink the coffee and then you're up, you start that car back up and you're fired up and

ready to hit the road again. Right. So the reason why it works, Chuck, is because of adenosine. That's a neurochemical. It's a neurotransmitter and one of the things adenosine does is it tells your body that you're tired. The thing is, is caffeine can attach to adenosine receptors. So when there's less places for your adenosine to attach, there's less chance for those adenosine molecules to tell your body that you're tired. So not only do you have the benefits of waking up with the whole caffeinated energy boost, you're feeling less tired because the caffeine has literally like elbowed out. Yeah. Well, maybe not literally elbowed, but you know what I mean. Sure. This chemical that makes you feel tired. So it's like the best of both worlds put together.

Yeah. And not only that, but if you're in too sleep, you're going to be flushing adenosine in that stage from your brain. So that's just going to open up more garage space for the caffeine to come park. Right. And you're just, yeah, it sounds pretty great. I'm not the biggest caffeine guy. Caffeine, I will have sometimes in the winter, as you know, I'll have like lattes and stuff. It's like a cold weather thing for me. Sure. But it always makes me excessively tired after like the caffeine come down for me is pretty, pretty big. Right. That used to be the same for me, but now I'm just so used to it. I don't even notice. Right. Yeah. There is something that I have noticed though. I think everybody's noticed, which is the post lunch dip.

Yeah. That's what I take mine. Yes. Okay. So this actually makes a lot of sense because there's entire cultures that are dedicated to napping during the post lunch dip, but there is a, there is a period and apparently it's not due to having lunch or a big lunch. It's just a natural period of sleepiness that humans tend to experience in the middle of the day, the early afternoon, about for about three hours from early to mid afternoon. It's called the post post lunch dip. And a lot of people just say, Hey, I'm taking a nap right now. And they have found that there's actually an optimal time to take a nap and an optimal length. And it sounds like if you took a coffee nap at this time, you would wake up with some sort of superpowers.

And that time drumroll please is what 2pm, right? Yeah. It says 1400 hours. That's 2pm. Your, your brother-in-law would know. So yeah, the 20 minute nap and these were studies and researchers have done like, you know, looked over the metadata of lots of studies and they found that a 20 minute nap at 2pm produced greater and longer lasting benefits to mood, fatigue, objective performance, self-rated performance and objective alertness compared to that same nap at noon. Yeah. So there you have it. If you ask me, like we've just told everybody, if you're going to take a nap, this is when and how to do it. Yeah. Go forth and sleep. Have that siesta. Agreed. So Chuck, we're not through with the

DNA scene yet. No, we're not. Should we take a break? I think we should take a break and then we're going to talk more about the DNA scene. All right. I'm going to have a two minute nap and I'll be right back. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the

early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell on iHeart. I'm 60 years old now, believe that? Yes, it's the truth. So I figure two thirds of my life are done, zero to 30, 30 to 60. And now I'm in the 60 to 90 if I'm lucky. Mostly, this part of my life is just about moving forward. And I thought, what a wonderful way to do it with the podcast that I can sit down here in my home with people I love and admire,

people I've worked with, people I've gotten to be friends with, and some family friends that feel like the real deal. Like who, you might ask? Natasha Leon, Jennifer Lewis, Ricky Lake, Fran Drescher, Sharon Glass, Kathy Griffin, Cameron Mannheim, the list goes on and on. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists.

We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS team supreme. They're like a second family to me. If your fan is deep diving into music, everything, all monacking your musical history, and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought, then you're a lot like me, but you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music.

Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeart Radio App, at the podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, I mentioned adenosine, said we weren't done with it, and by God, I was telling the truth because there's a whole other segment about adenosine that I find just absolutely fascinating, and that is that it's essentially almost a mechanical... What am I thinking of, Chuck? I don't know. So it's almost like a little bit, but more like you have a tray, and the tray is on a scale, like a balancing scale, but attached to that scale is like a stick,

and when enough adenosine builds up on that tray, and the scale, that stick goes up, and yes, it throws a switch, and all of a sudden, for you, it lights out. That's right. So the takeaway from this is it's a byproduct of cellular breakdown of the energy that you use, so the longer you're awake and the more active you are, the more adenosine you're going to have, and again, that's your body saying you're tired, so it sounds obvious, like, hey, if you're awake longer and you're working harder, you're going to be more tired, but that's how it works. But this is why. There's actually a reason why, and it's because adenosine builds up in your body,

and adenosine is part of that currency that all cells use as energy, ATP, adenosine, triphosphate, and it's just so neat that it's part of this energy package, and then once that energy package is broken open and the energy is removed from it, what's left over builds up, this adenosine builds up and then makes you tired, and then when you're sleeping, adenosine is cleared out. Which stage was it, N3, I think? Well, I think if you have a lot of adenosine, meaning you are up longer and you're super tired, you're going to be deeper in N3 and REM, but I don't know where it's cleared out, but that is a theory that if you wake up in your groggy, then you didn't clear out enough

of the adenosine. Right, but if you do get a good night's sleep and your body goes through its normal stages and cycles, adenosine is cleared from your body, and after it reaches a certain threshold, you wake up because that tells your body that you're going to start to need some more energy soon, so wake up dummy and start eating brain flakes. Yeah, I love it. Again, it's intuitive, but it's always kind of, I think, empowering to know what's going on in your body. Yeah, okay, yes, it is intuitive, but to say this is the thing that's doing it when it rises or raises and lowers, I just, for some reason, I can't put my finger on, I am just enthralled by it. I wonder if that would help you nap,

knowing the function behind it. A lot of people are proposed adenosine as like a sleep aid, but the problem is, is you have adenosine receptors all over your body, including your heart, and it can actually affect your heart's rhythm, and they're like, you don't want to mess with your heart's rhythm using adenosine, so it's not worth it as a sleep aid. Oh, they've synthesized it? Yeah, yeah, actually, if you go to your doctor and they put you through a chemical stress test, they're introducing adenosine into your system, and then what's the other thing? They actually use it to correct a regular heartbeat, too, so it's a powerful heart squeezer. Okay. So are you, my friend? Thank you. Thank you. So now we're at the point

where we kind of go over whether naps are good for you, and again, I've kind of already ruined that, like, sure, they can be great for your functioning if they work for you, and your memory, and your alertness, and your recall, and things like that, if they work for you, but they aren't for everyone. They will, if you're not getting enough sleep, like if you're doing it because you have a sleep deficit, then it will for sure improve your performance and help out, and I think the long full cycle nap is probably what you want if it's just one of those deals where you just didn't get enough sleep last night because of one reason or another, and you need something more, but like Ed said, this is more like, hey, this is sort of an emergency thing and need this

nap. Right. The thing is, is there does seem to be benefits from people like you who take naps as part of their everyday routine, and I don't know if it's just like I'm missing out on those benefits, or I just don't need a nap to have those benefits, who knows, but they have shown that people who are even well rested, who take regular naps, show consistent benefits like an improved mood, reduced impulsiveness, you're better able to deal with frustrating situations. That's me to a T. Yeah, for sure. And what's funny enough is I'm the opposite of that, so maybe I should start napping. And they also improve performance on memory tasks, right? So this is from people who are getting plenty of sleep during the night, but still take a nap

during the day. That's pretty impressive. Yeah, on the downside, and you knew there would be one, dear listener, but there have been, and I don't think that they've like proven direct links, but there have been some correlative, is that the word? Yeah, I think so. Correlative links between regular naps and the length of naps if you are elderly, and things like dementia and heart disease. Yeah, they've shown that napping for more than an hour every day was tied to a 40% greater chance of a developing Alzheimer's disease among older people. And they're like, okay, well, that's pretty scary, but they haven't figured out whether that's a symptom of developing Alzheimer's or it's actually a contributing factor to developing Alzheimer's. Either way,

that's definitely something to chew on. Yeah, like I wonder, I'm very sort of dementia aware lately, not for myself or anything like that, just, you know, it's come up quite a bit with like friends and family in recent years as you get to be our age and our parents get older, like, everyone starts to face those things in your family. So I'm just very aware of like, all right, keeping the brain sharp, not just settling down until like, of course, we're not retired or anything, but one day when if that eventually happens. Bite your tongue. Sting. Ow, that hurts. Staying active brain wise. And, you know, Emily's dear grandmother, Mary, he just passed away at 101 was up until the last year where, you know, she had the stroke and things like really went

south was she was just did word puzzles all day and Sudoku and or Sudoku, which is it? Sudoku. Sudoku and crosswords and did not just fall into that routine that I think so many folks as they get some age on them do, which is you sit around and watch TV because that is that's a just a prolonged slow death sentence basically. Yeah, sitting around watching TV is not a good way to keep sharp. No, not at all. So anyway, long wave saying I had just been thinking a lot more about dementia over the last few years and I'm like, well, you know, maybe one day I'm going to have to give up this this nap. Yeah, maybe. But I mean, this was an hour or longer every single day. And it was just a 40% greater chance. So you're probably fine. Thanks, buddy. So we're talking

about you possibly being a natural born napper and how I am not. They have actually done genome wide association studies where they survey hundreds of thousands of people to ask them, you know, hey, do you nap every day? How long do you nap for? Do you nap sometimes rarely, never? And then they look at those respondents genomes, their entire genomes, they scan them, and then they look for commonalities. And from doing those kinds of studies, they found 123 different regions in the genome that are associated with daytime napping. I have zero of them. Really? They, I'm sure I do. I haven't actually, I have had my genome scan, but I don't know what might, if I have them or not, I would, I would assume not. But that raises the question, like, are

humans designed to nap? Are we genetically programmed to nap or not? And I feel like the fact that some people seem to be genetically predisposed to it and other people not, there's your answer right there. I think some and some not, but I don't think it appears to be a, a through trait that humans all had at one point, right? You know, and you can kind of come up with the answer by comparing us to other, other groups. Yeah, like, I think the idea is that did we, is this modern life that we live where we go to work for 40 plus hours or so, and we're up during the day and we're doing things like, did we force that upon ourselves? Or were we supposed to have evolved differently? Right. And it really doesn't seem that way. It

seems like kind of the other way around, like circadian rhythm wise, that humans were probably evolved to sleep at night over a reasonable, you know, period of time. And then do things during the day, during the daylight, that just kind of makes sense. Yeah. And if you, if you say, well, what about some of our evolutionary cousins, like primates? If you look at primates, some sleep during the day, others don't. If you look at hunter gatherer societies, some sleep during the day, others don't. And then culturally speaking as well, some cultures do, others don't, like, you know, Spanish and Latin American cultures are famous for taking siestas. And apparently, that is not some sort of genetically ingrained thing that was originally something that they

did during their agrarian days to escape, to take a break from the hottest hours of the sunshine. Yeah, sure. And then I mean, you're just sitting around hanging out after you've just eaten lunch, the chances are you're probably going to fall asleep. But that's not the case with all cultures who are exposed to heavy sunshine during the daylight hours either. It just seems to have kind of developed among some cultures. And by the way, the Spanish are trying to abandon that. Oh, really? Yeah, it has a real detrimental effect. My friends, Laurel and Brayden, lived in Spain for a little while, and they came back and they're like, that's siesta, man, it's a killer, because everything just stops for a little while,

an hour or two hours. And then to make up for it, they end up working until like seven, eight at night every night. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And weirdly, the society, the modern version of like Spanish society is still trying to figure out how to reconcile the two and what they finally come up with is like, we should not be doing this anymore. Oh, they should do the Chuck method, which is nap and don't work until eight o'clock at night. There you go. There's your solution, Spain. Yeah, people work too much. Yeah, for sure. For sure, Chuck. They do. I know. But the sad thing is, is you have to to keep up these days. I know. All right, let's not get into that right now. I know. So that's it for naps, everybody. Go forth and test yourself. Maybe try a coffee nap

and see how that does you and go from there. And since I said coffee nap, it's time for Listener Man. All right, I'm going to call this honey. I'm going to call it what was in the subject line, honey saved my pooch's leg. Nice. And this is from Travis Wilgren in Texas, and accompanied were some pretty gnarly pictures because Travis's dog got bit by a rattlesnake. So here we go. Hey, guys, just want to drop a line and tell you how honey saved my dog's leg. Long story short, my three year old chocolate lab scout got bit on his back leg by a timber rattlesnake here in Texas. Three days and five vials of antevenin later, the necrosis had stopped, but they were worried that his joint was compromised and wanted to amputate.

Being a paramedic, I knew of honey for wound care. So we took him to our local backwoods vet, did wound care, changing the bandage every two days, putting manuka honey only on the wound. And within two months, his leg was healed up with no adverse effects. And he's now a happy pup and attached or some pictures. Look at your own risk. Also, we just relocated the snake because it wasn't his fault. Just a snake being a snake. Wow. And that is Travis Wilgren. And there was one, two, three, four pictures of the initial wound that was really hard to look at. And then getting better, better, better. And then two very happy sleepy dogs. And then a rattlesnake with his neck pinned to the ground by, you know, someone who knows how to do that kind of thing.

So as a gift to you, I printed them all out on high quality photopaper and I made you a collage. Maybe they can nub wallpaper my bedroom. Thanks Travis. That was an amazing story. I haven't seen the pictures yet, but I will probably be looking at them later. Yeah, check it out. If you want to be like Travis and share an amazing story about something we've talked about, we love hearing about those things. You can send it in the email to stuffpodcast. at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you,

hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet feel like a nightclub. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it. Listen to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace,

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I am Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.