Advertise on podcast: Sleep Unplugged with Dr. Chris Winter

“What do you think about peptides?” is one of the most common questions in the sleep clinic right now, and it’s about as answerable as “What do you think about sandwiches?” Insulin, Zepbound and a gray-market vial of BPC-157 are all peptides, but the word tells you nothing about what a molecule does or how well it’s been tested. In this episode we put the most popular “sleep peptides” to the test, including the one named after deep sleep that an FDA advisory panel rejected this summer while backing nearly everything else. In this episode we will: Define what a peptide is, including the FDA’s somewhat arbitrary 40-amino-acid line, and why most have to be injectedSort out supplements, FDA-approved drugs, compounded drugs and “research use only” vials, and walk through 2026’s regulatory sagaList the risks posed by unregulated peptidesRank the sleep evidence, from tirzepatide’s sleep apnea trials to the stories behind DSIP, epitalon and the growth-hormone peptidesLeave you with five questions to ask anyone recommending “peptides"Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

Last November on Episode 178, we talked about three companies racing to bring orexin agonists to people with narcolepsy. In less than a year, one of those drugs has been approved, another company has been bought for billions, and the race now runs from the lab to the insurance company. In this episode we will: Break down the latest data from the SLEEP 2026 meeting in Baltimore, where each drug stands and when the rest might reach patients.Tackle the questions patients are already asking: will these be controlled substances, what will they cost, and will insurance cover them? Highlight Orzeyful (oveporexton), its FDA approval, and what to expect from the DEARevisit alixorexton and its phase 3 push into narcolepsy type 1, type 2 and idiopathic hypersomniaTouch on cleminorexton (formerly ORX750) and why Eli Lilly paid $6.3 billion for its developer CentessaIntroduce the rest of the field: including products from Eisai and Harmony BioscienceOriginal intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

Imagine a sleep study where picturing yourself diving in a submarine boosted deep sleep by 81%, yet nobody slept a minute longer. It's a real result, and it points to an uncomfortable idea: with the right design, almost anything can be shown to "improve sleep." From free habits to FDA-approved pills to neurotech headbands, every claim has a study behind it, and how that study was built often matters more than the product being sold. In this episode we will Use that submarine study as a yardstick for judging every sleep claim that followsTrace the research behind Ambien's 1992 FDA approval, from its 4-5 week trials to the 2013 dose cut for womenLook at suvorexant, where the doses that were tested and the doses that were approved weren't the sameBreak down eight ways a sleep study gets steered toward a positive headline, each with a real insomnia examplePut devices and supplements like Somnee, Evolv28, Moonbird and magnesium through the same lensLeave you with a checklist for reading past the webpage and finding out who paid, who was tested, and for how longTo find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Sleep Reset, please use the following link: http://thesleepreset.com/podcast  Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

Dr. Valerie Cacho (@drvalsleepgal) joins me for another countdown of the Top 10 Sleep Threats, and her list asks a question we should all be asking more often: Have we actually figured out what is disrupting someone’s sleep? From peptides marketed as cures to the assumption that a woman’s fatigue is simply part of being a working mom, Valerie takes aim at the shortcuts that can delay an accurate diagnosis. In this episode we will: Examine what the research does—and does not—say about peptides for insomnia and hypersomniaDiscuss why morning sunlight and sleep hygiene are not complete treatments for chronic insomniaExplore how BMI, menopause, and the absence of daytime sleepiness can lead clinicians to overlook sleep apneaTalk about why sleep health deserves attention now, rather than after retirementFind out more about Dr. Val's free community for peri-menopause sleep education at http://www.skool.com/sleephoria Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

A courtroom, an insurance formula, and a supermarket receipt don't usually belong in the same sentence — but together they answer the question this episode is built around: what does a bad night's sleep actually cost, in dollars, tonight? Not the economy. You. We take the number everyone quotes and can't act on — sleep deprivation costs the U.S. $411 billion a year — and rebuild it from the ground up using the data that was actually measured on individuals, not GDP models. In this episode we will: Break down a landmark employer study of four U.S. companies that priced lost productivity per employee per year, showing the "insufficient sleep" bracket runs about $1,500 more than a well-rested peer, and the insomnia bracket nearly $1,900 moreWalk through a controlled supermarket experiment where one night of total sleep deprivation alone drove men to buy 9% more calories and 18% more food by weight the next morning, and tie it to a listener's own "revenge bedtime procrastination"Lay out AAA's crash-risk data by hour of sleep lost, including the finding that a driver on under five hours of sleep carries a crash risk comparable to driving drunk, and drowsy driving factors into more than one in five fatal crashes nationallyReconcile two independent methods with one built bottom-up from workplace data, and one built top-down from RAND's national economic modeling, and see they converge at roughly $10 to $20 for one ordinary short nightGet into the neuroscience of why the tired brain is the wrong tool to fight its own bad decisions, from impaired prefrontal-cortex judgment to a reward system that starts favoring one more episode over tomorrow's rested selfTo find out more about this week's podcast sponsor NOCTEM Health, please use the following link: https://noctemhealth.com/ Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

A few days ago, we did an experiment to see how well AI could interview me about sleep. In this bonus episode, I reveal the original attempt which was a bit all over the place. The interview was much more personal and strange which we corrected by adjusting the prompt in the "official" episode, but I thought it might be funny to share the trial run. In this episode we will: -Debate how much of my career success can reasonably be attributed to my looks -Discuss my questionable resemblance to Tom Hiddleston -Ask which voices in the sleep world I occasionally wish were a little quieter -Revisit the strangest place I have ever slept -Explore the difference between believing something works and believing it works very much -Talk about the irrational fear that someday the phone simply stops ringing -Consider who I am when sleep medicine, sports, speaking, and podcasting are stripped away -Get unexpectedly personal about work, family, friendship, and the things we sacrifice while building a career -Ask what I hope my children do—and don't—inherit from me Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

What happens when the interviewer knows nearly everything you have said publicly and has zero fear of challenging or offending you? In this unusual episode of Sleep Unplugged, I turn over all control of the podcast to AI and let it ask the questions and dictate the program. The result is a surprisingly candid conversation about certainty, contradiction, expertise, and what an algorithm might see when it examines a career devoted to sleep. In this episode I (or we?) will: Turn the microphone around and let artificial intelligence interview the interviewerExamine the tension between scientific authority and intellectual humilityDiscuss why sleep medicine sometimes rewards certainty when the evidence demands nuanceRevisit ideas and opinions I have expressed publicly—and allow the AI to challenge themConsider what patients, athletes, and listeners actually need from a sleep expertAsk whether an algorithm can recognize contradictions, vulnerabilities, and blind spotsOriginal intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

A Massachusetts courtroom just produced something that almost never survives into public record: a near-complete paper trail of one woman's psychiatric care in the three months before catastrophe. Her diary, her phone notes, and the testimony of every provider who tried to help her sleep all lead to a central question: what actually happens when insomnia and psychiatric illness feed each other, and how thin is the system supposed to catch it before it breaks? In this episode we will: Walk through the documented timeline od initial depression, an SSRI, a reported 48 hours without sleep, and a rapid cascade through a benzodiazepine, an antihistamine, and eventually an antipsychotic, across three different providers in three monthsBreak down SSRI-induced activation syndrome and why it can look clinically identical to an antidepressant unmasking bipolar disorderBring in the hard data on sleep loss as a trigger, not just a symptom, including a study of 870 women with bipolar disorder showing one lost night of sleep around delivery raised postpartum psychosis odds roughly fivefoldDraw the same throughline through Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, and Brittany Murphy, three deaths where a real, unresolved insomnia complaint met multiple prescribers without a shared pictureEvaluate national data putting mental-health ED visits at over 35,000 a day, and a 2013 survey showing a third of psychiatry residencies don't even offer an elective in sleep medicineTo find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Sleep Reset, please use the following link: http://thesleepreset.com/podcast  Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

Dr. Alison Kole is taking on sleepmaxxing, ChatGPT, and the sleep-industrial complex in her Top 10 Sleep Threat list. In this episode we will: Explore why patients sometimes arrive at the sleep clinic with their story and diagnosis already writtenLook at the fear of sleep studies, sleep apnea diagnoses, and outdated ideas about CPAPAsk why CBT-I remains underused despite being the gold-standard first-line treatment for chronic insomniaConsider why better sleep requires thinking beyond the bedroom to exercise, nutrition, mental health, and the entire 24-hour dayTo find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Fitnexa and their SomniPods 3, please use the following link https://go.fitnexa.com/egVvZ9 and use the code DRCHRIS10 for $10 dollars off your order. Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

Nobody blinks when a doctor says you'll be on blood pressure medication for the rest of your life. Say the same sentence about an antidepressant, or Zepbound, and responses are quite different. This episode digs into deprescribing, the fast-growing clinical movement around when and how to stop medications, and asks why some "forever drugs" get a cultural pass while others get moralized. In this episode we will: Separate the real clinical debate around antidepressant tapering from the online discourseTake on the GLP-1 stigma directly, with two 2024 JAMA Internal Medicine studies that found no elevated depression or suicidality risk, and ask why "you may need this forever" reads as scandal here but shrug everywhere elseSit with the RLS story, where the science just ran the opposite direction: 2025 AASM guidelines downgraded dopamine agonists after mounting evidence of augmentation, a drug-induced worsening of symptoms, making deprescribing here the conservative, evidence-driven move, not the fringe oneAsk why hypersomnia drugs generate almost zero cultural friction at all, and what that quiet exception reveals about the other threeLand on what actually predicts whether a "forever medication" gets treated as a fact of chronic disease or a personal failing — and why RLS should make you distrust any tidy answer to that question, including this episode'sTo find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Fitnexa and their SomniPods 3, please use the following link https://go.fitnexa.com/egVvZ9 and use the code DRCHRIS10 for $10 dollars off your order. Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

Our current gig economy did not just create new jobs, it expanded a whole new category of night worker, from rideshare drivers to online freelancers to overnight fulfillment teams. Today (or tonight rather), our bodies are struggling to make the switch. In this episode we dig into what that circadian resistance actually costs your heart and metabolism long-term, and the handful of interventions that can actually shift it. In this episode we will: Break down why 22 of 30 permanent night nurses still had daytime-oriented melatonin rhythms and why that's not a willpower problem, it's a light-exposure problemGet into the real stakes: a 2025 meta-analysis linking night shift work to 13% higher cardiovascular disease incidence and 27% higher CVD mortalityTake on the meal-timing question head-on and look at new data suggesting fasting at night preserves glucose tolerance better than eating, without pretending the evidence justifies one universal ruleReview how light and schedule consistency can help improve these situations To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor SideSleeperZ, please use the following link: https://sidesleeperz.com/Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

Nasal strips have been a fixture in pharmacy aisles and on athletes' faces for decades, sold on the promise of easier breathing, but the peer-reviewed evidence often tells a different story than the packaging does. We put nasal strips and internal dilators through the RCT wringer and sort out what these devices can and can't actually do, from your bedroom to the finish line. In this episode we will: Break down what the highest-quality evidence — a 2026 meta-analysis of 17 studies and nearly 500 patients — actually found for AHI, oxygen saturation, and sleep architecture across all nasal dilator typesSit with the placebo-strip finding out of the University of São Paulo, and what it reveals about the gap between subjective "I slept better" and objective, PSG-measured outcomesCompare internal dilators like Mute against external strips, and call out where manufacturer-cited stats diverge from the independent literatureHead onto the field and track: two competing systematic reviews on whether strips help runners and athletes, and why "very low certainty" evidence still shapes what gets marketed to youTo find out more about this week's podcast sponsor BreatheUp, please use the following link: https://breatheup.com/ Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

Ten million prescriptions a year, and most of them aren't for what the drug was built to treat. Seroquel started life as an antipsychotic — engineered to quiet psychosis, not close your eyes. Somewhere along the way it became one of the most common "off the record" sleep aids in America, riding on a side effect nobody set out to sell. The evidence behind that shift is thinner than most people assume — and Seroquel isn't the only drug doing this. In this episode we will: Trace quetiapine from its 1997 approval for schizophrenia through its quiet migration onto millions of nightstands, and unpack the receptor science that explains why a psychosis drug puts you to sleep at allSpotlight the actual clinical trials behind quetiapine-for-insomnia — including the 13-patient study nearly the entire off-label practice rests on — and the newer data linking it to cardiovascular events, dementia, and fallsBreak down what the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's guideline really says about quetiapine (it's not what most people assume), and why that gap in the data is its own kind of red flagDraw the parallel to trazodone — a different drug, a different original disease, and somehow the exact same storyTo find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Sleep Reset, please use the following link: http://thesleepreset.com/podcast  Audio Engineer: Bradley Bransly Barker Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

Most "top sleep threats" lists stick to one lane — pediatric or adult, clinical or cultural. Dr. Funke Afolabi-Brown's list refuses to. It jumps from kids' airways to menopause to AI chatbots, and by the end a pattern emerges: the same symptom, in different bodies, keeps getting waved off as normal. In this episode we will: Work through pediatric snoring dismissed as harmless and untreated mouth breathing, and why both are often lead to the same airway problem Get into exhaustion worn as a badge of honorLook closer at supplement use and the underappreciated risk of leaning on antihistamine sleep aids night after nightSit with three women's-health items back to back: 3 a.m. wake-ups blamed on "just hormones," menopause-related insomnia going undiagnosed, and the mechanisms actually behind bothThink about why women's sleep apnea symptoms are getting written off as stress or anxietyTo find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Flexispot, please use the following link: Flexispot Hako G1 Bed and use the discount code FLEXISPOTG1 for an extra 5% off. Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!

Every June, thousands of sleep researchers descend on one city and quietly rewrite what we think we know about a third of our lives. This year it was Baltimore's turn, for the 40th annual SLEEP meeting — and the data that came out of it hits closer to home than usual: blood pressure, diabetes, teenage phones, and why "night owl" might really mean "lonely." Here are my Top 10 studies from SLEEP 2026 most likely to actually change how you sleep. In this episode we will: Break down why being sleepy and wired at night is a uniquely dangerous combination for blood pressure — and why either symptom alone barely moves the needleSit with a staggering number out of Yale: veterans with both insomnia and sleep apnea face six times the risk of developing type 2 diabetesRevisit the "regularity beats duration" thread from Episode 209 with two brand-new studies — one in preschoolers, one tracking teens all the way to age 22Unpack why women's sleep apnea can look identical to men's on paper and feel completely different in the body, and why that's delaying diagnosesGet into the psychology of sleep: why night owls' anxiety may really be about nighttime loneliness, and why expecting bad postpartum sleep can help create itTo find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Flexispot, please use the following link: Flexispot Hako G1 Bed and use the discount code FLEXISPOTG1 for an extra 5% off. Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026) Produced by: Maeve Winter Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved More Twitter: @drchriswinterIG: @drchriwinterThreads: @drchriswinterBluesky: @drchriswinterThe Sleep Solution and The Rested ChildThanks for listening and sleep well!