Gib, hello and welcome to another episode of the podcast.

I'm Gib Gerard here with you today with another special intelligence for your health with Connie Celica.

Edition of the podcast.

Our guest today is none other than neurologist and sleep specialist, Dr Christopher winter, all kinds of great info about your sleep coming right at you.

So here, without further ado, is intelligence for your health.

With Connie Celica, do you have trouble following the conversation in a noisy, crowded room, leaning in with your right ear could make a significant difference.

The Association of British neurologist says that's because the words picked up by the right ear are mostly processed in the left hemisphere of the brain, the side linked to deciphering language, and overall, that makes our right ear 18% better at keeping up with rapid fire conversations and picking out the one voice in the crowd we want to Listen to compared to the left ear.

When it comes to perfumes, Cologne and home fragrances, the hottest trend is nature.

People want themselves and their homes to smell woodsy or like the ocean or green meadow.

It's part of the overall back to nature trend that's taken off over the last few years.

They're being called functional fragrances because they have therapeutic benefits.

They enhance our mood and relieve stress, the same benefits you can get from being outside.

And this is nothing new.

The idea of using functional fragrances goes back to 3500 BC, when plant extracts were used in ancient Indian, Chinese and Egyptian healing ceremonies, and today, essential oils from plants are being used again.

For example, lavender promotes relaxation.

The scent of cedar can produce the feeling of being grounded.

Citrus and lemon are energizing and wake up the brain.

There's even a fragrance called forest lungs, which is an anti stress perfume coming up.

We'll talk to sleep specialist, Dr Christopher winter, host of the sleep unplugged podcast, he'll help us understand the difference between feeling tired or sleepy and feeling seriously fatigued, and why knowing the difference matters.

But first, if you have a tough day ahead, you can conquer it better with blueberries.

Eat a cup of blueberries or drink a glass of blueberry juice.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the plant pigments that Gib blueberries, their color, also stimulate the growth of new neurons in the section of the brain that regulates your stress response.

In plain English, you'll be better able to handle high pressure situations without losing your cool when you use a stationary bike, are you only pushing the pedals down as you go?

If so, you're making one of the most common cardio mistakes.

That's according to Shape magazine.

They say pedaling exercises offer a powerful way to strengthen the hamstrings in your legs and the gluteal muscles in your rear end, but only pushing down gives them half a workout, and you'll give your lower body muscles a bigger workout if you also use them to pull up.

In fact, that's what the straps on a stationary bikes pedals are for.

Ideally, you should secure them around your shoes and then alternate using one leg to push down while the other leg pulls up.

You'll probably feel a lot more burn in your muscles, but that's the point.

It means you're getting twice as much exercise as your normal workout.

Okay, listen to this.

Constipation is one of the most common digestive problems, so what can you do about it?

One of the most effective cures, according to the Digestive Health Center at Augusta University, is to drink something hot a hot beverage stimulates your digestive system, making intestinal muscles contract.

Any hot beverage will do even plain hot water, but Augusta University discovered that caffeinated coffee sparked contractions in the gut that were 60% stronger than hot water and 23% more intense than decaffeinated coffee, so try drinking hot coffee for constipation.

Today, our guest is neurologist and sleep specialist.

Dr Christopher winter and when it comes to sleep, we often talk about the importance of sticking to a schedule where you aim to go to bed and wake up around the same time every day.

But Dr winter says some people get concerned when they try to go to bed and just can't fall asleep.

Here's why.

He says that's okay.

When I talk to my patients about setting a sleep schedule, it's really about allotting time for sleep to happen with the understanding that there will be times when it doesn't.

It's sort of like saying I'm going to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner every day at these times, but everybody has the experience of arriving at lunchtime and not being particularly hungry, so you skip it.

So when we talk about a consistent bed and wait, let's say an individual's bedtime is 11pm and their wake up time is 7am I'm much more Fauci.

Focused on the wake time, meaning I need you to be up at 7am every day, even if you went to bed at 11 o'clock last night and it took you an hour to fall asleep, that's okay.

In fact, we always tell patients when 11 o'clock rolls around or your bedtime rolls around, ask yourself a very simple question, Are you sleepy?

Do you think sleep will happen when you go to bed?

If the answer is yes, go to bed.

If the answer is no, stay up.

It's perfectly fine.

There's going to be ebbs and flows in our sleepiness.

That's perfectly normal, but that ebb and flow really shouldn't change your wake up time, because when that starts to change the wake up time.

Took me a while to fall asleep last night, so I skipped work and slept in until 10 o'clock.

That's when temporary little hiccups in your sleep can become long term problems.

Today, we're talking to neurologist, Dr Christopher winter, also known as the sleep whisperer, and if you're among the estimated one in three adults who struggle to fall asleep on a regular basis, Dr winter says there's a common misunderstanding among patients and many doctors as to exactly how to diagnose your issues.

In other words, are you just tired and sleepy, or are you seriously fatigued?

So I asked Dr winter to clear up the confusion and explain why it matters.

The word tired is kind of a loaded word in the English language, because some people use it to mean I'm having trouble staying awake listening to this radio show.

I keep falling asleep.

So I would describe that individual as being sleepy versus I don't have enough energy to carry this laundry upstairs and put it away in my kid's room.

Like I just feel like I don't have the energy to I feel like I've run 20 miles, I would consider that individual to be fatigued.

They have low energy.

And when we start crossing those signals, we get a lot of problems, meaning that the fatigued individual is going to bed believing if they could just sleep more or sleep better, they wouldn't feel fatigued.

If that fatigue is coming from a tick borne illness or a vitamin deficiency, or some other illness, like long COVID.

It has nothing to do with sleep, even though there might be the belief that my sleep is bad, that's the reason why I feel so poorly during the day.

So I think understanding the nature of fatigue and the nature of sleepiness and how we determine who has what could you have both absolutely can really send you down a path of solving your problem in a much faster way, and it might mean that you're educating people that are taking care of you along the way.

Eating red meat can make you hungrier.

Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center found that eating foods high in iron, like red meat, increases appetite because iron suppresses production of leptin, the I'm full hormone leptin also slows our metabolism.

And know this, iron is the one mineral that your body cannot eliminate naturally.

So the more iron you ingest, the lower your leptin levels, and the more likely you are to overeat.

So if you're mysteriously gaining weight, try cutting back on red meat.

Today's medical term after event amnesia.

It refers to when you attend a highly emotional event like your wedding or a concert by your all time favorite artist, and even though you were there, you can't remember many details about the event.

So what is going on?

Dr Ewen Mcnay is a psychology professor at the State University of New York, and he says after event amnesia comes from emotional overload, because when you're overly excited, your body enters fight or flight mode, just like when you're really stressed, and stress is a memory eraser.

When we're in the heightened emotional state, our memory neurons start firing erratically, plus the more details and information we have to process, the more trouble we have absorbing all of it.

But Dr Mcnay says not remembering an emotional event can be a good thing, because when we're wholly immersed in something, we remember fewer details than when we're observing something as an outsider.

But what if you want to remember a hugely exciting event?

Stand still and do a check in where you think about where you are, what you're feeling, smelling, hearing and seeing.

Those sense memories help solidify the moment in your mind.

And that's today's medical term after event amnesia coming up.

We'll hear more from sleep specialist, Dr Christopher winter, whose latest book is called The rested child, he'll talk about some of the dangers associated with children who get too much rest and actually have excessive sleep disorder.

But first, if you have difficulty meditating because you can't clear your mind of distracting thoughts, try this trick.

Emily Fletcher wrote stress.

Less accomplish more.

And she says, instead of battling your thoughts, think of them as guests at a party you're hosting.

Greet them, listen for a minute, then excuse yourself at a party you wouldn't spend the whole time talking to one or two people.

So don't entertain troubled thoughts for too long while you're meditating that will help you stay present in the moment and reap the benefits of taking a mental break.

What do ankle sprains, bone fractures and major head injuries have in common for a growing number of people, they're the painful result of just walking the dog.

According to new data from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, emergency room injuries linked to dog walking have quadrupled, and while sprains are the most common injuries, there are many cases where a fall while dog walking is severe enough to cause arm and leg fractures, concussions and even internal brain bleeds.

So why are these injuries happening more often?

Well, one explanation is that more of us have adopted dogs, especially since the pandemic, so there are far more opportunities for dog walking related accidents.

A lot of injuries occur when people have the leash wrapped around their hand or wrist and the dog pulls, which can lead to tendon injuries, bone fractures in hands and arms and dislocated shoulders.

Experts say most of these injuries can be avoided by simply using shorter leashes, which are less likely to get wrapped around your legs and trip you up, and by training your dog.

Okay, listen to this.

Do you ever yawn in the middle of your workout?

Here's why you do it.

Yawning is your body's way of cooling down your temperature rises during exercise, heating up your blood and brain.

Yawning brings in outside air, which regulates your body's thermostat, cooling your brain so you can think more clearly back with more health intelligence from neurologist and sleep medicine specialist, Dr Christopher winter, his latest book is called The rested child.

Why your tired, wired or irritable child may have a sleep disorder, and how to help.

And I asked Dr Winter How we can tell if our child or grandchild is well rested or if they're showing signs of a sleep disorder.

I think healthy sleep looks like a child that's getting an adequate amount of rest, and that certainly changes as children mature, but most importantly, leaves them feeling refreshed, not sleepy the next day.

So we inherently start to create problems sometimes when we focus on getting a child to fall asleep quickly making sure that they never wake up during the night, because when children start to express disorders of excessive sleepiness, which we often see that can often be misinterpreted as a child who sleeps wonderfully, meaning the child who puts himself down for a nap and sleeps 12 hours a day.

That looks good, until they hit high school and then they're falling asleep in class and falling asleep doing homework.

So we want an individual who's getting a normal amount of sleep, and that amount of sleep is making that child feel refreshed and not sleepy the next day, back with more health intelligence from sleep specialist, Dr Christopher winter.

He was just saying that children and teens who get, say, 10 or 12 hours of sleep a day could have a problem with excessive sleepiness, also known as excessive sleep disorder.

So I asked Dr winter to share some signs that a kid who sleeps all day may have a problem that goes beyond just being really tired.

One of the things that we deal with a lot with children is differentiating what is a normal amount of sleep from what's excessive.

In fact, we did a podcast episode on our sleep unplugged podcast.

It was episode seven.

Why?

No one cares?

Your child is sleepy.

Because for a lot of parents, that's what they want.

They want the child that can fall asleep easily and sleep through the night, and at some point that can become problematic.

And this is where you really start to lean on a parental instinct, if you feel like your child is showing signs of excessive sleepiness, and it's not because they're staying up late playing video games, then I think that's a very reasonable referral to either your primary care doctor or a sleep clinic, because one thing that we have seen explode in the last five years is the number of children dealing with issues related to fatigue and excessive sleepiness.

So if you're noticing this, if your child's noticing this, if your school is letting you know that your child seems excessively sleepy, a lot of times, there's sort of a blame of, well, your child needs to get more sleep, and it's the parent that knows.

No, my child comes home, takes a two hour nap, tries to do some homework, goes right back to sleep, sleeps entire weekends away.

It's not from an inadequate amount of sleep.

There's something that's making their sleep not make them feel fully rested the next day, and that always needs to be investigated to quickly get a creative boost.

Blink, according to the Gerard.

Internal psychonomic bulletin, momentarily closing your eyes, even by blinking a few times, can help you come up with ideas or solve problems, because even that short moment of blocking out the world reduces the amount of information your brain is processing, allowing it to focus on the problem at hand.

And that can be enough to spark creative insight, more intelligence for your health.

From neurologist and sleep specialist Dr Christopher winter and in recent years, we've heard a lot about machines and apps that promise to help us fall asleep with soothing white noise or pink noise, for example, or nature sounds.

So I asked Dr winter if any of that sleep sound technology actually works.

I don't think we need any sound to help us fall asleep.

I don't think that there's any compelling research that any of these things, Pink Noise, white noise, brown noise, really does anything above and beyond silence.

I don't have a problem with these types of noise.

In fact, we did a whole podcast.

Episode Four was on white noise and sleep that.

Look, if you live live near loud traffic, or you've got a partner who snores, who will not address his or her snoring, yeah, maybe white noise is a great way to sort of condition the environment, but I don't think these noise machines are offering us anything beyond silence, which I feel, still think is a is a great way to sleep.

So, you know, when you see that the ad on your social media about how this color noise is going to put you to sleep in 30 seconds, it's it's all bunk.

I mean, so it's just different noise.

It's like the equalizer we used to have on our stereo.

You can push up the mid levels or push up the bass or the treble.

That's essentially what all these different noises are.

They're different frequencies that are enhanced over others.

But there's been no compelling research that shows that any of these things are dramatically improving people's sleep, and it's impossible not to sleep.

So the idea that we need pink noise or green noise in order to sleep is really not a real thing.

Do you have a favorite food you find yourself eating day in and day out?

According to Tufts University, as long as the food you're eating is healthy, it's perfectly fine to eat the same thing over and over.

The researchers looked at the eating habits of nearly 7000 people and found that those who ate the widest variety of foods tended to eat the most unhealthy foods.

They also had the worst metabolic health, which means having less than ideal levels of blood sugar, triglycerides, cholesterol, blood pressure and waist circumference, and those factors directly relate to a person's risk for heart disease, diabetes and stroke.

Meanwhile, the people with the healthiest diets actually ate a pretty small range of foods.

So the researchers concluded that the saying everything in moderation is not the best advice.

It's better to eat fewer foods for the most part, as long as they're healthy.

Here's an email I received at Connie at intelligence for your health.com.

It comes from Sarah Tyne, who writes, is it bad to pee in the shower?

My husband does it, and I told him, it's germy.

Who is right.

Well, Sarah, it's not as unhygienic as it seems.

According to urologist Dr Yamin brombach, about 90% of urine is water.

The rest is made up of salts and compounds that are filtered out of your body.

And although urine loses its sterility after it exits the body with a constant flow of running water to wash it down the drain, it's extremely unlikely to cause infection, even if it comes in contact with broken skin.

Dr brompot says it won't damage your shower tray or drain either.

And urine is cleaner than what you wash off your skin after a workout, the bottom line is that peeing in the shower is unlikely to harm you, so whether it's part of your water saving efforts or the urge just strikes, it is fine to pee in the shower.

And according to a survey by Shape magazine, 80% of people do.

Thank you for your email.

Sarah, I hope this helps.

Okay, listen to this.

Why does everything taste terrible after we've brushed our teeth?

You can thank the chemical sodium lauryl sulfate.

It's added to toothpaste to create foam and make the paste easier to spread around our mouth, but it messes with our taste buds, suppressing the receptors that perceive sweetness, while at the same time, it breaks up fatty molecules on our tongue, and we need those fatty molecules to keep bitter taste from overwhelming us, so anything you eat or drink after you brush is going to have less sweetness and more bitterness than it normally would, unless you use a toothpaste without sodium lauryl sulfate, something like Arm and Hammer or Sensodyne.

Parents, grandparents.

You know this to be true, kids start lying around age three.

And it's not that kids have some sort of moral failing.

It is perfectly natural.

In fact, the younger kids are when they start lying, the smarter they are.

That's according to the Journal of parenting science, because lying is actually an important milestone.

Of cognitive development, kids have to be smart enough to know that the person they're lying to may not know the truth.

That's what psychologists call theory of mind.

Another thing about kids who lie, a study in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology found that kids who are good liars, meaning they can really fool people, have better working memories.

That's because it takes a lot of mental effort to keep a lie straight, to remember what you said or the order of events.

So lying is a sign of a clever little brain, and kids who are good liars also have more emotional control.

They can stay cool under pressure.

Oh boy.

So although you may have to give your kids the it's wrong to lie talk a few times, you can secretly know your kid is smart and has good thinking and memory skills, more intelligence for your health.

From neurologist and sleep specialist Dr Christopher winter, if you'd like to know more about him or his popular sleep unplugged podcast, check out W Chris winter.com and in a recent episode of his podcast, Dr winter explored this debate, what's better for helping us fall asleep, wearing PJs to bed or Sleeping Naked.

So I asked Dr winter what he recommends.

You know, I generally recommend my patients sleep in very light clothing, or, you know, wear nothing, if that's something they want to do, and regulate their temperature with sheets, blankets, pillows, duvets, comforters and things of that nature, because you can move them on and off.

And what we want to try to avoid is wearing the flannel pajamas that ip up in the back and have feet on them because you're a little cool before you go to bed at night.

You know, we talk about temperature dropping in that time before we go to sleep as being a natural phenomenon.

So it's not uncommon for people to feel pretty cold when they go to bed.

So if you're making clothing choices based upon that feeling and then your temperature changes during the night, you're kind of locked into these, you know, warm pajamas all through the night.

So I think that choosing what we wear when we sleep properly can really affect the nature of our sleep in very fundamental ways.

I've had patients who say, you know, I sweat a lot at night, and they've switched just wearing a pair of shorts when they go to bed or something, and it really makes a big difference.

So I don't think there's a tremendous amount of research that says Sleeping Naked is better than sleeping in a tank top and shorts.

But I do think that giving yourself that easy control of kicking a blanket off when you get hot, pulling it up to your neck when you get cold, can make a difference for a lot of people with their sleep.

That's it for our show today, our special intelligence for your health with Connie Selig.

Edition of the podcast, I'm Gib Gerard.

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So thank you so much for listening.

You.