Lux, Lumens, Sunlight & Sleep, Interview with Dr. Chris Winter

Ginny: Hi, everyone! Welcome to the One Thousand Hours Outside Podcast. Today we have Dr Chris Winter. Dr Chris Winter is a sleep specialist, a neurologist and author of two books, The Rested Child, which releases tomorrow as of the day that we're recording (August 17th) and The Sleep Solution that was published in 2017. He's been dubbed the “Sleep Whisperer.” He has been involved in the field of sleep medicine for twenty five years and is a Dr. Winter has been helping individuals sleep better through his private clinic consultations, work with professional athletes and dynamic media presence. The Sleep Solution is number one bestseller in sleep disorders. The book is from 2017 with the subtitle: “Why your sleep is broken and how to fix it.” The Rested Child: Why your tired, wired or irritable child may have a sleep disorder and how to help, Raising healthy sleepers from crib to college comes out tomorrow, August 17th. Thank you, Chris, for being here. 

Dr. Winter: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate you.

Ginny: I’m so thrilled. I had a chance to peruse through this book. The Rested Child is 17 chapters and the titles of the chapters are so catchy and funny. I love it. Three hundred fifty pages. It's interesting. I learned so much just from the portions I was able to read ahead of time.

Dr. Winter: I'm so glad that's that's that's the point isn't it, just to make people better informed so they can make better decisions I think.

Ginny: One of the things that I think would really interest our listeners is information about lux and lumens and full spectrum light. Might we talk about that quite a bit? About how not all light is created equal? About how indoor light tends to just be for our vision, but that full spectrum sunlight affects our entire body. One of the things you say in the book is that light is one of the biggest influences on our sleep and circadian timing in general. You have this short section where you talk about the real versus the ideal. You say that ideally kids get up and there's bright sun and all these different things, but that the ideal is not what we’re getting. We're getting up and we're getting on the bus and maybe school is not light enough and no one's outside. So can you talk to us about what would be the ideal light situation for a child or even for an adult? 

Dr. Winter: It's interesting you brought that chapter up first. I bet I'll do a hundred interviews and that will not be the first thing that people bring up. But, you know, it's interesting. It was an important chapter to me because when I sat down to write the book, I felt like it was important to put things in there that people may not have already heard. 

I mean, I think most kids and most adults know it should be quiet in your bedroom and probably shouldn't have a computer in your bed, et cetera. But the whole lighting thing to me is just fascinating as a sleep specialist. And it was interesting because one of the things I had to fight to keep in there, because there were a lot of editors and reviewers who were saying this is too technical. People aren't really going to be interested in that. But it fascinates me. And it really has to do with the idea of, like you said, what are the things that influence our sleep at a body level, sort of a scientific level. And light is a huge one.

The ideal would be that we all sort of live outside in tents. And when the sun comes up, we get outside and sit around a campfire and make some pancakes. So we have our first lessons of the day and then we run and play outside and we're just sort of in tune with nature and the comings and goings of light. Now, if you live in Alaska or someplace where light can be scarce in the winter time, there may be a need or at least a bit of it for artificial lighting. But I think that the average parent can learn a lot from just understanding that light intensity is important. So how bright the light is important is important, but also what makes up our lighting. And in generations past, everybody was either outside or using some sort of incandescent light bulb, which produces a full spectrum of light, the ROYGBIV, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. 

Energy efficient lighting is potentially good for our environment but is not entirely great for our wakefulness and sleep, depending on what the nature of that light is. So with some relatively simple tools, it's very easy for a parent to evaluate both the brightness of the light that their kids are exposed to, but also the quality of light.

So you can get this whole thing called a spectroscope. It looks like a tiny little telescope and you can walk around your house and look at different lights and you will see the color spectrum that's coming out of those lights. Some are full. Some have very bizarre little signatures, like a very bright orange, a little bit of green and then some deep purple. And when you look at it, it doesn't look that color looks white or yellow or blue, but it doesn't look like it makes sense that those lights would combine to produce the light that you're seeing with your naked eye. But if you have a child who is sitting in his bedroom in the evening trying to do homework and the lighting intensity or the characteristics of the light are not good, then it could be working against your ability to either stay awake or asleep whenever you want to. And this is not even mentioning the lighting that they're using in the school. 

Ginny: I found this part fascinating. And I'm really glad that you kept it in the book because it's an easy solution as a parent to know that when you're exposed to full spectrum light, that's going to help your health and that's going to help your rhythms. What an easy thing! During my childhood back in the 80s we walked to school. It was a mile and then we had morning recess. We also had two afternoon recess and we walked home.

I’ve read in a different book about how the sunlight guides you through the day. When that sun goes down, it's a natural signal to your body to start to slow down. And so I just really love what you're talking here about humans.

Dr. Winter: What if somebody said, look, we want our kid to be as healthy as he can be? What should we do? I would say walking to school is probably about the top of the list because think about it. You're getting up. You're getting outside. So you're going from a dark bedroom to a bright walk first thing in the morning. You're probably walking with friends so you're getting social interaction. You're getting exercise. You're warming your body through the walking. It's something that's happening at the same time every day. And you've probably got some food. It’s either in your hand as you walk or you ate right before you walked out the door. Those are fantastic things to sort of establish a rhythm.

There's one of my friends who's a sleep doctor up and a specialist up in Minnesota. She takes her kids camping the week before school starts to really help to get that rhythm going and then kind of shake off the summer.

Ginny: I didn't realize there were tools that you could test it with. A lot of people ask about, well, what about on a cloudy day. It's still so much brighter than it would be inside. Even on a cloudy day that's going to help you reset your systems. I think all of it is counterintuitive. How can morning sunlight affect your nighttime sleep? So that's why I'm so glad you included it in the book. What a simple solution to walk to school. 

Dr. Winter: It's so interesting to have that little light meter and to go outside on a sunny day and see what twenty thousand lux is like, and then on a cloudy day it is still ten thousand lux out. It’s versus your living room where your one child likes to do his homework is twenty eight lux or something. That's really staggering sometimes.

In fact I always take these things with me when I go talk to professional sports teams and it's always interesting to look in their locker room. So your players are coming off this bright, energetic court and they come into the locker room in the evening and for halftime they go back out. Well, you're kind of putting your players to sleep in here. You know, the lighting's all wrong. Like this would be much better lighting for after the game when they're trying to get ready to sleep the upcoming night. So I think everybody can learn from these types of things. 

Ginny: It’s an easy thing to miss - that light matters. I never know. I just thought it was helping you see, but it really matters. I like one of the things you said in your book that the main source of life in a child's life is no longer the sun. The main source of light often is this phone screen. And so it is something that has changed and I think something really important to talk about. So I appreciate that.

And you talked about full spectrum sunlight in the different colors and the different wavelengths, and especially this blue light, which, you know, you hear people talk about blue light and screens. Can you explain that a little bit? 

Dr. Winter: Yeah. So you're talking about the intensity of the light. You can also look at this with the nature of what's coming out of it. And screens are dangerous because if your child is on a screen a lot, it's kind of like you said when you were growing up, you were sort of guided by the sun. You walked to school when it was bright outside. You sat in school and as the sun kind of went down in the evening, when you're out there playing softball, at the end of the day, your eyes were kind of aware of the fact that we are slowly losing light.

I remember when we would have baseball practice. Our field was not lit in our high school. So at some point it became a little dangerous because you couldn't quite see the ball until it was kind of right in front of you. And that's what the coach said, “OK, it's time to be done.” But, you know, all of us were out there as that sunlight was slowly going away. And that's a very powerful trigger for our brains to release the chemical melatonin.

We actually call this DLMO - Dim Light Melatonin Onset. So our brains really respond to that loss of signal. Now, if your child is not playing softball or baseball and is always on the phone, they're always getting sort of a constant amount of blue light in their face, which kind of fools the brain into thinking the day never ends, which can be really problematic for, like you said, not only just going to sleep that night, the entire twenty four hours where your brain's trying to make a schedule. It's like you're trying to make a schedule for your family. And every time you look at your watch, it says six pm like it's hard to kind of understand where you are in time if that watch is sort of stuck. And that's kind of what happens when individuals are constantly exposed to what their brain thinks is lunchtime sun.

So it's very important to create situations where we see that rise and fall of light in our day. And sometimes if you've got kids, you have to be on computers. I mean, our kids, as they got older, their assignments were on a computer, the readings were on the computer, their communications with teachers were on the computer. It wasn't like that back when we grew up. Dad could just take the computer and throw it in the lake or, you know, my dad always threatened to throw items out the window, for some reason. If you did OK, well, you just threw my little Nintendo out of the window, but I've still got my books and my Catcher in the Rye copy. I can still do my homework. That's not really the case now. So you may have to do things that alter the light that your kids are seeing, like wearing blue blocking glasses or something like that to try to help keep that rhythm established for your children. 

Ginny: Reading your book helped me to understand those blue light blockers more and what they're doing and then how they're helping the kids with the rhythm. So you talked in this book about the twenty four hour clock and something that I learned that I didn't know before and was when you graph your temperature it rises and falls and you've got this graph and that looks like a curve. People's curves can be shifted a little bit.

And I found that that was fascinating because my mom is a night owl. My dad, he's asleep at nine o'clock but he's up at five. And so they have this funny thing where when they go on vacation together my mom says it's eight o'clock in the morning and she wakes up and my dad is sitting there. He's already run five miles and he's showered. He's just sitting there waiting for her to go. It’s like their curves are slightly shifted. What is this correlation between body temperature and sleep and this curve? Should we be trying to move it for our kids or do we take their natural habits and try and work with them? What do you think about that? 

Dr. Winter: It's so interesting to talk to people who haven’t been around this book for so long. You kind of lose all sense of objectiveness. All of it kind of runs together. And this is another part that I found really fun to write about just because I thought it was something fresh, that the idea that our circadian rhythm we talk a lot about in relationship to sleep, but it also has to do with when we're hungry or when we're best able to take a spelling test or when we're most likely to hit a home run in a baseball game. It governs everything about our bodies. 

I can't look at you and see your body temperature. Oh, she looks a little hot right now. She looks a lot hotter now than she did at the beginning. This interview, she seemed cooler. You can't tell that. I can't tell when your bones are making red blood cells or when your digestion is at its best. But we can see sleep and maybe more people now have been seeing temperature because we're checking temperatures all the time because of covid. So what you're referring to is I have this little thermometer I can stick on my forehead and immediately get a reading. And so everything that circadian rhythm researchers do is generally based upon body temperature. But anyway, when I had this thermometer, I thought it'd be kind of fun to check my temperature every 15 minutes and see if my curve looks like with all the research, does it? Of course it does. And then it's just like you said, it tends to peak around four to six o'clock in the evening and then it suddenly starts to kind of drop off and we start to rise again about an hour before we wake up in general.

Now, if you're a night owl, all that got it gets pushed later. So instead of a four o'clock peak, maybe it's the seven o'clock peak and instead of it's starting to rise at five a.m., maybe it starts to rise at eight a.m. or something of that nature. So I'm a night owl, and that's exactly how I feel when I plotted my rhythm. And that's kind of what I saw. My wife is much more of a morning person. You can think of her temperatures as starting to fall earlier. And this is often the reason why people will fight over the thermostat at night. If you were to check in on our house at some random evening, you might see me sitting there after work, like in my underwear and dress socks. You realize, oh, God, get some clothes on, for heaven's sakes. And she's in a blanket.

And we've all felt it like when you were in school, if you had to stay up really late one night, like all of a sudden you're cold. You had to pull the blanket off your bed around you as you studied for your art history, vinyl or whatever you had to do. It's because you feel that that temperature drop at some point in the night. So it's a great marker for circadian rhythms.

Can you change it? You can, but it does take work. But I think understanding these rhythms is really important. Not so much say, you know, if your daughter's making red blood cells, but really about when she is at her best or worst because the average child is going to intellectually peak around 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon when school's over.

So I was just hosting a show last night about kids and sleep and somebody said, what do you think about homeschooling? Is it good or bad? You know what? We've seen a lot in this pandemic. And my answer was, I think it can be quite good as long as you're structured about it. But if you've got a child who's really night oriented and feels great at four o'clock, it's really a shame that they have to take their calculus at eight thirty in the morning. You know, if you could have if every kid could have their schedule sort of adapted to them, I think there'd be a lot more academic achievement. So if you can't do that, Chris, our kids have to go to this public school and she wants to take calculus, but it's only offered at eight thirty. And she's a real night owl that I think it's helpful for parents to understand some of the things that we talked about in the book about, OK, well, how can we make her a bit more morning oriented and more likely to succeed in the morning? 

Ginny: Right. And you have all sorts of easy ideas, which is get outside, walk to school. 

Dr. Winter: You know, when you look at kids who swim in the morning, like, my son is my youngest, my youngest is a rower, my oldest is a swimmer. And every morning at five thirty he got up and swam and nobody likes that. Nobody's interested in that schedule. It’s intense. It is. But man, when they get to school they are ready. They've been exercising in this brightly lit pool around other people, exercising their body for three hours. So they're ready. You have to watch out with those kids that they don't have calculus at the end of the day because they can slump prior to that time. So it's just trying to create healthy environments for all of our kids until they grow up and kind of choose their own schedule, if they can. If they're a nurse or something, maybe they won't be able to do that well. 

Ginny: I like that you're offering tips to help you adjust. Your book is called The Rested Child. And you think this is about sleep, but it's really about life. It's also about living. And these are all really helpful things to know. And if you have more than one child, you can kind of look and you can accommodate for them and you can help them adapt. And you can you know, if they struggle with a certain class period, sometimes maybe there's a reason.

Dr. Winter: That's right.

Ginny: I also like what you said about if you are a homeschooling family, you can use that rhythm, the body rhythm and work toward individuality. So, you know, what a gift. And I had no idea that we peak around 3:00 or 4:00pm.

Dr. Winter: Absolutely. And you as a parent know and my wife's a teacher and we talked about homeschooling our kids every year like it was always a discussion. And, you know, when you look at some of the research about kids and sleep and development and all this timing that you an intelligent homeschool situation could be far better than the situation that some kids are in where they have to get up and go to grandma's house to catch the bus because their parents have to be to work. There's so many things that can be negative about an in person learning situation. Now, the one nice thing is you do have some structure every day. The kids do the same thing every day. So I think that in a homeschooling environment, you have to be careful about that. OK, we'll just do English whenever we want to today. So I think it's important to have a schedule, but your schedule might not start until 11 or let your kids sleep later.

Dr. Winter: Have your classes outside. My son did a semester of his junior year of high school in Boise, and they were often outside doing classwork or on some sort of expedition. And you wake up and you cook over your fire. And then we sit in our little camp chairs and we do our AP US history outside of the sunlight. I mean, nothing could be better. 

Ginny: Nothing's better. I remember that as a kid. I remember being in elementary school and at the end of the year, the teacher would take out a big blanket outside for our reading. I mean, those are the things that are so good. It's so simple. 

Dr. Winter: It is. I remember Sylvia Hendrix, my 8th grade English teacher, and she would often go outside and we would conjugate verbs. I walk, you walk. He-she-it walks, they walk. We would do all these past participles. And I remember walking in the woods and doing that was so much fun.

Ginny: Isn’t that amazing? You wrote in your book about the pattern of our body temperature and how it rises and falls in a predictable way, just like the tides or a sunrise and sunset. That's beautiful.

Dr. Winter: We are part of nature. We're not meant to be extracted from it. It doesn't mean you can always be connected to it. But we're very tied to this. There's a reason why our body has its own intrinsic twenty four hour rhythm, just like our world. 

Ginny: Right. So I've written down some notes here. You talked about TV, video games, and cell phones. They produce this response and that dopamine produces wakefulness and facilitates addiction. This is really interesting if kids are on these devices as they're supposed to be falling asleep, but the devices are actually promoting wakefulness and addiction. I would imagine that this is really affecting whether or not kids are rested.

Dr. Winter: Sometimes the way things are structured runs counter what a body needs for its sleep. But the technology is really concerning. And like you said, dopamine is a neurotransmitter in our brain that does amazing things. It has a variety of different jobs in our brain. And it's that combination of wakefulness and addiction that is sort of problematic.

I mean, if you ask me, I've got three kids myself. What is the hardest thing about raising kids? I would say it is technology. And my oldest is twenty two. So they all came about at different times. I feel like she sort of escaped the worst of it. And with each successive kid there was just more of it to be consumed. And it is a drug, I mean and people who design apps and games will tell you we are very much in the business of manipulating your dopamine. And, you know, I've seen games that they play. This is the silliest game ever. It's so easy. Of course it's easy because it's easy to master, which gives you a little bit of dopamine and you get big scores. And there's lots of interesting things that go along with it. It's not Atari Pong which actually had some kind of a skill to it. It's really meant to get you coming back for the second game. They want the game to last a long time, to really embed itself in you.

And so, you know, our kids, we have a rule that phones live in the kitchen and a lot of times they would sneak their phones up there. My son actually made a little pretend phone out of wood and so he would plug the pretend phone up. But all along he had the real phone upstairs. And I described him as a very good kid. But they just want to be on that phone and then their peers are on it. So it's just very difficult to get the rest you need when you've got that thing in your life that even when they don't have it they're in their beds like, oh, I wish I had my phone. Oh, what's going on with my phone? Who's texting me right now? 

Ginny: That's interesting. They're just wired. I like what you said about phones sleep in the kitchen. I like that phraseology. 

Dr. Winter: Yeah, that's why we chose it. And I think it's important for parents to model that too. So now if you're on call or something as a parent, because you might have an emergency, that might be different. But, you know, my wife and I also plug our phones up so anybody can walk down there and see whose phone is their because everybody has their little spot and whose or not. And so I think it's important for parents to to model that same sort of behavior, too. It's not - Well, you all have your phones there, but we get to keep ours in our bedroom. I don't think that's probably a good idea.

Ginny: You say in the book that you're a sleep guy, not a technology guy, but that things are really going hand in hand.

Dr. Winter: Well, my guess is you're a teaching podcasts women and maybe not a technology person. Well, here we are on technology, and it's hard to separate those things, isn't it? 

Ginny: Yeah, our movement is about bringing back balance. The kids are outside just four to seven minutes a day but four to seven hours on screen so there's just some imbalance there.

Dr. Winter: That should be on a t-shirt.

Ginny: That should be. So I think that's probably affecting sleep. 

Dr. Winter: Oh, there's no there's no doubt about it. I mean, we've talked about the light, but just also the play and the exercise. And that's also a dangerous thing about a video game, is that you're running through a world collecting objects and I don't know, shooting people, which is a terrible thing to think about. But it gives the child the impression they've done something. Well, Dad, I ran out of this world, collected all this gold and built a castle today. What did you do? You just sat up there talking to patients and you really didn't do anything. 

Outdoor play and exposure is so important to sleep. And people ask me, what's the one thing I can do today that'll make my sleep better? It's get up in the morning and exercise for thirty minutes. And at the same time, every day it's so important.

Ginny: I think exercise is important wherever you can get it in. The best time to exercise is whenever you're doing it. But, you know, to have a little bit of a guidance - to know that this is going to warm my body and wake my body up, this is going to help me with my temperature curve, I thought that was that was really interesting. What about serotonin and melatonin and the connection to light. I read that light helps your body produce serotonin, which makes you feel good. 

Dr. Winter: Absolutely. This is another really interesting thing, too, if you look at sleep, I'm a neurologist, psychiatry, psychology. It's been interesting to see even over my career how they've all kind of come together. They used to be very different things. And we talked about using a light box in the morning for seasonal affective disorder, people who may struggle a little bit with their mood, particularly in the winter time, or if you live in a place that's very dark, a place like Alaska or something like that. And so we always talked about when you use this light to kind of facilitate things like serotonin that allow you to feel better, there's other things you can do to to facilitate serotonin. You could take a medication like Prozac or Zoloft and they tend to boost serotonin as well, which are perfectly reasonable treatments for people who are struggling with their mood.

But then the real question becomes, what can we do intrinsically to make these things better besides light? And maybe taking medication will help - but exercise social interactions, hobbies, relationships, intimate relationships with other people. All these things are wildly productive of serotonin, and they're all the things that people get rid of when they're struggling with their mood. Well, I've been struggling lately. I'm not being my best and I've just kind of stopped going to the gym. And I used to love to play my guitar and paint and I don't do that anymore and I just don't feel as connected with my partner. So all of these things are important that we understand that whatever we do to kind of move our mood in the right direction, that we really try to pull these things back into our lives because they're sort of the generator that will keep that serotonin machine working as well as it can. And so sleep really plays a strong role in that. These neurotransmitters that we look at that involve ourselves and mood are very involved with the quality and functioning of our sleep as well, too. 

Ginny: I love those things, Chris. It's like back to the simple, right? 

Dr. Winter: It is. Absolutely. It was always there. It's just that it takes science one hundred years to explain. This is why your grandmother said things like you better get your sleep or you'll get sick. Well, it took a long time for science to figure out why exactly is that? Is that true, number one? And if it is, why and we've kind to figure those things out now. But, yeah, they're very simple things and things that tend to kind of make intrinsic sense. 

Ginny: Absolutely. So one of the things I noticed is right on the cover of your book, Crib to College. It seems like up until somewhat recently, the sleep resources have been really focused on infants. So many books are out there about infant sleep because parents get exhausted. I do think getting babies outside in the morning helps. You know, 

Dr. Winter: We had a little lightbox on a changing table. So the first thing in the morning when we went to change a diaper, we turned the light on. And so they get that little light. 

Ginny: That's a brilliant little tip, get a bright light bulb by the changing table so that they can help to establish their rhythms.

But now you have a book that goes through college. I have not seen that many books that are talking about sleep for teens. Is this a newer thing that people really need to talk about because of screens, or has it always sort of been an issue? I often hear parents say the same thing. Their kids are on their phone until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. I can't get them up, that type of thing. I have heard this more and more. 

Dr. Winter: Yes. So you said so many amazing things there. I will go back to the light box on the changing table. If you've decided that you want your child to wake up around seven o'clock in the morning, if she wakes up at six, that's fine. What I would do is just kind of hold her, try to be very calm and not really that engaged and then try to hold off the feeding if you can. And then it's seven o'clock. We pop them up on the table, light turns on, open up the window, feed the baby. So even if the baby's not on the schedule, you try to control that light happening at the same time every day. It does wonders for getting your kid on a schedule very quickly. 

Your point is a very important one. When I wrote my first book, I thought I really like it. I'm very proud of that book and it's done well. But I feel like if it had never come into existence, the world would have been OK. When I wrote this book, it was really an outgrowth of the fact that I see adults and kids in my clinic. It was a combination of the rise in kids that we see who struggle with their sleep, either I can't sleep or I can't stay awake like my kids tired all the time, and they're just calling him depressed.

But as a parent, I don't think he's depressed. I don't think he has ADHD. I feel like there's something going on that we're missing. So it was the combination of the rise and disorders that we see. And just like you said, if you talk about kids and sleep books, people will name off the books that they got when they had new babies about how to get your kid to sleep the night and take some regular naps. Very important books. There's some wonderful ones out there. I used them myself when I was a young parent. But it's sort of like there's this idea that once your kid is sleeping through the night, they're good until, you know, they've got their first job. And there's so many things that threaten the sleep of our children that are, to me, even more important, because I've never met a kid who's like in the fifth grade who the parents come in and say, yeah, well, we never got them on a schedule. It'll happen. It's just about how quickly it's going to happen. But kids will get on a schedule. So we focus so much attention on getting the kids through the night that all of the real disorders that threaten their mental health, their academic achievement, their physical abilities, we just ignore. And there's reasons for it.

And it was funny because when I was talking to my publisher about the book, they're like, oh, we've got plenty of these books. I'm like, no, you don't. You actually don't have any of these books. You're thinking about that book that cry-it-out or don't-cry-it out or whatever the theory is. So to me, it was really important to get this book out there because like you said, there's this sort of vacuum. And then the problem also becomes that you think, well, even if I don't understand it, my doctors will figure these things out in my kids and get them diagnosed appropriately. No, they won't.

They did a research study that looked at one hundred and fifty seven pediatrician training programs around the world. The average kid doctor is getting about four hours of training and sleep over the four years of training in the four years of medical school. So in eight years, you get four hours, about a quarter of kid doctors get no training and sleep. So this idea that we'll just kind of leave it to the experts, we're not training people about these disorders. They don't know about them. So you're likely to get a dismissive nod or hear just have them take some melatonin gummy bears. So it's amazing the number of people that I see. Like, what did your doctor tell you about this or how did you end up coming here? It's the parent that said I demand to see the sleep specialist and not the doctor.

So I figured, you know what? Let's just go right to the parents. They know their kids better than anybody on the planet. And if we could educate them to advocate for their kids, we can maybe make a dent in this hidden crisis that we've got with sleep.

I mean, think about this in terms of pediatric problems. About two out of every three kids between cradle to college will have a sleep problem. So that's sixty six percent. So if you look at the incidence of diabetes, it's not sixty six percent. It's about a quarter of a percent. Depression's four percent, ADHD nine percent, obesity Eighteen percent. Sleep disorders are sixty six percent. Even if you cut it in half and said that's too much, 30 percent, that's still a massive number of kids that have huge problems and no foundation to help fix that.

And these kids are getting misdiagnosed with mental problems. And when we miss these diagnoses, they develop all kinds of issues with the system, with esteem and performance. And so it's just an awful situation and the pandemic has definitely not made it better.

Ginny: Sure, well, when you talked earlier about those things, about relationships and hobbies and outdoors and all those things that just tend to help you have a better sense of well-being and 

Dr. Winter: hugs people seeing people other than your parents and having some physical connection with them. It's really interesting to see what happens when you remove all that and you live virtually. It's not healthy. 

Ginny: That little subtitle up in the corner, right where it says from crib to college, That really caught my attention. It's that little trigger that reminds you, oh, I should be paying attention to this past the age of three or four or two or whenever they start to sleep through the night. This is an important thing to know about and to understand. And I love the correlation you talked about. There's a chapter about depression, and I think that could be a good chapter for any one child or not.

Dr. Winter: Oh, yes, absolutely. 

Ginny: I want you to know I really enjoyed the book. I was fascinated. I learned so many things that were pertinent to my own parenting to myself. And I haven't even finished it yet!

Dr. Winter: Well, that's so exciting to hear because you wonder if it's just like, oh, your books are not good. The fact that you wake up at 3:00 in the morning and think, oh gosh, what if it's terrible? So it's so nice to hear you say these things about it. 

Ginny: Where can people learn more about the book and learn more about you?

Dr. Winter: So I tend to be mainly active on Twitter and my handle is sport, @sleepsleepdoc because I work with a lot of sports teams, not a huge sports fan, but it's fun to work with the athlete and see their performance get better. So I'm on Instagram and Twitter is at SportsSleepDoc. I have a web page. It's www.chriswinter.com. Then we host, I work with Sleep.com and I hosted two rooms a week on the app clubhouse, Thursdays at five p.m. Sundays at 10:00 pm. And it's so much fun because even though I'm the host, I get to invite sleep experts and sleep people that I look up to from all over the world and have them as guests on our show. So each week we do two topics. So yesterday we were doing kids and sleep. This Thursday we'll do something we call junk sleep. And it's a wonderful way to sit and listen as you walk your dog where you can raise your hand and participate and ask questions. So instead of just sort of being one directional, it's almost like a little mini conference. And so we've got a really big following on there. And really, they're dedicated to putting out great sleep information for people to hear.

Ginny: Well, that's fantastic. And they can find a book, I'm sure, on Amazon.

Dr. Winter: It will be on, I think, audible. It's at Barnes and Noble. You can look at the Penguin Random House site, but the easiest place to grab it is probably just Amazon. And I really appreciate any feedback your listeners have about it.

Ginny: Absolutely. I know all of that helps. If there was one little quip of wisdom you can give parents as something that they can do right now I'm kind of thinking it's the walk to school thing.

Dr. Winter: Just walk to school if you can do it. If you're a parent, drop your kids off a half mile away from school and then just drive away. And now they have to walk to school. You walk the last half hour and the half mile would be good for you. 

Ginny: Let’s end with this. Tell us a favorite outdoor childhood memory of yours.

Dr. Winter. So I grew up in southwest Virginia, in Salem, Roanoke area, and my my father and his brothers had a little cabin up in Greenbank, West Virginia, which is this middle of nowhere place in West Virginia, where there's this big radio observatory, like all the things that listen in space for aliens and stuff like that. So when you drive their cell phones don't work, there's very few power lines that are above ground because they want to keep all the electrostatic resistance or interference to a minimum.

So my favorite sort of outdoor memories were driving up to the cabin. We always call it the cabin or camp when we would grab up to camp. And it was just so much fun to be outside of this great place where they had kind of dug into the side of a little hill to get some rock, I guess, to fill in a foundation. But when you go and pull out the little pieces of light of sedimentary rock, there were often fossils in them. So my sister and I would tie ropes onto the trees and we would hang there on the side of a little hill and black rocks and just find doodles of fossils. And we'd be out there until we couldn't see and run home. And it was just the coolest place. Still, we take our kids up there and it's a really special place. And you can write if you if your listeners want something to do, they live near Green Bank, West Virginia. You can actually take your bicycles and ride along the campus of this observatory. And it's so cool for kids to be riding their big boy and big girl bikes next to these massive telescopes. I think once a year they have Telescope Day where you could actually go inside them. So it's a really cool place. If you're kind of in that area, there's Sinica rocks, you can do some climbing or some caverns. And there's something also called the Greenbrier River Trail, which is at one of those rails to trails, and is perfectly flat along the river. So a neat little place to get out and get some of your hours outside. 

Ginny: I love that. I love that. And get in that and have your body start releasing the serotonin, right?

Dr. Winter: That's right. That's exactly right.