254 - Sleep Issues and COVID-19
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2021
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
COVID-19 is tied to sleep issues like insomnia but is this a result of stress and anxiety or is there a biological issue caused by the virus? Dr. Rachel Salas, a neurologist and sleep specialist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Sleep and Wellness talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about sleep anxiety and the neurological drivers behind insomnia in patients regardless of whether or not they've had COVID. They also talk about the sleep issues plaguing health care workers, changes in circadian rhythms for people working from home, treatment plans for sleep issues, and why seeking help for insomnia may be easier than ever.
KEYWORDS: sleep hygiene; orthosomnia
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:19.6 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence |
| 0:22.4 | and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists, |
| 0:27.8 | community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas |
| 0:34.4 | or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question |
| 0:38.8 | at jh.edu. |
| 0:40.5 | That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.6 | Today, our topic may make you sleepy, which would be a good thing. |
| 0:51.8 | I talked to Dr. Rachel Salas, a neurologist and sleep specialist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Sleep and Wellness. |
| 0:59.0 | We discuss how COVID-19 is keeping people up at night and what can be done about it. |
| 1:04.7 | Let's listen. |
| 1:06.4 | It's great to have you, Dr. Salas, to talk to us about sleep and COVID-19. Tell us what you're |
| 1:13.1 | seeing in patients. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. I would say that initially when the |
| 1:18.8 | pandemic first hit, we were seeing patients that were coming in, reporting issues getting |
| 1:24.6 | asleep or staying asleep, which is insomnia. But it was mostly because of the fear, either of getting COVID or a loved one getting |
| 1:32.4 | COVID or losing their job. |
| 1:34.5 | You know, there was that kind of fear surrounding. |
| 1:36.9 | However, in the last month or so, we're now starting to see patients come in who had COVID, |
| 1:43.2 | had symptoms, recovered, and now for the first time |
| 1:46.7 | are having pretty severe sleep issues. So tell me about those sleep issues. Is it just insomnia or |
| 1:54.2 | insomnia plus other kinds of problems? I think it's a little bit of a combo. We're definitely |
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