Hi there it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast. I would like to

welcome back my dear friend Dr Michael Grandner, thinking about that insufficient sleep and its impact,

leads us onto the natural conversation of then, why would athletes be suffering from a lack of sleep and I suppose it's a two-part

question in my mind based on your experience vast and knowledgeable as you are in general

what do you see in athletes as their sleep problems?

Are they the same sleep problems that we commonly go through?

And then the second is, obviously, they have a unique lifestyle which works strongly against sleep, which is this notion of

training and travel and competition. So training perhaps goes into the first

bucket, which is in general what's happening with their sleep

when they're training intensely the second is when they're traveling what happens and

then the third is when they're undergoing a competition you've got that mental

stress and how does that relate to travel perhaps an

environmental factor stress a mental factor and then training a physiological body

factor how should I and people listening think about the types of sleep problems that you could undergo when you're an athlete?

So you bring an interesting question about sort of the uniqueness of it, and we may talk about this later, but some of the work I did was with the International Olympic Committee and we're talking about mental health challenges and Olympic athletes and we're developing this policy statement. And one of the things that came up in that discussion was this idea of

athletes facing these very unique challenges and the point was raised that none of

the challenges that athletes are facing are unique only to athletes.

Everything that they're facing are things that lots of people are facing,

just in different combinations.

So the things that pop up the most from a sleep perspective,

and circadian perspective and athletes is number one,

often very early mornings, especially when it comes to training,

...