Sleep is wonderful, and it's essential to life.

The better we sleep, the better we concentrate, the better we make decisions, and the better we perform.

Sleep minimizes the chance of making errors on shift.

Better sleep makes us better learners as well.

It plays a key role in consolidating both declarative and procedural memory.

Better sleep means better adaptive capacity to stressful situations, which are plentiful in EM, of course.

And the better we sleep, the better mood we're in, and the better our relationships.

The better we sleep, the lower our chances of developing cancer. The better we sleep, the lower our chances of developing cancer.

The better we sleep, the lower our chances of developing heart disease.

The better we sleep, the lower our chances of developing depression.

And the longer we live, yeah, more sleep is associated with a decreased mortality rate.

So the better we sleep, the happier and healthier we are.

And as we're all too familiar with, shift work disturbs our wonderful sleep because shift work messes with our

circadian rhythms and our sleep drive. And messing with our circadian rhythms and our sleep drive is not

trivial. Besides all the long-term badness, our chance of being involved in an MVC on our commute home is much higher when our circadian rhythm is messed with.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I smashed up my car on my commute home after an overnight shift early in my career.

But since then, I've learned a few things about sleep, and I think it's made me healthier and happier.

Yet, I still feel I need to up my sleep strategies to the best that they can be.

And I have so many questions about how best to optimize sleep for shift work.

So I invited a sleep expert to give us some evidence-based answers to some practical questions

and give us some solutions so that we can sleep better and live better.

Dr. Michael Mack is a sleep medicine specialist and staff psychiatrist at the Center for

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