Hi everyone, I'm Susie Weiss, and I've noticed there's just simply not enough podcasts in the world. So I'm launching my own. Let's go. Let's go, baby. Second Thought is a weekly show about pop culture. The stuff everyone's been binging, arguing about, obsessing over. Here's the thing about heated rivalry. I mean, even the most devoted swifties, I think we can agree, not our best work. We'll be hosting thoughtful conversations with culture's most important figures. Talk about genius.

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Coming to headphones near you on April 17th, with a first guess you won't want to miss. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Ben, you mentioned that you've been eating cheese because you had heard the cheese helps people fall asleep. Is that right? The funny thing is that things become part of your

ritual because you'll have a successful night of sleep and you'll think, what did I do? Oh, I ate a

piece of cheese and then I had an onion and then I, I don't know, I spun around in circles three times

and talked to my neighbor for 15 minutes. Well, I better do that again tonight.

Welcome to how to. I'm Charles Duhigg.

Each week on this show, we help folks confront some of life's toughest challenges.

And in a bunch of episodes, experts have given us this one piece of advice again and again.

Get more sleep. But what do you do if you can't fall asleep in the first place?

I've had sleep problems for about most of my life. It's like trying to push a balloon full of air underwater and hold it there. And that's the sense I get when I'm trying to fall asleep. And the only time I feel like I can really fall asleep is when I've missed a night of sleep, like a night before. And then I'm like really, really exhausted so I can sleep. This is Ben. He lives in San Francisco and he's a super

busy guy. In addition to working as a therapist, he's a published author and he exercises a lot.

He's a black belt and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. But for years, Ben has been operating on little

to no sleep. You kind of wake up feeling like a broken pain of glass. You just feel kind of shattered and sort of out of it. Like you haven't really closed your eyes all night. And if you're just laying in bed and you're like, you're trying to go to sleep. Is your mind racing? Are you feeling like? Yeah. I'm usually, yeah, it's racing and all sorts of narratives.

You know, I'm a therapist, so I think about my patients or I work at a clinic and I think about that.

It's like there's a party happening in my head and I can't stop.

That sounds torturous.

I also get this phenomenon where I get really itchy.

Like I'll wake up with scratch marks on my face because I've been scratching myself.

It's crazy.

We've all had sleepless nights, right?

I took Ambien every night for like a year to help me sleep, which incidentally is precisely

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