How nice at the end of a long day to snuggle down into the blankets and sink into your pillow and then not be able to fall asleep.

What have you done wrong? Did you eat or drink something that helps or hinders sleep?

Is it a behavior thing? An environment thing? Who knows what's true and what's false?

Today we're going to take a look at 15 of the most popular myths about

sleep. That's coming up right now, unsptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

15 sleep myths.

Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience,

real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions

by knowing what's real and what's not.

Everyone knows that sleep is pretty important and most of us probably feel we don't get quite enough of the best quality sleep. That means we're

likely missing out on some of these benefits which are not only health related but

cognitive as well. Is it possible that we're all sleeping so badly that it's made us too dumb to learn to sleep better?

Well, we all certainly hope not.

And in the interest of double checking our sleep knowledge, today we're going to examine 15 popular sleep myths,

and hopefully we'll all be wrong about at least a few of them because that means we have room

for improvement.

Some of these myths were verified by a 2019 paper by Robbins et al,

published in Sleep Health,

which compiled a whole bunch of claimed sleep myths from the popular media, and had them

all evaluated by 10 experts in sleep medicine, each of whom had published at least 20 articles

in peer-reviewed journals, and had them rate how true or false each myth

...