Sleep Unplugged with Dr. Chris Winter

Nobody blinks when a doctor says you'll be on blood pressure medication for the rest of your life. Say the same sentence about an antidepressant, or Zepbound, and responses are quite different. This episode digs into deprescribing, the fast-growing clinical movement around when and how to stop medications, and asks why some "forever drugs" get a cultural pass while others get moralized. In this episode we will:
Separate the real clinical debate around antidepressant tapering from the online discourse
Take on the GLP-1 stigma directly, with two 2024 JAMA Internal Medicine studies that found no elevated depression or suicidality risk, and ask why "you may need this forever" reads as scandal here but shrug everywhere else
Sit with the RLS story, where the science just ran the opposite direction: 2025 AASM guidelines downgraded dopamine agonists after mounting evidence of augmentation, a drug-induced worsening of symptoms, making deprescribing here the conservative, evidence-driven move, not the fringe one
Ask why hypersomnia drugs generate almost zero cultural friction at all, and what that quiet exception reveals about the other three
Land on what actually predicts whether a "forever medication" gets treated as a fact of chronic disease or a personal failing — and why RLS should make you distrust any tidy answer to that question, including this episode's
To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Fitnexa and their SomniPods 3, please use the following link: https://www.fitnexa.com/product/fitnexa-somnipods-3
Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026)
Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026)
Produced by: Maeve Winter
Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved

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Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
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The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child
Thanks for listening and sleep well!

Our current gig economy did not just create new jobs, it expanded a whole new category of night worker, from rideshare drivers to online freelancers to overnight fulfillment teams. Today (or tonight rather), our bodies are struggling to make the switch. In this episode we dig into what that circadian resistance actually costs your heart and metabolism long-term, and the handful of interventions that can actually shift it. In this episode we will:
Break down why 22 of 30 permanent night nurses still had daytime-oriented melatonin rhythms and why that's not a willpower problem, it's a light-exposure problem
Get into the real stakes: a 2025 meta-analysis linking night shift work to 13% higher cardiovascular disease incidence and 27% higher CVD mortality
Take on the meal-timing question head-on and look at new data suggesting fasting at night preserves glucose tolerance better than eating, without pretending the evidence justifies one universal rule
Review how light and schedule consistency can help improve these situations

To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor SideSleeperZ, please use the following link: https://sidesleeperz.com/
Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026)
Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026)
Produced by: Maeve Winter
Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved

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Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child
Thanks for listening and sleep well!

Nasal strips have been a fixture in pharmacy aisles and on athletes' faces for decades, sold on the promise of easier breathing, but the peer-reviewed evidence often tells a different story than the packaging does. We put nasal strips and internal dilators through the RCT wringer and sort out what these devices can and can't actually do, from your bedroom to the finish line. In this episode we will:
Break down what the highest-quality evidence — a 2026 meta-analysis of 17 studies and nearly 500 patients — actually found for AHI, oxygen saturation, and sleep architecture across all nasal dilator types
Sit with the placebo-strip finding out of the University of São Paulo, and what it reveals about the gap between subjective "I slept better" and objective, PSG-measured outcomes
Compare internal dilators like Mute against external strips, and call out where manufacturer-cited stats diverge from the independent literature
Head onto the field and track: two competing systematic reviews on whether strips help runners and athletes, and why "very low certainty" evidence still shapes what gets marketed to you
To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor BreatheUp, please use the following link: https://breatheup.com/
Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026)
Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026)
Produced by: Maeve Winter
Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved

More
Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child
Thanks for listening and sleep well!

Ten million prescriptions a year, and most of them aren't for what the drug was built to treat. Seroquel started life as an antipsychotic — engineered to quiet psychosis, not close your eyes. Somewhere along the way it became one of the most common "off the record" sleep aids in America, riding on a side effect nobody set out to sell. The evidence behind that shift is thinner than most people assume — and Seroquel isn't the only drug doing this. In this episode we will:
Trace quetiapine from its 1997 approval for schizophrenia through its quiet migration onto millions of nightstands, and unpack the receptor science that explains why a psychosis drug puts you to sleep at all
Spotlight the actual clinical trials behind quetiapine-for-insomnia — including the 13-patient study nearly the entire off-label practice rests on — and the newer data linking it to cardiovascular events, dementia, and falls
Break down what the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's guideline really says about quetiapine (it's not what most people assume), and why that gap in the data is its own kind of red flag
Draw the parallel to trazodone — a different drug, a different original disease, and somehow the exact same story
To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Sleep Reset, please use the following link: http://thesleepreset.com/podcast 
Audio Engineer: Bradley Bransly Barker
Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026)
Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026)
Produced by: Maeve Winter
Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved

More
Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child
Thanks for listening and sleep well!

Most "top sleep threats" lists stick to one lane — pediatric or adult, clinical or cultural. Dr. Funke Afolabi-Brown's list refuses to. It jumps from kids' airways to menopause to AI chatbots, and by the end a pattern emerges: the same symptom, in different bodies, keeps getting waved off as normal. In this episode we will:
Work through pediatric snoring dismissed as harmless and untreated mouth breathing, and why both are often lead to the same airway problem 
Get into exhaustion worn as a badge of honor
Look closer at supplement use and the underappreciated risk of leaning on antihistamine sleep aids night after night
Sit with three women's-health items back to back: 3 a.m. wake-ups blamed on "just hormones," menopause-related insomnia going undiagnosed, and the mechanisms actually behind both
Think about why women's sleep apnea symptoms are getting written off as stress or anxiety
To find out more about this week's podcast sponsor Flexispot, please use the following link: Flexispot Hako G1 Bed and use the discount code FLEXISPOTG1 for an extra 5% off.
Original intro music Vigilanteology by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026)
Original outro music Vigilanteology (reprise) by Abhinav Singh (copyright 2026)
Produced by: Maeve Winter
Music by: Dr. Abhinav Singh (@sleep_vigilante), all rights reserved

More
Twitter: @drchriswinter
IG: @drchriwinter
Threads: @drchriswinter
Bluesky: @drchriswinter
The Sleep Solution and The Rested Child
Thanks for listening and sleep well!