PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — What keeps you up at night? (Apart from all the problems of the world.) Scientifically, why is it so hard to get a good night's sleep?
🎧 In Depth: Unraveling the Mysteries of Sleep
A lot of people have turned to sleep aids like melatonin, but those might not be exactly what they seem.
"It becomes this spiral of you think more and more about your sleep, you try harder and harder to sleep, but sleep is one of those things that, the more you think about it, and the harder you try to do it, the harder it is to actually do," says Dr. Philip Gehrman, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
As far as we’ve come in medical and scientific research, sleep seems to be an area that we just can’t pin down. We might understand the stages of sleep and what REM sleep is (kind of) but there are still a lot of unanswered questions — and questions that we hear a variety of answers to.
How much sleep do you really need?
Do sleep aids like melatonin really help?
What happens in our brains when we dream?
Why does it seem to be harder to sleep as we get older?
Why do we need sleep in the first place?
Gehrman specializes in behavioral sleep medicine. In our conversation with him, we answer the questions we can about sleep, find out what questions are still unanswered, and learn a few tips for getting a better night's rest.