Your Sleep Guide: Balancing Diabetes At Night

Audrey Wells, MD 

I’m so happy to be here because I am passionate about deep sleep and healthy sleep. Everybody deserves good sleep, which translates into better wakefulness. Isn’t that what life is all about? I am a sleep medicine doctor. I’m triple-boarded. I also do obesity medicine. then, way back when I took pediatric training, people thought maybe that’s not so related. But I like to tell everyone that when you’re sleepy, you turn into a toddler. That’s where my expertise comes into play. I have started a company called Super Sleep MD, which has the mission of helping people with obstructive sleep apnea get fully treated without sacrificing their comfort or their sleep. Sometimes that looks like CPAP, and sometimes that looks like something else. I’m happy to be here and to underscore the importance of healthy sleep today.

Beverly Yates, ND

Thank you so much. When it comes to having a healthy blood sugar response and the importance of being able to hit that big old reset button right when we go to sleep so much, goodness comes to our health from sleep. Healing is sleeping, and sleeping is healing. Can you give us an overview of what’s supposed to happen in a normal, healthy sleep situation? Because I want people to be able to contrast that with what happens when there is a sleep disorder of whatever kind, including sleep apnea.

Audrey Wells, MD

This is a fantastic starting point because I like to have the chance to outline what healthy sleep looks like. There are three factors. You want good sleep quantity, you want good sleep quality, which includes the absence of sleep disorders, and you want the timing of your sleep period to be consistent, preferably over the nighttime. When those factors are in place, a person has the natural ability to sleep, and, just to put some figures on it for quantity, you’re looking at seven to eight hours of sleep for adults. Quality should be cycling through the different sleep stages: light sleep, slow wave, deep sleep, and REM sleep. then timing, of course, overnight, usually from ten, 11, midnight to six, seven, or eight in the morning, to get an adequate amount of sleep. Those are the anchors for healthy sleep.

Beverly Yates, ND

Thank you. That sets the stage for the rest of the conversation. Sometimes people who have a real struggle with blood sugar problems, especially people who feel like they are otherwise doing the things they should do, are eating a healthy, whole-foods-based diet. They are exercising regularly, yet their blood sugar is still not their friend. They’re wondering what’s going on. Often, our secret problem, maybe not so obvious, could be issues with sleep and sleep disruption. What are some of the things people may experience that would be a great clue? Perhaps they need to have further assessments of their sleep.

Audrey Wells, MD

This is an important thing to look at because if you’re not sleeping well, you are sabotaging your body’s metabolism, the processing of glucose, and even digesting food. People with sleep disorders tend to present with daytime symptoms, nighttime symptoms, or both. Some typical things to look at are our presence or absence of snoring or other breathing issues like waking up, gasping for breath, or having passed us in breathing that a bed partner might notice. Frequent nighttime awakenings could be a red flag for issues with insomnia or sleep apnea, and even sometimes movement disorders during sleep, early morning awakenings, or frequent trips to the bathroom can be a sign that something isn’t right. Then you’re looking at daytime symptoms, which are a little bit more nonspecific. But these include sleepiness or tiredness, mood changes like irritability, or just falling asleep inappropriately, especially while doing things that require vigilance, like driving, for example. These are some daytime symptoms. But the truth is that anybody who’s having difficulty controlling their blood sugar may not have typical sleep symptoms. I often get referrals from physician assistants or other clinicians to look at sleep as a potential reason that the blood sugar is not controlled. Even in the absence of symptoms, it’s still a good idea to confirm there’s not a sleep problem.

Beverly Yates, ND

One person pointed out that it was something I was thinking about, and just clinically, the experience I’ve had is that sometimes there’s always someone who snores. That’s the obvious clue that something may or may not be right and needs further assessment. But then some people are silent. They’re not breathing; they’re not breathing at all. They are truly in an apnea state. To me, that’s terrifying and perhaps escalates the need for assessment. What are your thoughts about that?

Audrey Wells, MD

I apply to you bringing this up because snoring is not always available for observation. People might live alone, or the bed partner may be sleeping during periods of snoring where someone’s affected by sleep apnea. to hammer home the importance of getting a condition like sleep apnea treated. What I like to do is a little thought experiment with people. Are you with me on this? Are you ready for some fun?

Beverly Yates, ND

Do this. Let’s do this.

Audrey Wells, MD

With sleep apnea, what’s happening is that you’re getting relaxation of the throat muscles, which causes tissues in the back of the throat to collapse. That’s what causes the interruption in breathing. As a result, you’re not pulling air down into your lungs effectively, so your blood oxygen levels go down, and then your brain gets interrupted. Sleep is interrupted. It’s sensitive to those drops in blood oxygen levels. It has to wake up to gasp. Now, all of that is happening during the nighttime, during sleep. Imagine if we had something similar happen during awake. We have collapsed the throat, the blood, and oxygen levels go down, and whatever you’re doing has to be interrupted so that you can gasp again. If that were happening during awake, we’d have people going to the emergency room in droves. This is what’s happening at night. It’s interfering with sleep. It’s causing your blood oxygen levels to go up and down. It’s a stressor. It’s a stressor on your brain. It’s a stressor on your heart. It is a sabotage to your blood pressure and your blood sugar control. This is an important thing that needs to be addressed. If you have a condition like diabetes that is hard to treat.

Beverly Yates, ND

What I’m hearing you say is the time when people are asleep and people say, but I was asleep. But they weren’t right. This is also the same time when the body resets the blood sugar level. When people go to sleep and when they awaken. That’s why we call it a fasting morning blood sugar number. It’s a great barometer, if you will, a way to measure tangibly what blood sugar has done, and when it doesn’t reset that all that healthy number overnight, like under 100, somewhere between, let’s say, 75 and 95, I think the eighties are ideal for blood sugar, for fasting, blood sugar in the morning. With this stress, these life-threatening moments from not breathing while you’re asleep are causing chaos and, in particular, causing that blood sugar to rise. Therefore, it doesn’t reset. Can you say some more about the dynamics of that? Like there are these classic chemicals called catecholamines, etc.? Just help us understand why this is such a threat. Because every time we talk to people about this, I get so many messages from people saying they had no idea that sleep was that important. if sleep had that big of a role to play with my blood sugar.

Audrey Wells, MD

I’m happy to say more because people must be able to connect the dots and understand that we know the mechanism behind how this happens. It’s not some loose connection. Let me start by saying that with untreated sleep apnea, for example, you’re having these drops in blood oxygen levels, which cause the brain to be under threat. It releases that fight or flight response, that agitation that includes increasing heart rate, increasing blood pressure, stress hormones, and all of that, which leads to an inflammatory response, which is not good because this is a time when you should be sleeping, recovering, and rebuilding overnight. The other issue is just this sleep disruption and likely sleep deprivation. When your sleep is interrupted through those blockages in your airway throughout the night, that causes a stress response as well. Stress and inflammation are the results of untreated sleep apnea. Even with a condition like insomnia, you’re going to have stress from the shortened sleep time. sleep deprivation, just as an example, I want to bring up a famous study, at least in the world of sleep. A group of young men, college students, were put through this rigorous protocol meant to replicate the effects of sleep deprivation. One of the measurements they took was their blood glucose and their insulin sensitivity. They went through a period of six nights where their total sleep time was shortened to four hours. After a period of six nights, These young, healthy men, with no medical history and no medical conditions going on, were shown to have insulin resistance. This demonstrates how you can take a person who is, in some ways, in good health and create insulin resistance in less than a week. It makes sense that, over time, over decades of sleep apnea is developing, or if a person is struggling with insomnia, they’re going to have a hit to their metabolic functioning.

Beverly Yates, ND

Thank you for making that clear about how quickly the metabolism can get knocked off track. This explains to a lot of people why there’s been such a spike in the number of metabolic disorders. We can just see the disarray that’s going on, and it’s an international phenomenon. It’s just more and more people who are starting to struggle metabolically. It’s a reminder to the audience that you can’t necessarily diagnose something by just looking at people. Don’t make assumptions. If someone is overweight or obese, that’s one set of conditions. But someone could be quite lean and thin and still be insulin resistant, or what’s also called toffee thin on the outside, fat on the inside, and metabolically unfit. Sometimes it’s shocking when people realize that, and they often wind up not getting correctly assessed because the assumption can be from a clinician who should know better than they do. Everybody needs to be objectively assessed.

Audrey Wells, MD

It’s so interesting that you mention that because the same thing happens with sleep apnea. People who struggle with overweight and obesity get tested for obstructive sleep apnea more because clinicians think that’s the type of patient who has it. But the truth is, sleep apnea is not just related to your weight for most people. About 20% of people who have obstructive sleep apnea are not overweight or in the obesity category. Those types of people tend to delay diagnosis until their symptoms are quite prominent because it doesn’t come up that they’re the poster child for obstructive sleep apnea.

Beverly Yates, ND

That poster child thing is a stereotype. Sometimes clinicians will measure the circumference of someone’s neck, etc. I was still struck by one of the patients I worked with about a decade ago, a very lean, very fit woman. She gets up and does these boot camps in the morning, and she is very physically fit. She had obstructive sleep apnea, which bothered her because she had this idea in her head that someone who was not as physically active and in shape as she was was the person who could have it. I was like, Life is not that simple. 

Audrey Wells, MD

I wish there would be a much easier way to diagnose conditions like sleep apnea. But we’re still figuring it out. Unfortunately,  a lot of times, women do not show the same symptoms as men. Because of that, women in particular have a delay in diagnosis as well.

Beverly Yates, ND

Agreed. I’ve noticed that as well. It’s more of a push to make sure that she is objectively assessed completely around these parameters for metabolic health, which makes a difference. We’re talking about prediabetes, Type 2 diabetes, and diabetes and blood sugar dysregulation. The importance of sleep cannot be overstated. What are some of the myths out there about sleep that you feel impact people who have diabetes?

Audrey Wells, MD

One myth that I like to address is that you can catch up on sleep, and a lot of people do this when they’re working. In the middle of the week, they tend to pinch their sleep to maybe six hours, and then on the weekends, they sleep in a late nap, etc.    It just doesn’t work that way when you stay up later than you should; you tend to reduce the restorative, slow-wave, deep sleep that you have. When you wake up early and shorten your sleep that way, it cuts into your REM sleep time, which is rapid eye movement and sleep associated with dreaming, cognitive control, memory, and emotional regulation. These are important functions of sleep that need to be honored by having a regular and sufficient sleep pattern. Another myth about sleep has to do with these things. I joke that I no longer buy clothes that don’t have a pocket for my cell phone because it’s always with me. But everyone needs to know that exposure to that short-wavelength blue light within a couple of hours of bedtime has the power to impact your sleep. It makes you more likely to wake up. It makes your sleep lighter. It interferes with sleep cycling. Even people who perceive that there’s no problem with their sleep could be doing better if they leave the electronics out of the bedroom.

Beverly Yates, ND

Well said. Thank you for bringing that up. that a lot of us assume it’s only teenagers who struggle with the phone, the laptop, or the tablet. Those blue lights from wherever are a problem.

Audrey Wells, MD

I approach this with a lot of humility because it’s a challenge for me personally to disconnect from my phone, but it’s worth it. For anyone who has problems with that, I like to explore one’s relationship with oneself, because when you’re lying in bed at night, that’s who you’re with. You’re in the dark, in the quiet, and alone. Your relationship with yourself is coming out. If you have trouble sleeping, it’s worth it to work on some things that can benefit your relationship.

Beverly Yates, ND

That’s a wonderful point to make. I want to circle back to something that you brought up here when you were talking about mood and how much people’s moods affect; perhaps their mental health can be affected by these issues with sleep and blood sugar regulation. One of the classic things for people who have prediabetes, Type 2 diabetes, and glycemic dysregulation, in general, is that there are mood issues and that there are energy issues. It can often lead to pervasive fatigue that is hard to push through. People like to just get up off the couch and exercise. But what if someone is so profoundly exhausted and deeply depressed? It’s not so easy to just say, I’m going to get up and go to the gym, even though it’s necessary. People want to. They understand the importance of it. Sometimes there’s a real struggle there. Can you give us your thoughts about the role sleep plays in that situation?

Audrey Wells, MD

This is probably underrepresented when it comes to looking at mental health disorders, mood disorders, or even people who have a history of some type of trauma. I’ll start by saying that there is no psychiatric illness in which sleep is not affected. That’s how tightly this relationship goes. There are probably some bi-directional effects as well, meaning that people who have chronic sleep issues tend to be more prone to mood disorders and psychiatric diagnoses, and the opposite is true as well. People with psychiatric diagnoses and mood disorders have trouble sleeping. It’s a downward spiral, however. If you’re trying to treat somebody, addressing the sleep problem can amplify the effects of that treatment. I want to say that, specific to diabetes, there’s this interesting phenomenon where a person who is sleep deprived will stop looking at sleep as a place to regain energy, and they’ll start going more for food to regain energy. That’s relevant when you talk about somebody who’s trying to make healthy food choices to support their diabetes management while still having the energy they need to get through the day.

Beverly Yates, ND

Now that’s going to resonate with a lot of people listening because it is a paradox. We do need to nourish ourselves and to have the fuel, the calories, the quality, the nutrients—all of that to make the symphonic melody that happens for our metabolism when it’s functioning well—but when the metabolism is in disarray when we’ve got diabetes, there are problems there, real roadblocks, and sleep can be one of them. Before we continue our conversation, here’s where we’re going to take a break in our session. For those of you who are here for the free recording, this is great. I hope the information that we’ve shared so far is helpful to you. Thank you for tuning in. For those of you who purchased the premium subscription, we are going to continue the conversation. 

Let’s talk a little bit more about these metabolic issues, the idea of energy and moods, depression, and what goes on with sleep because these are real, real problems. We look at some of the classes of medications that are coming out or that are already out and growing; whether it’s the GLP1-type drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro, Wegovy, or other ones like them that make such a difference for people who have diabetes. In that realm, they’re addressing a poor need. One of the things that I hear people talk about is reducing what they call food noise. Now you are a sleep expert. How is the interplay here between sleep, let’s say, and food noise or struggling with cravings, things like that?

Audrey Wells, MD

This is a great question because, as an obesity medicine physician, I’m also looking at the impact that these GLP-1 highly effective weight loss drugs are having on people with sleep disorders. When people describe food noise, it’s like this chatter in the background about what they’re eating. Sometimes there’s a moral assignment to food. Foods are good, foods are bad, and that type of thing. It’s great to know that these medications are reducing that noise. But if you’re sleep-deprived, you can get that same rumination or chatter. Your mood and your way of looking at the world tend to be more negative as well. We’re already wired that way, but putting sleep deprivation on top of everything else makes it hard to pick yourself up, keep your long-term goals in mind, and stay motivated.

Beverly Yates, ND

It just makes sense. We’re all humans. If you are getting the metabolic legs kicked out from under you because your sleep is crummy and you have diabetes, this is a bad combo, and you have to fix or improve one to help make that difference for the other. that a lot of times the connection isn’t put together for people because, until it is, often there’s a lot of needless struggling. Now let’s talk a little bit about some of the therapies for sleep problems, sleep disorders, sleep apnea, and ways people can advocate to make sure that they A. are assessed and then B. if they are supposed to use a CPAP and BiPAP or some other breathing assistive device, what that’s like, and how they could be comfortable because this is often where the train jumps the tracks.

Audrey Wells, MD

I agree. I’ll start with the assessment because it’s so important to understand what we have as options for diagnosis at this point. The pandemic changed a lot of things. In the sleep world, what happened was that there was a massive increase in home sleep apnea testing. Now, I say that very deliberately because the home test states do not test everything related to sleep. They only test for hope in sleep apnea, specifically obstructive sleep apnea. On top of that, Dr. Beverly, I want everyone to know that at home, a sleep apnea test is only useful if it’s positive. If it’s a negative test, especially in the face of symptoms, the next step should be to go in and get an in-lab sleep study. Those are the two main diagnostic tests. Insomnia is typically a clinical diagnosis. As with restless leg syndrome, you can see a lot of different things on a lab sleep test. But just to give the lay of the land, those are diagnostic options for someone diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea, which is very common among those with diabetes. Even three out of four people with diabetes have sleep apnea. That’s the current estimate. If you’re diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea, particularly if it’s moderate or severe, the most effective treatment is PAP therapy, that’s Positive Airway Pressure Therapy, usually CPAP or auto-CPAP; they’re the same thing. The difference is quite minor. There are some alternative treatments, and if people are intolerant of CPAP or auto-APAP, I encourage you to keep talking to your sleep medicine doctor because there are things that we can do. The worst-case scenario is knowing you have obstructive sleep apnea, knowing you have diabetes, and deciding not to move forward with any treatment. There’s a degree of personalization that needs to happen. I feel strongly that sometimes it just takes a little more effort to get somebody to take care of it. Insomnia is another condition common and most responsive to what’s called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. This is reframing the way you think and how you behave to more permanently treat one’s insomnia, and it lasts for a long time. It’s very durable, with many fewer side effects than with medication. Prescription medications are typically used for a short time. These are the most common sleep diagnoses. then you have the ugly beast COMESA. This is when obstructive sleep apnea meets insomnia. COMESA stands for Co-Morbid Insomnia And Sleep Apnea. The coexistence of this condition can make a person struggle with treatment. But this is one of my specialties. I like forming relationships with people to tease all of that out and make positive steps toward full treatment of both conditions.

Beverly Yates, ND

That makes sense. Thank you. I had not heard that term before, COMESA, but that rings a bell because there are lots of folks struggling. My observation has been that often the struggle is that either they aren’t receptive to full therapy for both or the people they’re working with, frankly, aren’t competent to provide full therapy. Both sides can be possible. The situation is what I’ve seen.

Audrey Wells, MD

I agree with that. Unfortunately for anyone who’s trying to treat their sleep apnea, if the insomnia isn’t adequately addressed, it impairs that treatment path. I want to be sure and tell you about something that has come up in the literature. It’s especially important for those who suffer from diabetes. I talked about before that having untreated sleep apnea can make diabetes worse. The idea might be that treating sleep apnea would improve diabetes. But there’s a little bit of a caveat there. One is that the improvement in diabetes takes place over a long time. This is not a reversal that just takes a few weeks of CPAP treatment to achieve. The other thing is that there’s this common misconception that only four hours of CPAP treatment are necessary for the treatment of sleep apnea. No, you need treatment of sleep apnea over the entire night to feel better, but more importantly, to get your blood glucose numbers down, to get to a normal A-1C level, and to remove sleep apnea as a factor in diabetes control. You need full-night treatment to get to that point. It makes sense because, in the second half of the night, you’re going to have more REM sleep or dream sleep. I hope I’ve highlighted that as an important sleep stage.

Beverly Yates, ND

Tell us a little bit more about those sleep stages, because I want people to hear this in the context of their blood sugar supposedly resetting overnight to a healthy range. For those of you who have tried everything and done everything, been there, done that, and got the T-shirt, I’m telling you, it’s worthwhile to look at the quality and quantity of your sleep because it might be the thing that’s holding you back from that healthy blood sugar range again.

Audrey Wells, MD

I would elevate the discussion to two especially important sleep stages. In the first half of the night, you’re going to have more slow, deep sleep. Now, this is the sleep stage that’s important because memory tracks are laid down and insignificant information is filtered out. Also, this is the sleep stage where the brain gets cleansed of metabolites and things that gum up the inner workings. This sleep stage is critical. As I mentioned before, if you stay up later than normal, that will eat into the time when your brain is supposed to be in slow-wave deep sleep. That’s the first half of the night. In the second half of the night, you get REM sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep, where most of your dreaming occurs, and an important feature of REM sleep is muscle relaxation, even to the point of being paralyzed except for your eye muscles. That’s where the REM sleep name comes from, as does your diaphragm, which keeps breathing. The airway muscles are particularly floppy during this time. As a result, airway obstructions can be longer, and more prominent drops in blood oxygen levels can be especially low. As a result, people can wake up more frequently, and they may not always perceive that, but that is where the stress response comes from. So that can for sure affect that morning blue blood glucose measurement. If you’re seeing that repeatedly, you need to get your sleep tested, even if your symptoms are minor or even absent. Just get that crossed off the list.

Beverly Yates, ND

Thank you for a clear shout-out about that. I was thinking that one of the values of having CGM rather than just a fingerstick or drop of blood onto a test strip in terms of a glucometer for CGM is that you can get it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Guess what? Two weeks of 14 days of measurements around the clock to know what your blood sugar is doing, because if you don’t know, you might find that your blood sugar issues are tracking sleep issues. Getting the recordings on the app on your phone makes all the difference. then now whether or not there’s real chaos going on with your blood sugar when you should be asleep and blood sugar should be coming back to that healthy range. that having a way to objectively test and measure these things and not have to guess about them makes a huge difference. For example,  if we say test on guess, test for whether or not there’s a sleep disorder, and also test to see if your blood sugar is tracking issues, including insomnia. That’s a great segue. The next thing I want to ask you about is the sleep stages and the kinds of sleep and quality of sleep we get, which change throughout our lifetimes. What we experience as newborns in those first 28 days, then through infancy,  You mentioned your background in pediatrics, then as a younger child, middle school child, pre-puberty, puberty transition, and then puberty, all of the things as we become our adult selves, and then we go on to our twenties, thirties, and beyond, and then hit middle age, and our older years sleep changes throughout that time. What we think, at least through the research, is that people also need shifts. I would wonder how much this tracks with blood sugar, regulation, insulin sensitivity, and things like that. What’s normal versus what’s typical?

Audrey Wells, MD

So you’re right. The sleep changes that occur in the pediatric age group are profound. I’m talking about people 25 years old and younger. It has to do with brain development, maturation, and pruning of the neurons. There’s a lot of development there, and things are pretty stable from 25 to maybe 55, 65, or so, except for women. Women always deserve a little extra attention because there are sleep stage shifts that occur with puberty, menstruation, pregnancy, and even menopause. All of those things need to be on the tip of the tongue. For anyone who’s advising about sleep, as you age, you do tend to have more sleep fragmentation, and there’s often an advancing of the sleep period, meaning that people prefer to go to bed earlier and tend to have earlier awakenings from sleep. Sometimes that can be extraordinarily frustrating if you can’t get back to sleep. Now, interestingly, if you look at history before electronics and this artificial light came about, human beings probably had sleep periods, one that started around sundown. Then there was a prolonged nighttime awakening where you have sex, you tell stories, you put more weight on the campfire, and then you go back to sleep and wake up around the sunrise. Some people think that those who are aging lose the ability to inhibit that prolonged nighttime awakening, which can be an effective age. Also, it seems that the total amplitude of the EEG waves that we measure on the scalp is reduced as people age. They’re also probably producing less melatonin as a person ages. All of these things come together to make sleep more of a challenge as a person gets older, and sometimes that’s associated with an untreated sleep disorder as well.

Beverly Yates, ND

It’s interesting as you peel the layers here for us; it just makes it clear how important it is that we protect our sleep at every age and every stage.

Audrey Wells, MD

It’s one of the best things you can do for your brain. I like to say your brain is your most important asset, so support it with sleep.

Beverly Yates, ND

That is so much else that can be merchandise right there. No, but seriously, all joking about it aside, sometimes it’s good to put a little humor into a serious topic. One of the things I’ve always thought about is that parents of young children, they’re often so sleep-deprived. If you look at the conventions around prisoners of war, depriving people of sleep is considered cruel and unusual. Punishment is not permitted by international conventions. We have moments in our lives sometimes where our sleep is just completely messed up. It isn’t necessarily our fault; it’s just the situation we’re in. Are there any tips that you would share that people could use to quickly address that situation should it arise?

Audrey Wells, MD

In recent history, I was one of those people because I’ve got little kids. I often say that sleep deprivation was taken off of the table for the Guinness Book of World Records because of the threat to one’s life. You can die from sleep deprivation. It is a cruel and terrible form of punishment that, in medical school, I felt like I was subjected to. But for people who are not getting enough sleep and suffering the consequences of that, the very first thing that needs to happen is that sleep needs a new level of prioritization in your life. Sometimes that looks like self-care. putting yourself first, and I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but Dr. Beverly’s self-love says, I love you. Self-care says: prove it. You need to put yourself first and say, I need help getting sleep. I need protected time for sleep. I need to reflect on my responsibilities, my social obligations, and my workload. I need to recover because if you don’t, you’re headed nowhere good or fast.

Beverly Yates, ND

Brilliantly said, Thank you for that. That is 100% the case. the fact that we don’t, have like a little meter, we could see like maybe on our side of our face about, Yes, I got no sleep last night or No, I didn’t or we good quality or no, it wasn’t, wearable technology can help us, but only so much. You have to notice how you feel.

Audrey Wells, MD

The wearables, I love that they bring sleep quality and quantity into our dialog, but they’re not quite there yet in terms of accuracy. One of these days we’ll have a measure like a CGM, where sleep can be quantified and even quantified objectively to help people understand what their capacity is.

Beverly Yates, ND

That moment is hopefully closer than further away. But we’ll find out, won’t we? Thank you for this wonderful interview. 

Friends,  please share these sessions while they’re available for everyone to share with anyone who cares about their sleep or cares about their health, whether they are already healthy or striving to get healthy, or everyone needs to have better, quality information. Please share this with as many people as you can while this summit is up. We come together as professional colleagues to share expertise. But the bottom line is that we’re trying to help people live a great quality of life and to help have their health span equal their life span, and sleep is foundational to achieving that goal. Thank you for tuning into this episode. wait. Doctor Audrey, where can people find you if they like to connect?

Audrey Wells, MD

I’d love to tell people where they can find me. I am on social media, usually as Super Sleep MD, but going to my website is probably the most efficient way, and that’s supersleepmd.com.

Beverly Yates, ND

Thank you so much for this wonderful and informative session.

Audrey Wells, MD

My pleasure.