The Snooze Button—That’s the name of the podcast, the working title of the book and various other projects connected to the book. The man behind the button is Neil Hedley. Hedley explains, “I’m the host, producer, webmaster, social media guy, chief shoe polisher.”
According to Hedley, The Snooze Button is his attempt to fix a lifelong battle with insomnia in such a way that it also offers help to others with sleep issues by “helping them avoid all the horrible information that’s being shoved out onto the internet.” Hedley accomplishes this by talking to sleep experts and neuroscientists from around the world. But it’s way more than that. Hedley clarifies, “We’re also talking to celebrities and high achievers who have sleep challenges baked in to their everyday experience. How do you fall asleep when you’re on a concert tour that has you and your toddler sleeping in a different hotel every night for seven months? How do you fall asleep on the International Space Station? How do you fall asleep the night before “the big game” when you’re the starting quarterback tomorrow? When I get a sleep tip from those folks, I’ll try it out for two weeks myself, and share the actual data from my sleep tracker to determine which things worked and which things didn’t.”
The Snooze Button podcast series began with Hedley’s visit to a sleep lab in Toronto where he learned “just how little” he and his primary care doctor knew about one of the most basic yet critical processes of the human body.
So what does Hedley hope to gain from his podcast? A good night’s sleep. Or maybe several. Hedley states, “Sleep is at the heart of virtually everything our bodies do. There isn’t a single process in your body that can’t be improved by getting better sleep, but because sleep is something that eventually happens without much effort to everybody on the planet to one degree or another, we don’t pay it nearly enough attention.”
