Hi there it's Matt here and welcome back to another episode and welcome back to the next in this

AMA series and we're now doing these once a month and as always my partner in crime for these AMAs is Dr.

Ety Ben Ben, Simone.

Ety, welcome back.

Hello, sleep fans.

Happy to be here.

So let us just dive in for those fans.

And you have, I think, a number of different questions for me. I will try to do a better job at not meandering and having polluted streams of consciousness that go all over the place. I will stay focused as best I can and if you can

microphone slap me when I don't that would be...

Yes you get the picture please keep me on track. So to our first question what is the first AMA question? We've had really great questions and the first topic that I want to ask you about is sleep on pregnancy and especially how does lack of sleep affect someone who's pregnant both during pregnancy and after the baby is born and people are also asking if being constantly woken up during pregnancy doesn't serve to get the body used to the lack of sleep after the baby is born, so sort of practice makes perfect.

And the last part of the question is,

why is prolecting released mostly during the night?

Gosh, some interesting questions that particularly the second one one which is a theory that was or has been

knocking around and I'll get to it which is could this persistent awakening at night and this

essentially what is persistent chronic sleep restriction

serve as a way to train a brain and particularly the brain of a mother or father and help them with some of that.

So I will get to that.

That is an interesting theory that's been out there.

But let me pull back.

Firstly, the question, how does sleep affect both a woman during pregnancy and during

the post-natal period? Pregnancy is, of course, it's a transformational experience and it brings about some rather profound physiological, hormonal and emotional changes. There is a very large literature now in the sleep science

world that has demonstrated perhaps unsurprisingly to the first part of the question that sleep disturbances are common both

...