Hi there it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast and welcome back to

another AMA episode Ask Me Anything episode. I am as always joined by the extraordinary the

first rate the marvelous the outstanding the phenomenal the remarkable the special the prodigious the world-class entity that is Dr.

Ety Ben Simone, Ety, welcome back.

You're too kind, Matt.

Only truths.

Okay, so I think we have had once again a lot of interest a lot of questions and I will just let you take the wheel and drive off you go

wonderful yeah we have a great set of questions today and the first one we're going to shoot for the stars and we're going to talk about or people are asking about the influence of lunar cycle on sleep patterns and dreams.

Very nicely done in terms of Segway now. Okay, let me see if I can bring us back down to Earth with a bump in terms of my vernacular.

It's a really interesting question and I think sometimes we've spoken on this show before a lot about the link between

sleep and emotional regulation and when sleep gets short we become more emotionally

erratic and unpredictable.

And I've often thought how that relates to this idea

in movies and common culture that when the full moon is out,

people get a little bit emotionally different.

I always thought, well, what is happening there?

And it turns out, there have been surprising to many people

listening, several decades of research that have looked at the question of what happens to our sleep, if anything, as the lunar cycle changes.

In terms of the overall headline, the findings have painted shades of both affirmation and doubt.

Let me see if I can explain. There has been a substantial body of studies suggesting

probably a subtle but certainly measurable impact of lunar phases on our sleep. I think probably one of the earliest that was published

was back in the early 1990s. It's by a great sleep research among his colleagues and what they described was a slight decrease in total sleep time and I think causing that was an increase in the amount of time that people spent awake at night

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