Joseph's question, what advice do you have for people with weird work schedules, graveyard shifts, early mornings and the like? And of course, this is making our ears perk up here in the newsroom.

Yeah, so this is, again, this is a great question.

It's so tough.

People who have non-traditional schedules, it's really hard to get some good sleep.

And the reason is that if you're just on a night shift, we can work with that.

We can work with people who are just on night shifts.

But then on your days off, you also got to be night shift.

Do you recommend those before people go to bed?

And so are those accurate? Do they help people in the long run or are they more of a gimmick?

Um, so, um, Most of the trackers, and we've been using these kinds of trackers, well, I've been using them for about 30 years.

They've been in the field for about 40 years.

They are reasonably good estimators of how much sleep you've gotten if, and this is the big if, you're a good sleeper.

If you are not, they are not very accurate.

So they do not recapitulate what you would get if you were recording brainwave activity.

in the sense that the more you wake up, the less accurate it is.

Can you tell us a little bit about what's going on there?

When you

look at it though, the evidence indicates that the risk to any individual is vanishingly small.

It is just when you have 350 million people doing it on the same day, even a really small effect, you can see.

So this is like, I like to think of this as the Shirley Jackson lottery.

It's a lottery ticket, just not the lottery you want to win.

So that is the strong evidence.

There is good theoretical evidence and evidence that I like from a theory standpoint that being in permanent standard time is better for your circadian clock.

Does our body want to sleep more in the winter? Is it healthier to sleep more in the winter?

Why is – Why have we debated this for so long and not been able to come to some sort of consensus which leads to legislation and policy? I'm just shocked that here we are having this conversation in 2026, and we're talking about poor Kaiser Wilhelm, a different era, different time.

Yes, I mean, I agree.

It's very interesting.

I mean, people...

People don't like the switch, you know, so having the switch kind of makes sense.

You know, you're going to get that that increase of light in summertime, more light in the in the evening, which is great.

But the days are longer.

How important or not important is BC Switch in your mind in regards to this conversation in North America?

So we like to think that we're kind of outdoors people.

And when you do large surveys, for example, NHANES survey, large epidemiologic sample, people are saying, oh, they spend like two, three hours outside every day.

And that sounds all right.

That sounds pretty good.

But when the US does a time use survey, You find out that people spend less than 15 minutes outside every day.

So kind of the retrospective is much rosier than the prospective, what people are actually getting.

So we spend vanishingly little time outside.

Mm-hmm.

Well, that leads right to what I wanted to ask you about, which is two things, why do we sleep and how is it related to our circadian rhythms? And maybe even, maybe you should define for those who haven't thought about circadian rhythms very much, uh, what are they and how do they relate to sleep?

Sure.

So circadian clock, something I didn't hear about until graduate school, so if, if people haven't heard about it, that, that's okay, though, though it is definitely more, more out there right now.

I think these are intrinsic 24-hour rhythms.

Um, I find them particularly appealing.

They, they are endogenous to an organism, and you find them in every single organism that has ever been studied on the planet Earth.

So there's obviously something incredibly important about them if throughout the evolutionary tree you see them.

Yep.

Dr. Zeitzer, thank you so much for joining us today and for leading this really compelling discussion.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's, uh, I'm excited to be here.

Um, so circadian rhythms, um, it's something that I hold near and dear to my heart.

I've been studying them for about thirty years.

But what I like to do is start off by defining what is a circadian rhythm, and not everyone knows.

I, when I first started this, this journey, I had no idea what one was.

Use code ROOM for a free month of pro with your logo at qrpoll.com. That's Q-R-P-O-L-L.com. QR Poll.

He's a sleep scientist from Stanford University.

And that bright sunshine closer to when you wake up is, in theory, going to strengthen your circadian clock, and this is the clock in your brain that basically helps to synchronize, um, all of your internal organs and all of your functioning to this 24-hour solar cycle that we exist in.

So, you've got all these other clocks in organs, right? You've got a clock in your liver.

You've got a clock in your lungs, in your immune cells.

So say for example, your body has this ability to figure out how many calories you need, but...

When your circadian clock is weaker, it's able to basically less accurately determine this.

There is this connection between your metabolism and expectation of food, when you're eating, how much you're expected to eat, and the circadian clock.

So the, the way that you can see this most easily is lots of data looking at individuals who do shift work.