Sleep doesn’t usually come to mind when people think about fitness. But after Jeffrey Durmer, MD, PhD, noticed the lack of sleep support when he was an elite athlete, and again when his daughters were national-level swimmers, he decided to take the research into his own hands. Now, as a neurologist, systems neuroscientist and sleep-medicine physician, Dr. Durmer is that support for today’s top athletes. Through his work with the NFL and the USA Weightlifting team for the 2021 Tokyo games, he’s shown how simple tactics like sleep banking can make a serious impact on performance. But above all, he’s shown that sleep is recovery, and no training routine is complete without enough of it. On this episode, he gets specific about why sleep is essential to our physical and psychological health, tells us how to know whether we’re really getting as much as we need and sets us all up for a more alert tomorrow.