Andrew Holmes: I Stop Breathing 28 Times an Hour!

One in four Canadians have sleep apnea or are at risk of developing it, and roughly 80% have never been diagnosed. Andrew Holmes has spent over 20 years inside sleep labs, and he explains what is actually happening in the hours you don't remember. Andrew Holmes is a registered polysomnographic technologist and sleep expert with over 20 years of experience in sleep diagnostics and consulting. He trained at the Michener Institute for Health Science and spent 13 years working straight overnight across three Ottawa sleep labs before becoming Senior of the Cardiopulmonary Department at the Queensway Carleton Hospital, where he ran a 10 bed provincial sleep lab for close to a decade. In 2015 he founded Sleep Efficiency, which ships home based sleep testing devices to patients so they can be tested in their own bed, and now receives referrals from close to 500 physicians including family doctors, cardiology clinics, and preop clinics. He has presented to organizations including the Ministry of Labour and the Department of National Defence, and is the sleep subject matter expert for CTV News. He is on a mission to get people tested and to change how seriously we treat the third of our lives we spend asleep. He explains: ◼️ Why he walked away from a 20 year hospital career at the top of his department, and the itch he could not scratch inside the system ◼️ What actually happens during the 90 minute sleep cycle, and why the stage that repairs your body is not the one that saves your memories ◼️ Whether you can pay back sleep debt on the weekend, and what he tells his own teenage sons about school start times ◼️ The nap length that leaves you groggier than before you laid down, and the two windows he says are the only ones worth using ◼️ Why he tells people to stop reading their sleep tracker every morning, and the condition the technology is now creating ◼️ The patient who looked like he stepped off the cover of a fitness magazine and turned out to be one of the most severe cases he has seen ◼️ His own diagnosis, and the number that puts him one point away from severe Follow Andrew Holmes: Instagram —   / sleep_efficiency   X — https://x.com/sleepefficiency LinkedIn —   / andrew-holmes-rpsgt   Sleep Efficiency Website — https://www.sleepefficiency.ca The Health Talks Podcast: ◼️ Instagram —   / thehealthtalkspod   ◼️ TikTok —   / thehealthtalkspod   Sponsors: Guru Energy — guruenergy.com BMG Group — https://bmggroup.ca