Presenter: This is Meet a Professional! Hello and welcome! In our studio today is Dr. Benjamin Dale, a somnologist. Good morning, Dr. Dale! Thank you for joining us today!

Dr. Benjamin Dale: Good morning! Thank you for inviting me.

Presenter: To begin with  — what is a somnologist?

Dr. Benjamin Dale: It is a doctor that you go to if you have any problems with

sleep. Sleeping disorders, as we call them. They could be of different kinds. Maybe you are a young mother and have to wake up several times a night to rock your baby. Maybe you are a businessperson and have a hard time falling asleep at night.

Maybe you are an elderly person and have a tendency to wake up early in the morning and cannot go back to sleep. Or maybe you are a student and either study all night or party all night! All of these lead to sleep deprivation, which in turn, leads to all sorts of problems.

Presenter: Like what?

Dr. Benjamin Dale: It usually begins with a feeling of constant tiredness and irritability. Everything irritates you. If you are a parent, you can be unreasonably harsh with your children. If you are a teenager, and teenagers have enough problems as it is, you can be even more irrational and rude with your peers and grown-⁠ups. But this is only the beginning. Not getting enough sleep can also cause health problems. Irritability and fatigue can end in a nervous breakdown or depression. Another typical consequence is obesity  — when people don’t get enough sleep, they gain a lot of weight, which leads to heart problems.

Presenter: Sounds pretty bad. Although, honestly, I’ve never thought that not getting enough sleep is something that needs to be treated by a doctor. It sounds like it’s more related to bad habits. How did you decide to become a somnologist? Has it always been your ambition?

Dr. Benjamin Dale: Not at all! If you had told me when I was a medical student that I would be a somnologist, I would have laughed at you. Back then my ambition was to become a family doctor. I’m still a great supporter of family medicine and believe that only by knowing a whole family well can a doctor treat and prevent diseases in patients.

Presenter: So what went wrong in your plans?

Dr. Benjamin Dale: Nothing, actually. For many years I was a successful family doctor. Then I started noticing that many health problems that my patients had were related to not getting enough sleep. That intrigued me, and I went back to Medical school. Since then, I’ve been a somnologist.

Presenter: Isn’t it a rather new medical specialty?

Dr. Benjamin Dale: Yes, it is. And it’s becoming more and more in demand.

Presenter: Why is that?

Dr. Benjamin Dale: Well, even though people have been suffering from sleep disorders for as long as humankind has existed, recently it has become a more frequent problem with all age groups and categories of patients. In my opinion, it is connected with recent changes in technology. In the past people would read a book before going to bed, then they started watching TV instead, and now  — computers, smartphones and other gadgets have taken that place. Many stay up long into the early morning hours glued to their screens, unable to stop. And then they have to wake up to go to work or to school. This creates additional stress, especially for kids. Here we need to remember that a teenager needs a minimum of eight hours of sleep per day. A bare minimum! Better if it’s nine or ten. Another problem is that our houses are full of electronic devices that we tend not to turn off at night. They can create noise and vibration. We may not consciously notice them, but our bodies do. Add it all together and you will understand that it is very difficult to get a peaceful night’s sleep these days... (fading out).