Star 94 Mornings radio show co-hosts Cindy and Jimmy are awake and on the air in the wee hours of the morning.
To accommodate the early work schedule, Jimmy wakes up at 3:45 a.m. each workday. He’s able to take a nap during the day to squeeze in time for lost sleep. As a mom, Cindy doesn’t have time to nap, so she makes up her sleep by going to bed earlier in the evening.
No matter how they try to catch up, Cindy and Jimmy agree on one thing: They always feel tired.
“It’s punishing,” says Jimmy. “It constantly feels like you have jetlag. That’s how you feel all the time – kind of like you’re in a fog.”
The co-hosts decided to undergo a sleep study at Piedmont to determine if they have sleep issues that need to be addressed or if they should just attribute their exhaustion to their nontraditional work schedules.
“You always hear stories in the news about how if you don’t get enough sleep, you’re going to have a heart attack, have a stroke or gain weight,” says Jimmy. “Sleep is like gold to us. Anything we can do to improve the quality of our sleep, we wanted to do.”
Jimmy’s sleep study results
Aris Iatridis, M.D., a sleep medicine specialist at Piedmont, told Jimmy he has a mild form of sleep apnea. Sleep apnea occurs when an adult stops breathing for short periods of time during sleep.
Dr. Iatridis explained that over the course of the study, Jimmy only slept five or six hours. During this time, his airways shut down about 70 times.
“What shocked me was how many times I woke up in the middle of the night,” says Jimmy. “I think it was about 13 times an hour from that ‘choking noise’ [related to sleep apnea]. It was kind of scary.”
Dr. Iatridis recommended Jimmy start sleeping with a pillow under his head to open up his airways and consider using a CPAP machine.
Cindy’s sleep study results
Dr. Iatridis found that while Cindy does not have any major sleep issues, she is a light sleeper. Both she and Jimmy likely suffer from shift work sleep disorder, which occurs in people who work irregular hours like they do.
Dr. Iatridis and Cindy joked that she could easily “catch up” on her sleep by taking more vacations.
How they feel about their experience
Jimmy said he was initially concerned that undergoing the study would feel more like a clinical experience – as if he were going to sleep in a hospital for the night.
“It wasn’t like going to a hospital,” he shares. “It was like a high-end hotel room.”
Jimmy joked that the best part was when he forgot about being hooked up, was getting comfortable and about to fall asleep, and he heard a voice through a speaker, “Can you please move your cords?”
“You kind of forget [a sleep technician] is watching you,” laughs Cindy.
Both hosts say they were glad they underwent the study because they’d been curious about the results for so long.
To learn more about sleep studies, click here or visit Piedmont Sleep Services.
Need to make an appointment with a Piedmont physician? Save time, book online.