Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast. How is everybody doing? This week's topic, as you saw from the title is about sleep, and some tips to help hopefully get a better night's sleep. But before that, let's take care of a couple of housekeeping things. Head over to the show's Instagram page at instagram.com/as_podcast. Just remember @as_podcast, head over there, like the page, send me a message that you're on there, comment on some of the posts, and watch, I'm gonna have some new pictures coming up of my service dog in training Bandit. He's growing; he's just turned 10 months old. He's really making vast strides in the training that we're doing. So it's really great. Sometimes I think he's training me sometimes I think I'm training him. Either way, it's been a fantastic journey that the two of us have embarked upon. Also go to the website spondypodcast.com and sign up for the newsletter. It's been amazing. I've seen just a huge huge increase in sign-ups in the last three, four weeks and it's really cool to see all those notifications coming across. So go to spondypodcast.com and sign up for the newsletter, you'll get a prompt when you go on to the website. And lastly, the big news is a download came in for the show from the 101st country that the show has been listened in and that was Madagascar. So there's like 195 countries or so in the world and this show has been accessed in like 101 of them. To me that's amazing. Over 50% of the countries available somebody has access to the show just mind blowing. When I sat down and first recorded this and thought nobody's really going to listen, you know, why would anybody who I didn't even really know, anybody with Ankylosing Spondylitis to listen. So I can't thank all of you, the listeners, enough, the support, the messages, the encouragement that I get on a weekly basis is just fantastic. Feel free to drop me an email at any time. You can reach me at [email protected], love getting them I'll respond to you as quickly as I can. 

So with that, let's get into today's episode. The topic I want to talk about is sleep. For many of you I see it a come across all the different Facebook forum groups. What's the best mattress, what pillows should I be using; I would kill to have some sleep even just an hour. Sleep is an amazingly challenging thing to try to get on a normal schedule when you have Ankylosing Spondylitis. I'm living proof of that. The daily fatigue that I deal with is amazing. I tell everybody that I can sit down in my office chair and be asleep and a few minutes I can put on something that I'm trying to read or study up on and I'll just fall asleep because I don't generally get a solid night's sleep like many of you. So part of my issue is sleep apnea, I have a really bad and I don't always wear my mask or if I get up from my bed and go out and sleep in the recliner. There's no cpap machine out there. I'm fixing that; I have a person that is getting a new cpap machine. So they're giving me their older one, I’m going to adjust it up so that I'll have a cpap machine in the bedroom and a cpap machine in the living room. Hopefully that'll really help out and make a difference in the sleep. So in this week's episode, I found an article in healthline.com. I'll have a link to it in the show notes. It says eight tips for a better night's sleep when you have Ankylosing Spondylitis. And again, I use the term Ankylosing Spondylitis and I should really be using Axial Spondyloarthritis because these tips are whether you have non-radiographic or Ankylosing Spondylitis, they're applicable across the board. So I should get better in my own mind of using the term axial spondyloarthritis. But again, with that said, let's look at these eight tips that they talk about. Now the author she starts off by saying “you need sleep to rejuvenate your body and feel energized”, which anybody with ankylosing spondylitis can...