Don't Force It: How to Get into College without Losing Yourself in the Process

Anjalee Galion, MD: The Importance of Sleep for Teens

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In today’s episode, I sit down with Dr. Anjalee Galion, a pediatric neurologist and sleep medicine specialist, who shares her inspiring educational journey and her insights about the importance of sleep for teenagers. We talk about the crucial role sleep plays in adolescent health, and how consistent sleep habits and exercise can improve overall well-being. Don’t miss these valuable insights to help your child thrive!

Bio:

Dr. Anjalee Galion is a leader in the field of pediatric neurology and sleep medicine. She practices at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County now under the Rady Children’s Health System in Southern California.  For CHOC Children’s, Dr. Galion serves in several leadership roles including the inaugural Chief Wellness Officer for the healthcare system and as of 2025 she assumed the role as President of the Medical Staff. Dr. Galion has a commitment to fostering the next generation, winning multiple teaching awards at UCSF and CHOC, having previously served as a Program Director for the Child Neurology training program, and founding the Pediatric Subspecialty Faculty's Junior Faculty Leadership Council. Dr. Galion currently chairs the Council on Medical Services (CMS) for the California Medical Association and holds leadership positions representing California for the American Medical Association. Follow Dr. Anjalee on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjalee-galion-md-mba-173154224/

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Anjalee Galion:

A huge group that has been powerful to talk about this is athletes. High performing athletes have 100% figured out that sleep is tied to performance. I cannot tell you the number of professional athletes, professional teams that have sleep coaches and all of these people working on it, because they're in a similar situation. They're young. They often have night games. They need some time to veg out, and the stakes are high, the adrenaline, all of that stuff, but they have figured out that good sleep makes huge yields in performance.

Sheila Akbar:

Hey folks, welcome back to the podcast. It is March. The year is flying by. Today. I'm really excited to bring you a guest that I hope will ground us in just taking care of ourselves. Her name is Anjalee Galion. She is a pediatric neurologist and really a pediatric sleep specialist. And I know when I use the word pediatric worth thinking about little kids, but pediatrics goes up to, you know, 1820 and the subject of sleep really does have a lot of relevance and importance for teenagers who seem to never get enough sleep. So I'm excited to have you hear some of the tips from her and some of the impacts of sleep. But of course, she's just a really fascinating person and has had a really interesting set of life experiences that have taught her amazing lessons and perspectives that she loves to share, so we spend about half of our time really talking about all of that, and I honestly think that that is just as important as the sleep stuff. So I hope you enjoy. Anjalee, thank you so much for joining us today.

Anjalee Galion:

I'm really excited to talk to you. Thank you so much for having me. I always love an opportunity to talk about pediatric neurology and sleep medicine.

Sheila Akbar:

So I definitely want you to share with us what that is, before we go into too much detail about that, I'm really curious about how you ended up there. Can you tell us that story?

Anjalee Galion:

I love that question, because so often it's never what I expected for the people that I work with, and honestly, the people that I admire the most. So I am the daughter of two immigrants from India, and I bring that up because for them, going to Ivy League institutions was everything, because that's how you're going to get a good education. But growing up for a variety of reasons, I really wanted to maybe choose a different path. I really thought I was going to become a professional flute player. I traveled around Europe, you know, through Italy, played in symphonies. It was amazing, and it was so different from anything I thought I could do. I will confess to you that, as I was traveling the world playing music, I was not a great student in high school. I don't want to embarrass you with my GPA. I mean, I graduated, but when it came time for me to get into college, I did not have great opportunities like I thought I would. There was a real misalignment between what I thought was going to happen and then what actually did happen. So I applied to all the Ivies again. Shockingly, I did not get into any, but I started to open up my applications. And one of the places I applied was University of Maryland, because it was actually where my best friend applied, and I got in. And it was amazing. I had the greatest opportunities. I got tapped very quickly for opportunities in research to apply for Rhodes scholarship, Marshall Scholarship, and it was really beautiful, because I had seen what the results were when I didn't have the best grades, even though playing the flute and had given me amazing opportunities. It wasn't what was academically wanted at that time. I was also very genuine on my college applications. So one of the reasons I bring up that story about my music was because it really taught me the grit, and it showed me that if you work hard at something, you can really have great results, right? And I loved that, and it really sets the foundation for who I am as a person. And so I went to the University of Maryland. I was given so many great opportunities there. And I ended up becoming a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellow and doing research on spinal cord regeneration. And I would say that that really started my love for the brain and neuroscience. I worked at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, doing research to find a vaccine from malaria, which, during Operation Iraqi Freedom and endurance freedom was an issue because, in general, something that really kills a lot of soldiers on the battlefield is actually infection. Wow. And to this day, I am grateful to have been able to even be a small part of the service to this country. About a month later, I went to actually go present my research on spinal cord regeneration in San Diego at the society. For neuroscience, and walked into a restaurant and there was a really handsome waiter there, and that ended up becoming my husband. Wow, oh my gosh. So it's these beautiful educational opportunities that actually have taken me on the journey to be where I am today. So I got introduced to pediatric neurology at a random lecture in medical school, which is why I tell kids in college and everywhere, just go to stuff. You'll never know what will happen. And it was interesting one day on a plane, when I was going to visit my husband, I sat next to a guy on the plane who had two pagers. And I was like, that's weird. You have two pagers, because we still use pagers in the hospital and everywhere. And they said, Oh, what do you do? You have two pagers. He said, Oh, I'm a plumber. I said, Oh, cool. He said, What do you do? And I said, Oh, I'm a medical student, and I want to go into pediatric neurology. And he said, Oh, cool. Tell me more about that. And I said, it's this really cool specialty about kids and the brain, and there's not enough people that do it, and you can do all this amazing stuff. What I didn't know was that I was sitting next to Evan Snyder. He is in a renowned MD PhD researcher who was actually brought to UCSD to build and develop an amazing stem cell program, and he was going from Boston Children's to fly out there to help set it up. It was because of that meeting on a plane that I ended up working in his lab and helped me get a residency spot. Amazing, he's masquerading as a plumber, and he's like, I don't tell people what I do, because then they're gonna have all these doctor questions. And he's like, What are the chances you're going to sit next to a pediatric neurologist in training when you're the foremost leader in stem cells. So again, I think there is this theme of Be open, be curious, because in my life, some of the greatest things have come through that. Yeah. So because of great research with Dr Snyder and in his lab in San Diego. I did my pediatrics residency at UCSF Children's Hospital in Fresno. I matched into pediatric neurology at UC Irvine. And while I was there, I got introduced to sleep medicine. So I was actually really fortunate to be able to do a sleep medicine fellowship at UCLA, and I was the first pediatric neurologist they'd ever had.

Sheila Akbar:

This would be a great, I think, moment to pivot to like, what is that and what like, what are you treating? And what kind of patients come to you, and what are they complaining about?

Anjalee Galion:

So it's kind of everything we do, general pediatric neurology. So I used to do a lot of seizures, kids who were having more run of the mill issues like headaches, questions about their development and things like that. But the brain controls sleep, and so all the things that are related to the brain and sleep are also something that I'm really interested in and take care of. So one of the things I got certification in is helping children to sleep better. And how do you sleep? Train infants and children and things like that, because there's a huge need, and there is a pretty significant gap between all of the medical and physiologic things they have to teach us in medical school, and then some of the real world pieces about how are you applying everyday things? We have recently started to really appreciate how much more we could learn about things like nutrition and gi health, the relationship between your mind, body, health, sleep hygiene, all of these things. Because the medical curriculum is so densely packed with the volumes of information, there is an opportunity here. So helping, kind of teach the things around, how do you sleep better, sleep hygiene, but also helping understand the why. So this is how your brain does this, and this is the why of how the sleep is going well or it's not a beautiful population. Are children with autism, and up to 85% of them have sleep issues. And I think it just highlights is that the brain controls sleep, so any issue that affects the brain can also affect sleep. And I think this is really important for your teens to understand, because when you're asleep, you're not unconscious. So if you're worried about doing an exciting podcast with Sheila, or a big test or something going on with friends, it can impact your sleep, and it becomes this vicious cycle of I'm laying in bed worrying and I'm not sleeping, and then I start to associate my bed with the place that I worry. And so some of what I do is just kind of disentangling those misconceptions and helping help you do it better. I love to joke with my patients. We are not the sleep police. Doctors are some of the worst offenders of having bad sleep hygiene. But we want to give you the tools so that, if you want, you can choose to feel better. And I think that one of the things that's really beautiful is some of the data on how sleep affects your productivity and things like that.

Sheila Akbar:

I'm really curious, obviously, for the teenage population, I hear from so many parents and from the kids themselves that they are sleeping maybe five, six hours a night because they feel they have to sacrifice sleep if they want to finish their homework, go to all their practices, have some downtime, some social time, and then that the thing that we all really crave is, just like some, you know, vegging out time, scrolling on social media or watching, you know, some bad TV show on on Netflix or something like that, to fit all that in, they sacrifice sleep. And, you know, we hear among adults the the trend of revenge bedtime procrastination, which I am totally guilty of. This is the only time I get to myself I'm gonna stay up and do something that I want. Yeah, right. And so it's sort of a version of that for kids, but it's like all these obligations that they need to fulfill, and then maybe the social time or online time as well. And we know that that has such a detrimental effect on their ability to learn, ability to stay focused at school. It changes, you know, the foods they desire, and so their diet may suffer, right? Like talk to us about that whole ecosystem, and what can we do about it.

Anjalee Galion:

So I think the first thing to set with is, what's the goal? If the kid feels great is doing well at school and sports and socially and everything's going great. There isn't a number of hours that you have to sleep, but most people are not feeling that good, and that's why they get to you. So I think it's starting with what are your goals? Also, because one of the biggest mismatches we see and where there's a lot of parental conflict is if parents are thinking, you need to sleep nine hours, and the kids thinking, No, I only need five. So I like to start with, Okay, what does the kid want? Because that is the most powerful motivator to get them to change behavior. So we like to start with that, and also tell the parents we understand what you want, but they have to want it. And just like exercise, I can drop you off at the gym, but that does not mean you're going to work out or come home peak physical shape. It really has to be driven. And our goal is to give you options to live healthy for a lifetime. It's not just about until you get to college, right? Because when they get to college, we also want them to make good choices. So going back, I think a really important concept is that adolescents have what we call delayed sleep phase syndrome. Teens are naturally wired to want to go to bed late and sleep late. That is how their natural biology is driven. There is an evolutionary reason, but there also becomes a really powerful social and cultural part to it. It's when their parents are not bugging them, right? It's when they do get a second alone, yeah, and sometimes it's what they can do stuff which isn't really acceptable in the daytime.

Sheila Akbar:

Great. they can try some stuff out without lots of people watching them.

Anjalee Galion:

And I think that's an important concept, because if you talk to teens, they will say, I feel alive. That is when I come I am ready to do it. And so it's important if they are having a physiologic reason why they feel alive and excited. I call it the nighttime kid, right? There's nighttime person and daytime person. And daytime person is really managing all of this stuff that nighttime choices person made. So we talk about, okay, you're feeling that way. Are you having the result that you want? And usually the answer is no. So then we talk about, okay, what are you doing in the daytime? Because here is the sneaky little secret and a really powerful motivational tool. There is something called the synaptic homeostasis theory. Basically these two awesome research researchers, to noni and Sheila, figured out that during the daytime, we're making all these connections. Your brain is literally making all these connections. During nighttime, your brain gets rid of the ones that you don't need. So when you wake up first thing in the morning, you are much more efficient. You have much more clarity of thought. This is why there's a lot of books, things like Habits of Highly Effective People that say, tackle your most difficult tasks in the morning. It is a really powerful motivator to tell teens, if they are feeling like time is limited, you can be even more efficient if you get a good night's sleep and attack this task first thing in the morning. You can often do it in less time and have a higher yield. A huge group that has been powerful to talk about this is athletes. High performing athletes have 100% figured out that sleep is tied to performance. I cannot tell you the number of professional athletes, professional teams that have sleep coaches and all of these people working on it, because they're in a similar situation. They're young, they often have night games. They need some time to veg out, and the stakes are high, the adrenaline, all of that stuff. But they have figured out that good sleep makes huge yields in performance, and when you're talking about people. Who are performing at that level, honestly, like a lot of your students at the top academic level, those small differences can make a huge impact, right? So then for them, if you're tying it to what's your motivation, I can help you get there. That's a really different conversation. Yeah. It also is really powerful for them to realize that when they get to college and things like that, they can have choices in terms of maybe there are some people who are going to stay in that delayed sleep phase, who are going to choose some later classes and things like that, but if they are getting good and healthy sleep, they may be more productive efficient et cetera in the morning.

Sheila Akbar:

Okay, so there's no forcing someone to fall asleep, but are there, are there resources or books, or, you know, other things that you would point families to if they want to kind of get this information in front of their teenagers to help them maybe discover the motivation to change their sleep habits.

Anjalee Galion:

So I think it really depends on your kid. One of the issues is that there are a lot of resources. A lot of times people get resource overload. So honestly, having a conversation with someone that they trust their healthcare provider, a sleep medicine doctor, sometimes there's underlying anxiety, depression. There can be other pretty significant issues, because sleep really is a sensitive indicator for everything else that's going on in your life, if your leg is hurting, if you're worried about a test, if there are significant mental health issues, sleep is always affected. And for many people, it feels more comfortable to say I have a sleep problem, then this other thing is going on. Yeah, so if you think it's a really significant issue, again, I always recommend talking to your doctor about it, getting some resources. They also usually know you pretty well. But I think for parents, a really powerful concept is that parent sleep habits are very much related to children's sleep habits. Parents who were on their phone before bed, using technology, all of that are much more likely to have children that do exactly the same,

Sheila Akbar:

yeah, no surprise, right? They just pay attention to they do what we do and not always what we say, because we also are going to do what we do and not always what we're telling them, right?

Anjalee Galion:

And so just like we think about healthy eating, healthy nutrition, healthy active lifestyles, things like that. I think it's a team effort, so I sometimes will give out a few tips and tricks. So I really like the idea to do exercise between four to 6pm Oh, this helps you naturally increase your body's reaction to the melatonin that gets pushed out around night time, around six to 7pm that tells your body it's going to be time for bed soon. So if you shift your exercise to four to 6pm this is when a lot of practices are and things like that. It can be really helpful. And the other big thing is consistency. So a lot of teens have a tendency. I'll go to sleep really late during the week, maybe take a nap, and then on weekends, I'll sleep really late, and then I'll just pivot back Monday, Tuesday. It's like trying to do all of your workouts on Saturday and not working out the rest of the week. That's not going to work. And so there's a lot of opportunities there where we can help, but also figure out what is the thing that helps you feel really good, and how do we get you there? Right? Because, again, no one is a sleep police.

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we could probably go on about this for a really long time, but I want to be respectful of your time, so let's end it there. If people want to learn more about what you do, how can they reach your your clinic?

Anjalee Galion:

So we recommend looking at the resources at the Children's Hospital of Orange County website. But your pediatrician or your local doctor is also a really great resource.

Sheila Akbar:

Well, Anjalee, thank you so much for your time and sharing so much wisdom with us. I know so many people are going to benefit from this, and yeah, we'll have you back talk more about this.

Anjalee Galion:

Thank you so much. As you can tell Sheila, I love talking about it.

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah, you're so passionate. It's wonderful. Well, we were just starting to scratch the surface, but there, of course, are places you can go to read more about this, and certainly if you think your child may be having an issue with sleep, or you're just kind of want to check if they're even getting enough, I would definitely bring it up with your family doctor, your your child's pediatrician, to see what kind of information they can share with you. Well, that's it for today. We'll see you next time. Thanks.