Why do you wake up at night? What causes these awakenings that prevent sleeping through the night? How do these middle of the night interruptions lead to insomnia, the prolonged episodes where you desperately desire sleep yet cannot catch one wink let alone forty? Most insomniacs imagine stress, an overactive mind, or a genetic background causes this vexing sleep loss. Remarkably, these questions had never been researched until Dr. Barry Krakow and his colleagues conducted a study on 20 classic insomniacs, all of whom believed their problems were due to stress, racing thoughts or a genetic predisposition. In a landmark study, published in the journal SLEEP, they demonstrated 90% of awakenings experienced by these insomniacs were preceded by a disruption in their breathing while asleep. In effect, they found a major, and likely primary, cause for why people wake up at night and have continued to research and demonstrate this physiological breathing problem in thousands of insomnia patients. A lifelong insomniac, Barry Krakow was fortunate to gain seven years of blessed relief—four years in medical school and three at UNM School of Medicine, completing an internal medicine residency. Soon after, divine providence guided him to a sleep medicine career as a clinical specialist and sleep researcher, studying and treating chronic nightmare and insomnia patients at Maimonides Sleep Arts & Sciences, sleep medical center, and Sleep & Human Health Institute, sleep research facility. In the 1990s, Dr. Krakow learned first-hand how unwanted bouts of sleeplessness (insomnia) were not caused solely by the standard explanations found in nearly all medical and psychological textbooks. Insomnia was far more complex and ultimately proved to be intricately linked to sleep breathing problems. Since then, his quarter of a century quest to map out connections between insomnia and sleep-disordered breathing yielded results beyond anything he would have dreamed possible. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx