.jpg)
Up-Level Your Life with Mindy
Up-Level Your Life with Mindy
Unveiling the Science of Sleep with Sleep Expert Tracy Hannigan
Sleep expert Tracy Hannigan explains why understanding sleep is so crucial to our overall well-being and how we might be complicating our relationship with rest. She brings her expertise as a qualified sleep therapist to dispel common myths while offering practical insights for anyone struggling with insomnia.
• Sleep is the only major health pillar we cannot directly control, unlike nutrition, movement, and social contact
• The "8-hour sleep" recommendation is merely a guideline—your personal sleep need is genetically determined and varies throughout life
• Sleep trackers provide interesting data but are often inaccurate and can create unnecessary anxiety about sleep metrics
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) should be the first intervention for insomnia, not medication
• Normal sleep includes brief awakenings throughout the night—most of us just don't remember them
• Screen time before bed may not be as harmful as commonly believed—phones and tablets aren't bright enough to significantly impact sleep
• Creating "perfect" sleep conditions can backfire by reinforcing anxiety about sleep
• Being present in the moment, especially in your body, naturally reduces sleep-disrupting anxiety
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review to help others find this valuable information. Connect with Tracy at tracythesleepcoach.co.uk or find her as Tracy the Sleep Coach on major social media platforms.
To learn more about Mindy CLICK HERE
hey friends, this is your host, mindy duff, and you're listening to up level your life with mindy, your number one personal growth podcast that will bring you closer to uncovering your greatest self. As a certified holistic health and nutrition coach, I created this podcast for anyone who desires to improve physically, emotionally and spiritually. I'll be interviewing experts and sharing tips and tricks that have helped not only my clients, but that have guided me on my own transformational journey. I believe that we all have a greatness that lies within. We just need to uncover it. Are you ready to level up? Then let's begin. Hi everyone and welcome back to Uplevel your Life with Mindy. I am your host, mindy Duff, and today I am so excited for this episode because we are going to be talking about sleep, so maybe don't get cozy for this one, so you can stay awake and alert and get all these tips on how to have a good sleep here.
Speaker 1:I am definitely not a sleep expert. I am a sleep obsessive person. Maybe I don't know. I'm really interested in sleep have been for years so I have a sleep expert with me today. Her name is Tracy Hannigan and let me tell you just a little bit about Tracy. She is a qualified sleep therapist recognized by the Society for Behavioral Sleep Medicine. She has a degree in psychology, is a registered osteopath and a certified health coach, and she brings all of her skills and experience to the table in working with adults with insomnia, using only evidence-based approaches. When Tracy isn't helping her clients, she's in the garden weightlifting and buying far too many houseplants, and I feel you on that one, tracy. I had to cut myself off.
Speaker 2:But getting close to the line.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to our conversation.
Speaker 1:And before I kind of get into my questions for you, I just would like to hear in your own words can you tell us a little bit more about what you really do and the types of people that you work?
Speaker 2:with what I really do is an interesting one.
Speaker 2:A lot of people come to me because they're having difficulty with their sleep and I guess the first thing out the gate is I work exclusively with people who have insomnia. Sometimes they may have other sleep disorders that might need treatment alongside or instead of, or first. Particularly they tend to be females they self-select, of course, tend to be in the perimenopausal and postmenopausal age category, although there is no sort of limitation and the reason I say that. You know people come to me for their sleep but they end up coming out the other end of sleep therapy with something much better than just good sleep, and it sounds really weird to say it like that, but I help people improve their sleep using cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy for insomnia, which are both evidence-based approaches.
Speaker 2:But a lot of people find that the journey and the applications of the tools that actually really help sleep in the long run actually creates more of a personal development experience for them. As they are going through they learn really quickly that there are no quick tips and quick tricks, that kind of can magic sleep. Back into our experience, it's really about, with insomnia specifically almost getting out of sleep's way so that it can do what it needs to do. And so people end up finding themselves on a little bit of an adventure, even if they start out thinking I just want to tick this box that says I get good sleep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we are definitely going to come back and talk more in depth about what cognitive behavior therapy is and what that would look like for helping with insomnia. But let's talk about just sleep itself for a little bit. Now I'm going to go ahead and tell everyone listening I'm not going to use this episode to convince you that you need to sleep, and that might sound silly, but like there are people out there that think maybe it's not that important, I didn't used to think I knew it was important. I think we all recognize when we are tired we don't feel so great.
Speaker 1:But there is a book out there and, tracy, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Dr Matthew Walker's work, but there's a book called why we Sleep, and that's something that, if you're just not 100 percent convinced that sleep is that important, I challenge you to read that book or listen to it on Audible. It will change your mind. I used to think it was, you know, kind of important, just like nutrition is important and moving your body is important. Nope, after reading that book, I'm like this, I think, is maybe the most important thing that we get good rest and then everything else Right, and I think that is what makes insomnia so frustrating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there are. There's some really important fundamental pillars for our human health. Sleep is one of them. Nutrition is the other one, movement and social contact those are kind of the four key pillars of health.
Speaker 2:What I would say is you're right that a lot of the messaging around sleep is intended to be delivered to people who don't prioritize it, because most of us we recognize it's important, whether we prioritize it or not. But unfortunately the messaging around sleep tends to be a bit scaremongery and it tends to be read by the people who would sleep if they could. In the first place and with particular reference, I've had numbers of clients approach me and work with me off the back of that particular book. All I would say is, if you read that first chapter and you feel particularly anxious as a result, I would like you to Google a person named Guzy G-U-Z-E-Y who takes a critical and somewhat different look at the first chapter of that book. He stopped at the first chapter of that book and he stopped at the first chapter because there are lots and lots of different ways of looking at data points around sleep and what I would say is, if you're having difficulty sleeping, it doesn't really matter what the academic interpretation is it's generally not helpful to focus on things like health consequences of sleep.
Speaker 2:It's much healthier we're talking about health and those four pillars it's much healthier for us to focus on the things that we can control, because we cannot control sleep. We can control what we put in our mouth, we can control how much we move and how we move and we can control our social interactions. Sadly, when people don't sleep well, what do they stop doing? They stop exercising because it's harder to exercise. They stop going out and they stop being social and they also, if they cook before they tend to stop cooking and maybe don't make choices that are the healthiest for them. Make choices that are the healthiest for them. Of those four things, sleep is the only one that we can't control. We can influence it, but we can't control it. So I would not over-focus too much if you sleep poorly on a lot of the messaging out there, because it's really geared toward people who don't prioritize the sleep procrastinators of the crowd, which I've been one myself.
Speaker 1:I hear you sleep procrastinators of the crowd, which you know, I've been one myself. I hear you. Yeah, that's a very important distinction. I'm glad you made that. So yeah, we're not focusing on that it's good or not good. We're just assuming, on this episode, that, yeah, of course we want to get good sleep and going along with that, oh, the messaging We've heard for decades that we need eight hours of sleep. What is your take on the eight hours recommendation? And if it's not eight hours, how do you know how much sleep you really do need?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like to call this one the eight hour myth, and that's not because a lot of people don't do well with eight hours. The recommendations are in general and again we're looking at the middle of a very large bell curve. Most adults do well with seven to nine hours. Some people need more than that, some people need less than that. If you start getting out too much, to the extremes, that's where we have difficulty. But that eight hour myth extreme. So that's where we have difficulty. But that eight hour myth unfortunately can create a situation where somebody who is perfectly fine on six hours and 45 minutes, or seven hours, or seven hours and 15 minutes, particularly in a day and age where we have devices, where we try to optimize everything into our life, we try to over-engineer living. They then say, well, I need to do certain things in order to get that magic eight-hour number, because if I don't get the eight-hour number, then all these horrible things are going to happen. And they have slept well, fine, they've been sleeping fine, and then they give themselves insomnia and we've talked about the dynamic of how that happens. That's where that general recommendation comes in.
Speaker 2:In reality, our sleep need is very individual recommendation comes in In reality, our sleep need is very individual. It varies across our lifespan and it's genetically determined, just like our chronotype is genetically determined. I'm an early bird, some people are night owls, most people are right in the middle, I guess, because they fit in society right, so they're considered the normal ones and we are fewer and we're kind of out on the edges. So our sleep need is genetically determined, varies across the lifespan, varies from month to month, from week to week, which is why we don't like to focus too much on individual days. But in general, whatever that number is, that allows you to fall asleep in 15 or 20 minutes, or up to 30 minutes if you're an older person, to be able to wake once or twice in the night, long enough to remember it and then to fall back to sleep.
Speaker 2:And the reality is. Reality is we fall, we wake up a lot in the night. We just don't always remember it. And then, once you wake up in the morning and you get going and you start your day, do you have enough physical and mental and emotional energy to, in the morning and you get going and you start your day? Do you have enough physical and mental and emotional energy to do the things that you need to do in the day, and so if for you that is seven hours and 15 minutes, for me my ideal would be in the nine, nine and a quarter hour range. Whatever that number is for you is your number, so I wouldn't pick a number out of the sky and strive for it, because that can create more problems.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I definitely agree with you on creating more problems. And something else that I think is a blessing and a curse are our Fitbits and our Garmin watches and our Apple watches and I have one and I love it and one of the reasons that I wanted a fitness watch, um, I wanted to track my steps and I wanted to keep track of my sleep. Those were like my main things and that's why I ended up with the watch that I have and I think it's great and, um, to keep kind of a oh, to keep tabs on it, so you notice when something is abnormal for you, right. But I know that they're not always accurate, because sometimes it says, oh, you went to bed at 10 o'clock. I'm like, no, I didn't Like I laid in my bed and I was on my phone till like 1115.
Speaker 1:I wasn't asleep, but like my watch doesn't know the difference Right, so it thinks I'm sleeping, and I'm not.
Speaker 2:So I'm just curious of your take on those, those fitness watches, and how accurate they are. Yeah, I mean, I wear one to love mine. My partner wears the most overpriced one you can probably find and I, but I don't use it for sleep. For people who don't have issues with their sleep, it might be kind of interesting to look at. For people who do have issues with their sleep, it might be kind of interesting to look at. For people who do have issues with their sleep.
Speaker 2:It creates an over-focus which is problematic in two different ways. One is you're right, the information is not accurate. Some watches are better and are getting more kind of closer to the mark with certain aspects like are you sleeping or are you awake. So they're starting to get better and they're using essentially lots of different proxies to try to guess whether you're sleeping or not. But the real issue that that I have with them is just because they provide us some information doesn't mean we should be taking it at face value. So, for example, sleep staging they're not accurate.
Speaker 2:They're just. They're really off the mark. And that is where, because it's available, people tend to perseverate and put a lot of mental energy into these things. So they're definitely not accurate. But even if they were exactly accurate, people don't know how to put that information into context. So, for example, somebody has booked a call with me in the past saying I'm concerned that I'm not getting 100% deep sleep, and I would say that's a good thing that you're not getting 100% deep sleep. That is not how we are supposed to sleep. That would be really unhealthy and something would be wrong if that was the case.
Speaker 2:The percentage of time we spend in light sleep versus deeper sleep, versus REM sleep, again varies across the lifespan in particular, and there's just not a lot of good information to be taken. So it might produce a really like mine, a really pretty colorful graph, but take it with a grain of salt, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I love that advice, even though I mean, I check mine every single morning. Again, I'm just, I'm curious about it. There was a time where I was frustrated because, with things like deep sleep, it'll say well, you're not getting very much deep sleep lately. I'm like well, what am I supposed to do about that? Like I can't, like I'm sleeping, I don't know how to make more of one or the other, and I don't think we're supposed to. I think you know, if you're doing certain things, like you know, if you're drinking a lot of alcohol right before bed, that's going to impact your sleep, and maybe that's what somebody needs to see to go oh, you know what, those couple glasses of wine I'm having at night actually are impacting me. So then in that case and that's useful then you can go okay, well, I see it in real time.
Speaker 1:But something again you have to take all the data with a grain of salt. But something I've noticed in my own just sleep data is that it kind of evens out throughout the week. I might have one day where I don't get very much deep and I got a ton of REM, and then the next day I get more deep and less. You know, I don't think that it's supposed to be every night. We get X amount of deep we're supposed to hit or X amount of REM. It's what does your body need each day?
Speaker 2:Our brain knows how to get the sleep that it needs. If you take healthy sleepers and you take a group of them and you deprive them of sleep by keeping them awake for long periods, the next time they get to sleep, if that person's brain says I need some deeper sleep, they will prioritize the deeper sleep before other things. Another person might other person's brain might prioritize REM sleep. So when they fall asleep they go straight into REM and they dream and dream and dream, and dream and dream. The brain will get what it needs. We don't need to micromanage that. Yeah, yeah, we can't really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and that's where the frustration comes for people where I'm not getting the sleep score that I want, because you know what's going on, then they stop drinking um that.
Speaker 2:That can persist, but in others you, you can see a dramatic difference in their self-perceived sleep quality. So, even stepping, stepping away from the device, which is hard to do, I asked my partner you know how, how'd you sleep last night? And he has to check his watch to tell me I'm like no, how do you feel this morning is what I really want to know know how do you feel this morning is what I really want to know.
Speaker 2:So their self-perceived sleep is better and the same is true for me. One glass of wine with with dinner it had it would have an impact if you looked at the measurements yeah my self-perception is it doesn't have a big impact, but if I have two with dinner, I definitely notice it. And the other thing that you can also notice with these watches is you can correlate people's HRV as well. But again, hrv and sleep fluctuate for lots and lots and lots of different reasons, but for myself I've seen those two move pretty nicely together.
Speaker 1:What can you tell me about HRV and sleep? I guess I'm kind of.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting road. It's one that they are working hard on continuing to try to pave. Not being an HRV expert, but heart rate variability is an average measurement of the variability in the time between beats and, in general, it is better to have a higher heart rate variability than it is a lower heart rate variability, because it signals that a body is able to respond and adapt to demand and changes in demand in the way you use your body, as opposed to if you have a lower HRV. When people, just as an example, drinking alcohol and having poor sleep, their HRV usually tanks. When people are sick, their HRV will sometimes spike and then tank.
Speaker 2:It has a really obvious impact. My partner swears he can predict when he's going to become unwell because he knows his HRV pattern so well. I don't know mine nearly as well. I'm kind of like well, that's good, it's in the green zone. It's about as technical as I get. But in general, the healthier we are, the more resilient we are, the higher our HRV. And if people are not sleeping well, that can have an impact on HRV. It could be the sleep directly. It could be also whatever is causing the difficulty with sleep. When we talk about the insomnia cycle and the thing that keeps insomnia going over time, it tends to be anxiety or perfectionism around the sleep itself. Stress itself has an impact on HRV. So you know, I don't know enough about all the studies to tease out. Have they actually separated the sleep and the stress? I think that would be pretty difficult to do in a human being.
Speaker 1:but there's definitely an impact. Yeah, Kind of a chicken or the egg thing Like is it the HRV, Is it the stress? Is it the? Yeah, not, not really sure yet. So let's talk about insomnia a little bit Now. Everyone that's human on the planet has experienced some kind of insomnia at one point in their life where you can't fall asleep or you wake up. In the night, Maybe you fall asleep, great, but you wake up for more than just you know a couple of minutes and you just can't seem to fall back asleep. Then Tell us a little bit more about, maybe, some of the common things that you see with that and what what do we do about it?
Speaker 2:Right, I think it's a good starting place to say that if, if we are experiencing a stressful time in our life or an exciting time in our life, we kind of rationalize poor sleep as well, of course I'm not sleeping because that just happened or this just happened, and so we don't worry about it too much. It's normal and expected that those kinds of stressors, even if they're good stressors, would have an impact on our sleep, and we evolved that way. We were not meant to sleep for eight hours solid under a tree without the ability to wake up and fight off the lion. So if we consider that tendency adaptive, in a situation where we're under high stress, our brain is saying, oh, we might be being chased by a lion, so we really have to be alert and that makes sleep difficult. Now, if people have that situation and it passes and they move forward into the future, but they've become worried about the sleep itself, they get stuck in a cycle where the brain is worrying about not sleeping and then their sleep gets poorer, and then they get more upset and frustrated and annoyed and try more and more and more things and then their sleep sleep gets poorer. They get stuck in that vicious circle. So, in order to really oversimplify it, the best thing to do if you're going through a stressful experience and you have short-term insomnia which has affected everybody on the planet, try not to become worried about the sleep itself. That is the number one take-home message easier said than done, because we get all of these messages about sleep, poor sleep. If you don't sleep, all these things are going to happen. But try to step out of that and recognize actually me not sleeping well right now is showing me that the system is working exactly the way that it is supposed to work. And if we can take that on board, we can step back and just let it happen. And if you let it happen, then the sleep will return to kind of normal, more satisfying sleep for that person.
Speaker 2:If somebody is stuck in that cycle, the what do you do? Answer is a little bit more complicated. The answer is not sleep hygiene, it is not taking over-the-counter things. It is not taking over-the-counter things. It is not sleep medication, even If you look at the guidelines put out by all major medical and sleep associations. It is sleep therapy should be the number one intervention. It's successful for over 85% of people for whom it's suited. But it takes more time and is a little harder to deliver than sleeping medication. But what I will say is the research also supports that the effects are longer lasting than sleep medication because you are learning skills for life.
Speaker 2:My clients come to understand sleep better than the rest of the population aside from maybe the sleep experts and they then know if something happens in the future how do I respond to the change in my sleep, or actually, how do I not respond to the change in my sleep, and so they develop resilient sleep that lasts a lifetime.
Speaker 2:If somebody has gotten used to a short-term quote, unquote, big air quotes, fix what usually happens is that lasts for a short period of time and for a variety of reasons, that effect wears off and then they try something else, and they try something else, and they try something else and then they think, oh, I must be broken, when actually all that trying has fed into this fear of not sleeping and has kind of kept them stuck. And so cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia helps unwind all of the mental stuff as well as looks at things like what is the sleep structure itself look like? Are people spending 13 hours in bed? And so the brain says I can generate six hours, but I've got 13 hours to do it in and that worsens sleep over time. So we look at those structural elements, but a lot of emphasis is put on how are we viewing sleeplessness and sleep and how can we change how we think about it and feel about it so that we don't react in a way that makes it worse.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it's so. I just want to drive home this point again in case anybody missed it that what Tracy is saying here is that all the studies and all the research show sleep therapy should be the first thing that people try when you have a sleep. Maybe you went to the doctor and the doctor's like, yes, you definitely need some help with sleep, you have a sleep problem. Sleep therapy with a certified sleep therapist professional that's what the number one thing is. I don't think I had ever heard that anywhere else before. And you're right. I mean, that is what it says. All we hear is well, I can give you a sleeping pill or we can try this. You know, you can do over the counter, you can do a prescription or um, but that's not and there are.
Speaker 2:There are places for these things, people don't have to be off medication in order to do sleep therapy. Sometimes they're too scared to come off before they have confidence in their own ability to sleep and and there's a, I think, a good role for sleep medications like oh, I just had so shoulder surgery and I'm going to be in pain for three weeks. Nipping that in the bud early is probably better than setting up a situation where that person is in pain and then they're worrying about their sleep.
Speaker 2:So there's definitely a role, but a lot of physicians don't get much sleep education at all. I have colleagues who've told me they get one or two hours of sleep education. Many of them, unless they've been interested in sleep, have never heard of sleep therapy and, unfortunately, the way that healthcare systems are set up, it is cheaper and more scalable to prescribe medication than it is to deliver therapy. And it's not talk therapy. We're not talking about childhood issues and all that. It's very practical and homework driven. I would say there's things to do that you can then see the results of and for a lot of people, unless they're looking for support while they're tapering off of a medication which can take longer, it really only takes a few sessions.
Speaker 1:It's not as big a commitment as people often think that it is big a commitment, as people often think that it is. So, before we talk about actually what it might look like this sleep therapy, can you tell me who? Maybe some examples on the types of situations, the types of people, so you know if it's something short term? Or oh yeah, a couple times last week I couldn't go back to sleep. That's probably probably not for you, but some people, I think, don't realize, because it's become so normal for them to just wake up in the night and they're just awake for an hour and they just think that's, I mean, they don't like it maybe. But so what are maybe some qualifications? Or just some scenarios where you say, oh, this type of thing might warrant taking a closer look.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the classic diagnostic criteria say that you have had to have had three months of issues, four more nights a week with difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, et cetera. But you don't have to wait three months, but you're absolutely right If it's been a couple of weeks. We also don't want to make a big project out of fixing the sleep, because interpreting that as a problem sets up a problem that doesn't actually really exist. So sometimes it's a bit of expectation management. You know what is normal and what is not. But when you get to repeated difficulty with falling asleep, repeated extended wake-ups, you're distressed about them. They're having an impact on your life. That's an appropriate time to reach out for help.
Speaker 2:There are scenarios in which sleep therapy wouldn't be appropriate as a first intervention, and that would be if a person has unmanaged severe mental health issues. Those issues really have to be addressed because it's going to make it difficult to engage in the sleep therapy element of it. If somebody has sleep apnea that is untreated, we at least need to get some treatment on board with the sleep apnea in order for the sleep therapy to have an impact on their daily functioning. So if some, for example, how would I know the difference? Now, these have different ways.
Speaker 2:There are different ways of diagnosing these sleep, all these sleep disorders just like 85 or 90 of them now and insomnia is characterized by that tired and wired, can't sleep feeling, whereas other sleep disorders are characterized by falling asleep all the time, all day.
Speaker 2:They generally don't have difficulty with the falling asleep part, but lots and lots and lots of waking in the night and because they don't have that anxiousness that kind of keeps the arousal high, there's nothing to counteract the sleepiness that they feel because of the sleep deprivation. So that's how they kind of split them into those two camps. So if you have had a couple months of sleep disruption and it's really bothering you, you feel really tired and wired, especially if you're anxious about it and you're not falling asleep constantly, you're probably a reasonable candidate, provided you're generally physically and mentally well. There are certain adaptations for people with certain kinds of health conditions. There are a lot of individual scenarios but in a nutshell, if you have more of an insomnia picture and less of a different kind of sleepy picture, at least get yourself assessed so that you know what you're working with. That's really important when people come to me. The assessment element is absolutely crucial because I couldn't do certain kinds of suggest certain kinds of interventions if somebody was really sleepy.
Speaker 2:If they had treated sleep apnea and they also have insomnia. We have more options, so it's very individualized, but in general you're distressed with your sleep. Get it assessed. You might find that your distress is because you think that it's abnormal to wake up at night period when it's completely normal to wake up period. So that kind of chat can be really helpful for people. I've seen the light bulb go off and then they're like oh, one less thing I have to worry about, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I would say, just from listening to you here, so waking up for some people, um, it might be very normal, but waking up and being having the anxiety and the I can't stop. Yeah, I can't stop thinking about X, y, z. All these problems are coming back to my head. It's three o'clock in the morning. I can't fall back asleep. That's not common, that's yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really common presentation. Um, if, if you looked at one of these graphs of somebody in a sleep lab, you see the people go into deep sleep, they come up into very light sleep and they come back down. We're actually having brief awakenings when we come up into that light sleep and that's that's our arousal system built into how we sleep. That's a scanning for the tigers.
Speaker 2:We spend enough time in light sleep. We actually spend almost half the night in light sleep so that we can be awoken if we're about to be eaten and then we go back into lighter sleep. So it's normal to have a couple of those be long enough for us to remember If there are lots of them that we remember and then we fall back to sleep. We tend to think is there another sleep disorder present? That's creating the wake up, but they still have enough sleepiness to fall back to sleep. But the wake up that happens, and then the person's there and awake and frustrated and annoyed and thinking about all the problems of the world and basically having a difficult time managing their thinking. That is a classic presentation for somebody who could be helped with sleep therapy.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about sleep therapy. Now you mentioned that it doesn't have to be a long, intensive process. That might just be done in a few different sessions. You've mentioned homework, but what I mean? What types of things do you do?
Speaker 2:people have to do we look at some of the basic pillars of sleep therapy in general? We definitely spend a lot of time on this mindset element and the catastrophization and the fear of not sleeping. Not sleeping is really uncomfortable, but our brain is responding to it like the house is burning down. What we have to do is say, wait a minute, the sausages are burning is burning down. What we have to do is say, wait a minute, the sausages are burning, but the house is not burning down. So we spend some time reframing what we think around sleep. We look at these unhelpful beliefs that we have around sleep and correct those, and so that can be helpful from an eyebrows up point of view. We've all had mental epiphanies where we go oh yeah, that makes sense. Mental epiphanies where we go oh yeah, that makes sense. So there's a lot of that that happens.
Speaker 2:We do some I guess you would call it acceptance work around the sleeplessness itself Classic example of where this would be applied. And acceptance does not mean don't do anything about it. It's not resignation. This is about dropping the struggle. And a classic example could be if you go out dancing and it's two o'clock in the morning, well, of course you want to be awake, but if you're at home in bed at two o'clock in the morning and you're awake, you're really annoyed, angry and frustrated. Being awake is a neutral experience. It's the same thing in both scenarios. It's just the meaning that we've given it, and so there are different ways of helping, I guess, detach from that struggle. So, along with the cognitive bits, those elements are really helpful, and they form the majority of the work.
Speaker 2:One of the things that happens when people spend a lot of time in bed, really distressed, is that the bed becomes associated with the struggle to sleep Before we have sleeping issues. The bed is a place that we sleep. You know, we probably appreciate it because it costs us a lot of money and it's probably really comfy, but we don't really think about it any more than that. Our body, though, and our brain, says bed is where sleep happens. Bed, sleep, bed, sleep, bed, sleep. The more time we spend awake, frustrated, agitated, in bed, the more the brain says oh, sometimes I sleep here, but then I also plan my next day, and I think about the meeting I had 10 years ago, where I tapped my pencil on the table and annoyed everybody, or I think about the conversation I have to have with so-and-so. We go all over the place, and so that can actually become a habit.
Speaker 2:In bed, you could be sleepy on the sofa and the minute you go to bed, two things happen. One is oh, I've got to get to sleep, so there's performance pressure. And then you get into bed and the brain says, oh, it's time to party, it's time to think about all the things. That becomes a habit because of the cues that we've accidentally given our body by saying, oh, this is where we do this, so we reverse, engineer some of those things and where it's appropriate, if people are spending excessive amounts of time in bed relative to how much they're sleeping, we can look at looking at the sleep schedule a little bit Now.
Speaker 2:Now, a lot of times that scares people. The way that it used to be done very and it's still done by some practitioners is very much by the numbers, which doesn't always set people up for success, and so what I would say is have an open mind when you go to a sleep therapist to see how they work. It is often called time in bed restriction, and if we again, if we look at people who can generate eight hours of sleep if you let them stay in bed for two weeks for 13 hours a day, they're going to get insomnia. The way you reverse that is you take some of that awake time away and you train the brain. If you're going to sleep, you got to do it in this block and there are lots of different ways to dice that so that it's successful for people. But that's sleep therapy in a nutshell.
Speaker 1:Very, very interesting. And again, if you're someone who's like, well, you know, health is important to me. I eat really good and I exercise and I know I don't sleep great, but I do everything else. I know I don't sleep great, but I do everything else oh boy, I think that I would spend the extra couple, spend the money on a couple extra sessions and see if you can't get your sleep optimized, because you deserve it. I mean, it's something that's accessible to everyone and it's not that Sometimes, they're really small changes.
Speaker 2:You know, when you describe sleep therapy and you talk about time of bed restriction and relationship with the bed and the cognitive, it sounds really big. Sometimes it's as simple as make sure you're fueled before you go to bed If you've eaten dinner at five o'clock with your kids.
Speaker 2:You might want to take a little complex carb protein snack right before you go to bed. It could be something as simple as, for a little while, just be a little bit more consistent with your wake up time. Don't lay in bed extra in the morning. Use that time as an opportunity to build more sleep drive going forward. Sometimes the changes that person needs to make are really small in scale. That haven't. They haven't outsized impact. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you've shared some, but I'm curious in our last few minutes here, I want to hear all your favorite sleep hygiene tips for for everyone. I mean everyone is going to go to bed tonight? I mean I hope so. We all, we all. There are things that we know we probably should do and shouldn't do, but what are your some of your top absolute musts like for your own sleep? What are some things that you definitely do and definitely don't do to make sure you are getting the best sleep you can?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is a really interesting one, and I will just caveat this by saying my clients have insomnia and they have better sleep hygiene than I do. So I'm not necessarily a model, but I think the takeaway is, once you have insomnia, sleep hygiene isn't the thing that's going to sort it out, but that, setting that aside, if we can look at these things very neutrally, for example, it can be really helpful to have a dark room, because then the lights from the outside aren't going to wake you up. But if you are tempted to take your blind to the window, then it's the fear of the light keeping you awake and the light itself. So we want to kind of be neutral and reasonable with these things. We also know people who fall asleep on a park bench in the middle of the afternoon. Not a necessity, but it can be helpful. Same thing with noise.
Speaker 2:I tend to be a little bit of a light sleeper. Last night it was a little windy. With noise, I tend to be a little bit of a light sleeper. Last night it was a little windy, it was also really hot. So keeping your room as quiet as you can again without going overboard and burdening yourself with lots of equipment to drown sound out that you then have to take camping with you, right?
Speaker 2:We don't want to set a scenario like that so dark, quiet, cool room scenario like that so dark, quiet, cool room. Probably more important than having a dark room and having a quiet room, because our body temperature needs to be able to drop for us to have really good, deep, satisfying sleep. If there are perimenopausal women in the crowd, I can give you all kinds of individual tips on that, but in general you want the room to be a little cooler than you would be comfortable sitting in quietly, not moving, for a couple of hours. I personally like 1617C I don't know what that translates to in Fahrenheit. I feel like a recommendation. I've heard a lot is 65 Fahrenheit.
Speaker 1:I feel like a recommendation. I've heard a lot is 65 Fahrenheit, yeah that sounds about right yeah.
Speaker 2:A little bit cooler than you might ideally find if you're minimally dressed sitting there for a while. A lot of the things that people say that they feel like make up sleep hygiene recommendations. There's just no basis in fact for some of these, and so I wanted to touch on this. A lot of people say, well, I can't look at screens for two hours before I go to bed. I've been known to drop my phone on my face scrolling on Instagram because I fall asleep.
Speaker 2:Way back when it's now 10 years ago, they did a study looking at people's dim light melatonin onset.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that happens many, many hours before we actually go to sleep like between four and six hours is that we will experience a little burst of melatonin in our brain gets secreted and it begins this cascade, this process.
Speaker 2:It is inhibited by bright blue light. So daylight again, strong signal for the daytime, not so much tonight. But a laptop is bright enough, puts out enough light if you have it on full brightness to have an impact. And so they study people looking looking at a screen on a laptop, full brightness, for five hours before they went to bed. So they crossed that dim light melatonin onset period and they looked at their melatonin onset and said, oh yeah, it definitely has a 90 minute delay, definitely has an impact, but they didn't actually look at the sleep itself. So fast forward, more research being done. There is an impact on dim light melatonin onset with really bright screens and with light, but the screen condition, for example, the difference is about three minutes, four minutes, and a phone is not bright enough to have an impact and a tablet isn't bright enough to have an impact.
Speaker 2:So what I would say is instead of creating this list of things you can't do at night. Look at it as an opportunity for you to do something that you enjoy doing and that might be watching television.
Speaker 2:It might be, having one last look at the houseplants on Instagram, or whatever it happens to be. Don't should all over yourself and make your evening miserable, in order to try to quote unquote. Protect your sleep, because that's sending a message to your brain that if you don't sleep, it's dangerous. I think it's even more important for people who have difficulty with sleep to hear that. I know it doesn't sound very exciting, this kind of list of sleep hygiene tips, but really there are no perfect conditions that have to be met for people to sleep reasonably well. If you know that watching zombie movies is going to give you distressing nightmares all night, just don't watch a zombie movie.
Speaker 2:I do look at the evening time, the pre-sleep period, which they kind of define as dinner onwards as an opportunity for us to put things into our life that we enjoy doing Maybe we don't have enough opportunity to do and to look at it as a time for self-nurturing, rather than following some slavish set of rules that really kind of comes out of nowhere. If you like to take a bath, great. If you don't like to take a bath, don't take one, simply to try to help yourself sleep better. Anything that effort will create more of an issue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's such a great reminder there at the end. Especially, I like what you said about like the bath. Even Sleep is not like any, it's not any different than anything else, it's very individualized. So all these recommendations that Tracy just gave, I'm like, yep, I like that one, yep, I like that one. But if there's one where you're like no, that doesn't sound, that sounds miserable, to have my house at 65 or whatever, then that don't do that. Yeah. So basically you're looking at what, what makes you comfortable, and you're you're the only one that can answer that how can you best support your own self, what sounds the coziest to you, and then do those things.
Speaker 2:But I think certainly again, it's a self-select the right reasons, with a gentle intent, I think has the possibility of enhancing our life. Doing anything to extremes, especially with really focused reasons, like I got, to make myself sleep it's really not healthy. It's really not healthy. I think the way that sleep is different from most things in life and it makes it very similar with love. Actually, Sleep and love, I think, are the two best examples of how, if we approach them in the same way we approach everything else in life, it's not going to work out for us. If we need to learn how to wallpaper a room, we can look it up online and figure out how to do it. There are certain things, things aren't going right. We go into control mode and we figure out how to sort it out. If you go into control mode with sleep and you go into control mode with love, they're going to blow up on you. It just never works. I don't know if you've ever noticed, but it never works out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really interesting comparison, but you're right, it's so true. I love that. Now this leads me to my last question, tracy, and this is even though I could sit here and listen to sleep stuff all day, I could do probably seven episodes on just sleep, but it's fascinating We've got six more to go then, but I do have one final question, and this is something I ask all of my podcast guests, and that is what's one thing that you wish everyone on the planet would do in regards to their own well-being.
Speaker 2:Take more time to be in the moment, including in your body. Take more time to be in the moment including in your body.
Speaker 1:I love that and you know, what I think is interesting is I think if everyone did that, if we had more, more presence, more mindfulness, I think that's going to probably fix a lot of our sleep issues too, is it don't you?
Speaker 2:would you agree? With that absolutely, yeah, most anxiety is not experienceable in the moment. Yeah, and it tends to be something that we experience eyebrows up, which is why the caveat of being in your body. If you are doing something and you are moving your body and you're present in the moment, you can't be worrying about what happened 10 years ago and you can't be fretting about what's going to happen tonight yeah, yeah, oh, I love that, love that.
Speaker 1:So if you have been listening to this and you're thinking, okay, I am, my health is important to me and I've not been getting the best sleep consistently and I have made this decision. I owe it to myself to have good sleep and I want to work with Tracy. How do we get a hold of you? Where do we learn more about you?
Speaker 2:My website is a good starting place. Tracy the sleep coachcouk, that's T R A C Y rather than an E? Y. Some people spell it with an E Y Um. I'm also Tracy the sleep coach on all the major social media platforms. Not active on all the platforms, but you can at least reach out to me through most of them.
Speaker 1:And I will of course put those links in the show notes so people can just find you with a click of a button as well. Tracy, thank you so much for being on today.
Speaker 2:You're very welcome. I've really enjoyed our chat.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I have learned so much. I am thrilled to know that I can keep looking at my phone before I go to bed tonight. This is great.
Speaker 2:You're off the hook.
Speaker 1:Off the hook Best news of the week, and it's only Monday. Everybody else that's listening. I hope that you found some good nuggets of wisdom from Tracy as well, and if this helped you at all, please reach out and share your stories with me. Or if you work with Tracy, I want to hear about it. I want to hear these success stories too. Um, but everybody else. I hope you are having a fantastic day and I will catch you on the next one. That's it for today. Friends, if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe or, even better, leave a review and let me know what resonated with you the most. The more you tell me what you love, the better I'm able to create future episodes with even better content. I'm sending you so much love and light. I'll see you in the next episode.