Sleep Help for Overstimulated Moms: Barriers, Tips, and More

So much of sleep is out of our control as moms. Is it even worth the effort? And what do you do when it really is out of your control?

Sleep used to be like a 4-lettered word around here. Between the kids and our own difficulties, quality sleep can feel like an impossible feat.

Join Whitney as she shares her own family's journey through sleep difficulties, how the impacted her health, and how she navigated it. You'll walk away with:

• Basic knowledge of sleep science and sleep "requirements" for moms
• How hormones and other factors affect your sleep
• 4 common barriers to sleep for moms
• Some tips to enhance your sleep

 Whitney invites you to really analyze how you approach times when your poor sleep is out of your control and set reasonable expectations for yourself with lots of grace.

Time stamps:

16:20: Effects of sleep (and not enough of it)
19:20 How much sleep? Differences with men and women
20:40 Common barriers to good sleep for moms, including hormonal changes, kids who don’t sleep well, too much to do, and more.
29:10 Sleep enhancing habits and things to avoid

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Helpful resources about sleep:

https://www.thensf.org/
https://sleep.hms.harvard.edu/education-training/public-education/sleep-and-health-education-program/sleep-health-education-47
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/stages-of-sleep
https://sleepreviewmag.com/sleep-health/sleep-whole-body/mental-health/sleep-spindles-key-reducing-anxiety/

This podcast is not meant as medical advice or a substitute for any medical advice. Please contact your health professional with any mental health or physical health questions or concerns.

Chapters

• 16:20:00 Effects of Sleep (and not enough of it)
• 19:20:00 How much sleep & differences with men and women
• 20:40:00 Common barriers to sleep for moms
• 29:10:00 Sleep enhancing habits & what to avoid

Transcript

Do you identify with any of these:

• Emotional reactivity
• Decreased mental flexibility
• Decreased creativity
• Slower information processing?

If so, there’s a chance you could be dealing with sleep problems.

I think we all feel that way sometimes, right? Especially if you are a highly sensitive person, neurodivergent, or frankly… just a mom. Because sleep deprivation can tend to come with the territory of motherhood.

But if you get less than 7-9 hours of good quality sleep each night, then your chances of dealing with any of those things greatly increases. Along with the likelihood of a mental health difficulty, like depression or anxiety, and those are already higher just because you have female hormones.

Welcome back to the Sensational Moms podcast, the podcast for overstimulated moms who want to find connection and calm in the often overstimulating reality of motherhood. If you’re feeling touched out and talked out more than you’d like, then you are in good company here. After our time together, I hope you walk away feeling encouraged and equipped with one next step on your journey to a more regulated, connected life.

Sleep can kind of be a 4-lettered word for us moms, if you know what I mean. Maybe you don’t get enough. Maybe your kids struggle. Maybe it’s been a source of contention in your home… I know it has been in my home. And I know I’m not alone in this. Many of you on Instagram and in the facebook group have expressed that sleep is a concern for you as well.

So I encourage you not to skip this episode! I don’t aim to be another voice just telling you, “Get more sleep, and it’ll all be fine.” Mainly because I know it’s not always that simple; in fact, it rarely is for moms. 

To further compound things, chronically feeling overstimulated can lead you to feel anxious, which can cause a whole host of difficulties with falling asleep and staying asleep. I’ve seen this at play in my own home. So if this is you, if you feel you’re super easily touched out and talked out throughout your day, that alone can have significant impacts on your sleep quality. 

Poor sleep is a vicious cycle, and at the very least, if your main takeaway from this episode is that you adjust your expectations of yourself because you understand the normal consequences of sleep deprivation… then you’ll be headed in the right direction. You’ll be lightyears ahead of where I was in the throes of sleep deprivation 5 years ago. Maybe even consider sharing this episode with your significant other so that you can feel understood in this struggle.

So today, we’ll go over some sleep basics, because I’m a science nerd. Including some of the benefits of sleep, as well as the flipside of that coin: what biologically happens when you don’t get enough of it. Then we will go on to list  —- common things that keep moms from good quality sleep. Last, I’ll leave you with —- suggestions you can do to help improve your sleep. If you’re just here for the tips, I’ll put a timestamp in the shownotes so you can skip ahead as well. 

If we haven’t met yet, let me introduce myself. I’m Whitney Whitten, and I’m an occupational therapist who started using my training with my own kids only to realize that I needed to start with myself first. I’m a highly sensitive mom of 4 kids who homeschools my kids, and homeschooling is A LOT. Right?

Sleep is a hot button topic for me, near and dear to my heart. I had 4 kids in just under 6 years, so lots of sleepless nights with pregnancies and newborns. Then a few years ago, sleep deprivation due to a child’s significant sleep difficulty led me to a significant cascade of negative  effects that also took me years to heal from. So I know the self-perpetuating cycle of sleep difficulties.

Every night for years, I dreaded bedtime, and even after my child started sleeping better, I continued to experience a cortisol spike in the evening that led to anxiety and difficulty sleeping. All of this was compounded by adrenal fatigue and hormonal imbalances that just kept the ball rolling the wrong direction for a long time.

All of that is on top of the usual sleep changes that happen in different times of life as a woman, especially pregnancy, and now as I learn about and help moms in perimenopause.

Sleep difficulties are real and impact the entire family. Some of my kids were roomsharing through the difficult sleep season, so the hard nights affected everyone. It impacted my marriage. It’s hard to problem solve, nonetheless enjoy each other when you’re chronically sleep deprived. There’s clearly a problem to be solved (i.e. mom needs sleep), and it can be painful for another adult to be unable to fix that.

I’m happy we’re in a much better place now, but I still keep an extra mattress in my room because there are still hard times. I still don’t go to bed when I’d like to because we’re working through some bedtime concerns, but those are relatively minor compared to our reality years ago. So it’s hard to complain. I’m so grateful for the flexible schedule of homeschooling so that we can adapt as needed after a hard night.

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So enough about me. Let’s talk a little bit more about sleep. Most of the information I’m sharing is relatively common scientific knowledge. So I’m not going to cite many specific resources, but a great resource to understand more about sleep would be the National Sleep Foundation and startsleeping.org (check the show notes for the link).

First let’s define what sleep is. According to the Harvard Institute of Medicine’s Sleep Division, “Sleep is a state that is characterized by changes in brain wave activity, breathing, heart rate, body temperature, and other physiological functions.” 

If you know me, you know I love neuroscience. So let me share with you just a little bit more of the science-y part of sleep. Then we’ll move on to more practical application.

We used to think that brains were relatively inactive during sleep, but research has since proven otherwise. The kind of brain activity changes, of course. We have 4 Stages of Sleep. We’re going to talk about 4 stages, but you cycle through these stages throughout the night. Most people know about REM sleep or rapid eye movement stage, but let’s talk about the others briefly. 

The differences can be observed by different brain wave patterns during sleep studies. 

-Stage 1 technically isn’t sleep, and it lasts about 5-10 minutes. That blissful feeling of falling asleep… so rare…

-Stage 2 is about 50% of your time asleep, each time lasting about 20 minutes. Have you ever experienced that sudden jerk or felt like you’re falling? That was stage 2 sleep. You’re growing less aware of your surroundings. Eye movement stops. Body temperature usually lowers, heart rate and breathing rate slow. Brain activity on the whole is lower, but there are short bursts of activity that actually make it easier to tune out stimuli and stay asleep.

These short bursts, sleep spindles and K-complexes, are characteristic of stage 2. These bursts of rapid brain activity  are important for memory formation. Sleep spindles help noises not wake you while you’re sleeping because of their effect on the thalamus (FYI: The thalamus is like your brain’s traffic director when it comes to sensory input).

It affects your sensitivity to internal disruptions like worries and thoughts. In a research study, participants with increased sleep spindles showed less anxiety. So you can see how this affects those of us who deal with anxious tendencies. You can read more about that in the shownotes. 

Last thing about sleep spindles: dyslexia, epilepsy, pain, and age affect spindle production. 

So here was my question: Can you increase sleep spindles? We’ll get to that in the next section. 

-Stage 3 is the deepest sleep. You spend about ⅓ of the night here. Your muscles are relaxed. And during this stage, explicit or declarative memory shifts to longterm memory. So think of things like specific facts, experiences, procedures, or spaces… whether you retain it for longer than the day is largely due to stage 3 sleep. Think short term to longer term memory. Stage 3 sleep decreases with age, think late 20’s and into the 30’s it starts decreasing. Along those lines, kids spend more time in stage 3. Also, it can be really hard to wake up from this deep sleep; if you wake up feeling kind of drunk and disoriented… you’re probably experiencing sleep inertia from waking up during stage 3. If you or your kid deal with sleep walking, talking, or night terrors… those occur during this stage. Growth hormone is also released in this stage. Maybe that’s why I’m so short… just kidding. Kind of.

Lastly, there’s REM. Of course there’s REM sleep, characterized by rapid eye movements. Dreams. REM phases get longer as the night progresses. REM sleep includes processing and consolidating new information, and it’s also critical for memory. Interestingly, if you don’t get good sleep one night, the next night you may be more likely to have more REM cycles, which might leave you feeling more tired at first. I’ve definitely experienced that sometimes and thought, “Man, I felt better when I got less sleep!”

Throughout the night, you cycle through these stages. The cycles are longer in the beginning of the night and get shorter as the night goes on.

If you want to read more about sleep stages, there’s a useful short article on the sleep foundation website that I’ll put in the shownotes.

Sleep is important for memory, which probably isn’t surprising based on what I just told you about Stage 2 and 3.

So I’ll wrap up the science-y part of our sleep discussion here. Check the shownotes if you want to geek out with me there. It’s really fascinating and I find that knowing more about it actually motivates me to work on my sleep hygiene.

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Why should you care? Other than the obvious, that you feel awful when you don’t get enough of it. But why?

–Sleep affects so many things…

 immune health, stress recovery, learning, memory, creativity, emotional resilience. 

I think it’s pretty obvious that we as moms really need all of those things to be in good working order for the high demands that we face each day. Especially the emotional resilience and stress recovery piece. If you feel overstimulated easily and you’re also chronically stressed, then you will have significantly less bandwidth to meet the sensory demands of motherhood.

We’re starting to understand how the brain basically “cleans up” itself with glial cells, ridding toxins while you sleep. Check the shownotes for more information about your glymphatic system. We’re really just starting to understand this, but one example would be clearing out beta-amyloid protein, which is related to Alzheimer’s. 

A lot of the negative effects of poor sleep relate to hyper-cortisolism. So if anyone’s ever mentioned that you have too much or too little cortisol, sleep health could be a large part of that.

Cortisol is an important part of our body’s stress response, but too much of it is related to definite problems. Sometimes, the body can eventually be so tired of running on cortisol that it kind of gives up, basically because it can’t keep up with the high demand. So you can experience difficulty getting out of bed in the morning and significant afternoon energy crashes. Prolonged difficulty is often related to reproductive hormone issues, too; because if your body is chronically depleted, reproductive hormones are the last thing it’s concerned about.  I know I’ve dealt with that before personally as part of my healing journey.

So while that’s not my focus here, I encourage you to seek medical guidance if you’re struggling because the effects are so wide reaching, and they definitely include feeling overstimulated more easily.

How much sleep do you need? You’re going to have some outliers right? But the average adult needs 7-9 hours nightly. Women need more sleep than men, but we often don’t get it. And while you can’t “bank up” on sleep for bad nights, you can kind of repay a sleep debt by napping when needed. But do it carefully, and in a way that won’t make your sleep worse. We’ll talk more about that later.

–

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You likely know sleep is important, but did you know *how* important? You’re probably thinking, “Yes, I know it’s important. But…” And you could put so many things after that “but.” 

5 of those “but’s” that I hear frequently are: 

1. I have a baby or my kid keeps me up, and I’m the safe parent or single parent.

I’m starting with the elephant in the room here, because this elephant and I got to be closely acquainted with each other over the course of many years. If I could go back to myself 4 years ago, I would say this: Protect YOUR sleep as best you can.

That will look different for each of us in our own unique situations and in different seasons of life. I had a preschool aged child that kept me up at night for years. If I could go back to 4 years ago Whitney, I would give her a big hug first. 

Then, I would tell her to do what she needed to do to rest. 

At the time, I was so scared to make a decision that would cause problems down the road that I was paralyzed and felt powerless to try what might have helped then. I won’t go into detail because each mom’s situation is so different, and each child is so different. But what I will say is that your rest matters.

I mean seriously, I spent hours of time, plenty of money, and lots of hope asking for help for my child, but not one of those providers asked me how I was doing as a worn out mother or helped me understand how I could find rest. 

So if this is you, if you are the single mom or the only one home at night… the safe person, whatever it is…

Turn on the TV, take a nap, lay on the floor, share the bed, close the door, open the door, let them cry or don’t let them cry… I mean, there are so many ways this could go. But my point in this instance is this, do what you need to find some rest for yourself at some time in the day.

AND also… you cannot force someone to sleep, just like you cannot force them to eat. But what can you do? You can be kind to yourself through it. Remember the beginning of this episode when I talked about the reasons sleep is important?

 “immune health, stress recovery, learning, memory, creativity, emotional resilience.”

If you aren’t sleeping or aren’t sleeping well for reasons that are beyond your control… and you start seeing difficulties in those areas, be kind to yourself! That’s normal. Instead, spend your limited energy figuring out how you can simplify and find support during this time.

I’ll kind of combine reason 2 and 3.

1. I have so much to do and so little time and Night is the only me-time I get.

Getting clear on your priorities as well as how much time you “actually have” is really important for this one. If you want to feel more in control of your responses when you feel frustrated or overwhelmed… If you want to feel overwhelmed less often… if you want to be able to find joy in those little random moments of motherhood that also happen to be really overstimulating… you need sleep.

So what do you say no to? Maybe you say no to scrolling or binge watching a show. Maybe you say no to staying up too late tidying a house so you don’t feel so visually overstimulated in the morning. Maybe it’s planning or school prep. Those are *good things,* right? Getting clear on priorities and what matters most means saying no to good things.

1. My hormones are whack-o.

Yes! That definitely affects things. Let your healthcare provider know, hopefully someone who can help you get to the root cause. Maybe it’s perimenopause, pregnancy, or postpartum. Those definitely affect the quality and duration of sleep. But I wouldn’t assume is that without first seeing someone who is knowledgeable. Even normal cyclical hormone variations can be associated with sleep changes. An example of this is that Increased estrogen can be associated with neck swelling and sinus swelling; so breathing difficulties can affect sleep. 

During pregnancy, the first trimester is associated with worsening sleep because of hormonal shifts; usually in the second trimester things get better, then by the third trimester, most sleep difficulties are due to physical changes. 

Perimenopause is associated with fragmented sleep; that might look like difficulty going back to sleep. 

If you want to understand more about hormones and how they affect sensory processing, I’ll put a link to a blog post I’ve written in the show notes.

1. I can’t shut off my brain.

Safe to say we’ve probably all been there before. So what can you do? Keep a piece of paper to jot down those racing thoughts before you go to bed or get up, leave the bed, and do it. You might also consider speaking your concerns in a voice memo or something similar.

 Focus on sleep hygiene, which leads me to the next topic:

Sleep enhancing habits

Get ready for a list here. If you’re concerned about your sleep, you might hear this litany and think, “I’ve got a lot of work to do!” But I urge you to pick one thing and start there.

Let’s start with the Do’s, then we’ll talk about the Don’ts.

Do’s:

-Do create a bedtime routine for yourself. Bonus points if it’s sensory rich. Your nervous system loves predictability to help it feel safe.

-Do keep the bed just for sleep and intimacy

-Do keep the room cool and dark.

-Do keep a fairly consistent wake time.

-Do spend enough energy in the day that you feel tired; exercise is important for building up a sleep drive.

-Do consider using a heavy blanket or a tight fitting sheet.

-Do limit screen time as much as possible as you near bedtime. The ideal is an hour before bedtime, but if you can’t or don’t do that, then don’t let that ideal stop you from turning off that screen as early as you can. At least use the night screen function.

Some don’ts:

-Don’t consume caffeine within 7 hours of your bedtime. (The average half life of caffeine is 5-7 hours, which means that’s how long it take for half of it to leave your system. Everybody is different, but this is a general reminder to at least be aware of your caffeine intake and how its affecting your bedtime or quality of sleep)

-Don’t take a nap within about 6 hours of your bedtime, and keep it to about 30 minutes or less.

-Don’t scroll in bed. I know I already say this, so I said it twice!

-Don’t stay in bed longer than about 30 minutes if you can’t fall asleep. Get up. Sit somewhere boring (no screens!) for 20 minutes or until you feel sleepy, then try again. This can be really helpful if you have a hard time falling asleep, because our brain can begin to associate the bed with the stress of trying to fall asleep and being unsuccessful.

Ok, enough with the 10 Commandments of sleep. I’m just kidding. But the serious part is that these lists can feel really daunting. We can know things but the doing is another story. Even deeper is… why should we even worry with the doing in the first place? 

What’s your reason for wanting to change?

That’s where coaching is so helpful. We can get clear on your why and decide what next step is most practical for you. 

If you’d like more information about the Sensory Savvy Mom’s Coaching program and whether it might help you dig through the overstimulation to find the joy in motherhood… consider this your invitation to a free consultation. You can find the link to book yours in the show notes.

So as I wrap up the topic of sleep, I hope you understand a little bit more about how sleep is intimately connected to your ability to find connection in the chaos that is motherhood. But even more than that, I hope you’ve heard that you’re not alone if sleep trouble affects your family. And if you don’t act on any of those “do’s and don’ts” I mentioned at the close of this episode… if instead, you’ve found a greater capacity to show kindness and grace to yourself during sleepless times, whether they are days, months, or years. 

I’ll be back in two weeks with a new episode that I look forward to sharing with you. I’ll be sharing an interview with another homeschool mom and wellness coach, all about movement in the life of busy moms. 

Between now and then, let’s stay connected. If you haven’t signed up for the weekly Sensational Moment newsletter, I’d love to share it with you. I share helpful information with One Step you can take on your journey toward a more connected motherhood by connecting with yourself first, even in the midst of the chaos. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

 Until then, may you find connection, even in the chaos.