New Manager Tips for Better Sleep to Make You a More Confident and In-Control Manager

New managers don’t need another hack, they need sleep that supports leadership. Sleep coach Morgan Adams shares simple circadian rhythm habits so you show up clear-minded, calm, and confident at work.

Last week we talked about building trust and holding employees accountable with effective one-on-ones. This week, we’re zooming out: your energy and focus start long before the meeting, while you sleep.

Struggling to lead with confidence because you’re exhausted, foggy, or short-tempered? New managers often try more coffee, later nights, and weekend catch-up. That’s not Coaching for Managers, it’s burnout on repeat.

Here’s the fix: strengthen your circadian rhythm. In this Leadership Podcast for New Managers, sleep coach Morgan Adams breaks down manager-friendly habits that reduce 3 a.m. wakeups, stabilize energy, and help you run better team meetings, hold employees accountable, and handle conflict without snapping.

By the time you finish listening, you’ll learn:
 • Why “bright days, dark nights” is the simplest way to reset your sleep and leadership focus
 • The MEQ chronotype quiz and how to schedule team meetings for better Team Dynamics
 • Seven daily habits that improve sleep quality and office performance: morning light, dim evenings, consistent wake time (even on weekends), smart napping rules, cool-dark-quiet bedroom setup, five-minute “mindfulness snacks,” and a high-protein breakfast to stabilize glucose
 • How social jet lag wrecks Monday mornings (and what to do instead)
 • When blue-light glasses help, when they don’t, and what to buy to avoid cheap knockoffs
 • How steady glucose curbs afternoon crashes so you can lead effective team meetings and coach Difficult Employees without losing your patience

Key Takeaways
 • Consistency beats hacks: a regular sleep-wake window improves decision-making, patience, and How to Be a Better Manager.
 • Align work with people: know your team’s chronotypes to reduce burnout, improve Team Dynamics, and How to Lead Effective Team Meetings.
 • Stabilize energy: protein-forward mornings and fewer spikes help you hold employees accountable and handle conflict at work as a manager.

Up next: I read Glucose Revolution so you don’t have to—how steady glucose gives new managers more all-day energy

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Transcript

Desiree (00:00.138)
New leaders, if you are running on fumes, your team can feel it. And in this episode, sleep coach Morgan Adams and I get practical about how sleep drives confident leadership. We cover simple shifts that will boost your decisions, patience, and your presence at work. We discuss tactical ways to use morning light to anchor your day, create a consistent wake time to steady your energy, use darker evenings to cue real rest, and take smarter naps that don't wreck your night.

All of these tactics are in an effort so that you can lead calmer one-on-one meetings, handle conflict better, and show up like the manager that your team can trust. Not to mention, you will have steady energy all through the evening so your family can be benefited by your leadership as well. Welcome back to You're the Boss, Now What? I'm your host, Desiree Petriq, and our goal here is to help you lead yourself and your team with confidence. So lean in and let's get started.

Desiree Petrich (00:01.752)
Hi Morgan, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast today. Sleep is a conversation that affects everyone in a lot of different ways. And so I'm excited to hear your thoughts on how we as new leaders and aspiring managers can get better quality sleep to have a better overall quality of life. So thank you for joining us.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (00:18.705)
You're very welcome. I appreciate the invite to come and share my sleep knowledge with you.

Desiree Petrich (00:24.206)
So we're going to get into a lot of your typical recommendations for people, but it's kind of funny. I was just watching a comedian and this comedian was telling everyone that she cannot sleep. She has a very hard time sleeping. She's an insomniac. She's tried all the things. And she said, if anyone can tell me a sleep pack that I have never heard before, she was going to give them some sort of gift and no one could come up with anything that she had never heard of. So I'm curious, what is one of the weirdest sleep packs that you've heard?

Either that works or that doesn't.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (00:56.347)
Okay, so one of the weirdest sleep hacks that I've heard as of late, I mean, I've seen multiple reels about this and it's kind of hard to demonstrate visually, but essentially imagine if your eyes are shut, you're basically looking up, you're looking down, you're looking to the left, you're looking to the right and do that repeatedly if you can't fall asleep. And it's supposed to sort of work on bilateral stimulation. I can kind of understand from a scientific perspective why it would work.

but it just seems very hokey, honestly. But some people have told me it works. Like I met a woman at a party and she just brought it up and she's like, it works. you know, like whatever little hack you can use, awesome. But I'm not like a huge fan of those little like hacks overall because...

Desiree Petrich (01:31.153)
Ha ha!

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (01:48.209)
It doesn't really get to the root cause of why people are having trouble sleeping, but I appreciate the fact that it can help in the moment, which is really important at 3 a.m. when you want to fall back asleep. But that's, that's by far the strangest one I've heard as of late. And I don't know the name of the technique, so I'm not helpful in that regard, but it was, it was a little different. Yes.

Desiree Petrich (02:01.592)
Pinterest.

Desiree Petrich (02:06.808)
That's okay, no, so okay, you don't like the hacks, so tell us a little bit about your philosophy on how to get overall better quality sleep from a longevity standpoint.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (02:17.123)
Yeah, I mean, hacks can be okay in the moment, like I said, but from a longevity standpoint, mean, there are so many ways we can we can go about that. But what I really am honing in on so much with people is strengthening your circadian rhythm. Circadian health is really on the horizon of being a huge, huge topic in health. And it's starting to creep in a bit. But I'm predicting in 10, 15, 20 years, it's going to be, you know, a mainstay.

But essentially with a strong circadian rhythm. Well, let me just back up and say the product of a Good circadian rhythm is better sleep. So when people are trying to get better sleep It really makes a lot of sense logically to start with the circadian rhythm So, you know, how how do we even do that? I mean there's we can go down that that path, but that is really I think what is

at the crux of how we need to start a journey on getting better sleep. It's not the supplements, it's not the meds. I mean, I've been there, done that, seen clients try those approaches that are more kind of like one hit wonders, but the circadian rhythm optimization is...

not only helping people with their sleep, but it's helping them with their overall health. So that's kind of where I lean in on as a starting point.

Desiree Petrich (03:44.248)
So tell us a little bit more, what is the circadian rhythm? And then I would love some, I mean, I still call them hacks, but you could call them habits, right? What are some habits we could implement in our daily life that would help us to create a better circadian rhythm? So tell us a little bit more about what that is.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (03:52.041)
Yes.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (04:00.349)
Circadian rhythm really is, we have a 24 hour body clock and we have something called a suprachiasmatic nucleus or SCN for short. That is our circadian pacemaker located in our brain. And that is, that's our circadian time, our time clock. Imagine that is like the conductor of the orchestra. And then we have all of these corresponding circadian cells.

in organs that have to actually sync up with our SEN. So imagine those cells and organs are like the people in the orchestra. They have to sync up to the main conductor, which is SEN. And really the main anchor for our circadian rhythm is light. And so when I'm really focusing in on getting someone realigned with their circadian rhythm, I'm always starting with the light and dark management. And so what that looks like from

the perspective of the morning is getting out and getting exposed to natural light as soon as possible upon awakening. So 30 minutes would be ideal. And getting out into the natural light, you know, literally outside. So it doesn't really count if you're standing in front of your window. A lot of people ask me, well, does opening my blinds count standing in front of the window? I would love to say that works, but it's not as effective. So you want to spend 10, 15 minutes.

you know, ideally out getting exposure, you really want to avoid having something covering your eyes. So that would be sunglasses, eyeglasses. And the reason why is because that natural light needs to hit your retina and your eye. And from there, that sends a signal to that suprachiasmatic nucleus, that SCN, that circadian pacemaker, upon which there are all these wonderful hormonal cascades that happen. So that light hits your eye.

And then what happens is that any residual melatonin from the night before it gets shut down, your cortisol has a natural boost. So it's like a good cortisol. It's not like a cortisol in the way that we kind of negatively speak about cortisol. So there's a good cortisol boost. And so it's really telling your body and brain it's daytime and we're going to start having those daytime hormonal and neurotransmitter functions. So that's really, really a pivotal part in beginning our day. And then on the

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (06:23.985)
opposite end of the time spectrum you have the evening and that is really the time that you want to mimic the way that the light is outside. So you can essentially think about the way you want your environment inside is similar to the way it is currently outside. So in the morning you want to have your environment bright in the evening a couple hours before the sun sets you want to start preparing yourself from from a light perspective.

So that would mean things like cutting off any overhead lights in your house, especially the LED ones that are very blue-rich and blue light-rich and bright. So turning those off and instead having like a table lamp or maybe candles or just very dim light, because that is a signal to your body to start making melatonin. And melatonin is something we start producing a couple hours before bed. It's, you know, often known as our sleep hormone.

And that is sort of the signal for your body to start cooling itself off and getting prepared to sleep. just think about like from a perspective of just this kind of principle is bright days and dark nights is really how we wanna live our life. And if you think about so many years ago, like before we had the electric light bulb and we were living outside, we didn't have the...

the luxury of having these lighting options at will. So today we're often going against our circadian rhythm quite often by having these really bright evenings. Imagine you go into a grocery store at night, like at eight o'clock, maybe you're going to pick up a few things for the next day, and the blue lights are just blaring at you, or a gem for that matter at night. Like back in the olden days, quote unquote,

there was no such thing. When the sun set, it was dark for the duration until the sun rose the next morning. So it's really a lot about getting back into our normal biological rhythms of our ancestors.

Desiree Petrich (08:34.85)
That's so interesting. I had listened on a podcast about someone who she calls it a circ walk. And so every day within an hour of waking up, she'll go out into the sun. And I was having to search it because I wake up at five 30 in the morning, most days in the sun doesn't rise quite that early. So can you explain a little bit to us about, know, you are an early riser or a late riser. Does that circadian rhythm kind of depend on when we like to wake up and go to sleep?

a morning person versus a night owl. How is that working? How can we implement that in a unique to us way?

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (09:05.673)
Yeah.

That's a great question. And I'm the same way. I wake up around 5.30 just naturally. I'm an early bird chronotype. So there's a way to find out what your chronotype is if anyone's curious. And you can go to a free website, free quiz called the Morningness Eveningness Questionnaire or the MEQ for short. And you'll be guided through a list of questions. And at the end, they will basically say what your chronotype is. So it's like, you know,

Late evening, moderate evening, so you've got some variation there. But essentially what we want to do is we want to live within our chronotype. And unfortunately, the way things are set up in our society is that people who are night owls are somewhat punished in today's world of a nine to five schedule.

If you think about the way a lot of offices are, I when I was working in corporate, we would have morning meetings at eight o'clock. And that was just fine and dandy for me because I was an early morning person. I have a peak of energy in the morning. But for my colleagues who were night owls, they were not really fully up to speed. Their brains weren't completely online at 8 a.m.

one of the things that I like to share with folks who are in charge of other people in a professional setting is talk to your folks about their preferences in terms of chronotype, like what is their natural inclination. And quite often what can be done is meeting people in the middle. So if morning meetings were like 8 a.m.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (10:54.345)
maybe pushing those to 10 a.m. to accommodate a wider swath of the chronotypes so that everyone's a little week and aware. So that's just a little tip for folks out there who are planning meetings at their office. Yeah.

Desiree Petrich (11:09.43)
Yeah. And if you didn't listen to the episode around the five love languages, I'll link it in the show notes along with that, MEQ quiz, but it's the same concept of the more you get to know the people that you're leading, the more able you are to, kind of lead in a way that is what they want out of their day too. helps people to burn out, you know, on a slower pace. helps them to feel more like you care about who they are as a human and what makes them special. So I would definitely recommend.

utilizing that, another free team building activity here for you. Have everyone go and take that quiz and have a conversation around it. What is currently working in your workplace and what is currently working against the people on your team? And Morgan, I'm really curious when it comes to, you've talked about blue light a lot, blue light glasses, myth or actual tool.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (11:59.004)
It depends on who you ask, but I actually do really favor blue light blocking glasses.

Desiree Petrich (12:00.824)
Okay.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (12:07.581)
But there's a couple caveats. There's only a handful of brands out there that have actually legitimately tested their lenses to make sure they block 90 something percent of the blue light. There are a lot of cheap knockoffs out there. So buyer beware. I can steer people to the brands that are actually vetted and tested and the ones that I personally use myself and refer my clients to. But you wanna really make sure that if you're using them in the evening, they are orange tint or red tint.

clear ones are really not going to cut it. And another thing that you know, I don't know, I haven't seen this personally a lot, but I'm, you know, in a lot of sleep kind of coach circles. And I hear a lot of people talking about folks walking around during the day with blue light blocking glasses on outside, or maybe even indoors. So you you don't want to do that because you actually do need some blue light during the day. Otherwise, you'll be really

groggy during the day. just remember keeping those blue light blackened glasses with the orange and red lenses for the evening. I suggest maybe putting them on an hour or two before bed. That time may vary a little bit once the season changes and we start having darkness at five. I'm not excited about that but we could potentially change our timing of

the placement of our glasses at night.

Desiree Petrich (13:38.956)
Interesting. So I have anti-glare glasses because I had heard that you shouldn't have blue light blocking glasses during the day, but I was getting terrible headaches from the glare off of my computer screen. And so I had had someone recommend anti-glare glasses. So they're essentially non-prescription, just the lens is anti-glare. And so that has been really helpful for anyone who says, I need the blue light glasses to not get a headache during the day, just food for thought.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (13:50.173)
Yes.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (14:02.761)
And there are a couple brands that I use that have

what they called circadian optimization lenses maybe, and they've got a slight yellow tint for people who are on the screen all day. So they're blocking some of the bad blue light, but they're letting a good portion of it in. So every now and then you will see me on screen, maybe on a presentation wearing some like lightly yellow tinted lenses, and it's because I've been on the screen a lot. I'm just trying to really kind of balance all that out. So they are out there, but you kind of just need to like find

the brands that are reputable and the ones that know what they're doing versus like the cheapo Amazon $20 pair.

Desiree Petrich (14:44.334)
Gotcha. So if you have access to those, maybe I can link those in the show notes for our listeners so that they can go and find those. I am so glad you said that. The other thing that I wanted to talk about specifically when it comes to circadian rhythm, we all have a different chronotype. We all are kind of forced into this societal nine to five. Our kids are having to be to school by eight. Like there's not a ton of options. There's not a ton of flexibility that we have provided in that. But I recently heard about social jet lag.

essentially this idea that we're getting up at a certain time during the week and then sleeping in on the weekends thinking we're catching up on sleep. But essentially my understanding is that when you sleep in two extra hours on the weekends and go to bed two hours late, it's that much harder to get your circadian rhythm back during the week and you're constantly jet-lagged, essentially. So I'd love to hear your take on that, especially for people who feel like they're just tired all the time.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (15:38.45)
Yeah, I think it's such a great point.

There's, social jet lag really is a thing and basically how it usually plays out with my clients and probably most of your listeners is maybe they wake up at 6 a.m. Monday through Friday for work and then Saturday and Sunday they sleep in maybe till nine. So there's that three hour differential and it is essentially like flying cross country. And what ends up happening quite often is Sunday night, you're not sleepy at your regular time. And so you may go to bed late

and then Monday morning is a really very difficult and sometimes Tuesday too and then you just repeat the cycle week after week. So what I what I recommend for people to do is really find a time in the morning that they can get up every every single day of the week that ends in day. That's every day. So

You know, then I do get a little pushback, which I understand because people may go out at night, maybe Friday or Saturday, they're out later socializing and whatnot. So you do have a little bit of leeway and on the weekend. What I will share is that maybe sleep in an extra 30 minutes.

is not going to completely disrupt your circadian rhythm. Maybe one day on the weekend, you could maybe do an hour longer of sleeping in. But when you hit two days or more, that's really when you start getting into the murky territory about the real effects of social jet lag.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (17:13.145)
So it's just something to think about, you know, really carefully because people have a very, you know, they have this concept of sleeping in is very, you know, luxurious and like it's a way for self care. And it actually isn't like the best form of self care because it's throwing your circadian rhythm off and giving you that social jet lag.

Desiree Petrich (17:36.097)
Okay, so in that same breath, what about naps?

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (17:39.28)
Naps are...

fine, they're fine. But you want to have a little bit of guardrails around the naps. And so you want to think about naps that are on the shorter end, like maybe 20 20 ish minutes would be a good time period for a nap. And then keeping your naps earlier in the day. So for the clients that I have who are really struggling with their sleep, that sort of general guideline I give them is let's let's cap the nap at 20 minutes, and let's cap it at 3pm. So what ends up happening sometimes is if you

nap too late in the day or take naps are too long. It's essentially

diminishing your sleep drive for that night. So you can kind of look at naps like snacking on sleep. So like if you were having dinner at seven o'clock and you had a snack at five o'clock, you're kind of cutting into your appetite for your dinner. You can kind of think about that in the same way about sleep if you're taking like a later nap in the late afternoon or early evening. But definitely naps are a great practice for getting a little bit of an extra energy and creative boost during the day if you feel

like you need that, you know, and if you have maybe had a bad night of sleep before, or you really just feel like you need a refresher during the day, I think it's awesome to be able to do that. If you have the luxury of doing that and you're...

Desiree Petrich (19:00.366)
was gonna just say, if you have the luxury of doing that, sorry to anyone who doesn't currently have that luxury. I feel like we're probably teasing you a little bit.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (19:04.489)
I know. Well, yeah, I mean, there's, there's a definitely, you know, argument for having a sleep nap friendlies work culture. Some some places in Asia, they have like nap pods, you know, I haven't seen any in the US at this point. But it's an interesting concept to, you know, really promote that idea and like, you know, encourage that for people. So we'll see what happens in the future with that.

Desiree Petrich (19:35.214)
I will be very curious to see if I'll often do an exercise with companies to write down like their ideal culture. Even if it's totally unrealistic, I'm always just really curious. And I have yet to see anyone say like the ability to take a nap during the day, because I think it's so far outside of what we would expect to be possible that it's not even thought about. But I will every once in a while take a set of timer for 20 minutes and lay down. Even if you don't sleep, that reset for your brain is really helpful.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (19:49.032)
Yeah.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (20:01.833)
Absolutely.

Desiree Petrich (20:04.664)
So I want to get into a little bit more of the tangible tactical things that we can do. Often when I work with teams, we'll do a habit tracker of sorts. I almost every single time sleep is on there. It's I want to get more than seven hours. I want to go to bed by 10. I want to not hit the snooze button. It's something in regards to sleep. And my my number one recommendations are always don't have your phone in your room. That's not only for being able to get up, you know, and having to actually stand to turn off your alarm.

but it's also the blue light on your phone, the addiction of the dopamine hit that we're getting as we're scrolling. It's all of the things that come with the phone all throughout the day, but it's almost like worse at night because there's nothing else that we have to be doing. So there's no reason we have to turn it off. And that's the first thing is getting your phone out of your room. But the second thing is pick up a book and people will always say, well, I'm going to fall asleep within the first page. And I'm like, exactly. Case in point. I have nothing else to say. So I would love to hear some of your

tactical, tangible tips for people on a daily basis that will compound over time to help get us to that point where we're sleeping in a consistent way.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (21:13.961)
Sure, yeah. Well, we really want to look at the consistency piece. A lot of times people are talking about getting eight hours of sleep.

And what we're really seeing right now with the research is that the consistency of our sleep-wake cycle is actually more important than the duration in some respects. So they did a study, oh gosh, 2023, thousands and thousands of people, where they showed that people who had a very consistent sleep-wake schedule, they had a lower mortality and disease rate than people who didn't have that consistency. And this was independent of sleep duration. So you do want to...

do want to log in probably at least six and a half hours. That's probably the bare minimum for the majority of folks. But you really want to make sure that your sleep wake times are very consistent. So in this particular study, they found that the top 20 % of regular people had between a 20 and 48 % reduction in mortality rate. And what regular meant in that study was sleep wake times within an hour of each other.

The bottom 20%, the ones who had the highest mortality rate, they had about a three hour differential between their sleep and wake time. So that kind of goes back to the jet lag, the social jet lag piece. It's basically our circadian rhythm is so critical for getting that.

know, that great metabolic health, overall health. So that regularity, I I just, can't stress it enough, is try to keep things as consistent as possible. Again, the morning light is like probably number two on the list. Exercise is very important too. There's multiple studies showing that consistent exercise helps with sleep quality. And it doesn't really matter if it's cardio or strength training, both are very, very

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (23:07.035)
good at helping us with our sleep regularity and our sleep quality. Also making sure that we have some kind of plan during the day on how to

De-stress so I talked a lot about something I think I made the term up if I didn't someone correct me But it's all the mindfulness snacks because we've all heard of like exercise snacks Which is the those little bursts of activity that you do during the day for exercise Well, the mindfulness snacks are the same concept, but you're blocking out like five ten minutes at a time Really? What the goal for that is is? Having your your your brain

not having to take in any information. It's giving your brain white space to process thoughts and emotions because so many times people are so busy during their work days, they're going from back to back meeting. They literally never have any downtime to process those thoughts and emotions. And when what ends up happening in those circumstances is that when their head hits the pillow at night, that's when all of these thoughts and emotions start popping up. Or it happens at three in the morning when they wake up all of the

they start thinking about their elderly parent who needs placement in a nursing home because they didn't process that during the day. So I really, really am a big believer in taking that downtime, that white space during the day. Also, we really want to think about our bedroom environment. I think that gets overlooked a lot. So we want to think about

our bedroom as a cave. So cool, dark and quiet. So generally 65 to 68 degrees is a really good temperature for most of the population. Being cool helps us have deeper sleep. It helps us fall asleep faster.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (25:00.553)
You might want to think about bedding that is cooler like bamboo sheets, bamboo sleepwear is also very cooling, much more so than some other polyester fabrics that can trap heat. As far as the light, you actually want your bedroom to be so dark that you could not see your hand if it was put in front of you. So how we get that level of darkness that couple ways blackout shades and curtains, there are lots of

lots of them on the market these days that are very, very good at keeping all of the light out. Those are a little bit more of an investment. So if someone doesn't really want to make the investment in that, we also have eye masks. So just putting that eye mask around you every night that really shields out, you know, most of the light in your environment. And then with sound, it's very, very hard to get like a completely quiet room, especially if you live in a city or if you have pets or kids.

or random house creaks that we all seem to have. So a lot of times people will have some kind of white noise machine or some kind of like track of music playing that's on a loop so that any kind of random noises get dampened. I'm a very light sleeper myself, so I'm like very heavily reliant on some form of outside ambient noise to keep all of those random things from interrupting my sleep. So that's just...

you know, just a way to kind of craft your bedroom environment for, you know, getting that the optimal sleep.

Desiree Petrich (26:37.23)
Yeah, I love that. When you were talking about the mindfulness snacks, I love that. I admittedly don't do that as much as I should, but I was recently finding myself laying down with a book at night and not being able to focus. We've all been in a place where we have to read the same sentence, same paragraph over and over again. And I started to journal for five minutes. I was part of a health challenge that required us to journal. So I would do it right before I would pick up my book. And that simple practice of getting some of those thoughts out on paper all of a sudden made me able to focus on my book.

because my head wasn't spinning anymore. So I think even if you can't find the time during the day, even just a five minute nightly practice is going to be really helpful too.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (27:08.585)
I'm gonna that.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (27:15.913)
Yeah, I like that. sometimes people will find a lot of value in before bed or as part of their evening wind down to do like a gratitude journal. So you're just basically going, there's so many variations of this, but you know, it could be as simple as writing down on paper three things you're grateful for.

that happened that day, or maybe even three things that you want to make sure you focus in on the next day. You know, there's various iterations of doing it, but I think it is a nice practice to kind of wrap up the day on a positive note, for sure.

Desiree Petrich (27:52.248)
Yeah. And have one more thing. I know I told you 20 minutes Morgan and we're at like 28, but I don't even care. love this conversation so much. So I was having, I was taking naps every single day. I physically could not get through the day without a nap and I was just feeling exhausted. And because of this health challenge that I joined, I started tracking my glucose and it was incredible to me that when I started to regulate my glucose levels, essentially meaning that

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (27:56.956)
It's a good one.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (28:12.848)
Desiree Petrich (28:19.478)
I wasn't snacking on a lot of sweet things or really carb heavy things throughout the day and spiking my glucose because I have hypoglycemia, which means then I would crash and then I would need a nap because I couldn't figure out how to get myself back up. And I haven't had a nap in like eight or nine months because the simple act of kind of leveling that out has helped me to, to regulate everything and to feel more consistent. So I'm just curious, have you been seeing any research studies on that? Have you done any work with the, with glucose at all?

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (28:48.704)
yeah, I mean.

So one of the reasons why a lot of people wake up at 3 a.m. is because they have a glucose crash. And quite often I'll suggest that they wear a continuous glucose monitor. And sure enough, what they find is that their blood sugar does crash and that's correlated with that wake up. So I'm always working with my clients on how to balance their blood sugar from the moment they wake up till the time they go to bed. And you you hit on a couple of really key points, snacking frequently, processed

foods, sugar, those things just throw your blood sugar on a roller coaster. So I'm always recommending that people eat breakfast within like an hour of waking from a circadian perspective. Like again, going back to that whole thing with the circadian stuff is your body wants to be told it's morning and to begin those processes and food is a circadian cue just as light is. So we wanna get something high protein in our bellies, you know, about

and around sunrise, if we can fit that into our schedule around sunrise, that's ideal. If you have to have it a little bit later, that's totally fine too. having that high protein breakfast to start the day and then having three meals, fairly well spaced apart, like maybe four to five hours apart and having in each meal, 30 grams of protein, healthy fat and a carb.

And then if you have to have a snack during the day, making sure it's not like something processed because the processed foods, I mean, you've experienced yourself. just, and I've done CGM experiments on myself. I've had a piece of cake in the afternoon and it's just, it's like a disaster. So yeah, thank you for bringing that up because the...

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (30:38.959)
stable blood sugar is critical for so many things, including good sleep and energy during the day for sure.

Desiree Petrich (30:46.764)
Yeah. Well, I'm really glad to end on that note because for those of you listening, I read the book Glucose Revolution by Jessie and Ashby. I don't know if you follow the glucose goddess Morgan. She's Instagram, but I loved her book. I have been living the lifestyle and I'm going to do an episode on that book, kind of just some of the hacks that I've been using to help level that out. And that's going to tie directly back to this conversation around sleep. So make sure you hit the subscribe button and

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (30:57.421)
yes.

Desiree Petrich (31:14.914)
You're not going to miss that episode because it's a great one. But Morgan, if someone is needing a little bit more one-on-one attention when it comes to sleep and they just really need some help, how can they get in touch with you? How can they follow you? Tell us all the things about you and what it is that you do.

Morgan Adams, Sleep Coach (31:28.487)
Yeah, thank you for.

asking about that. So I do have a free guide. It's called Awake Again at 3 a.m. Your guide to why you're waking up and what to do about it. It's a free guide. You can go to my website and download it. It has tons of information about those 3 a.m. wakeups, how to prevent them, what's driving them. And if you feel like you really need some one-on-one support, I do offer sleep coaching in a one-to-one container. And you can schedule a consult on my website, you know, a free consultation, and we'll just sort of chat about your challenge.

and see if it's a mutual fit. So thanks for asking about that.

Desiree Petrich (32:04.824)
Amazing. And I will see if I can get a link to the awake again at 3 a.m. for the show notes for you all. But thank you so much for being here. I know this is a little off topic from what we would normally talk about, but as I have been reminded again and again, it is not a work life and a home life and a health life. It is one life and sleep is one of the biggest pieces of making sure that it's a good one. So thank you for listening. And just remember that leadership is a privilege, but it's also a really big responsibility and you're the boss now. So what are you going to do with it?