Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Couple of Nukes. As always, I'm your host, Mr. Whiskey, and I came to a realization the other day when I was preaching on my other podcast, Radiating Faith. I was, said something about that we were on YouTube, and I was like, it's just me in a cowboy hat with sunglasses preaching religion.
And then I was like, you know what? I just realized that all my people who are out there listening on podcast only, didn't know that I was wearing a cowboy hat this whole time. A couple of nukes, I've mentioned it before, but I realized on my other podcast, I was like, they have no idea. So ladies and gentlemen, if you are listening to this right now, not only am I wearing a cowboy hat, I'm wearing a brand new one, fresh out the mail.
Unfortunately, I could not find any cowboy hats in person nearby, which is very preferable. For a man trying to buy a cowboy hat and you don't want to amazon was great I got it the next day, but you never I had to return three other ones through the mail so it was rather inconvenient and Summer season and I finally got my white hat.
I was supposed to have it about four months ago five months ago So I am done violating the cowboy code of conduct, but i'm having trouble with the studio lighting getting It's like I have a shiny white reflective orb in my head. But yeah, for those of you who didn't know we're available on YouTube, we are available on YouTube.
And there are a little just hints I have at like what today's episode will be about. If you didn't read the title for some reason, like my hoodie, because we will be talking about sleep today. And when I joined the military, they are very particular about The bed sheets being folded a certain way. I believe it was 45 degree angle, you know, very, very particular.
You've got to make your bed every morning, unless you're like me. And what you do is you don't touch the blankets. You don't touch the sheets. You just sleep on top of it in a hoodie. That's how I got through the entire military. I began this journey of just throwing on a hoodie. and sleeping wherever. And my hoodies would be my blanket.
So I want to wear a hoodie in honor of that. I feel like I'm sleeping. I've got the cosmic space background behind me because there is no better place to sleep than outside looking at the stars. If you're, if you're not surrounded by mountain lions or something, but yeah, I am here with Ms. Tracy and she is a sleep therapist and As soon as I saw her profile online, I was like, she needs to come on the show.
My military listeners and their families need to sleep. My blue collar listeners need to sleep and people in general due to addictions to their phone now also need to learn how to sleep and put that phone down, which I'm sure we'll get into that. So Ms. Tracy. After that long winded intro, would you please tell us a bit about yourself and who you are and what you do as a sleep therapist and what that does for everyone.
Thanks so much, for. I'm bringing me on first. I'm really excited to be here. I'm looking forward to having a nice in depth conversation with you for all of your audience. My name is Tracy Hannigan and I'm a qualified sleep therapist and I work in the UK exclusively via zoom and I only work with adults who have insomnia.
Really, really rewarding work. I've been doing it for quite a long time now in previous careers and iterations of my working life. I've worked with sleep indirectly in a lot of different ways, working in community mental health in the United States when I was there working in pain clinics, here in the UK, but have branched off and, work exclusively with people who have sleeping difficulties now.
And if I am someone who is not diagnosed as having insomnia, but I still have trouble sleeping. Can I still use your services? Yeah, so 1 of the things that I do, because I'm a qualified health care provider, I have to screen people to make sure that they are appropriate for treatment.
So somebody might think that they have insomnia, but they're, they have sleep procrastination, or they have a circadian rhythm disorder that makes it difficult for them to fall asleep, or they wake up early. Or something else might be going on, might be restless leg syndrome or sleep apnea, and it's not been diagnosed yet.
Those things show up quite differently. And I assess for those first. So if people aren't sure if I can help I have a chat with them first to make sure that I can. That's awesome. So I remember actually my youngest sister, She would go through huge growth spurts. She's very tall. And when she went through those growth spurts, her leg pains were so bad she could not sleep at all.
And she would be in pain, and she would almost have kind of symptoms of, you know, restless leg syndrome just because of the way her legs were growing. You know, she Bean sprout kind of kid. And I remember it was, it was long nights for her and my mom my mom would go come for her, but how do you go about diagnosing that?
So do you have common symptoms that you look at and based off what they tell you, you can kind of, you have a level of knowledge where you can assess like, Hey, this is most likely this or that. And are you like a licensed professional in the aspect that. That is a medical diagnosis or you tell them this is most likely what they have and then they have to go get a second opinion.
Yeah, because I'm not a sleep physician. I can't quote unquote diagnose and I don't have access to a sleep lab, which would be required for diagnosing some of these things. But insomnia and other sleep disorders, they almost fall into separate camps. If somebody has restless leg syndrome or sleep apnea, there might be
some signs there, people waking up with headaches, frequent urination at night, those sorts of things. But the sleeping element itself, what happens is insomnia, people tend to be tired and wired. There's a certain level of arousal or hypervigilance there that makes it difficult for people to sleep. It also makes it difficult for people to nap during the day.
They just can't quite have a low enough arousal to get into that state very easily. Whereas a lot of the other sleep disorders. They, yes, they interrupt sleep and they create sleeping issues, but they don't have the arousal component. So how that shows up instead of being tired and wired people are being what they call it pathological sleepiness.
So people are sleepy, falling asleep in unusual places throughout the day. So it shows up quite differently in the daytime. Other signs and symptoms might indicate kind of looking, maybe looking in one direction or another. But I always support people in making appropriate referrals. If if that's necessary already.
And, you know, I think I might have insomnia. Honestly, I've never seen a doctor, but I know my father has it and was diagnosed with it. I don't know if it is a genetic. Can you verify that? Or Is it most insomnia is psychobiological. What I would say is I, I don't have a single client. I don't think who has found their way to me who doesn't have some sort of anxiety issue.
And those can be both nature and nurture. There can be a bit of a genetic predisposition there. That's not to say that. No, insomnia is genetic, but a lot of the times what creates longstanding insomnia is a certain kind of response to a situation or to sleeplessness itself.
And that response tends to be higher in people who have a tendency to be anxious. And I think, several decades of my father being like, I have insomnia, so you have it since I was born, probably did not help at all, you know, I, I struggle a lot with my sleep. He actually mentioned specifically one of my issues, which is, I cannot sleep during the day, I mean, I've pulled all nighters before, I, I could be very tired, but I, I just cannot sleep during the day, it has to be a certain threshold of night.
I'm so interested in studying all this now. Is it because I believe night time is more peaceful during the day because I do have paranoia condition and stuff. So I am paranoid. I guess I'm like daytime is when people are around and stuff. And I also hate the idea of missing out on a day, especially at being in the military when your free time is limited.
More limited the idea of sleeping away your free time is something that has very irked me and you know That happens when you turn 50 as well By the way, you sort of feel like you don't want to waste any of the time that you have Days are slipping by too soon. They really are. Yeah, and So when it comes to sleeping, it's also, I envy my dog so much because she sleeps so much all throughout the day, all throughout the night, and I was thinking about it, about the difference between her and I, and not only am I an overthinker, but just as a human being compared to whatever she's thinking about is either food, going to the bathroom or sleeping.
So, you know, I think it is, I think it really is. We look at. Animals just go to sleep, especially, I guess, the dogs this morning have to realize they're not in an environment, I mean, she knows that my house is a safe environment because, to her, there's, she's never been attacked in it, there's no animals in it, to me, I'm thinking, a guy could break in the door right now, is every window secure, you know, I've got all these thoughts, she's just sleeping, you know, all the time, she's on my lap sleeping right now, she's mad we, I woke up early to, Record with someone from the UK, which I want to bring up for people, again, not watching on YouTube, Ms.
Tracy is drinking tea which further propagates my constant commentary on the show when I had British you know, guests that, you know, tea time, the whole British joke, but it's iced tea. So she is combining. The southern culture of the show with the UK culture, having iced tea. So it's like still British.
It's not quite sweet tea, but it's good. Oh, okay. Yeah. I hope it's not unsweet tea. I'm not a, I'm not a fan of that. So yeah, there's no, there's no sugar in this. It just has a bit of a natural sweetness to it. Okay. Okay. I, I do love sweet tea though. Oh yeah. Well, I, you know, it's funny. I had a shipmate of mine.
I don't think I've shared this before. He would just dump so much sugar in his tea. He would put like multiple cups of it. And this was hot tea, you know, he would put it in hot tea, which was interesting. Like, you know, it would be. Black tea or green tea. And he would just put Domino's sugar down a sponsor.
He would just get like two, two, three cups of it. I'm like, man, you have some, some tea on your sugar. I was like, it was interesting. It sounds like sludge to me. Yeah. Yeah. And I had to. Had a shit mate at the same table with me would do that to his oatmeal. He would put almost the whole container, the big square containers.
He would put like half of it on his oatmeal or like, got a little bit of oatmeal, texture for anything else. Oh yeah. We were like, you got a little bit of oatmeal on your, on your sugar pile there, but, but yeah, Tracy, can you tell us about your journey with sleep? Do you have insomnia? Have you fought against these things and what kind of pushed you into this field of work?
Yeah. Interesting question. So way back when I had, I had two bouts of insomnia. If you add up all of the numbers of years together, it's probably like eight ish years, 10 years maybe. Okay. First bout was after the the death of my spouse, which of course you would expect to have some sleeplessness after an event like that, but it went on for years and years and years.
It essentially began to feed itself and transformed from sleeplessness into its own thing, which is. That is insomnia. And then I wasn't sure at that point what exactly got me through that particular bout, but moving on in life many, many years later, I had a second bout and, and came through it actually using the kinds of approaches that I now use today with clients.
Although they were definitely not called this they weren't identified as the same sort of thing, but the themes are very similar. Yeah, it's so interesting how psychological it is because for the past few years I have Been with Ms. Whitney now, and she cannot sleep without a nightlight. And it has become to the point that I can no longer sleep without a nightlight because it has been so required for the past few years, I can still do it.
Cause I, you know, for years, I never slept with a nightlight, but she. Her whole life has always had one. She's not a big fan of the dark. And you know, that's understandable. So she always likes to have at least a small nightlight in the room or like a star projection, something. And it's gotten to the point now where it's like, I can sleep without it, but it is highly, highly preferred.
And it will bother me if I'm like, so dark in here. What, what is this? It's so unfamiliar to me now. But, you know, I had been. You know what? In fact. A lot of military members will sleep with a red light on to prepare themselves for sleeping on the submarine or on the aircraft carrier. Now a lot of the, I'd have to see how many veterans carry that with them.
But when I know active duty wise, when we were at the barracks room or at home, like my roommate bought a red light. To sleep with to, you know, simulate that. So it's very interesting, very, very interesting. We have these cues, these contextual cues for sleep. Bed is usually a contextual cue for sleep. Darkness can be helpful.
It's not necessarily mandatory is it? Well, I'm sure we're going to talk about what I call safety behaviors, like having to have Things a certain way, but definitely going to talk about, I think it's going to fit neatly here, but these contextual cues are really, really powerful. And they're subconscious.
Like, I talk a lot with people about that subconscious relationship with the bed. And, you know, we spend a lot of years getting in and out of bed. Bed is the place that we. We're either sleeping or we're feeling safe and warm and welcome. And then we take our life and we go out and we do lots of exciting things.
And then this is the place that we return to to sleep. So our body and our brain says, this is where sleep happens. And it gets confused when people start working on their laptops for hours in bed and it becomes a place where if you are tossing and turning and panicking and worrying about things, the brain and the body start to say, Oh, I get into bed and this is where my brain wakes up and starts thinking about lots and lots of things.
Yeah, so it's powerful and that can be a plus and it can be a minus. Thanks. Well, and humans are very much creatures of habit and we will form habits knowingly and unknowingly and What's interesting is going into that on the aircraft carrier, you know I know this hard for a lot of active duty members.
It's like your rack where you sleep is also your home on that ship So it's hard to get that separation. I mean obviously, you know work is separate When you're trying to relax somewhere or lay down, the only time you can really do so is in your rack. Obviously there's lounge spaces and stuff, but there's other people walking around or it's the only privacy you have, you have your little curtain.
And so people will often, that's where they go to read their books or be on their laptop on, on the ship. So I understand why a lot of military members, it's difficult for them to have what, what we call sleep hygiene in that, in that separation. And I was going to say that comfortness can also be dangerous because bedrock has become a huge thing where people don't leave bed.
And what happens is they form this mindset. Like you said, that the bed is so comfortable and when they dread their real life, not that sleeping isn't real life, but when they dread what's going on in the world out there, they started forming this, like, well, I'm just going to stay in bed all day. It's safe here.
It's comfortable here. Like you said, and then people end up. Actually waking up and feeling tired or having that urge to just keep going back to sleep. Not because they're physically tired, but because they are so anxious, as you mentioned, anxiety earlier, or dreading the day that it's like, well, let's just go back to our quiet place or safe place.
And especially when you have, yeah, you form a nest there. And it's like, especially when you have, you said personal stuff going on. And it's interesting how, even though we can be physically tired, if we're so mentally aroused or wired, like you said, we can't fall asleep. When I went to bootcamp, you're awake for the first.
It's almost like 30s 36 hours, it's not quite 48 because you get to go to sleep that second night But you're you're awake for almost 36 hours, but it was my first time sleeping in Iraq I was in a top bunk nonetheless with the red lights with all these other men around me snoring or doing this and that I had Never slept with so many people around me.
I never slept with red light it was also being in top bunk was weird, especially as a grown man. It's like as a younger kid. You know, I shared a bunk bed at my one shore house with my youngest sisters. You know, they would have had the bottom. I would have the top cause it was just a little shore house.
And when you're family, you know, you do stuff like that. So I would have the top bunk and then I would always sit up and hit my head on the ceiling cause it was so close to it. So, but you know, I hadn't done that in years. Also the military you're in like this metal rack and it's like it's not that uncomfortable You can make it comfortable, but in boot camp you don't have all you know, you don't get a bunch of blankets You don't get your anime girl blankets to put on the bed and be like this is nice So it was hard even though I was exhausted.
We had been up for 36 hours for most of us I was never a whole all nighters in high school kind of person like I didn't Do that. So for me, that was the first time staying up all that time and then staying up overnight. And then all I wanted to do was sleep, but I couldn't. I was so like, this is, what is this?
How did I do this? And then I got, what I often struggle with is, I'm like, watching in time, watching in time. Every minute that passes, I'm getting more frustrated, more upset, more anxious at not falling asleep. It gets to the point that I'm too frustrated. And then I just stay up and then I mess up my sleep schedule.
There'll be times where I'm like, if It finally gets to the point where I'm like, I'm just staying up. Forget it. You know, screw it. I can't fall asleep. I'll stay up and do something. And eventually I'll calm down and get tired again. And now I just wake up and it's the afternoon already. Yes. Yeah. So that's a perfect example of how contextual cues can impact your ability to.
Kind of feel calm. It's, it's a survival response, right? We, we never would have, we never would have evolved into human beings if we'd all been, you know, out there hunting and gathering and going to sleep and then being eaten by the bear or the lion that comes by. We have to be able to have that arousal system override Our biological the biological elements of sleep, which are sleep, driving the circadian rhythm.
We wouldn't be here without it. It serves a really important function, but it can go haywire on us. And that is the difference between human sleep difficulties and the fact that your dog doesn't have trouble. Cats tend don't tend to have trouble. You know, you don't see birds. We got lots of birds here where I live.
You don't see them having difficulty sleeping. If you were able to interview them, they probably would say, what are you talking about? Right. Well, they don't have a laptop in their bird's nest. They just have pieces of wood. They're focused on the basics, keeping safe, keeping fed, and making more of themselves.
Right. And it's interesting. I actually watched a fighting anime and they had this guy who prehistoric man, they thought out of the ice and he used to fist fight dinosaurs and hunt them. And he would just go to sleep anywhere. And they're like, how can you sleep when he's surrounded by so many dangerous.
People. And they actually established that it was the privilege of the strongest creatures that they could sleep anywhere. Cause they said, they're not worried about anything attacking them. They'll just wake up and kill it. So it was a very interesting theory to study, but can you break down for us?
Get more into like Some of these keywords you're saying, like the contextual cues and some of these kind of terms, what exactly are those? And what do they mean for our sleep? That's a really great question. So when we're talking about contextual cues, we're talking about the things that trigger response in us.
So, real practical one, if you are, if you're out to the concert or you're somewhere and you're standing or you're at a sporting event and there's like a, Well, we would call it a port a loo, but like, you know, one of those portable bathroom things with the big, the blue one with the plastic door and they're always a bit gross.
Well, you're standing in line and say, you're really, really, really, you really need to go. Right. And then somebody starts watering the grass or, you know, you, you can hear water sound, you hear the person in front of you and you know, suddenly you're like, I really, really need to go. Oh, that's a really, Someone turns the water on and suddenly, because your brain and your body say, Oh, I associate that sound and this feeling with this particular action.
And it suddenly becomes more urgent to you to be able to use the bathroom. So, or you might not be hungry at all, but you smell something you love the taste of. And suddenly you might start salivating and you might start feeling hungry because you, you want to eat it. You're used to eating that thing.
So those are contextual cues and they're often completely unconscious. So with our bed, ideally, we want to have a relationship with our bed, this unconscious one that says the bed is, yes, we might have paid a lot for the mattress and we might love our sheets. And there's this conscious level. But we have a relationship that is bed, sleep, bed, sleep, bed, sleep, bed, sleep.
And that is the ideal one. We want nice, calm, relaxed feelings associated with the bed. So that way the bed is a cue, a contextual cue for sleeping. The reverse of this might be true. If you're a person who likes to go and work out, but you'd like to be at the gym instead of doing it at home.
Because the, in the mindset and the environment of being in the gym helps you build up your energy and you have better when, when you're there, as opposed to when you're in your garage or in your living room. Just these things help put us in the right state.
Yeah. Right. No, I feel you on that. When I work out in my living room, it's like, I'm going to sit down on the couch for a minute. And then it's like, Oh, no longer working out, you know? No. I get you. When I go to the gym, it's like. That mindset, like we're going to focus on this, this, and this, we're not distracted by anything.
What's interesting is it goes into like learned behavior and conditioning too, and it's like, you're talking about, you might not be hungry, but you smell something good and it makes you hungry at the same time. It's also like you typically, when you're smelling food, you're like, okay, it's time to eat.
And people who work in the kitchen, the one time I was working in the kitchen industry for a little bit, I got like desensitized to it where. The smell of food wasn't his time to eat, like someone made a meal. It was a constant smell. It just meant we were at work. I actually ate less and lost my appetite because of it because I didn't have that, you know, want, that desire to eat because to me, the smell of food became work.
And people don't want to work, you know. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. My laptop. Is a cue for work and so I can use that to my advantage at the end of the day. It's almost an emotional ritual to close the laptop. I'm much more, it's much easier for me to then switch into say, you know, personal activities and hobbies and family stuff.
And I try to minimize working on my phone because my phone comes with me everywhere, like it does for most people. And I don't want that associated with work. Although I love what I do, we all need to have boundaries and compartments with our work. Otherwise we'll burn out. My dog is the same way where as soon as I.
Click the button on my mouse to turn it off, and I start closing my laptop. Whether she's deep asleep or whatever she's doing, she will sit straight up on my lap. Start wagging her tail and it's like, it's me time now. Yeah, it's my time. We're gonna go for a walk. Yeah. And so sometimes she gets confused because I just turn the mouse off 'cause I'm gonna use the touch pad.
And she's like, I don't understand. I thought we were done, thought we were a walk. Now that's my cue for a walk. That's her cue for a walk. And so sometimes if I'm trying to be sneaky about it, I have to close my laptop like so slowly. 'cause it. It creaks a certain way if I do it at a certain speed and that's her cue for her.
She got her ears just like perk up and she's like, it's, it's, it's walk time. Daddy's done work now. Right. Yeah. And it's, what is the same way people condition dogs to, you know, Really, they condition us that we hear the bell ring and we go take them outside. But a lot of people like to believe that we train them, they ring the bell to go outside.
No, they're going to go to the bathroom whenever they want, you know, they've trained you to come pick up their poop outside when they ring the bell, you know, so it's, it's interesting. But, you know, we talked about how we subconsciously kind of. Program or hinder or sleep. So you kind of help us with reprogramming ourselves or setting up a new routine or practicing some things to help undo that damage or prevent further damage.
So can you talk a little bit about those methods and practices to help improve our sleep? Yeah, a lot of them have to do with this, this relationship with, with the bed. So if we, if we take an ideal average. A person who has ideal sleep, right? So like a typical situation, it's going to take a certain amount of time to fall asleep, you know, up to, you know, 20 minutes, some people 30 minutes, but usually longer than that.
We start question marking, like, what's that about? I mean at your age, yeah. But if you are. Yeah. 70, it would naturally take you longer to fall asleep, right? And it's normal to wake up a couple of times in the night. Yeah, it's normal to wake up a couple of times at night. Right. Long enough to remember it.
Because we actually wake up many, many times. And that's important to remember because we're going to come back to the contextual key piece here. And it's normal to take a little time to wake up in the morning. Some people jump up out of bed, ready to start the day. And some people, it takes a little bit of time for them to get moving.
So ideally, this ideal situation, you're not spending more time in bed than that. But what can happen is, If people's sleep begins to wobble for whatever reason, something's happened, something's going on. Right. And they, they begin to take the well meaning advice of go to bed early. For example, if you're really tired and having difficulty sleeping, you go to bed early, but often what happens is the person then lays there awake.
waiting to get to sleep. They get frustrated about this. So they start worrying about the sleep itself, or they're worrying about what's going to happen the next day if they don't get enough sleep and they get caught in this hamster wheel. So slowly over time, what happens is that person's relationship with then becomes one of, of stress and frustration and concern.
As opposed to sleep. So that makes it harder for the person to fall asleep over time. It actually these very well meaning kind of bits of advice that we sometimes get in order to help us get a little bit more rest can actually make sleep worse over time. The, the place this, and so that is the context, the contextual cue, the bed becomes the battleground instead of the place where we're feeling really restful.
And we can use that to our advantage. If we're not feeling, if we're not sleeping. Or if we're not feeling relaxed, or if we're awake for many, many, many, many hours in bed, it might be a good idea to take that energy someplace else. So we can reverse engineer the cue by our actions. So we take that anxious energy, go someplace else, do something relaxing and enjoyable.
I usually suggest people don't go and do something boring to try to make themselves sleepy. And I'll tell you why in just a minute. But if it happens is you go and you do something enjoyable, that arousal comes down. And this is now an opportunity to say, hi, brain, I want to pair this sleepy feeling with the bed again.
So we've removed the anxious association and now we're like, Oh, here's an opportunity to like, we're training a dog to sit, to train our body. This is where the sleepy feelings belong. At the beginning people say, well, I did that for a couple of days. It didn't work. It takes a while for this to work. But it is quite successful because we're essentially manipulating our unconscious to have the response that we, we want.
Another thing that kind of a good takeaway that's safe for everybody to do. You know, you touched on it already and this is a great way to kind of. I guess more productively use those moments awake at night is to not check the time, because checking the time just makes us more anxious. Nobody, including myself, has ever woken up at three o'clock in the morning and said, yes, I've gotten three hours of sleep, like nobody does that.
So if we don't have the ability to know what time it is, we don't have the opportunity to hang our sleep anxiety or anything else on that. And because we wake up multiple times naturally, kind of at the end of each sleep cycle, we come back up into light sleep. We scan, is there a lion in the room? No.
Okay. Then we go back to sleep. If we wake up and we have a strong emotional response to the situation, Oh, I'm awake. Or, Ooh, it's three o'clock. I've got an interview tomorrow. We have a strong emotional response. The brain says, Oh, there is a lion in the room. Right? So it makes you more likely over time to continue repeatedly waking up at the same time.
Okay. Even though there isn't a lion in the room, if our big human brain interprets that as, as being a lion that wake up, that can actually create a habit of creating arousal, anxiousness, and wakefulness in the middle of the night. So taking the clocks away can help us unwind that a little bit. You know, our, our human brain likes the idea of having lots of data.
That's why everybody's tracking everything. And there's apps for this and there's apps for that. And sometimes when I suggest to people that they stop looking at the clock, they get really nervous. Like, well, how will I know what time it is? Well, does it matter what time it is? Cause you should be sleeping, right?
You're not, you don't have an appointment. You're not going to be late. Right. We it gives our brain this idea that if we have enough data, we can control the sleep and make it do what we want to do. And my kind of favorite analogy is that sleep sleeps like love. If you try to force it to be a certain way, it's almost guaranteed to backfire.
Hmm. Well, And what's interesting is, you know, when we look at the time, or at least I do this, I'm sure everyone else does it, is you're like calculating, like, okay, if I fall asleep within the next 15 minutes, now I'll get this many hours of sleep. No pressure. Minimum, you know, I know it's like no pressure.
What I want to touch upon, which is so, I think very common nowadays is you said we lightly wake up a lot throughout the night and try not to have that big response because then you're going to put yourself back on high alert. You're going to start this pattern. A lot of people wake up and check their phones now because there's so much FOMO, fear of missing out, in the world.
I do it. I check my notifications every time I wake up. And sometimes I even go on my phone and my dog gives me this kind of look. Because that used to mean, Oh, it's time to get up. We're going on the phone. Now she knows. This, this jerk is just looking at his notifications again. So she's And have you ever missed anything that you would have really, really regretted missing if you'd have just slept through it and then checked it three hours later?
No, people don't like me texting them at 3 a. m. So yeah. And you know, it's always whatever. It's nothing that requires my attention. So, and with that, then I'm checking the time and going back on high alert. All right. It's actually funny you mentioned the lion in the room. I have raccoons that build a nest in a tree outside my window and every morning between two and three a.
m. they will just randomly start fighting each other. Like, I don't know what they're doing. Every day at the same time, they do it and it wakes up my dog and it wakes up me. And I'm sure long after they're gone, I'll still be waking up at that time. Cause I, I, you know, you wanna, it's so easy. They're playing or fighting or, you know, I don't know how PG your show is, but, they, they might be making some noise. No, I didn't know raccoons can make the noises they're making. First off, I never really liked them. Heard raccoon noises, let alone, it's like this high pitch shrieking. And it's like, they're all, it sounds like they're just playing. And I'm like, why are you doing this at 3 AM?
But that's like, you know, they're they're afternoon time for them. So it's interesting back when I used to, I mean, I still set alarms, but it's always at a different time now in high school and the military. When I had the alarm set for the same time every day, I would always wake up just five or two minutes before the alarm, because I get very, like I said, I'm a very light sleeper, very paranoid person, very anxious person.
If there's any noise, I'm like up. It is like, we're on lockdown. We're checking the whole house. I don't, I don't do it the other night. My dog's one of her, like. One of her pens, like, like a little gate randomly fell. It's been standing for five weeks. It randomly fell like at 2 a. m. In the morning, there's suddenly this loud thud in the house.
Oh, someone broke in. And I could not fall long after I, I searched the whole house or I checked every nook and cranny, fixed the gate. My heart would not stop pounding. I could not go back to sleep. Cause I'm like, I don't want to fall back to sleep. And it falls again. Bye. Like, so I don't like my alarm going off because it like gives me a little heart attack.
You've essentially trained yourself to wake up just before it went off. I would always wake up right before it, yeah. So I think that's interesting that we can do that. I was like, this is perfect. I don't even need to set the alarm. That emotional response helps us create habits for better or for worse.
But it also gives me It's our brain's way of being efficient. And then I was like tiptoeing. I'm like, I don't even need the alarm. But I will never fall asleep if I don't have the alarm because then you have that fear like you said. We don't have appointments throughout the night, but it's, we want to wake up at a certain time for, for whatever reason to go about our day and everything.
And it's definitely interesting how many times we wake up and don't know it, you know, don't notice it. And I remember my mom did, you know, you, you said we track everything and my mom got. Like a fit band or some kind of Watch it wasn't like an apple watch but it was specifically just to track her sleep and she was like Every morning she was talking with us kids at breakfast Like I got only this many hours of deep sleep true sleep Like it looks like i'm sleeping so much but look how many times I wake up And, you know, and then she's justifying it.
Well, that was when the dog barked. This was when this happened. This was when this happened. And she found it. Like you said, humans love analyzing data so much for whatever reason. You know, we're all, we're very curious people and my mom loved that. She's like, look how much sleep I'm getting or lack thereof.
Yeah. Number two tip I say is if you have difficulty with your sleep to stop tracking it with those devices. Right. A, they're not accurate. They're not, they're not accurate, particularly with the things that people are most interested in, and you just gave a great example of a certain amount of deep sleep.
Most of us spend 70 percent of the night in light sleep, so it wouldn't be quote unquote normal to get more than 20 percent in a night. of quote unquote, deep sleep. And that changes through time. The, the, the percentage is different for, for a younger person than it is for somebody who is, you know, over 60, for example.
So not only are they not accurate, people don't know how to place that information into context, even if it was accurate. And so what it does is it generates a lot of anxiety that isn't necessarily warranted. I had someone literally book a call with me. Because they were worried about only getting 20 percent deep sleep and it was a, it was a sleep education issue for that person.
That age, it's a completely normal number. Right. Well, and my mom has placebo effect that she formed for herself where she was like deep sleep. His true sleep is the only actual time her body gets rested. And so she's looking at, now she's looking at those numbers, like, I need to get more deep sleep. What did I do?
And, and, and, you know, all kinds of stuff. And the harder we try to, to make sleep happen, the more likely it is to backfire. And, and that is because of this arousal system. You know, it, it is, it says, gee, if Tracy's working really hard on this, she's tracking Everything she's researching every day on, on Dr.
Google and she's talking to all of her friends and she's trying all of these supplements and doing all this. She must be in real danger. And of course, if the brain perceives we're in danger. It's going to be difficult for us to sleep. So it is one of those things. It's very different from the rest of life.
You know, we, we get trained, you know, if you work really hard and you follow the rules and, and you want something really badly and you practice a lot and that you're going to get the outcome that you want and sleep is actually exactly the opposite. It's very difficult to take our hands off of the sleeping situation because we've been trained to view it in a certain way.
And because it's uncomfortable and most people have been trained to avoid discomfort at all costs which isn't really necessary, creates more, more grief than, and then really warranted, but with, with sleep in particular. If I ask someone, what is your greatest fear about what might happen if you don't sleep well tonight, if the answer is along the lines of, I'm going to be really tired and it's going to be really difficult for me to do certain things.
That needs to be put in context of all the potential things that could possibly go wrong for somebody. And I'm not talking, I'm not trying to minimize a person's experience because it is miserable and I've been there. Right. But there's a difference between recognizing that something is uncomfortable and responding to it like you're being attacked.
And we want to fix the problem and, and throw all of these resources at it as if we're being attacked. And that makes it more difficult. To kind of overcome relative to if we can fit that into a, you know, broad experience of potential things that could cause us discomfort. Yeah, it's just, it's a mindset shift that really helps with this process.
Right. And, you know, going back, you had mentioned you wanted to get back to something to hold the thought I've been holding it. And I think I know where you're head. If you're going to have to leave the bed to try a reverse. I love the word we're going to reverse engineer sleep. Sounds so cool. It's like, it makes me feel so smart.
I'm reverse engineering my sleep. This is like genius stuff right here. You know, leave the bed, go do something. You said that is enjoyable or keeps your attention, not boring. And I can already see if you do something boring or something or something very repetitive. It leaves room for your mind to drift and go back to the, I'm not sleeping or, or overthinking which is only going to prevent you.
So what's going to happen is you can do something boring, being like, all right, Ms. Tracy said, let's go do something. We're going to go do something. All right. We did whatever boring task it was, who knows. And the whole time you were just thinking about how you can't sleep or whatever it is, you start overthinking about whatever was preventing you from sleeping in the first place.
Then you get back in bed. And you're like, that didn't work. Now you're just even more frustrated. It's like, it puts a lot of pressure on the situation for sure. Now I got to go do it again. And it's going to be even later. And now you got this mindset, now I have to go do something, which is only going to make you even more alert.
Yeah. And people often ask, well, what's the thing that I should do because I don't want to wake myself up. Right. What if I do something fun, I'm going to wake up even more. The flip side of that is if you wake up for longer, you're building more physical sleep drive. Which then can be can be used doesn't always happen the next night, but you can then build that up and spread that out over time.
But my bottom line, I'm very mortality motivated. And, you know, kind of touching on the fact that, you know, sometimes life experiences make you realize how valuable your days are. Being awake shouldn't be a punishment no matter when it is. Right? You might have a preference for being asleep at 2 o'clock in the morning, but if you happen to be awake, why not do something you enjoy?
The flip side of that is if you do something you enjoy, your arousal will come down. Right? So even if you don't sleep. you feel better about being awake because you're doing something that you, that you enjoy and you're using your, your very valuable time on this planet in a, in a way that serves you instead of I'm going to, you know, no offense to anybody in here who likes reading complicated things, but if you go read something really complicated that you don't understand in the middle of the night, cause specifically, even though you hate it to try to bore yourself to sleep, that's just another way of saying, if I don't sleep, I'm in danger, right?
I almost try to take. In my sleep therapy work, the emphasis off the sleep entirely, which sounds kind of backwards, but actually that's the root. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that would be very dismissive. If somebody came to me, I said, well, all you have to do is like. You know, stop worrying about it, but the question is, well, then how do you operationalize that?
And that looks very different for different people, right? And, and that's where, that's where the work is. It's almost personal development work. To, to do this, you know, what I was kind of teasing a little bit with the, the checking the notifications at night, right? Not doing something that is a habit and a reflex brings stuff up for us.
And we all have coping mechanisms for when things are uncomfortable. It can be uncomfortable to change a habit. So it brings that kind of, that kind of stuff up, but you learn through that process too. And on the, on the scale of the scale of, All the things human beings can do to kind of alleviate discomfort.
Checking your phone's probably one of the more benign ones. But yeah, yeah. Especially if you get on social media or start scrolling on the news or something. Oh man, last thing you want to be doing at 2am. That is the, I, I have completely cleaned my news feed so that I get no news unless I look for it.
And I don't look for it on my phone. So right when I'm on my phone, it's my happy place. I'm scrolling hobbies and things on my Instagram and on my Facebook. Right. . Yeah. Yeah. And ladies and gentlemen, if you're gonna wake up and check your phone at the middle of the night, you should check out the couple of nukes Instagram though.
It's pretty good. I did a photo shoot is dropping at, oh, I forgot this episode comes out in the future. The photo shoot already drops. You should check it out. It's me and my dog wearing. Well, she's not wearing anything. She's naked because she's a dog, but I'm wearing all black and white. It was to showcase my new hat.
I wore black and white boots, shirt, pants, and everything to match her because she's black and white, but her and I do have matching outfits. I just don't dress her often because she doesn't really like it. And I'm not going to be. No offense, don't cancel me, but those pet owners who, you know, your pet, you know, if your pet likes being dressed or not, right.
They make it pretty obvious. You can see it in their eyes. You can see their whole soul when, when they, while wearing a poodle is, you can see when they do not like wearing a certain outfit. Especially cats. They just lay on the floor and try to disappear. Right. Well, my, my dog is funny.
She'll, she'll wear like, you know, shirts and stuff. I got her a little pink cowgirl hat that, that matches mine. It would be so cute. The only thing she will take off, she will whip her head around like a T Rex trying to kill something. She will not wear the hat. You put the clothes on her, sometimes it's like she's happy.
Sometimes she gives me this little sad look and I'm like, oh, don't do that. Don't do that. I don't know. It's for you. Come on. Why are you doing this to me? Right. And yeah. So if you're, you, if you do wake up in the middle of night, you should listen to my podcast. Someone commented on Facebook that they listened to my podcast until they fell asleep and I didn't know.
How do you feel about that? Well, he is a decently aged veteran, and I think he meant it with good intention. But it came off to me as, your show is boring, and I used it to fall asleep, and I was like, thanks. You could take it as a compliment to your voice. Right. Oh, well, thank you. Yeah. Check out Radiating Faith, my other podcast, My Poetry Reading.
That should be good for sleeping. I, I have a poetry voice. I don't know how I do it because I don't do it intentionally, but I listen back and I'm like, why do I read poetry different? And it just, it just comes out a different way, but no, I had, I had posted, I shared one of my episodes on Facebook and he commented the next day, he was like, listen to it, listen to it until I fell asleep and I was like, okay, I mean, he's 70, at least 60, so I was like, it's all right, you know, it's funny, my grandfather, he never sleeps is what he claims.
Yeah, he only, you know, he's like, I only need an hour or so at night, but every time we look over on the couch, he's passed out and then, you know, he'll do like these little power naps, and his excuse was, he's like, no, I was just checking my eyelids for holes, making sure they were still all there but his chair is where he sleeps, where he watches TV, and he never leaves it, and so he ends up sleeping.
Sleeping commonly throughout the day because it's the place of comfort is his home nest. It's funny actually, he has a, it's a massage chair and it's a remote that he pushes to raise the chair and have him, it stands him up out of the chair. He doesn't even have to get up out of the chair, it actually stands him up out of it.
But he'll stay there and then he'll end up sleeping in it every night, falling asleep at 3am watching the news or golf or something. And so. He doesn't even, like, the bed isn't even a sleep place to him. It's the, the recliner is the sleep place. It's also the, yeah, the in, in the dining room. I love who sleep places.
The couch. And this is another contextual cue thing too, you know, that's what you're kind of alluding to, right? People have difficulty sleeping in bed and they get up and they go watch television and they fall asleep on the sofa. Do that repeatedly, right? You got two problems to overcome if you ever wanna sleep back in that bed with your partner again.
right? One is. Never resolving the issue with being able to sleep in bed, but also you've got temptation. I could sleep on the sofa because it's a no pressure environment. Nobody gets on the sofa initially and says, Oh, I really have to sleep. They get into bed and they say, I really sleep. But what you raise also is around sleep structuring.
This happened in the pandemic when I don't know exactly what happened in the state where, where you were, but. We essentially had nine weeks of, you don't leave the house except to go to the grocery store, the emergency room or and so people's structures, their whole life structure went out the window.
That happens every day when people retire and they don't have something to do. They don't have to get up at a certain time. They can take a nap, three hour nap in the afternoon. They can go to bed whenever they want to. And as we get older. Our sleep is different. So newborns, they don't have to be awake for very long to build up enough physical sleep drive that they go right back.
You know, the, the, the typical person, you know, you know, 20 to 40 maybe a little bit longer for men. It changes a little bit for women around then you know, 20 minutes to fall asleep. But the older we get. Instead of a sharp drop into sleep, people could see that kind of a steep trajectory into, into sleep.
It almost becomes more like skidding across skidding a rock across the top of a lake. Well, that's interesting. And it kind of bumps along. So the, the angle of the, that dive into sleep is much shallower and Because sleeping difficulty is arousal based, constantly bumping up, bumping up, bumping up. So a lot of people will sleep in very light sleep to the point they feel like they haven't slept at all, which might be what's happening in a situation like that.
They used to call this paradoxical insomnia. And it's just, it's almost like you're sleeping, but there's a part of your brain that is awake and is watching what's going on. That happens to me when I'm really stressed out. My partner will elbow me and I'll say, why did you elbow me? And he will say, well, you were snoring.
You know, I want you to roll over. I wasn't snoring. I was thinking about this and I was thinking about that. And I was thinking about this and that. And he's like, no, well, you were snoring. So I guess I was asleep, but there's a piece of me that was awake and was monitoring and thinking and, you know, being, I have that as well, but I also have, I suffer from night terror conditions.
I have. You know, such vivid dreams and nightmares that I, I'm a little violent in my sleep. I'm a little screaming. I'm a little talking. I'm a little complaining about people in my sleep. That's awesome. And they'd be saying is you're not a real sailor unless you're complaining. So the fact that I do it in my sleep, like, who was it?
Like I said, when we were on vacation, my sisters and I would share a room and a sister one time, she was like, you were talking initially talking about how you didn't want to take out the trash and you were arguing with dad. And I was like, this is awesome. This is a, I think I, I think I need to get back to writing poetry before bed and expelling some of those emotions because I bring a lot with me when I go to bed.
Finally, when I do fall asleep and I'm also a sugar addict and I've, I've tried cutting that down because that does not help the nightmare factor that You know, really propagates it and also trying to cut back being on my phone or doing video games or TV right before bed as well, because that all puts imagery into my mind.
So yeah, I mean, anything that is particularly exciting or potentially upsetting, it's good to leave that stuff for earlier, earlier in the day, even for me. little projects. I get excited about them, but I have to kind of keep them in the laptop. So when I close the laptop, I can kind of do, I can do other things.
You mentioned nightmares and it might be of particular interest to your audience, at least based on what I know, military veterans I know in my life. If people are struggling with repetitive nightmares or repetitively themed nightmares check with your provider about imagery rehearsal therapy.
It's sometimes called imagery re scripting. It's very, very, very helpful for repetitive nightmares because what happens is because our brains really good at creating habits and habit loops based on emotion. It's almost like it's this is going to date me. Oh my gosh. It's it's almost like, a skip on a, on a record.
It just goes back and goes back and goes back and loops back. So it almost becomes a habit to replay it. You get to a certain point in the night and that the time of night or the number of sleep cycles that the person's already had triggers that loop. And so that program plays and that program is whatever the nightmare is.
But there are ways of working with that. That can be really helpful. I, yeah, it's so funny. I have such a vivid imagination and my nightmares are so wild and it's such a large range. And I remember them pretty well. I had a nightmare. I got three, like one star and one half star reviews on my show and I was like, Oh my goodness.
But I was looking at my reviews before, but, yeah, I'm trying to, I'm trying to get my rating up on Apple Podcasts. Everyone, please go give me a star rating. Be honest about it, but like, If you give me four stars because you think the episodes are too long that really pisses me off. My, I'm a long form podcast.
I don't know what to tell you. I hate people leaving that review. And if you leave a review saying, I didn't think talking about nuclear war and nuclear missiles would be something interesting, but it is, I know for a fact, you didn't listen to this show. Cause someone left a review like that. We don't talk about nuclear weapons on this show.
So I know you didn't listen to that episode. You lied. But yeah. I was going to say, what's funny now, I'm going to have the nightmare tonight. Cause I'm, I'm thinking about it, but it's like having their continuing nightmare that instead of most people, it's like you show up to work and you don't have pants on or something, but I was going to be like, I had a nightmare.
I was on my show and I didn't have my hat and all like I was wearing it. And then all of a sudden it was gone, but nightmare content is really personal because we all have vulnerabilities that are very specific to our, our particular psyche. It might be your dad saying no matter how many books you write or how many submarines you go on, you'll never be anything to him, but who knows?
I was going to say, what's interesting is the point. The reason I brought it up is you talked about the paradoxical insomnia where you light sleep so much that you still feel exhausted because. Of the mental toll sometimes that my night terrors take on me. Sometimes I can have slept for a set amount of hours.
They're always changing how much is supposed to be a few years ago, seven hours, now it's eight or nine. Now there are new reports saying women should sleep 10 to 12 hours. And I was like, that's the last thing. No offense, that's the last thing most young women need to hear. They're already sleeping.
Because I do, I honestly believe that women sleep more than men. I think, I think, I don't know what it is based on it. I think maybe women just. worry less. I think men just think too much. Men are problem solvers, you know, I've seen that in relationships, which is part of the issue, rather than just listen to women and be like, you know, honey, that's whatever.
Sometimes we like to advise and problem solve. And I think that especially at night, we're thinking about the family, the job, this and that. Not that women don't have responsibilities, but I think they just scroll on tick tock and then go to bed, you know, like water talk. Which, speaking of, I haven't seen this in young men, but I have seen it in a lot of young women, I know.
They can no longer go to the bathroom if they are not scrolling on social media, like they have trouble They have programmed themselves because obviously they weren't born scrolling on social media to go to the bathroom. Absolutely. Their body knows how to do it without a phone in their hand. Right. And if you disagree with that, I'm telling you, I'm telling you it's true.
I've been trying to tell our boys since they were, well, phone holding age. It doesn't help you at all to sit there and watch YouTube while you are going to the bath. Because it's going to train your body to take, well, let's just take an hour to achieve this basic bodily function that shouldn't take very long.
And That creates problems. It creates problems biologically, but also like, do you have to wake up an hour early because your body takes that long to kind of do what it needs to do in the morning? That's unhealthy. It's really unhealthy. Well, I mean, I can understand in the morning you got to like warm up, you know, it's like everything's been shut down.
Everything's cold. You got to warm up a little bit. I understand that part, but yeah, it's just interesting. But what's interesting too, ironically, is some people have developed it where they can't fall asleep unless they scroll on on social media first. But they they associate that with comfort. It's like, I worked all day.
I didn't have my phone. Now I have my five minutes of whatever time before bed. And I had to switch my habits because I used to like to read the Bible before bed. But then I would fall asleep while reading and I wouldn't remember it. I'm like, no, this is, this is exactly reading too. I don't remember it.
I know. Reading really helps me fall asleep at night. But I'm like, I, I don't want to read anything I don't want to, not remember. Like, I don't, I want to remember it, right? I don't want to read just to fall asleep. Read that one passage every night for the rest of your life. I know. It's like, I want to read and remember it.
You know, I don't want to read something. And I mentioned to you when we had a phone call, kind of, there's some new, Forms of podcasts are out that are like people reading lists to you. Or I have friends who military guys who can't fall asleep without ASMR. And sometimes a lot of anime girls talking to them about how they're a good boy and they can sleep now.
But there's also just like sound ones. Like in my dad back before there was ASMR stuff had a little radio with white noise on it. There was a ocean channel and this channel. And a lot of people get so used to sleeping with noise, especially if they grow up in a household with other people. If you're in the military I'll tell you, I got, you have to get used to sleeping with alarms, machinery, noises, other people.
And noise, and it's, it's interesting. These things become associated with sleep. You know, just on the noise bit spent a lot of time living in big cities. One of the quietest places I ever went was the desert in Jordan and it was so quiet, the wind was blowing, but you couldn't hear it. It was so quiet.
I laid awake all night long because it was too quiet to sleep. Isn't that wild? But all of these things, there's nothing inherently wrong with white noise. There's nothing inherently wrong or right about listening to You know, sleep sounds or any of these things, they are neutral in and of themselves.
They can help people sometimes distract from. More arousal provoking kind of lines of thinking, right? So they can serve a purpose, but they can become a problem if, say, a person doesn't have their phone or they, they don't have their, their particular kind of almost become, it becomes like a crutch. They don't have reliable and if the 1st response is, if I don't get that time to do that thing.
I'm scared. I'm not going to sleep. Then it's almost become a bit, a bit of a problem. Right. When again, on that brief call, sleep hygiene is you go online or your, your doctor says to you, well, just, you know, improve your sleep hygiene, make sure your room is cool. And your, your room is dark and you take all these, you know, having a bath an hour and a half before bed and all, all these things are neutral.
They're helpful for some people. These things focus on blocking intrusion from the outside. If there's still a fear of not sleeping that underlies anything that we do on purpose related to sleep, then it can potentially backfire for us because it's still sending that message. If we don't sleep, we're in danger.
If I don't have my phone, my TikTok time, I'm in danger. If there's light poking in the sides of the blinds, I'm in danger. And it's the perception of fear that's the problem rather than the actual circumstances. Right. Well, you know, it's funny because most people associate, you know, the darkness with sleep and this and that and We stayed at a hotel once my family where the Bedrooms had no windows at all They were inside the hotel and only the living room had a window and that vacation we would all All just keep going back to bed thinking it was, we had no windows, and, and, you know, it was, not everyone was sleeping with a phone, cell phone at the time, you know, this was several, several years ago, and it was like, and we didn't, it was vacation time, so we're like, oh, we'll go back to sleep, we can sleep in a little bit, and then we would wake up and be like, it was 12 in the afternoon, and you know, it was just pitch black, and so, for the military, Which we'll use as a transition to rotating shift work, I had to buy blackout curtains.
Cause I, I cannot sleep if it's daytime. And I can't sleep if I know that I'm pretending to make it nighttime. Which doesn't help. Cause the blackout curtains are nice. They can make it dark. But I'm like, it's 1400. I'm, you know, people are out getting lunch right now. How am I gonna sleep? I'm, I'm an awful sleeper.
But I know you work especially with healthcare workers and rotating shift workers and you know, how is it, you know, you said habits take a long time to form and unfortunately, we can have these schedules some of us where we're changing our sleep rotation every now and then so like, Can you shed a little hope on those people who are thinking like, you know, Mr.
She, I'd love to form this habit, but I, I've got to change every few days or every few weeks is, can I make it zoom out bigger picture? I have this cycle now and there's habits within the cycle. That is part of one big habit. Like, can you talk about that for a little bit? So it's, it's approached a little bit differently depending on whether the person's going to continue to work shifts and what those shifts with the shift cycle, is it going to, is it going to remain as it is, or is somebody going to be transitioning off of working shifts or going to a more stable shift situation?
The circadian rhythm element is the, is the element that's kind of problematic there. And that usually has to be addressed first. If the person's going to be transitioning to a more stable kind of schedule, because you can have a circadian rhythm disruption and then also on insomnia on top of that.
Right. So insomnia isn't just not sleeping. So I could have jet lag you know, flying to the U S to go see my folks. I'm gonna have jet lag and be awake at four in the morning. Well, that's a circadian rhythm issue. It's not early morning wakening insomnia. So dealing with the biological element first is, is really important.
But if you're in a situation where shifts are constantly changing, and that's just not going to change jobs anytime soon, it's just the situation that you're in a. I'm sure there are various petitions floating around. It doesn't work for all professions, you know, hospitals have to be staffed and security has to be maintained in different places to organize the work, help organize the workforce so that individuals are not having to do this.
That's, that's a good thing to do. But if you're in that situation, we'd sometimes talk about sleep diaries and sleep tracking and, and sorting a shift working situation out could take like, A lot of episodes to go over, but in brief instead of writing down all the times that you're awake and you're asleep, I would suggest that you graph it out on graph paper and shade when you're awake and when you're asleep over a few rotations of your shift and see where the sleeping.
overlaps across all of those or, or is close. And I would focus on those periods of time to make those as consistent as possible, because if you can make that sleep as deep as possible, it's going to be easier to function when your shift changes. I mean, I'm not a circadian specialist, but that approach has been helpful for people who've come to me who have insomnia and a rotating shift type of schedule.
So maximizing the sleep time that we do have Yeah. And making it as consistent as possible. Yeah. So if you notice, Hey, there's this period of time that always overlaps no matter, or I could sleep in this time and it overlaps across all of my shifts or two out of three of my shifts. Or a certain percentage of the days across, even if you're usually awake and maybe doing errands at that time, if you can make that time as consistent as possible, do your errands some other time and sleep in that block so that your body's always sleeping in that block or as frequently as possible sleeping in that block.
That's helpful. You know, so luckily as a podcaster, I get to be an expert without actually being a credit expert on anything. So here's my expert advice on sleep as a non sleeper. I'm not a sleep therapist or anything like that. Not a sleep coach, not a sleep therapist. I don't even sleep on my own. I don't even sleep.
As, as we've discussed, I barely see myself, but I can give you an expert advice here because I am relatively intelligent, which is don't use alcohol to fall asleep. That is a bad, I have seen it is very common in the military is very common in law enforcement. I'm not sure about nursing side. I don't know if nurses go home and, you know, get drunk and fall asleep.
I haven't really interacted with them, but. I remember back on Prototype when we were doing as I mentioned to you, which is the worst kind of schedule, in my opinion, you've got 8am to 8pm, you know, day shift, then you've got 12pm to 12am swing shift, and then you've got 8pm to 8am midnights, and they would call it SWIDS, and have these parties where everyone would just get drunk to transition from swings to midnights, and I've seen a lot of military members use alcohol.
to fall asleep. You know, that's that's not my father between his insomnia and working rotating shift work as a police officer. I think that's one of the things that greatly fueled his alcoholism was needing alcohol to go to sleep. I mean, he needs it to do anything, but especially sleeping, he would just drink until he fell asleep.
For some of us, that's one beer. For some of us, that's a whole bottle of whatever it is. You know, it's different for everyone, but I would not advise that. I know a lot of people take it as an easy option compared to habit forming. It's much quicker to just, you know, drink until we black out. Then, you know, look at our circadian rhythm, look at when we're sleeping, track this stuff, or Put in that effort, you know, of, Hey, I'm going to miss out on a little sleep tonight to help start forming this habit.
I'm, you know, like you said, we're, we're worried about getting every minute of sleep that we can, you know, we want every single minute of sleep that we can, and, and really it's such a privilege to be awake and living life. And in the long run, if you need to be awake. Doing whatever to separate your bed and your comfort and your anxiety from all, from being all entangled as it is with most people.
That little bit of sleep that you're sacrificing is gonna play a huge benefit in the long run. Whereas the sleep you're getting from the, the alcohol abuse. In the long run, I think it's going to be very detrimental to your health. Again, not an expert, but I feel like, I feel like anyone can say that.
I've seen it destroy a lot of lives. It's so true. And if you, if you, if you, you can look at it this way Having to take a little time and effort to to do almost like that personal development work around the mindset of, you know, do I have to fear this or, or, and how do I respond to this? Having, having to do that's a bit of a first world problem.
Really? And you're absolutely right that alcohol. It's got its additional problems, right? It functions to help us if we drink enough of it, we will pass out, but we kind of don't care so much about the things that worry us when we're kind of little buzzed. Right. And people find that helpful for falling asleep, but what is often missed because people are often passed out rather than actually sleeping all night is If we look at the sleep stages and the impact that alcohol has on those stage 3 sleep is our most restorative, deepest sleep.
And it basically deletes it and it doesn't take very much. And if you drink regularly and sufficient quantities, even when you stop, it can take a long time. For that restorative sleep to actually come. It's not like it's just on the night. So my dad doesn't have insomnia. He's just an alcoholic. I mean, it, and of course, you know, alcohol as other pervasive health and psychological and social consequences to, to, to its use.
But if you're just talking about the sleep piece, it doesn't create sleep. And it, and it destroys the most important Part of our sleep. And so people appear to be sleeping. They feel like they have slept. They wake up, they feel horrific. They wake up late and maybe feel horrific. And then they drink energy drinks all day long.
And then their brain is wired around and around and around they go. And then they feel like they need to calm down again so that they can quote unquote sleep, which isn't the real sleep. And they get stuck in that circle. And ladies and gentlemen, I meant to mention a while back. There is an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, amazing show, it's super funny don't ban your kids from watching it, it's not that bad.
There's an episode where he can't fall asleep, and he, he's got work the next day or whatever it is, and it's about him doing everything he can to fall asleep. Drinking warm milk, reading bedtime stories, you know, running around the house trying to do a workout to fall asleep, and it's like, if I do a couple pushups and run around I'll get tired, and I remember it ends with Patrick is his best friend.
For those of you don't watch the show, it's like, Oh, I've, you know, my parents used to make this beverage that would put them to sleep and he gives it to him. It turns out his coffee goes, Oh, sorry, they use this to wake up. I thought you were trying to stay awake. He gave him like a whole mug of coffee and now sponge was all wired and like his eyes are bloodshot.
And so it's pretty funny, but, you know, kind of just talking about the alcohol and you mentioned the energy drinks also. A lot of people are drinking energy drinks, coffee, even caffeinated tea, and oftentimes too close to their, to their sleeping hours. That's a huge issue, especially in the military.
And you know, I've always been very, I don't want to say anti energy drinks. I, I just, for me personally, I feel like you're doing yourself a disservice, you know, when you're being, coming, relying on these things, when you're training your body to need these things, when you're not having your body develop its own energy and resilience.
Also mentally, I think you're, you're breaking down that resilience for yourself. And same thing with melatonin is a huge word thrown around for people who can't see that I just take a, you know, go to the store. I'm so glad you raised melatonin as an issue. Oh, yeah. Keep going. I'll try it. Or just like here in the U.
S. I know, I know you mentioned it's a little different in the U. K. But I know in the U. S. I'm pretty sure you can buy anywhere or Z Quil, NyQuil, you know, whatever, whatever you want. There's alternatives. I think melatonin is pushed as the most natural one, the safest one. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a pharmacist.
I'm the exact opposite of that. I don't, I don't believe in half that stuff, but you know, I especially don't believe in just taking certain amounts of chemicals to fall asleep, even if melatonin is naturally made in the body, what you're doing is, I've, I've, I've researched and I've talked to some different people and one of the theories was that your body makes melatonin so you can sleep, but if it is getting an outward supply, it's going to be like, well, we are, we already have melatonin, we don't need to make as much, or we don't need to make it, and then when you lose that outside supply, It's going to take time for your body to register that.
And now you really can't sleep because your body's not making the proper chemicals needed. And then if you have too much of it now, I don't know if maybe you'll have trouble waking up or whatever it may be. Like I said, I haven't researched it too much, but. You know, you definitely, it's a minefield, it's a minefield and doing that falls into that trying really hard to sleep category from a psychological point of view, the melatonin piece in particular is really interesting because everybody says, Oh, well, it's, our brain makes it, so it must be safe.
It's not necessarily safe for everybody. That's why in a lot of countries, you know, United States not being one of them, but in a lot of countries, it's regulated and available by prescription only because it also impacts heavily on growth hormones and those sorts of things. That's why they're very careful about prescribing for Children, for example.
But the biggest issue is that if you look at all of the major medical association guidelines for the treatment of insomnia, you look at all of the major sleep associations all around the world. Melatonin is not indicated for treatment of insomnia. Helping people with their, their insomnia.
There's definitely a strong placebo effect here. The way that the melatonin works, our deep our dim light melatonin onset actually happens much earlier than we think that process has already started. You know, if you take a melatonin tablet and you say you fell asleep in five minutes, that is very likely that there's a placebo effect in there because that process has going already and your brain can only, we use.
Our brain generates like Pico grams of this stuff. It's really, really tiny amounts. It doesn't need very much. It's not going to use that. You know, people start with 1 milligram and they're like, oh, it quote unquote, didn't work. It didn't work in quotes, because it didn't work. You're doing it because you're terrified of not sleeping.
So of course you still don't sleep. So then you increase the dose and increase the dose and increase the dose and increase the dose. The brain's not taking that really on board. It's, I mean, it's a finely balanced system. It does its best to kick off any extra. And the other issue with food supplements, which would fall into that category, Is that they're not regulated and there was a couple of really excellent studies looking at over the counter melatonin in the States and in Canada and assessing them.
You know, if this says 5 milligrams, like, how much does it have across board? You know, so we looked at lots of brands and lots of samples and they found everything from. You know, it's got 4, 000 times the amount of active ingredients. It has 3 percent of the active ingredient. They actually found some melatonin samples had serotonin in them, which is just, it's dangerous to take.
You can't take that. So I guess I would say you know, I can, I can preach all day long about why you shouldn't take melatonin for lots of different reasons. We don't know what we're taking when we take it over the counter. If you're going to take something over the counter again, I'm not a doctor or pharmacist either, but there are third party tested options where at least they've been tested to say they have in them what they have in them.
And you're probably not going to find them in the, the you know, the, the bottom shelf in the supplement aisle at your local big box store. You're going to have to look for them. Right, so ladies and gentlemen don't, don't be overdosing on melatonin, don't chug alcohol before bed, don't chug alcohol mixed with NyQuil, definitely don't do that one, and so, Makes me feel ill thinking about it.
Yeah, I was gonna say, so don't do that, what you should do is check out the link in the description below for Ms. Tracy's website, but Ms. Tracy, if you also want to plug that, best way to contact you and reach you, again, Ms. Zoom. So everyone here in the States and wherever else you're listening to this podcast.
Shout out to all my international listeners you can work with Ms. Tracy you might mess up her sleep schedule to fix yours because there'll be whatever time via the across the world. But read her email. It says I work in many time zones. I am a. I'm Traveler , you know, phrasing. Yes. I walk across many time zones.
The some time zones are imp It's very difficult for me to work with clients in New Zealand, for example, because Right. Yeah, the logistics of the time zones, but people can find me on Instagram. Tracy, the sleep coach, and my website, the Tracy, the sleep coach.co uk. You can actually book a free 20 minute chat with me to see if your sleeping situation.
Might be something that I can help with. So it's kind of a no commitment way to make sure that it's a, it's the right match. No, that's perfect. I think I hate is to pay y'all this money and then like, Oh, you actually have some other medical condition and I can't treat that. So yeah, I try to screen for all of those things beforehand.
So we don't get into that situation, but the chat's really useful, particularly if you're going to be working with somebody for a while make sure you get on a little bit, it's not like pulling teeth. Right. Awesome. So Ms. Tracy, before we close out here, you know, to wrap it all up in a bow. I was going to do it, but you know what, I'll let you do it because you're the sleeping therapist.
Kind of summarize everything we did here for basically how we can tackle our insomnia or perceived insomnia. Whatever, whether it's just not being able to sleep at night, whether it's insomnia or not you know, Big key, keyword I do want you to focus on is the the internal versus the external.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Cause it's completely normal to have external or situational things that, that disturb us. But if you've got the feeling that your sleeping difficulties are being generated by the stress of not sleeping. And you're not falling asleep all day long. You might have insomnia. But you can get the most of first, first and foremost, get screened by somebody who knows what they're doing so that you know what you're dealing with, because there are over 85 different sleep disorders.
There are different treatment approaches. Sleep therapy is not appropriate for sleep apnea, for example. So knowing what you're doing first I would say, you know, If I had to take a few top tips from the things that we've discussed ditch the watches and trackers, if you have any sleep difficulty, because they're not accurate and they're just giving you a place to hang your sleep anxiety.
If you don't work shifts, one thing we didn't talk too much about is the importance of waking up at the same time of day, regardless of how you've slept. If, if you have sleeping difficulties, if you don't, then you got some flexibility there, but it's, that is a really important. Anchor for the entire biological and psychological system.
I think having good boundaries and compartments for quiet activities that you enjoy in the evening that are for you versus stressful things and work and family and obligations and commitments during the day, having those healthy compartments can help set you up for sleep a little bit better. I would say don't obsessively follow sleep hygiene rules.
If, if the rules are telling you to do something that you don't actually like doing you don't want to be doing something you don't like to do to try to make sleep happen, because it goes back into that reinforcing the idea that there's a situation that's threatening. It's uncomfortable, yes, but you're not being chased by a lion.
And that mindset shift is probably the most important part of, of working with. Sleep, not only in the short term, it can being dropping the anxiety around not sleeping, help sleep in the short term, developing lifelong resilience sleep. That's where that personal development work comes in. Cause we're all going to be thrown things that disrupt our sleep and the more calmly we can respond to those things over time.
The less and less likely we are to have ongoing sleeping issues. Yeah. So if you're a parent and you've got those toddlers who are just awake all night and sleep all day, just if you fix their sleep, you'll fix your sleep. Don't worry. I know that's an audience we didn't get to talk to too much, which is New parents or just parents who have young children can definitely be disruptive to your sleep.
But like you said, no matter whether you have sleeping issues or not, we're all going to be faced with outliers, especially externally and internally to that are going to disrupt her sleep. And we just have to be prepared for that and, you know, cope with it properly. Otherwise it can start that snowball effect of a long chain of worsening events to the point that.
It's like this, the less you sleep, the more you can't sleep. You know, it takes a life on of its own, you know, the toddlers example is perfect. Yes, our toddlers will wake us up and that's just a kind of fact of life, but I've worked with a lot of parents of young children who, whose kids are sleeping now, but they aren't because they're in this habit of waking up and now they're distressed by it.
And it's the distress that's creating more and more problems. Well, Ms. Tracy, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm hoping that we helped some people here. And, you know, like I said, it was near and dear to me because I can't sleep. And I know a lot of, I've seen a lot of my shipmates are just, you know, can't sleep.
And then it really affects their personal life and their stress as well. You're already in the military in a stressful environment. Or even getting out, you want to, you know, have a new life. And it's, you got this, you can't sleep. And then, so you're irritable, you're short tempered, it affects your relationships, it affects your ability to focus and concentrate on work.
So as again, it's also going to be alive and awake, but we do want to be taking care of our bodies and getting that proper amount. And so for those of you who have just accepted defeat or just like, you know what, I just can't sleep and I'm just going to, it is what it is, it's my existence. It's hard for y'all sometimes to see the impact it is having on your life truly.
So definitely take a step back and really look at it.
