Eat Love Do – Tracy Hannigan, Beat Insomnia And Have Better Quality Sleep

Hello and welcome. This is the Eat Love Do Show, which is exclusive to Women's Radio Station. I am Janine Newbury, your hostess with the mostest chat, bestest guests, and most awesome information, hopefully. Remember to hit up our social medias. We are @WomensRadioStn on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. And do go to our YouTube channel and hit that like and subscribe because it really does help, um, and we really love it when you support the channel. And it lets us know that you love what we're doing so we can do more of it. Um, and do hit my social medias up as well. I'm Janine Newbury, Newbury spelled like strawberry. So easy peasy to find. Okay. So today's show is all about the subject sleep and none of us function properly if we've not slept right. Like, you know that if you've had a bad night's sleep or you've not been sleeping for a while, it really impacts everything. It impacts your health. It impacts your happiness, your relationship with others, your ability to work, your cognitive functions. We need sleep. Um, so our body can restore itself, so we have energy, and so we can also process, um, things that have gone on that day as well. Our subconscious mind can process stuff while we sleep. There's lots of hacks and stuff that can help you sleep, and sometimes these can really help, but sometimes you need a little bit extra. And today's guest, Tracy, she will be chatting to you about that because she's fab and she knows everything to do with getting sleep if you've got insomnia. For those of us that don't have insomnia, sometimes these hacks can help. And sometimes it's just clearing out the stuff that's stressing us out. I know that when I work with my clients and they've, they've got things in their life that they're worried about or anxious about, or if they're trying to set up a new business or change something in their life in some way, often when I clear out the, um, the beliefs and stuff that are holding them back and the blocks that they've got, they tend to find that they sleep a lot better as well because they haven't got that kind of background noise and that stress that might actually be keeping them awake at night. And you know, if you've had that, like you're worrying about stuff or you're thinking about stuff or you're excited about stuff even, like, you know, I never sleep when I've got to get up and go to— I'm going on holiday the next day because I'm so excited about going, I just don't sleep, right? Like, yay! Or if I'm thinking and worrying about something, it's on my mind, I won't sleep. So what I found now is if I just clear it out, what's the root cause of it, I sleep really soundly and really well. So that's obviously something you can work on, but insomnia is like a different level. So today's guest, if any of you is suffering from insomnia and not having good sleep, you're going to love today's show. So that's it. So let's get started. So today on the Eat Love Do Show, because what you eat, how you love yourself and others, and what you do on a daily basis to bring more health, wealth, and happiness into your life matters, I've got quite a fantastic guest. Her name is Tracy Hannigan. She is known as the sleep coach, and what she doesn't know about sleep probably isn't worth knowing, quite frankly. I can't wait to chat to her today because sleep— I know how important sleep is for health and in every area of our life. So, and I'm sure there's people that struggle with sleep that are listening to this right now. So listen up, we're going to have some gems and some gold. So Tracy, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Very happy to be here. I'm so happy. Honestly, this is a big topic. And because, like, because sleep is like one of the massive things that every human being needs sleep. And if we don't get sleep, it impacts like our health, our cognitive functions, probably our relationship, every area of our life really. So I love that you're working in that field and you're a specialist. So do you want to just share a little bit about what you do? Sure. So I'm a qualified sleep therapist. I'm one of the few recognized by the Society for Behavioral Sleep Medicine here in the UK. My specialty is adult insomnia, so I don't work with children. I can screen people for other sleeping disorders. And that's quite an interesting area because what you were talking about, some of health consequences of not sleeping actually are more associated with other sleeping disorders rather than insomnia. So it's very interesting to me and really important to kind of screen people appropriately. And I, I use the kind of the foundational approaches that are in the evidence base for working with chronic insomnia. So if you look at any of the major medical and sleep associations around the world, they all recommend cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia as a first-line intervention. Now that doesn't mean it's not, it's always offered because there are not enough people qualified to deliver it, but it is the most evidence-based approach for longstanding sleeping issues. And that kind of forms the foundation for the work that I do with adults who have insomnia. Do you want to just explain what CBT is so that people listening understand? Yeah. So CBT and CBT-I are different. So CBT is cognitive behavioral therapy, kind of found the generic version of it. Yeah, there are different versions for anxiety and depression. There's a different version of it for insomnia as well. So CBT-I essentially works with the fears that we have around not sleeping, which drive our behaviors that actually get in the way of us improving our sleep. So for example, we might have a fear about the consequence of lack of sleep. And so then we start doing things like trying to go to bed early, laying in bed later, taking naps, reading around on the internet for all the ways to kind of quote unquote fix our sleep. And a lot of this fuels the fire of insomnia. It can actually take a short-term natural reactive sleep response. So periods of stress, anxiety, excitement, it's normal for us to not sleep then. These kinds of fears can actually generate longer-term sleeplessness out of that short-term sleeping problem. And so CBT-I focuses on the, the emotional and psychological component that creates arousal, which directly gets in the way of sleep and also affects our behaviors and the things that we try to, we try to do to kind of fix our sleep that actually, um, they look like they might make sense on the surface, but underneath they actually get in the way of improving our sleep in the long term. I'm so interested. It's like the irony as well. So we're worried about sleeping, so in turn we end up not sleeping. Yes, absolutely. Sleep anxiety is, is the primary fuel for longer-term sleeping issues. Interesting, interesting. Okay, um, so, um, do you want to take people, um, to share a little bit about your process? Because you, I know you mentioned to me that you, you have principles and pillars that you use to help people. So what, what is it? What's it you do? Like, how, how can you help people? Yeah. So essentially, Bob, I do an assessment. And the things that I'm looking to do is to understand what people's fears and feelings are about their lack of sleep, because some people have very specific ones. Some people feel like if they don't get the 8-hour magic number, which we can talk about, it's a myth, if they don't, then something bad is going to happen. We work on those pieces at the same time we work on these behavioral pieces. And so in order to really make the, the general recommendations make sense, kind of a little bit of a background, kind of breaking it down, is understanding that sleep is regulated by 3 things. The first thing is sleep drive. Sleep drive helps us fall asleep, stay asleep, and is responsible for the quality of our sleep. And if, if you imagine you have a balloon, uh, you wake up in the morning, you have an empty balloon. The longer you're awake and the more active you are, the bigger the balloon gets. We need a really big balloon to have a good sleep drive. And the timing of when that actually kind of induces sleep is regulated by the circadian system. And everybody who's traveled over multiple time zones is familiar with how the circadian system works. It is on a— it's on a clock and it's trained by various kinds of stimuli. So those two work in concert together because if we didn't have the circadian system, then we would wake up in the morning and we get slowly, slowly, slowly more sleepy across the day. So I'm, I'm looking for behaviors that get in the way of those two pieces to begin with. And then looking at the arousal system, which is actually the most important piece, which is that anxiety piece. It's our safety brain. That is, it's being focused on sleep in the same way that it would want to focus if we had a bear coming into a cave to eat us in the middle of the night, right? So we don't want sleep drive in charge. We don't want our circadian system in charge. We want our system in charge so we can fight the bear or run away from the bear. That's that fight or flight system, is that what it is? Absolutely, yeah. Is that where the arousal sounded like it's gonna be way more fun? Yes, yeah, it's a bit— it's a funny word. Yeah, yeah, that's a different— that's a different kind of arousal. It can keep you awake too, but that's not the one we're talking about. This is the one that, um, it, it's pretty black and white, and it switches on and it switches off. And if we have a fear of not sleeping, it switches on. So it's going to make it difficult for us to sleep. And so that's our stress response. Something exciting is happening, something bad's happening, arousal is high. It's going to get in the way of this sleep drive and the circadian system doing what they need to do. Long-term recovery really needs to address that piece. Yeah. And at the same time, working on some of these behaviors. So I look at people's sleep diaries as part of an assessment. And I can see if somebody's spending 13 hours in bed, but they're only sleeping for 6 or 5, they're actually making their sleep worse because they're being less active. They're being, they're kind of usually in a dozy sleep. So those affect sleep drive. Then they spend a lot of time in bed tossing and turning and stressing out about sleep, which gets in the way of our relationship with our bed. The relationship with our bed is not something people usually think about until it's highlighted to them. So if you're sleeping well, you think, what's my relationship with my bed? And I'm like, I don't know, it's cozy and that's where I sleep. But when people are tossing and turning and really stressed out about not sleeping well, that relationship goes from bed, sleep, bed, sleep, bed, sleep to I might sleep, but actually I'm really freaked out about what's going to happen tomorrow and I don't feel good. And what's wrong with me? Is my sleep broken? So the bed becomes associated with struggle and anxiety. And so improving people's sleep drive by getting them out of bed more and working on that relationship with the bed are the kind of the behavioral pieces of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. And then working on the emotional psychological part is the cognitive piece. Okay, good. So it's all have to be done together really to get the best outcome. Okay, cool. So if someone was struggling with sleep, rather than staying in bed, would you say get up? Like, get to encourage them to get up so they're kind of moving their body more so that they're building up that balloon and therefore will sleep better the next night? Is that what you encourage? Yeah, so, um, it's always a balance, right? Um, so when I talk about sleep drive with, with people who haven't been sleeping well, they have plenty of sleep drive there. It's just the arousal is in the way, so it's not able to actually do what it needs to do. But when we're talking about the relationship with the bed, if people are spending twice, you know, the same amount of time in bed stressed out as they are actually sleeping, we do encourage people to try to separate those things. We can kind of train ourselves. We can recognize that we're laying in bed stressed out. Yeah. And we can say, aha, here's an opportunity to work on my relationship with my bed. So stress and wakefulness belong out here. Sleep belongs in here. So taking that energy, moving it someplace else. Yeah. Doing something we enjoy. That's really important because when you read about this particular technique online, a lot of people get the message, well, I have to do something I hate and it's really boring in order to make myself go to sleep. Right. And intention is really important because if you do something to try to make yourself go to sleep, you're sending a message to that safety radar in your brain that says, oh, not sleeping is really scary. It actually can get in the way, right? Create a problem. Go do something you like. Your arousal will come down. The sleepy feelings come back. And you go, aha, here's an opportunity to train my sleepy feelings to be attached to the bed again. And it's not an instant fix because it usually takes months to get to the point where the issue is created. And it can take time to kind of reverse engineer that. But that is a, it is a really powerful technique when it's deployed in the right setting to help people recreate that relationship with the bed. And of all the behavioral sleep medicine techniques for chronic insomnia, it has some of the strongest evidence for it as a standalone intervention for people for whom it's appropriate. So you basically, you separate yourself from that, from the emotion of what's going on, and then, then you can relax. It's powerful. Yeah, yeah. You don't want the bed to be a trigger. So yeah, I like that. Absolutely. And it becomes a trigger. It really is seen as a battleground for a lot of people. You might be downstairs and you have so much sleep drive, you're literally falling asleep on the sofa and you go up and you get into bed and you put your head on the pillow and suddenly the mind is racing and the heart is going. And it's simply because we accidentally train ourselves to have that physical and emotional response in the bed. Because we've spent so much time in the bed having that kind of reaction. So it is, it's simply a matter of discipline to kind of retrain that piece. And when you're doing that, at the same time you're trying to build sleep drive, at the same time you're working on your fears around sleep, that's kind of a, it's a quite a nice recipe. Yeah. Interesting. Before we came on, we, I was chatting to you briefly and you were saying that there's a lot of information out there online and people read up on it. And I think you said one of the things you were saying that the advice it gives you is to not look at your phone or a blue screen or screen or something after 8 PM and things like that. So should we talk about some of these kind of myths or truths, or what's your— Yeah, there are all kinds of, um, all kinds of myths when it comes to sleep. Um, but when it comes to specific— when it comes to things like that, so we lump those into kind of a bucket called sleep hygiene. Um, And if you think about the term sleep hygiene, it's a little bit of a weird one, but if you think about it in terms of cleaning up your sleep, right? So instead of cleaning up your teeth or cleaning up the kitchen, you're cleaning up your sleep. Sleep hygiene types of interventions, such as making sure the room is dark, making sure the room is cold, maybe having a warm bath, those sorts of things actually are not helpful all by themselves once you have a self-perpetuating insomnia problem. They're really more for good sleepers. So it's not actually recommended as a standalone process for people to focus on. But unfortunately, when you go online and you read, oh, you know, make sure your room is dark, make sure it's cold, and make sure it's not noisy. When people do these things and they're like, well, my sleep isn't any better, they feel like their sleep is broken, right? Because that actually kind of makes people feel worse. It makes them more anxious. Mm-hmm. So there's nothing inherently wrong with making sure that if you're having difficulty sleeping that you don't have external things waking you up, right? Light is a good one in summer here, especially because it gets light so early. Yeah. I can almost guarantee you that if you've had insomnia for a long time, the light coming in between the blind and the wall in the morning is not what's keeping you awake. It is the fear of that light coming through the wall making your sleep worse, that is keeping you awake. I, I have literally known people who duct tape their blinds to the wall, never open them, because they're afraid the light is what's creating their sleeping issue. But it's actually the fear of the light that is creating more of a problem than the light would itself. We all know people who can sleep in broad daylight. Darkness is not an absolute requirement, but it can be helpful if you are easily woken up. Um, same thing with dealing with noise and, you know, having noise-canceling headphones and things like that. We all know people who can sleep when it's really noisy. It's not necessarily a requirement, but it can be helpful if you're a good sleeper to optimize your sleep, and it can be icing on the cake if you're doing CBT-I. But unless you're dealing with the fear of not sleeping, doing these things to the nth degree can actually fuel the problem. 'Cause you think, oh my goodness, I must be broken because I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to do, but I still can't sleep. This must be very, very comforting to anyone listening who's not sleeping and tried these things and like, I can't sleep, like what's wrong with me? So this is, yeah, I just, as you were speaking, I was just remembering a memory from when I was little. I grew up with my sister. My sister could only fall asleep when the light was on because she'd get scared if the light was off. She was younger than me. So I'd have to wait for her to fall asleep and then I'd go and switch the light up on the hallway and go back into my bedroom when I could sleep. So I always sort of need it to be dark now because that's what I formed as a child, I guess. That's your contextual cue for sleeping. Yeah, absolutely. Whereas my sister always likes a light on somewhere because when she was little, she liked the light on. So it's like two opposites. And it is really interesting because doing things like, um, like keeping a light on, we have an anxi— if somebody has an anxiety about leaving the light off, we call leaving that light on a safety behavior because it protects you from the anxiety of having the light off. It doesn't actually address the anxiety, but it makes you feel better in the short term. The trouble is then you always need a light on. And this is how phobias and things develop too. You know, I tell a story about my kind of earlier phobia of spiders. I mean, I used to nearly pass out if there was a spider in the room. Wow. But, and so that was my way of kind of escaping from the anxiety. And then it would be kind of running out of the room and doing all that. But slowly, slowly recognizing it's a pretty dysfunctional thing if you live in the woods to be afraid of spiders. I, I began to just allow myself to be in the room and actually realize the spider's not out to get me. And over time, my anxiety around spiders kind of decreased. And the same thing can be done with the safety behaviors like having lights on. Some people need professional guidance with that, but understanding how that works is important for sleep because when people have difficulty sleeping, they engage in all kinds of safety behaviors like, you know, taping the blinds to the wall and buying really expensive headphones to keep out any sound. They're not really addressing the underlying issue. They're just kind of protecting themselves in the short term from the thing that they think is the problem. And that can actually create— it just sends a signal to that part of our brain that lights up that, that arousal system that says, oop, not sleeping is really, really dangerous. We have to kind of be ready to fight or flight, and we protect ourselves from that by engaging in these behaviors. And what's really interesting about people feeling like their sleep's broken, because they're doing all these things and they're doing them to the nth degree and they're doing them 100%, and they feel like their sleep is broken, actually having difficulty sleeping with that much arousal around sleep and fear of lack of sleep actually shows that their sleeping system is working exactly the way it should. What? Because they've got lots of sleep drive because they're not sleeping. Yeah, the circadian system's working, it's sending the right signals at the right times, but none of that's going to work if the arousal system is, is keyed up. So working on those fears is really important. That's so fascinating, isn't it? And also you save yourself an absolute fortune if you just fix the fears. You don't need to buy the expensive, um, the gadgets and the supplements and the sprays and the, the Vicks VapoRub on the feet and the garlic on the feet. I mean, people have done all kinds of really interesting things. And what happens is they say, oh, well, it worked for a few days, but then it stopped working. But actually what happened is you relaxed around your sleeping issue because you thought that this was going to be the answer. So you stopped worrying about it. Your arousal came down and then you were able to sleep a little bit. But then something tweaked in your head about, you know, is this going to work or should I look for something different? Or maybe you just had a normal night of bad sleep and then suddenly you think it didn't work and you're on the hamster wheel again. Wow, interesting. Fix papers on the feet. That's a new one. I've not heard that one before. The garlic. All kinds. At least they were, you know, protected from vampires. Oh, do you know, I always, I always have trouble sleeping on airplanes, um, and it's, it's obviously a belief I've made up around that. I always feel really like, you know, long-haul flights, I always feel really envious of people that can sleep and they wake up refreshed. I'm like, how do they do that? Me too. The whole idea of a red-eye where you're sleeping when you're supposed to be at night is a great idea if you can actually sleep on a plane. I'm not somebody that can get comfortable enough to sleep on a plane. Um, yeah. So is there something, is there a way around, is that a belief thing as well blocking that, or is it just purely because it's, it's, it's, you're flying through a time zone where you'd normally be awake, or? It could be both. It could be both, yeah. I mean, sometimes it's a physical comfort thing. I, the way that I am most comfortable sleeping, I cannot get in that position. Into that position on a plane. I suppose if I was on a plane long enough and hadn't slept long enough, I would eventually sleep on the plane. But you're right. You know, I have this idea in my head that I don't sleep on red-eye flights, and so that doesn't do me any good, right? Yeah. See, even, even those of us who know how it works also deal with these things. Yeah. Your beliefs are formed, aren't they? Unless you actually do the work to remove them, they're going to still stay there. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Luckily, I don't do enough long, long flights that it has much of an impact on me. But for people who do have to do long-haul flights a lot, my partner used to do them all the time. He just, he can sleep like a baby on a plane. I like to sleep on my stomach. It's really hard to do that on a plane. You have to lay in the aisle. Yes. Just walk around me. Be fine. Oh, that's really interesting. I might try it next time I've got a long-haul flight. I might try like clearing out some of the belief stuff and then see see if it works. Yeah. And if there is a really long-haul flight, the circadian bit does play a role in that. So if you're going a couple of time zones, so maybe even 3 time zones, it's not that big of a deal. But if you're traveling 10, 11 time zones, there you're definitely going to take a period of adjustment. And some people choose to try to adjust before they get on the plane, which is actually really difficult to do because we've got work and house— home responsibilities and family responsibilities. We can't just decide where we're going to try to sleep at totally different time. When we're on holiday, we don't want to be sleeping in order to prepare to come back. So most people just bite the bullet and then deal with jet lag when they get to one, one end or the other. Yeah, that's always been my process. Ah, I'll deal with it when I need to. Yeah, I can, I can actually, you know, I can work out a really precise plan for myself, but am I going to do it? No, actually, because I have other responsibilities. If I didn't have them, I could experiment with that. There are ways to kind of mitigate some of the effects before you actually land in your new time zone, but they require you to do things that just don't necessarily fit into our lifestyles, like slowly going to bed earlier and earlier and earlier or later and later and later, depending on which direction you're traveling. That's tricky to do. Is that about the same, about every 15 minutes, like if you're trying to set up a new sleep pattern? Like if you do it in 50-minute increments. Do it in little, little pieces. Yeah. So your body can adjust to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. So, um, what are your principles and pillars that you take people through? Like when you work with them? Oh, we, yeah, those pillars really are looking at sleep-related behaviors that affect sleep drive. Mm-hmm. And the reason we look at those first is because people who are quite convinced they've lost the ability to sleep because they don't get sleepy anymore quickly become convinced that yes, they can. And so all the approaches are really geared toward increasing people's level of sleepiness. Now, obviously there's a threshold because if people are walking around too sleepy, then it's dangerous. So I do monitor that. There are ways to monitor that objectively to make sure that people are safe while they're doing this. And so working on, on that piece at the same time as we work on the relationship with the bed. So those two pieces are really key. And the third big pillar is this arousal piece. And the, the, the, that we've already talked about. And, and the fourth one, um, different therapists do it differently. Um, this is what some people might call like relaxation training. Um, I like to use mindfulness approaches because I think that if you pull out a, uh, one of these kind of decks of cards that have relaxation tricks on them, right? You pull it out like it's, it's something that you're going to do to try to make yourself sleep. You're setting up the wrong kind of mindset, right? You're setting up this, if I sleep, it works. If I don't sleep, it doesn't work. So I try to encourage people to, to develop practices that they can do during the day that have nothing to do with sleep. Ideally, that also help them with the cognitive piece. Mindfulness is great because it kind of separates you from your thinking so you can see it a little bit more clearly. But doing things during the day to help relax, whether it's a yoga practice and meditation practice, whether it's mindfulness, whether it's coloring, whether it's anything, whatever works for that person, or tapping, whatever it happens to be. But doing it during the daytime until it becomes a skill before saying, I'm going to do this before I go to sleep to try to make myself sleep, because we really need to look at the intention piece. It's really, really important. But if it's something that you enjoy doing and you're kind of doing it 24/7, you're doing it in different environments, it's not necessarily attached to sleep effort and trying to create sleep, then it's something that people can use in their kind of wind down at night. They can use it in the middle of the night. They're just having to be careful of that intention. So we're not sending the wrong signal to our safety radar. Okay. So it almost kind of distracts them from focusing on them that they're not sleeping. So you kind of, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. People who don't sleep for a long time, they, so they focus so much on sleep even in the daytime to the exclusion of other things. So they stop seeing their friends because they don't want to go out late because it might affect their sleep. And eventually the kind of frame of their life becomes all about sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep. And so much power is given to sleeplessness. And so it's really important to keep those things in our life and to engage in relaxing things that we like doing. A, it makes your life better, and B, it will help your sleep whether or not you actually do it before you sleep or not. I guess it's a bit like when people are trying to lose weight and they're focused so much on their weight and on their eating, so they become obsessed with food, so they probably overeat because they're stressing themselves out more. Sounds like it's a similar thing with the sleep. Yeah. You're obsessed with not sleeping that you ironically cause more not sleeping. This is really fascinating. Yeah, they spend a lot of time on the internet looking at ways to fix their sleep. And unfortunately, even the kinds of approaches that, that I use within CBT-I, if you look them up online, they're really generic. They're actually really customizable to people. So some of these techniques will work for some people, sometimes they won't. It depends on other health situations and things like that. But if you just look at like the quote unquote rules of cognitive behavioral therapy, you would think God, that looks brutal and horrible. There's no way I'm going to do that. I'm going to keep trying all this other stuff first. And actually, it's not that bad. It's not the easiest route and it's not a quick fix, but it is a long-term fix. So I often have clients who've tried everything under the sun. Now they come with spreadsheets of things that they do at night, starting at what time, and, you know, an hour after, an hour and a half, I do this and then I do this. And there's just so much focus on trying to make sleep happen. That sounds like a full-time job. I'm getting stressed out just listening to that. It stresses me out seeing it too. Yeah, yeah. In, in life, I think we're all trained like the harder you work at something, the more energy you put into it, the more focus you put on it, the more you want it, um, especially kind of in an entrepreneurial world, the more you go for it, the more likely you are to get the outcome that you want. But sleep is exactly the opposite. Again, the more hands-off you can be, the less you worry about it, the better your sleep will be. But you can't tell somebody who's not sleeping well, just don't think about it, right? It's a process to get to the, get to the point where you really can understand and integrate the idea that worrying about it is making it worse. And how do I stop worrying about it? So it's a big transition to go from I'm spending 4 hours a day searching online for an answer to I'm supposed to not worry about it. So it's a process to get to that point. I was going through something quite stressful a couple of years ago, and then I was struggling to sleep and switch my mind off. So I started listening to meditation CDs at night, just on YouTube or whatever. And I put on just loud enough so I can hear it, but not so loud that it keeps me awake. It's like a certain level. And I find now that I do that every night, just pop one on and fall asleep. But now I don't sleep unless I've got one on. I've got so used to listening to this meditation CD or whatever I'm listening to to put myself to sleep that now if I don't have it, I can't sleep. So I'm like, I almost created a problem for myself now. Yeah, but I'm like, damn it, what if I'm somewhere where I can't have one on? I won't be able to sleep. Yes. Yeah, so, and that happens quite a lot, you know, um, sometimes when people have this relationship with the bed that's really kind of like a struggle and it's the battle zone, they have difficulty sleeping there, but they've got a lot of sleep drive. They go out onto the sofa and they go, oh, I can sleep here, this is great, I'm going to sleep here. Well, that becomes your new sleeping place in time. And what happens is if you then want to go back and be sleeping in your bed because your partner sleeps there, what— socially it fits better for you, you then have two different issues to deal with. You still have the anxiety that's attached to the bed. But the double— the doubly difficult problem is, you know, you can sleep someplace else, and you have to resist doing that and put up with the process, some with relationship to the bed. So it can really, in the short term, it can be helpful. But being aware of the long-term dynamic can be tricky. So you'll be great as long as you have a way to play your CD. Yeah. Yeah. But it just depends on the level of thing and how available it is, whether or not it's sustainable. I know, I'll just clear that out. But it's interesting you were saying about the sofa thing. I've got a girlfriend of mine and the chap that she's dating, he has this, has that habit where he falls asleep on the sofa and he now can't sleep in the bed. And that's having an impact on their relationship because he won't sleep in the bed with her. So she's in the bed going, why won't you come to bed? And he needs to sleep on the sofa and it's literally creating a separation between the two of them. So not only is it impacting his sleep pattern, it's impacting their relationship as well. So. That, you know, yeah, in so many ways. Yeah, I need to send them to come and see you. Different people have different, different kind of sleeping arrangements, right? There's no kind of one right way to do it, but it is— when something becomes created unconsciously like that, then it's not like the couple have agreed to do this for a particular reason, and it can create— you can create problems. Yeah. We trigger each other in different ways, but that's a different topic of conversation. Okay, so this is really interesting. So, um, are there any kind of techniques you can teach now, um, that people can maybe try at home to help or to sort of re-change things up a little bit? So I can, I can give, uh, kind of a few guideline pieces, and actually these are really good for, um, for the majority of people who have difficulty, um, with insomnia. Really important. The difference between— the biggest difference, because a lot of people have different issues with their sleep. Insomnia. Yeah, I was going to say, how do you know it's insomnia and not just something else? Yeah, so there's about 85 different sleeping disorders, and so screening for different sleeping disorders is really the best way to go about it. But as a general rule of thumb, somebody who has insomnia has difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking up early. And they have difficulty sleeping during the day, and that's because their arousal is really high. So if someone has difficulty sleeping but they're falling asleep all day long, um, then we're probably looking at a different kind of sleeping disorder. So the caveat to these, these pointers I'm going to leave you with are make sure that you speak to your doctor to make sure that they're safe for you, because if you are— if you have sleep apnea or periodic limb movement disorder or some other kind of sleeping issue, these are not going to be appropriate for you. So it's really important. But anybody who's maybe having a little bit of a wobble in their sleep can benefit from some of these things. Anybody who has insomnia, and again, really general, they can be tailored for different people. But the, the old adage of getting up at the same time every day is really important. It is in part about training the circadian system. It is in part a matter of consistently building sleep drive. So sometimes if people aren't sleeping well and then they kind of sleep for 14 hours because it feels amazing, they don't want to get out of bed because they're continuing to sleep. That has a knock-on effect on subsequent nights. So if you have a, a big opportunity to catch up, it's really tempting, but I would suggest that people resist that temptation so that they can take the built-up sleep drive and spread it out over the next few nights because the consistency piece is part of retraining the sleeping system. And so that, that can be really important. So the waking up time is more important than the going to sleep time. Because I think a lot of people do that on a weekend, don't they? If they're working 9 to 5 and long hours, they'll try and catch up on their sleep on a Saturday or Sunday. Yeah. And if you don't have insomnia, then it's not that big of a problem to have a little bit of a lie-in every now and then. But if you have having ongoing sleeping issues, it can really get in the way. Okay, good. Yeah. The next thing is to make sure that you only go to bed when you're actually really sleepy. So not necessarily paying attention to the clock and how many hours am I going to get? Because we want to— if you go to bed too early because your clock is telling you to or because you have to get up at a certain time and you want your magic 8 hours, again, that's a myth. We'll talk about that. We— you're laying in— then you're then laying in bed worrying about getting to sleep. For longer than if you would have just gone to bed when you were sleepy. Yeah. And it's an opportunity to develop sleepiness and continue to pair sleepy feelings with the bed. Yeah. So thinking about the relationship with the bed and, and like, how are my sleep behaviors impacting that? Am I laying in bed for 2 hours in the morning tossing and turning and maybe getting 5 extra minutes of sleep for that 2 hours? Would it be better to get up and start my day, build a little more sleep drive for the next night? So if you, so if you go to bed earlier, you risk building up your arousal because you're worrying about not sleeping because you're not able to. Potentially, yeah. Especially if you're going to bed on purpose to try to get a little bit of extra sleep. What's the, what's the fuel under that? It's worrying about sleep. Yeah. Just wait till you get, wait till you get sleepy, then go to, then go to sleep. Even if you're going to end up having to get up early and you're going to have a little bit less, you're going to have more sleep drive for the next subsequent nights. Yeah, I've done it. Like, if I've got to get up early for a flight the next day, or if it was modeling shoot or something, I knew I had to get up at 5 AM or 4 AM, which is slightly, you know, a bit earlier than normal. I'd go to bed early, but then I'd wake up in the middle of the night, like 3 AM, 4 AM, because A, I've gone to bed too early, and B, I'm probably thinking and worrying about waking up, even though I've set an alarm that will work. Absolutely. Anticipatory anxiety is a thing. So if you do fall asleep earlier, you're using up your sleep drive earlier as well. Ah, so you're using up the sleep drive. Yeah. Plus you then, you've got enough arousal around worrying about, you know, is alarm going to be loud enough? Even though I know it's going to be loud enough, I'm thinking about what's going to happen at the airport and all this subconscious stuff. It, it raises that, that base arousal so that it doesn't take much to kind of nudge you into wakefulness. So you've used up a bunch of sleep drive And then your arousal is higher. It's just that much easier to wake up. It's really common though. Really common. I think, yeah, I might probably also say the same thing. When we know we've got to get up early, we'll just keep waking up. And I'll set like 2 or 3 alarms on my iPhone and then I'll set my actual alarm clock and then I'll set my Lumie one. So it's not like I'm not going to wake up. It's just like, oh. Yeah. And people can do things to kind of mitigate some of that, um, anticipatory anxiety, you, you probably have done these things like making sure your bag is packed ahead of time, you've double-checked it, there's writing, writing out lists and things to make sure that you're remembering everything. When our brain is turning over in the night like that, that is, that is our safety brain saying, make sure you've done this, make sure you've done that, don't forget this, don't forget— it's trying to do us a favor. It just really shouldn't do it in the middle of the night. It's really inconvenient. If we can do things to reassure it that we've got it managed, it might say, all right, okay, that's fine. I'll sometimes wake up in the night with that kind of, um, that kind of thing, and I just— I don't even turn my light on. I just write it down on a bit of paper. Yeah, can't even read it the next day, but getting it out has told my brain that she's got it under control. It's all right, I don't need to bother her with this anymore. It's such a small thing but can be so helpful. That's really powerful. So basically as you're going to sleep, before you go to sleep, if you sort of have a conversation with yourself and go, everything's packed, or everything's done, everything's done that needs to be done, don't need to worry about everything, everything's taken care of, you can just sleep and relax. Would that help you have a better sleep than you think? Yeah, kind of giving yourself permission. Yeah, it's okay, you cannot— yeah, yeah, some people's under control. Some people's, you know, safety systems are a little bit more um, like lower thresholds. It's easier to kind of trip that switch to kind of having that kind of circular thinking about remembering this, remembering that, remembering this. So sometimes people might need more, like writing out lists and just double-checking the packing and things like that. But it is so common, um, affects me sometimes too, even though I do these things. And I just accept that and I don't get upset about it. So it's, it's just, it's a one-off problem when it happens. Yeah, yeah, same. Usually just only like early flight or something, which is, you know, yeah, again, things, it's just so annoying because then you wake up and you're exhausted. Yeah, all right, did it again. I'll be applying your tips now, so hopefully that will improve. But you briefly said something about, um, people thinking they need to have 8 hours, but that's a myth. Should we talk about that? Yeah, so The number of hours a person needs optimally for their own sleep is genetically determined, and it varies between people. So we generally look at whatever number allows you to fall asleep within, you know, 15, 20 minutes. Sometimes people have 30 minutes, so somewhere in that under the, you know, 20, 30-minute mark, but not less than 5 minutes. So it's normal to take some time to fall asleep. If people are falling asleep really fast, that's a sign potentially a different kind of sleeping disorder. So in that 5 to 20, 5 to 30 minute range, wake up once or twice in the middle of the night and long enough to remember it. That's really important because some people believe you need to sleep solidly all night long, and that actually isn't the case. We would have, we would have been eaten and would never have evolved if we all slept like that. We have lighter phases of sleep that we cycle through. And we essentially, our safety radar is, it is waking us up a little bit. We just don't always remember it. And we're scanning for safety. What happens is sometimes we'll wake up just long enough that we'll actually consciously remember it. And that's, that's normal. As long as you're falling back to sleep within a reasonable amount of time. And if you wake up refreshed and able to do what you need to do during the day, that whatever that number is, is your number. For me, it's closer to 9 hours. Some people, they can do that on 6.5 hours. Some people 7 hours. And it's important to know we're not actually very good at knowing how much time we're spending sleeping. Even good sleepers, you stick them in a lab and you ask them to estimate how much time they actually slept, it's— they assume they had a good night, so they got 8 hours. It's not usually that 8 hours because our brain's not so good at knowing in those lighter phases of sleep, am I awake? Am I asleep? I don't know. So one of the things that we do with our human brain is we think if we know all the details, we can control our sleep, which is where sleep monitoring and devices and rings and things come in. But I discourage those. That's another suggestion for people. I discourage people from tracking their sleep. A, because those devices aren't accurate. Yeah. And B, because it creates an overfocus on sleep. You know, people will ask, oh, well, I only get 15% of deep sleep. How can I get to like 21%? It's really looking at the wrong thing and trying to micromanage something that has to be left alone in order to work at its best. Yeah. Then you create negative beliefs around that, that I'm not getting enough sleep, which will in turn make you not sleep as well. Yeah. Yes. I found that really interesting what you said about the, the patterns of sleep where we won't sleep deep through the night because we're we've not evolved to do that, that makes perfect sense because when you wake up, I have to wake up in the middle of the night and fall back asleep. Um, and I still feel refreshed in the morning. So that's, that's quite good. It sort of debunks that myth that if you wake up in the night, you'll be, you'll feel exhausted the next day because yeah, we're meant to do that. I think that's quite powerful knowledge to know because if you know that, you won't create that fear that if I've woken up, I'm going to be tired. Yes, exactly. And, and as we get older, our hormonal systems change, men and women. In such a way that essentially we don't suppress urine production as effectively when we're young. So we have to get up and use the loo, right? Absolutely. So the off button for our urine production, it doesn't work quite so well. So it's normal to have to get up and go to the loo when you're kind of pushing 50 like I am. It's just a fact of life. And I've noticed also, as Um, again, because I'm like in my late 40s now, so I've noticed that I sleep— I definitely wake up more during the night than when I was younger. So is that a hormonal thing as well? Not necessarily to pee, but just I just sort of do, and then I'll fall back asleep. I've noticed that more, and I've noticed I need less sleep now I'm older as well. Yeah, yeah, I know. Throughout your life, like when you're children and teenagers, you need more sleep, obviously, because your body's forming. But as an adult, yeah, it seems to As you, as we get older, we need less sleep. I notice in my parents and older people, they sleep even less. Yeah. People's sleep schedule tends to change when they get older. So they sleep, they turn more, if we're looking at kind of the clock, they kind of turn back the clock. We call it an advanced phase. So they start going to bed earlier and waking up earlier. The total number of hours tends to stay about the same. But what does change as we get older is we spend more time in lighter sleep. So it becomes easier for us to wake up and, and therefore we need more sleep drive to kind of counteract that and to be able to fall back to sleep. And when you add in situations like perimenopause and menopause, chemical menopause for people who are taking estrogen blockers and things like that, you have another whole layer of the hormonal impact, you know, changes in progesterone and estrogen. They will affect our sleep as well.. But what's interesting in, um, in, in menopausal women, if you look at, uh, menopausal women who are having difficulty with their sleep because of menopause, they're waking up essentially with hot flushes. Um, so they're having these vasomotor symptoms and you split them into groups. They did this study. They should do so much more. They, there's so much potential here and I can't believe they haven't studied this to pieces, but they had a group of women go through CBT-I. They had a group of women do symptom management education courses, and I think the other group was acupuncture. And so I looked at that and I thought, well, the group that's going to sleep better will be the CBT-I group, which is what they found. But actually, they also found that those women complained of fewer hot flushes in the night, period. They had reduced symptoms. And I was speaking to a menopause educator about this, and she said that that didn't surprise her at all because CBT used for menopause symptoms is actually really helpful in reducing symptoms. And if you look at cultures where they don't view the symptoms as a problem, yeah, they also complain of fewer symptoms. So absolutely fascinating, really fascinating. You think that would be a good thing when you're like, yay, I'm having fewer symptoms. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But if you live in a culture where having these symptoms is not viewed as a negative thing, it's viewed as a positive part of a natural transition, your reaction to them is going to be different as opposed to we wake up in the night and we go, oh, this thing again. And I hate this. And then, so that just feeds your stress level, which makes you more prone to the symptoms. And it also makes you worry about your sleep. So they kind of go hand in hand. So it was really interesting to see how sleep improved and some of these symptoms improved as well. So what are some of the symptoms that it can help improve? Is that like the night sweats? It's the night sweats. That's, that's the, that was the main one that was being studied there. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's because that's the most problematic for, um, for women who either are experiencing kind of chemically induced menopause or menopause is the, the hot flushes in the night. Of course, you've got the temperature issue and the discomfort and the sweating, plus you've got adrenaline and cortisol, which is going to make it difficult to get back to sleep. And from a CBT-I point of view, um, it's about managing— you can't necessarily delete the symptom, but you can work on someone's response to that symptom to kind of keep the arousal as low as possible to make it more likely that it will be easier to fall back to sleep. So interesting. I didn't know you could use it for that. I might need to chat to you about that because I'm definitely in perimenopause now and I, I definitely have the night sweats thing. Like I'll wake up in the morning like I've been swimming and just whip off my pajama top. Yeah, me too. I'm like, what? Yep. Great. Yes, it's like, oh, I think we better open the window again this morning even though it's 6 degrees. Let's air this place out. Absolutely. And is this also like when women get their periods as well? Because I know it's— people, women sleep, you know, because of the heat and the hormones and everything. Can it help with that? Can it help reduce that as well? Um, it, it can. So at the end of a woman's cycle where the progesterone drops off a cliff, yeah, women will often have, have difficulty with their quality of sleep. And so when that is very predictable and very cyclical, yeah, I'll help, um, help a woman put into place a bit of a plan in the lead-up to that time if it's really disruptive, to make sure that their sleep drive is absolutely maximized. They're doing everything they can to improve the quality of their sleep. Ideally, they want to do that, you know, every day and kind of have it as a foundation. But sometimes a little more support is needed for that kind of the tail end of the cycle. Okay, that's really interesting. So, um, how many— like, how do you know that you've got— like, so somebody comes to you and they've got insomnia and you help them, like, how long does it take for the symptoms to start to dissipate and for them to start sleeping again? Because I guess this will be something that somebody will be worrying about as well, like, how long is it going to take before I sleep right? Is it, is it per person or is there like a sort of a process? It's really individualized. Um, and it tends to, tends to depend on how much anxiety is embedded into the situation. If somebody ha— and if somebody has untreated generalized anxiety disorder or untreated depression or something like that, it's gonna be really challenging. Um, because there's just that, that level of arousal is already the baseline is really high. People who have a little less sleep anxiety tend to respond a little bit more quickly. So just a couple of examples. I worked with, worked with a gent who had difficulty falling asleep, would take like, you know, 2 hours to fall asleep and waking up early, you know, for, you know, 9, 10 years, something like that. And we made some changes to where different things happened in his schedule kind of in the lead up to sleep and making suggestions about ways to— if you're going to wake up early, let's maximize your sleep drive. And so we made some changes in the morning as well. And two relatively small changes, that person went to falling asleep in 15 minutes, and that was within a week. So what were the changes that you made with this person? What was the difference? Simply things like instead of being awake in bed reading, reading someplace else and then waiting until they got sleepy to, to go to bed. And instead of, um, this person liked to have really slow starts to the morning, just their nature. Instead of doing all of that waking up and looking at the paper and stuff in the, in bed in the morning, right, um, doing a little bit of that outside the bed in a, in a comfortable place, but then having a hard fixed time where they begin their day no matter what that was earlier than what they usually did. I found, and I often find, that these adaptations, sometimes that means that the process might be a little slower than if you say, okay, if you're up at 4 o'clock in the morning, you just start your day then, and you do all these things kind of to more extremes. Sometimes that doesn't set people up for success because if it's too hard, people won't do it long enough to achieve the benefits. So you see pretty fundamental changes within a few weeks. A lot of sleep anxiety can take a little longer because that arousal piece and the habits of thinking take a little bit of time to work out. It's like any kind of therapy, really. That's interesting. That— this a little tweak. I like that little tweak. So it's, it's just like separating the reading, um, from, from the bedroom to being somewhere else and then going to sleep. So you're keeping the bed just purely for sleep and then in the morning separating. It's really powerful, isn't it? And you wouldn't necessarily think that was a thing because people often read in bed at night to try and get sleepy and go to sleep. Yeah. And for some people it's not a problem, but it, it just looked like a really easy opportunity. To give the low-hanging fruit a try, and it was really successful with that person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, if you have no trouble sleeping and you like to read in bed, there's no reason you can't read in bed. But this was a context of really long-standing difficulty with falling asleep and, and waking up early. And this looks like there's quite a sleep drive issue here. So lots of laying around reduces your sleep drive. If you get up and get moving earlier, you increase your sleep drive. You increase the sleep drive at the same time we work on the relationship with the bed. It's a really nice recipe. Oh, interesting. You know, you mentioned before about older people, um, having a lighter sleep, so they've got low sleep drive. Do you think that's because they're moving their body less because they're a bit older, so they probably rest more? So if they were to be more active and maybe add more exercise, would that help with their sleep drive, and would they get into deeper sleep more then, do you think? If you were looking at a baseline, yeah. But our brains simply don't— you— they don't— it— our older brains don't generate as much deep sleep as a younger person simply because the things that we do in deep sleep, we don't need so much as a young person does. So, you know, babies sleep a long time, teenagers sleep a long time because there's lots and lots of change going on in the brain, learning how to form memories. There's a lot going on and it just takes the brain more time to do all of that developmental stuff. When you're a bit older and you're not necessarily needing all of that, the brain is really good. Our bodies in general are really good at conserving energy. Doing things like being more physically active, maybe learning a language, using your brain in different ways can potentially— I think, I don't know what it says in the literature about learning languages, but my attempts at learning languages, it's very mentally challenging. It's Some people are really good at it. Some people are not good at it, but it uses a different part of your brain. It requires you to spend time forming new memories. I think that that is potentially really helpful for people's sleep too. Yeah. And you're developing new neural pathways and— Yes. Yeah. I mean, and if you're looking across the lifespan, there's so many different confounding factors that can affect sleep, right? So medications can affect sleep. If you're older, you're more likely to be on medications for something. You're more likely to be less physically active than you were in your 20s. So this can dent your sleep drive. There's a whole host of potential reasons why people get lighter sleep when they're older. I just find people fascinating that can drink coffee at night and then go to bed and sleep. I don't understand it. If I drink coffee in the afternoon, I will be wired for sound until 2 in the morning. I actually made myself a decaf the other day, or I thought it was a decaf. Oh, oops. I'm laying there in bed staring at the ceiling at 2:30 and I'm like, nothing stressful, nothing exciting. Can't really figure out what I'm not thinking about anything. I'm just like staring at the ceiling. And I realized the next morning, oh, it's because I took the wrong sleeve of capsules out of the, out of the drawer, and I made myself caffeinated coffee at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. That explains it. I tend to keep, keep coffee for the morning. Um, yeah. And if I think, if you love coffee, don't cut out all kinds of things that you love doing. Yeah. Just as a sleep effort, right? Be mindful that it could have an impact. But things like coffee can cause sleeplessness. Yeah, but coffee doesn't cause insomnia. Insomnia is that self-perpetuating, arousal-driven sleeplessness. Wow, it's so interesting. It's that sort of key distinction is, is actually really powerful, isn't it? Yeah. So yeah, and it normalizes normal stress responses in our sleep. And that's really important because We all have things happen to us in life. This 2 weeks, I've had 2 family bereavements. It's normal to not sleep very well when you have that kind of stress, right? And to have— being in that process. If you're trying to buy a house, especially in the UK, it's really stressful, especially if you're not— yeah. So all of these things, that's a normal response to high levels of stress and arousal. And it only becomes a problem if we start pathologizing and worrying about it. So I know that, and it's already happening, my sleep is returning to normal because I'm not worried about it. But when we worry about it, that creates that extra layer that keeps it going. Is that how insomnia is formed in most people then? Is it because they've gone through something particularly stressful and then they've kind of created this habit or pattern and then Now they're in— they've got insomnia. Is that kind of— yeah, it's a really, really common, common trigger. Now, some people will have a medication trigger, but then it's usually the medication goes away, but they still can't sleep. That's because of that extra layer. In situations where somebody goes through like a stressful relationship change or job change, we call that a precipitating factor. It's precipitated a sleepless period. Yeah. The problem is when that period goes away and, you know, things have settled down, the sleeplessness stays there. It's because of these perpetuating factors that are keeping the sleeplessness going. And it's usually worrying about the sleep. Yeah. So interesting. It's fascinating. It's really fascinating. It is. It's fascinating. It's not what you'd expect either, is it? Because you expect like the usual things, drinking coffee at night, looking at your screen, da da da da. But actually the worrying about the sleep. And I've just learned so much from chatting to you today. It's been absolutely brilliant. And the fact that we don't have a deep sleep all night and we go into light, and it's okay if we wake up and fall asleep— that just knowing that, I think, takes a lot of the pressure off as well. So I think, yeah, I love chatting to you. I think you've helped a lot of people. This is absolutely brilliant. Um, we've got a couple— oh, just a couple of minutes left. So as we're wrapping up, um, Is there any, like, anything actually you'd like to share, or, and where could people find you? So people can find me on all the social handles @tracysleepcoach, and my, my website is tracysleepcoach.co.uk, and I offer a DIY 6-week course that walks people through customizing this kind of process for themselves. I offer one-off one-to-ones and also packages of both face-to-face on Zoom calls and Voxer voice noting coaching support. Yeah, brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Have you got a book out as well? Did you say you had a book? Not yet. Not yet. Oh, I guess we'll watch for that one then. The sleep program book. Your course sounds good though. So is it a 6-week course that you say? Yeah, 6-week course that walks people through how sleep works, the pillars and the principles, and how to look at your own diary, understand how that works, and how to apply the principles to your particular sleeping situation. Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. That's because then people can just do that at home on their own. Yeah, absolutely. And in their own, in their own time. I'll be running groups in the spring as well, so I'm looking forward to that. Oh, fantastic. Brilliant. There is no excuse not to have a good night's sleep now. We've got all the tools. We've got Tracy as an amazing resource. I feel like, I feel like I'm gonna sleep better already. Reassurance goes a long way. You know what, it does. It does. This is really, this is brilliant. So just as we're wrapping up, have you got any last sort of top tips or any, anything, any advice you want to give just as a— Yeah, ditch the, ditch the clocks and the trackers. Right. And try not to worry about your sleep. It sounds so trite, but it really is the long-term foundation for recovering from insomnia is to drop the worry. Tracy, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you. Um, and yeah, thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me. Oh, pleasure. Absolutely, absolutely loved this. Brilliant. Um, so I would say thank you everyone for listening today. This was the Eat Love Do Show, Women's Radio Station, because what you eat, how you love yourself and others, and what you do on a daily basis to bring more health, happiness, wealth, and indeed sleep matters. Um, we're on 9 AM and 9 PM every week, so tune in. Fabulous guests every week, just like the lovely Tracey we've been chatting to today. And until next time, we'll see you then.