sleep hygiene is kind of like your physical hygiene where you have a routine to keep yourself physically clean, you have a routine to set yourself up for healthy sleep. If you've enjoyed our episode or the content that we provide on the universe is your therapist. Check out our signature program, the whole health lab in the whole health lab. We walk you through healing from trauma, physically, emotionally and spiritually. If you're wondering if you have trauma, go to many trauma.com/quiz. Take our quiz, and you'll be able to determine if trauma is affecting your life. If it is and you find that you want to go further. We would love to be your guide as you recover from trauma. Hi, welcome back to another episode. How are you doing this morning? Lena?
I'm okay. How are you doing? Amy?
I think better than you.
You can tell by the tone of my voice. I feel like
I'm avoiding answering honestly.
It's true because I'm in pain. But yeah, you know,
you just yeah,
I'm not advocating like no pain, no gain. I'm just saying that sometimes you have to compartmentalize sometimes I have to compartmentalize a little bit.
Yes. very understandable. Because we have to function in life. Yes, I think that's really helpful actually, for today's episode, though, because we're going to talk about insomnia. And I know that insomnia can be related to physical pain as well as mental health. So let's dive in and talk about insomnia. And one of the things we know is that insomnia is one of the highest reported symptoms of unresolved trauma and toxic stress. That's something that we hear a lot about, that we both have struggled with. And I'm really excited about the episode just to kind of give people a few tips that I have found helpful and that the literature shows is helpful.
Yes. And it's something that I've worked with clients on for years. So I'm excited to talk a little bit about what has been helpful for them in the past and how we can help ourselves through a bout of insomnia.
Yeah, so the first thing to know is that insomnia is characterized by an not just an inability to fall asleep, but an inability to stay asleep. So we could be woken up in the middle of the night. This this is what is one of my biggest struggles is I'll fall asleep, and then wake up at like four in the morning and have a hard time falling back to sleep. So that is also can be insomnia, what other characterizes insomnia,
I think, I think those two are the main ones. And a lot of times what will happen for people that have trouble staying asleep is they'll wake up really early, maybe 2345. And then they will not be able to fall back asleep until some time around six. And then their alarm rings and a half hour and they're off to start their day. And the other thing that accompanies insomnia is a is a lot of anxiety. So you approach bedtime with a lot of anxiety about whether or not you're really able to fall asleep or stay asleep. And that is a very natural worry. And unfortunately, it it makes sleep harder. So learning how to combat that naturally occurring cycle where we don't sleep, and then we have a lot of anxiety about not sleeping and then we still don't sleep. That is one way to address some of the impact of, of insomnia.
Yeah, it is. It's kind of compounds. And so insomnia can be caused by many different things. But specifically for this episode, we're interested in how unresolved toxic stress or unresolved trauma compounds insomnia. And when that occurs, we are being sleep deprived because of the toxic stress and the trauma. And we need I mean, sleep is one of the very basic tools for healing from trauma and toxic stress. So it is a it's a compounding effect where we need sleep to heal, but we're not getting sleep because of the effects of trauma. And so it really does take very intentional interventions in order to break that
cycle. Really. Yes. And, you know, with my own battle with difficulty sleeping I've had A lot of interest in this for the last 20 years. And what I've realized in the last year or so is that sleep hygiene is, is really helpful because what it does is it sets up new neural pathways for your brain for this new behavior or this new way of engaging, whether it's like finding a way to have a routine before bedtime, that sort of thing. And those things are really good and important. But I don't know that there's been a lot of attention paid to the fact that if your nervous system your autumn nomics nervous system is super amped up, in general, that sleep hygiene asleep routine is not going to be the answer to your insomnia, learning tools to calm down the nervous system is going to be very helpful and vital to solving.
I think that's a really interesting point. And as I was researching this week, looking at what's been published recently, on insomnia, I did come across literature that talked about how sleep hygiene is absolutely essential, as well as mindfulness, as you say, because that would that would work on the nervous system. But there was something else that was considered very effective. And that was self monitoring. And I had to look up what self monitoring was because I wasn't familiar with it. So self monitoring is a combination of evaluating your quality, quantity, mood of sleep, before and after you sleep. And you can do it weekly, or monthly. And there are different tools that you can use. One of them is the Pittsburgh sleep quality index, the P S, Qi. And it can be used individually. And that's what the researchers were doing in a in a study, they were actually studying mental health professionals who were suffering from insomnia. And this would apply to anyone though, they found that those who combined sleep hygiene, with meditation with self monitoring, so that they could then kind of evaluate their sleep had the best results. So I thought that was really interesting. That's awareness.
That's super interesting. And it is awareness. I'm a little surprised that they don't have you track it on a daily basis because we forget, and you said monthly or weekly?
Yeah, I'm sure you could use it daily as well. It's just a set of questions. Got
it? Yeah. Because we tend to forget, so we can have, you know, a couple good night's sleep. And then we'll have one bad night and we think, oh my gosh, I haven't been able to sleep at all this week. That's what the brain does with the negativity bias. But that's really cool. I hadn't heard of that before.
Yeah, let's go over what a sleep hygiene protocol is because I think there's probably people who don't know what sleep hygiene is, okay, let's do it. sleep hygiene is kind of like your physical hygiene where you have a routine to keep yourself physically clean, you have a routine to set yourself up for healthy sleep. And it typically includes a fairly, I want to say rigid set of practices. Because again, as Lena said, we're looking to build new neural pathways. And so routine is very important when we're building new neural pathways. So when we are implementing sleep hygiene, we want to do a few different things. One we want to before we start to go to bed, and this comes from Dr. Daniel Amon at the Amon clinics. I love his work. And his suggestions for sleep hygiene are something that I used before we started mending trauma, and our podcast. So you want to any worries that you have at night, before you go to bed, jot them down or meditate or pray somehow get them off of your, of your mind at the center of your mind. So I find I keep little yellow notepads all over the house, but I keep on at my bedside table. And before I go to bed, I jot down everything I'm kind of worried about because that's why I can't sleep a lot of the times I'm worried I'll forget to do something the next day. So I write down all the things that you know, I'm worried about for the next day. And then so that's the first step kind of getting those off your plate. And then you want to set your sleep space up for success. So this is really interesting. And this also comes from Matt Walker, who wrote the book why we sleep and it is incredible. We want to ensure that our environment is a calm Triple temperature. And believe it or not, experts suggest between 60 and 67 degrees for optimal sleep. So Matt Walker talks about 69 degrees, so you can kind of play around with that. But it's a lot colder than I would have thought. We also want a dark and quiet environment. So if you are still working from home, and your office is in your bedroom, you absolutely want to shut down all your computers, you don't want to have your phone on at all, you want to turn it off. And you want to keep pets off the bed, because they can disturb your sleep. And then you want to set a sleep schedule, and you want to stick to it, like clockwork. Okay, very rigidly. So when you fall asleep, and when you wake up, you want consistent times, even on the weekends, and then won't always have to be this way, I'm sure there will be some flexibility down the road. In fact, I know there is as the neuro pathways take hold. But it's kind of like when you start eating healthier, or an exercise routine that you haven't started before, the more consistently you can stick to it, the easier it becomes. And it becomes I mean, our brain doesn't resist it as much. And then we want to create a relaxing sleep ritual. So some of that could include a warm cup of tea.
It could include journaling, asleep meditation lane, and I both love the calm app. And I know I do sleep meditations with my 13 year old, almost every night. And they're three minutes long. So it's not a huge time commitment, but it just really sets you up for relaxation, all your tech devices turned off not just on silent, but on airplane mode. So you really want to minimize any sort of disruptions or distractions technologically as well. And then you want to dim the lights before your actual bedtime. So yeah, we have an internal body clock. And it's the circadian rhythm. And it's our entire body is on a 23 hour 50 minute schedule, essentially. But if we are getting too much light, or not enough light in the morning, it it actually messes that system up. And so when you start lowering the lights as part of your your bedtime routine, you're telling your body, okay, we're getting ready to relax, and we're getting ready for bed. Yes, it's a queue, it is it's a queue and we're staying off screens. So that's really tricky. When you have like an electronic reader, right, I would highly suggest blue light glasses, or next time you get your prescription to have them put a blue light filter in. Because the light from electronic devices actually really also mess with our circadian rhythm. And so we want to set ourselves up as best as possible.
And Amy, you might be referencing me myself, because you know that for years I've fallen asleep to reading and I have an electronic reader now since 2011. And yes, I'm working on that habit. I'm working on being able to stop my reading and go into a more calm system nervous system so I can fall asleep without having to read to fall asleep.
That's awesome. And no, I wasn't referencing you. I think it's super, super common. I still struggle with it reading at night on my phone. I know Kevin still does it, you know, and so we have to really remind ourselves like, hey, it's time to shut things down and unwind in a different way. So yeah, I think it's it's really common. We're a technological society. Okay, so reading a physical book that's non stimulating. I've been doing adult coloring books, and that's really relaxing. So there's different things you can do but essentially you want to go to sleep at the same time. You want to wake up at the same time and you want to have a schedule. We actually have a free download on sleep hygiene on our website, mending trauma.com So you can definitely check that out and it would be under it'd be mending trauma.com/resources If you don't know what sleep hygiene you want, schedule you want that gives you a very easy one to follow. What else do you advise your clients about sleep hygiene and setting them up for success?
Well, one thing that you mentioned in we learned this from I'm Andrew Huberman from the Huberman lab, his podcast is that when you wake up, you get outside into the light right away. And it's the white is for the purpose of your eyes, to absorb the light, because that helps your circadian rhythm. And it's not just getting outside, so you have some on your skin, it's making sure that your eyes have exposure to light, not by directly looking at the sun. But by looking at the horizon and getting the available sunlight to filter into your eyes to help set your body clock. And I love that. The other thing that I've seen a lot of particularly in teens and young adults, is that if they've had a lot of trauma, they tend to want to sleep on the couch. And it drives parents crazy. But what I've noticed is that when they've had a lot of trauma, it usually has taken place in their isolated spot or in a bedroom or in secret. And so there's something about sleeping on the couch and open space that really relieves the nervous system of a lot of my teens and young adults. And that is really important to work with your team around that from an informed perspective as a parent, I think that happens for adults as well. I also think that this is a really difficult habit to form this healthy approach to sleep. And so as always, we're wanting to be benevolently curious. We want to be self compassionate, so that when we, when we are working on this, we just noticed without judgment, what's happening. If we don't notice without judgment, then we just get really upset. And we're back in our really activated fight or flight part of our brain. And it's hard to make healthy changes when we're operating from that part of our brain, the limbic system. So those are some things that I've worked on with my clients.
Oh, that's, that's great. I also wanted to say personally, one of the things that made the biggest difference for me, was using infrared saunas, and light therapy, so phototherapy, so not just going out in the sunlight in the morning, but also, before going to sleep using different light therapy, that I don't even know where you would buy it. But I know you can, because mine was in my sauna. But the light, the green light, specifically was what was used for insomnia, and it, it was very effective for me. And then finally, if you do wake up in the middle of the night, try not to look at the clock. And this is very instinctual to see what time it is to orient yourself. But really try not to look at the clock, because then that's that gets our anxiety going about what time it is. And it's very difficult to then go back into the real deep sleep. Yeah. So
I also think, Amy, that there are two techniques that would work really well when people are disruptive in their sleep when they're having problems with staying asleep. And one is the bilateral tapping where you tap on alternate sides of your body. And the other one is the physiological or double breath, sigh. Because if we think about calming down our nervous system, so that we can sleep, those two things are really effective with the majority of the people that we've worked with on our program and that I've worked with in my practice. And it's just a little quick thing you can do for three minutes or less. And it gets your nervous system back into regulation, so you're more likely to be able to fall back asleep.
I love that it is a like you said it's a complex problem. But it really is so essential to not just our physical health, but our mental health. And so as much as you can, I would encourage our listeners to make it a priority to work on this, of course with self compassion. But you know, I used to think, Oh, it's just sleep, it'll be fine because I would function on very little sleep. And what I found out though, is that as I as I got further in the healing journey, I couldn't function on little sleep. So I was more in tuned and more aware of my body and realize that it was very detrimental to my nervous system and it was increasing my depression and a Anxiety. Yes. So as much as possible, try and prioritize working on your insomnia in a very loving way. And just to recap, our top suggestions are to have a sleep hygiene process to get rid of those worries as much as possible. And when your nervous system is activated because of your worries, you can do some tapping where you're talking to yourself and resourcing yourself, and really kind of letting your your nervous system calmed down, as well as the double breaths, sigh which is to breaths in through the nose right in a row as much as you can, and then a sigh out the
mouth. Yep. And if if things are very, if you're finding that you are having multiple days a week or two without decent sleep, it would be wise to consult your family practitioner or your general practitioner. Our other sister Jodi is a therapist in California. And she works with a large HMO and in the psychiatric department, when people had such a difficult time sleeping, that they would start hallucinating or becoming delusional, that on occasion, one of the doctors would prescribe a sleep aid for three or four nights to help reset the sleeping body clock and I'm not a doctor. So I'm not suggesting you walk in and say to your doctor, I need a sleep aid. What I am suggesting is that if you have been trying and you've approached these things, and you've started new habits, and you're still not capturing more than a few hours of sleep at night, it would be wise to consult your medical professional.
Thank you. Okay, well, thank you so much for tuning in for this episode. If you're wondering if your insomnia is actually linked to unresolved trauma or toxic stress, we do have a quiz on our website mending trauma.com/quiz and it will take you through questions to see if unresolved trauma or toxic stress are affecting your overall mental health including insomnia so you can go there. But thanks so much for tuning in. And we'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to the universe's your therapist this week. If you have any questions or looking for more information, you can find us at mending trauma on Instagram, as well as mending trauma.com Our website and if you're enjoying our content, we'd love it if you could rate review and subscribe to the show. We'll see you all next week.
