6 Ways to Level Up Your Sleep Routine [Sleep 03]

We are talking about sleep routines today.  Getting to sleep is helping your body transition from a state of dysregulation to rest.  By engaging with structure and routines, we help any left over dysregulation from trauma or stress, including devastating loss, get worked through our body.

This episode will present a series of suggestions to help your nervous system make that transition into sleep. Each body and every nervous system is different, so some of these tactics will work better than others for you. 

You are a sacred human being and you deserve a gentle transition during the evenings. So what does your nervous system need? And when can you set aside time to work on one of the strategies from this episode? 

Join me as we look into building awareness and meeting your nervous system where it's at so you can help it get to bed and sleep.  We start with dinner...

Please remember that this podcast is not a replacement for treatment by a healthcare or mental health professional. This content is created for education and entertainment purposes only.

• Transcript

  This transcript has been created using A.I. please excuse any missed words or incorrect grammar.

  0:00:00.0 S1: Welcome to... I thought I was over this. I'm your host, Dr. Kimber a licensed clinical psychologist, trauma healer, and fellow life journey or

  0:00:12.8 S2: Every episode, we dive into the science of human-ing and whether you find yourself feeling like you've just had an iceberg and don't know where help is coming from, or you're ready to trade in your raft for something bigger, you aren't alone. Grab what you need. Get comfortable. And let's do this. Today, we are going to dive into sleep routines, how do you transition yourself from your week cycle to sleep and thinking about sleep routines. I definitely don't want this podcast to raise your anxiety because the worst thing that you can do on your way to bed is be worried about how much sleep you're going to get, so I want to just remind you that you are a work in progress, and as you dive in to try to get better sleep, be kind and compassionate to yourself. Your system is dysregulated, and we have to get to the bottom of what that dysregulation can be. And the thing about our nervous system is it can't determine whether our dysregulation is joy or devastating grief. To our nervous system, it's all the same - grief, trauma, just like joy can cause somebody in recovery to relapse, it doesn't make sense to our mind, but in our bodies, it can feel like the same thing, and it can feel very dysregulating, I just want to give you that framework that what we're doing is we're helping our bodies transition from a place of dysregulation, which can be caused by both positive feelings and negative feelings, such as trauma anxiety, and we're helping ourselves get to a place where our mind and our bodies can go to sleep and rest, if you happen to be somebody listening to this who is depressed and maybe you actually are sleeping a lot more than you need to...

  0:02:23.6 S2: I want you to know the way out of depression is anxiety, as you start feeling less depressed, you're going to feel more anxious, and I want to remind you, it's really hard to compete at the end of the day with the algorithms that are in social media because they have us coming back for more, you watch Netflix. Most of us will have a very hard time not allowing it to just automatically go to the next episode, and so if you can keep front and center that your human mind is no competition for some of the latest technology that we have. It will help you set better limits. I know in the first episode, I dove in and talked about the importance of sleep, but I also want to remind you again the importance of sleep and why I do this is because in the moment when you are join episodes or social media, you're not going to want to turn it off, even though you know you're not getting sleep, and so sometimes it's helpful to just keep reminding ourselves the goodness of sleep in order to motivate us to change our habits and our behaviors for the betterment of our week cycle.

  0:03:40.4 S2: So I was reading the other day in this book called Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting by Lisa Genova, and she says in there that the magic pill to improve our memory and significantly lower our risk of Alzheimer's is sleep. And so imagine that we can significantly lower our risk of Alzheimer's, heart disease, cancer, mental illness by sleeping better and longer, we can't have good mental health if our sleep isn't happening or it's happening too much, and so... It's a fight worth having. Trying to help ourselves sleep, and I think that sometimes here in the United States, we can pop sleep that there is some kind of myth that it's a waste of time, the reality is, is we're not doing nothing when we sleep, in fact, it's our super power, we're optimizing ourselves, as I described in episode one, our brain is being cleaned out, our memory is encoding the most significant parts of our day and helping those parts move into long-term memory. I'm going to read a quote from the book, remember with respect to memory, sleep plays a critical role in many ways, first, we need sleep to pay attention, if you don't get enough sleep tonight, your frontal cortex is going to be dragging itself to its desk job in the morning and your ability to concentrate is going to be sluggish, that the first step in creating a memory is noticing what you're going to remember and to notice anything you need to both perceive it and pay attention to it, so by ensuring that your frontal cortex neurons or alert, active and ready for duty, sleep provides you with the attention you need to encode new memories, she goes on to say that sleeping also hits the save button on all these new line coded memories.

  0:05:40.4 S2: And my son and I is an eighth grader. I've been listening to this book from Francis Jensen called the teenage brain. She also says a wait, restate-like sleep have also been shown to strengthen learning in laboratory studies when rats are given amazed to explore, their brains show an expected increase in activity, and when they are split into two groups with one group of rats getting arrested after their explorations and the other... Doesn't get any rest. Those that are given the downtime remembered the maze significantly longer, I had such a proud moment when he told me in the car that he had told his peers about this study because for the teen interrupted sleep is a huge deal. Texting in the middle of the night and all of those things, they really need our help setting boundaries and getting the sleep they need, it's important for everything that I say, that you remind yourself that you're actually the expert in you and what I'm going to be giving you is suggestions for how to help you transition from the wake cycle to the sleep cycle, and everybody is different, every nervous system is different, so some things may work really well, other things won't work, and I want you to keep that in mind because we don't want to get stuck in.

  0:07:04.2 S2: There's a right way to do it. There isn't... This is all about your nervous system and you're going to need different things, one thing that... A caveat that I want to say is there are times when the chemicals that we put into our body really interfere with our sleep, sometimes we can't get to sleep because maybe we've had caffeine too late for some people, sugar is something that makes your body more weight and so depending on when you've last eaten sugar, that can keep you up, it can keep you in an adrenaline rush in your nervous system, and then there's other chemicals like hard liquor is known to impact the depth of your sleep. So I want you to keep that in mind and just my caveat is I'm not a medical doctor, and if you suspect that some chemicals or medication that you're taking could be interfering with your sleep, I encourage you to talk to your doctor because no matter what I say, if you have a chemical interfering, you're not going to be able to sleep better, most people are transitioning from work into family time, evening time, solitude time at dinner, so think of that time as a time that you can unwind, you can be present.

  0:08:23.8 S2: If you have a family, this is time to relationally connect, and I want you to think about what is it that you're facilitating at dinner? Do you taste the food? We want dinner to act as a pause, as a way for you to transition from what could be high productivity into a time where you're slowing down if you have a family. Sometimes what can happen is that it feels like at dinner is the time that you need to captain the ship, and so you are flooding the table with all of these directions, advice, giving, checking in on homework, and those things are necessary, but could potentially cause tension and stress at the dinner table, if you are eating alone at in your mind and your body to get more present, you're tasting the food, you're noticing the chatter in your mind, you are trying to slow down your lucky like us. We get to watch the sunset. It's a time to be more present in both your mind and your body using your senses if you are eating with others, I think dinner is best framed as a time of connection in the moral development research.

  0:09:44.9 S2: We know that the dinner table is one of the most significant places that family members develop their morals, and it's even... Such an important part of life at Harvard is a project called the Family Dinner project. If you're short on time, if you have some issues with athletics or other things that interfere with your family, being able to dine together, that website has a lot of good resources to help you think through how you could make the most of dinner and unfortunately, the amount of time that you're able to eat dinner together is impacted by your social economic status if you are struggling and have financial burdens and have to work more than one job, you eat dinner less often than people who don't have those same financial burdens. And for us, no phones at the dinner table, we don't have the TV on, and what's funny is I just read an article in The this week by Jordan Cal on talking about the importance of watching TV together the dinner table, and he talks about how... For his upbringing, they talked about plots and sub-points and was very engaged, and so I love that there's multiple experiences out there, and want to say that it sounds like in his family there was an interest and discussion and everyone's opinion is welcome.

  0:11:19.8 S2: I think that's the spirit of being in a family dinner that no one is too young to have moment to express their thoughts and opinions, there are significant mental health benefits of eating dinner together, and while I know that it's not always practical, especially in athletics or arts theater, those kind of things, taking kids away during dinner time, I want to say it's something that's worth fighting for, it's something worth trying to make happen, and it really, for me, is the time that it's letting your whole body now, Hey, we're down shifting from production into a time of relating, one of the doctors that I worked with in the past mentioned that if all of us took a walk after dinner every night, we would prevent a lot of health issues because we're just helping all of our system process our food that we just ate and giving that a boost, and I want to encourage you to be careful about emotionally, you're staring, that is prevalent in your family, in your person, if you are living alone, what is it that you are reading, consuming, and what is the mental state that it's leaving you in just noticing those things.

  0:12:42.5 S2: And in the teenage brain, she talks about, and really this is everywhere nowadays, is that you really need to have a limit for your kids for social, because it's not something that they themselves can control, they don't have the pre-frontal cortex, which is our thinking brain, that's not developed in us until we're 25, and so as parents, we do need to set limits and parameters, and if you aren't parenting anyone but yourself, I want to say you got to set some limits for yourself, most likely because... What is it feeling? What is the outcome of what you're consuming, so after dinner could be a time to do homework, it could be a time where now you get on social media, because according to some of the experts in neuroscience, is that we really do want to get off all of our devices, an hour or two before we go to sleep, in our family, we have everyone get off devices an hour before and we remove devices from the room because again, we can't expect them to have the boundaries that they need... I know when I was working in the college counseling centers was common for my students to sleep with their phone right by their head on, they got nothing of getting woken up in the middle of the night and texting back and forth, really those behaviors.

  0:14:17.7 S2: You want to teach your kids about sleep habits because they're going to take them with them, and in our family, we do talk about the neuroscience, we try to get behind, why do we keep the devices out of the room? So here's my suggestion, at minimum, you get off all interactive devices, you don't watch the news, you don't interact with any information that's going to wake up your mind because you are transitioning and trying to get yourself to a place of sleep, so getting on emails, you don't know what email someone's going to send you... I even put my phone on airplane mode, an hour to an hour and a half before I'm going to go to bed because I don't know what someone is going to contact me about or text me about, and I want to be in control of my mind shutting off... I think nowadays, when you have a cell phone, there can be the sense that you need to leave it on, because what if someone has an emergency and they need you... If you think like that before you go to bed, then your mind is unconsciously alert and waiting for that emergency to happen, so what might be a better way to address your situation and not be thinking, I need to be available, 247, what can you do to give yourself a little space, give your mind space and not be worried that something's going to happen and someone needs to get you in the middle of the night sleeping, and I think that there's practical ways to address this, I think there's ways that you can have certain numbers that can call you.

  0:15:55.8 S2: I don't know all the ins and outs, you all need to research this, but if you are thinking like This, keeping your phone on it is a way of keeping your consciousness Sami away, and our goal is to fully relax, to trust that it is safe for you to sleep. So my suggestion, if you're going to get on social media, do it after dinner, and some people do actually have to work after dinner, and if you need to do that, notice, what can you do to help you better transition after you stop working for me, I need... At least an hour in order to transition my mind from work mode into sleep mode, so if I know that I need to go to sleep by 11, then I'm absolutely done with work at 10 o'clock when I've been doing this podcast. There's something about it that wakes up my mind and I actually need to stop an hour and a half before I'm going to get to sleep because it takes me that long to stop the adrenaline and to be able to really calm my mind in a way that it will go to sleep. When we do sleep routines, our whole focus is how can we transition from full alertness to sleep, and sometimes we need a lot of help, so one thing to do, even when you're at dinner is kind of check in with yourself, what is your heart rate, what's your breathing, like What? Muscle tension and muscle relaxation, do you have...

  0:17:30.2 S2: What's your mind doing? Is it bouncing off the walls? Do you have racing thoughts when you notice these things, you know that you need to help it transition, and so then the question becomes, how can you help yourself transition to a slower pace? There are nights when I need to stop working longer before I'm going to go to sleep because I need a lot more help, as I've been sharing this podcast is totally dysregulated my system. And also, full disclosure, I've finished a manuscript that I've been working on for years, and so that's been part of it, is trying to figure out how to get that published, and my system has just been completely out of whack, and so I'm going to give you five suggestions for transitioning your nervous system. So the first one is, stop your sugar intake several hours before bed, if you need a stack, pick real food, nothing packaged, just drive some real food to help you get to sleep and get your stomach in a place where it can go to sleep, and if you do find yourself going to the pantry at night. I wonder if there's something else that you might be able to do.

  0:18:41.3 S2: Is it really hunger or is it a way that you have habitually regulated your nervous system? Just notice that. What is it? And one thing that I've heard by health professionals is sometimes hunger and thirst can be confused, so what would happen if you drink a glass of water before you ate anything, another thing is that maybe you're under-eating during the day that you just simply don't have enough calories in you, and so you really are hungry at the end of the day, another thing that you can do, number two is notice how wine and alcohol impacts your sleep, everybody is different, and so you can start keeping a journal, rating how awake you feel in the morning. How deep did you sleep, did you dream and how easy was it to fall asleep and maybe rate these on a scale of one to five or one to 10, whatever gets you... Whatever you would like to do to compare that and just start noticing, I know, use gummies, marijuana gummies, and I would just say there's lots of different combinations of those, and so the same thing, start noticing, is it a way to relax you, but is it at a cost for how deep or sleeping or how well rested you feel in the morning, melatonin as well, just notice how these interventions, these chemical interventions are impacting your sleep, and one way to do that is to journal because it really is impossible to hold all the information in our minds, her memory doesn't work like that, so when we can best see patterns when we make notes and journal about something, another suggestion is to stretch, stretch while you watch a show, you can do gentle yoga.

  0:20:34.7 S2: I do not recommend doing something to wake your body up, like Power Yoga, do something that's slower, where you're really transitioning from a fast pace into a slow pace, my four suggestion is that if you're highly stressed or anxious or maybe you're on a creative high to listen to music, the point of it is to have it start where your energy level is and then slowly move into mellow, so just using heavy metal, for an example, you start... You listen to a couple of songs, heavy metal, then you would move down to, say, classic rock from classic rock, pick something in jazz or contemporary music, then from there, pick something that is a little more mellow than that, and from there, you would move into something... Even more mellow, it's a slower pace, so you want to start with matching your nervous system, but you don't to keep filling your nervous system with that kind of pacing. I happen to be really sensitive to the types of instruments, the types of music, and so many of the apps that have sleep music are a little bit too much for me. Costco music doesn't totally work. I started to join the music too much, so for me, I don't know why, but the floating through space playlist on Spotify really works for me.

  0:22:10.0 S2: Keep trying to find a music selection that would help you go to sleep, just remember, you're trying to transition your body into a space where you can slowly not off to sleep. So my next suggestion is that you actually don't discuss things that require decision making or are really important or will cause conflict before bed with anyone that you live with, including your children, you want to table those conversations if every night is a frustration around homework or how messy a room is, do problem solving on the weekend, do it during the day, don't bring up difficult conversations at night, we are all more mentally tired then, so it's actually easy to get into a conflict, our minds, if we are dysregulated, are going to start nitpicking on our partner, roommate, whatever it is, so we can be more susceptible to being judgmental and just starting conversations that have no business being started because our mental capacity has already been met, you are going to need to create space for important discussions, and I encourage you to put those on the calendar, schedule those, don't wait until you're in high stress, if you do get into a discussion, then talk about When...

  0:23:45.2 S2: Can put it on the calendar, don't ignore the problem, but also give it the time and space that it needs to have mental power around it, so I love John Gottman system, a finding resolution, if you have conflict that keeps coming up that feels unresolved, I really recommend his book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. And for me, this book, you don't have to be married to really benefit just because he has a great method of resolving what seems like un-resolvable conflict, and the last thing that I would suggest in transitioning is to read, read something that isn't too emotional for you, that's going to keep you on edge. I know some of my friends can read psychological thrillers before they go to bed. I cannot do that, I have to save those for the weekend, sometimes during the day, but you know your body, just Look at it, notice it. Notice what works, not all reading material is going to be helpful for falling asleep, I can't read anything at night these days that might be relevant for this podcast because it will instantly alert my mind and I'll be down a rabbit trail of thinking how to integrate it what episode it's going to go in, etcetera, etcetera.

  0:25:08.8 S2: I just know what boundaries I need in order to again, get myself to sleep at a reasonable time, there are some audible books that work, I guess lastly, this is actually a bonus recommendation, is to use a sleep app, there are great sleep apps out there, head space has some good sections for sleep, but get to know what your favorites are, I think it takes a little time, what voice do you like, what rhythm do you like, just try things out, don't just be one and done, if you have a really fast-paced mind, you need something like body scans, there are body scans on YouTube, you can have three-minute ones, 10-minute ones, 15, whatever you need, you don't have to just have a meditation where it's very slow and there's lots of blank space there, do one that's more active, it can help you again, what you're doing is trying to meet your mind where it's at, and if it's racing, then you down-regulate whatever that is, so if you go for a walk after dinner and you're really ramped up, Be mindful, your body might want to walk really fast, but this is the time to down-regulate, and so you want to go at a slower pace, even if it feels like there's ants crawling all over your skin, notice your feet, walking, keep your mind coming back to the slower pace, it's your mind that needs to direct the energy, don't let the energy direct your mind, so just to recap, dinner is often the signal to your body, Hey, we're going to transition from productivity, from adrenaline, rushing things and get more present with your senses with the humans in your life, with yourself and transition into sleep.

  0:27:11.9 S2: I hope you can try one of the six strategies for helping your body transition to sleep, notice again, just on your humanness, that you are going to be more tired, and so you're more prone to grab what's easy, what's comforting, even though it might not be the best for you honor that part by helping you set structure in place where you won't be full of regret of what you've done or how you've spent your time, it's easiest to do outside of the situation when you have more discipline and more willpower than at night, and if you are full of anxiety, take some time to journal, but journal maybe an hour or two before you go to sleep, and I would even say this with prayer, if you're praying for real crises right before you go to bed, you're waking your whole nervous system up again and so be mindful when you do things, what works best for you, that's the right way to remind you – you are a sacred human, full of possibilities and dreams, and how you transition, how you spend your evenings matter to fulfilling that which you are dreaming of, maybe haven't even stated it out loud, What does your nervous system need, how can we keep puzzles and being more present and connected to our own energy levels, our own mental health, what is it that you need to do to move from a survival state into a thriving state, and if you're in a thriving state, what's helping you be there, and how can you keep maintaining those things? So in every episode, I ask you to reflect what are you taking, what part of getting to sleep do you need to improve as you think about those things, when can use calendar time to work on a strategy? Change takes a lot of intention, our nervous systems, our minds, they like what's familiar, even if the familiar isn't good for us, we create that for whatever reason, even if we're in high state of trauma and anxiety, there are ways that our minds masterfully try to go back to that, because that is our baseline.

  0:29:44.9 S2: And pauses like sleep, really help us notice when we're going back into that state, and that's all that we need to do, it's kind of like meditation when we catch our mind going off into thoughts rather than focusing on our breath, meditation is about catching that, and so here, as we get ready to go to sleep, it's a time for you to really dial in into what your nervous system is like and what it needs, maybe cuddling is so important for you to enter into a deep sleep, maybe you had a trauma that was in the bedroom, and what your transition is telling you is that there's things still in process with it, and for you to be able to sleep, you need to remind yourself that you're safe, that it's different, our bodies, remember, our nervous systems, remember things that our mind wants to forget... And so by really being dedicated to the sleep routines, it's just an opportunity, it's a structure to help you learn what is it that needs care and consideration in your life, in your nervous system, in your past, what is it that needs attention that can really help you lean into, giving yourself rest and giving yourself over to a place where you can rest and relax.

  0:31:18.6 S2: You got this sleep, such an important pause in your life, and I just wanna remind you, you don't need to be anxious about whether or not you're getting it, I have faith that you will, and of course, there's times we're going to be sleepless. That's not the point. The point isn't the end result, the point right now is for you to build awareness around what keeps you from getting sleep, and is there something in your situation that you can help by doing more of these routines, we talked last episode about watching nature videos, maybe your body needs nature videos before you go to sleep, maybe you need to be more present in positive ways at the dinner table because activate stress in the way that it functions now. So what would you need to change? Maybe you need a new play list, maybe you need to have a walk after dinner, whatever it is, it's... We're fighting for that habit and making it a part of your life, if you haven't subscribed, please do so on your podcast platform, and I'd be so grateful for a review. Thank you for taking me with you. Be well, be consistent.

  0:32:33.7 S1: Until next time.