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Carlee
Do you always get your full eight hours of shut eye? Hi, I'm Carlee Myers, your friendly stress management expert. And this month we're talking about physical health. Now, I've brought on two amazing guests, and I'm going to let them introduce themselves. Jackie and Amanda. But before I let them introduce themselves, I just want to say welcome. Thank you guys so much for coming on the show.
Amanda
Thank you for having us.
Jackie
Thanks for having us, Carlee.
Carlee
Absolutely. So, Jackie, why don't you start? We'd love to hear a little bit more about you.
Jackie
Sure. Well, I'm a licensed clinical psychologist together. Amanda Swain and I we are co-founders of Behavioral Sleep Medicine Associates. It's a practice developed to help deliver sleep education to community organizations, corporations, and practices. But I'm also a clinical psychologist who practices in a clinical setting at Bryn Mar Psychological Associates, where I specialize in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.
Carlee
I love that. OK, Amanda, what about you?
Amanda
I'm a family medicine trained physician and I've worked in adolescent medicine actually for most of my career. I've been at student health office in Philadelphia for coming up on 14 years and through my work with students. And also, quite honestly, in my experience as a mother, I became really interested in the effects of sleep deprivation. As you can imagine. And that led me to do some training in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. And through that training, it was how I met Jackie. And we realized that we made a really great partnership. And we both had a strong interest in education about sleep. And that's what we joined up to do several for several years now. And what we really consider our passion.
Carlee
I love that. And, you know, it's funny, you know, working in the stress management field, one of the most common things that I hear is that I'm having trouble with sleep. I can't get to sleep. Right. What do I do about this? And so I thought it was so, so important to bring on the true experts in terms of sleep and really get into, you know, what we can do, what we can do. You know, now to turn the page. Flip the script. And so I'm curious, you know, there's so much we can dig in and we're gonna dig into that today. But I'm curious, what led you guys to head head down this path?
Amanda
So our mission statement literally reads, empowering people to live their best lives through healthy sleep practices. And Jackie and I came to this idea through both our personal and professional experiences. We're both mothers. As I mentioned earlier, which means that we know intimately what it means to have disrupted sleep, to struggle to manage daytime sleepiness and to be truly sleep deprived. And we're also, importantly, both doctors. Jackie has her PHD and a specialty in treating insomnia. I'm a board certified family physician and I've seen the effects, of poor sleep on my patients for many years and early in our careers and our relative practices. We both came to realize that sleep is pivotal to both physical and mental well-being. It's no surprise that insufficient sleep places one at risk for cardiovascular disease, metabolic conditions, decreased immune functioning, dementia, emotional struggles. Yet sleep eludes many of us, either acutely for a few nights or chronically. Sometimes it's through choice. We we purposely put off sleep or because we have some other condition that makes it more difficult to achieve. And the ill effects of sleep, insufficient sleep, it's really become a national epidemic across the lifespan. And vulnerable periods exist during adolescence, midlife pregnancy, postpartum and throughout aging. The good news is that poor sleep is a modifiable risk factor for many issues, both physical and mental, mental and both Jackie and I really want to empower people to make behavioral changes that will yield important benefits for years to come.
Carlee
I love that. And, you know, one of the things that you shared really reminded me. I, I followed, I think was Shalene Johnson years ago. I used to listen to her podcast and she shared that she underwent a sleep study and she always shared with with people. She's like, I don't need sleep. I got I survive on four hours of sleep a night. I can do it. I can show up. And she actually had a study done and she found out that she was literally killing off brain cells. And she was horrified to find like the actual statistics behind what she has done to her, her mind by depth by sleep deprivation. And so I just wanted to bring that up, because if there is true effects, whether it's by choice, whether it's, you know, something related to another condition, but really getting this address is going to be really important. So I'm curious, Jackie or Amanda, either one of you can jump in. What do you recommend for folks who are struggling with sleep right now?
Jackie
Sure. I mean, there's many aspects to sleep. I think the thing we'd like to speak to today is more on insomnia, the difficulty falling asleep or maintaining sleep. And there's a couple tips we'd like to share. Obviously we could spend a whole podcast talking about any one of these. But I think that's some of the most important things are keeping a consistent rhythm and a consistent wake time and in particular, to help establish a routine with your sleep and getting your body into a rhythm. And there's many ways to do that but by keeping a regular rise time. And there's this idea of practicing what we call stimulus control and making sure that our bed and bedroom becomes a cue or a signal to sleep and things that are kind of counter to that or promote wakefulness. We want to make sure people bring those outside of the bed and bedroom. So if you're sitting there and ruminating or doing Tik Tok videos or even doing work in your bed, we want to break those associations and make sure that you're using your your bed as a cue or stimulus for sleep and getting to wakefulness out of bed. So if you find that you have insomnia, the thing to do is get out of bed, do something pleasant and do an alternative activity and just listen to your body. The second thing along those lines is a lot of time sleep is a very natural creativity and it's not something we can control. It's not like a light switch. So what we want to make sure that we do is we give up sleep effort. So we stop trying. Just like it can't digest or try to digest your food. We want to make sure that you don't try and sleep. So if you find yourself putting too much effort into trying to sleep, you need to kind of break that up again and get out of bed when that's not happening for you. And Amanda, do you want to add one more comment about the sleep lies we tell ourselves?
Amanda
Sure. Jackie and I phrase this as lies because often times we get attached to these very unhelpful beliefs and attitudes about sleep out of our anxiety, out of our experience with sleep, misinformation in the media or just because these ideas seem to make sense to us. An example of this are things that we tell ourselves. Like, my day will be completely ruined if I don't sleep tonight or I'm going to get corona virus if I don't get sleep or I'll never sleep again. These types of thoughts are activating. They make us feel more anxious. And in turn, they fuel our insomnia. Making it even more difficult to fall asleep and realizing that these thoughts represent insomnia. Talking in a way that's really not helpful. So reframing those thoughts can be helpful. Really kind of turning back and saying, what's the evidence for this? What's the evidence against this? Push back against those thoughts and try and reframe them into healthier and more positive messages.
Carlee
Wow. So it's it's interesting. I'm always talking about, you know, fight or flight mode. And it sounds like oftentimes like these things, especially if we're already in an anxious or fight or flight state using those lies, actually fuels the fire and can prevent getting sleep. So definitely, you know, implement those routines, practice, that's them. Stimulus control, try to practice. You know, be careful with those lies that we tell ourselves. And you're going to be headed on on the right track. On the right direction. So Jackie or Amanda. Where can we find you if we want more information?
Amanda
So we have a Web site that has a lot of information about us on there. It's w w w dot Philly sleep works dot com. If you go there, you'll see our contact information as well. And then we also have a Facebook page for Behavioral Sleep Medicine Associates that has a lot of good information there. We post lots of information that we find in the media that we think is actually worthwhile reading and listening to.
Carlee
Perfect. Perfect. So for those of you who are listening, we want to know which of these tips do you think will have the biggest impact on your sleep practices? Let us know in the comments below, Now, we also have some big news here at the Stress Less company. The stress less space is back and it's more affordable than ever. This is self-love accountability taken to a whole new virtual level. Join us twice a month for one hour group Accountability Sessions to make sure you stay on track with your self care goals and aspirations. Just visit Stressless CO dot COM slash virtual stressless space to learn more. Now this concludes this episode of The Stress Less Show. I want to give one final thank you to Jackie and Amanda for coming on the show.
Jackie
Thank you
Carlee
Awesome. So if you enjoyed this week's episode, let us know by giving us a big thumbs up and hitting that follow or subscribe button. Thanks for listening. And we'll catch you next week.