B (23:07)
Yeah. One thing that's so interesting that's worked for some of my clients, and it sounds so bizarre, but like having a really nice set of sheets and pillows. Right. Like, I don't know about you, but many times through my adult life have I rocked the no sheet on the bed, bare mattress, like piles of crap in the back. Nobody wants to go in that to bed in that bed. Right. Like, sometimes it's as. It's as simple, but also as seemingly unconnect. Like, it seems like fluff, but, like, having a really nice bed that you want to get into. Or, like, you're saying, having a nice morning routine. I had this one client that was brilliant. He started calling. He started putting aside time every morning to do just something that he wanted to do and calling it, like, luxury time, right? Like, because morning routine sounds brutal. Who wants to get up and grind their morning routine? But, like, what if your morning routine is, like, play some video games. Like, do your favorite thing. You know what I mean? Like, have your favorite breakfast. Like, that's motivating. And I've had some other clients use some really interesting hacks to overcome parts of that. So in our last episode, we were kind of talking about phone being advantageous and disadvantageous. Well, there's this app called Alarmy. A lot of people use it to get out of bed. It's like an app where it doesn't stop going off until you, like, get up out of your bed and you go, like, match a photo. And so a lot of people use, like, a barcode from the shampoo bottle in their bathroom. And so in the morning, they have to get out of bed. They have to go in their bathroom and take a photo of the barcode. And so now they're up and out of bed. But this client actually used it to get in bed. It was so brilliant. Ash. What he did is he taped a photo on his ceiling right above his bed, and he used that as the image. So the alarm would start going off at night when he wanted to go to bed, and he had to go lay down in his bed horizontally, point the phone at the ceiling and match the photo. And then, lo and behold, he's already in bed. Right? And like you said, it's not everything at once. Sometimes it's just like that one thing. And I also. Another thing I find interesting is how many steps back. Sometimes it has to go, right? Like, someone's coming to coaching. They want to work on work productivity, or they want to work on emotional regulation or how they show up socially. And if we track that back to sleep. Okay, well, now we're working on the basics of sleep. Sometimes that tracks back to something like your exercise routine, getting enough body movement in the day, or cleaning. Like, maybe it's easier for you to choose to go to bed when your surroundings are peaceful. And if your surroundings are chaotic and you can't sleep in a messy house and you feel you keep getting, you know, distracted by things. Now we're Starting with like finding some homes for things in your house. And it doesn't seem connected, but it's all connected, right. Sometimes it does have to start a few steps back when we figure out what it is getting in the way of sleep. But I just want to say, like for that other camp of people, you know, I, I sometimes get those clients who feel like they've tried everything and so they're coming from a place of hopelessness and it's really hard. And there's. There are two things here. One is that sometimes it's not like one right thing. Like, what is the one thing you have to do differently? Some people have the kind of nervous system where they might have to do all the sleep hygiene things every night. Like, it might be a lot of work for you to prioritize sleep. It might be about temperature of the bedroom, comfortable sheets, you know, lowering the lights, you know, different, different. Like not having food after a certain amount of time. You might be the kind of person who has to do a lot of things to achieve sleep. And if that's the situation for you, that sucks, right? And that's a bummer. And also like, you get to choose, is the sleep outcome worth it enough for you to like make some lifestyle shifts, to do all these things. Right. I think it's kind of similar to a person who has like a, like some, some level of digestive issues, right? If there's certain foods that upset your digestion, some people, for them it's a no brainer. They're. They'll like eliminate those foods, they'll change their diets. Other people will just like live. My dad has had the worst heartburn since he like for my whole life. And he'll eat like a pint of ice cream and then be like, oh my heartburn. Like, he won't change his lifestyle. So he doesn't, he just lives with the heartburn. So like you can just live with the crappy sleep. You don't have to do all the things if it doesn't feel worth it. But you get to make the choice of like, is the sleep important enough that I'm willing to make these lifestyle shifts? And like Ash is saying you can make them over time. You don't have to make them all at once, right? But there, I think there's some group of people here for whom like a higher level of intervention is just going to be necessary and that's okay. Like the easiest level of higher intervention is melatonin. And I've, I've learned a lot about Melatonin because my daughter has sleep issues. And one of the most interesting things I learned about melatonin is that a lot of people take it wrong. They take it when they want to sleep and it's like not a sleeping pill. It's, you know, melatonin is the hormone that builds up in your brain. You know, way long time ago, in ancient times, melatonin would start building in our brain as it got dark outside, right when we were like people who lived without natural lighting. So as the sky slowly darkens starting in the late afternoon, melatonin is slowly building. Well, now we have artificial lighting and some people's systems are really sensitive to that artificial lighting. And so if you're not going to start making your environment darker after like 6pm what you can do is like take whatever your dose of melatonin is that your doctor tells you or that you've decided. But instead of taking it all, you know, at 10 and you want to go to bed at 11, break it up into 4, take a baby dose at like 6, take a baby dose at 8, take a little bit big of a bigger of a dose at 10 and like slowly like mimic what your brain is supposed to do. I've heard some people have really good outcomes with that. And so that's interesting because I didn't, I didn't know that before I started researching sleep more because so many of my clients struggle with it. But there are a couple of clients I've had who've actually had to see sleep specialists and get like, in one or two really extreme cases, get this kind of medication that blind people take because they have. Blind people don't see any light. So they have often circadian rhythm issues. And so there's like, you know, there's a whole gamut of like higher level interventions as well. There's a really good. I just want to give a shout out to, there's a Canadian company called sleepworks and they do like neurodivergent informed CBT for insomnia. And I've heard really good things about them. I've had a couple clients have good experiences about them and I love that they take a neurodivergent informed sleep to the psychological aspects of insomnia because sometimes it's not physiological. But I think the thing to do for me, I always think like, go in stages, right? Start with the stuff we're talking about. If that doesn't work, proceed to the, to building it up where like maybe you're doing several of the things at the same time, because maybe you need to, but add them in one at a time. And if that's still not working, like it's really important, I think, not to blame yourself and not to get into, you know, that kind of same shame that we were talking about with social media or with food. Like a lot of people in our society don't have a problem sleeping and they can't understand how it might be hard to sleep. And so there's almost kind of this feeling of like a moral failure, like it should be easy, but it's not. And that's a really tough grief and, and feeling to hold. And so if you are one of those people struggling with some kind of more like higher level of insomnia and sleep issues, just know that like you're not alone. It's more common among neurodivergent people. You may need a higher level of intervention. And that's okay, you know, we gotta do what we gotta do.
