The Livy Method Podcast - Psychology of Sleep with Dr. Beverley David - Winter 2025

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

In this Guest Expert episode, Gina and Dr. Beverley David take on a topic that might be the key to your weight loss journey: sleep. Dr. Beverley explores what happens to our bodies when we're sleep-deprived and how consistent bedtime routines and honouring natural sleep cues can change everything. From the surprising impact of sleep on hormones and weight loss to practical tools like keeping a sleep diary and understanding sleep efficiency, this conversation is packed with insights. Dr. Beverley also busts myths about sleep beliefs, tackles strategies for calming a racing mind, and shares the power of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia.Dr. Beverley is a Clinical Psychologist registered with the College of Psychologists of Ontario. She also holds a Ph.D. in Sleep Research (Insomnia) and a Master's in Health Psychology.Find Dr. Beverley:https://www.yourpsychologycentre.ca/@drdrbeverleyYou can find the full video hosted at:https://www.facebook.com/groups/livymethodwinter2025To learn more about The Livy Method, visit www.ginalivy.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Gina Livi and welcome to the Livi Method Podcast. This is where you'll have access to all of the live streams from my 91 Day Weight Loss program. With a combination of daily lives, guest expert interviews, and member stories, there is something new almost every day. Miss the Morning Live? Want to relisten to one of our amazing guest experts? Well, this is the place.

This podcast is hosted on Acast, but it's available on all podcast platforms, including the one you're listening to right now, Spotify, Apple, and Amazon Music. At OLG, we celebrate winning every day. That's because we make millions of sports and lottery winners across Ontario all year round. In the last year, we had more than 208 million winning

tickets, and we gave away more than $2.6 billion in prizes. That's a lot of winners and a lot of dreams that came true. At OLG, every winner has one thing in common. They played. Could you win next? Play in store or at olg.ca and bring home the win. Winner, Kenyo. Play in store or at olg.ca and bring home the win. Winner, Geno.

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This is an opportunity to become curious. To learn some things. How do we help you feel less overwhelmed so you can continue on your journey? Keep believing in yourself and keep trusting the process. Just be patient. Is your sleep the reason why you can't lose weight? Could be. So today we're gonna talk about how, why, and what you can do about it

with clinical psychologist, Dr. Beverly David, who is also a sleep researcher. So you are the perfect guest for this conversation. Hello, hi, good morning. Hello, good morning, Gina. Yeah. So we are finally on. We had a bit of a technical glitch happening.

I am in Mexico right now. I saw Nicole said it's just, it'll be ready in a Mexican minute. It is what it is, you get what you get and we're here. So how are you and why can't we sleep and how is that affecting our weight loss? What a brilliant question. My favorite topic of all, and isn't it funny how sleepy I feel today? How come that happens?

But okay, so what to tell you about sleep? Well, first of all, it's to, I suppose, let you all know how busy we are when we're sleeping, because sleep is not a static thing that we're doing every night and it's mother nature knows best it's no accident that we are supposed to spend a third of our lives asleep and this is our recharge this is our time to not only unplug but actually really look after our body because in order to do our day,

we must do our night as well. We must have time to replenish and restore. And behind those closed eyelids, a lot is happening in our body that then allows us to turn up in the day in the way we would want to. And as a clinical psychologist, I cut my teeth in sleep research at Loughborough University in my undergrad, my undergraduate research. And one of the projects I did at the end was what happens when you take sleep away. So what happens when you sleep deprive people. And psychologists love doing this to people.

They love finding out why do we do things and what happens to us when we're not able to do things? And that would be an example of sleep deprivation. If we take the opportunity away from you and then we watch what happens, not only to your, because remember psychology is your body, but also your thoughts and also your feelings and also your behaviours, what happens to all of those things when we take sleep away? And it's dramatic,

you know, probably all of us know how quickly if we miss a night's sleep or we have a shortened night's sleep or a poor night's sleep, we will find it hard to find words, word finding, or we're a little bit more erratic and impatient with ourselves. We'll get frustrated. We might be more emotional. And those are quite obvious things. We might notice then that we want to fall asleep because we haven't had the chance to fall asleep. And if we haven't recharged, we're going to be sleepy during the day. So we might start noticing mistakes. So that's cognitive things, we might not be able to hold lots of tasks in mind and multitask. So these very advanced human being things that we rely on

start going wonky. Okay. But also we know our body is changing. Okay, straight away. And Dr. Alinka will be talking about that straight away our hormones will start to adjust the hormones that can relate because we're talking about your program, fullness and feeling hunger. so those cues go wonky. Okay, so it's really fascinating that then when we give our sleep back, we then see this recharge and that we're able to actually see a correction in a lot of these things. We're able to make better decisions, we're able to have clarity, we're able to see bigger picture, we might notice impulse, you know, stops being around as much because we become very impulsive when we're very sleepy and reactive. So our choices change. We're more risky. When we do this to students, we would see that. We would also bring the eating clinic in and we

would put food out and we would watch what to sleep to pride people get drawn to. You know, what foods do they want to eat and what foods do they neglect? And often it's more of the salty, heavier carbohydrates that we are drawn to when we are sleep to pride. So there's a lot going on when we're when we're sleeping at night. Yeah, I love that summarization of all the things that are going on. The one thing that things that hit me that you just said is your sleep dictates how you show up each day, not just physically, but also mentally. And so Dr. Beverly today is here to talk to us about what's happening with your body mentally, physically with your brain, how's it affecting the choices that you're making, obviously

what you can do to get a better night's sleep or how do you know when you have a real issue with it. But it's really understanding the importance of sleep is the takeaway for this conversation and why you're going to want to make an effort to get better sleep. So tomorrow, Dr. Dr. Elena Alana McGinn is gonna join us. She's a stress and sleep expert. We're gonna talk about how to manage your stress, actually how to get better sleep,

like actionable things that you can do. And then like Dr. Beverly mentioned, Dr. Alinka is gonna join us on Thursday to talk about the physical impact, how sleep is affecting your hormones. So today I really wanna focus on that mental side of things and affecting the choices that you're making, your ability to show up every day,

your ability to make change, your ability to be more aware. At what point does lack of sleep affect you? Are we just talking like one crappy night's sleep or are we talking like insomnia? Like at what point is lack of sleep affecting us? We know that the largest study that takes place twice a year

is when our clocks change, just by one hour, okay? And when one hour changes, our body goes seriously out of whack. And a lot of us will be able to relate to that, to think, wow, that can take some time to get used to. Now, when we look at data, we see that when we lose that one hour, there is huge consequences the next day in national statistics of car accidents, suicides, heart attacks. That's one hour difference. And then when we get it back, when we get that sleep back, when we gain that one hour, we see a change in that data direction. So it's really,

it is very dramatic when we mess around with our sleep. Because every part of our sleep is important. And so we want to prioritize it. And it's very difficult because I'm an insomniac, my specialty is insomnia. I also don't want to worry people about it, because worry is the antithesis of sleep. If we're worrying and we're trying too hard, sleep runs away. So the main thing we want to learn about how to protect our sleep is definitely regularity. Regularity is the guardian of sleep, because our body likes to know what's what. And we have a very, very advanced, clever, sophisticated clock inside of our brain that is telling us when we're supposed to be sleeping. So every morning when we wake up, when we see the bright light, it hits our eye, it goes

into our brain and it messages that clock. It is daytime, okay? That sunshine telling, queuing us in because we have the outside queues and then we have our inside queues. So we want to help our inside body with those queues, just like eating at regular, at a regular interval or at regular patterns. It's helping our body know what's what. When is morning, when is mid morning,

when's afternoon, et cetera. And then we want to let our body know that we're winding down for the evening. And then we want to try and keep it as regular as possible because now we know even that hour messes us up. Social jet lag is that when a weekend can mess us up and make us very wonky, where we've maybe changed, we've stayed up a little bit later, maybe two hours later,

and then we've slept in a little bit on the Saturday morning or the Sunday. Now we're in a jet lag. We've accidentally made a social jet lag where we've actually traveled two zones. We would be maybe near Calgary in our body and then on Monday we expect ourselves to be on it and feel fresh but we're not. It's really, we've got to then readjust our sleep clock to be feeling normal again.

Heather Tabisola So we're doing a self-imposed jet lag. Dr. Julie Seyfried Yes. Heather Tabisola Okay. Dr. Julie Seyfried And most people do that on the weekend and unfortunately a lot of our So we're doing a self-imposed jet lag. Yes. Okay. And most people do that on the weekend. And unfortunately, a lot of our adolescents absolutely suffer with that because their sleep is so different at the weekends.

Well, not to mention the shift workers that we have in the program. Yes. Yeah. Okay. All right. A question about those changes in times. I want to ask you about dreams in a second. Should we be shifting our sleep patterns? Like as we roll into different

seasons and it gets darker earlier, should we be going to bed earlier? Should we be getting up earlier? When we do switch those clocks, should we be adjusting the time that we're eating, the time that we're going to bed? We want to try and keep as stable as we can. Hopefully the world will drop those, the clock changes, but that decrease in our daylight that also has implications for our mood and our energy and we can probably all relate to that, that when we have a shorter day, we don't seem to have as much energy. So we want to make sure we prioritise the daylight that we do have. And that was why the clocks changed originally, was to help farmers

and to be able to be gaining that advantage of the daylight and get work done in the optimum daylight hour. But now that we have artificial light and that's really difficult because then we're not queuing ourselves as naturally to when the sun rises and the sun falls. So then we accidentally will displace sleep,

we'll accidentally miss those sleepy cues. So that's more important is to notice your sleepy cues. That's what you want to follow is am I yawning? Am I rubbing my eyes? Am I actually sort of becoming a little hypnagogic, which is where you're feeling drowsy and heavy and then pushing past it and thinking, Oh, no, I want to watch that show, or I haven't had any time

to myself yet, or I want to read that, that book. Now, that's not listening to our cues. And you're, you're wonderful in teaching us to reconnect with our cues. And this is part of it. And, and of course, when when we do that we've missed that nice dip into the let's get prepared for bedtime routine. So a lot of us aren't even giving ourselves the chance to get enough sleep. So when people say how much sleep should I be getting? It is different for everybody. We are individual human beings. You want to be aiming.

You want to try and give yourself the chance to get six to nines or like maybe try and aim for about a window of eight. But a lot of people don't give themselves that chance because maybe they're staying up until past midnight and they know their alarm's going off at six or they know they're going to get up at five with the children. Now they've only got the chance to get five so now they're going to increase their likelihood of a sleep debt and we can't pay a sleep debt once

you've lost your sleep you can't get it back so you can't the next night try and sleep longer and try and repair that debt. So we want to be prioritizing the opportunity. The best way to monitor your sleep, because lots of people will ask me that, does the watch work? Does the ring work? The sleep diary is the best way to monitor your sleep

because you don't want to be relying on devices that aren't gold standard sleep research devices. They're the only ones that are going to actually be able to tell you you were in stage one because in sleep we have stages. We have stage one where you would probably be able to hear me if I said, Gina, are you asleep? You'd say, oh, no, I'm just resting my eyes. But you would have started to go into sleep stage two. You would be jolting a little bit. You'd see spindles and K complexes. That's a fascinating set at stage because that's often where you're learning.

And it's what you have at the end of sleep as well as you're coming out of sleep. Stage three is now what we call deep sleep and that's delta waves that's a beautiful deep sleep that's really allowing the prefrontal cortex the front brain to rest. Our computer doesn't totally turn off but it's at rest and that's when we see the flushing of the toxins, where we're allowed to then move the memories away so that we have more room to soak up more memories the next day because we need sleep to learn. And if we've learned, we need sleep to remember it. Okay. So we need to do that. And then we have rapid eye movement. And through a night, we move through those stages. So we go, we do fall asleep. We go stage one, stage two, stage three, then we come up.

Stage two, stage one rapid eye movement. We move through them in about 90 minutes. And it's really important to understand what we call the hypnogram. That's that hypnogram. So that you know sometimes why do you wake? Because we do. We do rise. And we can hear things.

This was a game changer for me when, first of all, I think people, they don't understand what we've learned through our conversations with our experts is you don't just go to sleep and stay asleep all night. And if you're the kind of person like I'm up two to three times a night, that's actually pretty normal as long as you're able to go right back asleep and This is where I know my sleep cycle is a full hour and a half So I sort of time myself to be able to get all the sleep cycles and if I wake up sort of let's say 530 and I can sleep in if I can't sleep in till at least

Seven then I'm waking up because I know this is where if you wake up before your sleep cycle ends, that's where you wake up groggy. But once you kind of understand, oh, I must just be finished a sleep cycle, let me go back to sleep, that's like a game changer. Yeah, as opposed to like, why am I awake again? Why am I awake again?

We are also gonna talk, someone asked about bathroom tips. We're actually gonna talk to a public health specialist who's gonna talk about that. A lot of times because you're up in your sleep cycle, you might be like, oh my goodness, okay, I should get up and go to the bathroom. That's a whole other thing that you can kind of train yourself to not feel the need to get up and go to the bathroom. So we are going to dive into that conversation.

Let me ask you this. When is the dream, like what's the sign that you're getting good sleep? Like is it dreaming? Not, no. It's how you feel. It really is your subjective experience. And again, that's why your own measure of it is the most important one. Okay. So a sleep diary would be asking you how did you, how did you feel? Did you feel like you woke up refreshed? Did you feel you had enough sleep? How was the day? And that's the measure. You can tell when you feel like you've got energy. Okay. And that's what you hope. It takes a little time. Like I always

tell even my teenagers, you know, when the alarm goes off, you sit up, you put your feet on the floor, you get up, because you know it's going to be hard sometimes to wake up. And then you want to expect a little bit of inertia, perhaps if you haven't had enough sleep, inertia, sleepiness, push through, brush your teeth, you've got like sometimes I've brushed my teeth with my eyes closed because I know I've got to get up, I've got, you know, I've got to meet in at nine or whatever it is, and then it passes, then that energy comes. But that's the best way to measure it. And you probably know, you probably know if you've got children, or if you have a partner when they have had good sleep and when they haven't. You can tell if they're groggy or grumpy or irritable or listless or distractible or hard on themselves or just don't seem to have that get up and go. So know your own signs of sleepy. Yeah so this week is our week of mindfulness and this is really important and it's just like people are so used to not eating when they are hungry especially when going on diets and people are also very used to not sleeping when they are tired.

So the same cues when you're asking those four mindful eating questions, yes, it's about the food, but at the end of the day, it's also practicing being aware to your body's cues. So you'll also be more aware of when you're tired, you'll also be more aware of you have more energy and a lot of people in the program will get better sleep because they are eating a lot better and they're just doing things that are making their body healthier and they will notice that during the day And a lot of people in the program will get better sleep because they are eating a lot better and they're just doing things that are making their body healthier. And they will notice that during the day, they actually feel great.

I have all this energy, but then they'll say, oh, at night, I am just so tired. What's wrong? What's going on? Well, you're using more energy in the day and your body is letting you know you are tired. Yeah, I like that. I like it when people say that,

what's wrong with me at the end of the day? I'm like, that's how it works. That's how, just like our phones run out of battery, we run out of battery. We need to plug in and restore. And, you know, we want to learn about our sleep because a lot of people, we will get it wrong, we'll have those thoughts and beliefs about sleep that can sometimes come and bite us in the bum.

Okay, so sometimes we think, well, I must get into bed early to catch up on sleep. Now that can interfere with our sleep because we might actually not have a crude enough sleepiness yet. So as soon as we wake up in the morning, that's when we start to build our sleep appetite, okay, because we finished with sleep and now we're building it till the night time. Now sometimes people will think, right, I've got to get to bed, or I must. Sometimes we have sleep beliefs and it's not a nice name for a questionnaire, but one of the questions is called dysfunctional beliefs about sleep. But it's not a nice name for a questionnaire but one of the questions is called dysfunctional beliefs about sleep but it might say I must have nine hours of sleep or I must have 10 hours. Now that demand on ourselves might make something go wrong with our behavior

so now we're getting into bed at 9 p.m even when we're not sleeping. Okay, now we're warming up the bed and we actually need a cool bed and a cool bedroom to fall asleep. And we're sitting there or lying there, not sleeping and then perhaps getting frustrated that we're not sleeping. Now we know very quickly we associate human beings with classically conditioned. So now the more we are awake in bed frustrated, we're gonna start pairing that bed with frustration. Now that's where we get into a pickle because now every time when we go to the bed, that's gonna provoke that automatic frustration feeling.

Like I'm not gonna get to, how long am I gonna lie here? Two hours, three hours, is it gonna to be one of those nights? You know, and then we start thinking. And that's counterintuitive to sleep. And that's a slippery slope to what then may become insomnia. Okay, so we don't want to be in bed, if we're not going to be asleep. So there's a 15 minute sort of rule that we want to be thinking, if you're not asleep within 15 minutes, get up and do something else.

But you want to be using, if you are wanting to look at your sleep a little bit, a sleep diary to start seeing what's going on. You want to see how long does it take me to fall asleep? Because it should take you about 10 minutes, 10 to 12 minutes. If you're falling asleep within seconds, that sounds like you're chronically sleep deprived.

Okay, so you want to have that wind down. It's okay to be there for 10 minutes, then you'll fall asleep. And then we want to know once that happens, what does the sleep look like? Did you wake up to sleep on set? How long did you wake for? Did you stay in bed for three

hours during the night trying to sleep or did you get up and go somewhere else? What time did you wake up in the morning finally and did you get up out of bed or did you linger? Okay, because what we want to start looking at is an equation called sleep efficiency. How long were you in bed not sleeping? Okay, because easy maths, if someone's in bed for 10 hours, but they only asleep five hours, that's 50% sleep efficiency, you're building a relationship with wakefulness in bed instead of sleeping in bed. Yes. So we want to closely match that. We want to start thinking, hang on,

if I moan me, if I collect all of my sleep, I'm getting about eight hours sleep or seven and a half hours or seven, I'm gonna give myself that chance. Then I'm gonna get into bed at 11 and my alarm's gonna be set at six. And I'm gonna give myself that chance. And what happens is we start to firm up and consolidate and, and, and

tighten up our sleep. And then we then we feel when we then see subjective accounts, we feel like our sleep was better. We have less wake after sleep onset, we fall asleep quicker, we wake up feeling more refreshed. And all of that then arrives into our day where we feel more vitality. So this is like data collection, right? This is like there's a place in the app where you can actually track your sleep and make notes, whether you're using like a pen and paper or you want to use the app. And what you're doing is you're collecting your data. It'd be no different if you were paying attention to when you were hungry, if you weren't hungry, if you over ate, if you were craving something, how you felt after you ate something like this.

The sleep is kind of the same thing but different. It's really collecting that data to understand what you're dealing with right now and understanding the changes that you can and want to make to that. So I just I want to remind people that these conversations are really about awareness too. It's not like you have all these takeaways or homework right now with this week of mindfulness. It really is about being aware of your sleep patterns, understanding the importance of getting better sleep. So keeping a sleep diarrhea. I love that. I've been I've been writing down people's questions. I want to take a quick minute out here to introduce to you our new podcast sponsor, and we are so aligned.

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Play in store or at olg.ca and bring home the win. Winner, Ganyong. And you just made me think of something. The awareness of ourselves. It's really important. Like, why are we staying up? Like, ask yourself that. Am I staying up because I think it's my job to do the dishwasher or get the packed lunch

ready? Am I prioritizing the chores instead of sleep? Do I think that the hustle is what makes the world go round? Because unfortunately we've neglected sleep, you know, the artificial light world did that to us, you know, work harder, sleep less, you know, sleep when you're dead. If you don't sleep you will be dead sooner. So we want to think mindful about that. Is somebody saying, oh, please stay up and watch a movie with me. Because it's really hard sometimes to negotiate that

with family and partners to say, I've really got to preserve my sleep. I really have to prioritize. I want to prioritize it. Cause I'm a better person tomorrow if I go to sleep. You're likely better if I go to sleep. So I started getting up early cause I love getting up early. And it just like, tomorrow if I go to sleep. You'll likely be better if I go to sleep. So I started getting up early

because I love getting up early and it's just like I want to be part of the 5 a.m. club. In fact, today I woke up at like five something. But Tony is like a stay up late and watch TV. And so I'm kind of like, well, I should go to bed but I end up staying up late because he stays up late but then he doesn't get up in the morning. He sleeps in like an hour and a half longer than I do.

And so, I mean, that's my fault. I should just totally be like, can you go downstairs and watch TV? Or if I wanted to go to bed, he'd be like, oh, I'll just, you know, I'll just go on my phone and read or whatever. But really understanding what you need. I got a bunch of questions I want to go through for the sake of time. What about men and women? Are they different in the amounts of sleep that we need? Unfortunately, the data continues to be solid that women report more sleep difficulties throughout the ages. So we still are winning, unfortunately.

We also see, and we can probably guess, we can probably guess, but the data tells us why we have responsibilities, we have influxes in hormones, we go through particular life events, perhaps, whether it might be having a baby, losing a baby, then we might hit our perimenopause, menopause, and we know that 30 to 40% will experience the sleep disturbance during menopause

due to that estrogen drop disrupting that the serotonin, not only the serotonin, which has a role in sleep regulation, but also the progesterone that helps kind of relax us in that sedation feeling. So hot flushes contribute to a huge amount of disruption in sleep. So we do see a lot more sleep difficulties in females along with also unfortunately more anxiety, more depression and more more mental health presentations.

Yeah so if you are in the menopause add-on, we had a conversation about what menopause is doing to your brain in general and also affecting your sleep. So if you have access to that menopause add-on group, you might wanna check out that conversation that Dr. Beverly and I had. What about racing mind? What can you do with a racing mind before you go to bed?

Okay, so that's one of the number one complaints. Someone will say to me, I can't turn off my racing mind, a perfectly worded question. So this comes back to looking at your sleep window, because it's all connected. The longer you have time in bed awake, the more likely the thoughts are going to arrive. Okay, so we've got to look at what's happened. To begin with, we could look at a little bit before that. We could think, have we had enough time during the day

to think? Have we set aside a worry time, a journal time, a mindful moment? Have we got some organization in our day? Because if you kept a 24 hour diary, and I show that in my course, where there's no time to think, it's this, it's this, it's this, it's this, it's this, it's this, and then you expect yourself to stop at the stoplight without breaking at all as you approach it.

So you want to look a little bit at your day, then you want to be thinking, okay, have I saved it all for my pillow? Okay, and I've said this before, little Leo, when he was a little boy, we'd gone on holiday, and he came home and he stole my nightmares have waited for me on the pillow, because he knew that that's where he often had nightmares was it, you know, not on holiday, but it's bed, because we associate that place with the thing. And so if you've started to use bedtime to download the day and think that's going to have been reinforced. So now what we want to do is think,

have you got too much awake time? Do we need to adjust so that you are asleep quicker? Because if it is taking you 20, 30, 40 minutes to fall asleep, then more and more, I think about it as a restaurant, more and more people are gonna come in and sit down and keep your mind busy. And we need to try and shut that up.

So that's where we would think, should we compress your sleep a bit? Should we sleep restrict you a little bit? So if you're in bed for say nine hours, but you're worrying and thinking and racing mind for an hour, then let's only give you eight hours and let's see if we can stop that. So then you pick your wake up time and you'd move backwards.

Okay, so you think, okay, seven o'clock is doable. I'm gonna go from 7 a.m. in the morning to 11. And even if the person is quite sleepy now, this is where I'm going to ask you to wait a little bit, then get into bed, do your night time routine, do something lovely, wind down in a nice way. And remember, good sleepers can do whatever they want, you know. So think like a good sleeper, then get into bed at 11. And we hope that because you're sleepier, because you haven't got into bed an hour earlier, your mind lets you sleep quicker.

So we're trying to prevent that opportunity for the racing mind. Because you're creating the habit of going to bed and then lying there thinking about a million things. One of the most, and I always share this because we have a lot of new members joining us each and every group. One of the first conversations I had with Dr Beverly, she said, just don't think about going to sleep. And I literally thought she was crazy wackadoo. And afterwards I was like, what? Is she crazy? What is she talking about? But sure enough, this works like a charm where I struggle with racing, might I've got to do this, this happened,

what am I doing about that? And literally not thinking about sleep was a game changer for me. I want to talk, someone says, what can you do about consistently waking up at 4 a.m.? And this is one of the things some people don't realize. If you're going to bed really early, you might have had enough sleep

so that you're waking up at 4 a.m. And so this is where you might do the sleep-deprived thing like Dr. Beverly just suggested, hold off on your sleep a little bit longer. So if you wanna sleep in a little bit later, you're kind of, you're adjusting to that, correct? Correct. You're gonna watch it. You're going to watch it, you're going to give

yourself at least two weeks of data collection to watch. And you're going to be a detective, you're going to think, okay, is anything else going on at four o'clock in the morning? Do the neighbors leave? Do the bins come? Does the dog jump on the bed? Does the heat come on? Because if the heat comes on, our body heat rises and we wake. Okay, so we need to cool our bodies down to fall asleep. We warm our bodies up to wake. Is something happening? Is my partner snoring or going to the bathroom? What could be going on? Then we, and maybe

our bladder is practiced to wake up at four o'clock. Okay, so we want to be thinking, how is it working? And then you're absolutely right. Let's look at the data. Let's think, did you just get all of your sleep like front loaded? If you went to bed at nine, 10, 11, 12, one, two, three, four, you might've had seven hours of fabulous sleep already, but a lot of people don't like being awake early. So then you're right. If you

want to try and shift it, we want to shift it a little bit slowly. And we want to think, okay, now we're not going to allow ourselves to get into bed until later. And we're going to watch to see what happens to that 4am. Does it budge? But the very important thing about cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia is also that frustration. Okay, you talked about sleep effort. We don't want to try and sleep. It's called paradoxical intention. If I tell somebody, okay, please fall asleep as fast as you can. It's very hard. If I tell someone to please stay awake for as long as they can, that's difficult. Okay. If you're in a lecture and you're like, Oh, I'm trying to find, try to stay awake because the instruction is different. So that's what I will always tell children.

Never try to sleep. Just I'll be back in a minute. You know, just you rest your mind, rest your body and then by not trying sleep comes. But then also, the angst, the frustration, like I must sleep, I've got that meeting tomorrow, if I don't, I'll be good for nothing. This always happens to me, why am I the only one up at night? So these are cognitively potent with and that is going to provoke cortisol and it's going to chase sleep away. So it's very difficult, but we have to think, I'm just gonna read my book.

I'm gonna read my book. I'm gonna put a show on. I'm going to give up trying to sleep and I'm gonna give up that frustration because that's definitely not going to help me sleep. Yeah, speaking of hot flashes, it's getting hot where I am right now. I'm like, okay, so I have a couple of questions and I want to finish off. I know we got to get going with what you think is important when it comes to sleep and how it's affecting people's weight loss journey knowing that what people are doing on the program.

And what do you think about sleeping pills? And then the next question is about the 5 a.m. club. Is there any benefit to getting up early and being part of that 5 a.m. club? OK, so first question you said about sleeping pills. OK, so sleep. So I am on I sit on the Advisory Committee for Ontario Health Quality Insomnia Standard and the Older Adult Insomnia Collaborative. And it is long been known that the first line treatment for insomnia,

where you can't fall asleep or you can't stay asleep or you wake up feeling unrefreshed more than three times a week more than... I'll explain that all after if you want to. But if you have that, the first line treatment is not sleep medication. It is CBT-I, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. Because what has gone wrong is your relationship with sleep and your body clock. So that's what we need to correct when we're trying to remedy something that's gone wrong. We have to go up the remedy. If you've got a broken bone, we need to fix the broken bone and sleeping medicines don't do that. They don't fix how we think about sleep. They don't fix the do that. Okay, they don't fix how we think about sleep, they don't fix the, they don't address what has happened with insomnia. And what they do do is they give you the sense that you're asleep,

but they change your hypnogram, where it is not doing what we want it to do. Okay, it'll change to stage one, stage two, stage three rapid eye movement. And that then has different implications. So if you are giving a sleep-to-sleep medication, you should be giving it with a real plan to come off it. It's supposed to be a very short term solution if you need it, but they should be helping you know how and when are you coming off it. And I see a lot of people that will have been on it for 30 years.

It is most definitely not working because they're coming to see me because their sleep is still poor. So it's changing your sleep architecture. So the next one was the 5 a.m. club. Okay, so I definitely want people to be thinking, are they getting enough sleep? Because if they're not, I don't want them to be getting up at 5 a.m. If they're staying up till midnight hustling, and then they think, okay,

and I'm gonna want a really great start and wake up at 5 a.m. Now you're shrinking your sleep to five hours and that's really short and you're going to start. No. So you want to be thinking, does this fit into your lifestyle? Does it?

Do you have room for it? And if you don't, how could you implement the things that are being done in that sort of group somewhere else? Whether it's time for yourself, exercising, journaling, mindful moments, can you put it somewhere else? Because some of us really, like our chronotype is quite solid. We do really have larks, we do really have owls,

and we do have the people that are a little bit in the middle. And so you may find that you are a natural lark and you really do, you just thrive in the morning and you tire and your productivity and your efficiency wanes in the evening and that's totally fine. And some people it's the opposite, they're slower in the morning which is fine, and they accelerate more into the evening. And that's where they get their momentum. And of course we clash when our teenagers are like that,

but it's a very known fact that they often turn into owls. You know, they are very productive at night. Their circadian rhythm shifts and they're not as sleepy. And that's really tricky because they still have to get up for the alarm. So I would look at, does it fit into your life? And is it going to, is it gonna cost you? Or is it gonna be for you?

Then for you. Someone asked, how do you get sleep if you just can't sleep? I mean, that is the big question. And I think a lot of the takeaways from Dr. Beverly today was like let's bring awareness to what's going on. How are you feeling when it's time for bed? Once you're in bed are you waking up? How are you feeling when you get up the next day? And this is that suggestion of a sleep diary. Collect that know exactly what's going on and where you're at right now. We'll give you

insight into figuring out what you need to do. Are you going to bed too early? Are you not going to bed late enough? You know, are you getting up? There could be other factors like getting up to go to the bathroom could be just a natural sign of your body releasing fat and detox, or it could be an underlying issue with pelvic health. There's a lot going on.

The first thing you need to do though, is understand the importance of it and how it's affecting the choices you're making and how your body is responding. We're going to get into more sleep hygiene tomorrow with Alana McGinn. Before we go today Dr. Beverly-David, in knowing that people are here to lose weight, how do you think sleep is impacting their ability to lose weight? Well we know those two hormones are very involved. So sleep loss, sleep deprivation is going to disrupt

those hormones that regulate the hunger and regulate the appetite. So we're going to feel hungry more and we're going to miss the cues of fullness. Okay, so it's going to do that. We also know that it plays around with our ability to regulate blood sugar. Okay, so that further can contribute to our weight ebbs

and flows and weight gain specifically, because that insulin sensitivity is much more difficult when we're missing sleep. We also know that if we are pushing sleep off and we're staying up later we're more likely and the data shows that we probably eat it. I know we don't count calories but the research will say about 300 to 400 more calories than somebody that's having a seven hour night's sleep because they have another opportunity to maybe eat more. Okay, so that then contributes to our weight changes.

And of course, when we've rested our mind, we've rested our prefrontal cortex, we then are able to be more mindful. We're able to know, am I hungry? How am I feeling? Am I busy? Am I stressed? I'm at you know, we're able to be more mindful of everything our choices are wise, that we're allowed to and then we don't berate ourselves, we're able to then say, Yeah, I really enjoyed

that. You know, I saw that I wanted that instead of when we're sleepy, then we're very down on ourselves. Like, why did I do that? Why did I just eat that? And then that's that vicious cycle of a very negative relationship with making a choice. So the bounce back is harder when we're sleepy. So okay, so sleep is very important if you need it. Absolutely. It can be impacting not just how your body function physically, but mentally the choices that you're making and more importantly, how we started the conversation, how you are showing up for yourself, not just with the program and this process, but in day to day life. I know that you have a sleep

you offer besides being a clinical psychologist, you also offer like sleep programs. You have one starting next Monday, I believe. It's a workshop. It starts on February 3rd. Any other details people need to know for that? If they're interested. It's six weeks. It's an evening course.

It's from seven to 8.30. Most people, if you are in Ontario, you can claim for your insurance because it's psychological services. It is the gold standard cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. So it will talk through all of this to how to get your sleep.

If you believe you have insomnia and you can go to the website and have a little look to think, would this suit me? You know, am I, you know, finding it hard to fall asleep, stay asleep? Do I not wake up feeling refreshed? Is this happening more than three times a week? And perhaps even more like three more than three months, if you think that you have insomnia, then this is the treatment that would be the first line. And the gold

standard, it's the gold standard approach. And it will unpack all of it. So sleep education, how to measure it, how to get it back on track, challenging those sleep beliefs, noticing our behaviors, and realizing that sleep hygiene isn't enough to sort out insomnia, we need to go at the clock, we need to actually get that circadian rhythm back on our side with regularity and understanding how we've shifted it and how we've unfortunately extinguished the relationship with bed and sleep. And so it's great.

You're getting hot. I watched you getting hot. I feel like I'm giving you a bath. That's taking my shirt off. Dr. Beverly has quite often offers a variety of workshops. If you're interested, you can go to yourpssychologyCenter.ca is the website. You can go to YourPsychologyCenter.ca slash store for more information on any of

our workshops. You can also follow her on Instagram, Dr. Dr. Beverly. Thank you for everyone who's joining us live. Thank you for everyone who's downloading and listening after the fact. I know there's some really great takeaways. There always is. Again, these conversations we're so grateful to have because people don't have the opportunity to have them with their own healthcare provider. So lots of insight, I'm sure some aha moments today. Dr. Beverly David will be back in the next few weeks joining us to have a variety of other conversations that are going to fall in line with where you're at in the program and the process. So stay tuned for that. Dr. Beverly David, thank you so much. Have a good day.

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