We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - Can’t Sleep? 4 Strategies to End The Suffering | Leah Corkum & Marlee Boyle

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

If you've ever climbed into bed exhausted only to lie awake for hours, you're not alone. After experiencing chronic insomnia, Glennon found the two sleep experts who helped her sleep again. In this conversation, Sleep Works founders Leah Corkum and Marlee Boyle explain why insomnia isn't a personal failure—it's a treatable sleep disorder—and share the practical strategies that could change your life. - Why "luging" is different from simply being tired - The surprising reason trying harder to sleep often makes insomnia worse - The four strategies that helped Glennon improve her sleep cycles. - Why Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia is considered essential treatment For more on Sleep Works, go to https://www.sleep-works.com/, and follow @sleep_works. Marlee Boyle: Registered Respiratory Therapist (RRT); Certified in Clinical Sleep Health (CCSH); BSc Biology  Marlee is a registered respiratory therapist, certified in clinical sleep health. Her interests include treating sleep disordered breathing, CBT for insomnia, and sleep coaching for neurodiverse clients.   Leah Corkum: Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN); Certified Child & Infant Sleep Consultant, BA Psychology.  Leah is a Licensed Practical Nurse certified in CBT for insomnia and a Child and Infant Sleep Consultant through the Family Sleep Institute. She has spearheaded initiatives like shift worker education, long-term care facility sleep strategies for staff and residents, and teaching drug-free sleep techniques to hospital staff for better patient outcomes.  Together, Marlee and Leah co-founded their company, Sleep Works in 2022 after recognizing the growing rates of sleep problems and lack of sleep services available to the public in Canada. Sleep Works provides sleep education, counseling, coaching, courses, and keynotes virtually so anyone can access support for their sleep health from the comfort of their homes. Follow We Can Do Hard Things on:  Instagram — ⁠https://www.instagram.com/wecandohardthings⁠

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Oh, I... It's so fun. We're here. I feel already relieved for the pod squad today because I truly feel by the end of this hour that a lot of people who are suffering from this one situation, which is sleeplessness, whether it's actual insomnia or the inability to sleep caused by paramedopause or the inability to sleep because of stress or anxiety or mental load or fascism or whatever are the myriad things keeping everyone I know awake except for Abby.

I feel that by the end of this hour you're going to get some ideas from a couple of the people who have helped me figure out how to sleep, who I feel like if I can be helped, anyone can be helped because my insomnia became so severe. First, I want to talk a little bit about my experience with insomnia, and maybe you all can chime in. How are you? Okay. Well, first of all, it is true and it might be our age but I do feel like many of the women that I know are really struggling yes with sleeping at night Abby and I started our friend TIG is one of these people too and when I explained to TIG what I do at night which is just all day I get scared that night is going to come again because it seems to always do that so my anxiety starts raising

as the sun sets. Then I lay down and then I don't sleep. I just kind of lay there with my arms beside my body and stare at the ceiling and think about every awful thing I've ever said or done. Think about everything that could ever happen to anyone that I know and think about how to fix all of that. And then eight hours pass by during which I feel my mind starts to get. through some really scary places. It's like a really strange feeling of aloneness that is

extra terrifying because I feel like I actually am alone. Like everyone in the world goes to this place when they lay down and they go to this other place, which is called sleep and I have to stay not in that place. And then I don't wake up, I just stand up. Okay? There's no waking up because there's no fucking sleeping. It's just standing up. So TIGs. told us that what she calls this is not sleeping, it's loosing. Okay? So it's like you just lay there all in bed. We have to explain to these folks what loosing means. Can you? Because I feel like Yeah, pod squatters. So pod squad luge to luge, like in the winter sports and the winter Olympics, you know, when they get on the sleds and they lay down real like real tense and they're

going around the, it's like the bob sled track, but there's loosing and skeleton. Right. So we don't sleep, we just looge. You don't. And every morning we wake up, we stand up, having been the biggest looser. And that is what we do. And parts of it are funny, but actually it's not funny. It's been one of the hardest things that I've ever dealt with. Lack of sleep compounded over and over and over again over the last two years has negatively

affected my mental health, my job. my joy, my job, my work, my relationships. And what I have found is there's this inverse relationship. Usually things when I try harder, I can do them better. Like effort equals success. And sleeping is, that doesn't work. The harder I try, the more I think about it, the more I, the less, I can sleep.

So sleep, like one of those things, it's like we can do hard things, but we cannot do easy things. Like, I cannot sleep. So at some point this got so bad, I was going two nights, three nights in a row. I reached out to some friends. Two of my dear friends who have both been guests on the show, who I will not tell you who they are in case they have sleep shame. I don't know why you'd have sleep shame, but just in case. said you must reach out to these two women.

I also just want to say, as we're having this conversation, you have been learning and sleeping more. Well, because of them. I know, but I just want to say as you're talking about it, I think present tense and past tense, the way that you're talking about it might matter. Okay. As you're talking about it, I'm feeling in my body like, oh, no, she's talking about it like it's actually happening right the second. And it's not. That's interesting. I feel all amped up and jacked up about it right now. Yeah. So can we just mind our tenses? It was, I have PTSD from it for real. For sure. For sure. You do too.

Yeah. Because of all the things we tried, which we're going to get into in a minute. For sure. I feel like I have to say something right now, which is a weird thing that we'd ever have to say. But because of the way that the manosphere works, I feel like I just want to say to the pod squad that as always, we did not pay these people or they did not pay us to come here and know, has ever paid us or we have never paid them or no one has ever paid anyone or no one has ever gotten a free class and then been like can you give me a free class and then I'll come on to the podcast like we have never done that shit and we will never do that shit and I honestly didn't know people did that shit until I started reading articles about boys who podcast so what I need you to know is that no one has paid anyone that like we paid them well I paid them for services Yes, for their services.

For their services, which is what people should do. And then after a long time went by between the service and now, I thought, you know what, you really helped me. Would you come on and talk to the pod squad and people who might not have the time or money to invest in this and you can help them on the podcast? But no trickery has gone on is what I'm saying and never will. Before we introduce our sleep fairies, does anyone else want to say anything about sleeping first? Well, I just think it's a huge, I mean, not only deeply personal because of everything that you've gone through, but I feel like it's like a enjoyment of life equity issue.

I feel like there's just, it's an absolute epidemic and it's part of this like basket of shit sandwich that women are. supposed to be like, your job is to adjust to this and this is what life is and don't complain and just get used to it. And so there's, by the time women reach perimenopause, 60% of women, more than half of women report sleep problems. And most of those people just think it's something that they have to live with and don't get the care that they need. I was looking at up and said 70% of women with chronic insomnia remain either totally unmas. untreated or undertreated, less than 4% get guideline recommended treatment. And I just think it's, you know, all of these things where it's just like your job is to adjust and live with it is not okay.

And if there are solutions, we need to not be adapting to shitty outcomes. We need to be learning what those are and taking the shame away from it because it seems to me like a very biological thing that's happening and not. individual people's failures to manage their lives correctly so that they're not sleeping. And so I feel like it has become this kind of like personal shame, personal anxiety, personal like burden that people just think at a certain point they don't get to sleep. And that's just a luxury they don't get to enjoy. And I think that's bullshit. And I hate it.

And so I feel like it should be placed in this is a problem. world is having and we should start talking about it. And if there are some things that will help people or solutions, all the better, but at the very least bringing it out of the dark so that people laying there alone know that this is not like their personal failing that this is happening. I'm just going to add to that because I think what you're saying is completely true. And there's also the complexity of being in partnership with somebody who is riddled with insomnia. And what I've learned through this process is my role in this is in some ways really, really, really impactful and important. So I know that there was a lot of work and there has

been a lot of work that Glennon has gone through that she's had to just kind of figure out and do in her own, with her own therapist and whatnot. But I myself was also on almost every single one of the calls that she and Leah had. Because if you're co-sleeping with somebody, it's both your problems. And I think that that is something that a lot of people don't experience where they're not calling their partner in to join them in the process of understanding what this is, of why this might be happening, and being a team in the approach of trying to manage it. Because like what Glennon was saying earlier is so true. I mean, I've woken up many night where she just is in a panic because she feels that loneliness, that deep aching loneliness of nobody's going to help.

Nobody's here to help. And she's stuck in this place where she cannot sleep. And having a partner who wants to go through the healing mechanisms and the process that Glennon has needed to go through has been, I think, really important. And so I share this as a lifeline to the folks who might be listening, who might be going through insomnia in their own way, that they reach out if they have, if they are partnered to their partners and they ask for them to join them on the road to recovery or whatever you might want to call it because it does take two. I mean, the reality is we stopped sleeping in the

same room two years ago because my loud breathing, I thought that this was the problem, right? That drew a little bit of a distance. And so interestingly enough, and we'll get into it through some of the healing process, we have now started sleeping in the bed together. And that is actually been a healing mechanism. So what we might think initially will be the things that will help us sleep better. Anyways, I just say that as a calling in, not to be mad at the partners who might not be wanting to participate in the healing process of your insomnia, but to say, hey, I really think that maybe this could be something that we could kind of go down the path together. Okay. So we're about to introduce to you the people who I started working with and my two friends

who have been on the podcast, started working with all of whom report much better sleep after having worked with these two women. I also have to tell you that one of my favorite things is Leah, I'm about to introduce you to Leah Corcom who I worked with directly. When I asked her to be on the podcast, she wrote back a little bit later, many paragraphs explaining how she loves the podcast and was so honored to be asked on the podcast. and absolutely under no circumstances could come on the podcast without Marley because these two women, they've built this business together, they've been in the trenches together through life,

through everything, and they are partners and they, in business, and they would, Leah wouldn't do it without Marley. And I just thought that was so effing cool. So cool. So anyway, here are these two brilliant love bugs. Marley Boyle is a registered respiratory therapist, certified in clinical sleep help. Her interests include treating sleep disorder breathing, CBT for insomnia, and sleep coaching for neurodiverse clients.

Leo Corkum is a licensed practical nurse. She is certified in CBT for insomnia and a child and infant sleep consultant through the Family Sleep Institute. She has spearheaded initiatives like shift worker education, long-term care facility, sleep strategies for staff and residents. and teaches drug-free sleep techniques to hospital staff for better patient outcomes. Together, Marley and Leah co-founded their company's SleepWorks in 2022, after recognizing the growing rates of sleep problems and lack of sleep services available to the public in Canada.

Sleepworks, which is interesting, I figured that Americans couldn't sleep for specific reasons, but it appears... Canadians probably can't sleep because of America. That's probably true. Our problems have leaked to freaking Canada. Let us apologize once again to Canada for that. Sleepworks provides sleep education, counseling, coaching courses, and keynotes virtually so anyone can access support for their sleep health from the comfort of their homes.

Hi, Marley and Leah. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Hi. We're so excited to be here. So happy to be here. Oh, you too. I'm so grateful for you. why don't we just start off with some big questions, which is, when I ask you, why can't we sleep,

can you just talk to us a little bit about who can't sleep and why we can't sleep? Where can people who are listening find themselves in this matrix of sleeplessness? Amanda's research was incredible with the statistics, very accurate. it is the majority of people having sleep problems. It's over 50% of the public, but even more specifically women. Women are more likely to have sleep disruption just because of the nature of how we sit in society and the pressures and all of those things. And then we also have biological reasons, hormones, changes, things that men biologically aren't experiencing. Yeah, you're certainly not alone. There are so many people struggling with their

sleep. It is an epidemic. Marley, when you say how women sit in society, I just always like to be a little more specific about that. So could you just say a little bit more about, quote, how women sit in society? And honestly, let's not even use the word sit. Yes. We're not sitting. We're standing. We're multitasking. Standing and handing out. Snacks. Just the sheer amount of roles that were, you know, expected to fill in a day. And the role that isn't necessarily expected is that taking care of ourselves and putting ourselves first, which sleep is self-care. And that gets pushed and pushed. And it's a good chunk of time. You know, we're supposed to prioritize at least seven hours for it.

But we start chipping away at that time to make room for other people's needs. There's so much that lands on us that I think the opportunity for sleep starts to shrink a little when we start taking in all of the other expectations. The mental load. And the mental load doesn't get taken out and put on the shelf at night. The mental load comes to bed with you too. Or even our ability to shut our brain off at night when we've had an entire day of just trying to keep everything together. And then we have our first quiet moment is when our head hits our pillow and then up pops every thought that we didn't have a moment to think about all day. And I think that is something else that women specifically are struggling with, You know, so often we'll hear from clients are like, oh, my husband just puts his head down on his

pillow and he goes right to sleep. He can just shut his brain off. And I think that there is a significant difference in the mental load that people take on. And then for women, it's impacting our ability to not just our ability, but our opportunity for sleep. Yeah. And I just want to say also, like, Glennon, like, thank you for kind of expressing and Abby, too, like just saying, giving details about your experience because it is lonely. That is something we hear across the board from our clients is like, I thought I was alone. Like nobody understands because and, you know, what we hear often and what we'll say to people is, you know, when you go and you tell, you say to someone like, I'm not sleeping or, you know, something about it's like, oh, nobody's sleeping. Like nobody sleeps

anymore. And it very much gets sort of pushed. But when it is a traumatic experience for you, every single night, that builds and builds and builds. And there's so much fear, there's so much anxiety. And it gets really isolating. Yeah, it's very isolating. And it isn't just feeling tired, right? Like, I mean, there's the, I feel like it's like three buckets. It's like you can't enjoy your life because you have the anxiety in advance of sleeping and you have the exhaustion from the night before. It's feeling like shit because you're so tired. and you don't see a way out. But then there's also real physical, like, for people who are like, well, I can just adjust

to feeling like crap in my life, what are the actual ways it affects your body and your decisions? I was reading this article that was talking about how insurance companies, something like the night after daylight savings, they have calculated that there's like some exponentially more wrecks just from losing the whole world losing one hour of sleep. That is wild to me. And I'm like, wow, if everyone's life was represented by that in terms of like what are the little wrecks happening in our lives that are a result of not getting enough sleep? Yeah, you're right. It is rarely that we're tired. Honestly, the majority of our clients are

women, you know, dealing with insomnia in particular. That's kind of our biggest group. And yeah, it's rarely tired. We're still getting all the things done we need to do. There's still responsibilities. There's people counting on you. There are appointments. There are things. There are responsibilities. We can't just lay down and have a rest. And even if you could, most people who are dealing with insomnia actually can't nap. So it's not that simple. And we do get used to feeling crappy. It's such a slow progression over time. And then the tricky thing about being sleep deprived is that it impairs our judgment about how we're feeling, just like drinking. So like our impairment level, we can't judge how impaired we are when we're impaired. And that happens over a long period of time for a lot of people and they don't even realize how terrible they're feeling or, you know, they're not taking all their symptoms. They're kind of chalking it up to. It could be this. It could be this. And it really, it's lack of sleep. We need that time to restore and repair. And when it's chronically not there, we end up with a lot of health issues. Like Leah said, we rarely see insomniacs just like falling asleep all day. It's more or less that it takes a toll on their quality of life, their mood, their ability to enjoy life. You know, we always joke sleep as the elixir of life. And it makes everything so much better and it makes everything easier. But it is true. And when it's not there, it makes everything so. so much harder. It's so much harder without sleep underneath our foundation. Yeah. It's how we

experience our stress, like the stressors in our lives feels totally different on sufficient sleep versus insufficient sleep. Now, anxiety levels, depression levels, women with insomnia, that is one of the major factors is mental health. And when you go to the doctor or to a health professional and say, like, I'm not sleeping, you know, I'm, I feel depressed, I feel anxious, chances are you're going to get medicated for those symptoms instead of getting help for a major cause, which is insufficient sleep. That's the unfortunate thing is, you know, we can band-aid these different symptoms, but we think about, you know, what the contributing factors to our baseline health, you know, our physical fitness, our, you know, what we put in our bodies and our rest.

Like Marley and I kind of say those are to people all the time, those are three things, but actually sleep is almost like a foundation to those other two pillars of our health. Because if we're not sleeping, can we properly nourish ourselves? Can we properly exercise and gain the benefits from it? No, we can't. So not prioritizing sleep as part of your health is really doing a disservice to all of those things. I love to research everything, which you may have noticed. But that also includes what my family is eating regularly. I want to know what's in it. If you're like me, then you'll also love Little Spoon.

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Code hard things at IM8health.com slash hard things. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Can I ask you a question? Because we've been going through this for many months now, years, really. You say prioritizing your sleep is one thing. But what if you are stricken with insomnia or you're having many days in a week where you're just not sleeping, but you're prioritizing it?

you put it on your to-do list and you're like, I'm going to do this. And like Glennon was saying earlier, the harder you try, the harder it is, right? Can you kind of explain to us what somebody under these circumstances who are experiencing insomnia insomniac moments and nights? What do they do to, quote unquote, prioritize their sleep? I love that question. And actually, Leah and I were having a good discussion about this because it does seem kind of like conflicting advice because we tell people, you know, make sure you prioritize sleep, but don't worry about it. And it's a bit nuanced because, you know, how do you prioritize something but then also not worry about it? And, you know, it really comes down to prioritizing the things that we can control and letting go of the outcome of

it, which is really, really hard. And we, you know, we often talk about the formula and why we think we have so many type A overachieving women that just can accomplish anything in the world, but then they can't sleep. It's because of that formula. We have learned that effort plus time will equal success. And with sleep, it backfires. So the harder we try, the worst we get at it because we're so focused on that outcome of if I do all of these things, then I should be able to sleep.

But that's actually putting an incredible amount of pressure on ourselves, which our nervous system responds to. It's like, well, we're stressed out about something. We're trying really hard, which stress is kind of the antithesis to sleep. So, you know, prioritizing things that set us up for sleep and then letting sleep happen. So prioritizing would be to create a protected seven to eight hour window where you're not making exceptions for, oh, you know, I could just watch one more episode of this. Everything's on streaming. It can wait till the next day. Make that a protected window. Invest in, you know, a good mattress. Make sure that you're not waking up, you know, crawling out of the sink hole with sore hips and shoulders and knees and things like that,

because pain isn't great for sleep either. Make your bedroom and environment that you are excited to be in and those kind of priorities. So those situations can make a big difference. But kind of a caveat to that and what you alluded to, Abby, was if this is something that people are struggling with, not just for occasional nights here and there. It's been months. It's been years. We hear a lot of stuff about sleep hygiene or healthy sleep practices is another way to say it. And there's no research out there that sleep hygiene will fix a chronic sleep issue.

And so often that is the advice that we're given. We'll put your phone away and make sure your room is dark. And those things can be helpful for short-term sleep disruption and improving the quality of the sleep that we can get. but it doesn't fix insomnia. It doesn't change the way that our anxiety has been trained to as the sun goes down. It starts to go up because we start to anticipate what kind of night is this going to be. Will I sleep tonight? Will I be able to function tomorrow?

All of those kind of normal human thoughts that we can have when we're not sleeping well, they really do perpetuate the insomnia and keep us from sleeping. So we want to be able to prioritize sleep without worrying about it, which is really tricky. And it sounds really complicated, but it's actually a strategy that's used in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which is considered the best treatment for chronic insomnia. So pause quad. What Marley is saying is the single most effective strategy for people who are really struggling

with insomnia is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. Okay, so it's great to have a cold room and a nice mattress. This is not going to help those of us who are in the trenches. So can you to explain what CBTI is for people who, for whom this is brand new? Yeah. And thank you for clarifying that also, Abby, just to say prioritizing, when you're not struggling with falling asleep, but you're struggling to get to bed and actually get to sleep, that's the prioritization.

If you're struggling with chronic insomnia, the prioritization is getting help for that, treating it as its own, it's a sleep disorder. It's not a personal failure, like you said Amanda. It's not something is wrong with you. It is that you have a sleep disorder and it needs its own focus treatment. And that's what CBTI or cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is. And that's Marley and I's passion. That's what we've been, you know, treading away talking about for the past nearly decades.

at this point, there isn't a lot of providers of CBTI, and that is the struggle. So it is a branch of cognitive behavioral therapy, which some people may have heard of as, you know, a treatment, a psychological treatment for a variety of different things, you know, anxiety, all sorts of things. CBTI is a very specific set of techniques, strategies that is focused specifically around sleep. so specifically around trouble sleeping. So most CBTI programs cover kind of the same techniques over somewhere between five to eight sessions. So chronic insomnia is most often a very long-term issue.

So when we say chronic insomnia, that really is referring to difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep at least three times a week for at least three months. And I can tell you most people we see, been much longer than three months because it does ebb and flow. Insomnia is not static. And so we have these moments where, oh, things are kind of going okay. And then we're back kind of where we've been struggling. And then, oh, maybe it's okay. You know, okay. And then we're back in the same position. So because of that ebb and flow, I think people end up dealing with it for much longer. So cognitive behavioral therapy is just that. So from the cognitive just means cognitions are

our thoughts. So it's just really about the thoughts that we have about our sleep. And like Marley said, when we're stressing and worrying and having anxiety about our sleep, am I going to sleep tonight? Oh, is this going to be a terrible night? I can't do this again. Like, this has been going on for too long. Our nervous system is way up there. And so we're learning to reroute, change those thoughts, replace them with something different. And I can tell you, and Glennon can probably vouch for it. It feels like faking it till you make it when you start this because it takes more than, you know, a session or two or three or four, you know, it's, it is a lifelong process. I'm still restructuring my negative thoughts about my sleep here when I have, you know,

off nights. So it's an ongoing lifelong process. So what Leah is saying for the, since I've been through this process, what I'll explain it as is, you know, many times on this podcast, we have talked with, numerous experts who have taught us that our thoughts, the thoughts that we have trigger a bodily response. Okay? That is just science. So if our brain is saying something scary, our body listens to our brain, and also this goes the other way around, so it's a circle, but our body listens to our brain and says, oh, my person is scared and starts to armor up and starts to

fight or flight. And so if there's a, like for me, my thoughts in my brain would say as the sunset, I am a person who was never going to sleep again. My body does not know how to sleep. I am not going to sleep tonight again. So I'm not going to be able to take care of my kids tomorrow. the thoughts would continue that way. And so my body would get more and more and more jacked up. So the idea is that Leah would, we would identify some of these thoughts. And then we would replace the thoughts. So for example, Leah, you'll have to help me remember, you know, you would say things like actually,

if you don't sleep tonight, you will be fine tomorrow. You're not going to die tomorrow. Your body will adapt. I think the hard thing is for people it feels like they're accepting that, like, I'm accepting this and being okay with it. But we kind of do have to accept that just to release the pressure of, you know, a certain outcome. So I always say, you know, you're not saying this is what you want. You're just saying it's okay that this happened. I can manage it. I've done this before. You know, you have lots of evidence to show that you make it through 100% of the days that you don't sleep or

you don't sleep as much as you would like or you don't sleep as well as you would like. So yeah, it's really about that acceptance piece. That makes sense because your body is responding to danger. Like those those thoughts you have are like, I can't sleep, I'm never going to sleep. This is a problem. Your body's like, we're, this is a danger. This is a threat. A bear is chasing me. A bear is chasing us. So now I have to have all of my nervous system on alert, which means I'm never going to go to sleep. So you're not accepting that you're never going to sleep again. You're accepting that there is in fact not danger here and you're reassuring your body. It doesn't need to send in the danger response team. You're just trying to calm yourself down. So do you remember any of the other things you'd say?

Because you said that and I used it with my kids and it really helped them. Well, first of all, I was 100% sure that was not going to work and that it was total horseshit. Like I was like, oh my God. Like, this is what we're doing. That's great. This is the best thing. Okay. So I'd sit with my journal and be like, I mean, one of mine was the two people who had done this program before with Leah and Marley. It worked for them. So I would write over and over again, this worked for so and so. It will work for me. This worked for so and so. I would actually take pictures. I felt like, The shining, like, I'll work and no play, makes Jack a Dole Boy. Like, I felt like I used to take pictures of it and send it to my friend.

And she'd be like, just keep doing it. Just keep doing it. One of the sentences was, I actually am getting more sleep than I think I am. Yeah. Because we'll talk about the different levels of sleep. My body does know how to sleep was one of them because I'm always convinced that I'm a special, special person whose body doesn't work like other people's bodies work. So if you're listening right now and you want to know how to do this without Leah and Marley next to you, which I really recommend, you would write down, I imagine, your scary, scary thoughts and then replace them not with positive thoughts because we're not spiritually bypassing insomnia, but with what Leah and Marley call realistic sleep thoughts, which are more based in fact.

And Leah and Marley, could you give us some of these examples of realistic thoughts about sleep that our community might not know? Like, for example, you don't have to sleep for eight hours to be a healthy person. All of these ideas. The entire sleep industry wants us to stress about getting eight hours. And then often we hear this eight hours is this magic number. And if eight is good, more must be better. But there is millions of studies out there now that shows that. we don't need eight to nine hours of sleep to stay healthy. Using a kind of a meta-analysis of a ton of

different research studies, they created this J-shaped curve to show kind of our lowest mortality risks versus how many hours of sleep that we're getting. And that research shows really strongly that people that sleep seven hours actually have lower health risks than someone that sleeps more than eight or nine. So it's not that more is better. Often, you know, that can be one of the regular worries that we can have is, oh, I'm going to get sick. I'm not sleeping enough. You know, it's going to affect my health. And just showing people and recognizing, okay, actually, my risks are actually lower with if I'm getting, if I'm underslept, then too much sleep. And that can sometimes alleviate a little bit of the worry. And sometimes that realistic sleep thought is, you know, research shows that people

that sleep seven hours probably live longer than people who sleep nine hours. Suckers. Yeah, and that feels great because seven hours is more attainable than eight or nine for most people or getting closer to seven. The other thing that works really well is when we first wake up in the morning and we just stand up, our immediate thought might be, oh, last night didn't get any sleep. I'm so exhausted. Today's going to be so hard.

There's tons of research that shows that just thinking that, regardless of how we slept, is going to impact how we feel and how we function throughout the day. So a nice way to restructure in the morning that's based out of fact is when you get up, is to tell yourself, I probably got more sleep than I think I did. And the reason behind that is because, well, there's two reasons. One is perception changes when we're under unpleasant circumstances. So, you know, that expression, time flies when you're having fun. Well, there's not many things more miserable than lying in a dark room,

just trying to will sleep to happen to you. So it feels like forever that we're waiting for sleep to happen. So we tend to overestimate how long we're awake for because it's such a miserable time. And then poor sleepers underestimate our total amount of sleep as well by about an hour on average. And then the other explanation for this is when we are going through sleep difficulties, we often spend a lot of time in stage one sleep. So stage one's sleep is that first stage of sleep where we're falling asleep and we actually don't perceive that we have fallen asleep or that we've woken up. So we're kind of stuck in

this stage one. It's called paradoxical insomnia. We're just lying there. It feels like and we're like maybe six hours past, I don't know. But we've actually drifted into stage one's sleep. And even though it doesn't feel like sleep, it is in fact sleep. So we can tell ourselves when we get up in the morning, probably got more sleep than I think I did. And just that little change. It's not like, oh, I had the best sleep of my life. Just that little change changes the way that our nervous system is responding. And so we're not starting the day thinking today's going to be harder than it needs to be. Very much can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, just like laying in bed, thinking I'm never going to fall asleep, ramp up your nervous system, probably not going to

fall asleep. Self-fulfilling prophecy that just drives that thought process and that pattern of thinking forward, just like waking up and saying, today's going to be awful. know, the saying, we can do hard things. Sleep is simple, right? Sleep should be simple. We should do that. Do you know what the hard thing is, is getting through the day tired when you're not sleeping? That's the hard thing. And so for me, that's often been one of my biggest cognitive restructuring, realistic sleep thoughts. If I haven't had a, you know, a great night's sleep, I wake up in the morning. I can do hard things. This is going to be fine today. And I can. We can. And like Lee always says, we've survived 100% of our sleepless nights so far.

and we'll get through another day if it happens again. And just that little change in the way that we think changes the way that we feel about our sleep. Anyone who's been to my house recently knows the entire extent of my home decor process because it's simply one word, article. What I've always appreciated about article is that their furniture manages to feel both beautiful

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So when it comes to laundry, I choose all free clear detergent. You all know this about me. I'm always thinking about the small everyday choices that add up to how we take care of of ourselves and the people we love. And in our house, sensitive skin is just part of our reality. So I'm always trying to make choices that help keep everyone comfortable. That is why it matters to me, that all free clear is the number one detergent brand recommended by dermatologists for sensitive skin and that it's 100% free from dyes, perfumes, and paribins. And the thing I appreciate is that it actually works. It tackles tough stains and odors, you know, real-life messes,

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bucks a month at mintmobile.com slash hard things. That's it. There's no catch. Up front payment of $45 for three months, 90 for six months, or 180 for 20 for 20. 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow down when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabytes hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. For the people suffering from insomnia, I want to kind of delineate between the feeling of tiredness in what I was experiencing. Okay. So tiredness was something that during this time, I would have my kingdom for some tiredness. Like tiredness means to me, I feel sleepy, I feel like

my eyes could close, I feel like I could lay down and take a nap. That is not what I was experiencing. I was experiencing this feeling which people often describe as tired but wired. It is not sleepiness. It is not a feeling of ease. It is an absolute jackedness of your nervous system where you feel like, I mean, I got to the point where I would hear constant buzzing in my ears, because my nervous system was so wired. So it's not a tiredness that was a result of my insomnia. It was a wiredness that would not allow rest. It was a wiredness. It was a tiredness. It was a a fogginess and a very, very, very intense brain fog. And it was also as a caretaker and a person who defines herself by relationship,

when you all talked about the basics of human need, which are food and rest and nourishment, for me, connection, relational connection, especially to my wife and children was almost as gone as my ability to feed myself. I felt like I could not show up for my kids. I felt like there was a fog between us. My irritability with Abby was through the roof. I was unable to connect relationally, which felt as foundational to me as all of the other things.

So I think when we say feeling tired, I just want to make sure that everyone who is experiencing this feels seen and heard, tiredness isn't it? It's like a complete, like you're a satellite from the rest of humanity. It's like you're not yourself anymore. Exactly. When we meet, because we do like consultations, like initial free consultation with everyone, just a few minutes to kind of get a feel for the client and what they're going through. And that's what we hear. And Marley and I is two healthcare professionals who've been working in healthcare for a long time aside from sleep, sleep is like the one place where when you help somebody with their sleep, watching the way that they change as a human, the way their face looks, the way they respond,

their personality, their back is up. They're not connecting. Like you said, it's a different person. And then after when we speak with them, it's like, I'm myself again. I thought this person was gone. That was the original reason I like fell in love with sleep as like an area of health care was I was like, I would come home and be like, Leah, like, my patient, she can play with her grandkids now. And it was so exciting to see those relationships and people having the energy for them again. Yeah. Because that does take energy. It's not tiredness.

And for chronic people with chronic insomnia, especially long term, you know, when I say three months of struggle, most people is at least multiple years, sometimes multiple decades. You know, we work with women into their 80s sometimes who have been dealing with this for 40 years. And there's been no mention or no offering of something like a CBTI program or a service like that. It just doesn't exist in a lot of places. That makes such sense to me, the fear, replacing the fear voice, the anxiety voice with the realistic calming of yourself voice. and some people might not even be thinking that that's a fear voice. You know, if you're just like, well, that's oxymatic. Like, of course, that's, I'm just stating the obvious, which is that this sucks and I'm

not going to sleep and I'm not even making a choice there. So even viewing that as like, oh, that's an active thing you're doing that is not serving you, replace it with this is a big deal. What are the, what other kind of micro shifts that you're calling? have that help them? Here's one for perimenopause group that might be experiencing even vasomotor symptoms that are disrupting their sleep and then like waking up. What's a basomotor? So like hot flashes, night sweats, waking up and then you're having like that pari menopause rage because you're awake. Very, very common. But that rage or that frustration that there's thoughts

that precede that people sometimes have a hard time to identify. Kind of like what you said. a minute, it just feels like they wake up and they're like, this was fact, this sucks, and that's it. But there are some thoughts that precede it. But something that we find important to tell our clients that are experiencing wakeups due to perimenopause symptoms is all the studies show that most of those things that happen, like the vasomotor symptoms, hot flashes and night sweats, are actually just happening when we're already awake or just in stage one sleep. They're very, very rarely ever actually disrupting good, deep restorative sleep. So one of our restructuring thoughts for realistic thoughts is, you know, if you wake up and you feel

that rage, like, oh, I'm awake again and I'm hot or sweaty, you know, instead of thinking that way to go, I was already probably awake, I was in of a light sleep already. This wasn't that disruptive. And that little change of not getting angry and feeling frustrated can help you fall back to sleep a lot faster. So that's one little micro change that we get people. to recognize as they're not happening during our deep sleep or our dreaming sleep. It's happening when you're already awake or on your way to be awake already. And so it's not disruptive there.

And then I know Leah and I have also talked about a rule that we think is pretty important. It's based in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. And yet it's a tricky one, but it does work. And we call it the 2020 rule. Oh, God. What is the 2020 rule? Glennon loves that one. Glennon, big fan. Big fan over here and G. Sometimes it's, no, it works. Sometimes it's half hour, half hour, 2020.

It depends on which program you're doing. I like the 2020 rule. It reminds me of Barbara Walters. So it is based in stimulus control. So essentially... Wait if you don't have any of that. So with stimulus control, basically what's happened through repeated experiences of being in your bed, awake, worrying about not being able to sleep or worrying about not being able to function the

next day, our brain starts to make the association with our bed, this is where I go to worry about sleeping, not where I go to sleep. This is where I go to be chased by a bear for eight hours. And it triggers, so we'll hear from clients, you know, I was dozing off on the couch, and then I got into my bed and bing, my eyes were wide awake and I could not fall asleep. And it's often because they've had the experience of being in their bed awake, trying to sleep, much. So the 2020 rule, basically, if you're not asleep or if you wake up and you're not back to sleep within roughly 20 minutes, we actually encourage you to get out of your bed for roughly

20 minutes. And it is hard. It is a hard strategy to do. It takes a lot of that internal negotiation and sometimes you have to do it over and over again throughout the night. But eventually it does work. But essentially you're removing yourself from the best. so your brain doesn't go. This is where I go to worry. Your brain is remembering, oh, this is just where I go to sleep. So it's removing all of the other activities. We don't want to eat in bed, watch TV, work, have stressful conversations, all of those things. Amanda. So we shouldn't do all of our work and snacking and sleeping. Okay. If we're having trouble sleeping, we want our subconscious brain to go, this is just where I sleep.

We don't want it to be confused about what other activities. So sleeping and intimacy is for the bed. And then, you know, it often is our cozy, safe space, though, and it is tricky for people to maneuver those things out of bed. And we don't, we're not monsters. We're not like, oh, you'll never be able to do that stuff in bed. But while you're having sleep problems, it's best to not do those things in your bed. When you said 2020 and you said roughly 20 minutes, this makes me think of like clocks and counting minutes and stuff. Is that something that, because I would think like When I'm watching the clock and I'm like, oh, shit, now it's been an hour. Now it's been a whatever.

And then that gets my body more revved up is I'm like counting. Oh, now I only have four hours sleep. Now I only have three hours of sleep. Now I have. But in this case, you want to know that 20 minutes. And besides that, no clocks in your room? I guess clocks in or clocks out? Clocks out.

We would say just for insomnia acts, it's exactly what you said, Amanda, like the countdown. If I fall asleep right now, I'll get six hours. And so we don't want clocks. And we don't want the 2020 rule to become clock watching or promote clock watching. Yeah, like, okay, it's been 16 minutes. Okay, it's 17. Okay, 20 minutes.

Get up. No. So it's really about how you feel. It's an estimate. So, you know, when you're laying there, you think like, I feel like it's been about a half hour. That's what we say, you know, 20 to 30 minutes or roughly. But if you lay down in bed and you're there for five minutes, and your mind's going like a mile a minute, chances are another 15 minutes of that isn't going to

help. So sometimes it's better to just go, okay, I'm not ready, take myself out of bed. And it's not about with all of these things, like I can't stress enough. It's not about something working. Like, this is going to put you to sleep. It's not about that. It's about working toward the goal of sleeping better. So the goal is not to condition our brain to lay awake and worry and think and you know, all these other things. The goal is that our brain thinks our bed is for sleeping. So if we're laying there awake, we're working against the goal that we have. So if we're awake in bed for too long, we want to just go somewhere else and do the thinking and the worrying and whatever, figure it a way to get that under control, maybe writing it out, writing the things you're worrying

about, doing some of that restructuring, do something relaxing. You don't want to go turn on TV and get into a new show or you know, you wanted to be kind of boring, not a lot of light. And then when you feel, okay, maybe I'm ready. I feel more calm, lay down in bed again after about 20 minutes or when you feel ready. For some people, it can be really quick. They get up, go use the washroom, go back to bed. It's like a change of, you know, just a reset, kind of get yourself out of that thought loop, you know, whatever it is and go back.

That can work. But it's not meant to, when you go back and lay down, don't fall asleep again. It's like, I failed. Oh, I'm not asleep again. Here we go. We don't want to trigger that again. It's really just about, okay, I've been laying here a while again. Should probably just get up and I don't want to be laying in my bed too much awake.

So like Barley said, it's hard. I had nights where I would be up and out eight or nine times. Like when I tell you that this is what my process was like, I went to the bookstore. I said, I need you to give me some books that are just the least upsetting books you've ever. Like, I need books that basically nothing happens. Boring and uneventful and not upsetting in any way. And then I would keep the books on the couch outside the bedroom. After I would not sleep, I would stand up, go read the book, try to wait until I thought I'd felt,

tired, then I'd go back to bed, then I'd lay there and stress for 20 minutes, and I'd get up and then go back. So, and eventually there's something about that. I won't use the word works, because I know we're not supposed to do that, but that did eventually untrained something about the bed being a terrifying place, which helped in the long run. But it was painful A.F. For a while. Sometimes it takes people a while to get on board with it. You know, it does work over time, but it's not like, there's no instant fix when it comes to like years of conditioning. So just kind of allowing for that process. So it's a process. It was a process to get you there, to get you to the place where you're very conditioned for wakefulness and stress and worry in

your bed. And it's a process to break that. You know, when you're just in a short bout of insomnia, a couple nights of that will usually straighten things out and get you back to sleeping well. When it's been a long-term problem, it just takes, just takes more time. And the 2020 rule is a great place to ask your partner to be understanding and supportive as well. And I love that. You mentioned that, Abby, because so often people, they don't talk to their spouse about it. They know that they're suffering, but they're just like, they don't understand. So I'm not going to even bring them into it.

They don't need to suffer either. I don't want to ruin their sleep. They're sleeping fine. All of those things, which just isolates you further. And that 2020 rule, sometimes people are even hesitant to do it because they don't want to disrupt their bed partner. But if their bed partner knows, you know, the purpose behind it and they've been brought in to be supportive in that, with that strategy can be hugely beneficial and less stressful for the person trying to get in and out of bed, you know, every 20 minutes. Yeah, it's not forever. It's just a process, you know, it's a means to an end. This isn't like every 20 minutes for the rest of time you're going to be getting in and out of bed. For some people, once or twice in a night really helps. For other people, like, you know, with Glennon, you had to do it a bunch of time. but it's not every night forever.

And it feels like it when you're in it, that it's going to be that way, but it isn't. Okay, so we've got replacing negative sleep thoughts with realistic sleep thoughts. We've got something about the 2020 rule, which what's important to know is whenever you start to notice that you're stressing or having anxious feelings in bed about falling asleep, that never before has more anxious and more stressful feelings led to, to more sleep. So you break that cycle by getting out of bed and doing something else for a certain

amount of time. For me, it was reading. I know that Leah kept saying some people fold their laundry. That's not, I don't like to do that during the day. I'm not going to want to do it at night. So for me, it was just more reading. But that is a second strategy. Can you all talk to us a little bit about something that seemed counterintuitive to me, which was I had the idea that since I can't sleep, I should probably get in bed at like 5 p.m. So that maybe more will come over the 17 hours that I'm in bed. I'm sorry, statistically. Right.

You're going to have to sleep more. This one's been really strange and helpful to me. So can you talk to us about the strategy of building up sleep pressure and how people might do that? Sure. Yeah. So one of the regulators of our sleep, so one of the things that makes us sleep is something called sleep pressure. It's basically just how long we're awake for, the longer we're awake for, the greater the drive is to go to sleep. That becomes kind of dysregulated and our brains don't

really remember how much sleep pressure we need to sleep all night. We're forgetting the cues of sleepiness over a course of chronic insomnia. And so we can do something called, it's traditionally referred to as sleep restriction therapy in CBTI. Leah and I have over the last decade kind of stayed away from calling it sleep restriction therapy because it provokes more anxiety for people. You're already not sleeping and we're like, okay, now sleep less. It is counterintuitive and it does feel more stressful. So we use a formula that is evidence based in the same principles as sleep restriction, but less aggressive. And so what it is is we're telling you to wake up at the same time and get out of bed at the same time every morning. But we're going to actually usually use

your average amount of time that you're asleep for. So we get you to track your sleep using a sleep diary. We use your average total amount of sleep and we add an hour to it. And then that becomes your sleep window. So you're usually for people because just like what Glennon experienced when we're having difficulty sleeping, well, if it's taking me two hours to fall asleep, I'll go to bed two hours earlier. And then we just spending more time in bed awake. And again, that adds to that conditioning of we get into bed and we get into bed. we think about not sleeping.

So with delaying our bedtime, spending more time building up sleep pressure and only getting into bed when it is our prescribed bedtime based on how much sleep we've been getting, we're regulating our sleep pressure. So we're only getting into bed when we feel the cues of drowsiness. So then we have a lot of that drive to sleep for the period of time that we're in there. So generally, you know, under five and a half hours. but sometimes people are spending 10 hours in bed to get six hours of sleep. And so we reduce that so they're spending seven hours in bed to get their six hours of sleep.

And that's building up their sleep efficiency and making their drive for sleep a little bit better. So what that practically looks like is that Glennon gets into bed way later than she used to. Which is anxiety provoking. Walk through it. So like if your situation was you normally wake up at what time? Okay, well, do you mean stand up, like during this time? Right, you're losing, you have a gold medal, you stand up. I stand up at 6 a.m., whatever, whenever it's socially acceptable to stand up,

and as early as possible. And then I'm miserable and scared all day. And then I get in bed at, you know, I'm eight or seven, something like that. And then I'm tired and wired so I can't sleep. When Leah and I started working together, I think what Leah said to begin with was, you're not going to get in bed until 10.30. And I was like, I'm sorry, what do people do? I mean, I had to learn more hobbies.

Seriously. I had to think of things to do after dinner. I had to, we played cards. We've moved dinner back an hour. Yeah, yeah. Just difficult for me. Life changing weird. And I still don't know this.

I still don't know what people do other than watch TV after bed. It's something that, or after dinner, it's something that we talk about all the time. We have Maja. We have Maja. No. We don't know how to play it. It's just all over our table. And I don't understand it, but it's better than pickleball.

So we're going to do that. But the point is that helps me so much. because it turns out that if you stay up later, you're tireder. Okay? So weird. So weird. So weird. So if you stay up later, you're more tired and something builds up called sleep pressure.

And the anxiety is less because you're not laying in bed being anxious about not being out tired for those two hours because your body is not technically tired. Eventually sleep's going to come back. When is it going to come? When am I going to fall? Yeah. And you're just losing for even longer. All the focus.

You're not restricting it, but you're building up pressure. So like in the case, if someone wants to try this at home, in the case of you're a looser and you're up at 6 a.m. So we go back how many hours? So it really depends on how much time they're spending loosing. Okay. So say they're loosing for, you know, they're going to bed for 10 hours. They're in their bed losing for 10 hours. Okay.

But maybe they're sleeping for five of those hours. We would want them to be in bed for six hours if that's. So we would cut their bedtime time in bed from 10 to six hours for a period of time until they're sleeping the majority of their new losing time. Okay. Slowly add more time. Eight to six before. Now welcome to Majong because you're going to bed at midnight.

That's right. But here's the good news, 12 to 6, because now your body is like, oh, bed is for sleep. Bed is not for laying and worrying about why I'm not sleeping. Okay. And then do you extend it up more as you go? Yes. Okay. Once you're sleeping, like Marley mentioned sleep efficiency.

So how efficient are you at sleeping? How much time in your bed are you actually asleep? If you're only asleep five of 10 hours, you're only sleeping 50% of the time. That's not very efficient. We want that number to be a higher percentage. So we want you to be sleeping at least, you know, if we can get as close to six out of those six hours, like 85% sleep efficiency is kind of our threshold. When you hit that, we kind of slowly add small increments of time over a, you know, a few

weeks. So it's a slow process. It takes time and that's another, you know, it works, but it takes time. So it's not an overnight fix. It helps build confidence in our ability to fall asleep again. Because we start feeling not confident, like, will I be able to fall asleep tonight? But when we drive up that sleep pressure every night by staying up late and we're getting into bed really tired, we're more likely to fall asleep faster. And so it starts to build up our confidence in our ability to sleep again as well.

And then when you wake up. Yeah. And then you try to get, even if you lose a little bit or even if you don't, quote sleep or if you get only light sleep, which I'd like to take just a couple minutes, if you all would describe the different stages of sleep, then you still get up at the same time. Because in order to, you stand up at the same time. Because in order to build up sleep pressure, you're not building it up if you're then sleeping till noon because you, so you do still try to get up at the same.

same time, which is why at the beginning of this process, things can feel crunchy. It's not, it's crunchier before it gets smoother. Absolutely. It's, and we say to people like going through a CPTI program, like going through this type of a therapy, it is like riding a wave. Like, there are highs, there are lows. You're on a high. You think you've got it under control. Boom. You're down in a low again. And that's why it's so helpful to have like a coach or a therapist or somebody who is there with you to remind you that this is part of the process. So, you know, all of these things are super helpful, but it is tough to do it on your own because of the nature of it. But like Abby kind of mentioned there, like consistency. That is what sleep is all about. People say,

like, if I could just sleep for 12 hours, I know I'd feel good. You would not feel good. You know, that's the inconsistency. We feel our best when our sleep window is consistent. And that's what we're shooting for with, you know, minimizing, shrinking our sleep window and making it more efficient, you know, when you hit close to that seven hour window, even between six and seven hours, people are always like, wow, I feel totally different. I thought I needed nine hours of sleep to feel like this, but that consistent regularity is really what we should be shooting for. Our bodies love routines and consistency. And so when we can create that with our sleep, everything else runs so much more smoothly. And I'll give a quick description of the four stages of sleep and kind of our sleep cycle,

because we all do learn, you know, we have a health class here or there in our lives, but no one teaches us about sleep. And even in healthcare, you know, we don't get very much education about sleep. We have to take it on separately. So just for fun, so a sleep cycle, we start in stage one sleep, which is falling asleep, very, very light sleep. We're still aware of our surroundings a little bit in stage one sleep. So that's why when we hit that stage, we don't know that we have fallen asleep yet. Or if we wake up from stage one, we don't know that we've been sleeping. And we can get stuck in that, especially with high levels of stress and our nervous system really responding to sleep loss. We can get stuck in stage one and have multiple nights of that and having to remind

ourselves that stage one sleep is still sleep, even if it didn't feel like it, can be helpful just to move through that, but stage one, if someone whispered your name and they said, hi, Amanda, or hi, Glennon, or hi, Abby, you'd hear of them and just completely be awake. Then we go into stage two sleep. So normally if we're not having any difficulty with sleep, we don't spend very much time in stage one, you know, five, ten minutes, and then we go into stage two sleep. Stage two sleep is still considered light sleep, but we're not aware of our surroundings. We're into sleep at this point.

stage two is also if we're going to lie down to have a quick power nap and we want to feel refreshed but not groggy when we wake up stage two is the stage of sleep that we want to reach and stage two is where we spend about half of our total sleep is stage two sleep and then just a fun fact about it because I'm obsessed with sleep and I love it is stage two sleep is also where our motor memory is learned so if you're trying to learn like a do dance move or my job yeah yeah something That involves a sequence of movements and you have a power nap or have a sleep and you go into stage two. That's when your brain will actually learn that. And then when you wake up, you'll be able to recall the movements a lot easier.

And that's your motor memory. So that's stage two sleep. There's other functions in stage two. And then we transition to stage three sleep, which is our deep sleep. So deep sleep, stage three, same thing or slow wave sleep or my personal favorite calling it beauty sleep. And the reason behind that is because in deep sleep, our growth hormone, so our human growth hormone, the majority of that is released in only stage three sleep. So that's what's responsible for doing all the repair at a cellular level. So our muscles, tissues, all of those things, including

like the bags we get under our eyes and the dark circles. And that's why we call it beauty sleep as well. Now, deep sleep is interesting. When we first go through our sleep cycle, we actually get our longest amount of deep sleep at the very beginning of the night. So our first time through the sleep cycle, we get our longest stage of deep sleep. And then every time we go through our sleep cycle after that, which would be about five times in a night if we are getting roughly seven hours of sleep, that deep sleep gets shorter and shorter because our bodies are getting rested each time we go through. It's also when our brains get cleared out of all the byproducts. So we have byproducts of energy expenditure and thinking and all of those things that are sometimes associated with Alzheimer's, dementia, those kind of things. In stage three sleep, we have our glymphatic system that actually

creates some folds in our brains. So then our cerebral spinal fluid can wash our brain while we're sleeping, which is kind of cool. Isn't that neat? It's so sweet. Of our bodies to do all of that. I know, isn't it great that it does that while we sleep? We get a good deep cleaning of our brain. And then we go into REM sleep, which is the rapid eye movement sleep, where we do majority of our dreaming. We can dream in other stages, but it mostly happens in rapid eye movement sleep. And that's opposite of deep sleep, because at the beginning of the night, we get a lot of deep sleep.

We only get a little bit of REM. Deep sleep gets progressively shorter as our REM stage gets progressively longer. So really, right before we wake up in the morning, we should be spending a little bit of about an hour in REM sleep dreaming. And that's always a good indication of like, are I having a normal sleep cycle? Am I waking up pretty like aware of that I was dreaming before I woke up? Not necessarily remembering what you dreamt, but that you were dreaming can be helpful. And REM sleep is where, you know, a lot of our emotional regulation comes from working memory, our executive functions, doing things like walking into the kitchen and being like, what did I come in here for?

that's a function of REM sleep. It's not us getting old. And so those are the four stages. And we cycle through those each night. We cycle through all of them over and over again. Yeah. So we cycle through approximately every 90 minutes to two hours. So we can go through about five cycles in a night if we're getting enough sleep. And then the cool thing about not getting enough sleep is our brains, if we're sleep deprived. So maybe we've been getting you know, three or four hours or no sleep for a couple of nights, what our brains will do after that is prioritize deep sleep and REM sleep because we need those stages to keep going. So it'll actually

bypass and have really short stages of stage two and one sleep and we'll spend a lot more time in the deeper stages of sleep because our brain is trying to catch up in air quotes. Wire for survival. And that's a good realistic sleep thought as well. Like my brain knows what to do. it's going to get what it needs, you know, even if it's a short sleep. Sometimes we need to get the sleep we need over a few nights, and that's, okay, we can do that. We're wired for survival, so that can help alleviate some of the pressure of, you know, sleep looking a certain way or a certain number or, you know, whatever it may be. Okay, before we get to a fourth strategy that I want to get to before we end,

and then I have a little twist I want to put on to that one. I want to ask about two things. And maybe I'll just talk about this and then you guys reflect because I don't want you to have to make any like sweeping judgments about this. But I do want to talk about sleep medication just for those who are on and off of that or have. I don't think there's any sleep medications that I haven't been on over the last two years. I think if there are. If you are, can you write us an email about them? Because we want to know.

Yeah, we've tried. We've tried all of them. I've been on so many sleep medications that our pharmacy has called us alarmed several times. And I'm not joking. Yeah, they won't fill new scripts. Well, to be fair, it's because you're not, you've tried something. It doesn't work. And it's not working.

And they think you're like on seven at the same time as opposed to trying one and being done with it. Right. So don't. Our doctors have to call them back and say, no, it's okay. We have to return the medicines to the actual pharmacy. Right. I want to say that in terms of number one, no judgment of when you're. in deep insomnia. I mean, trying anything makes a lot of sense. I have tried all the things.

Number two, one of the things that I really appreciated about working with you, Leah, was the absolute lack of judgment in that, or the lack of pressure to stop right away, or it was always like, we will go at your pace, we will taper, we will, that was just a really big relief because if something's even slightly working and then there's pressure to take it off, that just increases the anxiety and makes everything worse. So without judgment, I will just say I have learned that there is a difference between sedated sleep and regular sleep, meaning when I am drugging myself, which I have done and I'm sure we'll do occasionally in the future at night, it might feel medically. It might feel like I am sleeping for a certain amount of hours and that does

feel like a relief because I'm missing the loneliness. That's the difference for me. It's like I'm not necessarily feeling much better the next day because it's not real sleep, but it's sort of like knocking yourself out to miss the terrifying loneliness all night. But just if you're listening and you're wondering why the hell not just be medicated all the time, if it's, quote, working, what you all have taught me and what I have felt and experienced is that when you study the brain on sedated sleep versus unsedated sleep, the brain is doing completely different things and is not necessarily going through the necessary cycles. Is that true? That is accurate. Okay. What is it doing when it's not going like as opposed to stage two, stage three, stage four? What is happening

during sedated sleep? Mostly stage one and stage two. So it is, so most sleeping aids are central nervous system depressants. So it basically, when we're asleep, so I used to work in a sleep lab, we could see someone sleeping, you'd look at the cortex of their brain, there's all this electrical activity happening based on which stage of sleep that they're in. A sedated brain is just a quiet cortex. There's really not that much activity coming from it. So your brain's just quiet. You'd want that after suffering, you know, because it does take away that experience, the excruciating experience of lying there alone, trying to will sleep to happen. So it does fix that piece and even subjectively feeling like we've slept is a relief when we're going through that. So

absolutely, we have no judgment about sleeping aids. I think that they're a wonderful tool, you know, for short term and for an intervention to help people. We just don't want people to rely on that and that be the only tool in the toolbox because we do have the ability to sleep without sedation. And then our brains can actually do the things that it needs to do and go through all the different processes that, you know, evolution spent millions of years perfecting for us. And sleeping aids really do, you know, they have their place. But for chronic insomnia, the problem with sleeping aids is that the sleep problems are every single night. So we end up taking something every single night where most sleeping aids are designed to be used occasionally.

So those are the prescription ones, and that is for people who are aware that they have a problem, but I feel like half the planet is on some. So I want to ask you about, first of all, like, the THC sleep gummies. Are those the same thing? Is that a sedation situation as well? like it's not doing anything there in your brain when you sleep? Yeah, and it's not that it's not doing anything. How I would say, again, our brains are wired for survival. So, but it's a quality issue. So the quality of, you might get eight hours of eyes closed,

but you're maybe getting the quality, and this is not an accurate number, but maybe the quality feels more like a four or five hour sleep. So you're not reaping all the benefits that make you feel refreshed and regenerated and all of these things. And over time, you just kind of erode away that quality piece. But people can be on sedating medications for very, very, very extended periods of time. So it's not like you're getting none of those deep sleep stages, but your cycles do not look the same. The architecture is different of that sleep stage. And THC, unfortunately, is a sedating substance.

So same thing. It's different. And I'd say, we've only really just be. begun to truly look at it with a scientific lens and truly study it scientifically and what this means. So I think, you know, the next five, 10, 15 years, we're going to understand a lot more about the actual impacts of both, all the different components of cannabis. So THC, CBD, CBN, CBG, that whole alphabet soup of cannabis. Right. Exactly. So there's a lot that hasn't been really studied in this way, it looks different than other sedating substances. In some studies, it says, you know, looks like more deep sleep, but at the expense of REM, but it's a change in architecture, you know, that the architecture that our body wants, the architecture that our body does

naturally, it's still different. So, you know, if you're having less REM, generally any sedating substance is limiting REM. Is that also true? Oh, sorry, I was just wondering, I know a lot of people do take magnesium or is it melatonin? What is the melatonin? Melatonin. Do you put that in the same bucket or is that different than sedation medicine? Different. Different. Okay, so you feel those don't interfere with the cycles? Melatonin does in a sense that melatonin is pretty like commonly used now as like a natural sleep aid and things like that. But melatonin isn't regularly used in sleep medicine as a sleeping aid. It's called a chronobiotic or a time, it's a clock resetter for us. So that 24-hour circadian rhythm we have in our body, one of the modulators of that is melatonin. And so if we take

it at high enough doses, we do get a little bit of that sedation drowsiness from it. But normally taking it at regular doses would just reset your clock for a different time every day. And that's how Most people, like, people are taking it at bedtime as a sleeping aid and then finding themselves quite groggy in the morning. And so it really should be taken quite a bit earlier. And we use it temporarily for shift work and for jet lag. We're not typically using it for insomnia, although we do know that it's marketed as a sleeping aid.

And that's how most people are taking it and finding a lot of inconsistencies with it. So melatonin is a little bit tricky. It's not one that we promote as something you should take every single day. We can actually create our own melatonin at perfect doses, you know, for our bodies and for our sleep at the highest quality. It's not artificial. We don't have to worry about what's in that supplement. Melatonin is our hormone of darkness. And our penial gland and our brain creates it when we're exposed to enough darkness.

So we're not melatonin deficient. So we should be supplementing. We're overexposed to light, an artificial light. Yeah. Okay. And before we get to that, which is going to be our fourth strategy, which I want to, way done because I have an idea for us. I want to get your opinion on something which we can cut if it's not, if you guys don't want to talk about it. But I want to ask you too about these devices

that people are wearing at night. I don't want to talk about any brand. And I also don't want to talk about the fact that maybe we shouldn't be tracking as women are anything about ourselves. Because the world is just come, yes. Right. And maybe that the people that own these, these companies can't be trusted, all of these things, which maybe the more we're monitoring ourselves, the less wise we are at this point. Putting all of that aside. And I just want to say this, everything that we're saying is not medical advice that we are giving anybody. Everybody needs to talk to and consult with their doctors around all of that which is being said today, because I understand that there could be complications. And we are not, Amanda, Glennon and Abby are not

experts at this. We're just living through it. Clearly. And it's all individual as well. So same for us. You know, if we want to talk about your specific case or, you know, your specific medications, that's something that you want to talk with your doctor about. We can help you with your sleep. We can talk through that. But it is all individual. This is very general. Right. And when we were going through our process, actually, Leah did talk to my doctor many times. Like she was in constant contact with my doctor, which was beautiful. I just want to know your opinion about the these devices that people are wearing to track sleep. And the reason why I want to ask you about it is because I avoid these things, like the

plague, because I always think that things are tracking me and I have a little bit of paranoia about it. But what I want to tell you is that sometimes I tried to tried it recently. And one of the things that Abby uses is a ring. Okay. and I swear to you that I can not sleep all night. Maybe I'm in stage one. Maybe I'm in stage two.

I don't know. But what I'm saying is that several times through the night, I look at the clock and I'm like, still awake, still awake. Or I am completely conscious that I'm not asleep all night. And then I roll over and look at that freaking thing on my phone. And it says, 90 percent, you are ready for your day with a freaking crown on. on top. And I feel like I am the ultimate gaslighting myself. Like I am, I can tell in my body that something happened and I am looking at my phone to tell me that that thing did not happen

and to tell me how to feel. So what I'm wondering is, how much do you guys trust this tracking of sleep cycles and all the apps that are doing that? Tracking age, yeah. We don't trust them at all. Okay. You think they're giving bullshit information or you think you think they are just like not good for becoming intuitive to yourself because I'm interested in which one. Both. Both. Yeah.

So like when we look at the results of the staging of sleep, you know, trying to predict whether you're a sleeper or not. It's obviously not very good at predicting between loosing and sleeping. So it's also, they're not accurate when we test them in our labs against lab equipment. And we can see brain waves and we know for sure someone's asleep. and the wearable is saying they're, you know, they're walking or something. There's a huge discrepancy. There's almost no accuracy to most wearables.

And in fact, all the wearables that I know about currently, as far as sleep staging, accuracy goes. And that it just gets more inaccurate with a bed partner, any type of restlessness, any noise in your room, a sleep disorder, anything that, yeah, that's not completely controlled for, it makes it even less accurate. So, I mean, we get so many people booking appointments. They're like, oh, my watch says that I'm getting zero percent REM sleep. And we're like, well, how do you feel? They're like, I feel good. We're like, then you're getting REM sleep. You're alive. You're alive. You're getting REM sleep. You're fine. I think it does, it does create an anxiety. And there was like a term coined in the past few years called orthosomnia, which is, you know, when we become so obsessed with data and tracking these that it actually can create an insomnia with worry

and stressing around those things. So a lot of people will choose like, okay, I need to take a break from this. It can be a helpful tool if you don't have chronic insomnia, if you don't have a lot of sleep issues, you know, there are some great things. Some of these newer devices are tracking oxygen levels, which is, you know, that's a good information to have. Are you getting enough oxygen while you sleep. Maybe just like the time that you're in your bed, it's good to know, like, how much time am I allotting myself for sleep? As far as staging your sleep and that sort of thing, you know, maybe a trend over time. You can see, you know, if you're sleeping more soundly, whatever, it may be useful for trending your sleep over time. But as far as night to night telling you you're getting

1% of your RAM or 1% of your deep, that's just adding stress to an already stressful situation. And, you know, so if it's creating more worry around your sleep, take it off. Give yourself a break from it. If it's helping you to prioritize getting yourself to bed on time, if procrastinating bedtime is an issue for you and seeing those numbers is helpful for you, that's a good tool for you. So it is individual, but I would not hang my hat on those numbers. Absolutely not. Like Marley said, we need brainwaves to know where we're at with our sleep, like what stage

of sleep room. We need to be able to see those in order to get that. And really, it's going on our heart rate variability and, you know, movement. So we can only get so much information from that. It can really make that cognitive restructuring piece backfire on us, too. And we know through the research of CBTI that the way we're thinking about our sleep affects the way that we feel about our sleep, which will affect the way we behave around our sleep. And if we wake up in the morning and our phone says, oh, you slept like crap last night. Then we go through our day. Yeah, exactly.

You get an F. It's going to be another miserable day. And the research shows that. I mean, there's tons of studies out there of, like, people that they sleep the exact same. And in the morning, the researchers tells one group, you slept great. And the other group, you slept like crap. And their sleep is exactly the same. And the people that believe that their sleep has been poorer go through their day with lower functioning and, you know, a lower mood.

And their sleep has nothing to do with their sleep. It's the mindset around it. So I don't like wearables. Okay. Great. But speaking of the last strategy I want to talk about and then I want to tell people how they can find you and give them a little idea of what it would look like to work with you all. You said something Marley recently, which was that we can create our own natural melatonin through exposure to darkness, which basically just means realigning ourselves with original circadian rhythms that used to alert us. us, our bodies of when we should wake and when we should sleep before technology and light

became something we could create 24-7, right? So like the sun would set and that would affect our bodies and our bodies would understand that it was time to start slowing down. And now we have hijacked all of that with all of our technology. So what I want to do is I want you to talk to us a little bit about, just briefly, about the glasses that you told me to wear. And then I would actually like to put out into the universe to the pod squad. Marley and Leah are going to talk to us about these glasses. Now, if I were a boy podcaster, what I would have already done is created a partnership with a glass company. Okay?

And then I would be talking randomly about this thing and then I would throw a link to you and you would not know that I was getting money from every time you bought these glasses. So what I would like to do is reverse engineer this situation and say this. I think that the glasses that Marley and Leah are about to talk to you about

are something that are going to become really big with women because they are help. I know they're helping me and I just have a hunch about it. What I would like to do is if you are a glasses company, but some of them suck and some of them are good. Okay. So you need actual sleep experts to help you figure out which of these lenses will actually help create melatonin, which will help you sleep. If you are a glasses company who would like to consult with Leah and Marley about creating an actually good pair of these orange glasses that will help women and maybe men.

I guess men need melatonin. I'm not sure about men in general. You guys can tell us. Menotin. Then we will, I will sell the shit out of these glasses and give all the money to Leah. and Marley, who have created this fierce, service-based, beautiful company for women and are so heart and mind-led, and I just believe in them so much. So we're just trying to reverse engineer this.

If you want to contact me, create these glasses, we will sell this shit out of them, and we will not take any money. We will make sure that Marley and Leah get them. So hit us up, glasses, company, whoever you might be. Okay, go ahead, Marley, and tell us just enough about the glasses to not give away enough so that someone else does this first. Okay. So, you know, historically, we haven't had electricity. So now the sun goes down in the evening and what do we do?

We turn on lights. And so light is the strongest determining factor of our circadian rhythms, other than our genetics, of course. So it is not really practical for everyone to at the same time, every night, dim every light, turn off every bit of electricity in our house. It's just not practical. Even though that would be great for us, it's just not going to happen. So instead, what we can do is put on a pair of amber lensed glasses. And I actually, I'll be a lot of those for you. Oh, hell yeah.

Look at you guys. How badass are they? And you can look super cool. You'll catch us. Leah's a nurse and still doing shift work, so you'll catch her walking home from the morning, like from the hospital in the morning wearing hers. Everyone thinks I'm insane.

I'm like, well, see you later. I'm making melatonin. I know, like, I'll be sleeping. I think they look cool. I'll be sleeping well. Don't mind me? And essentially what that does, now these are more than,

we've heard a lot about blue light blocking glasses, so those clear lenses with the filter on them. These are different. These are amber glasses that essentially filter out all the wavelengths of light that are coming from our artificial light environment and hitting our eyeballs. So when we put these on, it filters out that light. And then the wavelength of light that hits our eyeballs is on the color spectrum.

It's long. It mimics the same color that we would see in a beautiful sunset. So if you think of a sunset in the evening, that orangey glow over the horizon, that light, actually, we have little cells in the tops of our eyeballs that are meant to take in that light, travels through a little network of nerves, and we have this little cluster of cells in our hypothalamus that tells our body what time it is. When we get that orange light into our eyes, it tells that little timekeeper, it's nighttime. The sun is starting to go down. Start the down regulation of your body. Start getting drowsy, and one of those things is start creating melatonin in dim lighting. And so

these are a really easy way to do that and not have to think about turning all your lights or changing all the electricity in your house to timed lighting or anything like that. You can just pop on a pair of amber glasses. Still watch TV in the evening because I'm with you, Glennon. I don't know when people are watching TV other than after dinner or what other activity there is. And so pop on the amber glasses and, you know, it does change the colors a bit. But the benefit of being able to get drowsy, sleepy and be able to fall asleep, really outweigh, usually for most people, the difference in colors. on their screens. So sunset time is about when you would put those on?

Roughly three hours before bed, just because we all live in different places. Here, we live in Canada where sunset for most, like, good portion of the year, it's like 4 p.m. Right. Okay. Okay. Like one to three hours kind of with, you know, one being the minimum and, you know, up to three hours before bed. And that just helps, you know, like Marley said, we don't rec, we don't use melatonin generally in sleep medicine, but if you do, generally how it would be prescribed as like 10 to 12 hours before you want to wake up, you would take your melatonin. So that's why we have that draggy sort of groginess, especially because it's a higher dose than what our brain would actually make for us. So if we start the down regulation and start producing the melatonin earlier, then we're going to

be able to enter those deeper stages of sleep sooner than we would if we were just taking in, you know, close proximity, blue light all evening. And then, then laying down trying to go to sleep. Amazing. Okay. So we've got number one, changing our sleep thoughts. Number two, the 2020 rule. Whenever you start stressing in your bed, you get out and do something else and then get

back in. We've got three. Build up more sleep pressure by going to bed later. We've got four orange glasses. Anyone who's going to make, wants to make them with us is going to write to me. and then we're going to just be, just make Leah and Marley a shit ton of money by helping women sleep all over the country. I just want to end with, let's explain to people what it is like to work with you too.

Well, I'll tell you for me, what it looked like was once a week for six weeks. I think it was six weeks. I would meet with Leah for an hour, maybe a little bit longer. and during that time, it was really like a teaching period. It was very much a program that had been expertly curated and unfolded in a way that I could really take it in, even when I was in kind of a traumatized state. And this is the period, the first couple of sessions were the sessions that I came to. Yes.

And I think that that was really helpful for the sleep partner to be a part of those sessions, to understand and learn what you were learning. Go. Agreed. Yes. And so it wasn't like, you know, if you're like, oh, my God, I'm already in therapy and I don't want, it wasn't like that. It was more like I was learning.

And it was like a kind of a presentation that I could ask questions about, but very low lift on my part. I would also keep a sleep diary, which was an easy app thing that, that Leah sent me where I could really track how much I was sleeping or not, which is actually quite helpful. Because when you're not sleeping, everything feels like it's been going on for a million years and that you've never slept before in your life. So to actually be able to track that realistically was helpful. Also, there were daily check-ins, emails. I got on Zooms with Leah and just cried and cried because I was so.

So I'm thinking I was probably like a more difficult case than the typical one. I don't know if that is. But what I'm saying is that it very much felt like I had a hand, like holding my hand throughout the time, which I truly don't know how I would have done it if I didn't have that. If I had just had classes because it was so emotional. Yeah. What am I missing, Leah and Marley? No, I mean, I think that's an accurate representation. You know, and the Sleep Diary, just as a sort of aside, it's not meant to create more anxiety when you're tracking that in the morning.

it's very subjective, so it's just sort of your best guess. I don't want anyone clock watching that sort of thing. But we always meet with people before, like I said, for a few minutes, you know, 15 minutes, just to talk about what the situation is, what the best option would be, because it's not insomnia for everyone. It doesn't always look the same. We do most of our insomnia therapy in group settings. So there's just two of us. It's just Marley and myself. So we want to see as many people as we can kind of to do those information. sessions, that learning session. So we kind of present that information to the group. There's a little bit of time within that for, you know, get to, you know, introduce yourself, you know, ask questions if you need to. And the groups are small. Like five people. Yeah, five maximum eight people.

Which helps with the isolation of insomnia. We started finding that. It's huge. Yeah, that people would be like, oh, it's so nice to be able to say to everyone like, I have anxiety about going to bed. And no one's like, what? Everyone's like, me too. Yeah. It's like some of these people that we see end up having like friendships outside of this group, which is really cool. And it's just comforting and, you know, you're not comparing yourself. You're kind of celebrating each other's progress. And then we also offer the ability like, you know, you had Glennon where you can hop on a call if you need a little extra support. So you're not waiting a week. If you're struggling, you hop on a call. We help you through that moment and just like

a quick call, talk through it, figure something out that we're, for you or maybe that you didn't quite get in that session, how that applies to you or how it can apply to you, we can use that extra support to, you know, get you on the right track so you're not waiting a weekend feeling behind. So we do offer that additional support between sessions and beyond the program. So, you know, if you, in three months, if you're in a crisis and you need a little help, you can hop on a call with us. Like if you've gone through our program, it's maybe not a good business model, but ideally we want to give you all the skills you can have. support. After we do these glasses, you won't have to worry about a business model, okay?

Just, it's all good. Hand holding is the reason why people find success with this. There are apps out there that you can do, but doing it on your own is it's still an experience of isolation. It's scary when you're on a downhill. You don't know that there's another uphill coming and having somebody to say, it's okay, this is part of it. This is what it can look like. Hang on. we were going to get there. And then when they come back up the hill, it's like, for us, it's a win too. Like, there's so much emotion in this for Marley and I, which is a reason why it was funny before this call. Marley's like, I can't believe we're doing this. Like, we're going on, you know, we can do hard things because we are a fan of the podcast. But it's like,

if you work really hard at something for a decade, things can happen. Anything can happen. That is a perfect line for all the insomniacs at there. If you work on for a decade. You too can sleep. But yeah, I mean, it's everyone who works with us, like, your success is our success. And, you know, it is work. It's hard. It's difficult. And, you know, it's not like you're going to go to the session and do nothing different and you're going to see success. When you do the work, you will see success. We'll do our best to get you there, too. It's, yeah. Okay. And how do people find you all? So we're all. So we're all. online we do everything virtually so the best place to find us is on our website so we are at

www.w.w. sleep dash works.com and leah i don't know what our socials are but i'm sure you do because i hyphen sleep hyphen works right is that the same thing okay how much do you love these the girls they're like i don't know what our socials are we're going to find your socials and then we're going to put them we have a list i believe We'll send it. Two healthcare professionals. We don't know. That just means you healthy.

Okay. We appreciate you both so very much. I know our family in particular. Appreciate you both so much. Thank you for building this thing together. It's so inspiring to see the two of you doing what you love and making that a mission that is like freeing so many other people. You all are so special. And I have a feeling that you're going to be getting some calls and emails.

So get some sleep. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you so much. Appreciate all of your kind words. And no pun intended, this is literally a dream come true. Oh, yeah. We love you both.

All right, y'all. Go find Leah and Marley. Sleep dashworks.com. Sleep dashworks. com. Sleep dashworks. com. You got it.

All right, y'all, we can do hard things. We'll see you next time. Bye. We are proud to say that we can do hard things is an independent production brought to you by us. Treat Media. Treat Media makes art for humans who want to stay human. And you can follow us at We Can Do Hard Things on Instagram.