Need Better Sleep? Start Here!
Let’s talk about sleep, my friends!
Check in with yourself real quick:
Do you sleep through the night consistently?
If you wake in the middle of the night do you fall back asleep easily?
Do you sleep well but still feel tired during the day?
Do you rely on coffee or sugar to get through your day?
Imagine for a sec how life could improve for you if you had better sleep…maybe you’d have more energy for the things you love, you’d think more clearly, or your health would improve.
Today’s episode is super personal for me: I share the heartbreak and turmoil I went through that ruptured my sleep cycle. I also share exactly how I rehabbed my relationship to sleep and found the power of deep and restorative rest again. I’ve been there during trauma, insomnia, sleepless nights, anxiety, and fear. I’ve been there and in this episode I share the science behind what happens while you sleep and some surprising facts about the impact of sleep on our kids and auto accidents.
And most importantly you’ll learn actions you can take tonight to start changing your relationship to sleep.
You deserve deep and restorative rest. Start now, I’m right there with you!
What happens when you sleep:
Consolidation: integrates new information you’ve gathered during your day and integrates new memories.
Cleaning: while you sleep, your brain washes cerebral spinal fluid through the brain, which helps carry away harmful waste like proteins that can build up over time. Riding the body of these neurotoxic waste products is one of the vital functions of sleep.
Sleep and kids: They experience sleep deprivation differently than we do. So small children will experience that fatigue as more hyperactivity rather than being like, they need to take a nap. So it's something to watch out for that it plays differently depending on the age of who you're looking at. And, uh, 2009 study in the journal of pediatrics found that children ages seven and eight, who got less than about eight hours of sleep a night were more likely to be hyperactive, inattentive and impulsive
Ways to rehab your relationship to sleep:
1. Go see your primary care physician. Having a regular physical will help ensure that there are no biochemical or disease processes that are impacting your sleep. Having a “big picture” overview of your health is a great step to take and will give you valuable information which you can turn into action.
2. Check out some alternative health folks. Look for someone who is concerned with the totality of you as a holistic being and can help identify patterns and blind spots that you may have. Acupuncture, naturopathic doctor, psychologist, chiropractor, etc...the important thing is make sure it's someone you trust and that you can share your challenges with honesty. Asking for help isn't always easy, but when you ask the right people it can make a world of difference.
3. Darkness rules! Is your room actually dark or do you have light coming in from outside or electronic gadgets that glow? Our sleep and wake cycles function in response to light and dark cues.
The absence of light sends a signal to your brain that it's time to rest. This has to do with melatonin, which is a hormone produced in the brain's pineal gland, which is often known as the sleep hormone or the darkness hormone. So if you're not sitting in darkness or sitting in near darkness, as you head towards bedtime, you're not actually giving your body the signal it needs that it's time to sleep. You need darkness!
Get rid of the glowing gadgets. Get some good quality shades for your windows. Turn of the electronic devices at least an hour before bedtime and help use your environment to cue your body that it is time to rest!
4. Guided deep relaxations rule! You can reset your patterning for sleep and actually get good rest by training the relaxation response. Check out the resources below for some good stuff to listen to tonight for quality zzzz’s!
Resources:
1. Wendy Troxel's "Why School Should Start Later for Teens" Ted Talk Teens don’t get enough sleep; and it’s a public policy concern. Troxel gives a fascinating look from her point of view as a sleep researcher and mom to a teenager.
3. Sleep drives metabolite clearance from the adult brain
4. Drowsy Driving Kills -from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
5. Arianna Huffington Sleep Revolution
6. Deep Relaxation Recordings to help with sleep .
Sleep well with total yoga nidra (deep relaxation) I LOVE this one and use it frequently
Simple guided relaxation 20 minutes
Guided Sleep Meditation by Deepak Chopra
Deep Sleep Binaural Beats for Sleep Brain Sync with Kelly Howel
Full Transcript:
Hello, my friends and welcome to the Gita Brown show, bringing harmony into everyday life. I love being creative and I love wellness. And I've been teaching both for about 30 years. To be creative. It helps if you have a lifestyle that supports your wellness, because this is where your creativity starts. My philosophy is simple and based in yoga tradition; doing simple practices daily over a long period of time naturally creates a lifestyle full of health and abundance. And from there, your creativity can flow. I am a teacher, a writer. I teach yoga and music, and you could think of today as like a little mini class with Miss Gita. I'm going to give you some actionable tips you can do. And we're going to do a little deep dive into our subject today. My friends, which is sleep. Rock-a-bye baby in the tree tops, which is actually really a horrible song.
If you think about it, don't ever sing that to a child, but we're going to really dive into it a little bit. And I want you to really think about sleep. Now, I know some of you have stumbled across this episode and went like, Oh yeah, I need that. Or for a second, you might be thinking, actually, I don't need that. My sleep is really good, but let's pause for a moment because it might not be all about you, my friend. You might be a parent, or you might have a loved one in your family who is struggling with sleep right now, or God forbid, a period in your life might occur where sleep starts to be a little elusive for you. So I want to give you a little class today in some basics around sleep, just a few little tidbits of sleep science, but really the meat of our lecture today, my friends is going to be actionable things that you can start doing right now tonight to start changing your relationship with sleep.
So again, I also would really challenge you to do a little check-in like I do with every episode. Cause you are a student, you've got to kind of figure out how you're gonna use all the information in today's episode. So check in. Do you sleep through the night consistently? It's either a yes or no. Do you wake up and in the middle of the night and when you wake up, how long does it take you to fall back asleep? Is it a right away situation or do you do the tossing and turning thing and flipping on the TV or you need to read to fall back asleep. Do you get enough sleep, but maybe you don't feel super rested throughout the day. You sort of feel like man, I should have more energy. Maybe you're asleep. Isn't quite as deep as it could be. And do you rely on coffee or sugar or other stimulants to get you through your day? Wherever you are on that spectrum. Remember there's always another level of wellness for you to achieve. When you achieve that level of wellness, then you can create more. You can be more productive, you feel better and you can add more into your life of those things
you love doing. So. Challenge
yourself. There's always a way to improve. And I'm going to give you some ideas today and some places to start. So picture yourself for a moment. Let's be a little aspirational here. What would life be like for you if you had better sleep, better quality, or you were just sleeping consistently, how much more productive would you be? Would you be happier? Would you be perhaps healthier than you already are? Do you want to be smarter? And if you're a parent, do you want your kids to be more successful in school? If you want those things for yourself, upgrading your sleep habits will totally get you there. And the good news is my friends it's so, so, so easy. So let me break down exactly for you, how we're going to proceed through today's lesson. So you kinda know where we're at. First thing we're going to do is I'm just going to give you a really quick nutshell of my story and my sleep issues that I've had.
So you kind of know where I'm coming from and sort of with the lens of your teacher a little bit, and also so that you just know I have been there and I really have rehabbed my relationship to sleep. So I know it's possible. Then I'm going to give you a little bit of info on sleep. Some surprising facts, maybe some things you knew, maybe a few things that you didn't know about sleep and its role in our brain, our development, and in our health. Then we're going to get right to those steps you can take. And I'm going to give you some resources and some ideas of how you can start to upgrade your sleep game to day. All of the information I give you today will all be linked over on my website, gitabrown.com. It'll all be linked there along with a full transcript and summary.
So you can reference the information, share it with loved ones and know that you have that as a resource. All right. It's kind of like your online, um, Trapper Keeper of this episode. Anybody out there remember the Trapper keeper? that notebook raise your hand if you do so all that's there for you at gitabrown.com. So let's get into it. First part is my story. Now, a little trigger warning. I do talk about addiction issues in this, and I do talk about abusive behaviors. So if you have little ones around pop in some headphones, or maybe give this little section a skip and you can always come back to it later, it's just a couple of minutes, but wanted to give you a little warning. So many, many years ago when I was 12 years old and just a wee girl with long hair and braces, I met a wonderful boy in junior high.
I fell in love and many years later we ended up getting married. I truly did marry my childhood sweetheart. It was a beautiful marriage. He was funny and warmhearted, but along the way, he got addicted to drugs and alcoho.l and you can fast forward many, many years. And the end of our relationship, his addiction had really taken over and he was sort of lost to the addiction. All those good qualities of him got really sort of washed away by the alcohol. And it was so sad and it was so hard to see him suffering. And here's where my relationship to sleep started to fracture. And here's exactly what happened. Then I'm gonna take you out of the darkness and into how I shifted it. But what happened for me was that because he was drinking, his schedule was very erratic, right? He would come to bed at all different hours.
And when he'd come in, I would always wake up. Partly by just being disturbed by him, his presence in the room. But then also partly because I was so afraid, I'm sorry, this is dark, but I was afraid that he would die overnight. I was really afraid that he would vomit or be sick and choke and die. So I was like on this constant, can you imagine my friends, constant like hyper alertness, even when I was sleeping. And some of you have kids, you know, this feeling right where you're asleep, but you have that ear open all the time. You're listening for a disruption so you can be ready to act. He would get sick a lot in the middle of the night and I have to wake up and clean him up, get him safe, clean all of the bedding. Oh. So you can see how my sleep started get disrupted. That went on for about two years of that fractured sleep overnight.
And then also his emotional abuse turned into the threat of physical abuse. And that happened overnight in the middle of the night, one night. And I was afraid for my life. I thought I might die. And that was the moment where sleep completely ruptured for me from that day on for about six months, I didn't sleep through the night. I would do things like barricade my door with furniture. Um, I can smile about it now because I, I see now that I made it through, but at the time it was terrifying. I was worried that he would get so, um, washed away by alcohol and be in this alcoholic blackout that he would hurt me. And you can imagine that I did not sleep through the night, even after the relationship ended and I was safe. And even sometimes when I was five States away from where the incident happened, I was still waking up in the midst of that trauma.
So. The good news is my friends is I've been there. If you're having a turbulent relationship with sleep, I've been there in the middle of the night. I've been in that place of panic and fear and being afraid to close my eyes because I know that I'm vulnerable and that something bad could happen. And I've learned over time, how to gradually retrain myself to let go. Retrain myself to believe in safety. Retrain myself, to let my body help heal. And it has happened. And I now sleep through the night and I've been there with you. So I say this story, my friends, not like as a downer and I'm sorry, it's heavy and dark. But for you to really understand I've been there and it is possible to change. So let's get into then a little info of sleep, little sidebar, and then I'm going to show you all the things I did and some things that I didn't do, but that I know other really smart people do to kind of rehab that relationship to sleep.
So, yeah.
Do you want to be a little smarter? Do you want those kids to be successful in school? There is this amazing, amazing clinical psychologist. Her name is Wendy Troxel and she did a talk on Ted, a Ted talk. And then she also had a little feature on Ted radio hour. And she said that kids who get adequate sleep have better grades, their attention is better. They have better mental and physical health. Now here's the thing. If you're a parent of a teenager, this is crazy. Listen up parents and teachers, 1 in 10 teenagers get the eight to 10 hours a night of sleep that they require. Only one in 10 teenagers is getting the eight to 10 hours that they require keeping in mind. As she says that the eight hours is the minimum. Most of them aren't even getting the 10. That means that most teenagers are sleep deprived.
That's really, really scary because we use a process when we're asleep called consolidation. Our brains are absolutely amazing. So when you have these, um, days where you're going in and taking new information and having stressful events, and like for me, having a very turbulent relationship. when you sleep, that's when your brain consolidates all of the new learning, it integrates the memories. It brings it all together in this process called consolidation. So for me, in my example, I was not getting that consolidation. So I would start the next day in a depleted state for those teenagers who aren't getting that eight to 10 hours a night. It means they're not even consolidating the learning they're doing at school in day one on Monday. They're not consolidating that information. So they go into Tuesday school in a deficit and it gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
Another cool thing the brain does. They're just figuring this out and they've only figured it out so far with rats. And there's another animal too. I'll figure it out here, Ah! Chimps. I believe so too. But they found out that the brain does this amazing kind of washing effect. When you're asleep, you could think of it like your brain pumps and sweeps when you're asleep. So this is from the university of Rochester. Uh, dr. Meichin, I'm so sorry. I perhaps might pronounce your last name incorrectly. Dr. Meichin Nedergaard, he's a professor of neurosurgery at University of Rochester, my Alma mater. And he did a study in Science. So he says your brain is " like a dish washer." What happens is your brain when this is what they're hypothesizing again, from the animal studies that your brain pumps cerebral spinal fluid, um, into your brain and it squeezes and pumps it through.
So during sleep, they have this hypothesis, that brain cells, this is where my science geek gets so happy. Your brain cells actually shrink down a little bit and the body pumps the cerebral spinal fluid up the spine and into the brain and pumps it through the cells and acts like a dishwasher. And it carries away the toxins, some of the plaques possibly associated with Alzheimer's and it carries that all away. Then as you awaken the cells like re- expand, and then you go throughout your day and you learn more and more. So it's kind of like when you're asleep, your brain does an auto cleaning cycle, but if you're not getting that deep sleep, you're not cleaning out all of that toxic material and it builds and it builds and it builds. Isn't that amazing and kind of scary to think about what sleep deprivation can be doing to your brain.
What else does your brain do when you are asleep to inspire you to upgrade your sleep? Um, Oh, here's another one, a lack of sleep for kids. This is especially for my parents and teachers, a lack of sleep and kids, a lot of times results in ADD/ ADHD, attention deficit and or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms. Okay. If you're a parent or a teacher, we've all seen this. Sometimes when kids are too tired, they actually get wired, right? They experience sleep deprivation differently than we do. So small children will experience that fatigue as more hyperactivity rather than being like, they need to take a nap. So it's something to watch out for that it plays differently depending on the age of who you're looking at. And, uh, 2009 study in the journal of pediatrics found that children ages seven and eight, who got less than about eight hours of sleep a night were more likely to be hyperactive, inattentive and impulsive. Oh my gosh, two other quick little facts. And then we're going to get to some ways that you can start to change this. Healthy weight for you, whatever that is, sleep and metabolism are controlled by the same sections of the brain. So when you're sleepy, certain hormones go into your blood, and those are the hormones that drive appetite. I felt this in my own life, when I don't get enough sleep, I'm always more hungry the next day.
Yay. So to keep all of those,
Those systems functioning in a homeostasis, you need the sleep. Here's one that is really, really interesting. There was a study by the national highway traffic safety administration in 2009, that said being tired, accounted for the highest number of fatal single car run off the road crashes. More so than crashes due to alcohol consumption. And dr. Rappaport of the study says sleepiness is grossly underrated as a problem by most people. But the cost to society is enormous. Sleeplessness affects reaction time and decision making. So having insufficient sleep can be as detrimental to your driving, as drinking and driving. Do you need any more evidence of why you might want to up your sleep game? So let's get into some ways. You can start to rehab your relationship. Again, these are all linked over to my website, or you can take some notes right now. Let's continue on my friends.
So what can you do? What can you do? Tuck all of these facts away and along the way, maybe think of one thing you can choose. And we'll talk about that again at the end. So one of the number one things you can do, if you're having any issues with sleep, please I've said it before, go see your primary care physician. So many times my students and even family members have been having issues with sleep. And it's actually because they have something going on. Their heart rate is fluctuating a lot, which is causing a little disturbance in sleep. One person, it took them a year before the doctor finally said, you know, I think you need a sleep study. This person had a sleep study. And it turns out that they had sleep apnea. So this person was waking up over and over throughout the night.
And it was just simply because of basically a breathing issue. got the proper care, the proper help, the proper devices, and now is sleeping through the night beautifully. So please attend to that big picture health first it's so, so important. In so many times in our wellness, we overlook the most basic thing. Go to your doctor, doctor and check out what's going on there. Also another very simple thing you can do that'll start to change it right away. Go see some alternative health folks, a psychologist, a talk therapist for me, acupuncture. You want to look for someone who cares for you and for your health very deeply, but is a little bit removed from your life. So can maybe see some patterns, maybe see some things going on that you couldn't ever see yourself, but they're going to help you to discover your best way to rehab your relationship, to sleep.
Having that like sort of person who cares, but it's a little removed has been absolutely fundamental for me. And it was one of the number one ways that I started to rehab as I got therapy and I found a great acupuncturist. And I go religiously and it really helps me to have those sort of people who are outside of the situation a little bit to help me manage my energy, which then naturally led to better sleep. Okay. Darkness. How many of you is your room actually dark at night? Is it actually dark in your room or do you have like all these little electronic things glowing everywhere, you know, you have like the, what is it? The smoke alarm up there has like the red light. I mean, obviously that's important, but do you have like light coming in from the street? Do you have like little things glowing is your gosh shoot.
Those alarm clocks that glow, all those little lights have been proven again and again, by science to disrupt our sleep. Your brain goes off of light and dark cycles and darkness is essential to sleep. The absence of light sends a signal to your brain that it's time to rest. And this has to do with melatonin, which is a hormone produced in the brain's pineal gland, which is often known as the sleep hormone or the darkness hormone. So if you're not sitting in darkness or sitting in near darkness, as you head towards bedtime, you're not actually even giving your body the signal it needs that it's time to sleep. You need darkness. So what can you do? You know, if you're watching TV or staring at your phone and then you shut it off and you go right to sleep well, no wonder you can't sleep.
Cause you are been literally tricking your body that it's supposed to stay awake. And then you're asking it to do the opposite. So an hour before bed, what would happen if you shut down the electronics. if you really need the electronics, you're like, but I need that, man. I'm putting some earbuds and turn that phone or the computer. So you're not looking at the screen and tricking your brain that it's daytime. You can still listen to stuff auditory wise, but give your body that darkness. One of my favorite things to do. And one of the ways I rehabbed my relationship with sleep that you might find useful is like looking at darkness as a friend and as an ally. So I would turn off the lights, lay in the room, had always have quiet music. Cause that kind of helped me feel a little more safe and I would open my eyes really wide and think of myself, drinking in the darkness, drinking it.
And I'd imagine it sending a message to my brain. It's time to rest. You're safe, you're relaxed. It's time to rest. And I would just repeat that and let that darkness do the job. And eventually my body got the message. So it's really, really important that you start to dim the lights as you head towards bedtime, it's peaceful and relaxing. So there's a really, really great resource on this that talks a lot about the role of all of like the computers we're looking at and all the screens we're looking at and how that affects our sleep. Arianna Huffington has a great example. She actually, um, I think she passed out at her desk. She just had overworked due to exhaustion back in 2007, she has this really, really great book, highly recommended called sleep revolution, transforming your life one night at a time, so that a great aspirational self-help title, but it's really, really great because she talks a little more specifically about very concrete steps you can do.
And as a way for you after this episode to get a little more deep into it and get another perspective on it. But she really talks about this, this whole thing about getting yourself away from the screen before bedtime. And for me personally, I resisted that because the screen was my last holdout, right? It was my last safety watching like a sitcom or something funny, or even like a talk on yoga really helped me to feel more safe. It was really hard for me, as you can imagine to lay there in the dark and just fall asleep. But I finally did it. I finally did it. And my phone now lives downstairs and I sleep upstairs. It takes time, but be patient. And remember you can always listen to things rather than watching them. Really, really important to remember. So you can absolutely do this is one of my favorite number one, things guided relaxations will be your new best friend.
If you do an intentional guided deep relaxation, you can reset your patterning for sleep and actually get good rest. Cause you might be sleeping through the night, but never actually hitting that deep as portion of sleep where the consolidation of memories occur and also where your learning occurs and where your brain gets that nice sort of rubbing and scrubbing from that cerebral spinal fluid we talked about at the beginning of the lecture. So to get that really deepest level of sleep, what would happen if you did a deep relaxation before bedtime. Or if you even did one while you were laying in bed. So some of my students love deep relaxation so much that they actually have like a dedicated iPod or a dedicated device they use and what's on it is only like meditations and it doesn't have any internet access. So they're not tempted to like start surfing things and checking emails and going on Instagram at 11 o'clock at night, you know, right.
They got the TV out of their room and they have this one device. And the only thing that's on it is meditation and deep relaxation. And they either just play it over the speakers of the device, where they put in little earbuds and they lie there and they listen and they get quiet. For me, myself. I got my phone is a big trigger. Once that phone comes out, I'm like down the rabbit hole. But for me somehow, like my computer's not a trigger. I don't know. You might have a device you use that doesn't trigger it like more obsessive behavior. So for me, it's my computer. My actually, when I need it, my computer is on the floor next to my bed. I'll play a nice deep relaxation. The deep relaxation ends. The computer goes to sleep away I go, if you need that little extra help, I have a whole list of relaxations over on my website, gitabrown.com There's yoga Neidra network that has some amazing ones that are actually done by hypnotherapists.
And within four minutes of those, I'm usually out. Because they're trained in how to prime your brain to get that deep rest. I have my own series of programs called Relaxation Rescue. It's an online mini class and I have right in that some, um, 30 minute ones. And I think I have a 10 minute one as well. I think I have two 30 minute ones and one 10 minute, one that are designed to send you off into sleep. In fact, I did one last night and I can attest, I did my own deep relaxation that it actually works. And there's also some free examples on YouTube. If you just look up deep relaxation before bed, you can find free ones right there that you can start practicing shifting your body, shifting your mind, into that deep resting and restorative state. So there, it is. My little bit of my personal story.
You got all kinds of information about sleep, who knew that it did all those amazing things for you and more. And you got a few ideas of some things you can start to do. So now I have a little challenge for you, my friend, what are you going to do? What are you going to do tonight? What's one little shift you could make. Are you gonna get off the phone a little earlier. Get off that computer, maybe even five minutes earlier. Are you going to dim the lights in the house? Even maybe you're still watching TV. You'd be like, I could dim the lights a little bit. You're going to try a deep relaxation. Maybe you're going to take a nice bath and like a candle lit room, figure something out that you can do tonight. That's going to give you that darkness trigger. That's going to start to help your body and mind to relax into sleep and start to make friends with sleep.
When you've picked your thing, my friend, I want to hear about it because I'm a teacher. And the only way I can teach you is if we go back and forth a little bit, right? So just hop on over to gitabrown.com And just drop a little comment in the box. Underneath this episode, I will be so happy to see what you're doing there to talk back and forth with you a little bit and kind of troubleshoot with you a little bit. And some of you have said to me like, Oh, you feel a little weird about sharing your stuff know online like that. I'm telling you my friend, your question or your challenge is someone else's challenge. And by you sharing what you're going to do, you will inspire other people to try the same thing. And you'll also inspire someone else. Who's kind of watching that to go well, if she did it, maybe I can do it.
And I've trust me. Your question is probably another student's question. So by answering and sharing, we can create a community of people who are rehabbing our sleep. So we are more productive, better rested, and can bring more joy to our lives. Because remember, if you want to be more creative, create that holistic lifestyle and your creativity will just flow from there. So hop over to gitabrown.com. Leave me a message there. I can't wait to hear about what you're doing and let's close with a little chant for peace. This is a universal chant for peace. Taught to me from within my yoga tradition, Integral yoga, and I'll give you the beautiful English translation afterwards, chant along with me and spread some peace!.
Lokah samasta sukhino bhavantu.
May you and the entire universe be filled with peace and joy, love and light. I'll see you over on the website or on social media. Share this with your friends. Let's start a revolution of good sleep! Sleep well, my friends I'll see you next time. [music outro].