Tag: sleep hygiene

Sleep Lesson from my 8 Year Old

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Sleep Lesson from my 8 Year Old

I have to share this amazing sleep tip from my kid!

 

(Side note: Let me say we do prioritize sleep in the household, but we don’t follow every perfect sleep hygiene prescription because, well, we’re human people. But we do have a nighttime routine and a regular waketime even on weekends! I have a sleep hygiene handout for clients that I really like and you’re welcome to use it if you like – find it here.)

 

Back to my kids: here is what she told me, completely unprompted:

“Can I tell you how I put myself to sleep? (Yes, of course!) First, I lay down  comfortably. Then I yawn. If I don’t feel like yawning, I do it anyway and then it becomes a real yawn. Then I close my eyes. Then I find the place in my body that feels the warmest and I think about it until the warmth goes to the rest of my body and then it’s relaxed and then I’m asleep.”

What an awesome technique!! I told her I would share it with the therapy world and also with clients who might be helped by it. So, there you go. 

 

 

Comment below: Any favorite sleep strategies that you use or teach to clients?

 

Childrens Melatonin

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1 milligram!

I found this at my nearby Walgreens, and I was unbelievably thrilled! Children’s melatonin!

“Now, wait,” you’re saying. “That doesn’t sound like the Ellis I’ve been reading.” (And if you’ve ever heard even a small piece of my “Bad Pharma” rant, you’re especially confused.)

The reason I’m excited is NOT because I think we should be giving kids melatonin. I pretty frankly don’t think we should, at least unless all the other behavioral/psychological/family issues have been worked out and the problem is still there. Unsurprisingly, I’ve never had a family committed enough to go through that process.

Also, it doesn’t do very much, in children or adults. Here’s a meta-analysis for you – increases sleep time by 8 minutes. (It might work better in older adults?) 

I AM excited, though, because there’s an easy-to-access 1mg dosage that adults can choose. I consistently have clients asking me about using melatonin. Of course, the first thing they get is a talk about sleep hygiene and a sleep hygiene info sheet! But, if they insist that they’re going to use it, they get a secondary talk about how the typical 3mg and 5mg dosing wildly, outrageously increases the amount of melatonin in your system (I mean 50x and more!). And when we flood our bodies with something that our bodies already make, our bodies quit making it. (This is how hormonal birth control typically works, btw. And it’s why testicles shrink when men are given supplemental testosterone.) Do clients with sleep problems want to shut down their bodies’ own melatonin production?? I doubt it.

Get this – I put “melatonin supplement” in Amazon and the first option was TEN MILLIGRAMS! I’m so pleased to at least have a less insane option to point clients toward.

You may want to read the National Sleep Foundation’s article about sleep and melatonin, as well.

Comment below with sleep tips, or general pharma rants. There will be more posts to come in this area, of course!

 

 

 

 

Just close your eyes and rest…

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“Just close your eyes and rest.”

This is what we need to tell our kids, and ourselves. Trying to demand that you fall asleep, or that awful thing where you think “if I could just go to sleep NOW, I’d get 5 hours. … if I could just go to sleep NOW, I’d get 4 ½ hours…” NOT HELPFUL. Changing this language is just the beginning of the wide array of strategies we can use to help clients get restful sleep – something that’s associated with pretty much every physical and mental health measure there is! 

 

Sleep hygiene is maybe the thing that’s most applicable to virtually every client – more so even than journaling, I’d say! It’s a shame, I think, that many accessible resources for sleep hygiene are quite poor (even though they’re usually pretty accurate). I’d like to share with you the sleep hygiene handout I made for my clients – feel free to share (but, you know, obviously don’t SELL!).

 

It’s geared toward adults, but could pretty easily be modified. It doesn’t mention sleep meds (which are often antipsychotics or antianxiety meds – BEWARE; also the sleep specific meds like Ambien have some really alarming side effects!) or pharma sleep “helpers” (like antihistamines or melatonin). It also doesn’t mention some of the sleep re-set techniques for when sleep has gotten really out of control, e.g., the 24 hour re-set or the 5.5 CBT-I strategy .

 

 

Comment if you teach sleep hygiene to clients, or if you’ve learned a new sleep hygiene technique you can share!