anxieties about sleep<\/a> have spiked, grown-ups have found they need help with their habits too. A Gallup poll from 2023 found that 57 percent of Americans think they would feel better with more sleep, up from just 43 percent in 2013. Only about a fourth of those surveyed reported getting the commonly recommended eight or more hours per night\u2014down from 34 percent 10 years prior.<\/p>\nSleep professionals are seizing the opportunity to help adults realize their dream of waking up rested. WIRED spoke to a sleep consultant who, after years of working with kids, tapped into that underserved population. She says it\u2019s entirely possible to transform daytime and nighttime habits to optimize for good sleep. Why not start tonight?<\/p>\n
Usually, an adult comes to me with one of two things: First, a major life event\u2014work stress, having a baby, losing a parent, a relationship ending\u2014that destabilizes their system. Sleep is always the first thing to go. The second is that they have a chronic pattern. There are people who\u2019ve really struggled with sleep since childhood, and then it becomes a part of how they see themselves. They\u2019ve tried everything, and then they say, \u201cI\u2019m an insomniac.\u201d<\/p>\n
In both cases, they\u2019re exhausted. I always laugh, because when I\u2019m cornered at a dinner party it\u2019s like, \u201cOh, I just have a quick question. I haven\u2019t slept through the night in 19 years.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been a sleep consultant for over 20 years. I started my child sleep practice after getting my master\u2019s in clinical psychology. I was working with a lot of parents, and I really started to notice a common issue: Their children\u2019s sleep issues were literally pushing them to the brink of divorce.<\/p>\n
Even once I got their kids to be fabulous sleepers, the parents were still struggling due to long-standing habits from way before their kids arrived. That\u2019s when I realized I needed to help the adults too.<\/p>\n
There are camps: trouble falling asleep or trouble waking up at night\u2014or both. So that\u2019s my job: to unravel that mystery of what\u2019s keeping someone up at night. Some of the toughest cases are people who come in only focusing on their nighttime habits and don\u2019t disclose things happening during the day.<\/p>\n
One of my clients had trouble sleeping through the night for years. We realized that they consumed most of their calories at night, and nothing during the day. So they kept waking up to eat, and that completely dysregulated their system.<\/p>\n
Another client, a woman who exercised all the time and drank 200 ounces of water a day, never made the connection that she was getting up to pee literally every hour. We had to diminish the amount of water she drank and have her stop drinking at a certain hour.<\/p>\n
Sometimes people actually just stop functioning. I\u2019m thinking about a mom who says, \u201cI just forgot to clip my child\u2019s seatbelt on in my car.\u201d \u201cI put my keys in the refrigerator.\u201d<\/p>\n
I start with the basics. Of course, we\u2019re doing sleep hygiene, but that\u2019s anything that you can Google: Get blackout shades, have a sleep sanctuary. Most people think they have a good setup, but their habits or their environment are working against them. That\u2019s where coaching helps, because I can spot what they\u2019re missing.<\/p>\n
People have these stories that they\u2019ve told themselves, like, \u201cIf I sleep, then I\u2019m not working hard enough\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m young and I don\u2019t need that much sleep.\u201d What\u2019s the new story that you can tell yourself about sleep? From there, I use a lot of journaling, cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, mindset work, breath work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Margaret Thatcher, who was known for sleeping only four hours a night, is often credited with saying \u201cSleep…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":511706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[210,43854,517,4757,1079,67,132,68,228754],"class_list":{"0":"post-511705","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-how-to","10":"tag-mental-health","11":"tag-parenting","12":"tag-sleep","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us","16":"tag-your-next-job"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115884283858980311","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/511706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}