Wellness Matters Webinar - Seeking Slumber: Nurturing women's health and well-being through quality sleep & rest

Tired of feeling tired? Did you know that women have unique sleep needs that are often overlooked? If you're struggling with sleep issues, it's time to prioritize your health and well-being. In this talk you will learn practical tips and strategies to improve the quality and quantity of your sleep. We'll discuss the common problems that get in the way such as stress, screens, substance use, and aging. You deserve quality rest, and we're here to help you achieve it.

Facilitator: Chelsey Wood

FAQs

• How many hours of sleep do adults really need, and what happens if I regularly get less than six hours?

  That most adults need about 7–8 hours of sleep a night, ideally enough to complete around five 90-minute sleep cycles. These cycles include light sleep, deep sleep, and REM, all of which are important for physical repair, memory, and emotional balance.

  Regularly sleeping less than six hours, especially after age 45, is linked with a much higher risk of heart disease and stroke. Poor sleep also makes you more emotionally reactive, weakens your immune system, and makes it harder to maintain a healthy weight and remember what you’ve learned.

• What are the most common causes of poor sleep in women, especially around PMS, pregnancy, and menopause?

  Women often have poorer sleep because of both hormones and social roles. Around PMS and during periods, shifts in estrogen, progesterone, melatonin, and cortisol, plus cramps and temperature changes, reduce REM sleep and increase emotional sensitivity. In pregnancy, frequent bathroom trips, heartburn, pain, and vivid dreams disrupt rest, and up to 80% of pregnant women report sleep problems.

  During perimenopause and menopause, hot flashes, changing hormones, snoring, and sleep apnea are major sleep disruptors. On top of the biology, many women carry a heavy “mental load” of planning, worrying, and caregiving, which keeps their brains busy at night and makes falling and staying asleep more difficult.

• How does lack of sleep affect mental health, anxiety, and emotional regulation?

  The webinar reframes mental health as having the right feeling at the right time and managing it in a way that doesn’t cause harm. Poor sleep makes this much harder. When we’re sleep deprived, we are more irritable, more reactive, and less patient, because the parts of the brain that handle planning and emotional control don’t work as well.

  REM sleep is especially important. It helps the brain replay emotional events without a surge of adrenaline, supports emotional “reset,” and improves our ability to read other people’s facial expressions. When REM sleep is reduced—through short nights, stress, or alcohol—anxiety, overthinking, and middle-of-the-night worry tend to get worse.

• What practical strategies can I use to improve my sleep hygiene and fall asleep more easily without medication?

  Simple, evidence-based habits can be: A dark, cool bedroom, a comfortable pillow and bedding, and a consistent bedtime and wake time all help your body know when it’s time to sleep. Reading a paper book in low light rather than scrolling on a tablet supports melatonin production and makes falling asleep easier.

  Managin stress management is also relevant: gentle exercise like walking and talking with a friend, slow breathing with long exhales, a “worry journal” done earlier in the evening, and a short grounding practice such as lying with your legs up the wall. Limiting caffeine later in the day and rethinking alcohol as a “sleep aid” are key, because both can disrupt deep and REM sleep and lead to those 2–3am wake-ups. Over time, even a few of these practices done consistently can noticeably improve sleep quality.

Transcript

Well, good evening. We’ll start now. My name is Nicole Imgrund, and I'm the owner and director of Rivers Edge Counselling Centre here in St. Albert. Before we start with our presentation tonight, if you don't mind, I'm going to take just a few minutes of your time because we have some really exciting things coming up at Rivers Edge that I want to make sure you are aware of as well, and then I will introduce our presenter.

I am going to screen share with you, a bit of a fancy way. I'm not used to doing it, so I'm hoping to figure this out. Almost… oh, I am really struggling. There we go, I did it.

We've started some group programming at Rivers Edge. We have a new space, and we're really excited about the programs that we have coming up. Some of them have already started, but we have some that are starting in the next couple of weeks, and so the registration timelines are a bit short, but they all have a couple of spaces left, so I wanted to introduce them to you quickly.

One is The Compassionate Road to Building Self ass Ste. We also have a grief group. We've run this grief group for about 10 years now, a couple of times a year. We're actually running it two nights, Wednesday and I think Thursday or Monday, and so we have two of them starting in a couple of, or a few, weeks, and we have space in both of the evenings coming up. There's no charge for that group, so if you or someone you know is interested, let us know.

We also have a new children's grief group, which starts this weekend. We could probably take one or two last-minute registrants to that group. We have a Teen Wellness Group; we've also run this one for a few years. That is coming up also in a couple of weeks, and we have a little bit of space. And also, next Wednesday, a group called Getting Through the Tough Stuff for Supporting Kids and Teens Through Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, and Other Disclosures. There are a few spots left in that one as well.

Also, let me see with my screen share. I'm really excited about this. Our big event is coming up in exactly a week. We have some tickets left—not a lot, but we still have some left. T.K. Hadad from Peace by Chocolate is going to be our keynote speaker for this event. You may have seen the movie Peace by Chocolate or read his book. It is a beautiful story of resilience and about entrepreneurship, being a newcomer to Canada, a really hopeful, inspiring story.

We'll also have a Q&A with him. Also, we have a mini-concert, about a half-hour concert, with some award-winning Indigenous classical musicians, the Jessica McMahon Trio. I'm really excited to see them as well, so if you're able to join us for that, you can go on our website and find some more information.

And lastly, this webinar is part of a series of webinars that we've been running for a decade now as well. We usually have a couple of them every month. We have some in person, and some are webinars like this, or talks. I just posted yesterday our entire winter/spring lineup, so there's about another 10 or 12 on there.

The next one is Sober Curious, and then we have one about the teenage years, one about sex therapy, boundary setting. There is such a diversity of topics, so I hope that you will be able to join us for one of them as well. All, I don't know, 70 or 80 or so that we've recorded are already on the website. There's lots of good stuff that you can watch anytime as well.

Our topic tonight is about sleep. I'm excited for this one. I think everyone here is—it's evening—if you're not sleeping well, you're probably feeling tired already in the day today, but here you are because you want to solve that problem, and it is so connected to our health, our mental health, everything.

I'm so glad that our presenter, Chelsea Woods, is going to walk us through that tonight. Chelsea is a registered provisional psychologist who graduated with the Master of Education from the University of Alberta. She is a longtime resident of St. Albert, married to a teacher here and raising three children, and she is committed to being part of this city's growth and development.

In her practice she strives to meet people where they're at and shape therapy around each person's unique needs, believing we are a complex people in a complex world. That is well put. And Chelsea, you see teens for sure, and I think older kids?

“I think right now like 18 to—no, 12 to 82 right now. A human lifespan.”

And how long have you been with Rivers Edge again? I was trying to—

“It's over a year. I'm almost at about a year and a half.”

So that's pretty… We're so lucky to have you, and with that, I'm going to turn it over to you. If anyone has any technical questions, I'll keep my eye on the chat. If we have a bit of time at the end of the hour, we can take some questions. You can post your questions as you go as well in the Q&A or the chat.

And Chelsea, will you make the presentation available, as well as the recording on the website, later?

“Yeah, absolutely.”

Notes too furiously; you'll be able to see them later as well. Good.

“Wonderful. Hello. Hi y'all. Thank you for being so patient already. I'm Chelsea. I'm a registered provisional psychologist, as Nicole said, and I'm so glad that you're joining us here tonight. I'll be equally grateful for those who join us asynchronously. It means a great deal to those of us who work at Rivers Edge and are part of that team that we are contributing to the growth of our community, so thank you for plugging in with us tonight.

I'm really excited to talk to you tonight about the topic of sleep, okay? And as you might—I can imagine some of you who are joining tonight—this is a frustrating topic, for sure. It is a primal drive, and for that, it might be frustrating for you to hear me say that out loud. It's something that we are just born to do and should be as natural as breathing, and yet it can be so elusive.

I can't help but wonder if you might be struggling as you're plugging in this evening, so I really hope that I can offer some practical tips and strategies to improve the quality and quantity of your sleep tonight.

You know, there's so much that we could be covering in this topic. It's such a vast array of content in this topic, and so I won't be going into some of the more specific topics like napping and sleep disturbances and insomnia, but I am going to try and talk to things that I think can be helpful to you now and more relevant. Maybe I'll have to do a part two at some point.

And lots of what I'll be talking about will be broad and general, but every once in a while I'm going to dip down. I'm just going to aim at how we have complicated topics around being women as we try to sleep. There are things that are affecting us not only physiologically but sociologically that impact our sleep, so that's part of what this conversation is going to be tonight.

So just an overview: the webinar today, I'm going to cover why we sleep, the stages of sleep, topics that are important to our sleep, mental health matters that are unique to women, like I said, stress management, sleep hygiene, and what potentially is getting in the way of our sleep, okay?

So sleep, like I said earlier, it's a basic drive. And if you're really struggling with sleep, if you have full-blown insomnia and you're here, I feel for you, and this webinar might not teach you a bunch if you've already been to see a doctor, and I really hope you have if you're struggling at that capacity. I'm really hoping that you can be encouraged even though I'm going to state plainly: sleep is a primary drive.

Just like food and water, sleep is necessary for our survival. The longer we go without sleep, the more determined our brains are to get it. Our primary drives are always working for and towards homeostasis, which means we're trying to bring balance to our systems. So when we're hungry, we need food; when we're thirsty, we need water.

Which means if you feel like you haven't even been sleeping, if you feel like you could say confidently, “Oh, I haven't slept in a week,” chances are actually you've just been getting really light sleep—not the kind of sleep that's really satisfying and restful—but I'm hoping maybe we can take some strategies away from today that can help contribute to more satisfying sleep.

So what happens when we sleep? Oh my gosh, so much. There is barely a system in our body that doesn't benefit from a good night's rest. A good sleep is one of the most effective self-help measures we can possibly do to boost our mental health and our physical well-being.

So the benefits include emotional steadiness. Can you believe this? You probably can. Good sleep strengthens our emotional resilience and lowers risk of depression.

Weight control: good sleep can help direct the hormones that regulate how we experience hunger and satiation. So not only do we have less time to eat if we're sleeping, but it also helps us contribute to good weight management just by regulating hormones that contribute to hunger.

A physical boost is part of what we get—tissue repair, cell regeneration, the enhancing of our immune system takes place—so we're better able to fight off illness. We can manage our diet and exercise, but it's almost impossible to do those things well if we're not sleeping well.

Heart health: deep, deep sleep, which we'll learn more about later, lowers both your heart rate and your blood pressure. Studies show that sleeping less than six hours increases your risk of heart disease.

And memory consolidation: your brain sorts through the day's events when you go to sleep. It does a bunch of tidying up, deciding whether we should keep some of what we've learned in the day or if we should just get rid of it. That all happens when we're sleeping at night.

So I'm going to just talk about a few things that are really important for you to know in the conversation of sleep.

So the first is adenosine. When we wake up in the morning, a chemical called adenosine begins to accumulate in our brains, and adenosine plays a role in sleepiness and in our alertness. Its purpose is truly to slowly accumulate and accumulate and accumulate, and it's creating a sleep pressure throughout the day. It's keeping stock of how long you've been awake, and it's a part of what is responsible for making you sleepy, like I said.

Melatonin—y'all are probably pretty familiar with melatonin, especially if you have kiddos. Melatonin is a hormone that helps you sleep. It's naturally created in our bodies, and it's sensitive to light and darkness.

Often, when I'm meeting someone in my counseling practice for the first time, I'll ask them how they're sleeping, and for those who are struggling they will often say, “I used to take melatonin, but I don't find it helps anymore. So I'll fall asleep, but then it doesn't keep me asleep. I wake up.”

Well, that is exactly what melatonin is for. Its purpose is not to sustain sleep, but it acts as the starter pistol in a race. So when it gets dark out, melatonin is released into our bloodstream, and it shouts with all its might, “It's dark!” and then the race is on, in the same way that if we said, “Runners, on your mark, get set, go,” and that starter pistol goes off. That's the purpose and the usefulness of melatonin.

So it doesn't actually serve us all through the night providing long-lasting sleep; it just starts the race. And it's why, on the back of a melatonin bottle, you'll see that it's used for jet lag, because when you have jet lag your body needs to be told when it's time to go to sleep.

Circadian rhythm. I'm sure you know this term. It's our body's internal clock. Lots of research has been done that's demonstrated that all humans display roughly a 24-hour pattern, or circadian rhythm. This clock is always paying attention to when we eat, when the sun's out, when the moon's out. It's watching and getting cues all the time from our patterns and from the outside world, and it's producing cortisol, serotonin, and appropriate levels of melatonin all through the day.

Our brains actually keep magically accurate time. When you wake up five minutes before your alarm goes off, it's because your brain is actually keeping good time. It's capable.

So if we're going to talk about the rhythm of sleep—oh, my window isn't totally in the… I want to just show you; it's like 30 to 30 over here. I'll try and squeeze it in the middle. Let's talk about night owls and early birds.

It's a real thing, and you know it, particularly if you're married. I feel like we always find the other partner. One of us is a night owl and the other is annoying—I'm just kidding. Clearly I'm the night owl, and my husband is a morning person. He loves the mornings.

And you can see here, there's a division. There's about 30% that are considered hummingbirds, which is sort of they float in between being either a morning person or a night owl. I'm here to tell you that research has found that this is largely influenced by genetics. If you're a night owl, chances are one of your parents was a night owl, and the world is unfair in that it doesn't bend to your rhythm.

Some people peak at 11:00 a.m.—you know early birds, 10 o'clock is really when they're buzzing at that time—and some of you, you're your best at seven, and the world is largely shaped around the early bird.

That said, all hope is not lost. You can set a rhythm, and your brain and your body will listen. You can reinforce this routine by the way that you change your daily cycle. If you're a natural night owl and your job requires you to be on site at 8—maybe not perky, no perky pants, but maybe just on site at 8—your routine is going to have to reflect this, and so you'll have to reinforce it with morning light: turning the lamp on as soon as your alarm goes off, getting a cup of coffee, having a shower. All of these will help establish your pattern, and it effectively does change your pattern so that you can function better.

However, know that if you won the lottery and you were whisked away to the Caribbean, you would likely return to your regular innate rhythm of going to bed at 2 and waking up at 10, and that's just who you are. And you can embrace that if you're not working.

Also, these sleep types are really influenced by your age. So if you're an adolescent, you're more likely to be a night owl; that's just how your brain is wired. And if you're over 60–65, you're more likely to be an early bird.

Okay, the stages of sleep. So this gets a bit heady, but I think it's super important for us to know not all sleep is the same. And if you were hoping that I was going to say in this webinar that six hours of sleep is enough, I'm sorry—you're going to have to find another webinar.

No, that's not true. One of the books I was reading through, Sleep Solutions, he kind of makes a bit of an argument that six hours could be roughly enough, but you are lacking some of the really necessary REM sleep that our bodies need. I'll make that argument later.

So really, as adults, most of the literature—I'd say 99% of it—says we require seven to eight hours of sleep a night to be really functioning well and for our systems to be online the way they should be. And if you're sleeping in the range of seven and a half hours, you complete about five of these cycles, and each cycle is roughly 90 minutes, depending on the time of night that it is.

There's quite a lot of information that goes with our sleep cycles, but in the interest of time I'm going to try and give you the CliffsNotes. Overarching, there are two types of sleep: non-REM and REM sleep.

So we begin in stage one over here: light, light sleep. It's our lightest sleep. We're easily woken up in this stage, and you might even wake yourself up with those muscle jerks that happen around this stage of sleep. They go by many names; they also go by myoclonic jerks.

Stage two. If you actually struggle with myoclonic jerks, maybe adjust your caffeine, and also stress can affect those before bed. We'll talk more about how to manage stress later in this talk.

Stage two: in this stage, your brain is starting to decrease in activity, and it's bringing down your body temperature, which is really important to good quality sleep. This stage is about 10–20 minutes, really important for memory consolidation. I'll get into that in a minute.

Stage three is slow-wave, deep sleep. This is a very restorative stage of sleep. A growth hormone is released during this stage, and as adults you might wonder, why does that matter to us? But the hormone helps our body stay young and healthy and perform. Unfortunately, this stage of sleep declines naturally with age, so as you're getting to 60, 65, 70, you're getting less and less of stage three sleep just naturally. You don't have much control over that. Dreaming happens during this time, but it's just kind of like normal dreaming; it's less weird, as you might know.

Stage four: REM sleep—rapid eye movement. Your brain is increasing in activity significantly, and paradoxically your body is almost going into paralysis. Temporarily, you're just immobile, and this is where your dreams get pretty zany as the night progresses. As the night gets longer, you're going to have longer REM sleep as well.

Remember, this REM sleep plays an essential role in memory consolidation, emotional calibration, brain development, and the recognition of other people's emotions based on how you can get them off of someone's facial expression—super important. It's also a part of creativity and novel problem solving. So if you're coming up with just wild answers to some of your problems and gaining solutions, it's likely happening during this stage four REM sleep.

It's also—oh, this is marvelous—one of the only times our brains don't have active noradrenaline. I'll explain why this is important. Our brains are trying to make sense of the day's events during this stage. So if we have really big emotional things that are happening throughout the day, our brain tries to bring them up in REM sleep without the presence of adrenaline and replay it so that it can sort of move out big emotional memories of what's happened during the day.

So why does that matter? There is a cliché: “Time heals all wounds,” or something like that. But one sleep specialist said maybe it's REM sleep that helps us better understand a situation without all the emotional intensity, because our brain can re-engage in events without emotional activity, replay them, replay them, replay them, and just help our brains make sense of what happened during the day.

I just think that's so cool, how our brains are always trying to work for us, and how essentially we're working for our own healing all the time. Isn't that marvelous?

So jumping into stage two and stage four again, I just want to talk about memory consolidation really quick. If you're a student, or if you have a wedding that you're prepping for on the weekend or something and you have a speech to do, don't do it the day of if you can. Try and do it a day before. Study for your exam the day before, and then get good sleep. Don't do an all-nighter. Your brain actually won't harvest that information and store it anywhere; it won't go into long-term memory. It's super important that you get a full night's sleep if you really want to be able to retain something.

This also actually matters for napping. Napping, you might even hit stage two sleep, which will be helpful for memory consolidation. So if you have, let's say, an exam and it's at 7 at night and you studied for it in the morning, try to get a 30-minute nap in the afternoon, and you will do yourself some favors by storing some of that information you just took and putting it into long-term memory. Just don't go over 30 minutes, or you will feel like a zombie, as we all do.

The next topic here: sleep and mental health. Why is this important? Well, it just is, of course. Why is it important that I bring this topic together and try to reframe it before we go into the conversation?

I think we need to better identify what mental health is. An American psychologist—you might have seen her work—Lisa Damour, she's a psychologist who focuses her work on the mental health of young women, teenagers, young adults. She reframed mental health and what it is recently that I think is so pertinent to this conversation.

She says: “Let's be clear. Mental health is not about feeling good; it's about having the right feeling at the right time, and then managing the feeling effectively—managing in a way that brings relief or does no harm, in a way that doesn't deepen negative feelings.”

So what she says here is that mental health is having feelings appropriate to the situation. So if you're supposed to be mad, you're going to be mad, and that you can manage those feelings effectively.

We don't have to work hard to draw a straight line about how poor sleep might negatively impact mental health. If you've ever had a child—or been a child—you have witnessed a parent attempting to explain outrageous behavior by pointing to a poor night's sleep the night before, and the parent really means that they notice the night before: bad sleep, next day terrible behavior or just dysregulated.

And if you've suffered five hours of broken sleep, how patient do you feel the next day? How much more emotionally reactive do you feel? It's the same. We can also have inappropriate responses due to lack of sleep.

And let's talk again now about REM sleep and how this is impacted. It affects our emotional equilibrium. REM sleep is that stage where we're really getting our recalibration and our ability to recognize emotions in other people's faces so that we can respond appropriately. So important. This affects our emotional IQ.

As a side note, I'll slip in here that we'll discuss more later that alcohol does its greatest damage during REM sleep, and how that affects our emotional IQ.

Also, I just want to pop in here: if you have teenagers, you know they really get their REM sleep late in the morning, so like 4 in the morning, 5 in the morning, 6 in the morning. Their sleep expectations are a little bit longer than an adult's—around nine hours—and so they need more morning sleep.

Now think about this: they have to get up so early for school, and if they come home and they're saying, “My math teacher hates me,” it actually might be because they're lacking REM sleep. It might be less about the math teacher or whoever, or “My friends hate me,” or “They're terrible,” or “She had the worst look on her face,” or whatever that is. It actually could be because they're lacking their really necessary REM sleep. Isn't that interesting?

Sleep and physical health. With the onset of midlife, our bodies don't run with the same strength and efficiency as they did in our 20s. I didn't have to tell you that. Our health resilience declines.

Insufficient sleep therefore takes a toll on our cardiovascular system, and if we sleep less than six hours a night, research has found for adults 45 and older you increase your risk of heart disease and stroke by 200%. So I'll say that again: sleeping fewer than six hours a night among adults aged 45 and older increases the risk of having a heart attack or stroke by 200%. So that's pretty significant.

Weight management: simply put, the less you sleep, the more likely you are to eat. In addition, when our bodies are sleep deprived, we can't really manage our calories effectively. So it's really important that we get the sleep we need to manage not only our physical health and weight management, but decrease the likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes.

Our immune system. I talked earlier about how sleep boosts our immune system to fight off illness. An interesting study was done where healthy young adults were separated into two groups. One was sleep restricted to four hours a night for six nights, and the other group was allowed the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep. At the end of six days, everyone was given a flu shot. Then the researchers took blood samples to investigate the differences in their ability to fight off illness. This is a study from this guy here, Why We Sleep.

The sleep-restricted group produced less than 50% of the immune reaction compared to the well-rested group. So we produce less of the good, protective fighting cells with lack of sleep, and this has a myriad of influences in everything from fighting off the common cold or flu and fighting off malignant tumor cells.

Sleep also affects us cognitively—our mental processes. Making good decisions is the function of our prefrontal cortex. We do all our thinking and planning way up here, and that is really affected by REM sleep. We have to have really good sleep, lots of REM sleep, in order to be good decision makers, making good plans.

So this is where I dive into the conversation of how women are uniquely challenged in their sleep. Overall, women report having a greater sleep need and poorer sleep than men. On average, women need 11 more minutes of sleep than men. Yes, it was a study.

Why is this? It seems that research primarily investigates two overarching influences, both physical and sociological. Physically, the focus is on the influence of hormones, different phases of life such as puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause, etc. So let's start there. Let's talk about the physical differences that require more sleep.

I'll start with the beginning: menstrual cycles. It affects the amount of melatonin that we release, and cortisol, which is our stress hormone, as well as body temperature fluctuations, painful cramping, etc. All of these impact our sleep, and sleep quality is lowest while a person is on their period and during PMS. There is a decrease in REM sleep—again, emotional regulation, it's going down. So it speaks to that time while we can feel really emotional during PMS and during our period.

So suggestions during this time to help with sleep are: I'm going to say to avoid alcohol, which also decreases our REM sleep; engaging in moderate exercise can be really helpful for bringing on that adenosine, which creates sleep pressure—that's really helpful—and then also to eat estrogen-rich foods like soy, flaxseed, oranges, and peaches. That can also be helpful, contributing to sleep during this time.

Moving on to pregnancy. Up to 80% of women report sleep problems during pregnancy. So I'd like to meet the 20% who don't have sleep problems during pregnancy; I've never heard of that, but anyway that's what research says. 80% of women struggle with sleep problems during pregnancy.

Peeing through the night, for sure. Heartburn, joint pain, weird dreams—the list goes on. Now, a pregnancy pillow is my tip here. It is not going to solve all your problems, but gosh, if it doesn't make laying in bed just a little more tolerable, if not delightful, after a long day of carrying around another human, you know? So that's my tip for pregnancy: a pregnancy pillow. Indulge, indulge yourself.

Menopause and perimenopause. Estrogen is waxing and waning during this time, as well as progesterone, and it's contributing to snoring and sleep apnea and mood swings, restless legs, and so on. Repeated night hot flashes are the number one complaint during this time and can, for some women, lead to insomnia.

So I'd suggest seeing your doctor about that, and a sleep specialist, and a doctor who can help with talking about hormone replacement therapy and so on and so forth. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that; I'm sure you've already had those conversations if that's something that's bothering you.

But I'll tell you this: I did read a study in 2004 that showed that acupuncture can help with the production of melatonin and improve sleep, and a study in 2019 found that acupuncture was more effective for helping with sleep than mainstream drug therapy, particularly for menopausal women. Isn't that interesting?

Also, keep your bedroom cool. You probably already do that—get all the fans going, and your partner can get another blanket. And then wear natural fabrics. And then I also read one specialist suggests having a second set of pajamas outside your bed so that if you need to do a quick change in the middle of the night, you can do that—something that's moisture wicking and nice and loose. Cloud 9 Pyjamas, if you're in St. Albert, I know they have, I think, those bamboo pajamas, which can be very helpful from what I hear while managing hot flashes at night. So interesting, hey?

Okay, gosh, I really wanted to play a video here, and I don't see it's coming up. And it was so funny. I'm just going to have to skip it. That's fine. I'll get over it. It's fine. Just imagine I said something really funny about how your brain never shuts off.

“Oh, maybe it'll work.”

“Oh, Nicole, were you coming to rescue me? That was so kind. I'm going to see—suggestion—but is it going to play for you?”

“No, I don't think it will. As I click on it, it just arrows ahead instead of actually playing.”

“You could just put the link, the URL, in the chat, then I'll screen share. You don't have to change your settings.”

“Would that mess up your screen sharing?”

“Well, then you'd have to jump ahead to like 28 minutes on… it's like you could…”

“It would mess up my screen sharing. You know, it was just for a giggle, so I can probably get over it.”

“Okay, up to you. You could put—”

“I can get over it. I can let it go. Thank you though, Nicole. But do put the URL in the chat so we can watch it later.”

“I will.”

“No, I love that. It is, it's really good. I mean, Wanda Sykes is hilarious. So maybe I'll just read my notes that go along with that screen though, that I was going to talk about.”

So other influences that women face in terms of sleep is social influences. What is required of us as women compared to men. Again, I will say a lot of this is going to be broadly, generally speaking. I know, I know, the times are changing, but there are still marked differences in what is expected of us as women in the world. So I'm going to jump into that.

So how do our brains get so busy? That's what this little clip was about—it's how busy our brains are. According to researchers, women devote more time to paid and unpaid labor, work and social responsibilities, and family caregiving than men, and we often carry this busyness into bed with us. We're more likely to wake up to take care of others in the home in the morning, which cuts into our own good sleep.

So: busy brains. This is under the topic of, we have very busy brains. I'm just going to pull up a few studies that support that. COVID-19 shaped a lot of research studies, and some of these were focused on unequal gender distribution in unpaid work within the household and childcare. During lockdown, many families were burdened with increased household and childcare tasks worldwide.

This particular lit review from this year highlighted the unequal distribution between men and women, consistently to the woman's detriment. It goes on to say the cognitive dimension—so all the mental tasks—and its impact on our physical, mental, and partnership health requires more scholarly attention. High cognitive load or multitasking is associated with reduced capacity to exercise willpower and make long-term decisions, as well as increased anxiety and stress.

This article here in 2021 defined the mental load, all the things we're thinking about, as a combination of the cognitive labor of family life—the thinking and planning and scheduling and organizing a family—and the emotional labor that is associated with caring for and being responsible for regulating other family members.

This emotional impact is taking a toll. It's an invisible, boundaryless toll, often being carried into not only our leisure but our sleep. So, like many other research studies that focus on mental load, this article delineates between two types of mental load: emotional—again, carrying the concerns and doing the emotional regulating for the home—and cognitive, which is the thinking, planning, scheduling.

And there was another article that talked about something called anticipatory mental load, which was the cognitive load directed towards future events, considering tasks and attempting to perceive anticipated potential necessary problems. And I thought, that sounds a lot like anxiety.

So we're going to talk about stress and anxiety and stress management. If we're talking about these things—mental load, the pressures that are on us and how they affect sleep, which is in these articles—then we need to talk about stress and stress management.

So what is stress? You know what it is. It's a feeling that we have in response to daily pressures. It affects us both physically and mentally. We have some stress in our life, and we require it—without stress, we probably wouldn't get out of bed and have a job—but we can experience it in not only our sleep quality but in our mental and cognitive health. So we need to learn how to manage it.

I'm hoping you have come resourced with already ways that you manage your stress, but maybe you could use more arrows in your quiver, if you will. So I'm going to talk through some of these, not all of them, because I imagine you know some of them just through your own practices.

So I'm going to focus on about five of these that I have listed.

Managing your stress:

Walk and talk. Walk with a friend and do it regularly. Harvard Health reported that one of the most effective ways of managing your stress is walking and talking with a friend. Easy, right? Talk about your life and get your heart rate up. It will also help reduce that adrenaline and cortisol that we carry around in our systems with us. That will help us ease into a night better.

The next one I want to talk about is stay informed, but not too informed. The world has so much information—terrible information—not only in content but in the amount that we get. The American Psychological Association released a news article in 2022 stating more psychologists are seeing increased news-related stress.

So if you think your constant plugging in and headline scrolling is just benign behavior, think again. Headline anxiety, headline stress, these things might be affecting you. Dr. Bruce Perry, in one of his books—I believe it was What Happened to You?—talks about how we're really meant for smaller groups. We're hardwired for smaller communities, like 75 to 150 people, and our brains are loaded to manage about that much bad news. We have capacity for about that much information and how we can emotionally regulate.

So if we're plugging into news from around the world, some of us will be truly affected by that. Consider turning off your news notifications if they're on already, or consider ingesting your news in some more traditional ways—traditional being like television versus your phone, or the paper. Or maybe it's time just to take a media break. I'm going to, for the purpose of your mental health, say: just take a break, like a sabbatical, from the news. Just the sheer volume of headlines you read on your phone can impact your nervous system quickly.

Next one: practice breath work. Long exhales send signals to our brains and our bodies that we're safe. Practice really long exhales. We wish to engage in rest and digest. We need rest and digest, and that is engaged with long exhales. Yoga is great for this, but if you don't do yoga, think about breathing in through your nose, counting for four, holding for two, and then exhaling for six to eight seconds, and then holding for two.

You can practice this when you're driving; you can practice it when you're going to bed at night. Inhale for four, hold for two, exhale for eight, and then inhale for four again.

I'm going to skip down; I'm noticing time here.

Limiting or ditching social media. This is a great little book, Why We Can't Sleep by Ada Calhoun. I think she had a really great piece here. She said screen time, as we all know, correlates with poor sleep. Generation X is more addicted to social media than either Millennials or Boomers. According to a 2017 Nielsen study, we spend almost seven hours a week on it, about 40 minutes more than those ages 18 to 34.

Before bed, she says, “I use a banking app to deposit a check. I emailed someone about a potential work project. With various friends, I played a dozen games of Scrabble. I checked and rechecked the transit app. I looked at social media and the breaking news and heard about global threats and felt envious of my friend enjoying the sunset on the beach.”

And then she wakes up in the middle of the night feeling warm, so she opens her window and she pulls her hair into a ponytail and she drinks a glass of water, and then she picks up her phone and she just notices the cycle that she's in about how her phone use is waking her up as much as it is keeping her up. Just an important conversation. I thought that was really poignant.

A worry journal. If you haven't heard of this before, some of you with really, really busy brains, lots of stress, you already maybe have pen and paper before bed that you write down your things—you know, things you need to remember before the next day. Keep that up.

If you really are struggling with uncontrollable worry, I want you to consider this as a practice: getting a hard book—imagine this is a journal, a hard book—and you write down five-ish, three to five, just one lines of things you're worrying about, and then leave space underneath each one. And then, after, go back to the top of the first thing you wrote down and try to think of something that's sort of like a resolve.

So maybe, “Okay, I can actually phone the doctor at 3 o'clock tomorrow, so I'm going to do that.” But maybe the resolve is just, “I can do hard things,” and maybe that's how you resolve that worry for the night. You have those five things; you write a resolve to each of them.

And then I want you to go, as loud as you can, to slam it closed, as to say, “This is for tomorrow now. I'm putting this to bed today.” And your body will now have a reference point that if you wake up at two in the morning and you're like, “I need to worry,” you can be like, “No, I remember I closed the book on that before bed and I said the rest is for tomorrow.” You can reference that point. Something to think about.

Also, don't do the worry journal right before bed. Do it like an hour before bed.

Let's talk about anxiety for a second, shall we? A state of unease, dread, or fear. It's future-oriented, about anticipated events, and it's without the presence of danger. Again, we can't avoid all anxiety. We are going to feel anxious before a job interview, and after the day of that job interview, we're going to have that stress in our system; we're going to be aroused; our cortisol, our adrenaline is going to be up.

If we don't do anything with it, we take that adrenaline and that cortisol into the bedroom, and our minds are racing and we're irritable and our breath feels shallow and we have a hard time falling asleep, and this can even affect our likelihood of dealing with nightmares at night.

So go back to stress management. Perhaps focus on that worry journal or breath work. Maybe it's time to make an appointment with your counselor. Maybe it's time to just focus on your anxiety management.

But feeling anxious or stressed before bed will not make us tired; it will wake us up. Our brains cannot tell the difference between the stress of walking down a dark alley or the stress of all the things we're worried about for the next day. It affects our nervous system. These things will not make us sleepy; they'll make us more awake, and are more likely to promote those alarming 2 a.m., 3 a.m. wake-ups.

So not only do we need to do stress management, but we also need to engage in practical tips to help improve our sleep. Maybe you were plugging into this thinking, “Maybe I'll learn something I've never learned before, like if I put my bed headboard at south or southeast every night, that'll increase blood flow and blood flow will help me sleep better,” but I have none of those tips.

The things I'm going to walk you through not only are founded in good research, but they are things your grandma might have told you. You might already know these things. So I'm here to tell you, then, you maybe have to start practicing them.

So, the number one is: go dark. Again, Dr. Chris Winter, in his book Sleep Solutions, talks—he really challenges the alarm clock that is illuminated. You know those red numbers that we're looking at all through the night? He says, why do we do this if we have an alarm probably even set on our phones by our beds? Or if the alarm is set, can't we turn the light around? Isn't it just serving the purpose of allowing us to check the clock at 2 in the morning—“Oh, here I am, 2 in the morning again. I'm up at 2. I'm going to be up at 2:20. I'm going to be up at 2:40”—and now you're focused and mad at your alarm clock.

So maybe you can turn it around, and maybe that's a pattern you can unlearn. Like I said, your brain is always keeping time. It can affect your circadian rhythm; if you're always waking up 2 in the morning, you will likely always wake up at 2 in the morning—or not to say you can't change it, but just keep that in mind with your alarm clock.

Anything else that's creating light in your room, anything else, try to drown it out. Your brain is always paying attention to light—always.

Number two: get comfy. Do you even like your pillow? Is your pillow the same one that you had when you moved out of the house? So think about really getting comfortable in bed. Do you need a new blanket? Can you get a fuzzy $14 blanket that you snuggle with at night and that is your security blanket? I kid you not. Make your bed as comfortable as possible so you can ease into it, so you can delight in crawling into bed. Full-on rage can happen as you're going into bed and you're mad every night that you can't sleep, so make it an enjoyable, delightful crawling in.

Limit screens. You've heard this before. I don't feel like I have any new news here for you. You can get the glasses, sure, but they actually did a study—okay, so maybe you don't know this—they did a study on reading on a tablet versus reading on a hard-copy paper, and they found, if an iPad is turned off two hours prior to bedtime, it still suppresses melatonin by 23%.

Compared to reading a printed book on low lamp light, reading on an iPad suppressed melatonin by 50%. So if you are reading by traditional low lamp light in a book, you might have an easier time falling asleep. Melatonin is for falling asleep.

Turn down the temperature. Really important. I think that Dr. Walker said 18° is the best temperature for your room. Some of you like it cold—that's good. Cold is good. You need your body temperature to drop by about three degrees for you to easily slip into sleep, and that also happens through the night; your body temperature will drop.

And then: routine, routine, routine. When you're teaching a baby to sleep, you establish a sleep routine, so why don't we do this for ourselves? A great one to put into play is a bath, a hot bath. About an hour before, maybe do your worry journal or you write down your things you need to know for the next day, and then slip into a hot bath.

As you pop out, that will help decrease your body temperature and prepare you for sleep. But the routine you set is constantly sending signals to your mind and your brain: “Okay, it's time, we're going to bed now. Get your book, read by low light, set your alarm,” yada yada yada. Do the same thing every night, including on the weekends.

If you're really struggling with sleep and you want to get serious about it, do it every single night—same routine, same night time, and then waking up around the same time as well.

Lavender. If you can believe it, lavender actually is not just pseudoscience. They did a study in 2014 at the Johns Hopkins Foundation Hospital, and found that their patients exposed to lavender had better sleep. Isn't that remarkable? Maybe you are not surprised to hear that. I was.

Bed is for sleep and sex. TVs, working in bed, watching YouTube, all of those things send mixed signals to our brains. If you're really struggling with sleep, it needs to just be for sex and for sleep.

Sleep-cation: so if your partner is a super tossy-turny, very snore-y, very disruptive sleeping partner, maybe you need to renegotiate. Just like two nights a week you go to the guest bed or they go to the guest bedroom so that you can actually catch up. There is sleep debt; when you're not getting great sleep, a debt is created. So maybe you need to do some catch-up, and maybe your marriage can survive it, or your partnership. That's a tough one, I get that, but I'm going to be one of maybe many people in your life and make the suggestion, and maybe one day you'll be convinced.

This one: counselors in their own practice—we are human. Sometimes we are able to go home and we can sleep. People with high-stress jobs, sometimes you can go home and you can sleep. Sometimes first responders, they can go home and they can sleep. Sometimes you’ve got to do things differently; you’ve got to really be intentional about setting aside the day.

So I'm sharing with you something that I do. It's five to ten minutes of grounding, and what I do is, before bed, I lay on the ground and I put my legs up against the wall. This is research-based, so it actually stimulates rest and digest. Your bum goes right up against the wall, your legs go up in the air, and your body is recirculating blood, doing all these good things, and you're laying down flat.

Maybe you're listening to a five-minute sleep podcast, but what you're doing then is you're just being in the moment, you're just focusing on your breath, and you're stimulating rest and digest, and you're really just trying to let go of the day. The intention is to let go of the day. And then you get up off the floor and you're like, “Okay, maybe that feels a little bit different, maybe feels really intentional and ceremonious.” So something to maybe take into your day.

Lifestyle changes. Maybe you don't want to hear these, but also maybe I'll tell you about them. Diet and exercise—no one is surprised to hear me say that diet and exercise is going to affect your sleep. I like the one that says, “I forgot to go to the gym today. That's eight years in a row now.”

Caffeine. You know caffeine affects your sleep. I'll try and give you information maybe you don't know. It peaks at around 30 minutes after you drink it, and it still has 50% of its potency up to five to six hours after you drink it. So if you're drinking a cup of coffee at 4, you're going to feel that in your system. It can stay in your system up to 10 hours.

So maybe go to half decaf; maybe limit the amount of caffeine you're drinking in a day. It blocks adenosine—remember that sleep pressure. Caffeine blocks it, and as soon as the caffeine is out of your system, boom—all that sleep pressure now comes back. So sometimes, maybe after a cup of coffee in the afternoon, you're like, “Oh, why do I feel tired?” It's because you were, and it just blocked it and then it went away, and you get that sleep-attack feeling.

Alcohol. I am so sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it is not a sleep aid. I often hear that wine after dinner or after a TV show or before bed or whatever helps with falling asleep, and it is a sedative. It helps with sleepiness, but it doesn't help with real, good sleep.

Not only does it affect the amount of sleep you're getting, but the quality of the sleep. The result is, you don't go through all the stages of sleep that you're supposed to, particularly in REM sleep. Again, that affects your emotional equilibrium.

You might notice alcohol fragments your sleep. It brings you awake all through the night; you might not even notice it, but it's actually happening. Or it gives you that great big 3:00 a.m. wake-up call because that sedation that you started with, now it's gone through your system, let go, and—bing—your body's awake.

It's been called the Chardonnay Shocker or the Chardonnay Hooray: “It's 3 in the morning, yay,” and then there you are left contemplating conspiracy theories about yourself or your co-workers or your family. Actually, The New Yorker had this great cartoon, and it said, “Now playing: Everything You Said at the Party.” There it is. That's what happens after a party.

So consuming even moderate amounts of alcohol in the afternoon can deprive a person of REM sleep. REM sleep helps us lock in our memories and creativity, helps us emotionally regulate. Maybe Barb at work doesn't hate us, and the Starbucks barista wasn't rude; maybe we just had too much wine before bed.

So there we are. Take a deep breath. Sleep is not only necessary; it is the foundation to our health and a flourishing life. Try to carve out appropriate time and be intentional about getting the necessary seven to eight hours.

As women, not only do we have stages of life that affect our sleep, but a significant amount of stress that often comes in life, so we need to prioritize stress management for our sleep and aim for—not just hope for—better, more satisfying sleep.

This has been a brief overview. I hope it's offered some tips and tricks that you can take away, some information that you can incorporate in your day-to-day life, and I am truly wishing for you better and more satisfying sleep.