How a chronic insomniac solved her sleep problems

From rnz.co.nz

Kate Mikhail is a former chronic insomniac who has researched her way out of her sleep problems.

Seven to nine hours sleep are considered optimal, and anything less can have a big impact on your health - from immune and cardiovascular systems to psychological behaviour.

A study late last year from researchers at the University of California San Francisco found poor sleep quality in the over-40s can age the brain. So, if sleep is a struggle - what are your options?

Mikhail has turned her research into a book: Teach Yourself to Sleep: An ex-Insomniac's Guide.

                                                                                                                          Photo: Avis Leigh Bader

Insomnia crept up on her, she told RNZ's Nine to Noon recently.

"I've been a chronic insomniac, not realising it for decades, it started probably my late teens, and it just got worse and worse, and particularly after I had children.

"I'd go to bed, often absolutely exhausted, ready to go to sleep, and then my mind just wouldn't switch off. It was sort of crank up almost."

This became a debilitating cycle, she said.

"I was very emotional some days, I'd wake up exhausted. I'd have burnout days, I could feel it. I knew it was a burnout day, because I'd get to the point where I couldn't stay vertical almost. I just had to lie down in a dark room and give myself 24 hours until it passed," she said.

Intrigued by the work of her great, great uncle, a pioneer in cognitive therapy, she decided to research her way out of her sleeplessness problem.

"He wrote a couple of pages about how our thoughts and our mindset impact us physiologically and behaviourally. And these two pages specifically in relation to insomnia. And I just found that a fascinating idea, and then started researching it."

One of the first things her research revealed was the interconnectedness between day and night.

"I'd always seen sleep as just an add on to my day, and I had my day, and then sleep happens.

"And what I really realised is that our day and our nights are totally intertwined. You can't separate your sleep from your day or vice versa."

She found reading sleep scripts during the day helped calm her anxious mind.

"I started listening to very short sleep scripts that my uncle had written... really short, one minute.

"I'd listen to that earlier on in the day, every day, and sleep scripts are very, very powerful sleep habit cues, they shift our mindset, and then with it, physiology, expectations and ultimately behaviour."

The agency helped reduce hyperarousal, she said.

"Reassuring ourselves is key, because the amygdala, the emotional bit of our brain, is hyper alert to danger and threat, and just effectively calming it down, reassuring it is very effective."

She found she could trick the circadian rhythm to help her sleep too.

"Obviously, our life these days is very indoors, we're not getting those really, really strong light signals.

"I have a light box on my desk, for those dark, gloomy mornings, I have a light box to give me 10,000 lux, which is how you measure light, so that I can get a decent light signal.

"It's not as strong as you're going to get outside, but much, much stronger than inside."

Food, she found, is also important.

"Light is key for the master body clock and then food for those peripheral body clocks and the big one is tryptophan.

"We get tryptophan in high protein foods, animal products, but also beans, pulses, oats are very high in tryptophan. And we need tryptophan to synthesis serotonin in our gut.

"And then we need serotonin for the sleep hormone melatonin."

Exercise is another plank for a good night's sleep, she said.

"A morning walk's fantastic, because you're getting two-in-one, your really bright morning light, which you can't replicate indoors, and that is anchoring your body clocks.

"But also, the more exercise we do, the more movement we do during the day, there's a chemical called adenosine builds up in the bloodstream, which then make us sleepy later on."

These techniques combined with stress reduction exercises during the day to reduce her cortisol levels gradually shifted her sleep dial, she said.

"If you don't get enough sleep, everyone knows this, your moods are immediately impacted. It has a real impact on our stress resilience and our energy levels.

"And for me, that was key, having greater stress resilience, much more even keel of my mood and having energy.

"I used to wake up exhausted often and just really didn't feel physically strong enough to start my day, let alone hit the day running, and that's gone now, I wake up with energy. I wake up feeling strong."

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/540671/how-a-chronic-insomniac-solved-her-sleep-problems