Want to stop Doomscrolling? You May Need a Sleep Coach

Margaret Thatcher, who was known for sleeping only four hours a night, he is often credited with saying “Sleep is for wimps!” » But sleeping is actually work. Hanging up the phone, putting aside your personal or political concerns requires discipline. True relaxation takes practice.

Sleep coaches primarily treated newborns (and their exhausted parents). But recently, as anxieties about sleep grew, adults discovered they also needed help with their habits. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 57% of Americans think they would feel better if they got more sleep, up from just 43% in 2013. Only about a quarter of respondents reported getting the commonly recommended eight hours or more per night, down from 34% 10 years ago.

Sleep 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 children, tapped into this underserved population. She says it’s entirely possible to transform daytime and nighttime habits to optimize good sleep. Why not start tonight?

Usually an adult comes to me with one of two things: First, a major life event – ​​work stress, having a baby, the loss of a parent, the end of a relationship – that destabilizes their system. Sleep is always the first thing to do. The second is that they have a chronic profile. There are people who have really had trouble sleeping since childhood, and it becomes part of how they perceive themselves. They’ve tried everything, and then they say, “I’m an insomniac.”

In both cases, they are exhausted. I always laugh, because when I’m stuck at a dinner party, I’m like, “Oh, I just have a quick question. I haven’t slept through the night in 19 years.”

I have been a sleep consultant for over 20 years. I began my child’s sleep practice after receiving my master’s degree in clinical psychology. I was working with a lot of parents and I really started to notice a common problem: their children’s sleep problems were literally pushing them to the brink of divorce.

Even once I made their kids fabulous sleepers, parents still struggled because of long-standing habits long before their kids arrived. That’s when I realized I had to help adults too.

There are camps: difficulty falling asleep or difficulty waking up at night, or both. So that’s my job: to unravel the mystery of what keeps someone up at night. Some of the most difficult cases are people who come to focus only on their nighttime habits and do not reveal what happens during the day.

A client of mine had trouble sleeping through the night for years. We realized that they were consuming most of their calories at night and none during the day. So they kept waking up to eat, which completely deregulated their system.

Another client, a woman who exercised all the time and drank 200 ounces of water a day, never made the connection to the fact that she was getting up to pee literally every hour. We had to decrease the amount of water she drank and have her stop drinking at a certain time.

Sometimes people just stop functioning. I think of a mother who says, “I just forgot to put my child’s seat belt on in my car.” » “I put my keys in the refrigerator.”

I start with the basics. Sure, we take care of sleep hygiene, but that’s all you can Google: get blackout shades, have a sleep sanctuary. Most people think they have a good setup, but their habits or environment work against them. This is where coaching helps, because I can spot what they are missing.

People have stories they tell themselves, like, “If I’m sleeping, it’s because I’m not working hard enough” or “I’m young and I don’t need a lot of sleep.” What’s the new story you can tell yourself about sleep? From there, I use a lot of journaling, cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, mindset work, breathing work.