Unlocking the Secrets to Better Sleep: What You Need to Know with Diane Macedo

In this episode, Diane Macedo unlocks the secrets to better sleep as she shares what you need to know. From her personal experiences with sleep challenges, she shares something counterintuitive: how sleep isn’t something we do, it’s something that happens when we stop trying so hard. Diane talks about retraining a wired brain and the systems that actually govern sleep. This episode is packed with helpful strategies to improve your sleep.

Key Takeaways:

• Discussion of common sleep problems, including insomnia and restless leg syndrome.
• Exploration of the psychological impact of stress on sleep quality.
• Overview of the two systems governing sleep: homeostatic sleep drive and circadian rhythm.
• Personal experiences and struggles with sleep from the guest.
• Practical advice for improving sleep quality, including writing down worries and actionable steps.
• Introduction of the concept of a “reverse curfew” to enhance sleep drive.
• Examination of the effects of food and diet on sleep, including the role of carbohydrates and melatonin.
• Insights into various sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea and narcolepsy.
• Strategies for managing circadian rhythm issues, including light exposure and consistent meal schedules.
• Discussion of sleep inertia and the myth surrounding waking up fully refreshed.

Diane Macedo is a three-time Emmy Award-winning journalist, anchor of ABC News Live First,
breaking news anchor and correspondent for ABC News, and a bestselling author.
Macedo anchors ABC News Live First, ABC News’ Emmy Award-winning streaming morning
newscast, every Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 1 PM ET on ABC News Live. As the first
daytime anchor for ABC News Live, she helped establish the network’s daytime streaming
coverage, leading the expansion of real-time news programming. The program delivers a
fast-paced mix of top headlines, real-time breaking news, in-depth reporting, and expert
analysis to start the day. In addition to her work at ABC, Macedo is the author of the bestselling book The Sleep Fix: Practical, Proven, and Surprising Solutions for Insomnia, Snoring, Shift Work, and More, which challenges common misconceptions about sleep and offers evidence-based strategies to
improve it.

Connect with Diane Macedo: Instagram | The Sleep Fix Method

If you enjoyed this conversation with Diane Macedo, check out these other episodes:

How to Eat for Better Mental Health with Dr. Drew Ramsey

Understanding Choice Points for Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise with Michelle Segar

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 00:01:12  Some nights the sleep police show up in our heads. Alarms about Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and how screens after 8 p.m. have ruined us forever. Diane Macedo spent years chasing every rule and her sleep only got worse. Then she discovered something counterintuitive. Sleep isn’t something we do. It’s something that happens when we stop trying so hard. Today we talk about retraining a wired brain, the two systems that actually govern sleep, why a notebook can be the sleeping pill, and how a simple reverse curfew can rebuild trust with the bed. If you’ve ever felt broken because you didn’t pop up at dawn full of joy. Good news. That’s called sleep inertia, and it’s normal. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Diane. Welcome to the show.

Diane Macedo 00:02:01  Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:02  I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your book, The Sleep Fix Practical, Proven and Surprising Solutions for insomnia, snoring, shift work, and more.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:13  And I did find lots of surprising solutions in the book. I feel like I know a fair amount about sleep, even though we haven’t done many episodes on it. I just travel in circles where people talk about sleep a lot, and I found this book really helpful and so I’m excited to share it with listeners. But before we do that, we’ll start in the way that we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Diane Macedo 00:03:09  It actually makes me think of another parable of sorts. It’s a Chinese tale, and I won’t go into the whole thing, but we we call it maybe, said the farmer. And it’s a tale. You’re nodding your head. I know some some. I’m sure many listeners will be familiar with it, but it’s essentially about a farmer who has a series of fortunes and misfortunes happen, and people congratulate him every time something good happens and they say, oh no, I’m so sorry. Every time something bad happens. And he always responds with, maybe because you never know what that thing is going to lead to. And so one example in that story is his son breaks his leg and everyone comes and says, oh no, I heard it’s so horrible. And he says, maybe. And then it turns out his son ends up not being drafted into a war where everybody dies because of that broken leg. So the moral of the story is, you never know what even those misfortunes will lead to. My husband and I, ever since we heard it, will now frequently turn it to each other in different scenarios and literally just say the word maybe.

Diane Macedo 00:04:07  And we both know what we’re saying to each other, which is even if we’re riding super high on something, you don’t want to count your chickens before they hatch, so to speak. And when something happens, and it’s really helped us in situations where you know, you miss a train. For example, we live in New York, you miss the train. It’s a huge bummer. And rather than get really frustrated the way we used to, we now say maybe like maybe we weren’t supposed to be on that train. Maybe something bad was going to happen if we were to get on it. We have no idea what the future holds or would have held, and so it just sort of helps us to stay levelheaded and essentially not sweat the small stuff. And so for me, I think that’s just one way that I try not to feed the bad wolf, so to speak, and keep the good wolf on my side, even during small things where sometimes, you know, you can, you can lose it a little bit and lose track of what’s really important.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:54  Yeah, I love that parable. It actually, I think makes it into my book, which comes out next year. But what you should do is I would recommend is you go to YouTube and look for the farmer story Hee Haw version. Do you remember that old TV show Hee Haw? That was kind of like a very strange southern like variety show back in the day. Might be might be before your time. Anyway, they do a version of that farmer story and it is hysterical what they do. It is really funny. I highly recommend it. The other idea that comes along with that, that I really like, is that we always try and stop the story in the middle of it. Because that’s kind of what that is. You just take the event and you think like, okay, you just stop the story then and whatever that is, is what it is. But if you let the story continue, there’s always a different chapter. As you were sharing about that, it made me think a little bit about you and this book because you had sleep problems, and those at the time, I’m sure were really, really difficult.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:58  And yet here we are with a book that came as a result of it. Maybe you could share with us a little bit about what brought you to the point that you wrote a book about sleep.

Diane Macedo 00:06:08  And to be clear, I am not a doctor. None of this is medical advice, but it is great stuff to talk to your doctor about. Yeah, so for years I had trouble falling asleep. Trouble staying asleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to fall back asleep, or it would take me hours just to fall asleep to begin with. Some nights it felt like I wasn’t sleeping at all, and I got increasingly frustrated and increasingly interested in the topic. But then the more I watched segments about sleep and read articles about sleep and so on, and tried all these tips, I was getting worse instead of better, and I didn’t understand why that was happening. And it got to a point where I felt like I was following all the rules. You know, I had quit caffeine, no screen time before bed.

Diane Macedo 00:06:52  Everything else that every expert I could come across was advising. And mind you, I also work in news. So in some cases people were coming on either my show or Good Morning America, which I do a lot of work on and did a lot of work on at the time. And I would not only, you know, listen to whatever segment was happening on TV, but I would often talk to some of these people, you know, backstage. And so I was trying everything that I could find and just getting worse and worse and worse, and I could not figure it out. And then finally I started reading sleep textbooks, and I stopped reading the bestsellers that I had been reading and found some books by actual clinicians who treat people for sleep. the books were far less popular, but it turns out they were far more helpful. And those are where I found my answers in those textbooks in. I read hundreds of clinical studies, and once I started trying that stuff, I almost by accident, I was supposed to actually do a piece on it for ABC and shoot this whole I was going to call it sleep boot camp and let this sleep doctor put me through, you know, whatever they wanted to.

Diane Macedo 00:08:01  But just reading up so that I wanted to be informed going into the segment, I was going to be interviewing all these experts, just in doing all of the research to prepare myself for that and kind of in the process, accidentally trying some of these things myself, I ended up fixing my own sleep problems in a matter of I don’t know, I want to say it was two and a half or three weeks and I was working the overnight shift, which so many experts that I had spoken to and articles that I’ve read and so on, basically said was going to be impossible. And so once I uncovered those answers, I thought, well, why is nobody talking about this stuff? And so then I started really focusing on talking to experts in insomnia, specifically the people who treat people who have difficulty sleeping, who have the same issues that I was having, which so many people do. And all of them said, listen, the science is there. Nothing of what happened to you. Nothing of what you found is surprising to us just for some reason.

Diane Macedo 00:08:57  That’s not what people talk about. And so I put it off for a few years. But eventually it was one of those things that was just calling to me, and I couldn’t think about anything else. And so I decided to write the book that I wish had existed when I was struggling, because had I had those answers years prior, I never would have struggled the way that I did.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:18  You know, one of the things that you talk about in the book and I think is so common, I have restless leg syndrome. So I’ve had my share of sleep issues at points. And as a younger man, I was an insomniac. I’m not really any more, but one of the things I think about the last, I don’t know, five years for sure, has been this talk about how critically important sleep is. And while I think that’s valuable that we know that I refer to it as like the sleep police who are coming, you know, like they stress me out, right? They keep talking about how important sleep is and I’m not sleeping.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:55  And now I’m thinking like, oh, not only am I not sleeping like I am on the fast track to Alzheimer’s and heart disease and and so then the stress around sleeping starts to really build. And you talk about that really eloquently in this book.

Diane Macedo 00:10:11  That stress is far more destructive to your sleep than any cup of caffeine you’re going to drink, or any amount of screen time you’re going to have at night before bed. And that was one of the big things that I had to learn. You know, the more I read about how important sleep was, the worse my sleep was getting. And I equate it to you or someone with an allergy, let’s say a peanut allergy. And all you keep reading is about how great peanuts are for your health, and how awesome it is, and how terrible it is that you can’t have them. And you’re just thinking, okay, got it? But what do I do? It made me feel like a failure. Like, if I wasn’t sleeping well, it must be because I’m not trying hard enough or because I’m doing something wrong.

Diane Macedo 00:10:54  And actually, it was the opposite. I was trying too hard. Yeah. And what I’ve learned is that sleep is not something you do. Sleep is something that happens to us. And if you try too hard to try to force sleep to happen, it has the opposite impact. And so rather than trying to will this into existence, and I have a very strong willed person, I had to learn something that I’m not very good at, which is I had to learn to surrender. And what I found really interesting is the concept of the threat of wakefulness, because we understand that if someone were to put a gun to your head and say, fall asleep or else, right, even if you were the best sleeper in the world, you would suddenly probably have a hard time falling asleep because you’re trying so hard to make it happen and you are under threat if you spend enough time worrying about being awake at night. Wakefulness itself becomes a threat. And you go to bed thinking, oh no, I hope I don’t stay awake, or I hope I don’t wake up in the middle of the night, because if I do, all these bad things are going to happen.

Diane Macedo 00:11:54  I’m not going to be able to function. I’m going to have Alzheimer’s disease. My skin is going to be terrible, right? And there’s no shortage of all of the things we have seen in, in some cases, legit literature, in other cases, a lot of fear mongering. And so all of that goes through your head. And rather than help people sleep, it does the opposite. And so I felt like when I wrote this book, there’s plenty of stuff out there to explain to people how important sleep is. And that message is important for the many, many, many people who just don’t sleep because they’re not prioritizing it enough.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:24  Precisely.

Diane Macedo 00:12:25  However, I felt like there was a huge void in literature for people who are doing the opposite right there. They’re going to bed. They just can’t sleep. Once they get there, they’re trying to sleep and they can’t. And so rather than write another book that was aimed at persuading people to go to bed, I wanted to write a book specifically to help people on how to sleep once they get there.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:46  Yeah, and I think that’s really important. I think it’s very useful to know, okay, sleep is really important to health. I should make that a priority. And for me, anything beyond that actually wasn’t very helpful. Right. Because it just made me it made me more anxious about it, you know? And it sounds like like you, when I relaxed, that didn’t that’s not what fixed my restless legs. I’m being treated for them in a different way, but it helps a whole lot to just not be so worried about it.

Diane Macedo 00:13:13  I want to be clear for people listening, they might be thinking, oh, just relax. Well, great. It’s it’s much more, of course, than that because one of the I think the more fascinating things that I learned is that our brains have this autopilot feature. So if you were to walk into your favorite restaurant, you might start to salivate before you even walk in the door because your brain says, oh, I know where we are. We’re about to have some awesome food, and it starts to prepare for that so that you, our brains naturally do that.

Diane Macedo 00:13:40  So we don’t have to actively think about every single thing we do. If you spend enough time frustrated in bed, that autopilot kicks in and your brain starts to associate bed with being a place where you need to be alert. And so now, as you get ready to go to bed, instead of that being a cue for your brain to wind down and prepare for sleep, it becomes a cue for your brain to prepare, to do battle, to be in that stressful, alert place. And so you end up getting this cue for wakefulness instead of this cue for falling asleep. And that’s why a lot of people will have that experience where they’re dozing off on the couch one second, and as soon as they get up and go to bed, they’re suddenly wide awake and all wound up and in this kind of tired but wired state. Yeah. And so and I’m not saying that you were saying this, but it’s not just about oh, just relax and it’ll go away. Right. It’s you have to reprogram your brain to start to recognize the patterns that lead you to sleep and fall into that routine again.

Diane Macedo 00:14:38  And there are really concrete ways that you can do that, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:14:42  I think very often there’s a reason we’re not sleeping, that we’re going to talk through the different types of sleep issues. There’s often a reason we’re not sleeping, right. Mine was restless legs, so relaxing didn’t solve that problem, but it was the anxiety that I started piling on top of that that just actually exacerbated the problem and made it worse. When I didn’t get so stressed about it, it didn’t mean my restless legs went away. I still had to deal with the underlying issue. So I want to kind of back this up for a second here. And I want to talk about a key theme in your book, which is sleep as a two system battle. What does that mean?

Diane Macedo 00:15:17  You have two central systems that allow you to sleep and be awake during the day. One is your homeostatic sleep drive. I like to think of this as sleep hunger because it works just like normal hunger, right? The longer you go without eating, the more hunger you feel.

Diane Macedo 00:15:35  The more food you eat, the less hunger you feel. Once you stop eating, the process starts all over again. It’s the same with your sleep drive. So the longer you go without sleeping, the more the chemical adenosine builds up in your brain, which makes you feel sleepy. The more you sleep, the more that chemical dissipates and takes your sleepiness with it. Once you wake up, that process starts all over again. There’s also the other part which people will probably be more familiar with. Your circadian rhythm. Your circadian rhythm makes you sleepy and awake at different times of the day, regardless of how much you have slept. So if you are a morning person, for example, or a night owl, we sometimes think of those as preferences, but their biological. If you are a morning person, you are biologically programmed to wake up earlier in the morning and feel sleepy earlier in the evening. If you’re more of a night owl. You are biologically programmed to wake up later in the morning and to feel sleepy later at night.

Diane Macedo 00:16:32  And so if you are a biological night owl, for example, with either an early work schedule or even a quote unquote normal work schedule. You’re probably jet lagged every single day, and that makes it harder to wake up in the morning. You’re dragging because you’re waking up when your body is still sending you sleep signals, and then you’re trying to fall asleep at night when your body is still sending you wake signals, just like when you are jet lagged. And so what I found a lot of people have an aspect of both of those that factor into their difficulty sleeping. But if you have more one than the other, that’s going to dictate how you want to address the issue. Because if your primary problem is a circadian rhythm issue, and you’re just doing all these things to try to help your homeostatic sleep drive or to try to, you know, wind down some of the anxiety that’s feeding your insomnia, you’re still not addressing the root of your issue. You’re still going to have sleep problems, and vice versa.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:56  Question about circadian rhythm. This may not be tied to circadian rhythm at all. I never thought that it might be till just this very second, but it popped in my head. So I’m going to ask many, many people, myself included. Report of 3:00 in the afternoon ish slump. Does that have anything to do with circadian rhythm? Do you have any ideas on why that’s such a common time that people get tired?

Diane Macedo 00:18:20  It’s directly tied to circadian rhythm. Okay. So in your circadian rhythm you naturally have a midday slump. And then it sort of rises again. Think of it almost like a when you look at a camel and they’ve got the two humps. Right. So hopefully not that deep, but rather than it just being this steady wave that increases and then decreases, it sort of has this plateau and often a dip in the middle of it. Now, if you are also not sleeping well so you didn’t get enough sleep, which means now your your sleep drive is also making you sleepy.

Diane Macedo 00:18:54  Now that dip is going to be more dramatic. And so for some people, they’re not that fazed by it either, because that’s just the pattern of their circadian rhythm doesn’t have as dramatic of a natural slump. But then also if you are sleeping better, you will feel it less dramatically than if you’re not.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:11  Yeah, there also seems to be, at least for me, a correlation to how I eat.

Diane Macedo 00:19:14  So different foods can have an impact on your sleep. Right? Everyone talks about melatonin in a pill form, but lots of food have melatonin in them too. You have foods. Carbs can have a certain impact because when tryptophan, which we always hear about turkey Thanksgiving, tryptophan cannot reach our brain without the help of carbs, essentially. And so and tryptophan stores in the body so often when you have that, you know, post-meal food coma after Thanksgiving, it’s not necessarily because of the tryptophan, it’s because of the carbs that you also ate that allowed to give that tryptophan a sort of fast track to your brain.

Diane Macedo 00:19:53  And if you have a lot stored and it gets in there, then you feel that all at once. That’s a long winded way of saying. And just a short example, a few examples of how your food can also affect your energy levels.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:06  Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self-control things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. Tensions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide. Now. At once you feel and take the first step towards getting back on track. I have been eating an extraordinarily low carb diet this this calendar year because I because I’d heard it might be good for energy and it’s it absolutely is.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:05  It makes a big difference in the depth of my 3:00 ish slump. It’s just much more minor. It’s there. But it’s not like, you know, going down a black diamond ski slope or something, you know, at three in the afternoon.

Diane Macedo 00:21:20  What’s interesting is you can use that same concept to your advantage. If you’re the kind of person who gets really revved up at night, right? If you have a racing mind or whether it’s because of your sleep drive or some sort of anxiety drive or circadian rhythm if you save the carbs for the end of the day. You know, sometimes people think I’ll eat carbs earlier so I can burn them off. You want to flip that if you have difficulty sleeping, because you can take advantage of that sort of food coma feeling to help you get into that sleep at night.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:47  That’s part of my new bestseller called The Large Pizza Before Bed. Don’t sleep, sleep fix.

Diane Macedo 00:21:53  It’s. I wish it were that simple. There are specific kinds of carbs that you want to go to or that you want to avoid.

Diane Macedo 00:21:59  But but yeah, no, I really enjoy that tip because people like that one.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:04  I guarantee you that would sell, that book would sell.

Diane Macedo 00:22:07  Maybe you should write a new one.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:08  I can eat a large pizza before bed and it’ll help me sleep. That book would fly off the shelves.

Diane Macedo 00:22:12  Yeah. I wish it were true.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:14  We’ve been pursuing the wrong, wrong, the wrong angle here.

Diane Macedo 00:22:17  Cookies?

Eric Zimmer 00:22:18  Yes, exactly. So let’s take a quick tour through types of sleep issues. You identify, I think five of them here. I can read them to you and you can say a little bit about them. Or you can, if you remember them. Either way.

Diane Macedo 00:22:34  yeah, I mean, I can I can go through off the top of my head and then you can, you can keep me in check and remind me. But, we talked about insomnia a little bit. some. There’s sort of a divide in the sleep community as to whether a circadian rhythm disorder is also classified as insomnia or a separate thing.

Diane Macedo 00:22:50  I like to define them separately because they have different solutions. Okay. So you’ve got insomnia, which is sort of that thing I described where your mental autopilot has now associated bed with a stressful experience. And now every time you’re going to bed, you’re either having difficulty falling asleep or you were having difficulty staying asleep, or you are waking up early earlier than you want to and not able to fall back asleep. any basically any time you are for an extended period of time and consistently having trouble sleeping when you want to, and when one would reasonably expect to be sleeping, that’s insomnia. It’s incredibly common, and sometimes people find the word to be scary, but it’s not. So if you’re saying, oh, I don’t have insomnia, I just might just have a bracing mind at night. Newsflash you have insomnia. Then there’s a circadian rhythm disorder, which can be related to jetlag. It can be shift work, which I had because I worked an overnight shift. Or it can just be that you are a night owl or a morning person, and your schedule is misaligned with your circadian rhythm.

Diane Macedo 00:23:55  A good way to notice that in yourself is if on weekends, you sleep better when you can do it on a later schedule, that’s usually an indication that your circadian rhythm is slightly delayed compared to your work schedule, and vice versa. If you’re the kind of person who’s, you know, bright eyed and bushy tailed at 5:00 in the morning, even when you don’t want to be, and then come dinnertime, you’re sort of dragging and really trying hard to keep those eyes open. Then that’s a good indication that your circadian rhythm is more advanced compared to your normal schedule. And if you work a night shift or have something a little more extreme, then we all know what that feels like. That sort of extreme jet lag feeling that you also get when you cross time zones. And the solutions to all those things are very similar to what you can do in order to remedy jet lag itself. There’s sleep apnea, which is incredibly common and is getting a lot more press these days, which I think is a good thing because, like I said, incredibly common.

Diane Macedo 00:24:52  And that is essentially your body can sleep and breathe, but not both at the same time. So while you’re sleeping, your either your airway often your airway will collapse because of it’s so relaxed in your sleep or your tongue will fall back in your throat and it closes up your airway, which causes you to have to gasp for breath in the middle of the night. And each time you are holding your breath for a period of 10s or more is considered an apnea. And some people have more than 100 of these apnea opinions per hour. And so if you think about it, when people say, oh yeah, I think I have sleep apnea because they snore or they have some other telltale sign, they will say it sometimes casually, you know, but I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to go to the doctor. But if I told you that someone was smothering you in your sleep 100 times per hour, you would probably think that’s pretty serious and you would want to remedy that issue. That’s how serious sleep apnea is.

Diane Macedo 00:25:49  It not only causes all these issues because you’re depriving yourself of sleep all that time, because even though you don’t remember the wake ups, they are happening. And that’s disturbing. Disrupting your sleep. But it’s also depriving you of oxygen overnight, which creates a whole other cascade of issues. So of all of the sleep disorders, sleep apnea is among the most dangerous and among the most straightforward to treat. So if you are a big snore, or if in general you’d feel like I sleep, I fall asleep fine. I feel like I’m getting the right amount of sleep, but I’m tired all the time. And not just tired fatigued, but like I feel like I need a nap Or like if I were to lay down in the middle of the day, I could fall asleep in five seconds flat. Those are signs that something is wrong. I’ll be at sleep apnea or any other of what I call the secret sleep disorders, where you think you sleep fine, but actually something else is happening while you are sleeping.

Diane Macedo 00:26:41  So this is the kind of thing where you feel like if you took a nap in the middle of the day, you would fall asleep, have no problems falling asleep in under five minutes even though you feel like you got enough sleep, or you’re just walking around feeling like you really need a nap all day. Those are signs that something is wrong with your sleep, even though you feel like you’re getting enough of it. Sleep apnea is the most common, but I call these the secret sleep disorders because these are people who don’t even realize they have a problem sleeping, and yet they have a very serious one. And so that brings me to some of the others, which is you talked about restless leg syndrome earlier. You have it. I have it as well. That often will manifest as this sort of discomfort in your legs. Or it could be another limb when you have been sitting for a long time. If you’ve been lying down for a long time, or just sort of toward the end of the day, and for some reason moving makes it feel better temporarily alleviates that discomfort, and so that can make it hard to fall asleep at night because you feel restless.

Diane Macedo 00:27:40  And some people don’t even realize that. Oh. The reason I feel restless. It’s a discomfort in my legs. You just feel restless in general once you go to bed at night. But that can prevent you from falling asleep. And then there’s PLM and periodic limb movement disorder, which is sort of less cousin, if you will. And PMDD is basically the same thing as RLS, but it happens while you sleep. So people with PMDD, which is why I call it another one of the secret sleep disorders, often won’t even know that they have an issue, but they’ll find out either, because when they wake up in the morning, their bed sheets are a disaster, or they have a partner, right? They eventually start sleeping next to someone who says, whoa, you move a lot at night. Something is going on. and then there’s narcolepsy, which a lot of people probably think from the movies and they think, oh, no, I definitely don’t have that. But real narcolepsy is often much more subtle than it’s portrayed in movies and much more common.

Diane Macedo 00:28:37  And so that often will manifest again as you’re just you’re sleepy at times when you don’t expect to be right, you got a full night’s sleep, but you still kind of dragging. It’s not falling asleep in your soup. You know, it might be as simple as just you’re kind of dozing off at your desk while you’re listening to your teacher. And then the really tricky part with narcolepsy is often then when you go to sleep at night, you also have trouble sleeping at night. And so most people think, well, I definitely don’t have narcolepsy. I can’t even sleep at night. But narcolepsy and insomnia often go hand in hand because with narcolepsy, your body’s sort of always toeing the line between awake and sleep rather than having these really clear differentiators before the two. So when you are awake, you still feel a little bit sleepy, and when you’re trying to sleep, you’re still kind of awake. And then there’s hypersomnia, which is sort of the one side of narcolepsy without the other idiopathic hypersomnia. You just are extremely sleepy all the time without quite knowing why.

Diane Macedo 00:29:33  Did I miss any?

Eric Zimmer 00:29:34  No. You got it. You got them all. I used your book yesterday in a useful way, because I have a friend who has sleep apnea, and he was describing how he has been given a CPAp machine and that he wakes up, like, almost in a panic wearing it because it feels claustrophobic to him. And I said, well, I read this book where you might want to talk to your doctor about a mouthguard of sorts, because even if it’s not quite as effective as a CPAp machine, if you actually use it, it’s going to be more effective than something you don’t use at all. And so I got that from you.

Diane Macedo 00:30:13  You can also the same treatment that you would go through for insomnia called CBT BTI Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for insomnia. Those same specialists, behavioral sleep specialists, are trained to help people with what they called CPAp compliance. I wish they didn’t say compliance because it makes it sound like you’re breaking some kind of rule by not using it. But what’s interesting is that often if people have sleep apnea and insomnia, which frequently go hand in hand, and most doctors don’t realize that if you have insomnia and sleep apnea, you will often remember those wake ups that happen in the middle of the night.

Diane Macedo 00:30:48  And then when it comes time to treatment, when you put a CPAp on, it’s much more difficult to sleep with the CPAp on because insomnia will heighten all of your senses. Yes. So you are more sensitive to everything, including the sense of touch. So where some people can wear a CPAp, no problem. Fall asleep. If you have insomnia, it’s going to be much more difficult. So if you go to a sleep specialist who’s also experienced in treating insomnia, they can help you to become more accustomed to sleeping with the CPAp. And then they go hand in hand. Making the insomnia better helps making the sleep apnea better. And now that you’re able to treat your sleep apnea with a sleep app, the insomnia gets better, and some people get to a point where they don’t need treatment for either one anymore.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:57  You just said something there that preclude my interest. You said insomnia makes all of our senses sharper. Say more about that.

Diane Macedo 00:32:05  This is one of the things that I connected while writing the book, because I feel like my knowledge on sleep is, and I say an inch deep and a mile wide, and that I will never claim to know more than a sleep researcher on their specific topic or a clinician who treats patients and whatnot.

Diane Macedo 00:32:20  But I have now spoken to so many of the top sleep experts from all over the world and started connecting dots that no one had really connected before, and this was one of them. And that what often triggers insomnia is your what most people would consider their fight or flight response, right? It’s a stress response that heightens all of your senses, as if you were in danger in being chased by a predator. That response literally heightens all of your senses, so your pupils dilate to take in more light. Your sense of sound will increase or your hearing improves, like as if you’re really focused on listening for the tiniest little sound. Your sense of smell will increase, your sense of touch will increase, and so on. And so once you start connecting the dots and you realize when people with insomnia will often complain about being very light sensitive, which is a huge trigger for me. And I had been told that it was essentially in my head. And once I started digging into the research and connecting the two, I then spoke to an expert in light and how light impacts sleep and started asking her all these questions and she said no, it’s entirely possible because not only do different people have different eyelid thicknesses, and so some people get more light through a closed eyelid than others.

Diane Macedo 00:33:36  But also, given you’re having an insomnia response, your eyelids, your pupils themselves are more dilated. They are taking in more light. And if you combine all those things, you can have someone who can’t fall asleep. Because if a tiny little alarm clock light or a tiny little light on, you know, on their computer or their TV, even when it’s off. Yeah. Versus someone else who can sleep in a fully lit room. And for me, I started realizing that it was impacting not only my light sensitivity, but it was also the reason why I couldn’t, for example, sleep with a sleep mask. Because my sense of touch was so sensitive at the time, because my insomnia was so bad that just putting a sleep mask on my face felt too irritating to me. And so once I kind of reversed the method of attack, if you will, and I stopped trying to do these things that I knew were going to affect my senses. And so instead of trying a sleep mask, I got portable blackout curtains, and I put that up so that I could deal with the light sensitivity in a way that wasn’t going to trigger a different sense.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:34  I never knew anything like that existed.

Diane Macedo 00:34:36  They are amazing.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:38  I luckily can use a sleep mask, but I was just saying to my partner the other day, I used to walk around in a hotel room with those little like binder clips that clip something really tight, and I’d be clipping all of the drapes in the hotel room shut so that it actually would stay dark in there.

Diane Macedo 00:34:56  So the nice part is that I don’t have to do that anymore either. I wear a sleep mask every night, because once you do these things in the beginning to kind of set up your foundation, and then as your insomnia improves, you’ll find you’ll need these things less and less. And so, you know, I went from traveling with portable blackout shades everywhere we go and needing now we don’t even have the blackouts in our room half the time. My husband loves to sleep with an open window. And now we can because I just throw my sleep mask on and I’m fine. And so, you know, you may need to put in, have a few more tools in your tool belt in the beginning.

Diane Macedo 00:35:33  But as your symptoms start to improve, you will find you need these things less and less because you aren’t having that dramatic stress response. So your senses are no longer as sensitive to things like light and sound and touch and so on. So same with tiny little sounds that can wake you up. That’s not necessarily forever. That may just be a part of your insomnia.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:53  Wonderful. All right, well, let’s turn our attention now to how to fix these things. And I think that the one that maybe we can spend the most time on would be the one that’s most common to people, which would be insomnia. So why don’t you start walking us through what you learned about ways to try and fix insomnia.

Diane Macedo 00:36:15  We don’t have enough time for me to cover all of them, but I will walk you through my favorite because it’s super effective and it’s so simple. And this is the kind of take down that that racing mind. Because if you think about your sleep drive, on the one hand you have that sleep part, right, that I was talking about before that hunger, the longer you go without sleeping, the more sleep you feel.

Diane Macedo 00:36:35  You also have your wake drive, which is triggered by things like excitement and anxiety and stress in general. And so if you are going to bed and you are particularly excited or stressed about something, even if your sleep drive is pretty high, that wake drive can power up and completely overpower that sleep drive. And now you’re wide awake if you then start stressing about oh no, I didn’t sleep well last night. I hope I sleep well tonight. Now you compound the problem and then what we often do is we go to bed earlier to try to make up for last night’s sleep loss. But again, sleep drive builds up the longer you have been awake. So if you try to go to bed too early, or you try to sleep in late, or you take a nap in the middle of the day, now your sleep drive is weak. It’s like you’re not hungry enough for a full night of sleep, and so then you end up having trouble falling asleep, having trouble staying asleep, or you wake up in the middle of the night because you haven’t built up enough sleep drive.

Diane Macedo 00:37:29  And those problems all compound. Then if you do it enough that then that mental autopilot part kicks in. So you kind of have to dismantle that whole soup that we just created, if you will. And so the first part for me, and I think the easiest to start with, is to try to take down that wake drive a little bit. And my favorite exercise for this is scientists call it constructive worry. I like to just call it a brain dump. And you’re essentially taking a notebook. Divide a page down the center on the left hand side. You’re going to write down anything that’s on your mind, the kind of stuff that you’re thinking about when you’re lying in bed. And literally just make a list. Once you’re done with the list, then you’re going to go on the right hand side of the page, and you’re going to list the very next thing you can do to resolve that issue. You do not have to have the solution. This can be as simple as I’m going to call Eric because he knows more about that issue than I do, and I’m going to see what he thinks it.

Diane Macedo 00:38:26  And if you do have the solution, then you can go ahead and write that down. But you just want the very next step that you can take in order to kind of move that issue along. And once you’re done and you can’t think of any other issues that you haven’t addressed on your list, the exercise is over and you may encounter something that there is no solution, right? It’s a hypothetical that you’re worried about or it’s something that has no solution. The solution in that case is that you need to accept and move on. You write that down, too. When you’re done, you’re going to take the notebook, put it in your nightstand somewhere near your bed, and if you wake up in the middle of the night and you again start cycling through thoughts, if it’s something where you’ve already addressed the thing that you’re going to do about it, then you can tell yourself that, hey, we’ve already figured out what we’re going to do about that. If it’s something new. Doctors often say if it’s something new.

Diane Macedo 00:39:10  Tell yourself you’ll deal with it tomorrow. My brain is very stubborn, so I actually will just whip out the notebook, write it down quickly, and then I can go back to bed.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:19  That is such a great tool, both for bed and in general.

Diane Macedo 00:39:24  Well, that’s the thing, right? So I was thinking when this happened, you know, Ambien doesn’t put me to sleep anymore, but some notebook exercise will. But it worked beautifully. And the coolest thing about it is you only have to do it for 2 to 3 weeks consistently before your brain just starts doing that automatically. And the reason it works is that we are. So go, go, go all day that we often don’t give ourselves the opportunity to process our thoughts and feelings from the day, which is a normal thing to do. So this gives your brain the opportunity to do it before bed so you don’t have to do it in bed. It also then gives you that new autopilot feature where your brain says, oh, this is where we worry and process our thoughts and feelings, not when my head hits the pillow.

Diane Macedo 00:40:03  You stop getting these repetitive thoughts that we often get at night, because that’s just a way for your brain to remember things the same way you were to remember a phone number you can’t write down because you wrote it down. Your brain no longer feels like it has to keep feeding you this thing in order for you to remember to deal with it, and then it helps you. The exercise itself helps you to stop just ruminating on problems, which we are so much more likely to do at night when we’re tired, versus then thinking about the solutions. And so this kind of helps rewire your brain to think problem solution instead of problem problem. Oh no problem, I’m doomed. Problem. Yeah. And what I found is that it not only helped me sleep tremendously, but it also then just helped me in my everyday life, in my general mental state, because my brain, after about 2 or 3 weeks of this, just started doing it automatically. And so now, even during the day, something would happen.

Diane Macedo 00:40:54  And rather than me thinking, oh no, what am I going to do? I would just kind of automatically think, oh no, what am I going to do? And then I would think about the next thing that I’m going to do. And I would think, okay, either I’m going to do that now or like, okay, now we have a plan And now I know what I’m going to do about that. Moving on to the next. So it’s a huge help for sleep and for mental wellbeing in general.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:12  Agreed. Years ago I had this program that I offered to listeners. I called it the 90 minute stress Reduction, and that was essentially what it was. We sat down and wrote down everything that worried people on one side, wrote down what the next step was on the other side, and then took as many of those steps as they could take in the remaining 90 minutes, because it was just something I had stumbled upon years before that, when I would just start to feel overwhelmed and I realized, like, if I just write it all down and write the next thing to do, somehow that for me that just signals my brain like, okay, we’re back in charge here.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:45  We’re okay, we got this. It’s such a great, great tool. I’m so glad you shared that.

Diane Macedo 00:41:50  I’ve got two more things I think we should cover on this one. so one is we talked about how people will often want to go to bed earlier in order to make up for their sleep loss. You’re actually going to do the opposite. You’re going to give yourself what I call a reverse curfew, which is rather than say, I have to go to bed by 11 p.m. to make sure I get enough sleep. You’re going to do the opposite. You’re going to say, I cannot go to bed before X time and make it slightly later than your usual bedtime. Again, this is for people who are having difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep. You make it slightly later than your usual bedtime, and if you get to bed and you still can’t fall asleep and it’s still taking you a long time and you’re starting to get frustrated, you get out of bed. Go do something enjoyable and relaxing and go back to get bed again when you feel sleepy.

Diane Macedo 00:42:39  But you are going to continue to wake up at the same time every day. And what this does is it builds up your sleep drive so that eventually your sleep drive is so high that you go to bed and you fall asleep almost instantly. But it also removes that association between bed and being awake and frustrated. So when you are awake and frustrated and this I call my golden rule of sleep, if you are in bed long enough to feel frustrated, get out of bed. Go do something enjoyable and relaxing. Go back to bed again when you feel sleepy. And so work that into this reverse curfew. Use those two things together and if you find that the bedtime you have set for yourself is still not late enough, and you’re still taking a long time to fall asleep, keep moving that later and later in 15 minute increments until you are finally falling asleep easily, staying asleep consistently through the night. And then if you feel like you’re not getting enough sleep, then you slowly open that window back up again so you’re spending more time in bed.

Diane Macedo 00:43:34  And then the other thing to help with that is I actually tell people to make a list of activities that you want to do when it’s nighttime and you can’t sleep, things that you like to do, not things that you feel like you’re supposed to do. So don’t put yoga on your list. If you’ve never done yoga before, or if you know you hate it, don’t put meditation on the list. If you know that meditation makes you feel frustrated, right? I want you to look forward to these things. So if you love to paint and you’re working on a painting, maybe that’s a good time to paint. If you wake up at 3:00 in the morning, you can’t fall back asleep. Make that your painting time. If I like to organize it, it makes me feel better after I’ve organized something. But this isn’t the time to take on. You know you’re not going to organize the kitchen, but maybe you organize a little box, a little drawer somewhere. Maybe it’s just watching an episode of friends that you’ve already seen 45 times.

Diane Macedo 00:44:20  Anything that to you is enjoyable and relaxing and not obviously stimulating, because by getting out of bed and doing that enjoyable activity, you are removing part of the queue that’s causing you to be stressed. You’re no longer sitting there focused on, oh no, I’m awake and I’m going to be doomed, and so on. Right? You’re letting your mind focus on something else and you’re doing something that’s enjoyable to you. And so for one of my friends, for example, he found reading cookbooks was his sweet spot because if he read a normal book, he would get sucked in. And then it was 4:00 in the morning and he forgot that he had been reading for four hours. But he loves to cook, and so he still enjoys reading cookbooks. It’s not that it was boring to him, but it was enough that he was able to separate himself from it once he started feeling that sleepiness kick in and he could go to bed and drift off.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:06  My restless legs. When they wake me up, I tend to usually be able to go to sleep.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:10  I usually wake up a couple hours later with them bothering me, and again, I treat them with gabapentin, which has helped tremendously. But it doesn’t always help. And maybe it’s just the nature of restless legs, but I immediately get out of bed and I go out in the other room, and I used to take a bath when we had a bath. That was my thing, which I also think helped because my body would then start cooling down as I got out of the bath, which we now helped sleep. But something for me about getting up, getting out of bed, going in the other room for a little bit and I usually will then fall fall back asleep. So getting out of bed really helps. I have one other insomnia cure. Now, I know that you said like meditation didn’t work for you. Breathing exercises didn’t work for you. There is a sleep podcast that has been around a long time and it’s called sleep with me, which is a great name, by the way.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:59  And it is this guy who I think he is a genius, but a genius of the oddest sort because he tells stories that are preposterous. But he tells them in the most discombobulated, rambling, semi coherent way that the first time I heard it, I thought, what? What is wrong with this guy? What on earth am I listening to? But it put me right to sleep. It still does. I very rarely have insomnia anymore. It’s very rare that I need something to turn my brain off. That show works like a charm for me. I don’t understand it. It’s very strange. It’s very bizarre, but it works for me nearly every time. It’s just interesting enough that you have to pay attention, but also at the same time, boring enough that you fall asleep. It’s. I don’t know how he does it. It’s a strange line to walk.

Diane Macedo 00:46:49  So all these things have different mechanisms to work in different ways. So the reason why I recommend having a list of activities that you look forward to, that you can do at night is so that wakefulness is no longer a threat.

Diane Macedo 00:47:02  So you’re no longer thinking, oh no, I hope I don’t wake up at 3:00 am or I’m going to be doomed because you think, oh, well, if I wake up at 3 a.m., well, then I get to paint, or then I get to have my bath, or then I get to do the thing. So it.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:12  Sort of.

Diane Macedo 00:47:12  Reduces that, that threat, which makes it less likely that it even happens. Yeah, the story time is great because it’s sort of distracting you from having those anxious thoughts, but not in a way that you’re getting so sucked in that now you’re not sleeping because you want to hear the rest of the story. What I find interesting about that is something I uncovered in my research when I spoke to researchers from Australia. They do a lot of work with music, this particular research team. And so the doctor, Thomas Dickinson, if I remember his name correctly, said that they found all this stuff about how helpful music can be for people with insomnia.

Diane Macedo 00:47:45  And he said, but it will not work for you if you are a musician.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:49  Exactly.

Diane Macedo 00:47:50  And and I, I am a singer. I used to sing a cappella, I used to make musical arrangements and so on. And so he explained exactly the phenomena that I experienced, which is if you are a musician and you listen to these things, rather than just sort of doze off, you will start to dissect the music. And now your brain’s in work mode and so it may actually keep you awake. And that storyteller podcast is that can work the same way. One of my colleagues, for example, tried it and said, because I write stories and tell stories for a living, it didn’t work for me because all I kept thinking about was, oh, how bad the story was and how I would have rewritten it, and I would have told it this way and I would have told it that way.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:30  So if you were a speech therapist too, you could not listen to this, simply couldn’t do it.

Diane Macedo 00:48:36  But I think it’s such a great illustration of when you see those, you know, do these top ten things to fall asleep in five minutes. Yeah. Hey, you’re not supposed to fall asleep in five minutes. If you do, you probably have a sleep disorder. And B, there is no top ten things because the top ten things that are going to work great for you may actually work horribly for me, so a lot of it is trying to unpack the problem and then finding the solutions that work best for your problem and your brain.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:04  All right, let’s change channels a little bit and just let’s spend a couple minutes on. If you determine that circadian rhythm is your problem, give us a couple fixes for that.

Diane Macedo 00:49:16  So light is the most powerful.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:18  Okay.

Diane Macedo 00:49:19  So we could do a bunch even just on that alone. So my favorite right. Well what you will often hear is to get bright light first thing in the morning. Direct sunlight first thing in the morning. That is great if you struggle with waking up in the morning, which most people do.

Diane Macedo 00:49:38  However, I live on the east coast. It’s freezing more than half the year. I often wake up before the sun’s up because I come into work early, and the last thing I have time to do in my morning routine is sunbathe. Because every every single second is full. So what I do instead is I have a therapy light and it’s in my bathroom. And so when I’m brushing my teeth, doing my hair, doing my makeup for the men out there, when you’re shaving, when you’re doing your hair, whatever it is that you’re doing to get ready in the morning, put a therapy light where that is and just you don’t need to be staring into it. You just have it somewhere where the light is reaching your eyes. And what it does is it mimics sunlight to communicate to your brain, hey, it’s time to wake up. And that not only makes you feel more energized in the moment, it’s also setting your clock. And so now, tomorrow morning and every morning thereafter, you’re consistently telling your body that this is when we should be getting those wakeup signals.

Diane Macedo 00:50:32  And not only does that help you to then wake up more easily because you’re setting a clock, it also helps you to feel more sleepy at bedtime. And it’s one of those things that solo effort. It takes no extra time out of your day. You just have to hit an on switch and then go about whatever else you were doing. You can also have one of these on your desk. So behind this computer where I’m talking to you right now, there’s this huge sort of vanity light thing. so I don’t have one in my office now, but I used to have one on my desk in my old office that didn’t have this whole setup, so that during the day, my body still getting those signs because most of us are not hanging out outside all day as nature intended. And so all of that helps to create this contrast between the amount of light you’re getting during the day and the amount of light you’re getting at night. And this way, when you have to work late and you have to be on your computer, or you want to watch TV, or you want to be on your phone a little bit at night, none of that light is going to trick your brain into thinking it’s daytime and keep you up.

Diane Macedo 00:51:24  You know, the whole conversation about blue light often revolves around that. None of that is going to be enough to derail the amount of light you got during the day. You can do all the work on your computer you want. Your brain still says, okay, well, we have a little bit of light here, but I still know that that was day. This is night and we’re getting ready to go to sleep soon.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:41  What’s the story on Blue Light? That was a real big thing a few years ago. I felt like every time I turned around, people were talking about blue light being a problem. Everybody had glasses. They were selling, right. We used to get sponsors for the show. Where is the current science on blue light?

Diane Macedo 00:51:58  Right now my understanding is there is data to support the amber blue light glasses. The other ones not so much. Blue light itself does simulate daylight. It’s the closest to daylight, and so it sort of tells your brain it has the most dramatic impact on your melatonin release at night.

Diane Macedo 00:52:14  But the whole focus on blue light kind of missed arguably the more important part of the screens, which is what you’re actually doing with them. And so I talk about a study in my book where they, you know, look at this. And what they found was the thing that impact people most wasn’t the blue light on the screen, but it was what they were using the screens for. If you were reading a stressful email before bed, that’s going to keep you up. If you’re watching a show that you enjoy. Totally different story. And so I like to frame it as passive versus active activities on the phone. And so if you are scrolling, writing emails, anything that requires your participation that is much more likely to impact your sleep than something where you are just a passive part of that, you’re just observing something that’s happening in front of you, and then you want to be careful not to get sucked down rabbit holes, right? So scrolling. The reason they use that motion on a lot of these apps is because it’s indefinite.

Diane Macedo 00:53:15  You can scroll literally forever. And so you have a tendency to do that. And then suddenly two hours later, you don’t even know why you picked up the phone. But now you’ve been scrolling for two hours. It’s way past your bedtime. You’re hungry, you got to pee, and now you’ve got to go to sleep, too. So being aware of doing finite activities right? Watch an episode of a show that has an end. Play a game that has an end. Or if you’re doing something that doesn’t have its own end built in, set a timer so that you have your own end. You can actually use the regular timer on an iPhone to automatically shut down whatever app you’re using. After a certain amount of time. So that’s kind of a good way to get around those things. And then yes, blue light filters, certain blue light glasses, turning the brightness down. All of those things will also have a big impact, but none of it’s going to do you any good if you’re watching stuff that in and of itself is stimulating or involving your brain to do a lot of work.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:09  Yeah, I’ve read a Kindle for years before bed. Now I turn the brightness down. I turn on the, you know, whatever the thing is that makes it a little bit more amber, but it has never caused me the slightest bit of trouble that I can tell.

Diane Macedo 00:54:21  The other part with circadian rhythm is turning down the lights like ambient lights in your house. If you have dimmer switches, lowering the dimmer switches can make a big difference. We often ignore that, and people often take melatonin like it’s a sleeping pill. You take it in and you’d want to pass out. But melatonin is much more effective for circadian rhythm issues, so normally you take a much smaller dose than you would think like a half a milligram, 5 hours or 4 hours before your bedtime. And that kind of helps with that clock shift. So that’s when you’re dealing with things like jetlag. Shift work disorder. Melatonin is best used for those things rather than as a sleeping pill, because you just generally have trouble sleeping.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:56  So you mentioned shift workers.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:59  I want to I want to hit shift workers really quick and then go to something else. But and I don’t want to go into it too much because it’s a small subset. But you said something I think is really important, which is you are a shift worker, pretty extreme shift worker, and you figured out how to have good sleep. And I guess I’m just asking people can figure that because a lot of times people talk about shift work as if it’s a, you know, it’s an early death for you. And I think you’re saying, hey, people told me that too, and I figured it out.

Diane Macedo 00:55:27  Yeah. I mean, listen, the best case scenario is to not have to do it. But when people kept telling me, oh, you want to sleep, you’re going to have to quit your job. Well, that that wasn’t going to happen, right? So the next best thing and the easiest way for me to frame it in kind of one recommendation is you cannot change when your body wants to sleep, but you can change what time your body thinks it is, at least to a pretty significant degree.

Diane Macedo 00:55:50  So look at your meals schedule and keep it on a schedule the same way you would during the day. So if you wake up at 7 p.m. to start your day, treat that meal as breakfast. When your family is eating dinner for you, that’s breakfast. And then have a lunchtime and stick to that lunchtime. Have a dinner, stick to that dinner time, have an exercise time and stick to that exercise. And look at when you’re seeing light and dark. If you’re waking up at 7 p.m. to start your day, make sure you are seeing light at that time. Have a therapy light even more important for that group than anybody else. And at the end of your day, even when the sun’s up and you’re heading home, that’s when you want to throw on some sunglasses or make sure the lights in your office are dim, and so on. Of course, doing all of this only to the extent you can safely, but being able to get your body on a set schedule and give it something to latch on to in terms of this is day, this is when we’re supposed to be awake.

Diane Macedo 00:56:44  This is night, This is when we’re supposed to be sleeping. Can be super helpful. And for weekends, you can also do something called a compromise circadian position, which is instead of fully shifting to your overnight schedule, which I had to do because my body could not adjust. Some people can get away with you, partially shift you kind of thread the needle between the two, and so as long as you have three overlapping hours between one sleep schedule and another, a lot of people find success that they are able to sleep on their overnight shift during the week, and then they can have more of a normal sleep schedule during the weekends and still be able to cross between the two.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:20  Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created the Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:48  If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at once. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. When you feed net book. My favorite part of the book was sleep inertia. Tell me what sleep inertia is, because there’s a myth that goes along with that, that that I have believed for years and has always troubled me. So talk about sleep inertia.

Diane Macedo 00:58:17  So sleep inertia is when your brain is still trying to wake up. So there are all these processes that happen throughout the course of going from being awake and being asleep. It’s not a switch. It’s more like a seesaw that tips over and people with sleep inertia, which is usually most extreme if you’re waking up in the middle of the night, let’s say you’re a firefighter and you get a call in the middle of the night. If you’re a shift worker and you’re sleeping out hours, or if you’re just generally experiencing very poor sleep, that’s usually when you’ll see extreme cases of sleep inertia. But usually it will last about 20 40 minutes.

Diane Macedo 00:58:50  And that’s when you just wake up in the morning and you feel kind of groggy, and then you kind of shake it off, and after a little while you feel okay. You wipe the cobwebs off your eyes and you feel better. That’s sleep inertia. But like I said, it can exist in more extreme forms, both in how severe it feels in the moment and how long it lasts.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:06  The reason it was so useful to me is that you hear these things like, if you don’t wake up in the morning and hop out of bed fully refreshed, something’s wrong with you. Either you have a sleep disorder or you’re in the wrong career because you should just spring out of bed and want to do everything. And most people I know that is not the case. I mean, they wake up and they’re groggy for a little bit, and I always thought that I should be waking up completely awake. And I loved the idea that sleep inertia is a normal thing, and that myth of waking up completely clearheaded and full of energy is the myth.

Diane Macedo 00:59:42  It is a myth. Circadian rhythm also doesn’t just control when you feel sleepy. It also controls when you feel energy. So some people will naturally feel more energetic in the morning. Others will naturally feel more energetic at night. But the interesting part about the sleep inertia myth is I think it drives a lot of people to consume excess caffeine because you wake up in the morning and you think, oh, I’m really dragging. And so you have that cup of coffee. Caffeine usually takes about a half hour to kick in, and now it’s 30 minutes later and you feel so much better and you think, oh, it’s because of my coffee. And what you don’t realize is that what you’re feeling is actually your sleep inertia dissipating, which would have happened anyway. But if you keep up that habit of having the coffee now, you form a caffeine tolerance. And now when you take the coffee out, you do feel sluggish, but it’s because you’re feeling essentially caffeine withdrawal, not that your sleep inertia is still intact.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:33  Yeah. Listeners, if you’d like to hear Diane and I talk about ADHD, which is another thing that she has a lot of expertise in, and we just ran out of time with. In the post-show conversation, you can get access to this post-show conversation, other post-show conversations, ad free episodes, and you can support the show by going to one. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I enjoyed the book. We’ll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book and find out more about you.

Diane Macedo 01:01:01  Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:03  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.