We speak to sleep expert and psychotherapist, Heather Darwall-Smith

Interview: Cheryl Caira. Lead image by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels

Your latest book, How To Be Awake (So You Can Sleep Through the Night) offers expert guidance on ways to reset and recover throughout the day. How will that help us sleep better?

If you can feel that you’re in the present, your body is able to drop and relax into the here and now. It is a mindful practice – mindfulness reduces activation and hyper-arousal, and that’s where we can start to make sense of how that affects sleep. The question is always: why is your system up and how do we bring it down? There is a measurable drop in stress hormones when you let your nervous system know it’s OK to be present in the moment.

Is there any way to have the perfect nap?

I’m very pro-napping, especially if you’re sleep deprived. I’d say go for a 20 – 30-minute nap, which allows you to drop into the first stages of sleep for a refresh, rather than deep sleep. If you want to get a full sleep cycle, then I recommend allowing yourself a couple of hours, because that gives you time to drop off, wake up and recover. 

There are a lot of bedtime wind-down routines out there. Do you have any recommendations?

I’m really careful about nighttime routines, because often with insomnia clients there’s a lot of perfectionism, and people can get really militant about their routine. That can start to control their lives, then you see anxiety spiralling. The best thing is to let your body know that the day is done, and if you can do things that are consistent, then great. That could be a quiet, calming bath, because body temperature has to drop to go to sleep, so the cool-down from a bath works. Reducing lights helps, and stepping away from work, emails and social media, because that’s filling the brain with content.  

Author Heather Darwall-Smith

Any advice on not going into panic mode if you wake up at 3am? 

It’s really normal to wake up between 3-4am, because sleep is a series of cycles. Most of us will wake up for a while then go back to sleep. Especially as we get older and particularly in menopause, because your melatonin has completely fallen away, which means you’re more wakeful at that time in the morning. 

If there’s already stress in your system, that’s going to be heightened. I would suggest taking 10 minutes in the early evening to keep a worry notebook – almost like a word vomit – and writing in it at a regular time every day. If you wake up at 3am, you can return to the notebook and write your thoughts down again. Your brain has all this content that needs to go somewhere, and it’s a training process. Over time you’ll start to reduce the load, and your brain will realise it doesn’t need to go through these thought processes in the middle of the night.

An estimated 50-75% of adults with ADHD experience sleeping problems. How can having a neurodivergent brain affect sleep?

With ADHD, there is a neurobiological process going on. You have different areas of the brain where the control and demand centres are working at different speeds, but added to that you have a difference in melatonin production – the hormone that makes you feel sleepy at night, which is often low with ADHD. If we’re stressed, cortisol will push melatonin down. Also, most people with ADHD are night owls, so that can be the root of a long-term insomnia problem, because you may have been trying to go to bed at a time where your body is not biologically sleepy.

Tell us more about our ‘chronotype’.

A chronotype is our body’s biological timing. It’s an inbuilt thing. Most people are what’s called ‘intermediate’– so that’s more 9-5, classic timing. Around 25% of the population are morning larks, and about 15% are night owls. We live in a world where we have to work to structured timing, but biologically your chronotype might not fit that, and that can be difficult because you’re constantly up against it. A lot of my work in that space is unpicking that and looking at how we can move someone’s clock, and the stress management around it.

We all have very different sleep needs, but is there one great habit that we could all incorporate? 

Getting up at the same time every day is a very important anchor point, because there are so many biological processes that hang off it. The body is rhythmic, and it likes consistency. When we wake up, cortisol naturally rises – it’s like a biological pulse. If we then get up and start charging around, stress is going to continue to rise. A great way to improve sleep at the end of the day is to put the brakes on stress first thing. Wake up, get lots of light, sit and have breakfast if you can, and slow the day down before you even start.

How To Be Awake (So You Can Sleep Through the Night) is out now