THIS IS A REPOST OF AN EPISODE THAT FIRST RAN ON DECEMBER 15, 2022. IT HAS HAD MORE LISTENS THAN ANY OTHER EPISODE on "OLDER WOMEN & FRIENDS." ENJOY!
If you have a sleep problem, you’re not alone. More than 30 percent of women over 50 are dealing with sleep issues.
You’ve probably tried any number of solutions. Sadly, nothing has worked, or the sleep you get doesn't get the job done. The clock may say that you slept for six or seven hours, but you feel sluggish and foggy.
Lucinda Sykes, a retired physician and now a personal sleep coach, explains that both her grandmother and mother struggled with insomnia and eventually became dependent on sleep medication. Lucinda saw the writing on the wall, got some therapy, and happily has not suffered from insomnia.
Lucinda explains that one of the--if not THE--downsides of insomnia is that the brain doesn't have enough time to refresh; there is no chance for the brain to rebalance. This imbalance can cause problems with everything from your heart to your memory.
Lucinda gives listeners strategies for getting better sleep that include mindfulness, a regular sleep schedule, avoiding blue light before bedtime, and much more.
If you haven't listened to my other episode that features a conversation with Lucinda about older women and mindfulness (with so much wisdom shared), do yourself a favor and check it out. (March 16, 2023)
THIS IS A REPOST OF AN EPISODE THAT FIRST RAN ON DECEMBER 15, 2022. IT HAS HAD MORE LISTENS THAN ANY OTHER EPISODE on "OLDER WOMEN & FRIENDS." ENJOY!
If you have a sleep problem, you’re not alone. More than 30 percent of women over 50 are dealing with sleep issues.
You’ve probably tried any number of solutions. Sadly, nothing has worked, or the sleep you get doesn't get the job done. The clock may say that you slept for six or seven hours, but you feel sluggish and foggy.
Lucinda Sykes, a retired physician and now a personal sleep coach, explains that both her grandmother and mother struggled with insomnia and eventually became dependent on sleep medication. Lucinda saw the writing on the wall, got some therapy, and happily has not suffered from insomnia.
Lucinda explains that one of the--if not THE--downsides of insomnia is that the brain doesn't have enough time to refresh; there is no chance for the brain to rebalance. This imbalance can cause problems with everything from your heart to your memory.
Lucinda gives listeners strategies for getting better sleep that include mindfulness, a regular sleep schedule, avoiding blue light before bedtime, and much more.
If you haven't listened to my other episode that features a conversation with Lucinda about older women and mindfulness (with so much wisdom shared), do yourself a favor and check it out. (March 16, 2023)
The following episode with retired physician Lucinda Sykes was originally posted on December 15th 2022. And since then, the episode Insomnia and Women Over 50 has racked up more listens than any other episode on older women and friends. Enjoy on Older Women and Friends Enjoy. Hi, I'm Jane Leder, host of Older Women and Friends. You know, when it comes right down to it, I find aging to be a complex affair Highs, lows and everything in between but as I see it, the one constant is change, and the key is how we adjust, how we transition. Do we start a new career, write that book we've had rolling around in our heads for years? Move to warmer climes to be near our grandchildren? Move to warmer climes to be near our grandchildren? Continue teaching or researching or coaching other women? Or do we just hang out, travel and have a good time? The guests on Older Women and Friends have many stories to tell, to share, about what they've been up to and what they've learned along the way. So turn up the volume and join me on Older Women and Friends.
Speaker 1:
If you have a sleep problem, you're not alone. More than 30% of women over 50 are dealing with sleep issues and you've probably tried any number of solutions and, sadly, nothing has worked Well. Lucinda Sykes, a personal sleep coach, is here to help save the day. Lucinda is a retired physician who spent more than two decades with Meditation for Health, a clinic in Toronto that focused on mindfulness. When COVID hit, she was forced to close up shop and, as she'll tell you, she began a new career as an online sleep coach. Welcome, lucinda. How are you?
Speaker 2:
Thank you, Jane. I'm very glad to be here with you.
Speaker 1:
Can you please describe your childhood as it relates to your own family and sleep issues?
Speaker 2:
Yes, yes indeed. In fact, I wonder sometimes if my coaching isn't an evolution out of those childhood years. My grandmother and my mother both suffered from insomnia. My grandmother took sleeping pills. As I can recall, every night of her life I used to go to the drugstore and get her the sleeping pills, and my mother too, struggled with periodic insomnia, and she too, on occasion, took sleeping pills. I was fortunate that I had a predisposition to sleep problems In fact I still do but early on I got some psychotherapy and it hasn't been as big an issue for me as it was for my mother and grandmother.
Speaker 1:
Well, can you talk a little bit, because it sounds like there were health issues that were involved. Can you talk about the bad news or the risks of not getting enough sleep?
Speaker 2:
Oh, yes, yes, the research is just exploding in this area. In the past 10, 15 years we've seen research study after research study pointing to the downside of chronic sleeplessness. The brain has trouble. If we don't get enough sleep, the brain is not able to cleanse itself and the heart and cardiovascular system more fully don't get a chance to rebalance and rest as they do when we are sleeping. And our endocrine system, especially our insulin levels, suffer too. And we have a predisposition to diabetes if we have chronic sleeplessness. And the list rather goes on, jane. There's some increased incidence of cancer, infectious diseases, increased incidence of cancer, infectious diseases, and so on.
Speaker 1:
The poor body, and indeed the mind too, requires sleep. It sounds like it. I'm delighted that at this point I'm sleeping fairly well. Yes, I know that a lot of women, a lot of men, turn to prescribed sleeping pills, turn to prescribed sleeping pills. Can you talk a little bit, first of all about how many doctors treat women who come in with sleeping issues?
Speaker 2:
Yes, well, in my years as a physician I've seen evidence of this. But more than my personal story, we can even turn to the research literature from the sociology of medicine. Sociologists are discovering that there's been an increased medicalization of ordinary life. Having periodic trouble with your sleep is pretty darn common. It's been happening to us human beings, I assume, all our years of evolution. But in recent decades it's been made into a disease.
Speaker 2:
And when there's a disease, well by gosh, we often turn to a pharmaceutical solution. And that has certainly happened with sleep. Unfortunately, all the sleeping pills, all the medications, none of them really induces natural sleep. We do lose consciousness if we're lucky, but the brain is not in a state of natural sleep and we pay the consequences for that. And again, there's been an explosion of research in the last couple of decades showing us that taking sleeping pills for a prolonged period of time and this might even just be a few months has a very deleterious effect on especially the brain. We see an increased incidence of Alzheimer's disease and other dementing illness in people who have been on sleeping pills for any period of time, especially the benzodiazepines and the so-called Zed drugs. Zed drugs, zed drugs, lunasta one comes to mind A number of them. They are purported to be different than the benzodiazepines, but actually they affect the brain receptors, and we're not surprised to find that they too are showing evidence of degrading cognition.
Speaker 1:
So all those ads on TV are leading us astray, you know if in fact they're supposedly in a different class and, as a result, they don't cause as many side effects.
Speaker 2:
Yes, yes, and I think the woman knows it herself. She takes the sleeping pills and the next day she doesn't feel fully refreshed. It can be a little bit of lethargy and clouding and so on. She knows that she didn't really have a good night's sleep by gosh. It was more comfortable than it would have been for her. She'd stayed awake all night dealing with the condition. Maybe she suffered a loss, a romantic loss or other form of grief, and she's up all night and a kind physician will prescribe a sleeping pill. In that situation.
Speaker 2:
The big problem is, if you keep taking sleeping pills week after week, that's where you run the risk of your brain being undermined by the chemicals. The brain will be forced to rebalance in the presence of the chemicals as well. We know the evidence is here now that while we are sleeping the brain gives itself a power cleanse. There's some very interesting physiological changes that happen in the brain that allow it to itself clean itself of the toxic metabolites which seem to underlie Alzheimer's disease. And now we're coming to understand that this is probably why there is such evidence that lack of sleep, and possibly sleeping pills too, can lead, and statistically do lead, to Alzheimer's and other dementing illness, because the brain is not getting a chance to cleanse itself every night.
Speaker 1:
Wow, that's startling and scary, particularly for those women and you say it's more than 30% of women, 50 and older, who are dealing with some sleep issues. That's rather startling.
Speaker 2:
I wouldn't want them to be unsettled. I wouldn't want them to be afraid, because you see the body, she knows how to sleep. It's in our nature to do so. Now, some of us may have a kind of genetic predisposition to sensitive sleep. We know, based on twin studies, for example, that if you are an identical twin and your identical twin has insomnia, the odds are good that you too will suffer from insomnia. But it's not fate, it's not destiny. Even if you do have a genetic predisposition to sleep problems, you can, dare I say, cultivate yourself. You can care for yourself and the body. She does know how to sleep, and you can help her to do so without needing to use chemicals.
Speaker 1:
I love that you refer to the body as she oh yes, well, that's my work.
Speaker 2:
You see, I work with women.
Speaker 1:
I want to talk about all these practical strategies for deep, natural sleep. I just want to sneak in one other topic before that, and it's sleep and menopause.
Speaker 2:
Ah, yes, yes, oh, that's an enormous topic. In fact, menopause itself is an enormous topic because it's so darned unsettling. We have so many symptoms that can occur to us at menopause and if we're not cautious we come to think that something's wrong. Now it is true, on occasion we may be having a rather untoward menopause, but by and large, menopause is meant to be a little unsettling and there can be some sleep issues as the hormonal rebalance is occurring. But if you get caught up in thinking that you have a disease, that you have a serious problem that must be dealt with, then by gosh you might even end up taking these hormones or those hormones or other pharmaceuticals, and you know it's very likely that you do not need to do so.
Speaker 1:
Are you, then, a proponent of natural treatment when it comes to some of these unsettling side effects of menopause?
Speaker 2:
Well, I won't venture outside of my lane. I worked years in family medicine and the like. I've certainly done so, but I no longer work in that way, and so I leave it to the physicians and their colleagues to hold forth. But I would venture in to say that a whole lot of money is being made off of selling women substances and even gizmos to help them get through the menopausal transition. And you know, once you see these commercial interests involved, even my professional colleagues may have commercial interests. I worry that the women are being misled.
Speaker 1:
Well, tell me how you came to becoming a sleep coach. There's an interesting story. I led into that initially by saying that when COVID hit, you were forced to make some changes, but it's interesting, after all your experience with mindfulness, for example, that you decided to focus on sleep. Can you tell us? Oh, yes, oh yes.
Speaker 2:
Well, in a way at this stage it feels like the culmination of my work, because I have been helping women sleep since the very beginning. I began medical practice back in the late 70s, early 80s, working at a family medicine clinic, and lots of my patients had trouble sleeping. I had a very special interest in psychotherapy. I secured extra training and so the way I was approaching sleep problems did evolve. But all the way through I was working with ladies who were having trouble with sleeping. That's how I know about the menopausal transition, for example. And then, as my work in psychotherapy for those who are interested, it was the work of Carl Jung and so on I went to Zurich, that kind of thing. But then I also trained in mindfulness-based stress reduction with John Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues. So I opened up Meditation for Health back in 1997 here in Toronto and for my gosh, it was 23 years. I taught mindfulness, but these were medical programs. All my patients were referred to me by other physicians and our focus was medical. I was applying MBSR, as it's called mindfulness-based stress reduction. I was applying it as a treatment, and very inspiring to see that so many conditions do respond to a program of MBSR, and one of the chief conditions that respond are sleep problems. So even there at my little clinic, mindfulness-based stress reduction we had a special group, mindful sleep group. I made a recording for the patients who were having trouble with sleep, and so I was very interested in sleep all the way along, perhaps, as I mentioned, because of my family history and my own proclivity, my own tendency to sleep problems. I have had a great interest.
Speaker 2:
So when long story Jane, I'll just cut to the chase. So my clinic had to close back. Gosh, is it three years ago now when COVID struck. Within a few weeks, I had to stop all in-person training at the clinic, of course, and I was left sort of high and dry, so to speak. I began doing some online work with my patients at the clinic and I focused on my ladies because I had had a Mindful Women 50 Plus group which is very active at the clinic. So we just continued and I did some other work. And then again, long story short, about a year ago I started to get I think well, lucinda, how do you want to spend the last years of your career? What really do you want to offer? And I thought well, sleep for my ladies over 50,. That would really feel good, and it makes use of all the stuff I've done, including. I've been practicing Hatha yoga for decades and I know that mindful yoga can be very helpful for sleep. Well gosh, it's helped me, so I bring a lot of background to this problem.
Speaker 1:
Sounds like it. And again, just quickly, can you? I don't know if it's possible to give a quick summary, but when you talk about mindfulness, what do we mean? What do you mean? Oh?
Speaker 2:
great question. Thank you for that question, jane. The other day I saw a magazine that was advertising mindful kitchens, and so from that I concluded that the word mindfulness does not mean what it perhaps once meant. It's a translation of a word from Southeast Asia, pali Sanskrit word Murti Sati. That means being aware without judgment.
Speaker 2:
So, as I learned down at the Center for Mindfulness I was down there quite a number of times we consider mindfulness as having four aspects, four bulleted points, if you will. First bulleted point is when you're being mindful, you're doing it on purpose. So it's not just a random whatever, you're doing it on purpose and what you are doing is you are paying attention. That's the second bulleted point. Thirdly, you're paying attention to what is actually happening right now. Here I am, looking at your face on my screen and hearing myself talk. That's number three. And number four, crucially, is the attitude. Number four bolstered point is you have an attitude that is non-judging. That doesn't mean that you aren't judging. You know, we're modern women. The mind does a lot of judging, doesn't it? But we don't need to judge the judging. We can be mindful of a judging mind. We can be paying attention, experiencing the thoughts, even the judging thoughts without needing to judge or change things. I find that one's really useful pointing out that mindfulness is not about making things be different.
Speaker 1:
So how would you go about teaching mindfulness? And you mentioned that you still have online group. That was very successful, teaching mindfulness for women 50 plus. And I'm just curious. I understand the four points and they make good sense. Yeah, it's also a challenge, I think, to be able to adopt those you know in a split second. I think it takes work right.
Speaker 2:
Well, they're here right now. Jane, I'm going to join you in this. You and I are aware of being here right now and things are happening. I'm aware of the light on the table beside me. I'm aware of your face smiling at me through the screen. I'm noticing my thoughts and my feelings, and maybe my mind is judging. Am I communicating well? And I'm just a witness to this all?
Speaker 1:
Interesting, and what role does meditation play in all of this?
Speaker 2:
if there is a role, Well, the word meditation is an elastic word. It refers to so many activities, I know, so it's almost a useless word, may even be now more useless than the word mindfulness, because there's so many different activities can be called meditation. But in my world we have the two types of meditation. One is a concentration meditation, where you intentionally direct your focus, your focus of awareness. You intentionally direct your focus of awareness to a neutral but steady arising, such as you decide to pay attention to the feeling of breathing, for example. That's one type of meditation. We call it a smriti meditation or a focused meditation. And the other, closely allied but different meditation is what we call Vipassana or open awareness, in which case it's what I was pointing to just a moment ago. In open awareness, we're paying attention just to whatever's happening. Each moment gives us a new experience.
Speaker 1:
Yes, All right. So I want to sort of slide back to because that was our focus, although clearly we've gotten into so many subjects, all of which are of great interest.
Speaker 2:
Yes, oh yes, we're dealing with consciousness.
Speaker 1:
Well, let's talk about some of the practical strategies for getting good sleep, particularly in the second half of our lives. Yes For women 50 plus.
Speaker 2:
Yes, yes, ladies have a regular bedtime, and that's on the weekends, on workdays. Go to bed at the same time and awaken at more or less the same time. If you have a regular bedtime, you probably will be awakening at the unusual bedtime. But if you didn't get much sleep, by gosh, get out of bed anyway. Do not linger in bed, caught up in the story of oh, I couldn't sleep. I'm going to try to sleep and lie there for another hour with the mind squirreling away about how I've got to get more sleep. No, get out of bed. So go to bed at the regular time and get up at the regular time.
Speaker 2:
If you didn't have a good night's sleep, so be it, live life and then go to bed the next night. The fact that you didn't lie in bed or you didn't take naps during the day, if you just persevered with your life, it's more likely that then in the subsequent night you will have more, as the scientists say, sleep pressure. So a common misunderstanding is we have a sleepless night, so then we lie about in bed, we take naps during the day and then, almost guaranteed, the next night it's going to happen again, because we've lost a lot of the sleep pressure because of our behavior Interesting.
Speaker 1:
What else can we learn from?
Speaker 2:
you Well, this stuff is so fascinating. If you are having a sleepless occasion in bed, you don't need to lie there in bed toughing it out for long periods of time. You could just, at a certain point you're lying there, you can't get to sleep. Get out of bed, keep the lights down. Do not turn on the electronic devices. Maybe get up. The lights are down, but you could put on a reading light and do a little bit of reading, old-fashioned reading from paper, or maybe do needlework or something that is calming. It doesn't require a lot of busy thinking. For goodness sakes, don't do work, and there will be a time, as the minutes proceed, that you'll want to return to bed again and do so without giving yourself a hard story about. Am I going to be able to sleep and allow the body? If she's being sleepless, you just very kindly get her up out of bed. Don't blast the lights at her. Keep it kind of dim and just in a very relaxed way. Give yourself a little period of wakefulness.
Speaker 1:
I also know I noticed on your website that you talked about seven ways. Oh yes, I think we're talking about self-care tips.
Speaker 2:
Oh yes, Any of our members in our audience. You're very welcome to download my PDF. Well, for me it's a little booklet, but for you it's a PDF. You can download it. Happy Sleep Secrets Seven ways that happiness, pleasure and beauty help women sleep after 50. And that's available at HappySleepSecretscom. Happysleepsecretscom. You could also, I think, get it at BestSleepAfter50.com. I've got that one there too. So for your charge, would you?
Speaker 1:
be willing to share one or two of your secrets, even though we're hoping loads of people will go and download the piece.
Speaker 2:
Yes, oh yes, and it's pointing to pleasure, to the happiness of being alive, and that includes. The first tip you'll read in that little document is what I just mentioned choosing a regular bedtime and getting up in the morning. You want to expose yourself to light, and most women will benefit by going out into the morning sunlight for about a half an hour. If you're worried about the sunlight on your face and so on, you can wear a hat, but don't wear glasses. You want the sunlight to enter your eyes for about half an hour. If you're someone who's falling asleep far too early in the evening and then you wake up pretty early in the morning, you might like to let your bright light exposure be later in the day, but you do want to. Ladies have bright light every day, but usually that'll be in the morning, but if need be, let it be in the afternoon, but have it every day, and that also gives you a reason to actually go outside.
Speaker 1:
And I know you're in Toronto, right, and I'm in the Chicago area and I'm only giggling because I know what's coming and I'm thinking wait a minute, do I want to go outside first in the morning?
Speaker 2:
Yes, well, it could very well help your sleep, because not only does the light, you know, regularity, regular exposure to bright light helps to entrain our circadian clock in our brains. It helps give us the rhythmicity of sleep that we depend upon as well. The body likes to move every day. And give her a chance to move every day. We do it for our dog. We take the dog out even twice a day and we let her run about in the park and we're kind of sitting there caught up in our mind, blah, blah, blah. Instead, you could just go out, give yourself a walk. Now, some of us like to exercise and that kind of thing. By all means do so. But even just having a daily walk, preferably in a natural setting, if you have access to it, to the park or the like, and you do so every day and let it be routine, sleep really responds to routine. Give yourself routine light, routine activity. And then, as the light is beginning to dim in the evening, do you notice how the bright sunshine of midday changes its color? In the later afternoon the color gets kind of reddish. Do you notice that the blue light fades away? Unless we're hooked up to our devices, our devices, they give us floods of blue colored light. I won't go into the physics of why that is, but they do, and that includes your mobile device and your computer and even most types of television and the fluorescent lights. They give us blue light and we are creatures, we're animals and we are set up after thousands of years of evolution. We are set up to be stimulated by blue light.
Speaker 2:
So if you're exposing yourself to blue light later in the day, you are, without realizing it, you are stimulating yourself and making it harder to sleep. You might even be interfering with the melatonin release of the very center of the brain, making melatonin for you, helping you fall asleep. But if you are staring into your computer screen, that section of your brain will tend to shut itself down and your melatonin release will be lowered. You'll have less melatonin. Wow, fascinating it is. It is. People can go to my blog. I have lovely, wonderful. I try to take the science and make it as accessible as possible. So I'm a nerd, ladies. I love to read the science and then I like to translate it into something that makes it digestible. And I do have a nice little blog post there about blue light and even maybe a hint for blue light screening glasses.
Speaker 1:
So where can people find your blog? Is there a link on your website or is it a separate link?
Speaker 2:
My website is lucendacykesmdcom.
Speaker 1:
And Sykes, by the way, is S-Y-K-E-S.
Speaker 2:
Yes, but if that's too much you could just punch in sleepcoachlucendacom, It'll take you to the same place.
Speaker 1:
And my last question, because unfortunately we're almost out of town, out of town out of time. Maybe I want to go out of town.
Speaker 2:
Well, if you're in Chicago, I'm in Toronto. Yes, we might like to go to a bum location.
Speaker 1:
Climates are very much, and now I've absolutely forgotten my question. Pardon me for interrupting. No, it wasn't. It wasn't you. Pardon me for interrupting. No, it wasn't you, it's just. My 77-year-old brain sometimes is just on overload, it's just a little slower, that's all.
Speaker 2:
But wisdom is here. Did you notice? I got that on my blog too, about wisdom. The brain is slower, but it has more access to wisdom. Oh yes, Us human beings, we have this precious few decades after menopause. The other animals do not have this. Chimpanzees do not have a postmenopausal period. But evolution has selected in us human women, has selected us to have a few decades where we do not have child-rearing responsibilities, and it would seem that these precious years are because women in the postmenopausal years have a quality of consciousness that helps the tribe survive. And this is not just my ideas. It's great that Kirsten Hawkes, the anthropologist, has given us these ideas, and other anthropologists too, that these are special years. So if your brain is acting maybe as it didn't when you were 30, well, so be it. It is nonetheless the brain of the postmenopausal women and you are bringing wisdom to the tribe.
Speaker 1:
Well, let's hear here for wisdom in older women. Thank you so much. Maybe we can have you back and we can go into more detail about some of this. I'm sure listeners would love to hear more from you.
Speaker 2:
Be fun to talk about wisdom.
Speaker 1:
So it's Lucinda Sykes.
Speaker 2:
Thank you very much, very nice to chat with you today, Jane, and goodbye to all your listeners too.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Older Women and Friends. And, speaking of friends, please tell yours about this podcast and if you have any suggestions for future episodes or guests or anything else you'd like to share, go to speakpipecom. That's S-P-E-A-K-P-I-P-Ecom forward slash. Older women and friends. You can send me an audio message or respond to one of mine, because it is your feedback that drives this podcast Until next time.
