| Sleepopolis

Episode 16: Everything to Know About Kids and Sleep (Part 1)

Show notes:

What do we do when our kids just can’t sleep through the night?

Should we turn to a sleep specialist first, or maybe a psychologist? Someone who does both? Today, in recognition of Children’s Awareness Month this June, we’re kicking off a special 3-part series to reflect on how we can prioritize our children’s health and well-being all month long. To help, we’ve invited Dr. Andrea Roth and Dr. Allison Shale to talk about common sleep behaviors and solutions for children from newborns to grade schoolers. Because if your child has trouble falling asleep, it may be more than just sleep issues.

Transcript:

Dr. Shelby: How are you sleeping? Are you sleeping? I’m Dr. Shelby Harris, licensed clinical psychologist and Director of Sleep Health at Sleepopolis, where we dive deep into all things sleep.

If you like Sleep Talking with Dr. Shelby, take a second right now to like this video on YouTube or give us a five star rating through Spotify or Apple podcasts.

I know it seems simple, but it helps us reach a lot more people to get them the rest they deserve. And if you’re tired of hitting that snooze button, hit the subscribe button instead. A new episode of science backed sleep tips is available every other Wednesday.

What do we do when our kids just can’t sleep through the night?

Should we turn to a sleep specialist first, or maybe a psychologist? Someone who does both? Today, in recognition of Children’s Awareness Month this June, we’re kicking off a special 3-part series to reflect on how we can prioritize our children’s health and well- being all month long. To help, we’ve invited Dr. Andrea Roth and Dr. Allison Shale to talk about common sleep behaviors and solutions for children from newborns to grade schoolers. Because if your child has trouble falling asleep, it may be more than just sleep issues.

Next time in part two, we’ll dive even deeper into these issues with practical advice for guardians out there.

In part three, we’ll be answering your questions, listeners. Anything and everything you want to know about kids and sleep. So, if your kid’s sleep could be better, or you know someone whose kid’s sleep could be better, just comment your questions below, if you’re watching this on YouTube, and we will answer them. You can also send your questions via Facebook or Instagram @Sleepopolis and @sleepdocshelby.

Now, let’s get to our guests. With over 10 years experience treating children in schools, hospitals, and private practice, psychologist Dr. Andrea Roth is known for her expertise in sleep and anxiety for children. Versed in a wide range of childhood concerns, Dr. Andrea loves providing insight and support to parents to ensure that when kids master new skills, their caregivers also gain the knowledge and confidence to be as supportive as possible.

Bringing another 10 years of experience to us today is Dr. Allison Shale, a psychologist and Director of Shale Psychology, specializing in anxiety, ADHD, depression, sleep disturbances, and behavior problems, Dr. Allison aims for children to feel understood and heard while providing parents with tangible strategies and insight that can benefit the entire family and last a lifetime. And I’m also so honored to be co- authoring an upcoming book for parents on kids sleep with them as well, so keep an eye out for that.

Dr. Andrea, Dr. Allison, we are so glad you’re here. Welcome to Sleep Talking with Dr. Shelby.

Dr. Andrea Roth: Thank you. We’re so excited.

Dr. Allison Shale: Thanks. We’re excited.

Dr. Shelby Harris: I’m excited to be here. I mean, we, we text all the time, but I never actually get to have a conversation with you.

AR: I know.

AS: Right. This is the text coming to life.

This is

AR: the closest we’ve come to ever sitting in the same room.

DS: It’s crazy.

AS: It’s true.

DS: So, Andrea, Allison, when we think about all the sleep problems plaguing kids today, and there’s a lot of things out there, that’s for sure, especially since the pandemic, what do we find, or what do you see in your practice, or the usual suspects? Like, what sleep issues really come to mind for you first?

AR: I think we get different stuff, Allison. What do you get first?

AS: Yeah, I mean, I think I see a lot more of the behavior issues. The kids who don’t stay in bed. I see a lot of younger kids, you know, toddlers who aren’t- maybe transitioned to a bed maybe a little too early and can’t stay in bed. Kids who are getting into bed with their parents and parents want them out, which is a different, you know, thing than for parents who like having their child in their bed.

So I think I see more of the behavioral side of things. And then certainly there’s always a little bit of that anxiety in there too, especially with kids who are getting out at night. But I think with my kiddos, it’s a lot of that preschool age still kind of learning the rules of bedtime and sleeping that parents really need a lot of help with.

DS: What about you, Andrea?

AR: I think I get right, some similar stuff, but then I think because of our training, because of the clinics that we’re in, I think I get a lot more of the anxiety side. I think we get a lot of kids here who have subclinical or clinical levels of anxiety and the kind of associated sleep concerns with them.

Even when families come to us primarily for sleep concerns, I feel like it’s very unsurprising when we kind of uncover the fact that there are a lot of kind of co-occurring anxiety disorders with them. I think specifically here, we tend to have a lot of kids that have, you know, separation anxiety or generalized anxiety or selective mutism.

So I think I definitely get more of that presentation, that sleep anxiety or the kind of the co-occurrence of the two.

DS: Interesting. So, so you guys have both talked about anxiety a good amount, stress, anxiety. Do you think, given that you’ve been in practice for a while now, have you seen it get worse since the pandemic in children? Like, has that gotten worse?

AR: I think so. I mean, I don’t necessarily know if like the anxiety in and of itself has gotten worse. And I don’t know if we can point to one specific aspect of the pandemic. I think when we went into the pandemic, I had this huge prediction that, you know, I treat a lot of kids with OCD, that we’re going to have this huge like surge of contamination based OCD.

DS: Yeah.

AR: And I don’t think I saw it as much as I did, but I definitely think that our wait lists, our referrals, the volume of patients that we have has just exploded. And so I do think that symptoms of anxiety have increased. But again, it’s hard for me to say because I think that the population that I get is a little bit skewed.

Allison, are you getting more anxiety?

AS: Yeah, you know, I think I am getting more anxiety than I used to. But really, one thing that I always wonder about is, is it really that there’s more anxiety? Or is it that parents were with their kids a lot more, and they noticed more things that were more concerning?

Or they saw their kid maybe doing virtual learning and realized, oh my God, my kid freezes, my kid never raises their hand, that kind of thing. And then I think now with more parents, still maybe doing a hybrid model or things like that. I get the sense that parents are just picking up on things more. I don’t really know if it’s that it’s worse or it’s just that-

DS: Recognition.

AS: Yeah, maybe it’s just a recognition sort of thing. And I think pediatricians and things like that maybe are on a little bit more high alert. So from a referral standpoint and things like that, I think I am getting more calls about kids with anxiety.

AR: I’d say in schools, too. I mean, states poured, at least in Michigan, states poured money into schools for mental health efforts and recognition and training. And so I think they’re seeing it a lot more and sending, I’ve never had so many direct referrals from schools before.

DS: But do you think there’s more stress, though, on these children, like I think about my school, I have a third grader and they start doing the state tests and it’s a lovely school, wonderful school, but the talk about the tests, like, I don’t remember this with my 14-year-old.

It’s like, we’re gonna do great. They had to write affirmations for themself. And I understand it’s coming from a good place, but I think it’s actually creating more anxiety in some of these kids. Test anxiety. Because they’re talking about it for weeks in advance over a test that really doesn’t mean that much in their own progress of their education.

AS: Right.

DS: So I’m curious if you see more of that kind of stress getting put on kids too.

AS: Absolutely.

AR: Absolutely. I, again, like, love my kid’s school. We got this contradictory email as caregivers of, like, literally one paragraph was like, it’s fine. Don’t stress. Everything’s good. No big deal with this. And then the next paragraph is like, but what you should do to prepare your child for this test is make sure they get a good amount of sleep, make sure they get a good meal, make sure that they’re not distracted, talk to them about trying their best.

DS: Yep.

AS: Yeah. And so if that’s the message that we’re getting as adults, I do. I worry about the message that they’re getting, my daughters in first grade, the message that they’re getting about testing. She’s nervous.

DS: Yeah.

AR: I don’t think I even knew what that was when I was that age, state testing.

DS: So how do you think that the anxiety and the stress specifically, how do you see it playing into bedtime, sleep issues, and what might you do for the kids who tend to really have a lot of anxiety at night or stress that’s coming out?

AS: I think one thing that’s really interesting always is that bedtime is this nice time for a lot of parents to really get quiet time, alone time with their kids. I have a family I’m working with now and we’re talking about sleep and the dad spends like 25 minutes in the bed with the kid and they don’t want to remove that because that’s really their only time during the day that they get to really talk.

So I think from an anxiety standpoint, a lot of times kids hold it together all day and then the parents get the dump, when their guards are down, kind of right at night. So some of it is being a little more proactive, right? Maybe earlier in the day, checking in on what went on during the day and things like that to maybe decrease the likelihood of that kind of explosion or dump right at bedtime.

But I know that I’ve talked to you guys about this idea. I think really knowing your child and who your child is during the day in terms of their anxiety level is so important in terms of what we then decide to do at bedtime. And, you know, some people, it’s more of like a cold turkey, we rip the band aid off and we change something.

For other people, it really needs to be a lot more gradual and kind of maybe gradually getting a parent out of the room.

DS: Yeah.

AS: Or gradually, you know, not expecting a child to go from waking up five times a night to no times a night, right? Maybe it’s just slowly doing it so the kid doesn’t have as much anxiety, but also so the parent doesn’t.

Because even when a parent wants change, There’s a lot of anxiety around what am I going to do when my kid freaks out when I change this. A lot of times I think in our work we really have to balance the anxiety of the kid and the anxiety that likely appears when we start talking to parents about what they have to do differently.

DS: Andrea, anything you?

AR: Yeah, I, no, I agree with Allison a lot and I think to your original question as well about like, how do we think that stress and anxiety is impacting them at bedtime? A conversation that I like to have with families is this idea that the behavior that they’re seeing in their child at bedtime is really just an extension of what’s going on during the day.

It’s not that your child completely shifts and changes at bed. This is very likely an extension of what’s going on during the day and their behavior, whether it’s kind of that more defiant kind of, you know, phenotype, or if it’s more this anxious, stressed phenotype of this is what we’re seeing all day long. It’s just being enhanced at bedtime.

And I think for , you know, a multitude of reasons, of the fact that brain dump at the end of the night, it’s the first time they have with their parent, they’re tired. And so they’re a little more maybe emotionally labile. I think there’s so many reasons as to why we see this real impact of daytime stress on bedtime functioning.

DS: How would a parent know that this is necessarily problematic or this is just my kid’s temperament? Like how would they be able to kind of tune into that?

AS: I think it’s funny because even just that question, right? So sometimes it can be a problem even if it really just is your kid’s temperament, right? Those things, they can both kind of be true. And I think for a lot of kids that have anxiety, it is a little bit of a part of who they are. And so our goal won’t be to eliminate the anxiety, right? Like that is who they are. But maybe we want to help them manage it. I often just talk to parents very broadly about do you see them missing out on things that you think they want to do, right?

Are they holding back? Are they saying they can’t go on that play date? They can’t go to that birthday party. They need you there? They won’t carpool? What are the things that you would like for them to do that you actually think they might like to do that they’re saying no to? I often pay attention to that impairment piece, which from a clinical standpoint is so important when we’re making an actual diagnosis of anxiety.

So I don’t necessarily use that word with parents, but I’ll say like, are there things in the day that you really think, you know, Samantha would love to do that’s something stopping her from doing? And maybe it is that.

DS: Okay. So anxiety, stress, I think everyone’s dealing with it. It’s just on various levels of how much it’s impacting them.

What about at night if a child’s waking up and they’re really anxious, like what other things other than having the parent there, are there other things, techniques, things that you teach them to do to help manage their anxiety a bit more at night?

AR: I think what’s interesting is that, you know, Allison and I both, when we work with families on sleep, I think we tend to work a lot more from a parent model and kind of parent led treatment.

And so I think when a child is older, we will work with them to, you know, use some anxiety strategies around cognitive restructuring or some physiological relaxation, guided imagery, et cetera. But I think what I have found at least to be very helpful is on the parent side of how do we respond when they’re anxious at bedtime in the middle of the night?

And I think that we talk about using strategies more during the day that then kind of carry on into the night.

DS: Okay.

AR: I think that when we get into this back and forth of trying to engage in a lot of strategy at three o’clock in the morning, it kind of can prolong what’s happening. It can make it bigger.

It then turns into this whole kind of engaging conversation where no one’s going back to sleep for several hours. And so I think that we start foundationally with a lot of anxiety work that really starts in like broad daylight that can be helpful. And one of the strategies that Allison mentioned was this addition of worry time or acknowledge and defer whatever manual you’re pulling it from.

It’s this idea of kind of having this consolidated time where child and one caregiver one on one sit and talk about like what’s on their mind, what’s stressing them, what’s bothering them.

DS: Yeah.

AR: And it’s really consolidated before we get into the bedtime routine and before we kind of move into that shift into night.

DS: So it’s really about focusing on the day. Because I get asked all the time, like what can I teach my child to do in the middle of the night? Can we teach them just deep breathing? It’s really about implementing it during the day to help them at night moreso. Okay.

What about consistent routine? Like how often are you seeing just like all over the place kind of stuff go on?

AS: I mean, I laugh because so many people come in and say, like, we have the best bedtime routine. And then Andrea and I both have them fill out like a sleep log and you’ll see that like bedtime has a 90 minute range from day to day, you know, with like a four or five year old or some days, you know, they let them watch TV. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes there’s phones in the bed. Sometimes there’s 10 books.

DS: Yeah.

AS: You know, I think sometimes parents think that they’re being consistent with their routine and they’re not. And we typically talk about having, like, a three or four step, kind of, really firm routine with everything leading to being in the bed, right?

So maybe it’s brush teeth, PJs, read some books in the bed, like short and sweet. We’re not, you know, incorporating the snack as part of the bedtime routine. We’re not having all these other things that may be part of your night, but we’re not calling that bedtime routine because those aren’t really like goal driven to get you in the bed and get you sleeping.

AR: I think on the other side of that, like, I think that the general public is learning more about the importance of a bedtime routine. I think it’s just everywhere now, you know, these visuals of having these little bedtime routines for kids. And so I think on the other side of that, I see a lot of rigidity around a bedtime routine.

And so it is kind of like, it looks nice, but it’s fanatic. It’s like when we have this perfect bedtime routine and we do this and we read the exact same book and we sing the exact same song. And then there’s this kind of. Yeah, real rigidity in it that I see and this real focus on it. And also, like, why is this one piece of sleep hygiene, this one piece of good habits, not fixing everything?

DS: Right. And if it’s also rigid to the point where sometimes it takes forever, and if they’re out late or they have a different evening for some reason, and the parent can’t do all these things, like, then it just unravels from there.

AS: Right.

DS: But what about, like, how would you recommend the like, just one more, just one more book? I’m thirsty. I mean, I remember my daughter was constantly like, but I’m still hungry. Like what about the demands that the three, four, five year olds come up with, even though you might have a good routine? Like how should a parent respond to that?

AR: My son is doing that right now. It’s not even bedtime. It’s like every time we have to go somewhere, he’s like, I’m starving. And I swear he might be, but he’s so hungry. We feed him. But I think that as Allison said, we don’t build it into the actual bedtime routine. Cause the bedtime routine is this, like ,targeted. heading in one direction thing of we’re getting ready to settle in. But with parents, I often, just like that worry time, we’re working a lot this time before the bedtime routine to talk about worries.

If a kid is consistently coming up with, I need this, I need this, I need this, I build that in. I have built in what I call last chance time with kids often, like, right before the bedtime routine starts. We’ve got 10 minutes, so if you really want to have, you know, 10 books, if you want to have, you know, more snacks, more water, go to the bathroom.

For me, it’s a lot of just, like, getting ahead of all of it. And then having the parent be firm and consistent in that we’ve already done that, the kitchen is closed, we’ve already done that, we get three books, now we’re done, that to me is more important. It’s not even just what do we do with the kid who wants eight more snacks, it’s how can the parent be consistent in their response of nope, time for bed, in a like a loving, empathic way.

AS: You said it better than I could have. That was 100 percent what I was thinking about, is that like last snack idea, giving them, you know, a bedtime water cup, get a little bit ahead of it. And then also trust your gut, right? If your kid is calling you back in asking for a snack and you know that they ate dinner and they had a snack 15 minutes ago, you don’t have to go in and give them a snack, right?

You are allowed to know that your child just went to the bathroom and that, are they just stalling you or do they really need to? So again, not a perfect science, but being consistent with, when I say three books, it’s going to be three books, because then if you give four today, of course they’re going to ask for a fourth tomorrow.

And it’s worth it to ask for a fourth because you might say yes. So we hope then that the child kind of learns just very behaviorally, you know, what you do shapes your child’s response next time or what they’re going to do next time. And so we come at it really from, with that mindset of, be consistent so your kid learns what will happen when they do XYZ.

DS: The thing that I hear a lot when I have parents of younger children in my practice, they will often say, well, I’m the hard one. I’m the one who follows the consistent stuff and says no, and the other one’s very lenient. How, like, how does that inconsistency between the parents play out? What do you recommend there? Because that’s really parent training more so.

AR: Didn’t we just add a chapter about that in the book?

AS: Yeah.

AR: Wasn’t that a last minute add?

AS: Uh huh, yeah. That’s a big one. That’s a big one.

AR: It’s so hard. It’s so complicated. And I would bet that within all of our marriages, there are differences between us and our partner and how we do anything, let alone parenting.

So there’s a lot of it, I think, that starts with that kind of empathic understanding of like, yep, I get it, that’s life, no one’s going to parent in the exact same way. We came from different parents, we came from whatever. But then I think, communication is like the biggest thing that we can do, and sitting down and having these hard conversations of this is what I do, this is what you do, and can we either meet in the middle, or can we have the third party, this psychologist that we are paying to tell us how to do this, can we listen to her and kind of all get on her page? And then I think, as much as I hate like a hack or anything like that, I think the secret weapon in this is writing it out.

I think writing the plan out is like secretly the strongest thing you can do.

DS: Oh, that’s great.

AR: In my personal practice, when I make recommendations for changes in sleep, I don’t do this for like general patients, but I write out what I have said to them or I type out what I’ve said to them and they get it.

They walk away with a written plan so that I know that they’re going to be on the same page. But then I think that there’s this like extra layer of there’s separation or divorce and that’s kind of, I think when we leave that to the co parenting professionals.

DS: That makes a lot of sense. I love the writing it out. I would never think to, like, have it just there as the plan, as opposed to like trying to remember.

AR: You can’t argue that. Yeah.

AS: Right.

DS: Yeah. And I often, I often say to people like I’m the fall guy, like blame me, blame me. I’m the one who’s giving you the recommendations. So that’s fine.

AS: Oh, all the time.

DS: Yeah.

AS: I’m like, if it doesn’t work, come back. Try it. Blame me if it doesn’t and then we’ll figure something else out.

DS: I love it. What about nightmares and night terrors?

AR: Well, the magic three questions. I think families just more come in and say, like, how do I know? So the magic three questions, which we all ask every single day, which hopefully your listeners know at this point is, you know, what time is it happening? First third of the night, it’s likely more a sleep terror. Latter, it’s a nightmare.

Who remembers it? If just the parents remember it, it’s likely a sleep terror. If the kid remembers it, it’s a nightmare.

And how hard is the child to wake? If you walk into their room, they’re immediately snapping up. It’s a nightmare.

DS: Yeah.

AR: If you have to like physically shake them, then it’s a sleep terror. And so I think it’s good, that’s like step one in treatment is you got to figure out actually like what it is.

DS: But what’s the difference between a sleep terror, aka night terror, that’s the old school way we used to call them, but now they’re called sleep terrors.

AR: I’m so with the times.

DS: Sleep terror versus a nightmare. What is the difference though?

AR: So, a sleep terror is a parasomnia, it’s happening when we’re, you know, again, in that first third of the night when we’re in that kind of deepest stage of sleep, whereas a nightmare is something that’s happening, they both have kind of similar like reasons or antecedents of, like, not having enough sleep or being sleep deprived.

But a nightmare is something that we can treat. To me, the difference is really all about treatment and the stage of sleep that we’re in, which is very boring.

DS: Can also be like more like a blood curdling scream.

AR: Oh, the presentation. Oh. Gosh, yes. It’s terrifying. It’s like screaming, sitting, maybe there might be getting up and walking. I mean, God, my kids have never had sleep terrors. Yeah, I know yours has, but like the way that I hear them described sounds awful. Awful.

AS: Horrible. Yeah. I feel like the biggest difference is what you do during the waking hours about them, right? So for a sleep terror, we tell parents all the time, don’t talk about it.

DS: Yeah.

AS: You don’t need to ask them if they remember and, you know, can you believe you did that last night? You were screaming like crazy, right? Because we don’t want to create worry or anxiety. That’s a scary thing. Imagine when you woke up in the morning, someone said to you, you were screaming like crazy for 20 minutes last night.

Could make you a little nervous to go to bed, right? Could create some anxiety for you. For both of them, though, we always talk about sleep hygiene because we know that if a kid isn’t getting enough sleep, that can often be a reason why a nightmare or a sleep terror is going to appear. So we always are checking the routine and the amount of sleep they’re getting to cross that off the list.

And then with something like nightmares, we spend a lot of time during the day helping kids to rewrite the dream in some way, right? So some sort of re-scripting or even redrawing where we’ll have a kid draw a picture, tell a story, write a story of what that nightmare was. And then rewrite it in some way.

I was just talking to someone yesterday where the nightmare was about having worms in the bed. And I said, well, what if it was gummy worms and it was candy and you were sleeping in a bed of candy, right? That’s a lot less scary than worms. And you can draw candy worms. They’re not as scary, right? Those, you know, those sour, yummy, delicious things.

So it’s things like that. Just getting kids to see that they can rewrite the ending. It can be different. It doesn’t have to be scary, can be a pretty easy way. And then we have them kind of practice it a little bit, kind of review their new ending, almost like I used to call it like dream planting, which I don’t think is really like a scientific word for it.

But to kind of like set the stage for, you know, I’m going to dream about gummy worms in my bed, not those scary worms that I, you know, woke me up last night.

DS: It gives them more of a sense of control over something that they feel like they don’t have control over.

AS: Absolutely.

DS: And I talk about it on social media and my daughter’s fine with it. Like my kids, I was a sleepwalker and my kids had sleep terrors and sleepwalked too. But even we were just traveling to Europe. And when we got there, my daughter was so sleep deprived that she wasn’t having sleep terrors anymore. She’s outgrown that, but she was having a confusional arousal. So just woke up and she’s like, oh, and she just started talking to us, but she’s totally asleep.

So even when things like that happen, cause they can outgrow sleep terrors and then just have more of these confusional arousals. I just kind of, I don’t engage with her. I just take her and I guide her by the shoulders back to bed. And we tend to outgrow that sort of stuff. So she doesn’t seem to be bothered by it.

AS: Well, you know, that’s another reminder about nightmares. A lot of times I feel like parents during the night when a kid comes into the nightmare, they’re like, Oh, what was the dream about sweetie?

DS: Yes.

AS: Right? So like, again, we are in the middle of the night. Our focus is getting back to bed. Right? So we were just reiterating like you are safe. You are good. You know, we’ll figure it out in the morning type of thing because a lot of parents, I think, really, they feel spooked. They try to over reassure. They get into every detail of the worms in the bed and that really makes it worse. So, you know, again, you’re not going to get them to take a deep breath and do all that stuff in the middle of the night. So we’ve got to just reassure and usher back to sleep.

DS: So we like to end each episode with a segment called Something to Sleep On. One last point you’d like to share with anyone looking to change their sleep habits, like any of your thoughts. So, Dr. Andrea, Dr. Allison, when it comes to kids and sleep, do you have one final thought for our listeners, something to sleep on?

AS: I think it’s 1, 000 percent consistency. Pick a plan, stick to it, give it a good amount of time to try it out before you say whether it is or isn’t working, and just really know that when you’ve made a decision, you gotta follow it and see it through, and then we can always change things and reassess, but stick through it in the moment, and let’s see where that takes you.

DS: Andrea?

AR: I agree. I totally agree. I think consistency is everything. I think being patient is everything. If it’s like one thing to families, I think it’s, you should be suspicious of people that work in broad generalizations and kind of say, you have to do this, you have to do that. I think the most important thing you can do is be consistent.

There has to be a certain amount of tailoring your plan to your individual child. And I think if anyone is telling you that you have to do X, Y, Z, you should be a little bit suspicious.

DS: It’s true.

Dr. Andrea, Dr. Allison, thank you both for joining us for part one of this three-part episode. I had so much fun diving into this with you. I could talk sleep and kids with you all day long. You guys know that.

And I can’t wait to dive a little deeper with you next time in part two.

AS: Thanks.

AR: Thank you.

DS: Thanks for listening to Sleep Talking with Dr. Shelby, a Sleepopolis original podcast. Remember, if you’re tired of hitting the snooze button, make sure to hit that subscribe button right now in YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening.

And for even more sleep tips, visit sleepopolis.com and my Instagram page @sleepdocshelby.

Today’s episode was produced and edited by Freddie Beckley. Our Senior Director of Content is Alanna Nuñez. Our Head of Content is Molly Stout and I’m Dr. Shelby Harris. Until next time, sleep well.