SPEAKER_01 0:12

Hi everyone and welcome back to Empower Your Menopause, the podcast all about health, happiness, and hormones for women over 40. It's coaches James and Julie here, and we're glad to have you with us once again. So today we're going to dig into something most of us sleep with, and I was even having complaints from my wife Laura about this in the middle of the night, and that is unfortunately our screens. If your phone is the last thing you touch at night and the first thing you grab when you wake up, or worse, at 3am, no, I didn't really do that, then this episode is for you. So we're talking about a digital detox for your hormonal health and why evening screen time hits harder in midlife, how blue life and late-night doom scrolling mess with melatonin and mood, and the simple framework that we teach our clients to reclaim their evening. So you're getting a real sneak insight of what we coach people here. So you can expect some practical boundaries, some tiny rituals that are going to help stick, and zero shame. We all do it, right? Earbuds in, screens down, let's get you sleeping like someone who runs the show because you do. So let's start off straight away by diving straight into it. Julie, what is it about screens that mean they hit us hard, but particularly, why do they hit us hard in midlife?

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Well, there are a number of different reasons, and we're going to talk through some of those as well as some examples of what that looks like. So let's just start by saying if your phone sleeps in your bed, your brain probably doesn't. Your bed should be a cue for either sleep or intimacy. Your phone, unfortunately, cues your brain for novelty and reward. It triggers that dopamine hit every time you look at it. And when those clues, cues, clues, when those cues collide, you're priming wakefulness in your brain. So you're telling it to wake up. But we're not saying that phones are evil. We all use them quite a lot. We rely on them for many different things, but they're very good at keeping your brain awake. Now, in midlife, that lands harder than in other life stages because your brain is already undergoing some pretty significant neurological changes. It's rewiring. And we don't need or want anything that's going to interfere with that unnecessarily. I mean, brain fog anyone, right? So see if you can identify any of these examples. Um we've got our 9 p.m. scroller. You finally sit down, open Instagram or whatever social media platform for just five minutes, and then suddenly it's 10:30, your bedtime keeps sliding later and later, you're feeling wired, and at 3 a.m. you're awake again, wondering what to do. Maybe you're that midnight researcher, right? The a hot flush happens, you get up, can't do anything, you're flustered, can't go back to sleep, and that leads you down that whole rabbit hole of Dr. Google trying to figure out how to sleep in menopause. So now you're having a big old cortisol party because you're feeling stressed. Again, you're keeping your brain awake, you're not letting your body sleep and do all of the processes that it needs to do to calm and relax. Um, and then we've got that whole relaxing TV trap, right? We're going to wind down with our favorite shows. But that cliffhanger you're watching, the really big action uh show, the bright screen, because TV is blue screen as well, are all keeping your brain on alert. And we won't even talk about the TV in the bedroom. No, no, no. But let's look at this in plain English. When you have that blue light in the evening, it delays the melatonin production in your brain and it pushes your body clock. We talk about circadian rhythms, right? So it pushes your body clock later, which means feeling sleepy comes later in the evening, even if you get into bed on time. Menopause amplifies that when you have vasomotor symptoms, which is, you know, basically a fancy way of saying hot flushes or night sweats, this already is going to fragment your sleep, and your stress reactivity is higher, your circadian rhythms can start shifting. So when screens get in there, it sits right at that weak spot where your body's already struggling. And there's a lot of research that has shown late-night scrolling is actually linked with more rumination and next day anxiety or brain fog. And it's not your fault, it's just your brain is responding naturally to this constant barrage of novelty. So your phone is doing exactly what it's designed to do. The issue isn't you, but the system is very noisy for your brain. So given that our brains love novelty and your life is already busy, what do we do? It's time to make bedtime boring on purpose. James, how do we do that?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Well, so this is something that I adapted some years ago. And, you know, no ideas are new, right? So I'd like to claim this is my own, but as usual, you read something in some way yourself, you start uh employing it in your own life, and then slowly you adapt it as your own. So this is something that I took from Ben Greenfield, he's a biohacker, you know, has his own podcast and things like that. So he I've read about this in his book Boundless, which was I think pre-pandemic or maybe just after the pandemic, then started employing it and thought it was a really good way to start bringing this kind of thing in for our clients. So we call it the 3-2-1 wind down routine. It's really, really simple. Those three, two, and one, they're they're hours, so three hours before bed. We want to stop eating. Why is that? Well, digestion raises your core temperature, there's a reflux risk, you know, you don't want your body to be going to sleep, trying to digest anyway, you want to have digested by then to have got all the best nutrients out so they can start running around your body and doing the stuff that they're meant to be doing while you're sleeping rather than your goat trying to churn through you know that 9 pm piece of filet mignon that you might have eaten. So you want your most of your digestion to have gone past. Now, a lot of people say to us, that's a challenge for me. Three hours is too much. So you can have something small if you want, just before bed, that'd be protein heavy and just a tiny little bit, so maybe like a couple of spoonfuls of cottage cheese or some Greek yogurt or you know, half a boiled eggs, something like that, but nothing more than that. So three hours before bed, that is the last main meal, and certainly no carb-heavy, sugar-heavy, fat-heavy snacks. Uh, after that. Two hours before bed, we want to stop work, and this is about setting boundaries as well, as much as anything. You know, I know that when I'm under pressure at work, when I'm getting emails from lots of clients at the same time, I feel this drive to serve people immediately, and a lot of us are like that, and particularly a lot of women are like that. So, it when it comes to that whole caring, sharing attitude, if you're there eight, nine o'clock at night and you're trying to answer an angry email from your boss or from a work client or something like that, it's not the best way to handle things when it comes to your stress levels. I mean, when to go to bed with our stress levels reduced as much as possible, so make sure you close that loop, write down the things you want to do for tomorrow morning, two hours before bed, and pick them up again tomorrow. This is your own sanctity, your own sanity that you're trying to preserve by keeping work boundaries well guarded, so you've got those guardrails in place, so you're not doing that and you're not stressing yourself out. And then, last of all, the one that almost everyone is challenged by is that one hour before bed when we turn our electronics off, so it screens away. Julie just mentioned the blue light issue and the challenges that presents there for cortisol levels. Your blue light is excitory, it keeps us awake, and so we want to get that off as much as possible. D-dim your house lights and try a wind down in a way that is actually analog rather than digital. So, what does that look like? It could be reading a book, and once again, we don't want to get too excited, so we don't want to be reading a book that's a novel with loads of cliffhangers at the end of every single chapter. We want to be reading something that is appropriate for a four-bed calm down. You might want to journal, grab your book out, do a little bit of journaling. It doesn't have to be hours and hours on end, it could just be a small gratitude practice, you know, write down two or three things, you've been grateful for the day, or reflecting on something that's happened. We've got all kinds of prompts to help people with journaling if that's something that you want to get into. Maybe have a hot bath, extra bonus points if you chuck some Epsom salts in there with magnesium as well, because they should help you sleep better. So there you go. Three, two, one. We always said to people work backwards from when you want to get up because the sleep sweet uh spot for sleep is actually eight hours. That old adage, get eight hours sleep, has scientifically been proven to be a really good Goldilocks spot. So anything below eight, it starts to be considered too little. Anything above eight can start to impair you in other ways, and so you want to aim for around eight. So work backwards from when you need to get up in the morning, then count eight hours back, and then you can start your routine. What might that look like with some real examples then? So let's have a look at what a working parent might their routine might look like. They need to get up at 6 a.m. in the morning, and so if I rewind back eight hours from that, that's 10 o'clock at night. We've got 2200 hours on our uh show notes for 10 o'clock at night. I realize that for American people, you tend not to work in military time. So 10 pm at night would be lights out, time to go to bed. So working back an hour from that, 9 o'clock at night, 9 pm, put the devices on the docks, get a shower, read a book, dim the lights so you're ready for bed. Around 9:30, uh around 8 o'clock ish, you know, tidy things away, turn your laptop off, stop answering emails, do a little plan for tomorrow, what you're gonna handle when it comes to that work stuff the night before, and then sort of like somewhere between 7:30 and uh sorry, 6 30 and 7 30, you want to have eaten and you want to get the kids down for bed if you've got younger children, and so that is going back to your 3-2-1 routine. Then so 10 o'clock is your bedtime, oh 6 o'clock is your waking time, 10 o'clock is your bedtime, 9 o'clock is devices away, 8 o'clock is no more work after that, and then somewhere between 6:30 and 8 o'clock by the time when the kids go to bed, last meal, and get everything starting to shut down. So, one thing that we're asked loads is what happens if I work a shifty type schedule. Well, you don't have to hit the three to one schedule absolutely every single time. We know that shift work really impairs people's sleep, so just start off with building really easily from that one hour no screens before bed, it will absolutely help you a hundred percent. Right, so some other kinds of things that we can think about then. If you're running on fumes, warm shower, cool room, gentle stretch, a little bit of herbal tea, a little bit of breathing exercises, maybe do a 4-6 routine or our favoured uh box routine 444, which is in for four minutes, four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, hold for four seconds. Just do a couple of minutes of that to try and help you when it comes to chilling out. Try doing a brain dump, as I said, on a notepad, a little bit of journaling, and keep that by the bed. If you wake up at three o'clock, it's probably better, rather than grabbing your phone, to actually grab that notepad and start writing a few things down. Read a paper book if necessary, a little bit of gratitude practice, as I mentioned before. Okay, so what happens when the rest of the household, and this happens to me absolutely all the time, dad, I don't want to go to bed just yet. Can we watch another episode? Or whatever it may be. I find that working with the family in those kind of cases helps more than anything else. Agreeing that we all do the same thing at the same time. I've got older teens that 15, you know, 15 going on 20, they want to be up rather late, and so sitting them down, saying it's a real family thing, we're all gonna do it, all the phones down at the same time. Wi-Fi bedtime is 9:30. Do any downloading you want to do before then, and then as ever, make all these things as flexible as possible. Just like with the shift work, try starting with one thing out of all these that you can employ. If it's just doing dinner three hours before bed, whatever it may be, but the one hour digital detox is something that we want to try and preserve as much as we possibly can. Remember, it's progress over perfection. Yeah, even 30 minutes of quiet time is gonna be better than zero minutes of quiet time and just trying to go to bed with your phone still in your hand. So, if 321 sounds like too much, Julie, what's your good enough version? I know you've got one of these that you work with.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

I do. As a matter of fact, I I've I've done this with clients before, and I have to say that it's it's probably one of the hardest habits for people to adopt is turning the screens off early before bedtime and not having the phone next to the bed or even in the same room. But without exception, every client who's done it, and myself included, because I had to do this with myself, um, every single person I know who's done it has noticed an enormous change in the quality of their sleep. So you can set some rules of thumb for your bedroom. I think this is a really good place to start. So get yourself a cheap old alarm clock. They still exist and they still work. And because you know, people's excuse, oh, but I use my phone as an alarm clock. Well, you don't have to. So if you have family, you're worried about kids calling or whatever, keep the phone out of the bedroom in a place where you can hear it. At least it's not right next to your bed. If you have trouble with light in your room, something simple is a nice silk blackout eye mask that feels nice on your face. Um, and it gives you that darkness that you need because especially if you have a partner who insists on doom scrolling and isn't willing to go and work that, uh, work that out with you, it's a good way to get past that. Um, keeping your room cool, having spare duvet covers or or comforters for those nights when you're too hot and then you're too cold, and then you know how our temperatures fluctuate at this time of night. Prepare yourself, this time of life, I should say, prepare yourself for those things that you that you know may be coming, and it just helps you have a go-to to make yourself more comfortable. There are some chemical levers that you can pull here. So we've talked before, caffeine has a much different effect on our body at this time of life. So you you need to set a cutoff time for caffeine. If you're still drinking coffee after two in the afternoon, there's a there's a good chance that that is still interfering with your sleep. I mean, as someone who lives in Italy and loves espresso, I find that I cannot have caffeine after noon because it really, even though it's just one espresso, it still affects my sleep. Um, alcohol, I know this is a touchy subject, so we're not the booze police, but it will make you feel sleepy. And I know for a lot of people this is a nice way to wind down in the evening, but it actually fragments your sleep. Most people who are drinking alcohol before bedtime will find that they're waking up around two or three o'clock in the morning. That's when your liver is part of the cycle, and it will wake you up. So if you can, maybe just set a simple rule of no drinking on a school night, as that's what we say in our house, on during during weeknights. And that way you can still enjoy your drinks on the weekends, um, but it keeps you a little more level during the week. If you can, this is especially great if you have a pet, just take a 10-minute walk after dinner. It helps the glucose levels settle because they're going to spike a little bit after you've eaten, and that will that will allow your muscles to start using up some of that glucose, and it helps calm down your evening. So you may find that you have fewer wake-ups. And I'm not talking about a power walk, I'm talking about just a nice 10-minute stroll. It doesn't have to be much. Put your shoes on, walk for five minutes, turn around, and walk back. I promise you, if you have a pet, they're gonna absolutely love you for that. And once you've done it once or twice, they'll never let you not do it again. Um, doing things that like reading, I know a lot of people like to read to unwind, reading a paper book or reading an e-reader like the paper white that doesn't have blue light behind it. Um, that's that's okay. Keep the brightness down. If you have to use a phone, I know they have a lot of different um filters for them. It doesn't block out all the blue light, contrary to what people might want to think. But if you're going to absolutely do that, then at least set a timer, put it into airplane mode and set a timer so that you do limit yourself. Um, maybe change that color and the and the back the background um to make it a bit less um bright on in your eyes. And then just, you know, make a micro commitment. I mean, we're giving you lots of suggestions here, but you don't have to suddenly change your entire life just because you've listened, listened to a podcast, a podcast episode. Neither one of us is speaking very well today. Um, but just a simple micro commitment. So maybe commit to turning your phone off at 9 p.m. I set mine so it automatically shuts off. Even if I'm in the middle of using it, it just shuts off. Or maybe no phone in the bedroom. Or choose a 30-minute wind-down routine that gives you that chance to relax. Tie it to some kind of a cue, set an alarm or set it to something else, connected to something else you're already doing. Um, there were studies that showed that removing the phone from the bedroom improved sleep quality and next day focus within one week. So I challenge you to try that for one week. I mean, what's it gonna hurt, right? If you decide you don't like it, you can always take it back in. But try it for a week and see what you notice. So, James, what about those 3 a.m. wakeups, partners glued to their screens? I mean, we all live in the real world, right?

SPEAKER_01 20:38

Yeah, so there are lots of different instances. So let's have a look at some a little bit of real life troubleshooting then. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, you know, I wake up at 3 a.m. and automatically reach for my phone, what could we actually be doing? Well, first of all, let's do a behavior swap. Yep, so a little notebook by the bed, pen there, you know, just write a line down. I've been thinking about this, then try doing a little bit of breathing. 4-6 is ideal for trying to get you to sleep, and that's inhale for four, exhale for six. Try and do that 60 times and just concentrate on the breath itself. Quite often that is a really good way of just drifting off. Now I know that a lot of people, as we get older, bladder function is not as great as what it may have been when we were younger, and most of us invariably wake up at some point in the night for a loot trip. So if that happens, that's the thing that wakes you up at three o'clock, and then you find that your brain starts worrying away. You know, don't switch the big overhead lights on anywhere. I find it's useful to have like a small red night, red night light, red light for night by the bed somewhere. You know, just one of those little plug in devices, gentle red glow, red glow. Red light is far, far less excitory. It's much more calming for when we're going to sleep to try and encourage that. And if you're awake for a while, you know, 10-15 minutes, you've tried all this, and none of it's working. Actually, get up out of the bed, turn a really low light on, maybe do a little bit of reading, and then come back when you actually feel sleepy and try and get back into bed. So that's number one, right? Challenge number two. My partner scrolls beside me. Yeah, it's all very well you setting up one of these rules to try and help yourself and get to sleep, and then you know, your other half is laid next to you in bed, and they're doom scrolling or scrolling away because they are less bothered by this kind of thing. Okay, so again, try reframing this as kind of like a team sleep rule. So you all are gonna do to everybody in the house devices out of the bedroom by nine o'clock. Let's make the bedroom phone free. A really good way of doing it is having one of those multiple port chargers somewhere, maybe down in the kitchen or in another room where everybody in the house can drop off their phones together at the same time. And maybe offer them a replacement, ask them if they want to get involved with a little bit of a 10-minute shed, wind down, a bit of a stretch, a little bit of a chat. How's your day gone? You know, try and bring some of that communication back that often leaves relationships that have been going on for a long time. Uh, not saying you particularly need to get intimate, but you know, maybe a little bit of a five-minute foot massage each might just help when it comes to getting to sleep. So maybe that's some ideas then if your partner is still scrolling beside you. What about if work pings at nine o'clock at night? Okay. Our phones have got really, really clever systems into them that quite often we don't actually employ. Things like focus times, do not disturb, you know, you could set up an auto reply after a certain time, you know, 7 30, 8 o'clock at night, have the auto-reply say something like, I'm off for the evening, I'll I'll get back to you in the morning. So you're setting a boundary, you're recognizing the fact that somebody wants to speak to you, but you're actually preserving your own boundaries of saying, I'll deal with this tomorrow. And another thing that is a really simple fix that so many of us don't actually do is putting something new email footer. Tell people when you actually respond to emails so people aren't actually automatically expecting something. And I would advise that slowly but surely you try and transition people into particular contacts streams. So if you've got a work contact who has your Facebook Messenger and has your Instagram account, and they can message you through that, and they have your WhatsApp and they also have your emails. If they're that desperate to get in touch with you, they will try and utilize one of those methods of contact if you don't put boundaries around them. So make sure that you say to them, work issues are confined to email, so you've got the boundary there about the types of contact that you've got. So what happens if you can't switch off your brain? And this happens to a lot of people, it happens a real lot to me. So I would think about potentially some kind of a brain dump, you know, a couple of minutes, writing it down somewhere, putting all your stuff there, and then if you're worried about something in particular, give yourself the grace of booking a 10-minute slot the next day to come back to things rather than worrying about it right now. Say to yourself, I'm gonna allow myself to worry about this, but I'm not gonna do it right now because right now I need to do something else. So schedule that worry for the next day. So you know, try soothe yourself through that. Maybe a little bit of white noise if you've got a radio or something in the room that you can use. Maybe going back to reading again and doing some breathing. We know that by breathing, when we breathe in and then breathe out, and we do a longer exhale, that that helps your parasympathetic nervous system. What's your parasympathetic nervous system? It's the rest and digest one, it's the one that calms you down, it's the one that takes you away from fight or flight. So that's why the four to six routine is really really good with that longer exhale for helping with that. Consistency is always going to be trying to do a mega mega action. So all you gotta do is try one or two of these things, see if they work for you again. It's really, really important to recognize this is not about never touching your phone again, it's about creating a protected hour where your brain can downshift massively. So, Julie, talk about picking one lever that people can jump onto tonight that's gonna make a difference because that's the whole point of doing these coaching conversations and tips and tricks, right? It's not just to listen to it, it's to actually put it into some kind of action. So, what's our one lever that we're gonna suggest to people then, Julie?

SPEAKER_00 27:37

I say move the phone out of the bedroom or set a shutdown timer or start with your one-zero zero routine, right? One hour before bedtime, no screens. You will be surprised. I promise you, especially if you can move that phone out of the bedroom or shut it off completely, you're gonna feel a difference within a week. You'll go to sleep more easily, you'll wake up fewer times, you'll feel a lot less wired and tired, and you will most likely have a lot better focus in the morning rather than waking up feeling like, well, I actually said this this morning, I felt like I'd been dragged through a knothole because I went to bed later than I needed to. So if you would like a personalized roadmap for your sleep, managing stress, what to eat, or movement that actually fits your life, the menopause impact assessment is a great way to do that. It's just 10 euro, 10 pounds right now. Um, it's about $13 for Black Friday. We're having this special offer. We still have a few spots left, so grab yours today. We've only got a couple of days left. And if you know anybody else who struggles with this, it would make a great gift. Since everybody's getting it's Thanksgiving in the US as we're recording this, it's Black Friday when we go live. So it's if you're thinking about I don't know what to get for somebody, this would be an absolutely great idea. Yeah, I guess that's all I've got to say.

unknown 29:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

So of course you can book one of those calls at impact.fabulousbeyond40.com and we will put that in the show notes. In the meantime, if you've enjoyed the podcast or you think somebody could benefit from it, in the true words of everybody who is trying to do something that influences somebody in some way, shape, or form, please like and share, pass it on to other people. If it's helped you, perhaps it will help them as well. So that's it for this week. We will see you next time. In the meantime, we've been James and Julie from Fabulous Beyond 40. Stay strong and stay fabulous. Take care, and we'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Bye.