Why Sleep Matters and How to Improve It with Dr. Heather Gunn, PhD (Part 1 of 2)

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Episode 33. This week I sat down with Dr. Heather Gunn, PhD. Dr. Gunn is an Assistant Professor at University of Alabama and a licensed Clinical Psychologist. In her role, she is engaged in research, teaching, mentoring, and service. Her goal is for individuals to have meaningful and engaging (and autonomy granting!) relationships and to be able to have restful sleep. Away from the office, she enjoys walking phone dates, exercise, baking, reading, and spending time with her husband and son and dog and cat. 

“Sleep is important.” Well, duh.

I know you probably already know that sleep matters for your health, but in this conversation we are going to cover a take on sleep you probably never considered. Heather’s area of focus is on sleep and interpersonal relationships, so we are going to cover standard behavioral treatments for sleep, and also how your relationship to people in your life, yourself, and your feelings of psychological safety matter a TON.

We had SO much important stuff to cover, that this is Part 1 of a 2 part series.

Here’s What You Can Expect:

• How much sleep do we need? (Hint: There isn’t a hard and fast rule for everyone, and Heather will tell you how to know what the right amount for you is)
• “I don’t have time to sleep!” How to recognize what you are trying to get for yourself by staying awake, and what to do about it.
• Ways to improve your sleep if you are having mild insomnia (wanting to sleep but you can’t), or have had it for 15 years.
• How sleep relates to eating and weight
• Why sleep got worse for so many of us during the pandemic and how to approach sleep during times of transition
• How hyperarousal and psychological safety relate to sleep
• How much your physiology gets synced with the people around you and how this relates to sleep (and eating!)

New to the Podcast and Blog? Welcome!

I’m so glad to have you. You might be wondering what this blog and podcast are all about.

We relate everything in this podcast back to motivation, but not the hustle and grind kind. Truly sustainable motivation that keeps you feeling energetic and engaged in your life for the long haul. We talk about why “I’m just not motivated” is a myth, and why the TYPE of motivation you have is so important to fully understand. If you are ready to learn about motivation and respecting your body in an effective way so that you can live a life you truly love, you are in the right place.

Check out the Foundational Episodes of the Motivation Made Easy Podcast here!

• Introduction: What is this podcast all about?
• Episode 1: Want to Get & Stay Motivated? A Crash Course on Motivation, Weight Loss, and Health
• Episode 2: How Dieting Steals Our Motivation
• Episode 3: How To Get Motivated To Improve Your Health (Motivation 101)
• Episode 4: How to Transform Health Fears Into Forward Progress

How to Build Truly Long-Term Sustainable Motivation

Do you ever feel like you are just going through the motions? Being pulled in a million directions, and not really spending your time the way you want to be? There are so many things to do, fires to put out, that self-care behaviors immediately go to the bottom of the list.

Then you feel angry and frustrated with yourself and the world, resolve to “be better” and then the cycle starts all over again?

I get this, and I still live this. Not in a diet mentality way now, but I still struggle with consistently prioritizing myself over all the other to dos. And yet, I know me doing so allows me to be the very best partner, partner, and do my best work.

One of the very first steps in developing truly internal motivation is to clarify what actually matters to you. Not your mom, not your sister, not your best friend, YOU. 

The more you reflect on this, the more you can move through your day knowing that even when it’s hard to say not, and leave things undone, you are prioritizing your time in the way that’s best for YOU.

If you’ve never clarified your values, the time is now. I do it early and often to stay grounded and make sure I’m using the precious time I have in this life in the ways that I wont regret. It’s a work in process, but values clarification is something we rarely do and we honestly all need to. And I don’t say that about many things.

Grab the free guide at DrHondorp.com/goals and get started today. I promise you, it’s never too late to stop dieting and start truly living. You will not regret it.

Things we Just Aren’t Considering When it Comes to Sleep, Eating, & Our Health

Heather says it so well here.

“I do think we tend to think of eating, exercise, sleep as such individualized behaviors, and we take it out of the context of the actual home people live in and what goes on in the house”

Dr. Heather Gunn, PhD

What is Sleep? What Effects It? And Why Is It Important?

Having an adequate sleep schedule helps us to align our bodies’ most important systems and maintain our homeostasis. Sleep affects EVERYTHING, and we can’t not do it.

Our bodies actually have a pretty cool way of letting us know when we need to sleep. So how does it work?

Sleep Drive: Dr. Gunn states that generally, because of the way we have evolved over time, we are awake for about 16 hours and then our sleep drive kicks in. It contributes to what makes us feel ready for sleep, like when our eyes get really heavy or we think, “oh I could fall asleep right now”.

Circadian Rhythm: She also notes that most of us operate on a day/night schedule, i.e. we are awake during the day and asleep at night. We all have an internal clock that tells us when our bodies are ready to rest and wake, and it varies based on our schedules, but it is typically aligned with the light/dark cycle.

Sleep is not individualized: It is intertwined with other functions in our body, and exhaustion can initiate a stress response that can take a huge toll on our mental and physical well-being. When we aren’t getting enough sleep consistently, our body tells us we need an instant charge of energy in order to compensate, which manifests in cravings and an increased drive to eat highly processed or sugary foods.

How Much Sleep Should You Be Getting?

This depends, and Heather tells us actually the best way to know is to track how you feel. Intuitive Sleeping!

It’s really important to note how you’re feeling throughout the day. Yes, the average amount of sleep adults “should” be getting is somewhere between 7 and 9 hours, but sometimes it’s necessary to remove those shoulds and take a more internal approach. The amount of sleep we need varies and tracking how you feel is a better gauge individually.

What is Insomnia?

“I want to sleep and I can’t.”

Many of us have experienced Insomnia at some point in our lives. It’s more common than you think, but often goes undiagnosed or untreated. Chronic Insomnia can take a huge toll on health and overall quality of life, so it’s important to note that treatment is actually fairly effective and can help significantly.

What is Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment for Insomnia and How Well Does it Work?

Well! 60-70% of people get better, in the people who we have studied. They tend to have insomnia only, without co-occurring psychological disorders.

There is more focus on behavioral treatment, and a little bit less on cognitive. The most effective procedures within this treatment have to do with reducing stimulating activity at night, like watching TV or scrolling through apps on your smartphone, and limiting the time that is spent in bed throughout the day.

Establishing your bed as the place you go to sleep rather than somewhere you sit throughout the day can actually make you fall asleep more easily at night, because you’re associating your bed with sleeping.

So What Else Affects Our Sleep? How Do Psychological Safety and Relationships Matter Here?

Sleep is vulnerable. You’re not unconscious but you’re not awake and alert- it’s an incredibly vulnerable position to be in.

– Heather Gunn, PhD

Sleep is vulnerable because we aren’t alert. Therefore, it’s adaptive to be on alert if there are signs of a lack of safety.

This used to mean having a predator around.

Now it might mean:

• Self-criticism
• Perfectionism
• Hostility from a partner
• High pressures you are putting on yourself for achievement
• Actual lack of safety (e.g., unsafe neighborhood)
• Traumatic events

Tips to Improve Your Sleep – Do I Need to Take My Phone out of the Bedroom? Not necessarily!

Heather reminds us that we are all different and unique and just like eating, (shocker!) dogmatic rules aren’t useful.

For some, the phone can be arousing and over-stimulating and mask sleepiness, and may cause insufficient sleep.

For others it may not. There are ways to use the technology effectively.

Examples include going on social media to help you wake up in the morning if you aren’t a morning person, or using your phone to listen to a meditation. It’s different for everyone, and it’s important to find what works best for you.

Sleep and Kids – Helping Kids Feel Independent While Also Getting Them to Bed!

It can definitely be effective to tell kids when they need to go to bed, and establish a target time to do so every night. What can be really empowering and helpful for kids is allowing them the freedom to make autonomous decisions about HOW they will unwind at night and prepare to go to sleep.

This could mean reading a book or having a book read to them, listening to music, or more generally just doing something that brings them comfort. Going to sleep for the night can be anxiety-inducing for children, and it can be helpful to give them space to find something enjoyable and comforting to do before bed in order to alleviate this.

Sleep & Couples – When Bedtime Becomes a Fight

When couples have different sleep schedules, it can disrupt sleep and cause tension.

For example, if you like to go to sleep at around 9pm because you wake up early for work but your partner gets home from work late and stays up until midnight so they have time to unwind, you might be woken up when they come to bed and your alarm might wake them up when it goes off in the morning.

It’s important to reflect on this tension and communicate with your partner to find the best ways to work through this.

Be Flexible With Yourself if You Can – Tailor to Your Natural Preferences

More of us are night owls than early morning folks (at least at the extremes of this) and yet the world isn’t really built for them.

“Early bird gets the worm” is a cultural myth that can cause shame and be damaging. If you naturally prefer sleeping in later and staying up later, there is nothing wrong with you! However, it can be hard to adjust if the world operates on a different schedule.

Main Takeaways: What You MUST Understand About Sleep

1. Sleep, social relationships, and stress management are critically important to your health, and VERY often overlooked. We often are told you MUST exercise and sleep is often one of the first things we sacrifice when we have so many demands. We live in a hustle and grind culture and it’s not helping anyone’s health. Remember that when we are looking at data of who is the healthiest and we over focus on factors like diet and exercise habits, that’s really only a part of the puzzle. Only you can determine this, but there’s a very real chance that getting more sleep instead of waking early to exercise may actually be the best thing for your health.
2. We must look at behaviors (sleep, eating, exercise) in their context. You cannot take the behavior out of the context it occurs in. And so often we do. I see this so often with people that come to work with me, they are just beating themselves up for not being able to “be more disciplined” with their eating and yet their life is immensely stressful and unsupportive.
3. Make sure you prioritize down time and connection during the daytime hours. Often we stay up late in attempt to give ourselves downtime we don’t allow for during our busy days.
4. Cognitive-behavioral therapy for insomnia is quite effective. 60-70% of the time it improves sleep for folks with insomnia (in populations studied). Even if you have had insomnia for years, it does not mean it always needs to be this way. Even 4-6 sessions of CBT-I may significantly improve your sleep. Most of us don’t know these behavioral principles and they could truly improve the quality and quantity of your sleep quickly, if implemented effectively.
5. We must consider psychological safety and hyperarousal when it comes to sleep. Sleep is vulnerable. There are reasons our brain has a hard time allowing sleep to occur if we are feeling threatened. This can be from a hostile or unsupportive relationship, or from perfectionism and self-criticism, or just a change in routine and increase in uncertainty (pandemic life, anyone?). Sometimes we can do things to increase feelings of calm and self-soothing, but sometimes we just need to realize that we are going to get a little less sleep for a bit. It’s about sleep over time, not 1 night or 1 week or even several weeks. It’s the big picture that matters.
6. Autonomy matters for sleep! For kids, and adults. We want to feel a sense of competence and control. To do this, giving ourselves choices within structure can be really useful. For kiddos, this might mean saying that bedtime needs to happen, but giving choices with how that happens, allowing them to figure out how they will sleep and wind down can be empowering.

Support Independent Bookstores Near You!

Did you know that that if nothing slows their momentum, Amazon will have almost 80% of the book market by the end of 2025?

Look, I love the convenience of Amazon, but I’ve got a super cool way that you can support local bookstores and my blog and podcast simply by buying books like you already do! You can choose any bookstore on the list in the US and Canada (they plan to expand to other counties in the future) OR you can just let the donation get split between all stores. As of this recording, they have raised 15 million dollars for local bookstores. On my bookshop, you will see my absolute favorite books related to health and wellness, courage and vulnerability, and even my favorite fiction and kids books!

My recent favorite related to improving the quality of our lives was Digital Minimalism. Our family actually has decided to do an optional screen free August to re-evaluate the role of screen time in our lives.

So if you believe in supporting local businesses, please consider buying your books through Bookshop from now on!

The Psychology of Wellness Bookshop Link.

Disclaimer: This blog and podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual professional advice or treatment, including medical or mental health advice. It does not constitute a provider patient relationship.

Disclosure: Using the Bookshop.org links in this post means that I would get an affiliate fee if you purchase from the online bookshop (this supports my business, and local bookstores too!).

Credit: This blog post was co-written and edited by Sarah Grace Rapoport, podcast and blog manager and Psychology of Wellness Intern, and Dr. Shawn Hondorp.