Transform Your Sleep with Holistic Sleep Coach Morgan Adams

Learn how to sleep again (finally!)

Transform Your Sleep with Holistic Sleep Coach Morgan Adams – FOF Ep 192

Ever find yourself counting sheep at 3 AM, wide awake, wondering why your brain seems determined to replay every embarrassing moment of your life? If you’re like me and struggle with getting a good night’s sleep, then today’s episode is going to be a game changer for you. In Episode 192 of the FOF Podcast, I chat with the incredible holistic sleep coach, Morgan Adams, who has all the tips and tricks to help you catch those elusive Zzz’s.

Morgan is a 54-year-old sleep expert based in Virginia, who has transformed her life from being a pharmaceutical sales rep to finding her true calling as a holistic sleep coach. Inspired by her battle with insomnia and a pivotal breast cancer diagnosis, she’s on a mission to help people live happier, healthier, and more fulfilled lives through better sleep.

Ever heard of CBTI (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia)? Morgan dives deep into this game-changing, non-pharmacological approach that has about a 70% success rate. It’s all about changing your behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs around sleep, without the need for sleep meds that often come with side effects.

Morgan also shares some life-saving tips to fix those pesky middle-of-the-night wake-ups. From figuring out if a blood sugar crash or overheating might be the culprit, to the importance of having a consistent sleep schedule—even if you’re a night owl like me—she covers it all. By the way, who knew that morning light and exercise could be such powerful sleep aids?

Whether you’ve been battling sleep issues for years or just had a recent rough patch, this episode has golden nuggets of wisdom for everyone. Tune in to learn how you can finally tell your sleepless nights to take a hike and wake up feeling refreshed and ready to conquer the day.

What You’ll Learn:

Morgan’s journey from insomnia to holistic sleep coaching
The powerful impact of CBTI for Insomnia
Why getting morning light and exercising can transform your sleep
Tips for handling those frustrating middle-of-the-night wake-ups
Understanding and loving your unique chronotype (Yes, it’s okay to be a night owl!)

Don’t miss this sleep-transforming episode! Make sure to check out Morgan’s website at morganadamswellness.com for more tips and resources.

Listen now and start your journey to better sleep!

PS: If you’ve ever argued about your sleep schedule being “just you wanting to sleep in late,” you’re gonna want to hear this. You might just win that argument next time! 😉

Ready to transform your nights? Hit play and let’s dive in!

Connect with me (Jen):

Contact: https://www.jenhardy.net/contact

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejenhardy
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fabulousover50show
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/thejenhardy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/thejenhardy

The power of a woman's voice knows no age limit

Jen Hardy

Host

TRANSCRIPT

It’s been really, really amazing to be able to help people transform their sleep so that they can live a more happy, healthy, fulfilled life.

If you are like me, sometimes you struggle with sleep, maybe more than sometimes. And I’ve got somebody today who’s going to actually help us get to sleep, which is so important, especially at this time. I feel like in our lives when it gets harder and harder, and we need more and more. So without further ado, here is Morgan, and who is

Morgan? The deep question, starting off with the deep. Well, I am a 54 year old woman living in Virginia. I am married and have 2 fur pups, And I am very deeply interested in health and entrepreneurship. Both my parents were entrepreneurs and I was meant to work for myself. And I went to many, many different jobs over the years and finally found the one that lights me up like nothing else, and that is helping people with their sleep as a holistic sleep coach. So that’s like the in a nutshell version of who I am. I mean, I could ramble on for a long time, but let’s just, like, get right down to it.

I love it. Okay. So how did you discover being a holistic sleep coach? Because that’s not something I’d ever heard about.

Yeah. Most people haven’t. Well, I had really bad insomnia in my mid thirties, and I, at the time, did not know what to do about it. And so I went to visit my primary care doctor, and I was given a prescription for Ambien, which I took willingly and without question. At the time, I was working as a pharmaceutical sales rep, and my world was basically centered around prescriptions and medications and all that stuff. And so it didn’t faze me at all to take a drug to sleep, and it worked as advertised in terms of helping me get to sleep faster, but I had a lot of side effects as a result of the medication, mostly the next day in terms of, like, grogginess, just difficulty kind of, like, jumping to the occasion, brain fog. But I kept I kept taking the drug for about 8 years, and I met a man who I started dating and in the early part of our relationship, and mind you, he is now my husband, so there’s a really happy ending to the story. But he said to me, when you take that drug to fall asleep, you act like a zombie, and it kinda freaks me out.

And I was like, woah, okay. I just got called out, but in a very nice way. So I did what I do not recommend other people do, and that is just cold turkey yourself off of medication, whether it’s a sleep medication or anything. But I was just, I went rogue, you know, and I did it myself. And fortunately, things went swimmingly, and I was able to get off the medication on my own. But again, if you’re listening, please go see your physician, your provider before you do what I did. I slept well for many years after that. Sleep was not an issue until, dun, dun, dun, 2020, March of 2020.

We all collectively experienced the same thing when we were like, what’s going on? Why can’t I go outside? All these terrible things. And my sleep just really started to tank. And I was like, I am not going down that road of insomnia. No way, no how, I’m not doing it again. So I started getting really proactive, and I got myself an Oura ring to track my sleep, started Googling how to sleep better, and I was actually able to get my sleep straightened out in pretty short order. And I got so fascinated with, like, how quickly this all happened and how easy it was that I started just organically sharing on Facebook things that I was doing to help my sleep, and I came to find out, Jen, that many other women in my little cohort were struggling with the same issue. And it dawned on me, quickly after that that this was a big issue for a lot of people and I and I felt like I wanted to help other people do this. Back in 2018, just a quick aside, I had breast cancer, and that diagnosis was, like, a pivotal moment for me in terms of what my life’s purpose was going to be.

I knew then with that diagnosis that my purpose was going to be to help people with their health, but I just didn’t quite know how that was all gonna pan out. And then this fascination with sleep came came on board, and I was like, boom. I’m gonna be a holistic sleep coach. And then, okay. Great. How do you do that? Well, then all of the schooling and all the courses and all the certifications for about a year, and I launched this business in 2021. So it’s been a few years, but it’s been really, really amazing to be able to help people transform their sleep so that they can live a more happy, healthy, fulfilled life.

That is incredible. That’s incredible because that’s what I need. That’s what a lot of my friends need. Like, I was telling you earlier, I just talked to somebody a couple days ago who has not slept well in 20 years without taking something. And those medicines, they’re not really good for you either.

No. They’re not. They they have they have their downsides. I mean, I I do, tend to kind of come off on those drugs pretty, reactionarily, if you if you will. But there is a there is a time and a place for those drugs, and really it is for a crisis situation, for short term. In fact, the pill bottles themselves or the instructions and the the package inserts say they’re not to be used for more than 4 weeks. However, most doctors that I know, that I’ve come into contact with, are potentially giving out refill after refill because they don’t have, unfortunately, the skill set to help their patients with insomnia. So primary care physicians and their training have pretty much been given, like, 2 hours of sleep science education.

So if someone with insomnia comes to them, and they basically do one of 2 things, typically. Now I’m generalizing, of course, there’s outliers, but it’s either here’s a script for a sleeping pill or here’s a list of sleep hygiene tips, which that person’s already researched thoroughly. Right? So my my point being is that they do serve a purpose, but there are other alternatives out there that are better first line for Insomnia than pills. And we can explain what that is if you want me to keep going. So really the first line, recommended therapy for Insomnia is called CBTI, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. It’s been around since the eighties and it has been recommended by the American Academy of Physicians as something to use over sleeping pills because there are no short term or long term side effects from CBTI. And I mean, we could do a whole episode on CBTI, but just succinctly I’ll say that it is really changing your behaviors, attitudes, beliefs about sleep, right, non pharmacologically. So there’s no drugs involved.

And it’s pretty powerful for helping most people. Not every, not everyone’s going to respond, but it’s very helpful for about 70% of people who have insomnia. So, you know, unfortunately, a lot of primary care doctors either have not heard of that, have not heard of CBT I, or they don’t know who to refer to to get that administered to their patient.

So about how long does that take? Because I know that’s not a quick fix, fix, is it?

No. It’s not a quick fix. It it there’s no, like, set time, but I would say in my experience, it’s gonna be a few months for most people. You know, 3 months, maybe more. Some people respond really quickly. Like, I’ve had people respond within, like, a couple of weeks. I’ve had people respond in 5 months. It kinda depends on a a lot of different factors.

You know, like, how long have you had the insomnia? Are you coming off of medication? How motivated are you? How how do you have the ability to control some external circumstances? So various things can depend, can, you know, can, it depends on really what’s going on. There’s no like, okay, 4 weeks and you’re done. Bye. You wish. Right?

Right. Right. Alright. So I want to ask a rapid fire bunch of questions. Is that okay?

Of course.

Alright. Because I got they’re questions that actually you helped me with, and I think they are absolutely exactly what everybody needs to know. Why is sleep so important?

So many reasons.

This may not be a rapid fire answer.

Well So you give

the answer you need to.

I’ll I’ll succinctly do this if I can. So we need sleep really to help carry out a lot of, bodily and brain functions. The first thing that comes to mind is our brain. So we have something called a lymphatic system in our brain. It’s functioning very much like our lymphatic system, but it’s specifically for the brain. And this was discovered not that long ago, 10 years ago or so, it was discovered. And it’s essentially, you can think of it as overnight, your brain is sort of shrinking and the cerebral spinal fluid is is kinda swimming around there. It’s kind of just imagine it’s getting wrung out, kinda like the spin cycle.

So when you’re sleeping, you’re getting, like, an amazing brain cleanse, all these toxins being released. You’re also getting a lot of emotional healing. A lot of emotional work can be done overnight, especially in the REM phase of sleep, which helps us with emotional regulation. And it also helps things like muscle repair, hormone regulation, and learning and memory. So there’s just like so a plethora of things it helps with. And, like, if you Google anything, like anything that you care about in sleep, you’ll see how much the thing that you care about is impacted by sleep.

And is there a set time that everyone needs, like, a set amount of hours we need to sleep, or does it depend on the person?

Yeah. It depends on the person. So the National Sleep Foundation recommends between 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night for adults 18 to 64. But if you read their fine print, it says between 6 10 hours could be appropriate for people. So really what people need to understand is everyone has their own sleep need. It’s sort of like everyone has their own shoe size. You may need more calories to survive than me, vice versa. So we really need to think about our own sleep need, but it’s not just about the hours, and I think our world of sleep has gotten too focused in on the number of hours because you also have to look at quantity, which is, you know, how much REM and deep sleep you’re getting, how much time are you spending in bed, versus being asleep.

You wanna have a high sleep efficiency number. You don’t wanna be lying in bed for 10 hours only to get 7 hours of sleep. That’s not what we want. And we also have to look at consistency. That’s like a real big thing right now. There was a huge study done last January where they were able to determine by looking at thousands of people longitudinally that the mortality rate was lower for people who had a consistent schedule of sleep wake. So people who slept 6 hours a night on a very consistent basis had lower mortality than people who had 8 hours of sleep on an inconsistent basis. So I think that in the public health sphere with sleep and the messaging that’s gonna be happening soon, I think we’re really gonna see the consistency piece bring become brought forth to light maybe over the number of hours.

That’s my prediction.

Okay. That I that’s fascinating to me, but I guess it kinda makes sense because, yeah, then your body knows.

Yeah. It

knows what it’s got to work with. Right?

Yeah. Exactly. Your your your body and brain, they want that consistent regularity to keep your circadian rhythm really healthy. So definitely, definitely consistency.

Alright. I’ve got a question, and this is about me.

Okay. Let’s go.

Here we go, because this is an argument that I have with with people sometimes, and it’s very frustrating. My circadian rhythm is not I am not a morning person. I worked a swing shift for a while, and I would, you know, I would get home at midnight. I would go to sleep about 2 or 3, and then I would get up at noon. And my I was I slept then. I felt good then. That’s how my body wants to be. And even now and my mom used to I oh, she used to get mad at me when I was a kid, because I couldn’t get up in the morning.

And she said, well, you know when you’re adult. But I’m 56, and my body still wants that schedule. And I’ve had people tell me, well, that’s just you. You just wanna sleep in late. But it’s not. Yeah. Okay. What do you think about do people have different circadian rhythms?

Yeah. You’re hitting on a really interesting topic, and the topic is about chronotypes. Have you heard that term before, chronotype?

No.

Okay. So it’s basically what it basically means is what your body prefers as a sleep schedule, your your body naturally, like without any kind of outside influence, you know, disregarding shift work. Like, let’s take that out of the equation. It’s your natural predisposition. So we have a variety of different chronotypes, but your main ones are your early bird and your night owl, and then most people are sort of in the middle. And so what you might be is you might be a night owl on the extreme end. Right? There’s even a word for it, and I don’t like to, like, diagnose people, but there’s something called delayed phase sleep disorder, and that’s when you’re really on the extreme end of being a night owl. And there’s nothing wrong with it.

It’s just people have to, you know, they have to classify these things and kind of put people into boxes. But you you may actually have a really very, very far, you know, leaning night owl chronotype. And what’s cool about this is that if anyone’s ever interested in knowing what their chronotype is, you can kinda find out on a taking an online quiz. It’s a free quiz called the morning it’s called the morningness, eveningness questionnaire, or the MEQ for short. It’s a series of questions, and it sort of asks you what you would do in specific scenarios. At the end, it will come back and tell you, are you like a intermediate morning, a strong morning, or strong evening, intermediate evening? So then you can kind of really understand, like, what your chronotype is. And from a societal standpoint, this is where things go kind of arise, that in our society, our world is pretty much catered toward the early bird person. Just think about, like, have you worked in corporate America before? I have.

Yes. I never will. And it will. I never will again. Nope. But things start early. You know, meetings start at 8 or 9. Right? And a lot of people who are night owls suffer because of this, because their, body and brain aren’t fully alert and ready to receive information and to be productive until 10, 11 AM, right? And so they’re at a disadvantage.

And so when I’m speaking to companies and sharing things about the workplace, my plea is that, like, managers, give your staff some some leg room, some leeway here, let people flex their hours and and try to do work in the hours where they’re most productive and awake. So instead of scheduling an 8 AM staff meeting every day, move it to 10, you know, when basically most people are kind of alert and awake. So, yeah, I’m I’m an early bird myself, Jen. I’m, like, a real early bird, like, too much, and, I don’t I don’t love that, but I but I but, again, it it does, like, my schedule does sort of fall into line with, like, what is, quote, expected of people in the work world. So I have a lot of empathy for the people who are struggling on the other end of the spectrum and are, you know, they’re sleeping in later than the, like, the early bird and they’re, you know, just sometimes judged harshly as being, like, lazy or So much judgment. And it’s just, like, I don’t like that judgment. So And it yeah. And so

thank you. Yeah. And I I won’t schedule anything before 11 AM unless I have to. But it’s funny. All my doctors and everybody knows, and they’re like, oh, I’m so sorry. All I’ve got is 8. And I can make it if I have to.

Yeah.

But it messes me up for a couple of days. I don’t feel well. And so I finally just said, you know, this is my body doesn’t function, and I don’t do it. And, I do get a lot of kickbacks. So this is interesting. And we’ll have well, I’ll have a link to that quiz in the description so people can go take it because because I think that’s really important. And before we’ve I forget, which I shouldn’t, but at the end, where can people reach you? Because I think what you’re doing is so phenomenally important.

Yeah. My website is morganadamswellness.com. So you can reach me there, schedule a consultation, or get a free resource from me. I’ve got, you know, some stuff on there that might be interest of interest to your audience. So, yeah, check check it out.

Okay. And we’ll talk about that again at the end, but I just wanted to make sure.

Yeah.

Okay. Now what causes these middle of the night wake ups? And what can we do to is there anything we can do to make them stop?

Yeah. This is a this is a juicy one, Jen. And, before I before I really answer the question so that people don’t feel like they have to take notes, I do have a free guide on the website called Awake Again at 3 am, your guide to why you’re waking up and what to do about it. I answer all those questions, but, but, so it’s very thorough, but let me just, let me give you some highlights of that. So basically we are wired as humans to have brief awakenings after we complete each sleep cycle. So we have between 5 7 sleep cycles per night. And so it’s normal to have a brief awakening. Often, we don’t even know we’ve woken up.

It’s so very, very tiny. We’re not aware. And evolutionarily those wake ups are designed for scanning our surroundings for safety, right? So, like you and I were probably in very safe homes, but think about like years years years ago, like we were out, you know, in the wilderness. There was there was no security system. There were lions and thing tigers and things waiting to pray. So this is very normal to have that brief awakening. And quite often in the media and in ads, you’ll see, like, sleeps 8 hours straight without being without waking up at all. That’s an incredibly unrealistic expectation of our sleep.

Right? So I just like to lay that out as a sort of a prelude to everything. But the problem the problem lies when we are woken up and then we can’t get back to sleep within a certain amount of time. That creates a lot of angst for us. And one of the interesting things about when you’ve been woken up in the middle of the night is that your brain is really operating from your amygdala. It is actually not in a very rational state. So when you’re woken at 2 or 3 AM and you’re lying there in bed, the thoughts that you have are not the thoughts that you would have at 8 in the morning. They’re different types of thoughts. They’re more catastrophic.

And I can I can attest to this for sure because I don’t wake up a ton at night, but the times that I do, I’m a lot more prone to, like, really weird thoughts? So, like, I’ll I’ll go I’ll wake up in the morning and I’m like, I can’t even believe I thought that last night. Like, why was I even worried about that? That’s so outlandish. So in terms of why why people, other than the little kind of transitionary, wake up in between sleep cycles, why do people wake up at 3 AM? And there are many, many reasons, but I’ll just share a few kind of top line ones that I see a lot. Number 1 is that people have, a blood sugar crash in the middle of the night, and that blood sugar crash really kind of sparks off this cortisol and adrenaline spike, which wakes us up. So a solution to that is potentially having a very small snack like an hour before bed, like maybe some Greek yogurt and some almonds to prevent. That’s a little test you can do yourself at home to see if your wake up is from the blood sugar, dip. Another thing is, especially with women in midlife or men in midlife for that matter, is people waking up too hot. Right? And it doesn’t have to be like a night night sweat or a hot flash.

It could just be you’re overheated. Right? And then you would really just take steps to make your environment cooler. We could save that for another time, but that’s sort of the fix for that. And then the third one I really wanna call out is about sleep apnea. So quite often, what I’ll see, since I’m working mainly with women in midlife, what we know about women in midlife is that their sleep their sleep apnea incidence rates climb. They actually match those of their male counterparts. Right? And 7 and, like, 9 out of 10 women with sleep apnea go undiagnosed. So it’s a real big problem.

So those wake ups, especially if they’re very frequent, you know, every couple hours, that could be a sign of having a sleep breathing issue. And in that case, you would really wanna contact your doctor and have your sleep breathing assessed, and there are many ways of doing that. But, my guide list out more things that could possibly be waking you up and then strategies on how to, you know, get back to sleep because nobody wants to lie. They’re tossing and turning for 2 hours at 3 AM.

Yeah. No. And sleep apnea so I have sleep apnea, but I don’t have obstructive. I have the other one, and my brain just stops even thinking it needs to breathe. So I have a BiPAP instead of a CPAP.

Okay.

And, but the difference in wearing it and not wearing it is huge. Wow. Because, you know, your brain needs oxygen. And so it’s it is is it hard to learn? Yes. To use a machine or whatever? Especially that one because it breathes both ways, but it’s so worth it.

Yeah.

And so if you’re listening and you’re thinking, I don’t want that machine, whatever, you need the machine. It actually extends your life. Doesn’t it? I mean, it can.

Yes. Thank you for sharing that because a lot of times people who have sleep apnea or suspect they might, they don’t even actually wanna know for sure because they don’t wanna have to go through any kind of CPAP or anything. But what I really like to to stress to people is that for people who have mild sleep apnea, there are a lot of alternatives besides CPAP. There’s oral appliances. There’s, different little devices you can get. There’s, like, other options other than CPAP. So CPAP is the gold standard, but with the way sleep apnea technology is evolving, there’s just a lot more options than there were a few years ago. I mean, I’ve seen the few years that I’ve been doing this work, and I don’t treat sleep apnea.

I mean, I have clients who have it, but it’s not my primary thing. But I’ve just seen overall a lot more, options in terms of treating the sleep apnea. So I find that really promising.

Yeah. Me too. I and my dentist has things at his office, and if I could use those, I definitely would prefer them. But it is it is really important, so please go get checked. If you think it’s a thing, it’s yeah.

Yeah. And if you snore or your partner snores, that is like a slam dunk sign. You need to get your breathing assessed. PSA. Yeah. Yeah.

Alright. So what are some things that everybody should know before we they stop listening to this episode? What are the, say, top three things that everyone should know about their sleep?

Yeah. Well, in terms of helping your sleep, if you’re struggling with it, here are the top three things I would recommend doing. Number 1, getting morning light, morning natural light every morning within, like, 30 minutes of waking up. It’s really a powerful signal to your circadian rhythm that the day has started, and you you basically start a lot of hormonal processes that are really critical to your health and keeping your circadian rhythm strong. And then caveat to that, don’t wear sunglasses when you do that. Because I see a lot of, I take my morning walk religiously, and I’ve taken my dogs, and my husband’s there too, and it’s a jolly jolly good time, but we see a lot of people wearing their sunglasses. And the reason why you don’t wanna wear your sunglasses is because your the sunlight needs to hit your retina. And from your retina, there’s this trigger that’s being sent to your suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is your circadian pacemaker, and that’s where all those hormonal and neurotransmitter happenings happen, right? So by wearing those sunglasses, you’re basically negating those wonderful things from happening.

So second thing I would say, we briefly touched on this earlier, is consistency, and especially the morning wake up. Consistency is is really critical. So you really wanna make sure that you’re not swinging or swinging your direction in, you know, more than 30 minutes each morning. You really wanna have that consistency. Again, strengthening your circadian rhythm because our circadian rhythm is not is all usually over 24 hours. It’s not exactly 24 hours for most people, so it’s going to drift naturally so that that consistent wake up time, you know, can help it from drifting too much. And then exercise. So, I mean, we all have been talked to about exercise, like, that’s not a new thing, but what a lot of people don’t realize is, like, how powerful that is to our sleep health.

So there’s, like, 13 different meta analysis showing that exercise helps our our sleep, especially deep sleep as we get into midlife because exercise, helps us build our sleep drive over the day. So if you’ve ever noticed that on days that you’re really active, maybe you’ve had a workout and you’ve been really active all day running around, things like that, you’re probably able to go to sleep more easily, and you may have a deeper sleep. So that’s that’s a that’s, you know, something that I would definitely recommend to people if they’re not doing it already.

Alright. That is incredible. You you’ve answered all of the questions already.

Good. That’s

so cool. Alright. So before we wrap up, is there anything you’d like people to know?

Well, without I think in general, what I’d like people to know is that in order to get better sleep and to strengthen your circadian rhythm, you do not need to go out and buy a lot of fancy devices, pills, potions, and things like that. You really have a lot of your tools at your disposal through nature and free things, kind of the things that we just talked about. So not to say, not to disarm the gadgets because I love myself a gadget. Believe me, you should come to my house and see all of them. But those are things that you would want to do later in your journey of getting better sleep. You would wanna start with the basic fundamental things that are free and accessible before you graduate on up to the biohacks.

Alright. That is that is awesome. And so for those who would like to get in contact with you, can you say again what your contact information is?

Sure. It’s morganadamswellness.com.

Alright. That’s not hard, and it’s gonna be in the description. Just you can click it, so it’ll be really easy. Thank you, Morgan. Oh my goodness. You’ve helped me, and I know you’re gonna help a lot of other people. So I appreciate you.

You’re very welcome, Jen. It’s great

be here.

Learn how to sleep again (finally!)

Transform Your Sleep with Holistic Sleep Coach Morgan Adams – FOF Ep 192

TRANSCRIPT

Share this:

Like this:

Related Posts