Unlocking Health and Happiness Through the Power of Restful Sleep - Helen Sernett

What if the key to unlocking joy and better health was simply getting a good night's sleep? That's exactly what Helen Sernett, founder and host of the Sleep Lists podcast, discovered on her transformative journey from battling depression and anxiety to reclaiming her life with the power of rest. Join us as Helen shares her personal story of overcoming a myriad of health issues by focusing on sleep, revealing how it became the missing piece in her health puzzle. Together, we explore the profound impact of quality sleep on everything from reducing food sensitivities to enhancing neuroplasticity and emotional well-being.

Discover practical steps to prioritize rest and improve your quality of life. We discuss simple actions, like putting your phone away earlier or indulging in soothing auditory experiences, inspired by Helen's own Sleep Lists podcast. These small changes can lead to significant improvements in mood, decision-making, and overall happiness. We also emphasize the importance of celebrating small wins and being forgiving with oneself during self-improvement journeys. Share these insights with someone who might benefit, and don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. Embrace the art of rest, and let it guide you toward a more joyful, fulfilling life.

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Chapters

• 0:07 Unlocking Joy Through Better Sleep
• 12:16 The Power of Quality Sleep
• 21:50 Prioritizing Rest for Joyful Living

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Welcome to Pleasure Principles, the podcast where we uncover what really brings joy, connection and meaning to our lives. I'm your host, abhik, and today we are diving into a topic that, let's face it, most of us underestimate until it's a problem. Yes, I'm talking about sleep. Yep, the thing we do for a third of our lives. If you're lucky, definitely so. But here's the twist sleep isn't just about feeling rested, it's all about living fully, showing up for your passions and, dare I say, like unlocking your pleasure potentials. And who better to guide us through this dreamy territory than today's guest, helen zernit?

Speaker 2: 1:02

so welcome to the show, helen thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate being here.

Speaker 1: 1:06

Lovely, lovely. So, helen, like before we start, I'll quickly love to introduce you to all of our listeners. Dear listeners, helen is the founder and host of the Sleep Lists podcast, a sleep enthusiast and someone who's reclaimed her life by mastering the art of rest. So Helen's story is proof that better sleep isn't just a luxury, it's a lifeline. Absolutely, yeah, exactly. So grab your favorite cozy blanket or your coffee, or drink any drink which you like, depending on your current state, and let's get into it. So welcome to the show again.

Speaker 2: 1:47

Thank you so much. I really appreciate being here and I'm always happy to talk about the value and importance of sleep in terms of getting the most joy out of our lives.

Speaker 2: 1:57

I certainly was in a position where I had a lot of depression and anxiety and in order to where I had a lot of depression and anxiety and in order to overcome those, I really did need to focus on the sleep that I needed in order to be able to help change the patterns in my brain, which would ultimately help me have more joy in my life.

Speaker 1: 2:19

Exactly, exactly. So mean, as always, like you have so open about how sleep transformed your life. So if you can take us back to that moment when you realized that sleep was the missing piece in your puzzle, yeah, so I was really burnt out from work.

Speaker 2: 2:40

I had taken a leave of absence. I started to just sort of make a list of all of the things that were problematic with my health and diagnoses that I'd gotten food sensitivities, that I was having a lot of different things that were kind of all piled up on top of one another, and you know that that page of symptoms and diagnoses filled up a college ruled piece of paper right like listed out. So it was a lot of different things, from skin irritations to hair loss, I mean, there was just a lot of things on there. So I was experiencing a lot of different um issues and it I was trying to figure out if I could address more than one of them with one approach, right yeah and that's when I started looking at the vast majority of them having some primary or secondary relationship with sleep.

Speaker 2: 3:53

Food sensitivities can be caused by inflammation, which can be caused by lack of sleep. Depression and anxiety are oftentimes linked to lack of sleep. They also cause not getting good sleep, so I was having issues on both ends of that and, all of that said I okay, I need to take a step back and think about my sleep, particularly as it related to depression and anxiety, because, like I said, I needed to change some thinking inside of my brain. I needed to return to a place where the thoughts were not invasive, intrusive, you know, dark essentially, and I needed to. I'd been in a place like that before, so I knew my brain was theoretically capable of it, but it wasn't doing it. Now, my brain was theoretically capable of it, but it wasn't doing it now.

Speaker 2: 4:49

And how could I use what I learned about neuroplasticity to help retrain my brain? And what I learned was you can't retrain your brain if it doesn't get enough sleep. Your brain actually needs the sleep. It needs it to clean out toxins, it needs it to myelinate synapses, which is a fancy way of saying learn new stuff, and it needs it to process emotions and the events of the day. So I was very focused on my depression and anxiety because it had come to the forefront of my long list of symptoms and was the most debilitating at the time, and so I was really coming at sleep from the perspective of helping to fix my depression and anxiety. But it had a lot of follow-on effects.

Speaker 1: 5:44

Understood.

Speaker 2: 5:45

So that was that moment, that moment that I looked at that list and said a lot of these things could probably be associated with poor sleep exactly I.

Speaker 1: 5:55

I really love how you emphasize the small wins. I mean so relatable, definitely sometime. It's just about kind of choosing to uh, prioritize, rest when the world tells us hustle, hustle, hustle harder. So yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:11

Well, and it's not, it doesn't. I mean, I can fall very easily into the trap of thinking you have to be perfect, and so it is really important, when anyone is starting on a journey of self-improvement, whatever that looks like for them, that they are forgiving with themselves and let themselves, you know, have appreciation for the small wins and appreciation for being a little bit better, you know, every day. Right, there's that expression 1% better every day, and that is definitely something that is a little bit easier to strive for than pure perfection.

Speaker 1: 6:55

Exactly and also, like your podcast, sliplists serves up bedtime dreams in the form of up bedtime dreams in the form of lulling lists. So how did that idea come about? I mean?

Speaker 2: 7:14

did you create it for others or as a tool for yourself? First, I created it as a tool for myself. More than anything else, I was looking for an auditory tool that could help me fall asleep. I'd tried different colors of noise. I'd tried different podcasts, meditations.

Speaker 2: 7:32

A lot of what was available to me were stories, like boring stories that were supposed to help you go to sleep.

Speaker 2: 7:41

But I found that a story has a beginning and a middle and an end, and even if it takes someone a long time to get there, I need to know what happens, and so I was very annoyed with how long they were taking to tell a really dumb story. So, for me, I knew that a long time ago, as a child, I used to count myself to sleep, and I wanted to be able to do that again, but the sort of intrusive thoughts of my anxiety were getting in the way of me being able to do that, and what I wanted was somebody outside of my head to just do the counting for me and I could follow along, but I knew what was coming next and so I could go to to sleep, not having to worry about how it ends. Essentially, so I made that recording for myself um put a little bit of sleepy music underneath it, and that became the first episode of work hard, sleep when you are dead.

Speaker 1: 8:51

So why do you think this mindset is so, so pervasive? I mean, how do we start to shift?

Speaker 2: 9:23

no-transcript, that you think about taking your medicine you know if your doctor prescribes it you're going to take it or if you want to think about it in terms of longevity of your life, getting enough sleep, dedicating one third of your life to sleep, can extend your life by five years. One third of your life to sleep can extend your life by five years. There's research to back that information. It tends to be more impactful for men, actually, than for women. Women get about two and a half years out of good sleep, whereas men tend to get five, and I don't know if that's just like globally that men get less sleep overall or what, but it tends to be more impactful on men.

Speaker 2: 10:11

But yeah, I really had to prioritize my sleep, so I had to say no to doing things that were going to keep me up late at night. I had to make sure that I was home and well fed and that I was ready to go to bed when it was time to go to bed. I had to really solidify a bedtime routine. That I did regularly to try to make sure that I was kind of giving my body all of the signals that it needed to go to sleep, and you know that it needed to go to sleep, and you know I still struggle with it occasionally, so it's a work in progress, but I do really try to prioritize my sleep as a way to know that it will help me feel better.

Speaker 1: 11:02

Exactly yeah, and so you have also shared uh. Sleep was the linchpin in resolving multiple health challenges. So, if you can, uh share like how improving sleep had a ripple effect on your overall well-being yeah, so, um, a lot of things improved pretty quickly.

Speaker 2: 11:29

So I was medicating for my depression and anxiety prior to really taking a focus on my sleep. Adding sleep into that mix really helped support the effectiveness of those medications and ultimately led to me being able to wean from those medications about a year and a half later. So that was one benefit of sleep, too, and like a direct correlation, right. Like I was taking, I needed a medicine and now I don't need a medicine. Similarly, I have hypertension, and so I was on several blood pressure medications. I still need those, but I need a lot less of them, right, so my dosages have been reduced significantly.

Speaker 2: 12:16

I had a growing list of food sensitivities like it was getting a little scary the number of things that were causing me to have indigestion, painful bloating, et cetera and that list is significantly reduced now.

Speaker 2: 12:32

So there's a lot more foods that I can enjoy, which, of course, leads to greater pleasure in my life.

Speaker 2: 12:38

I enjoy food a lot, so it was getting very frustrating to have to avoid a lot of foods and I can now tolerate you know I was big ones for me were gluten and dairy.

Speaker 2: 12:51

I can tolerate those much better now, um, and I can have a better sense of when too much is becoming, like what I'm starting to have too much, like I understand and can listen better to my body and what it's telling me, because I'm better rested and I don't have a thousand signals going at once. I can you know now, finally, sort of listen all at once, because I think part of what was happening was, as I was suffering from insomnia, my body had a lot of different alarm bells going off right. Like my body was telling me, like there's lots of things wrong all over the place, and as I started to take back my sleep, I was able to have a little bit better understanding of which inputs were causing which alarms and have a little bit more control over them overall. So those are just some examples of where it's been valuable to my health of where it's been valuable to my health Exactly, Wow.

Speaker 1: 13:49

And then also like, how does neuroplasticity tie into the sleep? Like, if you can share, yeah.

Speaker 2: 13:58

Yeah. So neuroplasticity is kind of just a fancy way of like. We can learn stuff. Our brains can change and grow and we can learn how to do new things. I was really interested in that when it became obvious that there was a problem with my thought process and that happens all in my brain. So I learned. I kind of dove into neuroplasticity and what it means, and a big part of that is like where your brain builds its major connections.

Speaker 2: 14:30

So if you've ever seen high level athletes who practice you know, their gymnastics all the time, they can without thinking make their whole body tumble in ways that would literally break our necks if we tried it. You know, you and I Right, literally break our necks if we tried it. You know, you and I right. They have myelinated those synapses and also improved their muscle tone. But also, like it's part of it is brain work right, like they've. They know how to make those muscles work.

Speaker 2: 15:00

Similarly, you see people who practice math. You know math a lot. They are suddenly really good at it and can do math. You know complex math problems in their head. They've kind of really built up those connections in their brain and the way to do that is both through practice and repetition and to get enough rest that you have the time to build those connections in your brain. Literally, your body has to take material and create what is called myelination over that synapse. So every time you bring two thoughts together, kind of in a new way and differently, you make a little connection in your brain and that's called a synapse. If you use that a lot it is a signal to your body that that's a frequent connection and they want to kind of. Your brain cells are like all right, we got this, we'll make this an easier connection. It won't be so hard, it will. You know. You make the door a little bigger, you make the ability for that connection to happen a little bit thicker and so those neurons are myelinated.

Speaker 2: 16:12

Those connections, those actual neurological connections, are what's called myelinated. It essentially the myelin is the sheath that goes over to make that connection. You can kind of think of it like if you were to put two pipes together. And you put two pipes together and there's like and you put two pipes together and then you connect them with like a nut or something right around them. Myelin is that nut and so myelination is just making that nut stronger and making the connection stronger. That process building that happens best when you're sleeping. Yeah, so that is the direct connection between neuroplasticity and sleep. Anything that you're trying to do in your life to make changes means that you have to make new connections, and if you want to make those changes into habits, those connections need to be myelinated, and so you need sleep in order to do that as quickly as possible.

Speaker 1: 17:09

Wow, that's really lovely. And so I mean, let's bring it back to here, Like how does getting quality sleep enhance our capacity of the connection, joy and the pleasure?

Speaker 2: 17:31

enhance our capacity of the connection, joy and the pleasure. Yeah, so I just want to take it like really down to basic levels and say that I think we all have experienced like a little baby that's crying and that they're fussy and they're not being there on their best behavior and they're causing their parents all kinds of stress and their parents will say, oh, she's just tired, she missed her nap or, you know, he didn't really get enough sleep last night. I want to remind people of that because that connection between being cranky and not your best self and being tired doesn't go away in adulthood. It's still there. We just cover it up better, like you know, with social cues and you know trying to be more polite, etc. But essentially we make significantly better decisions and we can present our best selves into the world when we have good rest and that gives us more opportunities for joy in our life.

Speaker 1: 18:30

That's interesting. Definitely, yeah. And and also on this, like, what's the one thing that you would tell someone who doesn't think sleep impacts their happiness?

Speaker 2: 18:46

Yes, I don't know if they, if that's their true belief, like I don't know how much I can do to change their minds, but, um, I think, I think maybe there are people who don't, who don't think that sleep is being important, and so I think I would say, if you're open to it, just try it. Try it for 30 days. Try getting eight hours of sleep a night, and you know what? You don't even have to get the sleep. Just keep that window open eight to nine hours open, and those are your in-bed resting hours. And try doing that for 30 days and tell me if you don't feel more joy in your life Wow, 30 days.

Speaker 1: 19:28

And tell me if you don't feel more joy in your life.

Speaker 2: 19:31

Be your own experiment of one. Sometimes you just have to be your own experiment of one person and figure it out for yourself. There's lots of science too that backs up what I'm saying. I am by no means out here on a limb saying radical things, but there is a culture of like, hey, I can, you know, do everything on two hours of sleep, or six hours of sleep, or I function best when I'm, you know, up and awake at 4 am and I stay out until 12 midnight. Yeah, that is, um problematic. So if you can't get all of your eight hours of sleep in one window, I recommend breaking it up into two windows. Like, if you can get a six hour window and a two hour window, that's still eight hours. So try taking naps. If, um, you're really finding it difficult to have continuously eight hours, or if you're in a job like this, where you're up at 1 am because you have to do interviews on a global schedule, just make sure that you're allowing for time throughout your day to have sleep and rest.

Speaker 1: 20:38

Exactly, that's very true. Yeah, definitely we need to maintain that sleep schedule for our health, uh, because it's our health and not anyone else's health. So definitely we should focus on health first. And yeah and uh, helen, this has been such an enlightening conversation with you and thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and showing us that sleep isn't just the rest, but it's about the renewal and rediscovery. So, for the listeners, yeah, it's truly restorative.

Speaker 2: 21:11

It's truly restorative. It can provide a lot of benefits. I took about a year off of convalescence. I called it where I was, basically just I would sleep whenever I felt the least bit tired, and it was incredibly rejuvenating and helpful. So, yeah, I strongly recommend getting as much sleep as it feels your body needs, but trying to have that be a minimum of eight hours.

Speaker 1: 21:44

Minimum of eight hours. Yeah, that's true. That's very, very true. And with this, definitely, dear listeners, this is for all of you, dear listeners, what's one small step you can take tonight to prioritize your rest? Think about it. It's very simple. You need rest, so maybe it's uh, also, you can. You can. Maybe it's listening to helen's soothing, sleepless podcast, putting your phone down earlier or simply reminding yourself that you deserve to recharge. So if you enjoyed this episode, yeah, so if you enjoyed this episode, yeah, so if you enjoyed this episode, then please share it with a friend or someone who could use a little more rest in their life, and do not forget to subscribe, leave a review and join us next time as we explore more of what brings joy and connection to our life. So until then, sleep well and stay curious. Thank you so much.