My mom was so proud of “her daughter the doctor,” but she’d get a good laugh out of how often sleep now becomes part of the conversation with the people who come through my door.
As a high schooler I was involved in all the clubs, played year-round sports, and was the queen of procrastination. My mother was convinced I’d never get away with waiting until the last possible minute and staying up late until my work was done, and yet time and time again I’d prove her wrong. After all, I was a student-athlete, held leadership roles, and was a National Honor Society student, so surely I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
College was more of the same – more leadership, more activities, and all-nighters for cramming. Ditto as a working grad student and young single mom – class mom, soccer, swim lessons, home-cooked dinners, quality time and volunteering, then back to work after bedtime.
It all worked. Or at least I thought it did, just like so many of the parents and teens who walk through my door.
Looking back, what surprises me most isn’t how little I slept. It’s that none of us questioned it. All-nighters were – and still are – a rite of passage. Working after the kids went to bed was what parents did. Answering emails after midnight was seen as dedication, not a warning sign.
That’s what has made this latter part of my career so eye-opening. After all those years of training and practice, learning all about brain-behavior relationships, how did I never learn just how foundational sleep really is? Why are there only a few neuropsychologists in the U.S. who are also board-certified in behavioral sleep medicine when our work is all about brain health?
And it’s not just mental health professionals. My daughter had outstanding pediatricians, but any comment about sleep at well visits was simply, “Any problems with sleep?”
It never occurred to me that I was “sacrificing sleep.” I was simply living the way so many students, young professionals, and working parents live. There was work to do, people counting on me, and not enough hours in the day. Sleep was whatever happened to fit into the hours that were left. Haven’t so many of us learned that feeling exhausted was simply what adulthood and parenting looked like?
Somewhere along the way, we’ve convinced ourselves that sleep is optional, even if our health, emotions, or attentional focus keeps telling us something is wrong.
The energy drink industry grows by roughly 10% every year, Americans buy about one-third of the world’s energy drinks, and coffee shops seem to appear on every corner.
At the same time, melatonin sales continue to climb. We spend billions on smart mattresses, sleep trackers, Oura rings, white noise machines, weighted blankets, blackout curtains, cooling pillows, and every imaginable gadget promising better sleep.
Those parallels are fascinating, aren’t they? On some level, I think we know we’re tired, but we just don’t seem to know why, or we presume that the solution must come in a bottle, a wearable, or a new piece of technology, thanks to great marketing and influencers.
I stumbled into the world of sleep almost accidentally, being in the right place at the right time, and immediately focusing on sleep as another rehab tool to expedite recovery from concussion. That landed me in an entire field I never knew much about. The more I learned, the more I realized I hadn’t been getting away with my habits after all. I’d simply become very good at functioning despite them.
There’s a difference. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
I’m a biologically wired night owl. I’m at my most productive as many of my friends are winding down. Just as high schoolers continue to take “just one more” AP class while juggling travel sports and resume building, I’m still just as vulnerable to “let me just finish this last report” because I know I can – even though I also know I’ll pay for it.
So when I zero in on sleep with my clients, I’m not speaking from some mountaintop of perfect habits. I’m speaking as someone who’s been there, still works on it, and now understands what’s at stake: attention, learning, memory, emotional regulation, mental and physical health, recovery, and resilience.
Once I understood how profoundly sleep influences the way we think, feel, learn, heal, and function, it became impossible not to view my work through that lens.
Today, when someone comes through my door because they’re worried about ADHD, anxiety, depression, concussion recovery, or other challenges affecting their daily lives, chances are we’re going to spend some time talking about sleep. Not because sleep explains everything. It doesn’t. But because I’ve learned it’s one of the first questions worth asking.
I can’t think of another modifiable factor that influences so many aspects of health and remains so consistently underestimated and overlooked. That’s why I keep talking about sleep, even if I sometimes feel like Don Quixote charging at windmills.
