Tony Gavin
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Here are some expert tips on how to get the best night’s sleep every time
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From the viral TikTok Sleepy Girl Mocktail to the importance of food, hormone balance, and routine, we hear from sleep science coach and the founder of The Sleep Care Company on how to guarantee a good night’s sleep.
If you struggle to fall asleep at night, wake up feeling groggy, or even just fall victim to the ‘always on’ culture we’re living in, you need to make 2024 the year you prioritise your downtime.
A woman who struggled with insomnia during years of burning the candle at both ends, Anne Marie Boyhan set about creating a solution in the form of The Sleep Care Company. A certified Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner and sleep coach, Anne Marie wrote a Sleep Journal to help build a consistent evening routine and nourishing sleep rituals, developed an Insomnia Solution private coaching programme, and prides herself on helping her clients take control of their sleep.
We sat down with The Sleep Care Company founder Anne Marie Boyhan to chat about her business, sleep hacks, and top tips for overcoming insomnia.
What inspired you to start The Sleep Care Company?
After two years spent struggling with sleep, I became passionate about helping others sleep well. I was also frustrated as I couldn’t find the sleep and emotional help that I needed in one place — insomnia can be an isolating journey. So, I decided to leave my corporate career and retrain, creating a career and a lifestyle by design and on my terms. The Sleep Care Company was founded in early 2021.
What were your struggles with sleep and how did you overcome them?
I was stressed, sleep deprived and—little did I know it until the doctor said it to me—rapidly burning out. A successful and award-winning marketer in the corporate world, working full time and having two babies at home (whom I never saw as I worked so much), I never knew how to unwind. I was always on at work or for my family, and I didn’t know the meaning of a good night’s sleep for two years.
This led to a health scare and that trip to the doctor, who told me I needed some time off. That moment was my wake-up call. It turns out that the stress was causing my sleep deprivation, but also other things that I never knew about until I became obsessed with the topic of sleep and how to get better. I read every book and (nearly) every sleep science paper, gobbling up everything the sleep experts advised.
I believe sleep issues are both physical and mental and I have now based my method, The Insomnia Solution, on this premise.
I wrote The Sleep Journal, a 90-day wellness journal to guide you to better sleep. I left the corporate world and studied to be a sleep science coach for adults and studied functional diagnostic nutrition. I carried out nutrition lab tests on myself and found out I had a parasite, liver and blood sugar issues alongside an autoimmune disorder called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis — all contributors to my insomnia. Who knew?
I worked with a functional diagnostic practitioner to resolve these issues through health coaching, involving diet and lifestyle changes, emotional support and accountability to take daily action. I’ve learned that food really is medicine and that the body keeps score. Once my health came back, so too did my sleep.
I believe sleep issues are both physical and mental and I have now based my method, The Insomnia Solution, on this premise. I am helping clients around the world resolve their insomnia via my telehealth clinic. I also believe in educating people about sleep and have made it my mission to change the narrative, that to be productive, we need to prioritise sleep.
If a leader is getting up to speak and they haven’t slept well, what message does that send out to employees? Functioning on four hours of sleep is the equivalent of being drunk on the job. As part of this mission, I offer sleep wellness talks, webinars and workshops to companies as well as help shift work employees.
What are the most common causes of sleep deprivation you see in women?
Stress, for sure. The mental load that women carry is far greater than men, and usually, sleep is the first thing to go when we are busy and stressed. We are also conditioned by society not to prioritise sleep and not to prioritise ourselves, but you can’t fill anyone else’s cup until yours is full. I learned that the hard way.
When we sleep well, we improve all parts of our lives, mentally, physically, health-wise, and more importantly, performance-wise. We can conquer the world once we sleep well. It’s no wonder that professional athletes prioritise their sleep. I see it as the secret sauce for being sharper and more focused in your job.
Often, people come to me with insomnia, and they don’t know what’s caused it and it’s my job to find the root cause and fix it.
How do hormones play a role in our sleep quality/duration?
Hormones are crucial for sleep and quality of life. For example, after a bad night’s sleep, studies have shown a reduction in leptin and elevated ghrelin, affecting our appetite and our weight. The human growth hormone does its best work between 10pm-3am, so if we don’t sleep during that time, it’ll affect our fat metabolism, our collagen production and appearance the next day — it’s called beauty sleep for a reason.
Hormones play a huge role and that’s why when I work with clients, checking their hormones and doing a full MOT to look under the hood to see hormones, gut health, neurotransmitters, minerals, and heavy metals, as well as look at the psychological and behavioural side of sleep and their autonomic nervous system.
I also see imbalances in testosterone not just causing insomnia, but feelings of apathy and a lost zest for life.
Cortisol is major, it’s our stress hormone but also shows how our circadian rhythm is doing. For example, if you are waking in the night it could be as a result of a cortisol spike and there are many reasons and internal stressors that cause this, as well as external stressors like pressure at work. We are diurnal creatures, built to sleep at night and be awake during the day, and as such we need cortisol in the morning to wake us up. Eustress, the good cortisol, gets us through a presentation to 100 people, for example. If our cortisol and circadian rhythm are off then it affects our sleep.
Our sex hormones also affect our sleep, as does our thyroid hormone which I see huge issues for women aged 40+ affecting mood, weight and sleep. Regarding our sex hormones—testosterone, oestrogen, progesterone, DHEA—if one of them is out of balance, it can have a knock-on effect on our sleep. It’s like an orchestra, all the instruments should be playing in tune.
I also see imbalances in testosterone not just causing insomnia, but feelings of apathy and a lost zest for life. It’s often a relief for people when I give them their results on paper and know that they’re not going mad, that it’s not all in their head and knowing that they can get a sleep plan and do something about it.
I would say if your sleep is affected and you’re in your 40s or 50s, get your hormone levels checked and get the right support because perimenopause and menopause really disrupt our sleep, but we can do something about it.
Try the viral TikTok Sleepy Girl Mocktail one hour before bed: sugar-free tart cherry juice, Priz Mag magnesium bisglycinate, and sparkling water. Tart cherry juice contains tryptophan and melatonin which can help regulate sleep.
Is there a specific nighttime routine or any rituals you recommend and why?
Would you believe that the best ritual you can adopt for sleep starts with the time you wake up? So, my one tip above all others, would be to adopt a consistent rising time and get up at the same time every day. This is more important than what time you go to bed.
The second most important ritual is also to do with your morning, and that is to get morning light within a half hour of waking. This is outdoor light if possible, so get outside, go for a walk and if it’s sunny, don’t wear your sunglasses for the first 15 minutes. This signals to the suprachiasmatic nucleus in our brain, which controls our body clock and releases the correct hormones we need for sleep at the right time.
If you can’t get natural light first thing in the morning, for example during the dark Irish winter, then use a SAD lamp or light therapy lamp. Place it beside you as you get ready in the morning or behind your laptop if you start working right away, and this will give you the right amount of light exposure (10,000 lux is what we need).
What should we NOT be doing before bed?
Scrolling on our phones in bed! As a nation, we’re really bad for it. There was a recent study done by furniture retailer DFS on 1,000 Irish people that found that we are 2.5 times more likely to be scrolling on our phones than our neighbours in the UK, who preferred reading before bed. There’s definitely a trend towards being always on. In psychology, they call it ‘reverse bedtime procrastination’, where we deliberately deprive ourselves of sleep in favour of scrolling our phones or watching Netflix, because after a hard day’s work, sure we deserve it. Netflix has even stated that their biggest competitor is sleep.
My advice about screens is to have a phone curfew, and switch it off one hour before bed or have it charge outside your bedroom. The blue light from phones disturbs our melatonin production which we need for sleep. I like the F.lux app for your laptop – it turns your screen to amber lighting so that if you really must work late, then there’s no blue light disturbing your melatonin for sleep later.
Any common misconceptions people still believe?
There’s a common misconception that we sleep less as we age, and that’s simply not true. I have clients thriving on seven or eight hours of sleep into their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond who had insomnia and survived on three, four, or five hours of sleep previously. It’s simply that the brain is not capable of generating that sleep, which it and the body still need. And, based on my training in sleep science and education in functional diagnostic nutrition, I believe it’s because the body is out of balance and doesn’t send the right signals to the brain. Getting older doesn’t have to mean sleeping less.
How does what we eat or drink affect our sleep?
Avoid caffeine after 2pm, and switch your afternoon cuppa to a decaffeinated tea or coffee or an herbal tea. I like the idea of a calming tea before bed as part of my winddown ritual; chamomile is known for its sedative properties.
Drinks that are good for sleep include tart cherry juice. For Dry January, or any time of year, try the viral TikTok Sleepy Girl Mocktail one hour before bed: sugar-free tart cherry juice, Priz Mag magnesium bisglycinate, and sparkling water. Tart cherry juice contains tryptophan and melatonin which can help regulate sleep. Magnesium may help you sleep better by regulating your gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) levels. GABA is a neurotransmitter and amino acid that plays a crucial role in sleep and is often low in people with sleep issues. It’s a science-backed sleep cocktail!
If you wake in the night hungry or with heart palpitations, it could be due to blood sugar issues. Avoid starchy or sugary foods during the day, as they affect your blood sugar.
For all of us chronic overthinkers, how can we ‘switch’ our brains off at night? Does the Sleep Journal help with this?
Find your off switch that will get you into the parasympathetic or ‘rest and digest’ mode. For some, that’s meditation, for others, it’s breathing. I recommend sleep journaling. When I struggled with sleep, I couldn’t find everything sleep-related in one place, so I created the Sleep Journal. It’s got meditations for when you can’t sleep, bedtime yoga poses and sleep tips from the world’s top sleep experts.
The main pages are for ‘brain dumping’, which is based on a study by Baylor University and involves writing a list of all the things you need to get done the next day. Writing the list allows you to ‘dump’ everything that’s swirling around in your head onto paper, which in itself is proven to help sleep rather than using a digital format. The study showed that people who wrote to-do lists fell asleep nine minutes earlier than people who wrote about their accomplishments the previous day. Plus, the more specific the lists were, the sooner the people fell asleep.
Anything else you’d like to add?
No one should have to live with insomnia. If you’ve tried everything and still can’t sleep, consider The Insomnia Solution at The Sleep Care Company, a one-to-one sleep coaching health program using testing and assessments to find out what’s causing your insomnia in both the mind and the body to get you sleeping well again.
Anne Marie Boyhan, a sleep expert and functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, is a member of the IMAGE Business Club. For more information, visit The Sleep Care Company website.
Feature image via Tony Gavin
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