participantOne:(1140-20259): Welcome to All Things Vegas, Nourishing Self-Care for the Helping Professional. During our time together, we will explore a wide variety of topics relating to self-care, all especially geared to the helping professional. Our guests are all thought leaders and cutting-edge providers in their respective fields of endeavor. And we'll be talking about self-care and self-care for the helping professional.
participantOne:(20340-48680): They will offer not only helpful insights, but practical skills that you can begin to use immediately. Dagny Deutschman is the owner and founder of The Art of Rest. They are a nervous system professional who works from a top-down and bottom-up approach to the nervous system, specializing not only in stabilizing a nervous system through sleep, rest, and habit formation, but also how to access nervous system health through connection, creativity, wonder, and awe.
participantOne:(49440-70800): Dr. Smith received his medical training from the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon. Before that, he completed a master's degree in New York City where he, his research focused on epigenetics and neuroscience. Dr. Smith provides comprehensive naturopathic care for individuals of all ages, focusing on neurological mental health,
participantOne:(71000-95800): gastrointestinal health, and respiratory conditions. He is passionate about supporting the health and wellness of patients across the lifespan and throughout the generations. Dagny, so nice to have you here on the podcast today. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thank you for having me today. I'm really excited to be here. Michael here also. Great, we got the twofer. It is a wonderful pleasure to be back.
participantOne:(96620-117040): In your way of working with the idea of sleep, what are some major things that we should just all know just going into this conversation? Oh, that's a fabulous question. Thank you for asking it. One way that I really like to talk to people about sleep is that sleep is a slow to form vital sign.
participantOne:(117360-140299): So similar to a heart rate or similar to the respiratory rate, we can learn a lot about what's going on in our physical bodies by getting curious about what's happening with our sleep. And I think that while I'm so excited that people are talking about sleep and rest more, one pitfall we have is we have a tendency to really judge our sleep rather than being curious about what it's telling us.
participantOne:(140740-170079): And so like you would do with any set of vital trends, you would look at those trends over time and watch the patterns of what those trends are doing. You wouldn't just take one heart rate and then make a bunch of judgments and assessments off of that one heart rate. And so I encourage people to think about their sleep in the same way and be really kind to themselves about what they're finding. So that's one thing I really like to start off with. And another thing that I really like to think about when it comes to sleep is really emphasizing this.
participantOne:(169880-196060): compassion and curiosity piece about what can I play with because it is a slower to form vital sign it's not as instantaneous if you go on a run your heart rate goes up with sleep health it takes sometimes days sometimes weeks sometimes months before you actually start to get any kind of changes in your sleep one bad night doesn't mean outside you had you're tired the next day right
participantOne:(196420-217459): No, our bodies are incredibly wise. So one bad night, perhaps we can pinpoint why we might think that is the case. And it's not a sentencing that that's what's going to continue happening. It's usually a very intelligent response of the body system to our internal and external environments. So staying out of self-judgment sounds like a big deal.
participantOne:(217740-244120): Huge deal. Yeah. We are in the winter season as we're recording this, and I'm going to guess that there are some differences in sleep through the seasons. Yeah, especially in the place that we live, right? We're recording this podcast around the 45th parallel, which means that in the summertime we get a substantial more amount of light, and in the winter we get a substantial more amount of darkness. Right.
participantOne:(244360-255900): And so when we're thinking about these changes, our dominant culture doesn't really make adjustments for our work, our lifestyle, our relationships based off of this lightness and darkness. But that does not mean that our bodies don't.
participantOne:(256180-280620): So in the winter, on average, we sleep about an hour longer than we do in the summertime. And that's, you know, this average of averages across the whole United States in some of these cases. We also want to be thinking about, yeah, that's a baseline of the research, but where do I live specifically and geographically? And how does the light and darkness change where I specifically live? So for us in Montana, we're different.
participantOne:(280720-305760): probably feeling the urge in our bodies to get more of that sleep. And whether we attend to that or not, the urge is still there. I think you bring up an interesting point. It's like the whole, so if you choose to ignore that. Especially when working with people or educating teams of people, I always try to ask folks to think about what is their value about assessing their sleep? Are they doing it so that they can understand the consequences of overriding it? And,
participantOne:(305460-313440): and deciding to ignore it, because sometimes we have periods or chapters in our life where that's necessary. We don't get to choose certain parts of our life.
participantOne:(313220-339720): And so we have to accept the fact that it is going to have consequences and we can't change them. So how do we manage them or work with them in chapters knowing that we're going to probably have to circle back around to fix or tweak things a little later to make up for that? Or how do we listen to what our bodies are telling us because we do have time and space and resource to listen to what our body is actually telling us that it needs in that moment and then starting to give our bodies those requests?
participantOne:(339720-345500): I'm guessing that you're talking about circumstances like having small children, toddler.
participantOne:(345300-370240): toddlers, you know, that kind of thing. Our schedules are not our own in those circumstances. So that kind of situation, is that kind of the... Yes, absolutely. So things like small children, things like work schedules, you know, most of us don't get to go to our employer and say, I would like to come to work at 1030 today just because I know my particular chronotype is this, and I get my best work done at 11. So I'm not going to have to come in until 1030.
participantOne:(370240-398560): Like that usually doesn't fly as a conversation. And I've been starting to do a lot of work with more shift workers as well or people who work night shifts. And so these folks really don't have autonomy over when they are sleeping and when they are waking up. And that is something that most career people who work shifts are choosing intentionally. And there are difficulties with that. I like to make sure that people understand the agency piece.
participantOne:(398960-419740): about is this my body telling me something and then I'm doing that dance as a choice? Or do I actually have the resources to make this change? And am I refusing to do that? And is that cascading into a series of different problems? We can't talk about sleep without talking about how we are awake. We can't talk about how we are awake...
participantOne:(420140-434700): without talking about how we sleep and this brought to mind the idea of that yin yang tai chi symbol where you have the light the white and the black that are morphing into each other and
participantOne:(434920-456400): it really represents the two parts of a whole. You can't just have one, you can't just have the other, you really do need both. And I think similarly as Dagny's been talking about, too much of one thing, too much of awake when we need sleep or too much of sleep when we need to be awake, can really disrupt our overall well-being.
participantOne:(456800-485320): Looking at that from a molecular level, I was pondering on the relationship with melatonin and serotonin. They're both two hormones that come from tryptophan and all these enzyme processes that make them. But then you have the serotonin, which is primarily responsible for our wakefulness and our arousal and our feel-good, serotonin is the feel-good hormone,
participantOne:(485740-514820): And then that is converted in a two-step process to melatonin, which is in charge of our sleep. So we get these, even in our body, we have hormones that are responding to the light and the dark. Sometimes the messages can get kind of a little blurry. And maybe you guys can both speak to this. They get kind of blurry. It's like, well, I feel like I want to sleep, but maybe it's not really a body request. It's more...
participantOne:(515380-522920): I just don't want to do what I have planned today, kind of a request. You know what I mean? So it starts to get a little murky, I think, for some of us.
participantOne:(523140-549560): I think seasons are a great way to check in with what our goals are. They're a natural progression. We evolved with them. And so our bodies respond to them, just the same way that every other animal body on the planet responds to them. Starting a season, when a season is starting to shift, that's a great time to ask myself, what is the intention with my sleep this quarter, this season, this turning of the year? And then when you have these moments where you're tempted to...
participantOne:(549800-571360): You know, we're great at making different sort of elaborate excuses for what we do and don't want to do on any given day. But if you have an anchoring intention of, ah, this intention of this season is I'm really going to allow myself rest. That's my biggest intention. So when I feel tired, I'm going to honor that tiredness, which sometimes for folks in the winter is an intention. People really try to lean into that seasonality.
participantOne:(571620-591260): then that's great. Anytime you have that daily impulse and you have it, then you can lean into it. However, if your goal for that season, let's say again, it's the same season, it's winter, but your goal that season is, I'm really gonna try to take care of my body this season. And I mean that holistically. And so taking care of my body also looks like eating well and exercising more than I don't.
participantOne:(591699-617720): So when you have that impulse for tiredness, you go, okay, body, I hear you. I'm listening. I hear that you're tired. And this season, we're focusing on strength building. I now know all these other tactics and tools to manage the tiredness or the sleepiness or the alertness. And I'm not overriding you. I'm going to work with you. But to achieve this different goal. And I think when we're looking at nature, looking at what nature is telling us,
participantOne:(617920-646400): that we're aligning kind of that reconciliation with the nature inside of us and the nature outside of us my ancestry comes from sweden and in scandinavia i think they do this really well where they have i think mastered culturally the idea of rest in in the wintertime because my ancestors my great-grandparents they immigrated from a small town like 60 miles south of the arctic circle like
participantOne:(646600-671280): ridiculously high surrounded by reindeer and big forests and big rivers. And in the middle of nowhere, they needed to figure out this balance. And there's two concepts that I love the idea of, and I'm probably going to mispronounce these, but the one is called MIS, M-Y-S, and that's a Swedish idea of like,
participantOne:(672000-689300): of comfort, of feeling cozy, of finding enjoyment in just the simple things, in relaxing and rest. And then the other one is Danish. It's hygge. I don't know how. H-Y-G-G-E. And that's the idea of just more focusing on the coziness in your home.
participantOne:(689620-716780): But weaving in these ideas of coziness into our life with candles, with socks, with a fireplace, with a good book, with relaxing, calming music, with dim lights, like all of the things to create our life to be more in tune to the season, as you were saying, so that we can resonate more, that resonance with nature. And it can really start in just the little things. Yeah.
participantOne:(717280-730820): Oftentimes when I work with people, they come see me and they say like, oh, I want you to fix my sleep. You can't actually fix sleep or you can't actually effort into sleep. That is another thing that people don't actually understand a lot, especially when they're struggling, it makes sense.
participantOne:(731100-752220): But you can't task your brain, brain, it's time for you to sleep now. That's not how it works. You have to create cozy causes and conditions so the body's cortisol will naturally lower, so the mind can be in the default mode network in the brain without that feeling disturbing or like it's elevating your cortisol response.
participantOne:(752339-780020): And then you have to let that drift you off to sleep. Sleep is a passive task. It's not an active one, like going back to that yin and yang symbol, right? It's the yin of that symbol. Thinking about these cultures who have this extreme darkness, of course, they've figured out how to perfect this idea of low lights, the warm fireplace, the insular space, the nice aesthetic of furniture that we're all sometimes lean into it.
participantOne:(779680-800540): It's that inherent communication from external environment to internal nervous system saying, ah, this is a place that you are safe and this is a place that you can fall asleep. One of the questions that's popping into my head, what do we do to be able to honor that and...
participantOne:(801020-818900): show up at work or show up for our families or show up for whatever it is that we're expected to show up for? Yeah, this is a huge question. And like my most humble answer is that I don't know. It's very complicated. It's a puzzle I'm thinking about every day of my nerdy life with this content.
participantOne:(819459-831800): And there are certain tactics that we can take to start to figure that puzzle out for ourselves, right? So the idea of intentionally creating some kind of guiding compass each season helps us titrate.
participantOne:(832260-852940): It helps us in one season focus on one aspect of our health and then on another season choose something differently. And we notice over time if we do that over and over again, we will gravitate towards certain things that hold a lot of personal meaning and value to us. Or we will notice places we've neglected over and over again that now then start chronic health problems. And then we are forced into making those more of our intentions, right?
participantOne:(853939-881980): But the things that we can do that we do have agency over once we figure out what is our guiding intention with sleep, with rest, with connection in these ways, I again bring it back to being compassionate and kind and curious with ourselves. So in a moment where we're noticing that we're missing some kind of nourishment, asking this question of, oh, interesting, why? What is my body trying to tell me about my rest right now? Am I feeling really burnt out with people? Am I feeling really burnt out with work? Why? Why?
participantOne:(882459-910760): Is it my diet? No, I eat pretty well most of the time. Is it my job? No, I generally like what I do. Ah, is it my relationship to sleep? How do I actually feel right as I'm laying down to go to bed? Does that process feel useful or does that bring up experiences of anxiety? And then do I have a tendency to procrastinate it? Am I pushing it off? Particularly when it comes to sleep and rest, we are the only animals that I'm aware of that put rest and sleep off.
participantOne:(911780-917600): If a dog or a cat is tired, it takes a nap as long as there's nothing, you know, in the environment that's telling it it shouldn't.
participantOne:(917780-945960): We are the only animals that when we are in a relatively safe environment that will stay up till 3 a.m. watching YouTube rabbit hole. Right. When you're asking, like, what are the practical things that we can start to do? One really practical thing that we can start to do is just simply get curious about what does it look like when I'm getting ready for bed? What does it look like when I'm getting up in the morning? What does that look like? And just spending one full week of your life getting really granular about spending your relationship there.
participantOne:(946220-973360): And noticing if you do have any hangups or anxieties or places you notice you're dissociating or adding in a new task or reaching for your phone, going back to the curiosity of asking, why? What is that for me? And not pathologizing, not obsessing over it, but just getting really curious about that process. So that's one thing that I say people can do very practically right now. And then another thing I think people can do really practically is...
participantOne:(973720-991720): to start to understand how you can leverage the light and the dark of whatever season you're in, whether it's winter or a different season. If you are at a job where you don't get to choose the hours and we're in a Montana winter and you have to be at work by 7.30 a.m. and the sun's not up yet, one thing you can do is meditate.
participantOne:(991340-1017660): make sure you're getting a light cue in your eyes first thing in the morning. Because that light cue, whether it's artificial or whether it's taking a walk once you get to work and the light is out, that is going to cascade a whole bunch of hormonal systems in your body that communicate to your body in that moment, hey, it's time to be awake right now. Hey, we need to be alert. We need to be attentive. We need to be communicative. We need to have connection with our whatever task we're having.
participantOne:(1017900-1037800): So those, I think, are the two major ones. One is to just generally start to get really curious about sleep and wakefulness. And then the other is intentionally choosing light and intentionally choosing darkness to fit whatever your goal is. As I was thinking about your question, the idea came to mind of the need to let go.
participantOne:(1038119-1047580): When I say that, I think about my eight-year-old son, who is this really energetic kid who loves doing everything and
participantOne:(1048079-1073440): will want to just keep going with his day and like oh let me look up that one thing on your phone because I'm interested in it or I've got to do fold this one origami thing or got to hold the rabbits one more time or whatever else that we're doing his brain just keeps going and my wife and I are trying to tell him you're you're not gonna ever get anything everything done in your day
participantOne:(1074040-1093180): And it's a lesson I've had to learn. And I'm kind of, I think I'm obviously a little bit ahead of where my son is, but I'm never going to be finished with my to-do list. And I think that's hard because as humans, we like to finish. We like to perfect. We like to make sure that there's a nice tidy bow on our day.
participantOne:(1093740-1121680): but we're not going to be able to get there all the time. Sometimes we can, and it's great, but many times we're going to get to the end of the day and there's work tasks undone. The dishes are in the sink. They need to be washed. There's laundry. There's so many things on our mental list, and we literally have to just let it go. If we think about nature, just letting go of the day, of letting go of the light, and being okay with the darkness sometimes,
participantOne:(1122280-1151700): and being okay with the stillness, it's hard. It's really hard. But as we practice it, as Dagny says, we stay curious, we're able to more fully practice that effort of letting go, of letting go of the light, being okay with the darkness, that it's not this big scary thing like it was when we were three years old and scared with the monster under a bed. Like it's okay and it's going to be nourishing.
participantOne:(1152120-1155140): When it comes to rest and nervous system regulation in a...
participantOne:(1155540-1181820): Our perceptions of safety. We have a very different perception of safety in the light than we do in the darkness. And so, yes, as adults, we love to think we're actually not afraid of the boogeyman under the bed when the dark goes down. But our boogeymen are just different as adults. We're maybe not afraid of a literal monster grabbing our ankles, but our boogeyman is, oh, what if I didn't write down all my calendar appointments tomorrow and I miss a really important phone call from a client or a friend? Right.
participantOne:(1182040-1208440): ah, my boogeyman is, ooh, did I remember to pay my taxes this year? Like, oh, it's a deadline on that coming up. Our boogeymen are different. And our brain, we have more access to our prefrontal cortex. And so we can task differently. And when the light goes down, our prefrontal cortex actually shuts almost all the way off. And our limbic system, our emotional centers become substantially more active. And so to just kind of make this very practical for folks who are listening, I'm
participantOne:(1208720-1227600): as we've been saying is there's ways to practice being in the dark that are in service to sleep are in service to health but they're about just choosing maybe if you have an opportunity in the night and you're starting to get curious about your evening and you just have a moment of
participantOne:(1227220-1245480): five extra minutes to choose being in the dark or being unstimulated. It's not about wiping an entire evening routine clean or trying to put your toddler to bed earlier or anything. It's just about taking that moment of noticing your own curiosity about how busy your mind might be or where these boogeymen might exist in your life
participantOne:(1245700-1271580): or noticing that you're feeling really stressed out by everything that did not get done at the end of the day. And then in that moment, very intentionally choosing to turn an overhead light out. Sit down without a podcast in your ears. Take five minutes to just light a candle and then watch the flame of that candle for five minutes. It doesn't mean you have to put your entire life down, but these tiny moments of practicing being in this unregulated state in the dark room,
participantOne:(1271680-1300680): with what is called your default mode network of your brain being active, this little tiny practice adds up over time. And so that by the time we end up laying down to actually go to sleep at the end of the night, if we've practiced this skill throughout the day and throughout our lives, we are then more comfortable with letting go as we go into sleep. The things that you are both talking about are really useful. And I'm also thinking, hmm. LAUGHTER
participantOne:(1300580-1321520): A little bit for me. You know, this is a very, this is kind of a personal question because I'm just like, well, I don't know if I could turn that off. We are born often with a very strong preference to be some sleeping schedule. Many people fall somewhere in the middle, but you can have people who are extreme night owls or extreme morning birds and...
participantOne:(1322160-1339860): This stays relatively stable, this preference, across the lifespan. And the caveat is that at different developmental stages, this preference also shifts at the developmental stage, right? So babies sleep famously all day long, right? And then they wake up and there's not a lot of rhyme or reason anymore.
participantOne:(1339860-1363600): Adolescents, their whole preference shifts backwards dramatically. And this is why teenagers often have this bad rap of being grumpy and moody and needing to sleep in all the time. It's because that's their biological preference. They need that extra time at a specifically different time of day. It's not their fault that they're that moody. We expect them to operate in a way that's completely opposite of what their bodies are
participantOne:(1363600-1390300): Going through something like menopause, right? This also shifts the preference, probably for most adults to be an earlier chronotype or the chronotype doesn't change, but the preference actually shifts to an earlier wake and sleep preference. One thing that people can do is get familiar with what their specific chronotype is. And this chronotype will help you learn a little bit about when does your body naturally start to get tired in the evening?
participantOne:(1390700-1419520): When does your body naturally like to wake up in the morning? And once you know that information, it's extremely helpful because it helps you do almost every other wellness thing at a more optimal scale for your own individual body. If your body is waking you up sort of if you're like a mid-morning chronotype, you're probably going to naturally wake up around 7. And it will be beneficial to start to get light into your eyes immediately at that time. Right? But this also sets when you should be eating during the day.
participantOne:(1419879-1445940): This also sets when you should be exercising during the day. And we don't want to get too perfectionistic. We don't want to get too prescriptive about any of this. But there is an enormous amount of literature in the sleep research body that the further away that you operate from your unique chronotype, the harder it is for your body to exist in general, the worse your objective sleep measures are if you are...
participantOne:(1445800-1467200): have a specific goal of having better sleep and rest. You are more likely to show lower lifespan, more chronic illness, that type of thing. To sort of answer your question, learning about your individual chronotype, very, very useful. And also framing it into what season of life are you in? Are you a teenager? Are you in menopause?
participantOne:(1467200-1482960): Are you someone who, you know, like there's these big developmental stages that are external. There's also some internal ones. Did you just go through a divorce? Did you just move across the country and you now don't have a solid, consistent social connection group? All of this stuff impacts sleep health and wellness
participantOne:(1482760-1506400): So yeah, very important to notice, am I working with my system or am I working against it? And one question I have for you on that note is, as a working individual, I have to wake up at a certain time to get to work by a certain time. And then my kids will get to bed at a certain time and I need at least a little bit of time afterward to decompress.
participantOne:(1506580-1529320): All of those variables in my life. And I don't have the luxury of just like sleeping as long as I would like. From your perspective, how do you discover your chronotype? There's some really great free questionnaires online that you can take. So if you Google it, you can find some resource that helps you find your chronotype. You don't have to pay for them. There's many that will trick you into thinking you have to pay for them. There are some free ones out there.
participantOne:(1529600-1544720): So that's a evidence-based way of finding your chronotype. Another way of finding your chronotype that is a little bit counter to what you just said, but is to think about a time span in your life when you maybe, and you can do this as a thought exercise, right? Because most of us do have a lot of time.
participantOne:(1545220-1570720): things we have to show up for responsibilities but to think about a time in your life let's say you have 30 days all to yourself and you don't have any external responsibilities you can do this thought exercise of asking yourself when would I naturally feel tired when would I naturally start to go to bed when would I naturally want to even though I start to get tired at a certain time what time would I naturally want to then actually attempt sleeping and
participantOne:(1570940-1594640): When would I want to wake up? Those questions. So even just doing that thought exercise, most people can answer those very precisely. People know their preferences on that. And if it feels muddy or confusing, you have a lot of stipulations. Like I said, I've worked with people who have done a lot of night shift work. Sometimes you're in chapters of life that are so long where you actually really lose track of your preferences sometimes.
participantOne:(1594820-1617340): Which isn't bad or good. It's just also something to be aware of. Oh, I have lost track of my preferences. How do I start to figure out what my preferences are given the conditions of responsibilities I have to show up to? Which can be really complicated. There's so much nuance in there. Like saying, in general, I like being up early. I like going to bed early. And I'm
participantOne:(1617600-1632540): There's also some shifting around that can happen because I think some people get like really strict. Yes. I'm kind of guessing from what you're saying is like really not that great of an idea. Yeah, the rigidity around sleep can actually change.
participantOne:(1632320-1660000): cause more sleep problems than help them. The gold standard for if someone is really suffering from chronic insomnia right now is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. This is evidence-based. Most people who go through this process and adhere to all the protocols, right? Just finishing it doesn't mean you actually get better at sleep. You have to go through it and adhere to the protocols. Most of those people have really great effects for up to 10 years after they run this program. It's pretty long-lasting, right?
participantOne:(1660280-1671180): The problem is that the adherence rates for completing CBTI are actually mixed. You see a whole spread. Some people say it's 30%. Some people say it's 70%.
participantOne:(1671500-1696900): But they're mixed. It's a pretty broad thing. There are three major things that I like to plant seeds with people about how what quote unquote healthy sleep should be. And one of them is consistent. One is flexible and one is reliable. So what I mean by this is like when something is consistent is that you should have a certain amount of confidence that you have a consistent enough sleep schedule where your body is not registering that as danger.
participantOne:(1697280-1707360): You also want to have enough flexibility so that you can stay out late, go out with friends, and not feel like that's going to ruin your sleep for the rest of the month.
participantOne:(1707700-1733300): So healthy sleep, if it's not flexible, which is getting to your question, is not necessarily holistically healthy. You might have found your cocktail of sleep and wake and it works really well for you, but if you have to hold it super tight, there may be some underlying things you might want to continue to explore so that it can be a little bit more flexible to live a busy, chaotic, ungovernable life like most of us do.
participantOne:(1733100-1753020): And then the last thing is reliable, right? So this reliability, the reliability piece is that when I have an opportunity for sleep and I do lay down on my pillow, can I trust that my body will actually fall asleep in that moment? One last question as we're kind of wrapping up the conversation is where does this whole, because again we're north,
participantOne:(1753540-1768560): We're north. And it is winter, and it's pretty dark. I think a lot of people struggle with the whole idea of seasonal affective disorder. How does that kind of fit into the conversation that we've been having about this?
participantOne:(1768780-1788900): this idea of sleep. I think when we think about seasonal affective disorder, or seasonal depression as it sometimes is called, we're thinking about how the darkness is actually suppressing our feel-good hormones. When we think about depression, one of the most common, I mentioned melatonin and serotonin earlier,
participantOne:(1789100-1810820): Our serotonin, our feel-good hormone, is actually one of the main neurotransmitters that goes down. And that's because a lot of it is being converted into melatonin in part because of the more pervasive darkness that we see from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. or whatever it is before it gets finally dark or finally light again.
participantOne:(1810820-1831660): Things are cold, we're stuck inside, there's not as many opportunities to be out in nature as easily as we might during the summer time or spring or fall. That can lead to mental health challenges. And so I think physiologically, we're going back to the light, the amount of light in our lives now.
participantOne:(1831960-1861200): collectively, what is it doing to those receptors? How is it triggering the production of melatonin? And then how does that make us feel? Depending on where we live, it might affect us more than maybe we did in other times of our lives. If we moved from somewhere a little more south, a little more sunny, to Montana, to the Pacific Northwest, to Alaska, wherever we are where it's just darker in the winter months, it's
participantOne:(1861280-1887120): it's going to be more challenging. And so giving ourselves, as we talked about, that grace, that permission to be in that place. And there's plenty of tools that we can discuss and talk about to navigate that light therapy being one of them. But overall, just finding peace with ourselves. I think one of my favorite things about science and about learning about these parts of the nervous system or the body is that, for better or for worse, I have this inherent trust that our bodies are really wise.
participantOne:(1887280-1910720): We co-evolved with the settings of our planet. They're not accidental. And so in addition to giving ourself grace and permission for seasonal affective disorder or whatever, you know, maybe we don't even want to call it that. Like I noticed for my own journey when I stopped calling it seasonal affective disorder and just started jokingly with my friends and family calling it my hermit time of the year and just gave myself permission to do.
participantOne:(1910860-1929360): be a little bit moodier, be a little bit more in my art and my things and my solitude. The reframing of that was enormously helpful. Thinking about this as like an evolutionary imperative, right? Like there's a reason that our body produces less feel-good hormones in the winter, and it's not to punish us.
participantOne:(1929600-1950440): It might serve a purpose, and only we individually get to ask ourselves what that purpose might be, but it's a useful question to get curious about is why is this stuff coming up this time of year, and what gift is it also giving me? Not to brightwash it or anything, you know, I've certainly had my own bouts of really deep depression that did not feel like a gift at the time.
participantOne:(1950720-1978560): But I want to just, you know, give permission for folks listening out there that similar as maybe like a microcosm example is when we are in the dark during a day and we put all of our phones down and we put all of our things down and we have that moment of facing our boogeyman at night. It is really good information to know what we are worried about. It's an opportunity to have a mindful confrontation with ourself of, oh, I guess I'm a little bit more worried about than I thought I was.
participantOne:(1979020-2004580): And I started to think about winter as an entire season where I get a lot of time to spend with those recurring themes. And then asking myself, how do I want to navigate them the other three months of the year? How do I over time set myself up better and better each season so that when this spooky times of the winter can come, I can be really gentle with them. I can be kind. I can know I'm supporting myself in them. I know I can support other people in them.
participantOne:(2004380-2032920): Just loving that yin-yang thing. This is the yin time of the year to really be in touch with those. And then, like you said, more practical things like you can do things that help boost those feel-good hormones, like light therapy, intentionally choosing towards that. There's a lot of research that shows if you do learn your chronotype and you have the resources to shift closer to it, your mental health symptoms will go down. The closer we can operate to our chronotype, the lower mental health symptoms we have.
participantOne:(2032920-2059859): So there are strategies we can use. But in general, I think kindness and curiosity about what is this season trying to tell me right now is a good play to start. As we wrap up here, anything that we did not touch on that either of you want to bring to the surface here? I will throw sort of a maybe like a little bit of a curveball out there. But it is important. And I think the more research I do and the more.
participantOne:(2059980-2086799): anecdotal experience I have with it is also winter is a beautiful time to get curious about your dream content as well. And that could be an entirely another episode of a podcast of what is so potent and interesting and also wellness based about listening and paying attention to dream. But that is one thing that I would say that we didn't touch on at all. It didn't really fit into the conversation well, but it isn't unrelated. While we have this
participantOne:(2087060-2117660): moody or more internal part of the year where we're tending to our rest and wake cycles. A bonus round of that is that we do dream more typically at this time of year and that we can get curious about that. Excellent. Thank you so much, both of you, for joining us today. All Things Vegas is brought to you by Western Montana Area Health Education Center, working to recruit and train healthcare professionals, and by the Red Willow Learning Center, working to make resilient skills available to everyone.
participantOne:(2117900-2128160): We are very grateful for the sponsorship from Matura Health and Wellness Clinic in Missoula, Montana, who is sponsoring a series of six podcasts.