Obviously there are the baby years, which everybody grinds through. But I’ve also suffered from fibromyalgia, an autoimmune condition, since my early 20s. One of the most debilitating symptoms is a lack of deep, refreshing stage 3 sleep and REM sleep. I could sleep 10 hours and wake up feeling as though I’d pulled an all-nighter. For 15 odd years I existed on coffee, Nurofen and sugar, anything to get me through the day. The symptoms lifted during my first pregnancy (hormones, people, hormones!), but came back with a vengeance after Sacha’s birth. A newborn + chronic fibro, what a combination.
As anyone will tell you who’s suffered from a sleep disorder, it’s a dark and lonely place.
You never feel like yourself when you’re sleep deprived; you’re snappy, teary, foggy. You can barely work, you push your family away, you think about sleep from the moment you wake up and all through the night. I don’t think it’s too much to say that the single most important thing in life is good sleep, because from it comes good health.
After chancing upon an article by a British GP who found that giving up high-oxalate foods significantly alleviated her fibro symptoms, I started my recovery journey. Through a combination of diet, hormonal adjustments, supplements and yes, the inevitable lifestyle changes, I can happily say that I’m 80-90% ‘cured’. I do have the occasional flare, and there are still some pieces of the puzzle that are missing, so I’m constantly researching, learning and testing.
When I started looking for a new career after having sold my fashion business, I realised that I wanted to do something that I had a deep personal experience of. Although sleep is suddenly really zeitgeisty, I found that all the articles in the papers and mags were about the importance of sleep (no, really?!) but very little was about actionable, scientifically robust things that you could do to improve its quality. So I decided to study as much as I could, particularly around hormones, thyroid health and autoimmune disease, draw on my psychology degree and personal experience in order to help others re-discover the life changing joy of a full night’s sleep.
I would love to share what I’ve learnt to help you get back to yourself. Creative, energised, happy.
I’ve got a first class BSc in Psychology from Durham university, a diploma in sleep science from the University of Michigan, a diploma in CBT and I’m an accredited practitioner of Christine Hansen’s Sleep Like a Boss method. In my previous life I ran an award-winning wholesale fashion business, manufacturing in the Far East and selling our clothing to department stores all over the world. What this means is that I understand first hand the pressures of working life, of juggling a family and a career, and what it means to lie in bed at night, wide awake, working out how to plug a 500k cashflow hole!