Support Your Sleep Naturally
When is the last time you slept like a baby? Like that really deep sleep that comes on naturally and keeps you sleeping all night long? What if I told you it is within your reach with just a few small habit changes, a few shifts in your environment and a few natural tools to maximize your time between the sheets?
Sleep deprivation is all you hear about when you’re pregnant. “Oh, get your sleep now. You’ll never sleep again!” was the soundtrack of my last trimester. Because of that, I never quite understood the saying “sleep like a baby” until I had Charlie. If I’ll never sleep again, why would you compare good sleep to sleeping like a baby? Aren’t they up at all hours of the night? It’s because babies have the ability to crash hard almost anywhere and sleep through anything.
Isn’t falling asleep and staying asleep at the root of most adult sleeping issues?
Case in point - that photo of Charlie up there is him passed out on my chest in a busy corner cafe in Hanoi, Vietnam in 100+ degree weather at 11 weeks old. If you know Hanoi and the motorbike traffic, you know that it isn’t exactly a restful soundtrack. Yet, there he is. Blissfully asleep against my chest.
And to the right? Still sleeping while I literally stand in the middle of a busy intersection in Hanoi…
That’s the sleep I’ve chased since leaving college.
Sleep changes as we get older and go through life transitions. Just because something that has worked in the past stops working doesn’t mean you’re doomed. There are so many natural ways to support sleep. You just have to be up to the challenge of trouble shooting what will support your body best.
I want to start this post by saying that I am not anti-medication to help you sleep. Some of the closest people to me in my life have needed prescription help for sleep at different points in their lives. If this is what you need, go for it! You do you and don’t hold any shame around that.
But if there is something inside of you that wants to explore other options or you’re just sick of the side effects, this post is for you. Or maybe you’re someone who has ok sleep but wants to maximize it by going deeper into sleep cycles. Or you’re someone who has tried a handful of natural sleep solutions and still find it is hard to fall asleep or stay asleep.
I am not a doctor. Just a mom, who has struggled with sleep for more than a decade and has worked with an essential oil company for 7 years and has more sleep testimonials that I can count. I’m hoping this will give you some ideas to explore on your own or with your health care practitioner.
My sleep issues really started about a year after I left college.
As someone with anxiety, falling asleep became an issue in my early 20s. I was living in New York City and working in an extremely - mentally - demanding waitressing job at a 3-star restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. In an average week, I would work 9 shifts/50+ hours - usually 3 doubles (lunch and dinner shift in the same day) and then three other days either in the morning or at night.
Working 6 days a week, on my feet, sounds like a recipe for crashing into bed. Unfortunately, it was quite the opposite. I would leave the dinner shifts around 11:30pm or later, buzzing from the energy of the night. My feet would ache to the point where I sometimes took a cab three blocks to the subway.
I would usually grab something quick to eat - a slice of pizza, Burger King or anything salty and fatty - as I made my way home to Queens and then later Washington Heights. I plan to dive deeper into my relationship with food soon but, let’s just say, it’s become very apparent to me recently that I suffer from a massive shame cycle around food. These late night food choices always led to beating myself up for the rest of the night.
Between finding my way as a new adult, living paycheck to paycheck from a job that had (high) but inconsistent income, in one of the most expensive cities in the world just added to that anxiety. By the time I got home and fell into my bed, my head was spinning. I would spiral as the chatter in my head amplified.
I’d like to say I figured out a healthy and natural way to support my sleep at this point in my life but I didn’t. I relied on a glass of wine and pure exhaustion before finally falling asleep around 1 or 2am. Let’s just say this wasn’t the healthiest point in my life…
In my mid-twenties, I transitioned out of restaurant life and became a full time nanny. My sleep shifted big time.
I went from passing out in the early hours of the morning to waking up in the early hours of the morning. I lived way uptown on the west side of Manhattan and my new nanny gig was on the Upper East Side. I had to be there at 7am, which meant I was in bed by 9pm so I could try to get 8 or 9 hours of sleep before my 5am alarm.
It was around this time that I started paying more attention to how I was taking care of my physical and mental health. I started using oils to help with my anxious feelings. I had a natural tool to use!
I was making healthier choices and that chatter in my head about late night binges and alcohol quieted down. The new source of anxiety for me? My early alarm and being prepared for my early day. I would get into bed at 9pm and I would read or watch TV with Nick in hopes I’d be asleep by 10pm. We would turn the lights out and my mind would go crazy.
“Did I take dinner out of the freezer for tomorrow so it will be thawed by the time wake up so I can get it in the slow cooker? Did I set up the coffee machine so I just have to push the button? I wonder what the weather will be? Do I need to grab my snow boots from the back of the front closet?” And on and on….
At some point, I would realize I had been spiraling for a while and then would start to stress out that I was now going to get less than 8 hours of sleep. “It is now 10:20. That means I will only get 7 hours and 40 minutes of sleep. I am going to be so tired tomorrow. I should have done more to prep for the day. Wait! Did I remember to put the seltzers in the fridge?” I just wanted to tell my brain to shut up and take a breath.
Thankfully, this is around the time doTERRA’s Serenity came into my life. When I tell you that it only took 2 drops on my body and 3 drops in my diffuser to make a difference, would you believe me? Because it was that simple. Those 5 drops a night quieted my brain and I was able to lull into a deep sleep within minutes of putting the drops of oil on my feet.
This experience pushed me to start sharing oils with friends and family. People needed to know about this!
The next shift in my sleep happened 5 years later, after I lost my dad in early 2018.
Serenity was no longer doing the trick by itself. It had always helped quiet my anxious mind but it wasn’t cutting it as the oil blend to help me through trauma. I had to change things up and use oils to support the emotions I was experiencing each night as I lay in bed - loneliness, grief, sadness and my mind going to scary, dark places of despair.
Thankfully, doTERRA has a wide range of oils and this is when I learned the power smell has on our emotional state. I believe it is important to feel all the feels and work through emotions at a pace that works for you. I never used oils to pull me out of my feelings and emotions but just to support me through them.
I started relying heavily on oils like Console (the comforting blend), Breathe (the respiratory blend), Elevation (the joyful blend) and Rose (the highest vibration essential oil there is). What worked best for me for sleep was a swipe of Console across my chest, Breathe in my hands and inhaled very deeply for a few minutes just before my light went off, Serenity on my feet, in my diffuser and 3 extra drops on my pillow case.
The console gave me the hug I needed and made me feel close to my dad. I got in the habit of holding my breath and taking shallow breaths after my dad passed. Breathe reminded me to breathe and I would carry the long, deep breathing into bed and continue doing it until I was asleep. Serenity, my old faithful, quieted my now oxygenated and comforted mind and I could get sleep.
4 months later, I got pregnant and, once again, I needed to change things up.
Moms, I know you get me here. Sleep when you are pregnant is not great. I was shocked that my sleep was so disrupted from really early on in my pregnancy. I’m talking like 5 or 6 weeks pregnant. I don’t know why this happens but I have to assume it has to do with hormones. Hormones are almost always the culprit, right?
This is when I turned to a homemade blend of doTERRA oils that circulates often in the essential oil community. We have a name for it that I cannot share here because of FDA regulations. Let’s just say we call it “Better Than” and then name something that knocks people out. I have helped more people get started with a doTERRA membership and these 4 oils than I can count. It just works when you need to knock yourself out.
Here’s the blend: 10-20 drops each of Serenity, Vetiver, Marjoram and Ylang Ylang. Put those oils in a 10ml roller ball and top with a carrier oil. Apply it to your feet, specifically the big toe, down your spine, on the back of your neck and under your nose before bed and you are almost always in for a restful night sleep.
Thankfully, this blend carried me through my pregnancy and I didn’t struggle with sleep at all. Well, other than waking up a few times a night to go to the bathroom. I haven’t found an oil to help with that yet!
As I moved into my third trimester, everyone around me was warning me about sleepless nights. My proactive, over planning self wanted to get ahead of the no-sleep curve and do everything in my power to set our sleep up for success. Thankfully, my preparation paid off and I think Charlie caught the sleepy vibes. He did a 7 hour stretch of sleep at 5 weeks old. By 11 weeks, he was sleeping through the night and he has never gone back.
Side note here: I could write an entire post on how we supported Charlie into sleep without sleep training him. Or maybe we did? We didn’t do cry it out because it didn’t feel right for us - no judgement if this is what you did - but we definitely did some things to encourage him to longer sleep. But I also really think Charlie just loves to sleep… who knows?! If you’re interested in what we did, leave a comment and I’ll write a post if there is some interest. I should add that if/when we have another, I am convinced the kid won’t sleep because we can’t get this lucky twice…
By the time Charlie was 6ish months old, he was sleeping through the night but I was still waking up at the smallest sound.
I could not, for the life of me, sleep deeply. Falling asleep was no longer the issue, it was staying asleep. Right around this time, we watched the first episode of the docu-series Babies on Netflix. As they explained the change in a mother’s brain, I had an a-ha moment. Here’s a brief explanation of what happens:
“In a normal brain, activity in the amygdala grows in the weeks and months after giving birth. This growth, researchers believe, is correlated with how a new mother behaves—an enhanced amygdala makes her hypersensitive to her baby’s needs—while a cocktail of hormones, which find more receptors in a larger amygdala, help create a positive feedback loop to motivate mothering behaviors.” - The Atlantic
As a mom, I am now hard wired to be so in tune to my baby’s needs that my body won’t let me go too deep into sleep. This explains why I would hear Charlie make a noise but Nick would stay soundly asleep.
So what have I done in the past year and a half to regain deep, restorative sleep?
Let’s start with the obvious ones, that likely won’t be news to you but have truly made a difference:
Low light - as soon as the sun starts to go down, I “nighttime-ify” our apartment by closing the curtains in our bedrooms and turning on our soft lights.
No screens - I am far from perfect here because sitting down in front of Netflix at the end of a hard day is almost impossible sometimes. But I notice a drastic difference in my ability to get a good night sleep when I choose to read a book before bed. I have my phone set up so it automatically goes into “do not disturb” 45 minutes before my set bedtime. I have my bedtime set for 9pm (even though I’m not asleep until 10pm most nights), which means I stop receiving messages and calls at 8:15pm (unless I deliberately go in). This has helped me break a bit of my scrolling addiction.
Cool room - We set our air conditioner at 23 degrees Celsius (73ish degrees Fahrenheit). While this is actually warmer that what is recommended (65 degrees Fahrenheit), our unit is new, super cold and our room isn’t that big. I’m not sure what temperature our room actually sits at but it is cold enough that I want to be snuggled under our comforter!
Quiet time - Charlie is asleep between 7:30-8pm. Once he is down, we do our best to keep things calm and quiet. I have learned that nighttime is not the time for me to get a workout in. I get too energized! We may watch Netflix for a bit but I always get my best sleep after reading or playing Othello, cards or some kind of game. I have also started using breath work to quiet my body down once I am actually laying in bed. I like to inhale to the count of 6, pause for 2, exhale to the count of 6 and pause for 2. This quiet rhythm has a profound effect on me.
No caffeine after 1/2pm - Gone are my restaurant days when I would be shooting back espresso at 10pm. I’ve recognized recently that if I have more than two coffees in a day, I struggle with shallow breathing and anxiety for the rest of the day. If that second coffee happens after 2pm at the latest, it will really affect my ability to fall asleep by 9/10pm.
Despite implementing all of those things, I have still needed some extra support as my body re-learns how to sleep deeply and not wake up at the slightest noise.
Here is what I have had to do to support my sleep in this new season of life:
Bedding - Before Charlie arrived, we splurged on new bedding from Magic Linen. I also found an amazing comforter on Amazon that would give us the fluffy feeling but not overwhelm us with heat. We do live in Singapore after all! The exact one we bought is no longer available but it is a quilted, down alternative and it was only $39.99! This one is similar. Just the simple shift in our bedding helped my sleep immensely!
Serenity - This oil blend continues to show up in big ways for me. It lives on my nightstand now for when I happen to wake up in the middle of the night. All I have to do apply one drop to each big toe and a swipe under my nose and I am right back to sleep. This absolutely saved me when Charlie was a newborn and waking multiple times a night. I never once laid in bed after he went back down struggling to fall back asleep. Nick was always the one to put him back into the cot in our room in those early days and I swear I was back to sleep before him most nights!
Magnesium Supplement - My naturopath recommended I try Thorne Research Magnesium Bisglycinate to help me fall asleep and stay asleep. It comes in a powder form, sweetened slightly with monk fruit, and I use one scoop in warm water to make a cup of “tea” before bed. I usually have to wait until I am ready to fall asleep to drink it because the effect is pretty immediate! I have learned to make it a small cup of tea otherwise I have to get up to pee, which defeats the purpose!
Eye mask - This one seems so simple but it never occurred to me before a friend mentioned it back in December. We don’t have blackout shades and it’s impossible to get rid of all lights in our room. I wear this eye mask every night and it allows me sleep in a pitch black room. I am also able to sleep in after the sun comes up on those days when Nick grabs Charlie out of bed! And by sleep in, I mean until 8am… my body doesn’t let me sleep any later these days!
Sleep clock for Charlie - This has been a game changer for us! We got a sleep training clock for Charlie last fall after two separate friends mentioned that it has trained their older toddlers not to run out of their rooms as soon as they wake up. We decided to get this for Charlie at 18 months so that, by the time we transition him to a big boy bed, he will know that he has to stay in his room quietly until the green light turns on. We’ve been using it for 5 months and something clicked about a week ago - even though Charlie still wakes up around 6:45am, he will sit in his crib quietly until clock turns green at 7:15. We’ve been diligent about not going in until 7:15 and it is paying off! We can sleep until we hear him start making noise if we want to. GAME CHANGER! This is the one we got.
Ditching the monitor - This one is home and family specific. We never had a video monitor with Charlie, just some old school walkie talkies that cost about $40. We’re in a 3 bedroom apartment, on one floor and our bedroom doors are about 20 feet away from each other. When Charlie was about 15 months old, we decided to put the monitors away. If he really needed us, we would hear him through the doors. Not having that next to my ear, hearing every little bump into the side of the crib or cough, changed my sleep significantly.
While my sleep isn’t perfect every night, I know what to do to change that. Some nights I decide to watch Netflix in bed after a long day where I have had a third coffee at 3pm. I don’t sleep well. But most nights, I try to read before bed, take my magnesium, wear my mask and get my Serenity all over me and I can sleep like a baby for 9 hours. I know my sleep struggles are far from over because I am evolving and my needs will change again. But for now this is working for me!
If you feel like you have tried all of this and are still struggling, here are other natural tools that have helped people I work with:
It might take some time to find your secret sauce but it will be 100% worth it.
