The Sleep Fix audiobook

This book is unexpectedly helpful. Diane Macedo, a lifelong insomnia sufferer, compiles tips and strategies that, shockingly, actually improved my daily sleep and improved my relationship with my insomnia when it occurs. This is a rare book that delivers what it promises. NotesTips and tricks- Record video or audio of yourself. Look for snoring, talking, kicking, jerking, grinding. Look for potential external factors that might be disturbing you. At any point does it sound like you stop breathing?- Constructive worry: you don't need to distract yourself or silence thoughts and feelings. Instead you need to embrace and process them in a productive way. List all your worries on one side of a page and the next steps to solving them on the other.- Journaling: is generally much more productive than relentlessly trying to distract yourself from your worries.- Enjoy your awake time: what are the keys to falling asleep is the stop worrying about being awake, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to start enjoying your awake time. So if you can't sleep at night, get out of bed and plan some enjoyable activities you can do if you don't feel sleepy.- Stimulus control: a common CBT-I technique. Use your bed only for sleep. Establish a regular wake up time. Go to bed only when sleepy. If you're awake in bed long enough for it to bother you, get out of bed. Return only when you feel sleepy or after a predetermined amount of time. No napping.- Sleep restriction: the premise is simple. Restrict the amount of time you spend in bed until you start to fall asleep quickly and stay asleep. Then slowly increase your amount of time in bed until you're getting a sufficient amount of sleep but still sleeping efficiently.- Sleep compression: like sleep restriction, sleep compression works to reduce you're awake time in bed, but instead of a broccoli cutting your sleep window down, you reach your goal by gradually decreasing time in bed.- Reverse curfew: Burning yourself from going to bed before certain time. Challenging yourself to stay awake rather than forcing yourself to fall asleep can alleviate some of the performance anxiety that comes with insomnia, in addition to increasing your sleep drive.- Circadian rhythm: reduce the amount of light you're exposed to in the four or five hours before you go to bed. Get bright light first thing in the morning.- Exercise: a 2019 study examined the effect of exercise and found that exercise at 7 AM helped to advance their melatonin on set by almost an hour. But even more surprisingly so did exercise between 1 and 4 PM.- Nutrition: ensure you are getting enough magnesium, vitamin B6, vitamin D, fiber.- Relaxation tools: relaxation techniques don't always produce relaxation. When we use them to try to make sleep happen, they often do the opposite. We don't appreciate the breathing exercise for the meditation or any other techniques for how it makes us feel. Instead, we work hard to do it well, so that it will make us sleep. That effort makes our brain more active. To keep relaxation or mental exercise from backfiring, the first thing we have to do is stop viewing them as asleep tool and start feeling them as something to enjoy for their own sake.- Have a passive attitude: outcome independenceUseful Ideas- The gold standard treatment for chronic insomnia is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I- Intensive sleep retraining (ISR): the treatment begins at a patient's usual bedtime and entails repeatedly giving them up to 25 minutes to fall asleep. But every time they do, they’re woken up almost immediately. As the night ticks by, they start falling asleep faster and faster. Toward the end, insomniacs report usually taking more than an hour to asleep or falling asleep within just five minutes. “We think it's because it's extinguished that insomnia response, that learned response that they have when they're trying to sleep, and instead replaced it with a really strong response for falling asleep quickly.”- Sleep drive versus arousal- Catastrophizing, fearing wakefulness, and conditional arousal- Conditional arousal develops because our brain likes to anticipate and prepare. Unfortunately for insomniacs, our conditioned arousal often goes beyond just cycling through to-do lists or processing our day. Instead, our fear of being awake kicks our arousal into overdrive. - To make matters worse, typical sleep advice often reinforces this. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that if I have trouble sleeping, I should read a boring book… since boredom generally facilitates sleep, the logic is that you can basically bore yourself to sleep. But this approach ignores an alternative reaction to boredom: frustration.- The more reasons we give ourselves to fear wakefulness, the more we see it as a threat, and the more likely we are to go into a state of hyper arousal as we prepare for sleep.- The sleep through the night myth: while we've been led to believe that a good nights sleep means sleeping straight through from bedtime to wake up time, that's actually not how humans sleep works. Instead, we sleep in cycles. In between cycles we usually wake up. Most people just fall back asleep so quickly they don't even remember these awakenings. Insomniacs, on the other hand basically freak out.- Sleep confidence: the leading theory on sleep misperception is that our heightened arousal, which continues during sleep, makes our brain much more active than a sleeping brain normally would be.

I read this for research - I'm currently working on a book where a character has a sleep disorder - but it's so practical and helpful for daily life! I have had insomnia during parts of my life, and my husband has sleep apnea. So I found all sorts of helpful suggestions. Macedo writes in a smooth and engaging style, and her perspective as a TV journalist was really interesting. Highly recommended for the library shelf - patrons looking for help will get a lot from it, and I know that I will refer to it again when I encounter sleep troubles. (Already thinking about implementing some of the suggestions).

The Sleep Fix is a super readable (listenable!), topical nonfiction book that is absolutely worth your time if you have ever had trouble sleeping. Diane Macedo is on a mission to educate the world about sleep and present proven and practical ways for us to regain control of our well-being through healthy and adequate sleep. Consider this book her mission accomplished.I picked this book up because I saw it on the HarperCollins website when I was looking for new books and I thought it might be interesting. I wouldn't consider myself an insomniac, but I do struggle with sleep enough to warrant reading a book that could give me some helpful tips and tricks. What I didn't expect was to learn SO much and have such a good time doing so.Macedo really felt like the right person to write this book. She is a journalist by trade, and suffered for years and years with sleep problems, including severe insomnia and a severe circadian rhythm disorder. She worked in a newsroom, which required her to get up for work at 3am, or work overnight, or be on call at all hours of the night for breaking news. She refused to give in to the assumption that her career was the problem, and instead tried just about every idea under the sun to sleep at night. Sleep specialists, melatonin, blackout curtains, fancy pillows - desperation drove her to invest a lot of time and money into trying to find a solution. In the end, after much trial and error, she was able to learn what her body needed to get a decent night's sleep, but it wasn't easy. In this book, she pulls together extensive research from doctors and therapists, sleep experts, and the experiences of ordinary people who have struggled with sleep. Simply put, she approaches the question of how to fix sleep as a journalist. Her voice is down-to-earth and her information is so, so practical. She explains all of the science and reasoning, but always keeps close to the most important thing: what to do about it. It's also super refreshing that Macedo goes against the grain of most of the sleep articles out there by getting real about the fact that worrying about your sleep is a huge cause of not getting sleep. If you are too caught up in trying to build the best bedtime routine, avoiding screens for two hours before bed, not eating at night, taking a relaxing bath, drinking tea - whatever it is, it can be no easier to get to sleep because while you are doing those things, you're thinking "I really hope this helps me sleep tonight." Everyone is different and you have to find what methods work for you, and Macedo not only explains each method/strategy in depth, she also explains which types of sleep struggles would be impacted by them, and practical ways for you to find out which works for you. She is open and honest about what it took for her to figure it out for herself, and walks you through it like a mentor. If you really and truly want to tackle your sleep issues for the long term, I would recommend getting a physical copy of this book so that you can refer back to it often. The audiobook is excellent otherwise, and there is a PDF link included that you can use, which includes all of the diagrams, illustrations, and how-tos talked about throughout the whole book. You could print this out to reference too if you really wanted. I pulled it up and looked at it a few times while listening, and it was nice to have the resource.

This is exactly the book you are looking for on sleep. In depth solutions, tests, and ideas for the average person to fix their sleep. I have thumbed through everything the library has, and this one is the gold standard.

The most practical and down-to-earth book on Sleep that I've seen. I wish I had this book when "Why We Sleep" by Mathew Walker scared me into insomnia. This is a user-friendly and easy to read guide on how to have a healthier relationship with sleep. I recommend it to anyone who has ever had any issues with sleep or anyone who is interested in the topic.

This book is as practical as any sleep advice book can be. I never knew my definition for Insomnia was very inaccurate until I read the first part of The Sleep Fix. I strongly recommend this book to anyone with sleep issues or just want to know more about the mechanics of sleep.

This book is so much better than Why We Sleep. It's written for people who can't sleep, rather than being a scare-mongering tome that would make any insomniac panic. It has an easy gentle approach to information about sleep and a TON of actionable steps you can implement to see what works for you. Highly recommend for my fellow sleepy-babes!

As someone with a sleep disorder, this had some really helpful tips and tricks. I like that she includes step by step guides for fixes.

Many people say that sleep is for the weak or wish they could get by with less sleep. However, sleep is essential to healthy living. It's something you don't think about until you can't do it. Lying awake in bed and watching the minutes turn to hours is terrible. I used to think I slept perfectly well until I found that I snore loudly. I went to a sleep specialist and found that I have sleep apnea, they gave me a CPAP device, and now I wear it to bed. It helps out.Diane Macedo is a person. She is a television personality or news anchor or something along those lines. Macedo also happens to have two sleep disorders; insomnia and circadian rhythm disorder. She wrote The Sleep Fix to help people like you and me power through the night and conquer their sleep issues.While the book isn't superb, I did learn some things from it. For example, sleep specialists don't all know everything about sleep. That is a bit of a confusing sentence, so let me explain. A sleep specialist might be an expert on sleep apnea but know nothing about insomnia. I suppose this shouldn't surprise me since sleep is complicated, and we still don't know everything about it.You could read the book cover-to-cover, or find a specific subject that tickles your fancy and read up on that. The book contains some testimonials from various people. They aren't about a specific product, though. I admit I took this book out from the library to learn more about sleep, but I didn't expect to glean too much. I read everything I could about it, so while I didn't think I was an expert, I wasn't a beginner at it either.Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.

3.75/5Main takeaways:1) Know your chronotype (early bird, night owl, or somewhere in between). This can help you plan your day according to your body's natural rhythms2) Our diet has a significant impact on our sleep. Diets rich in vitamins B6 and D and magnesium can improve sleep and boost energy levels throughout the day3) Benefits of a regular bedtime routine. When you follow the same routine every night, your brain becomes conditioned to expect sleep soon afterward, so you naturally start to feel sleepier (however, don't overcomplicate things when creating a new routine)4) Don't use your bed for different things throughout the day. Sleep specialists recommend reserving your bed for sleep and sex, which retrains your brain to associate your bed solely with sleep and relaxationActionable advice:1) Identify your chronotype & schedule work and commitments when you're more awake2) Make sure you incorporate vitamins B6 and D and magnesium in your diet3) Stick to a regular bedtime routine4) Retrain your brain's association with your bed

Thank you to NetGalley, Harper Collins and Diane Macedo for an advance digital copy of this book.Diane Macedo is a news anchor and correspondent for ABC and former insomniac. After struggling for years from sleep deprivation and the numerous health problems that accompany it, the author decided to tackle the subject using her skills as a reporter. This book is research based, covers common sleep disorders, and offers doable solutions. This is not a one size fits all guide to sleep, since all sleep problems are not the same. Lots of details, such as advice on mattresses, pillows and curtains are included in this very useful book. I have read numerous books on sleep and this is one of the most helpful and detailed ones I have come across. For those suffering from sleep problems, this is a must read!

Realistic SolutionsI’ve struggled with sleep issues for some time now and have always felt like the obvious solutions recommended elsewhere never have seemed to work so it was extremely validating to find out that I’m not the only one. More than that, it was helpful to read about realistic solutions that could help improve my sleep. I appreciated how Macedo translated the academic research into approachable and tangible “fixes” that were easy to understand and implement.

Oops I read another book I wasn't necessarily supposed to. I actually sleep pretty well these days but not always so maybe the first statement isn't quite accurate. Never the less here is a very readable guide to getting a good night's rest. Lots of advice, all of it good in my opinion. Excellent research and highly recommended to anyone looking to get to sleep in 10-20 minutes or push around their circadian rhythm.