 Hey, I'm Drew and you are watching or just listening to The Anxious Truth. This is the podcast where we talk about anxiety, anxiety disorders, and recovery. So if you're dealing with things like panic attacks or agoraphobia or OCD or health anxiety, well, you're in the right place. This week we're going to hear a success story. This is a success story from my friend Andy who has dealt with sleep anxiety and insomnia for decades and found a solution. She came by to share it with you, so let's check it out. And welcome back to The Anxious Truth. This is episode 231 of the podcast. We're recording in October of 2022. And this week we're going to talk about Andy's Andy Lyons. My friend Andy Lyons is here and we're going to talk about her success story when it comes to anxiety about sleep, not sleeping, and her struggles with insomnia for 30 years of her life. And she managed to get some good help and learn some good habits and overcame all that stuff and she's doing much better now. And since sleep is a big problem and a big issue with a lot of you guys, I thought this would be a really useful episode. So I asked Andy to pop by and she was gracious enough to do that and tell her story. So we're going to hear from Andy. Hopefully it's going to be great. Before we do, we have another new sponsor on the podcast this week. This week we are sponsored by Dr. Magic Fingers Special Mental Health Scissors. Now these might look like regular scissors, but they're infused right at the factory with positive vibes and gratitude. So if you use the special mental health scissors, you can just cut the anxiety right out of your life with these scissors. So yeah, these also come in multiple colors. This is the green one. This is Dr. Magic Fingers Special Mental Health Anxiety Scissors. I don't know what color the green is for. It might be for OCD, I'm not sure. But check them out and thank you, Dr. Magic Fingers, for supporting the anxious truth, our brand new sponsor. Really good. But not our brand new sponsor. That's not real. The anxious truth is actually just sponsored by the anxious truth. That's me. And you can find all of the stuff that I have for you guys at theanxiestruth.com. That's all the free stuff. And it's the three books that I've written that are really helpful for people and it's free video workshop and it's a monthly webinar I do with Daryl and the Hardis about distress tolerance and all the social media stuff and all the rest of the podcast episodes. So go over to theanxiestruth.com and check it out. There's a lot of good stuff there that I think you're really going to like. So this podcast is actually really sponsored just by me. So there you go. All right. Let's get to Andy's story here. She was a great guest. I think you guys are going to like her. She's super sweet and she was nice enough to share her story about sleep anxiety and overcoming insomnia and some of the lessons she learned along the way. So let's get to it. I'll be back afterwards to wrap it up. Andy. Andy Licious. Welcome. Drullicious Drew. I'm so grateful to be here sharing time and space with you. Yes. For those of you who have never seen Andy Lyons before, which why would you? Because Andy and I share no shared audience really in the end. Andy is in the world of startups and financing startups and she's just got a ton of experience and she's well respected in that. And she is I would like to thank a friend of mine. Yes. Oh 100% and a fan. A devoted fan. Oh well thank you so much. That's very sweet. So Andy's a kick. You guys are going to like her. Like I said in the intro, Andy has an amazing story about sleep and anxiety around sleep that I heard for the first time a year ago kind of. You were still working on it. Well, you know, I was reaching out to you and said, you know, given all the conversations you have around anxiety, which I've been living with most of my life as well. You know, what do you know about sleep? And you gave me the usual response. Yeah. Right. You know, and different ideas that you had heard. And I was like, well, okay, over 40 years, I pretty much have tried it all, including that wonderful advice. But thank you, Drew. Yeah. But that did not do it. And so what happened folks is that I came to a point where I said, look, either I'm going to figure this out or I'm going to learn to accept it because sometimes you have to accept things about our lives, right? Yeah. Now you are just to give people a quick read as I just background, this was years of sleep issues. Right. And so, and I've done EMDR because I did have trauma, everybody. When I was six years old, I got really sick with mononucleosis and it was during a time period where when they brought a child into the hospital, you left it there. Yeah. No parent stayed in the bedroom, it was a two-year window, lots of mea cupos after it. So I got left in a private room by myself and I thought, oh great, you know, when you're six and you're really sick and you're alone in the hospital and you think everybody's left and no mommy or daddy, can you imagine, I was afraid to go to sleep. Sure. That started, you know, the whole afraid to go to sleep. But it really kicked in and I had, I had plenty of other trauma later too, but when I was 26 years old and I had a routine in life, I was getting up and playing tennis for an hour or two and working and you know, very active 26-year-old and all of a sudden I couldn't sleep and that's when it started. And now I'm on, you see the sign behind me, Route 66, I'm on Route 66 NASA, 40 years and I mean, my husband, we've been together 37 years, waking up at night, you know, just tiptoeing, hoping he wouldn't wake me up because if I startled awake, that would be it. And I learned for 40 years how to take finals in graduate school, getting my MBA, taking an accounting final with virtually no sleep for night after night after night. You know, certainly tried anxiety meds, did that for about three years because I had a whole ton of anxiety, provoking moments in my life, had to go carefully off of that, lunesta, Ambien, Halcyon back in the day, all of those, you know, you just built up a tolerance and it was just constantly learning how to go live on my show with like a one hour sleep, things like that. And then I, if I can go on to tell the story on how I solved it. You can. I just want to interject one thing. For those of you, you don't know Andy, I have seen Andy do her thing. Because much of my audience has anxiety centered around sleep, primarily based on if I don't sleep enough, my anxiety will be horrible and I will be incapable. 100%. You would not believe what Andy Lyons looks like in a live stream, you would never in a million years know that that was a sleep deprived person. Right. And I learned it. It was just a coping mechanism I put into place. But I will say, you know, I have held back on so many things over the years because of my being, you know, am I going to be so tired? And so I decided, you know, I've solved so many problems in my life. Let me see if I can't solve this one or come to a point where I can accept it. And now that I was on Medicare, I thought, well, let me get a therapist who is covered by my Medicare and supplement. And so I found a woman locally and got into therapy with her. It was very clear what I was there to solve. The third session, she said, you know, I do a lot of work out of Dana Farber and there's a guy there named Eric Zhao, Dr. Zhao, and he works with adult and pediatric patients on sleep. You should give them a call and check out his work. I said, okay, I check them out. We have our one, you know, our consulting call, 15-minute call. And he's like, four sessions. I'm like, you know, it's all I could do not to go, uh-huh. But what he said was the first time I'd ever heard this, and I have been hearing things about sleep for forever, he said insomnia is its own thing. It is not about the trauma. It hasn't been about the trauma for decades for you or additional trauma. It is a pattern in your brain that we need to shift. And he says, so it's like, you know, when you have snow tracks, let's say, and it snows and the snow tracks get filled in, it's that kind of thing. My brain was grooved. Neuro pathways were grooved. And he said, you know, there's, everybody is locked into this, you have to have eight hours of sleep a night or you're going to, and I got that message going up, you're going to get sick, you're going to be tired, all this stuff. Well, he had to keep a digest. I went off all meds. Only one med would be lunesta. Keep a digest of my sleep for two weeks before we met. And then he said, Andy, you know, you clearly only need six hours of sleep a night. Anything more, you're going to be up all night because you've had too much sleep. And he said, and he said, I said, well, what about this average? He goes, yeah, but, you know, he had my husband with me on all the calls. He said, your husband's six, three. That would be like saying all the average height of men in the U.S. is five, 10. So we better cut something off of chat. You know, it's, this doesn't work that way. And so we got started. And the whole thing that he used for me was to, he saw that I spent a lot of time in bed. I mean, I just would go to bed early hoping I would fall asleep, right? And then I'd, you know, have coffee in bed in the morning. I'd be dangin' and going to take naps. There was a lot of time spent in bed. I was not allowed to go to bed until it was time to sleep. And we chose the time of, I'd be in bed by, I'd go to bed at 1130 with an alarm sitting, waking me up at 6 a.m. And so I was like, okay, great. And he said, but if you can't fall asleep within 15 minutes, get up and do something fun. So I was all ready to do that. First two nights, you know, I got up and did something fun, watched something or whatever, went back. And from then on, cause his whole theory is that you're gonna get tired and we're gonna get you to sleep in this time period. If you don't sleep in that time period, you know, go have a Red Bull, go do whatever you need to get through the day. But we don't care about caffeine. We don't care what exercise you've had cause folks, I don't know about you, but people say do yoga before you go to bed that never helped. Meditate, oh my God. I get wired when I meditate. I, you know, all of these things, he didn't care. You know, have a Starbucks, I don't care. You're going to eventually go to sleep and we're gonna train your brain to sleep between these hours. And the message that I'm hearing is you might be tired and you'll figure out a way to cope. You've been coping for 40 years, clearly. Yeah, it's not a disaster that you're tired and sleep deprived that day. Huge message, huge, right? Huge message. All of a sudden my life had this shift from constantly being focused on sleep. Am I getting enough sleep? Am I tired? Am I, you know, all of those things. It shifted into, and I told him, oh my gosh, I can't. So I told him when I first met with him, I said, well, I do this affirmation, it's so easy for me to fall asleep because, oh, forget that. Your new affirmation is just gonna be, it's so hard for me to stay awake. See, I love this. This is perfect. Even though you're addressing a specific issue, which was insomnia, I love the approach to sleep. Like you'll sleep, it's leave it alone. Stop trying to engineer your sleep. And so all of a sudden it's like, someone said, hey, can you meet, yeah, go to this event that's happening at seven o'clock at nine. I'm like, I gotta stay awake till 1130, absolutely. Let's do it, sure. Whereas I'm guessing previously, you would have like, no, no, no, I need to try to get to bed early so I can sleep enough. Right. Yeah. Okay. Oh my gosh, literally folks. I mean, I did feel a little catatonic for a while because it's like, what? Getting my circadian rhythm and something into shape. But literally, he was $275 a session and we barely made it to 45 minutes each time. And it's given my husband a new lease on life. Plus it's like, I'm up at six and I would crawl and I have to get out of bed. So I'd crawl into the living room, set up shop out there. And all of a sudden it was like, I have all this time in my day. I didn't know what to do with it because I spent so much time about sleep. So the rule now, if I can paraphrase here that you've built with the help of the doc was bed is for sleeping. I mean, whatever. Or, you know, for some reason. Right, for what other things, sure. But bed is, you don't lay in bed trying demanding to sleep at every moment. So when you're tired, you go to bed. If you don't fall asleep, you get out of bed. When you wake up in the morning, you get out of bed. You don't lay in bed in the morning, sounds like. Okay, not allowed to do that. And when I go to sleep now, folks, I often fall asleep within 15 minutes. Maybe my sleep will be light some nights, you know, but I always go back to sleep. And at my age, you gotta get up and go use the bathroom once or twice. And still I go back. And it's like astonishing to me that I fall right back to sleep. Like this is not my behavior. Yeah, was that the difference? And what I'm hearing here is I'm going to drop the demand to sleep. I must sleep now. Yeah, I honestly, and this is six months later, folks. So I mean, this is really into my seventh month and getting ready to go away for a few days would be, oh my God, I definitely need a sleeping pill because I don't want to be tired for the trip. You know, so I'm having a Starbucks at six o'clock at night. And that's the other thing. I have caffeine after a certain time. Doesn't matter. Once you reprogram yourself to sleep between a period of time, you do. And the fact that it was that simple, I'm almost a little peeved. I didn't find out this 30 years ago. Well, I think it's so interesting. And we've had these conversations before because Andy and I do speak. So I kind of knew what she was going to talk about. And that's why I invited her on because we knew it would be useful. But so much of the information when we find a problem and now I have to solve it. So this is a problem I must solve. And you get bombed. I did a podcast episode a month or two ago on this. If you guys want to check that out. It's the, no, no, no, you must have this much sleep. You must have this kind of sleep. If you don't, there will be health ramifications, mental health ramifications. You'll be less than optimal. You'll be failing. You'll be all of these things, right? And in the end, humans have been sleeping for a million years, you know, in our current form, generally speaking. And it seems to sort itself out. So how are you on days when you're, there are days when you don't sleep that well, I'm guessing, or lighter and you're tired, more tired than other days, I'm guessing. Yeah, so I go, wow, I'm a little tired. But then I have to laugh because I'm pretty sure I got at least four hours of sleep. Like that's like, yeah, mind blowing still. I have a deep appreciation for it. But also it's the, it's just how I view the day. So I'll be a little tired, you know? And if I have another tough night, for some reason, light sleep tonight, then I'll be even more tired the next day, you know? It's okay. So at some point your body's gonna catch up and you'll go to sleep. Yeah, you will go to sleep. And here's the other thing too, that for years, again, I read every book felt even worse about myself because of not, you know, eight hours of sleep or I'm gonna die. You're gonna have a shorter lifespan. I mean, the crap that is fed to you about sleep, everybody turn it out. But also how about the, get the room prepared, get the, this, get all of these things, sleep hygiene. Yeah. Well, I mean, and in some way you are practicing some very basic sleep hygiene. The bed is for sleeping. I go, I don't lay in bed. I don't, okay. That's right. That's fine, but it didn't take all kinds of extra special rituals and routines. No, and I mean, I'm not gonna go watch a nail biter or you'll listen to an audio nail biter before bed because that'll just get me wired anyway. But, you know, just, so I, as I start to wind down at the end of the day and I'll be reading in the living room or working on jigsaw puzzle or something. And then I'll say, wow, it's 1130, I can go to bed. And sometimes I'm definitely, I'm never gonna make it to the 1130. And I have to, I do go to bed earlier. So you'll have to go to bed earlier. If you're falling asleep on your jigsaw puzzle, it's okay to go to sleep. It's okay, absolutely. And now six months in, I am actually able to take a 10 minute power nap and still get to sleep. Like a nap would have thrown me off completely. And so, and this is for me personally, I don't know what it would be depending on who, you know, what your anxiety is, but I'm pretty sure this is how he does it for everybody. He follows your sleep for a couple of weeks and then he sees what looks like your needed sleep. And so much of that is, I mean, which is great because there are behavioral modifications there. And then a little bit of old school CBT and reframing the thoughts around sleep. Now I don't know this particular doctor. And by the way, Andy's in Boston. So for those wondering- He only has his license to practice in Massachusetts and I think New York state. Cause he's a PhD doctor. He's a psychologist. Psychologist, thank you. And there is a thing called ICBT, which is CBT specifically for insomnia. And this sounds a lot like what your doc was talking about. So there's parallels there. Right. But some of the reframing and the dismantling of your thoughts and beliefs around sleep and the ritual of sleep and the demand of sleep. And then coupled with behavioral changes. No, no, no, go to bed at 1130, set your alarm for this, get out of bed if you can't sleep. And there you go, things reset. Yeah. And here's the scope. That knowing you, it's that period of time that you can only sleep is so important because I tried the, well, just stay up until you fall asleep. Yeah, yeah, we talked about that. Four days later, I was still awake. You know, that, that didn't work out. You know, because I wasn't set up with that time period. You know, I feel that that was what was really important to get out of bed. Here's the time period that you'll be sleeping. If you don't, you don't. Yeah, yeah. But if you're consistent with that every day in the end, it's going to work out and you're going to get your average needed amount of sleep. Exactly. And folks, I've been living with anxiety too for most of my life and it's also definitely in the DNA of my family genetics. And so, you know, I understand how that, you know, lizard brain can get completely freaked out. Yeah. And anybody who's suffering with insomnia, I have a deep appreciation. And yes, it did get worse as I lost my hormones. So, yeah. So, so much is going to impact our sleep for sure. But you're right. All the information around sleep, I'm guessing. I hate to even mention the book because it was super pop. Yeah, I bet you know the book I'm talking about, too, came out about five or six years ago. It's called Why We Sleep. Did you read Why We Sleep? Nope. Good. Don't. It caused so much consternation in my community because there's a lot of really overreaching stuff and really well-respected research or two. We decided I need to sell out of books and made some statements that he had to walk back afterwards that the World Health Organization kind of stomped on him for. We never said that. Why did you write that? But there's so much self-information, self-help, air quotes about sleep that can really fuel that freak out. I'm not sleeping right. I'm not sleeping enough properly, right? Exactly. And some people expect to go into a coma when they sleep. That isn't it either. Now, I will say that our youngest son, I took to neurofeedback. And it was for his learning, some of his learning challenges and he had a bit of a twitch as well. And neurofeedback is where they study the brain and then they use stimulus to retrain the brain. Well, they found out with him that he wasn't getting REM sleep because they used to say, he woke up after 10 hours of sleep still yawning. I'm like, what's that all about? So they were able to calm the brain down and get him into REM sleep. So sometimes it is physiological, folks. But anyway, so certainly take a look at neurofeedback. But for me, it was absolutely dissolving the indoctrination and changing the neuro pathways. And I am still in shock. Talk to me in a year, because I'm still like highly skeptical, even though it's happening. Seven months in. Is this really working? I get you, I get that, I really do. I think it's so important. Sure, could it be physiological? Yes, but I also, it's really important to recognize here that Andy's telling a story that took 30 plus 40 plus years. Many people watching today are experiencing sleep disturbances for the last two weeks and jumping to the conclusion that their sleep is forever aft and they're gonna die early of cancer because of it. This is walking, living, vibrant, lovely proof, right? It's 66. That it did not kill Andy and she, you know. And I raised kids and I've had four businesses. That should have killed you, really. The kids and the businesses. Forget the sleep part, so. But I appreciate you taking the time to share that story. It's not a complicated story, as you could see. It's not full of like instructions. No. It's amazing. It is and it's not about what you eat, what you drink, how you exercise, none of that. See for me, that was the beauty of it all. Yeah. Let's talk before we wrap it up for a second about flexibility. And I mean, behavioral and psychological flexibility because when you learn the lesson that maybe I'll sleep really well tonight. Maybe I'll sleep light tonight and be tired. It doesn't matter. Do you find yourself, and it's so interesting to hear you say things, I have a Red Bull, I have a Starbucks, I have a cappuccino at six o'clock at night. Most people will be like, no, you can't do that. You'll never go to sleep. Okay, so now you can do that. Do you find that you've become really flexible and gauging? Well, I can do that, but should I tonight? I'm a little extra tired. I would like coffee, but I'm not gonna have one tonight because I do wanna sleep. I don't feel like having your coffee. So is it ever a debate? It's just whatever I feel like doing, I do. Isn't it? You know, not even thinking about it. I tested it out because we were visiting our son in Brooklyn and we're going to see a Broadway play and it'd been a busy day driving down. There are all sorts of excitement seeing people and everything and I wanted to be awake for the play. So I had a Starbucks at eight o'clock at night and I was still able to fall asleep at the hotel room about one o'clock, you know, got up. It's, I mean, really five hours of sleep. Come on. Which you're saying is good though, five hours continuous sleep. I was like, yes, like you won the Super Bowl. Come on, after years of functioning on two hours of sleep. Yeah, it's great, right? Yeah. That's the flexibility I was aiming for. So great answer. Like you don't even think about it. It's just whatever the situation is, I deal with the situation and everything works out in the end. That's flexibility right there. And it's the relief of it all is amazing. I mean, I just, it's a miracle. I am super happy for you, my friend, because I know when we talked about it, I know you were a little bit at its end and looking for answers and I'm so happy that you found them and things are working for you. I'm pretty sure it's working. Seven months. No. I'm feeling confident. That's just me. Now, if I could just solve some of the biggest world problems next, that would be great. Okay, next. Yeah, we'll work on that next, so anyway. But thank you so much for coming. And for those of you who want to, this is not a thing that Andy talks about. This is not her spiel on social media, but I will, if you go to the show notes at the anxioustreat.com slash 231, which is in the link, I will link all of Andy's stuff. And you can just go to andylines.com. I'll put that up too, if you want to see these stuff. Oh, thank you. Andy's worth checking out. Thank you, everybody. Please know my heart is with you. If you are suffering from sleep challenges like this, I, 40 years, I understand. And now look at you. Drinking coffee at eight o'clock at night and getting five hours of sleep. Go Andy. Anyway, thank you, my friend, I appreciate it. I'll be back in a minute and we'll wrap this one up. Okay, we are back. I hope that was useful to you. I hope you enjoyed listening as much as I enjoyed having that chat with Andy. Couple of quick takeaways. You can see where the irrational beliefs and the distorted views of sleep, I must sleep this much. I must sleep this way. It has to be this way or it's not right. You can see how that caused the problem for Andy for so long. And it was really just abandoning those irrational beliefs and just letting the process get a little bit more natural and organic with just a couple of very basic guidelines to go on changed everything for her. But the power of those irrational fears and distortions remain strong because even six months into it, seven months into it, you heard her say, I'm still not entirely convinced that this is working. But she's still at it and clearly it is working for her. So I hope that you were able to take something out of that. Normally this is the time when I would tell you to go follow our guests on social media but Andy does not really live in the mental health world. She lives in the world of finance and startup businesses and she's just expert in that area. So if you want to Google Andy Lyons, feel free to do that and follow along if that's your thing. But yeah, unfortunately, she doesn't have much more in the way of mental health to share, but this share was a good one. So if you're gonna share something, share this. Thanks Andy, appreciate it. That is it. Episode 231 of The Anxious Truth is in the books. You know that it's over because music that is afterglow by my friend, Ben Drake who wrote that song several years ago, inspired at least in part by this particular podcast, which I find amazing even to this day that he did that. And he's let me use the song ever since. It's a song you hear most of the time at the beginning of the podcast, always at the end. So you can go and find Ben in his music at bendrakemusic.com. If you're listening to this podcast on Apple or Spotify or some platform that lets you rate and review the podcast, leave me a five star rating and then take a second to review the podcast. It helps other people find it. If you're watching on YouTube, subscribe to the channel, like the video, leave a comment, you know the deal. And that's it. I will be back next week to do another episode. I do not know what I'm gonna be talking about, but I will be here. And as always, and until then, remember, this is the way. This is these feelings that you never show. Yeah, you're doing fine. It's all around you, you can breathe it in. This is where you start.