Three Questions with Meghann Koppele Duffy

3 Questions To Improve Your Experience With Sleeping

• Meghann • Episode 9

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What if sleeping “better” has nothing to do with blackout curtains, melatonin, or fancy mattresses? In this episode of Three Questions with Meghann Koppele Duffy, I take a brutally honest look at why so many of us are still sleeping like crap, even when we’re doing all the “right” things. I discuss how sensory input, body awareness, and nervous system regulation shape the way we fall asleep, wake up, and move through the night. This episode isn’t about rigid routines, it’s about giving your brain and body the information they need to feel safe, adapt, and rest. Whether you’re a clinician, a high-performing athlete, or just a tired human trying to figure it out, these three questions could change the way you think about sleep forever.

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Meghann Koppele Duffy: Welcome to Three Questions where critical thinking is king, and my opinions and research are only here to support your learning and understanding. Welcome back, I am your host, Meghann and I'm really excited about this episode because people talk about sleep all the time, sleep hygiene, all these little sleeping hacks.

Yet people are still sleeping like shit. So to me, there's gonna be a more nuanced discussion. So I'd love to use today's episode to ask you three questions about your sleeping habits. And question one is, what do you do before you go to bed? Take a moment. I want you to literally think about what you did before you went to bed last night.

Let's not think about two nights ago, and can you even remember what you did last night? Okay, I remember. So for me, I was actually working pretty late. Oftentimes I stopped working by 7:00 PM but I had to get a lot of stuff done. So I set the tone that I would be working a little late, and then I was going to watch a little TV in bed and then go to bed.

Well, now imagine you're my husband who has now been in bed for like two hours, and I come up and turn on the tv. Let's just say he wasn't pleased with, you know, my plans. Now I could have let that bother me or I could have changed my plans. And what I did was I got out of bed, I actually got down on my floor and I did some cat cows.

And you're thinking, God, Meghann, why are you so weird? I don't wanna do cat cows before bed. Well just hear me out a minute. It. The reason I did cat cows is I wanted to change the sensory information my body was getting. Now, the biggest complaint I get from clients, especially my clients with neuro condition, is their pain and symptoms get worse when they are sleeping.

Now, there are a lot of factors I'm not gonna go into, but the biggest one is when we lay down in bed, well, there's a very different sensory and put on our body. All day long, we had limited sensory information on our back or our head. Okay, so if you're sitting on the couch, the head is just floating around.

There's no sensory input there, okay? If you're standing, walking around, there's really no sensory input on the back of the head, and you could be wearing a hat, maybe wearing a backpack, but you're not leaning against the wall all day. Well, if you're sitting in a chair, okay, you're driving, there's sensory feedback at your back, but in certain spots when we sleep, I'm talking on your back for a moment.

There is sensory information from the top of our head to kind of our feet. Now, what's really cool about that is depending on the type of bed you like, like hard or soft, our bed kind of reacts to our body shape. But here's the weird thing. Even though the bed's gonna absorb, you know, our shape, my big old butt is not gonna be that same bigness.

When I lay down, it's gonna kind of smoosh out to the side of it. Okay? Think about where your chest goes, or you know, if you're a man, your genitals go when you lay down, all bets are off. So what happens is we often map our body as rounded and shaped as we feel or see it. But when we lay on the bed, it totally changes that sensory environment and the brain has to adjust.

So I couldn't get comfortable, I couldn't even focus on the tv. I was wanted to get pissed at my husband, but it's not his fault. He went to bed at a normal time. So I said, okay, let's, let's change this up. So what I did was got on the ground and I did my cat cow, and they focused on my feet. I just pressed my feet into the floor and I did my cat cow without changing the pressure at my feet.

So I said to my brain, here is some sensory information to my feet. Do what you want with it. Do a cat cow based off that information. And it actually calmed my brain down. What I didn't do, it was just get down and do a cat cow without focus, without a specific sensory input. Okay. Maybe you don't wanna do that.

I don't care. I'm just telling you what I did. I didn't say you had to do it. But what I want you to think about is before you go to bed is get your brain to respond to the current sensory info. Maybe you put your back up against the wall. Maybe you press different parts of yourself into the wall. Maybe when you're brushing your teeth, you feel your feet underneath you.

You notice where your tongue is in your mouth. You notice how your clothes are fitting into your body. And then move based off that. Now, that is not going to help you sleep better, but it's gonna help your brain better respond to the current situation. So then when you lay down and it's new sensory information, your brain can better adapt to that information.

Now, you know, I like to keep those, these episodes short and sweet ish. So just let that marinate and if you're freaked out about question one don't worry, we're gonna kind of circle back. Question two is what do you do when you get out of bed? And don't tell me like stare at the sun or like open your legs wide so your genitals get to see the sunlight.

I don't wanna hear that. Yes. Is sunlight first thing in the morning? Great. Yeah. But can your eyes adjust to that sun pressure? Does your brain know where you are in space? Can you feel your feet? Do you feel like shit? Are you disoriented? So what do you do when you get out of bed? Some of us just pop up.

Maybe you gotta pee. I don't know. But what if you spent a moment in bed moving individual parts or focusing on how your body feels in the bed? Feel the heaviness of it. Roll to the side, or, my favorite is do one eye exercise. Why do I like to do one eye exercise? Well, my eyes have been closed for hopefully eight hours.

Maybe more. I don't have kids. It's kind of a luxury. I can sleep that long, so they're closed. Now, that doesn't mean your eyes aren't working. They're doing a lot when we're sleeping, especially in different cycles. But when we open them, our eyes have to adjust to the change in light. Our eyes have to find focus, and oftentimes they're like, Ugh.

Mm. Give them a minute. Something I like to do when I empower you to try this. I wake up. I feel the heaviness of the blanket on my body. I often like my feet out of the heaviness of the blanket. Ugh. People with the tight tucking, just enough. I don't know how you deal with that tight foot thing, another episode, but anyway.

Put a thumb up and just do some convergence, like literally wait till your thumbnail comes into full focus. If you're picking your cuticles like I do, I got a little scab there. Look at something specific and just bring that thumb slowly towards your nose and away, and don't force it. Go slow and make the range of motion bigger as you go.

Help your eyes focus. That's gonna help your eyes adjust to things far away and close up. You might hate that one. Maybe you look up at your ceiling and you turn your head in multiple directions while staring at that specific visual target. Can use a vestibular ocular reflex. Do something to warm up your visual system.

And why this is important guys, is our visual. Vestibular inner ear and our proprioception of where we are in space that dictates our balance. So if you feel off balance when you get outta bed, well tune into one of those systems. Tell the brain what's up. Let the eyes focus. Take a goddamn beat before you get outta bed.

Now if you have to pee, okay, we'll do this when you're on the toilet, okay? Get to where you gotta go. Pause there. Let your eyes adjust Now. Question two B, is scrolling on your phone the first, first thing you do when you get outta bed? Zero judgment. I catch myself doing it as well. But remember what I just said about your eyes and how they're not like fully warmed up yet.

Think of scrolling on your phone is plyometrics for your eyes. Okay, so if your phone is crystal clear at the rate you're scrolling, think about how freaking hard our eyes are working. That is a lot of plyometrics. First thing in the morning. It would be the same thing as me saying, get up outta your bed and do 20 jump squats.

As soon as you wake up, no stretching, no doing anything, you'd be like, no, Meghann, you are absolutely insane. You have officially lost your damn mind. Okay, same thing with scrolling. So if I'm crazy for doing jump squats, you're crazy for doing scrolling, so take a beat, warm up your eyes before you do your scroll.

Cool. The other thing to think about that when you get out of bed is what are you focusing on? Are you focusing on your strongest system or part or your weakest? You know, so a lot of my clients, you know, have foot drop, they have neuro conditions or they're injured, so they're always so tentative about that body part.

So say if I've got a bum wheel on my right foot, I might be like hypervigilant of that right foot, but let me give you a little food for thought. That right foot, if it's injured, if you got foot drop, if you have a neuro condition, she's not getting a lot of sensory input and the brain is having trouble processing what he or she's even giving the brain.

So it would be like yelling at a deaf person first thing in the morning. They're not gonna like that. And they're not gonna get anything from that. So what if instead you focus on a part that gives you zero problems? Probably gives you zero problems 'cause you're not really using it as much, or it's beautifully mapped and there's no problems.

Either way, bring some attention to it. You got a bad right foot. Move around your left shoulder. You got a bad right foot, move around your right shoulder. I believe in diagonals, but I also believe in quadrants. So move another part diagonally or above the joint, you hate what that's gonna do. Mobilizing it first thing in the morning is not gonna fix the world's problems, but by moving it around a little bit, it's gonna bring the brain's attention to that joint and alert the brain that, yo, we've got some other joints we could use today.

How about you use this one? Because we need to support in order to fix, if you've got a bum wheel, you've gotta make sure the rest of the system can support and integrate the change. So question number three, y'all are gonna hate it. Do you meditate?

Well, do you? What does meditation mean? There's a lot of different forms of meditation. Sometimes you listen to a meditation. Sometimes you guide your own. Sometimes you're just quiet. Sometimes you're quiet in your brain and move in your body. Remember what I told you that I did last night to calm my nervous system and help me get to bed because you know what?

I was bad. I worked too late. I was looking at screens. I was all doing all the shit you're not supposed to do. What am I supposed to just like suck it up? No. I did a moving meditation. I got my brain to focus on one thing and then challenged my body to move without disrupting what I was focusing on. And focus comes and goes.

When you're meditating, you're gonna catch a thought, you're gonna lose it. You've gotta let that go. When you lose a focus, we can come back to it. To me, making mistakes is important. So if I'm focusing on my foot and then I get tired and I lose focus on my foot, I'm gonna have a rep that maybe moves my foot in a big way, but that'll bring my attention back to it.

So I want you to ask how you can quiet your brain once a day. It doesn't have to be a traditional meditation, although I encourage it. I do my meditation and my infrared sauna. Do I wish I could do my meditation without being forced to rest? Yes, but I'm this thing called a human, and I'm very flawed and most of the time I'm doing my best.

Not always. Okay. Maybe you just do a moving meditation where you don't have music on in the background. You get curious. You are focused on one thing. You put your hands somewhere and see how many exercises you can do without moving that hand. Maybe you do a breath practice, but what we all need to understand is making this idea of meditation, this little box, it's setting yourself up to fail.

And yeah, notice I didn't ask if you meditated before bed. I don't care when you meditate. I don't care if it's for two minutes. Sometimes you know what my daily meditation is, is what I'm getting annoyed. Is two.

I just did it. If you're watching me on YouTube, you saw me close my eyes and not really take a deep breath, but a, I got that idea from my dogs. Anybody have a dog who like sizes if they like pay taxes and work to nine to five? My dogs do, but sometimes I don't have the time. Energy or mental focus to get into a moving meditation or a good meditation.

So I close my eyes, remind myself I'm human.

Do something that makes a sound, a shift, a gurgle, maybe activates my vagus nerve, maybe doesn't, but it's my kind of cue to flip the script to fricking relax. To ask myself, why am I getting so worked up over nothing? So to go back to question one, what do you do before bed? Don't make it a big to do. My friends, I know we like rules and regulations, we like to follow things, but I would love you to kind of maybe go with the flow more.

What do you need today? And ask yourself, what am I doing before bed? I. That could help slow down my brain.

Slow down my brain's need to find where my body is in space, or to give my brain something that helps it feel safe. If you, I've actually had clients wear shoes in bed. Now, I know that sounds terrible, but these are clients that were having tremendous nerve pain in their feet. Their MS was progressing.

The nerve pain was unbearable. So I said, where are your shoes? Help your brain know where your feet are in space. Move your feet before you go to bed. Move your feet before you get up, but not moving your feet in the shoes. Keep your foot in the shoe and move the foot and the shoe together. Almost like a game of operation.

So your brain is kind of mapping your foot as the shoe. Is that gonna help you differentiate the joints of your foot? No. But it's gonna help your brain know where your foot is, so it's not searching for, and it's gonna feel safe and allow you to sleep. Because without sleep, huh? Good luck being a human.

What do you do the first thing before you get out of bed? Maybe you can change that to, again, wake the brain up, quiet the brain down, help the brain feel safe. And guys, I'm talking something quick.

And do you meditate? And what does meditation mean to you? How you can use these questions for a client is to ask them the questions, then based off their answers, that's how you provide their solution. If the client says, I gotta jump outta bed first thing in the morning, I've got some prostate issues and I need to pee immediately.

Okay, so as soon as they get out of bed, they are going to jump outta bed, go to the bathroom, and you are going to give them their exercise there while they're going to the bathroom. Maybe it's not changing. The pressure between their hand and what they're holding onto to pee maybe when they're sitting on the toilet is focus on the pressure under one of their feet or finding a visual target.

And tucking their tailbone, doing a little posterior pelvic tilt without getting below what they're looking at. If the client says, I need to lay in bed for a while and then I don't wanna get outta bed, and then I'm feeling anxious, well, you give them some eye exercises and exercises directly in bed, feeling how the shape of their body changes when they get in and out of bed.

I like to call it floating. So I almost ask clients to think of their bed as like a pool and all their meat is under the surface. So can you roll to kind of get your butt out of the water and then slowly roll back and dip your butt to tap the top of the water and then go under it? Okay. I might give them leg slides.

I might ask them to do their knee drops. I have one of my clients literally put the remote control on their pubic bone. Not move the P, the remote control as they move their legs to isolate their hips. It's only a stupid exercise if it doesn't fit into the client's life and it doesn't achieve the goal.

Putting the remote on the crotch helps that client not rotate their spine or pelvis, but stabilize the spine and pelvis so that they can isolate their legs, which is something this client needs to be able to walk.

What clients do before bed is gonna tell you everything. If they have to do dishes, I'm giving them exercises while they're doing dishes. Just one, maybe two.

Yeah. Is it gonna make the dishes take a little longer? Yeah. By like one minute. And when my client says, oh, I don't wanna do that. I'm like, all right, well enjoy a bad night of sleep. What are your goals? And asking them the question about meditation, guys, you've gotta be creative. I would not ask people if they meditate.

I don't wanna ask you guys if you meditated, but you know what I said to myself, let's go there. I wanna see what they think meditation is. And yeah, do I want everybody to have a meditation practice? Do I think we could all benefit from it? Yeah, but I should also eat less candy and more vegetables.

So I want you guys to think before I let you go, what is the goal of meditation? What is our goal of meditation? For me, it's often not to relax, but to gain neural focus, lose neuro focus, gain it again, lose it, gain it, because that's what's going on all day long. That's my goal of meditation and when I'm narrowly focused and can lose focus and find it, that helps me relax and calm down.

So how can we get them to focus? Maybe their meditation is I exercises really helping gay stabilization, maybe it's vestibular exercises to help them maintain the position of their head when they're moving around. Be creative, have fun with these questions and let it be an open dialogue between friends, clients, and yourself.

Because the answers to these questions, if you're not honest, they will not improve your sleep. You can do everything Andrew Huberman or whoever tells you to do about sleep, and there's some great, great solutions out there, but let me tell you. If you're going through menopause, you're having major proprioceptive changes, your body's changing.

The laxing in your ligaments is changing. Shit's kind of weird. So when you go to rest in your bed, your brain is like, what is going on? When you roll over, you might not stabilize. Your body might go into gripping in patterns. It can lead to a lot of heat. Heat flashes, hot flashes. Right. It's a vasovagal response.

I'm not saying I can control hot flashes, but having solutions and preemptive things to help your brain feel safe is crucial. Okay? I don't wanna leave people who aren't going through menopause out of the equation. Maybe you're like a athlete and you're worried about your sport. You're worried about what you're doing wrong, or the coach yelling at you.

Well, we can't focus on the goal. We have to focus on what helps us get to that goal. And focusing on sleep and how to get your brain prepped and body ready to sleep rather than cramping or feeling uncomfortable or being over soar is crucial. And if you're at a certain age and have a prostate, I'm, I hate that it's normalized that you have to wake up and pee multiple times.

I actually had a client, I know I'm going off topic, tell me that their doctor was impressed 'cause they only had to get up and pee twice. 'cause the doctor's like, oh, I gotta get up to pee six times. What is it? A competition. Now let me tell you, all of my clients that have this problem when we improve their foot tip connection in positions.

They, their pelvic floor responds differently. Don't even need pelvic floor exercises. Their pelvic floor is overactive active, squeezing that damn prostate. No worry. No wonder it's overworking and enlarge shit is working hard. Okay? So easy solutions to big problems, but it does take time and focus. So I hope you enjoyed these three questions.

I hope it fostered a little bit of deeper understanding about how complex humans are and how complex sleep is, and how hypervigilant our damn brain is when we try to relax. So pick the question that resonated with you, make one change, and I look forward to hearing from you. I was gonna say seeing you in the next episode, but I don't get to see you.

You see me. So enjoy this episode and see you guys next time. Thanks.