Counselor ToolBox News Live

Hey, everybody, and welcome Back to the second episode of Counselor Toolbox News. I am your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. In today's show, we're going to talk about ways to improve sleep not only for physical health, but also mental and sexual health. Why is this an issue or why do we care? Well, approximately 30% of the population report one or more insomnia symptoms. And as you're going to find out, insomnia is more than just being sleepy. It has a lot of effects on our life. The first article we're going to talk about is highlighted the fact that sleep quality improvement, improved cortisol levels, which is our stress hormone, sex hormone balances, and both of those, when they're improved, improve mental health. It was found that chronic sleep loss is associated with increased cortisol, that stress hormone, which can cause altered levels of our sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen. So when our stress is high, our stress stress hormones are high, our sex hormones are out of balance. High cortisol levels are associated with depression, anxiety, hypertension, obesity, inflammation and type 2 diabetes. We don't want high cortisol. Therefore, in order to keep cortisol low, we need to keep sleep sleep quality up. Low testosterone contributes to anxiety, depression and low libido by altering GABA and serotonin symptoms systems. Gaba, which is our natural Valium, if you want to think about it that way, and serotonin is our natural antidepressant and our natural, one of our natural calming chemicals. When testosterone is low, both of those brain chemicals are out of balance, which can make us feel anxious or depressed. Again. Good sleep helps maintain the levels of testosterone which prevents these problems. Additionally, for women, changes in estrogen levels impact the HPA axis, which is our stress response system, and the levels of oxytocin, which is the bonding chemical that we have that make us want to hang out with people and and bond. And again, serotonin, whether you are a male and your testosterone levels are being altered or a female and your estrogen levels are being altered, D the poor sleep quality alters our sex hormones, which contributes to alterations of all those brain chemicals that help us feel happy and healthy and help us focus and have motivation and all that kind of stuff. So sleep's kind of important. Sex hormones are also found to play a significant role in maintaining healthy sleep. So not only does sleep sleep help maintain healthy hormone levels, but healthy hormone levels help maintain quality sleep. High testosterone can make sleep apnea worse. A lot of people don't have to worry about high testosterone. A few do. But they found that when men were given high doses of testosterone replacement, it did make sleep apnea worse. Low testosterone levels, which is becoming progressively more common, and low estrogen levels are both associated with poor quality sleep and reduced cognitive abilities. And they think that the reduction in our cognitive abilities or our ability to think and solve problems and stuff isn't necessarily directly because of the hormone changes, but because of the sleep loss. We get good sleep, we can think more clearly and it helps balance our hormones and balanced hormones help us get better sleep during menopause. Estrogen replacement therapy has been found helpful for helping to improve sleep. And for men, sleep, functional performance, sexual functioning and mood were also either improved or unchanged with testosterone replacement when they had low testosterone levels. Remember, as we age, our sex hormone levels naturally decline. For some, they decline more than others. If we've got clients that are presenting with disturbances in their ability to fight, focus and think and concentrate, depression, anxiety, you know, it really can be helpful to make sure that they get their sex hormone levels evaluated in order to rule out any physiological causes of their mood and cognitive issues. If they get those hormones balanced, then they're going to be more likely to get quality sleep and have a positive cycle going as as opposed to a negative cycle of sleep loss and hormone imbalance. So, moving on a little bit from hormones, let's talk about essential oils, y'. All. If you've watched any of my other classes on our YouTube channel, you know that I am a big fan of essential oils. They don't work for everybody, but they do work for some. I am more prone to recommending that people inhale the eent essential oils as opposed to using them topically at all because some people are very sensitive to essential oils and I use essential oils a lot with, with our rescue animals. Anyway, how do, how do essential oils relate to sleep? Research supports that short term use of lavender and bergamot essential oil can help with the treatment of anxiety, restlessness, pain and insomnia. And using sweet majoram can also reduce pain. Lavender essential oil increased quality of sleep and reduced anxiety in one study. And sweet marjoram has also shown effectiveness in reducing pain. One of the more interesting studies that I read was bergamot essential oil can reduce anxiety and restlessness as well as pain, especially in people with dementia. And they found that in people with dementia who are having difficulty communicating with what's going on with them or what their needs are or where they hurt, that that can contribute to their anxiety and restlessness. Same thing is true for children. Be really careful when using anything with children get a doctor's clearance ahead of time, of course, yada yada. But children who are not able to express themselves, whether it's because they have autism spectrum disorders and are not able to communicate because that's one of their symptoms, or they're too young. There are a variety of reasons people may not be able to communicate when they are having some sort of ache or pain or problem. We don't want to ignore the pain because that generally means that there's a some sort of problem in there. But it can help reduce pain once we figure out what it is until the treatments kick in. For, for example, when your child has an ear infection and it hurts and the antibiotics haven't kicked in yet, or when you have a headache, or if you've just got muscle tension and pain, it's not an injury, it's just, you know, stiffness. Bergamot might be helpful. Additionally, sleep apnea treatment with a CPAP machine the continuous positive airway pressure or CPAP machine reduces depression and improves mental functioning not only in patients with obstructive sleep apnea, but also their bed partners. Obstructive sleep apnea is associated with negative health consequences including depression, drowsy driving, metabolic disease, cognitive decline, and irritability in both patients and their sleep partners. Why is this? Because the patients themselves are waking themselves up throughout the night when they stop stop breathing and their partners are probably being awakened multiple times throughout the night when they stop breathing and or may not be getting quality sleep because their partner is snoring loud enough to take the paint off the walls is not just bed partners. If you want to think about about it that way, anyone who sleeps in the same room with someone who has obstructive sleep apnea may be affected. So think about people who live in dormitories or reside in dormitories. You When I think dorms, I think college, but you can also think barracks. If somebody in that room has obstructive sleep apnea, they're probably going to keep everyone else up. I remember when my daughter went to sleepaway camp the first time one of the little girls in her room evidently snored like a freight train, as my daughter put it, and kept the entire cabin up all night long every night that they were there. So when my daughter came home, she was just. She was plum exhausted because she hadn't had a good night's sleep in a week. Recognizing the importance of sleep in our health, our mental health, and getting along with one another, it's important to consider Interventions for sleep apnea. If one partner or one person in the in the room reports snoring or difficulty with sleep apnea, intermittent lack of oxygen in people with sleep apnea may cause actual brain injury. It's not just one of those things that's like, oh well, he stopped breathing for a second, you know, yada yada, he started again. But doing that repeatedly can cause damage to the tissues in the brain, which can disrupt nor norepinephrine and dopamine systems. Dopamine, remember, is our motivation chemical and norepinephrine is also one of our energy sort of chemicals. When our dopamine and norepinephrine systems are out of whack, we're also at greater risk for depression because serotonin disruption is not the only thing that contributes to depression. Additionally, people with sleep apnea show increases in inflammation associated with worsening of autoimmune issues and depression. Something about the sleep apnea and the repeated stopping breathing triggers the HPA axis, our stress response system which causes our brain to secrete inflammatory chemicals throughout of our, throughout our body. When we see systemic inflammation like that that triggers or is and, or is a symptom of autoimmune issues and it is also highly associated with depression. We can help people a lot by just helping them continue to breathe when they're sleeping. Imagine that, because that'll improve their quality of sleep as well as stop any damage that's happening to their brain. Patients who had both depression and sleep apnea who were treated with CPAP machines showed significant clinical improvement in both mood and cognitive functioning. Those are a few tips that we can use to help people that we are assessing. Too often we just stop with thoughts in, in counseling, we need to think biologically too. Are their hormone levels adequate? Are is their sleep of good quality? Do they have problems with sleep apnea? All of those things can contribute to depression and anxiety and other things that we see in mental health. Clin like last time and every time. Henceforth I will review a book that I've read and this week we're going to talk about Act Made Simple. This is another book by New Harbinger and I really love ACT or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It is a great approach to helping people learn psychological flexibility. Just like DBT Made simple that we talked about last week, Act Made simple is a great primer. We it is not super helpful for the individual who doesn't have any clinical training at all. This is really a manual for therapists to give them an introduction to using acceptance. Acceptance and commitment therapy. But you know, it's not written so it's super hard to understand if you really want to give it an old school try. But for therapists it's a great resource and it provides a helpful basic introduction to actual it introduces you to the basic principles of act. It discusses how to modify assessments to better fit with the Solution focused ACT framework, which I think is really helpful because from the beginning we're approaching people's problems from the perspective of pain is inevitable in life and I see that you are in a lot of pain right now. Let's see what a rich and meaningful life looks like to you and let's let me help you develop some tools so you can better choose in the moment what to do and how to react in order to help use your energy to move you towards the things that are important to you instead of being stuck in this quicksand of misery. There are plenty of exercises in this book and activities to help teach clients the basic ACT principles and translate them to daily life. If you get the book, you can look at the activities, great things to do in group and even individual and in between sessions. There's a lot of useful stuff that you can use with clients. It's just like I said, the book is probably written more for therapists than for the general public. There are also tons of vignettes and this is not something you see a lot in books anymore and I really do like it. There are tons of vignettes to give you examples of exactly how to apply the ACT principles. What would this discussion with a client actually look like? So you know you get a better understanding and then when you apply it you can go back and look at the vignette and go yeah, mine pretty much followed that. So I did it right or somewhere I got off track because I ended up in a way different place than this vignette indicates that I should have, and it can help you identify places that you might need to gain more knowledge. For any of the books that I talk about that are from New Harbinger, you can go to newharbinger.com and use promo code 1168snipes to save 25% off your entire order. If this broadcast was helpful to you, subscribe by clicking on the link below and click on the little bell to be notified. When we publish new videos and go live every Monday, it.