
40+ Fitness Podcast
Sleep Is a Skill: How to Fix Your Sleep After 40 - Mollie McGlocklin
Better sleep after 40 comes from building the right daily rhythms, not from trying harder at bedtime. Mollie McGlocklin, creator of Sleep Is a Skill, makes the case that sleep is a learnable skill, and that forcing it or chasing a perfect score on your tracker usually makes it worse. Mollie went through acute insomnia while traveling overseas and left doctor after doctor with sleeping pills and no real guidance. In this episode she explains what sleep latency and sleep efficiency tell you, why falling asleep the second your head hits the pillow can be a red flag, which tracker numbers you can trust (and why deep sleep and REM aren't among them), when a nap helps and when it hurts, what to do when good sleep habits aren't enough, and why sleep really begins in the morning. Time Stamps: 03:42 Why you can't force sleep 05:07 Mollie's insomnia story 06:17 Sleeping pills and the case for CBT-I 09:07 Sleep as a skill, not a sleeper type 11:36 Sleep latency: when falling asleep fast is a red flag 13:18 Sleep efficiency and nighttime wakeups 14:51 Binaural beats, white noise, and sleep sounds 17:28 Sleep stages and why tracker data misleads 18:37 Blood oxygen averages and missed sleep apnea 20:12 Track trends in one device: HRV and heart rate 23:35 How wearables spotted COVID early 25:14 Why sleep apnea testing should be repeated 27:18 Naps and the insomnia exception 28:49 The caffeine nap 31:50 Shift workers and longer naps 33:37 When sleep hygiene isn't enough 35:15 CBT-I, ACT, and circadian entrainment 38:52 The health of your word 39:09 Sleep begins in the morning 40:48 Loneliness, relationships, and sleep 41:29 What hunter-gatherers teach us about sleep Links: Sleep Is a Skill (newsletter, podcast, and coaching): https://sleepisaskill.com The Wellness Roadmap: https://amzn.to/3U1xEdn





