[00:00:00.650] - Dori Durbin
Parents: do you ever wish that you could just pull a book from the shelf and learn straight from the experts? What would an expert want your kids to know about them and how they can help? Well, today I have Cindy Davies. She's a holistic sleep consultant and parenting coach, and I am honored and privileged to have her here and pick her brain for you. Welcome, Cindy.

[00:00:23.110] – Cindy Davies
Hi. Thank you. I'm you're so welcome.

[00:00:25.680] - Dori Durbin
Thank you for taking your time out in your day and being willing to equip parents and kids. And I know that you just have this fascinating job because you literally get to put people to sleep. So can you just give us a little bit of your background and how you got into this and exactly what a holistic sleep consultant does?

[00:00:48.300] - Cindy Davies
Sure. So I was a therapist for a long time, and after I had my first son, I had kind of a bad postpartum depression. Then I wasn't able to be a therapist anymore. It was just too much dealing with. I worked with addiction, and so it was really hard to juggle that and be a new mom and focus on my own health and things like that. So when I had my second son, I really had a hard time with his sleep. My first son was a premie, so he just slept all the time. So it wasn't anything that I really even thought about. But then my second son really had a hard time sleeping and sometimes he would be up 8910, 1112 times in the night. And I know how sleep can really affect your mental health. And so I was worried about my health, his health, my husband's health, because he was helping me a lot with the baby in the middle of the night. And so I hired a couple of sleep consultants that use more traditional methods and they didn't really get to what the issue was specifically with my son. So I was thinking, well, there has to be some kind of way to look at him specifically and figure out what's going on with him and find what the cause of this is, and then find a solution that's going to help him.

[00:02:08.810] - Cindy Davies
Maybe isn't the typical cookie cutter use cry it out, take away the crushes, things like that. So I did a lot of research and figured out that he had a milk protein allergy, which I feel like people talk about that now, but back then he's seven. That wasn't something that people talked about. So I figured this out. I put area on in my diet and that improved his sleep a lot. I was like, okay, so whatever. The thing was that the person was telling me that I hired didn't even take that into account, but he still wasn't sleeping fantastic. So I sort of made my own method, just kind of based on what I was comfortable with, what I felt he was comfortable with and tried a few things, and then he started sleeping better. So I am really like a learner. I'm a research person. I love reading, I love all that kind of stuff. I love solving problems. So I found online, after he was sleeping better already, something called the Holistic Science of Sleep. And it's a program that was created maybe like 15 years ago, ten years ago, I'm not sure.

[00:03:21.440] - Cindy Davies
But you can be certified in their method. So I did their certification program, and it's a year long program. It's pretty intense. And then I opened my business.

[00:03:34.390] - Dori Durbin
A personal need that drove you to be able to help other people was that scary?

[00:03:42.290] - Cindy Davies
Not too scary just because a lot of my background as a therapist was with women with postpartum depression working with kids. So I was very comfortable already with that kind of parent child dynamic. So that wasn't really nerve wracking. It was actually easier because I was doing a lot of my stuff over the phone instead of in person. So it took a little bit of the pressure off to get to sit in my house and talk to people.

[00:04:12.690] - Dori Durbin
Well, that's convenient too, because when is it that people really need help? It's not probably during the waking hours, right?

[00:04:18.950] - Cindy Davies
Yes, exactly.

[00:04:20.340] - Dori Durbin
So with your son, what were you noticing besides your own lack of sleep and knowing that he wasn't getting sleep? Were there like, cues to you that his body just was sleep deprived or what did you see?

[00:04:31.910] - Cindy Davies
He is a very happy child and he always has been, so there wasn't really too many cues where he was really grumpy or crying a lot or things like that, just because that's not really his personality. So it's actually, I think, harder when you have a kid like that because then there's not outright lots of crying or temper tantrums or things like that. He's just sort of a happy kid. It was more the, oh, my gosh, I can't keep waking up this many times. This is just so not good for either one of us. More than other kinds of behavioral type of things that you might notice with kids that have a different kind of temperament.

[00:05:16.470] - Dori Durbin
Yeah, I'm assuming that your son was not the common typical reaction either.

[00:05:23.880] - Cindy Davies
Maybe. I don't know. That's why I love this method so much, because all kids are so different. I've worked with so many families and so many kids, and every single one is different from any other one. So it's hard to even say in general, this kid shows this thing and that means they're sleep deprived. They're all just so different. And it's really up to the parents intuition to think, like, I feel like something's a little bit off, or we could improve on something.

[00:05:52.290] - Dori Durbin
Yeah, that's a really good point because you do know your own kids and tell when things aren't quite right.

[00:05:59.970] - Cindy Davies
Exactly.

[00:06:00.950] - Dori Durbin
Do you work with babies as well, or young toddlers.

[00:06:04.380] - Cindy Davies
Yeah, so my certification actually is for people who are pregnant, so I can work with people in pregnancy. And we all know there's all sorts of insomnia and things that can happen during pregnancy. And there's actually research about pregnancy. And if a woman is experiencing insomnia, sometimes that can affect the baby and the rhythms that the baby develops in Uteros and then they're born already kind of having a disrupted sleep cycle. And so if you can work with a mom before the baby is even born, then sometimes you can improve a little bit of that before you even have a baby to work with.

[00:06:47.170] - Dori Durbin
Should be incentive right there to get that straight.

[00:06:50.210] - Cindy Davies
Yes, exactly. So I work with people who are pregnant, and then for sleep, I'm certified from birth to age seven. And then for just general parenting coaching, I work with parents of kids of any age.

[00:07:05.690] - Dori Durbin
So the parenting coaching that you're doing isn't necessarily around just sleep, correct?

[00:07:11.930] - Cindy Davies
Yeah, well, that came out of a need from my sleep business where people started saying, well, how do I deal with this or how do I deal with that? Where maybe it's not 100% sleep related, but it's really, if you're looking at something holistically, everything influences everything else. So maybe a parent has trouble keeping consistent on a schedule and that might affect sleep, but it might affect stuff during the day too. So then you can look at that and that would be more of a general coaching scenario. But they all can work together. So I have parents who come to me specifically for behavioral things or things like that that aren't related to sleep, but then sometimes they're all working together.

[00:07:57.850] - Dori Durbin
Yeah, I think I read somewhere, I think maybe on your web page, that you were talking about components that are part of the holistic approach. But I remember eating was one of them. What are some of the other ones?

[00:08:10.450] - Cindy Davies
Yeah. So eating is important because there are foods that help your body produce sleep hormones, and then there are foods that can either keep you from producing hormones or just keep you awake or make your stomach upset or things like that. Your environment, which a lot of sleep consultants talk about environment, but the temperature, the degree of light that's in the room, the position of your bed, if it's like biography window or things like that. So I always do an environment evaluation with any of the parents that I work with for sleep. Then there's even just things like your child's emotional well being. If your kids in a separation anxiety phase, that's going to make certain sleep things more difficult. And then how do you work with that? Or if a child is someone that has a more sensitive type of temperament, then you want to look at their sleep in a different way than the child that doesn't. So all of those different kinds of pieces and then medical stuff. I have so many kids that I work with who have reflux and chronic ear infections and tongue ties and lip ties. So to look at how all of that affects sleep too, wow, I never.

[00:09:20.520] - Dori Durbin
Think about the medical piece of that because that probably really does have a big impact on their sleep, doesn't it?

[00:09:26.970] - Cindy Davies
Yeah, especially reflux.

[00:09:29.990] - Dori Durbin
You're upright, probably trying to sleep and that's awkward. You said something else that made me wonder. Night terrors. Do you ever work with people with the night terrors?

[00:09:41.510] - Cindy Davies
I do, but night terrors are such an interesting thing because there's not a lot of knowledge about why they happen or what they are about. So I do work with how to prevent night tears. Sometimes it's a scheduling issue where maybe a child is over tired and then they are producing a little bit of extra cortisol or something like that and that might be causing a night terror, but it's really hard to say. So it's more about just giving the parents tools to help their child through the night terror because the general rule of thumb is you don't want to wake them up when they're in the middle of that. You just want to kind of keep them safe and make sure they don't roll out of bed or something.

[00:10:26.080] - Cindy Davies
Walk down the stairs.

[00:10:27.780] - Dori Durbin
Walk down the stairs. I think I can tell you this safely, but I have a niece that used to sleepwalk and they always had to make sure they put something in front of the door to the house because they were worried that she would get so tired and sleepwalk and go straight out of the house. Yeah, those are some real scary situations that parents are really concerned about.

[00:10:51.840] - Cindy Davies
Yeah, well, sleepwalking is more of a medical issue, so that might be something that a doctor would address where I could help the parent look at things like schedule, diet, all these sorts of things and see if that's contributing and if there's anything we can do from those angles to help with the sleepwalking. But then the sleepwalking itself could be part of a sleep disorder that a doctor would have to work on.

[00:11:17.280] - Dori Durbin
Interesting. So when you get new clients, what does that process look like from your onboarding to maybe some of the beginning of your treatment?

[00:11:27.850] - Cindy Davies
Yeah, so for a sleep client, I mean, for sleep or parent coaching, it's fairly similar, but I pretty much always have just a quick phone call just to see what the person's goals are, see if that's something that matches what I could do. Like if it's someone who says my child is sleepwalking, I would potentially just refer them to like a pediatric doctor. But if it's something that I can help with, then I usually give the parents a couple of different options of how much support they want. So I have some packages that have a lot of support. And then I have some packages that have less, and I have some parents who are like, I read all the books, I've done all the things. I really just need someone to keep me on track. And so those parents usually go with the packages that are less support and more just me checking on them and making sure things are going okay. And then I have a lot of parents who are like, I'm so exhausted, I'm so I can't even think about reading the sleep book. I can't think about doing all of this.

 [00:12:27.500] - Cindy Davies
I really need someone to help me through this whole entire process so then that client might pick a package that has more support, where they can text me, they can email me, they have multiple phone calls each week, and there's really a lot more just hands on work from me. With that kind of client, I could.

[00:12:49.930] - Dori Durbin
See how that would you'd have to really itemize everything by what they need and what their kids were experiencing. Similar with the pregnant moms as well.

[00:12:59.770] - Dori Durbin
Yeah. I unfortunately don't have a lot of pregnant moms that come to me for help. I don't know if it's a cultural thing where women just don't like to ask for help or what the deal is, but I wish that I had more pregnant moms because of what we just talked about, where if we can start getting people developing a different type of rhythm before the baby's even born, that would be so helpful. But with a pregnant mom, it is fairly similar. There's just a couple sessions that we have to check in, and I give her some tips about how to not have to get up and pee every hour and that sort of you do.

[00:13:35.930] - Dori Durbin
That for 50 and up, too.

 [00:13:39.350] - Cindy Davies
I could give you some tips.

 [00:13:40.770] - Dori Durbin
Well, you know, it's funny. It's not funny, but it's funny in my mind.

[00:13:44.570] - Cindy Davies
Yes.

 [00:13:45.140] - Dori Durbin
I remember being pregnant and probably the last month, especially my second pregnancy the last month, feeling like I would get like an hour or two of decent sleep. And then you're kind of in this nesting buzz where if you can move around well enough, you can get stuff done, and then you go to sleep and your brain is just on. And I feel like that's not just a pregnancy thing for a lot of people, myself included. You get yourself wound up and you just don't know how to unwind, and so you're just, like, thinking about how.

 [00:14:19.990] - Cindy Davies
You should sleep, right? Yeah. Well, it's interesting that you say that, because even a lot of the work I do with babies is learning how to or not babies necessarily, but maybe toddlers learning how to relax yourself so that you can go to sleep, because we have a lot of people talking about your baby needs to learn to self soothe. Your baby needs to learn how to your baby knows how to sleep like natural biological function. Just like going to the bathroom or sneezing or whatever thing that you do. And so we don't really necessarily need to learn how to do it, but we do need to learn how to stop what we're doing, lay down, relax our mind, relax our body, relax our breathing, all of these kinds of things. And that can be tricky even for grown up, myself included sometimes. Yeah.

[00:15:18.150] - Dori Durbin
And then probably that can get exasperated with what you ate.

[00:15:23.510] - Cindy Davies
Yes. And then in pregnancy you have such horrible heartburn and all these compounding factors and yeah, it can be hard.

00:15:33.610] - Dori Durbin
Are there things that you absolutely should not eat within a couple of hours of going to bed?

[00:15:38.460] - Cindy Davies
Yes. Well, sugar is an obvious one, caffeine is an obvious one, but you want to avoid especially if you're pregnant or especially if you have any anything like that. Tomatoes, citrus, sometimes theory, it just sort of depends. But mostly tomatoes, citrus, sugar, caffeine, anything that can make you really gassy, like certain types of vegetables or things like that.

[00:16:03.720] - Dori Durbin
Interesting. So a couple of hours before would make a difference. Like let's say you go to bed at ten and you eat these things at like seven. Would you be better off 3 hours out? Or is it just kind of try to avoid them in the evening at all?

 [00:16:17.100] - Cindy Davies
It just depends on your own sensitivity level. Like some people have stomachs where they can eat whatever they want and it doesn't ever bother them. And some people have really sensitive stomachs and my oldest son has a very sensitive stomach and if he eats anything with tomato sauce for dinner he will have a very hard time going to sleep.

[00:16:37.000] - Dori Durbin
And that goes back to that whole mom awareness, child awareness.

 [00:16:41.140] - Cindy Davies
Yes.

[00:16:42.450] - Dori Durbin
Keep like journals or how do they keep track of what not?

[00:16:47.300] - Cindy Davies
Yeah, that's a great question. So there's an app that I have of my sleep clients, my parenting, my sleep clients, I have them use this app that you can like they add me as a caregiver so they can track things and then I can log in and I can see what they're tracking. So they can track food, they can track any night wakings, if they're breastfeeding or bottle feed, they can log those in there. They can log pretty much anything they want. So if I have a baby that I'm working with who I know does have a more sensitive stomach, I'll have the parent log what they had for breakfast, lunch and dinner in addition to what they're talking about for sleep. And then I can say like, oh, maybe we should avoid the peaches before we go to bed because peaches are a food that make you want to poop and your body wants to poop in the morning. Let's put the peaches in the morning where they're going to help with just your body's natural urgency to the bathroom and you don't want to do that before you go to bed.

[00:17:53.030] - Dori Durbin
But that's good information because I think, again, that awareness of recognizing what you're doing that's making a difference with how things are going through the night is pretty something you probably don't even think about.

[00:18:06.760] - Cindy Davies
No. Well, we have a lot of like for babies, lots of baby food has apples in it, and apples can give you a lot of energy. Oh, this is the other thing you do want to avoid before bedtime, apples or applesauce or anything like that, because it can give you a big burst of energy. Like, you just have a little cup of coffee and then make it really hard for you to go to sleep.

[00:18:31.500] - Dori Durbin
I wouldn't have ever thought of apples. Yeah, natural.

[00:18:34.670] - Cindy Davies
Why would you? Yeah, I had one mom that I worked with who was expecting, and I said, okay, go through your bedtime routine with me because we look at routines and schedules and all these things. And she said, Well, I have an apple and a huge glass of water every night before I go to bed. And then I lay there for 2 hours and I can't sleep. I finally fall asleep, and then I get up and go to the bathroom. Okay, we need to get rid of that apple. We need to get rid of a glass of water. And just those little changes, I mean, it didn't take out away all of the night problems because there's just so many when you're pregnant, but it did help her not get up as much, and it didn't take her as long to fall asleep. Yeah.

00:19:18.740] - Dori Durbin
And that's huge. After days of doing that in a row, is the standard, like, seven to 9 hours for adults?

[00:19:26.850] - Cindy Davies
Yeah.

[00:19:30.630] - Dori Durbin
What is this supposed to be for babies and kids?

[00:19:33.990] - Cindy Davies
It all depends on the age, and it depends on the baby. And I have a lot of parents who come to me and they say, I'm really trying to get my child to sleep 12 hours overnight because that somehow has become the gold standard. But a lot of babies can't sleep 12 hours overnight. One of the things that we look at is basically the totals of sleep that the baby is getting in a 24 hours period. So if you can sleep 14 hours and 24 hours, as maybe a six month old and 12 hours of those are at night, you're not going to take very many naps during the day because there's only 2 hours of sleep left in your body. You know what I mean? So then if you do take really good naps during the day, but you're still wanting your baby to sleep 12 hours and they're in bed for 12 hours, they're going to be up all the time because their body just can't sleep 12 hours. So one of the things we really go through and this is why the logs are so helpful, is this is how much the baby can sleep night.

This is how much they can sleep during the day. When you do this or that, you're going to subtract sleep from the overnight or add sleep to the overnight, and we try to get the timing right, because that is really a humongous factor in how well you're going to sleep and how easy it is to fall asleep.

[00:21:01.170] - Dori Durbin
So I'm assuming that it depends on the person again, but, I'm Sensing the theme: It depends on you. I'm also thinking is there like a time in general that you try to have people getting their kids down to bed or a time you try to get those expectant moms down?

[00:21:23.210] - Cindy Davies
It depends on the person. An expectant mom. I would say if you could go to bed between ten and 1110 would be the ideal time just based on how the circadian rhythm works. But realistically, I don't always go to bed right. Just kind of give them a little bit of a range so that they don't feel like, oh my gosh, if I didn't go to bed at 10:00, I made a huge mistake and I'm not going to sleep well and give them more anxiety about it. But for the babies, I have very specific schedules that I give parents just depending on their baby's age.

[00:22:13.290] - Dori Durbin
That makes sense. It's interesting too, because when you said that about making a huge mistake and upsetting things, does it take a while for the circadian rhythms and the sleep to reset so it's kind of more at a desirable level?

[00:22:30.290] - Cindy Davies
Not necessarily. I mean, babies are really adaptable and the good thing about little babies is they take a lot of naps during the day. So if one nap gets messed up, you've got lots of other naps that you can make up for it with. But I would say for a baby, and this is just guessing and based on what I see from people that I work with, maybe three to seven days for an older child, like a toddler, maybe seven to ten days and that's really being consistent with the schedule that they're on. And then for adults, again, it just really depends on how easily you can adapt to change. Some people a little bit of a late night or something is just like a blip on the radar, but for other people it can really be kind of like make things fall apart a little bit.

[00:23:31.810] - Dori Durbin
Yeah, I could totally see that. I was going to tease you and say it took longer older than you were, the longer it would take. But it's true, a lot of people are a lot more flexible with their schedules and staying up late one night doesn't mean the rest of the week is off.

[00:23:48.410] - Cindy Davies 
Exactly. Yeah.

[00:23:50.140] -  Dori Durbin
Although I would say with teenagers, I think that there is some truth to that late night knocks you out for two days kind of thing.

[00:23:57.130] - Cindy Davies
Teenagers are such a whole different ballgame because of their hormones are changing, their own body rhythms are changing. They're like individuating from their families. There's just so much going on that's so specific to just teenagerhood. You know what I mean?

[00:24:19.670] - Dori Durbin 
I do. There are different kind of complexities, we'll call them.

[00:24:25.060] - Cindy Davies
Yes, exactly.

[00:24:27.110] - Dori Durbin
So if you had two pieces of advice that you would give a sleepless mom or a mom who has a sleepless child, what would be the two pieces of advice that you would give them?

[00:24:38.560] - Cindy Davies
Okay, this is hard. I have so many pieces of advice.

[00:24:42.890] - Dori Durbin
What are the first steps?

[00:24:44.910] - Cindy Davies
Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of moms out there who try to fix it themselves, me included, because it's hard to ask for help. It's hard to spend money on something justify whatever it is. Especially sometimes it's really hard. Well, if it's the income or whatever the situation is, for some reason, moms who are not working seem to have a harder time. I think taking that step where moms who are working are like, this is impacting my work. I need to get this fixed, whatever it is. But moms who aren't working, I think, just have such a different feeling around their role, and like, I have to fix it myself. I'm the mom. This is what my job is and that sort of thing. And there's no shame at all in asking somebody for help and asking a professional for help, and especially if your sleep is getting to the point where it affects your mental health, then really taking care of yourself, as cliche as this sounds, is the best way to take care of your baby. Because when my moms come to me for help, they're so tired and so caught in that spiral of not knowing what to do.

And they're fighting with their partners because they're exhausted, and they're not the best version of themselves for their child because they're exhausted. And so many of the moms I work with will say, like, I just have no patience left. I'm nippier and I yell more than I want to, or whatever it is. But when you're feeling tired, of course you can't be your best self. So if you can get a jump on it and get someone to help guide you in a gentle and holistic way to get better sleep, then jump on it. Don't wait is my advice.

[00:26:49.410] - Dori Durbin
I think that's great advice, because I think it is for anything. We tend to wait till the very last minute when we need the help the most. What's interesting, too, with the whole concept of having moms get help before their babies are born, because you know that after the babies are born, if they're in that routine, it's going to be miserable for everybody. And so taking that step of just reaching out to somebody in the very beginning or reaching out when you start to notice the problem is huge.

[00:27:19.550] - Cindy Davies
Yeah. And not waiting until you're really at your breaking point where if I don't get help now, I don't know what's going to happen. Like, I'm going to lose it or I'm going to not be a great parent or whatever. The thing is, and parenting is so hard already, that if you have one thing you could fix fairly easily, then invest in that. Nothing I feel like is more important than your mental health as a parent.

[00:27:50.900] - Dori Durbin 
I agree. Well, we've only got a couple of Minutes left, Cindy, so where is the best place that they can reach you if they'd like to get a hold of you?

[00:27:59.710] - Cindy Davies
Yeah, so my website is the best place to reach me. It's holisticsleepcenter.com, and there's a contact form on there. People can email me directly from there. I also have Facebook and Instagram. I haven't figured out TikTok or any of that other stuff yet, so Facebook and Instagram, but my website is probably the best.

[00:28:23.490] - Dori Durbin
And then upcoming programs, do you have some? 

Cindy Davies
Yeah, every few months I have a sleep workshop that I do for any parents of kids, any age. People who are still expecting and haven't had their babies yet can join. And I keep all of those workshops pretty small so that people can ask questions, get individualized help, and then there's always some type of follow up support afterward, whether it's like an online group or emailing or things like that, so that people aren't just given a bunch of information and then sent off to try and figure it out. There's always extra support. And in May, I have a parenting class that's coming up. It's four weeks, and it's going to talk about emotional intelligence, how to be aware of your own triggers as a parent, how to discipline your children in really gentle, positive, effective ways. Yeah. How to feel good about yourself as a parent and really connect with your child and yeah. Just effective ways of interacting and problem solving and things like that.

 [00:29:36.220] - Dori Durbin
That's fantastic. Well, what we'll do is we'll have those links on the show notes underneath. They can reach out to you. And I just want to thank you so much, Cindy, for your time today.

[00:29:47.210] - Cindy Davies
Sure.

[00:29:47.980] - Dor iDurbin
Valuable invaluable information. And thank you for being on with us.

[00:29:53.470] - Cindy Davies 
Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I really find it so important to talk about this with parents and help parents feel like it's okay to ask for help and that you're not doing anything wrong if you're not following what the approved ways of doing things are. And it's so important.

[0:30:15.250] - Dori Durbin 
That's awesome. Thank you.

[00:30:17.330] -Cindy Davies
Thank you.