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