Host Amelia Phillips answers our listener questions with simple hacks and products she loves. Today she answers questions on the top tips for better sleep, what to do if you’re worried about your child’s weight, and how to support your kids when you relocate homes.
Sleep:
Ceiling Projection Clock
Dr Carmel Harrington Episode on Sleep
Biocuticals Ultra Night Muscle Ease
Pure Inventions Tea: Night Formula
Kids Weight:
Gary Leong on kids weight episode
Boosting body image in kids episode
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
Welcome to another. Ask Me Anything segment, and I have to say I’m feeling good today. . I feel like the last few times I did this, I was a bit down and out, but today I’m feeling good. I ran 13 and a half Ks this morning. It was a sunny sunrise, bounced into the house. Unfortunately, Angus isn’t feeling so great.
My six year old, he’s at home with a chesty. Let’s hope that doesn’t run rampant through the house, not covid so far. So keeping my fingers crossed about that. Before we jump into today’s questions, I’d love to encourage you to subscribe to my show so that you’ll get alerted each time a new episode drops.
And of course, the best way to connect with me is on Instagram or. Over email. I generally check my dms regularly as well as emails, of course, and check out my show notes today for more information on our questions. So let’s dive straight into it. We’ve got Lisa c Hi Lisa. Please help for tips for better sleep.
It’s been a long time coming, but I need to improve my sleep habits. I’m exhausted. . Oh my goodness. I’m hoping lots of you listeners are nodding your head right now because sleep is absolutely epic. Especially when you become a parent. Is it age? Is it the stress of having kids? Is it all of the above?
Anyway, let’s dive into it. I’ll chunk it down, I guess, into the setup of your room, your bedtime routine, and then some supplements and hacks that. I’ve come across in my experience. So let’s start with the room setup, and I’ve got this great podcast episode with Dr. Carmel Harrington. I can’t actually remember what number it is, but it’s way back near the start of my podcast.
But it’s all evergreen content, so it’s still definitely resonates. But that’s a great episode to listen to. So with your room setup, It’s got to be dark, so whatever you can do to make sure that as the sun slowly rises in the morning as well, that the room is nice and dark. It’s gotta be cool as well. So many people sleep in a room that’s a little on the warm side, or they have too many doers on, so making sure it’s just that tiny bit cooler than you’d like If you’re kind of into aromatherapy, then a drop of lavender oil or some laved oil on a tissue next to your bed.
There’s a little bit of research behind that. I’d also just smells really. A big one is the phone out of your room. For some of you, you’ll be nodding, going, Yeah, of course my phone’s been out of my room forever. But for others it’s just like, No way. Like it lives right next to me. But honestly, if you struggle with your sleep and your phone is in your room, just give it a go for a month.
And if you say you need it because you need it for your alarm or whatever, get a ceiling projection alarm clock. I’ll pop one in the show notes. They’re like 20 or 30 bucks from Target and they’re where they can stay black so you don’t have the clock face staring at you. And it just projects a really tiny light on the roof.
If you wake up in the night, you wanna know what the time is. You just look up. You can see the time there. And of course, it’s an alarm clock as well. I highly recommend one of those if you need it. But please just try the phone out of the. So that’s your kind of setup. Then you got your bedtime routine, and Dr.
Carmel had some really great tips for this. And the first one was to have a hot shower before bed because the body and all your circadian rhythms and all the complex hormones that are involved in putting you to sleep like to. Wind down on a cooling body temperature. So if you’ve just had a nice warm shower and your body temperature is slowly dropping after that shower, that helps signal to your body that it’s time to go to sleep.
Reducing screen time before bed is huge as well. Ideally an hour before bed. I mean, that doesn’t work for me because my favorite thing to do, and the only time I get is that, you know, hour of Netflix before bed. But one thing Dr. Kamel did say is it’s very different sitting there with your TV screen, which is across, you know, across the room, and you’re watching, you know, a, a film noir or a nice slow thrill.
Versus sitting with your bright phone, looking at TikTok and looking at big, bright lights flashing. So at least if you are gonna do screen time, try to make it one of those kind of slower shows as opposed to looking at your phone reading a book, so that couple of pages before you go to sleep again, just not, or not on a Kindle or a screen, but good old fashioned paper book.
And then one thing that I love, I do regularly, and I have data to show how much it improves. My deep, deep sleep is two minutes of box breathing, or at least a minute of box breathing before bed. And if you meditate, great, I don’t or can’t meditate. So how we box breathe is you’re laying in bed, you’ve turned the light out.
You’re just about to go to sleep, lie on your back and imagine a box. And for the first horizontal line of the box you breathe in, so into three, four. For the first vertical line of the box you hold your. Hold to three, four. For the second horizontal line of the box you breathe out to three, four, and for the final vertical line of the box, you hold that expanded breath to three, four and box.
Breathe for about one to two minutes, and that will get your deep sleep into a much longer time. So that would be the bedtime routine, and then supplements and hacks. So magnesium. Magnesium before bed. You’ve probably heard about this. It’s one of the most researched nutrient has the most impressive research behind it.
I like a brand called Pharmaceuticals, Ultra Night Muscle Ease. I find that. Really helps. There’s another tea that I found. I came across it in the States, and by the way, I’m not sponsored by any of these guys. These are literally just hacks that I’ve come across. This tea is called Pure Inventions, or the brand is, and the product is called Night And Inside it’s got Melatonin, L Theanine, which is like a stress reduction amino acid.
It’s got passion flour extract, valer root extract, camomile flour extract. You know, these are all known to have sedative effects and they’re used in both eastern and western medicine. It’s got something called oxy tropen or five htp, which is a naturally occurring amino acid, and it’s the chemical precursor to serotonin plus it’s got, you know, lavender oil, peppermint oil.
This tea, it’s in a dropper, and I just have it like half a dropper in a big cup of tea. It literally puts me to sleep. I love. The other thing I love talking about hacks is if you’ve got an Apple Watch, there is an app on the Apple Watch called auto sleep, and I’m obsessed with this. What I’ll do, I actually do wear my watch to sleep, but I turn everything on airplane mode and I put it on movie mode so that it just stays completely dark.
But it tracks my sleep. And it’s amazing when you look at things like alcohol work, stress, and what that does to your deep sleep. There’s another one called the Aura Smart Ring. Look, I haven’t done a lot of research on that one, but I know it’s getting a lot of publicity at the moment. And then another one that a colleague of mine absolutely raves about is these ankle bracelets.
Or you can put them on your chest and it’s called Apollo Neuro. Pop all these in the show notes, but they would be ones to look out for general hacks. And look, if none of this works and you’ve been struggling with sleep for over three months, you may be in chronic sleep deprivation. So please go see a sleep clinic.
Dr. Carmel Harrington has one called Sleep for Health, and you can go into Sydney c b d offices, or you can do it over Zoom. Get to the bottom of it because if you’ve got chronic sleep deprivation, you’re gonna have some health issues. Everything feels harder as you probably don’t need me to tell you if you have kids.
So if you’re in a situation where I wanna sleep, but I just can’t, cuz my kids keep waking me up. In my sleep episode, Dr. Carmel talks about the best way to have a daytime nap and how you can daytime nap to kind of counterbalance if you are in for sleep deprivation. So anyway, there are a few tips. I hope some of them resonate with you, Lisa, and best of luck.
Keep at it.
All right. Question number two is from someone who would like to remain anonymous. How do I know if my child is overweight? Ooh. Okay. So firstly, I’m sorry that you’re worrying about this. There’s nothing worse than having an underlying worry about your child, whether it be about their health, their physical health, or their mental health.
I know it can be a real worry. So I support you in going and trying to get to the bottom. is this really a problem? It can be really, really hard to tell. Kids come in all different shapes and sizes as we know. So I guess the first question to ask yourself, is anyone else in the family overweight? Cause often obesity and overweight is something that if it’s lifestyle, Induced.
A lot of other family members will have it too. So let’s say you’re in a situation where everyone’s really healthy weight, but you’ve got this one child that seems to have kind of packed it on a little bit. That would be my first port of to say, Look, I wouldn’t be too worried. But if you’re sitting here going, Yeah, look, I’m overweight, my partner’s overweight, the dog’s overweight.
Now I’m starting to see the kids are well then. Yes, that’s I guess, a. You can use a kid’s BMI chart, body mass index chart. Now these charts are contentious, so you’ll have a lot of people that are dead against them. And definitely on an individual level, the best thing about them is it will show you a trend.
So it will show you on the percentile where your child sits. And then what’s even more helpful is over time, if you plot your child, you know, every three months, or if you have been plotting them since they were. You’ll be able to see, you know, are they’re sitting on the 60th percentile. Oh, but now they’ve jumped up to the 80th percentile.
That may be an indication that they’ve put on a lot of weight in a short period of time. And then, yes, there might be some adjustments that need to be made. Another way of looking at it is also looking at their subcutaneous fat, or you know, the fat you can pick up under the. They might be quite big and solid, but can’t really get a good handle of fat on them.
And I’m thinking about a child here. I’m not thinking about a toddler. Of course, toddlers carry a little bit more body fat, but I’m thinking more about a school-aged child. If you are able to really pick up a chunk of subcutaneous fat under their belly, then that is. An indication that they are carrying that extra bit of fat, and that might be something that then you say, Okay, well maybe I do need to go and see a pediatric endocrinologist, and that’s who your GP would refer you to if you were worried about your child’s weight.
They can refer you to a pediatric dietician and an endocrinologist. They tend to be what your GP would do, but these, these are all the things your GP would do as well as far as testing their b. Just be aware that if you do use bmi, there are certain ethnicities that it doesn’t work for Asian cultures, islander cultures.
It tends to be like quite a kind of waspy Anglo-Saxon measurement. But definitely if your child is on the higher side of that, above 85 above 90%, you would also be an indicator. More importantly, lifestyle observations. Are they less fit than their peers? Do you see that they’re really lacking in energy when you’re watching them all run around?
Are they the child that sits down first? Do they seem to be falling down this rabbit hole of getting less and less active? What are their food choices like? What are the family food choices? And look, don’t get me wrong, it is totally normal for kids to crave junk food. I mean, that’s what food manufacturers are doing.
you know, they’re putting more fat, sugar, salt, and bright colored packaging to lure our kids in. So don’t be worried if your child just naturally tends towards unhealthy foods. With my four kids, I’ve got one of them. Eats like a lumberjack, like she just packs it in. And then I’ve got one that eats like a sparrow and, and that’s fine.
But for example, the one that eats like a lumberjack, instead of going for seconds of pasta, I’ll say, Well, hang on. Can you all your veggies on your plate get a second serve of veggies? And then if you’re still hungry, you can have a second serve of pasta. So just helping them make those healthier choices.
And then I would also look at your screen time with your kids. So the recommendations for under two year olds is zero amount of screen time except for video conferencing. And that’s, that came about during covid. That’s okay. One hour a day for two to five year olds and two hours a day for over five year olds.
So if your child is getting a lot more than that in screen time, then chances are they are not exerting enough calories in that day. And that can be really hard then to keep a child’s weight in. The other recommendation is 60 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous exercise. Now at school, kids will get at least 30 minutes in their lunch break.
It’s a really good thing to double check with your child. Are they actually running around in your lunch break or did you go to the library or is there a computer room? And then of course, after school, what are they doing? Are they going to sports practice? Are they able to get that activity after school?
So I think if you’re keeping your screen time in check and you’re keeping that activity level, You’re doing all those lifestyle factors, then I wouldn’t worry too much about it, especially in certain times. For example, in that year or 18 months before puberty, you’ll often see kids pack on some weight and then suddenly, boom, they grow into that weight when they hit puberty.
So look, if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re really, you know, into your child’s health, I’m sure you’re doing all the right things. So do not worry about it too much at all. One final note as well is language is super important. So when you are gonna talk to your child about their choices and about their lifestyle, never talk about weight.
We wanna make healthy choices so that you can have more energy, so that you can be healthier, so that we can improve your sports perform. Dr. Gary Leon, who’s a pediatric endocrinologist that I interviewed back in episode 28 on this topic, he said, Use the analogy of a car, and especially if you’ve got a son, your body’s like a Formula One race car, and would you put rubbish fuel in or would you put high quality fuel in?
And and he said, That resonates with a lot of kids. So I hope that helps you there. It’s a tricky topic. I should do another episode on it, particularly around the psychology as well in talking to. Okay. My final question, a kaha, Oh gosh, I, I hope I’m saying your name properly. Have you ever found it hard to uproot the kids from a familiar space to a new space?
Okay, so I assume you’re talking about moving here. Yes, I’ve moved three times with my kids, albeit they were relatively young at the time, but it’s always a big disruption. So a couple of tips I would have for you is number one, the oxygen mask analogy. So put your own oxygen mask on first. Look after yourself first, cuz oh my goodness, moving is so, so stressful.
So if you can help to manage your own emotions, As hard as that can be. And also try not to put your worries on them, because often what they’re worrying about, you are also worrying about too, what am I giving up? I’m gonna miss my old life, I’m gonna miss my friends, et cetera. So just trying to keep a check on those emotions and not transferring that 3D kiddies.
Honor their grief. And I think this is a really good one. You know, I’m a fixer. I love to jump in. They say they’re sad about something. The first thing I wanna do is jump in and fix it. And so I think this is a really big one to go. Yeah, it really is sad to say goodbye and allow them to be a bit sad and, you know, say goodbye to the room and favorite cafe and the school and write goodbye letters.
Don’t wallow in it, but definitely allow some space for them to. Talk about things ahead of time. I always found that really helped. So preempt things about making friends about, Oh, we might get a bit lost. It might be a bit of an adventure. Things might feel different. Kind of picking what you think are the main things the kids might worry about, and just having a plan of attack ahead of time I think is really helpful.
I love this idea of giving your child some control in the decision making, and this was really helpful for us when we moved, where things like which room they wanted as their own room and the position of the bed in the room and where the toys were gonna sit, on what shelf and what boxes they wanted to put their toys in.
If you’re painting, maybe choosing some wallpaper or a room. Some things that you’re not gonna say no to all the time either. Cause I have made that mistake before where I all their suggestions was a hard no. But giving them some control in decision making, getting them involved. I think they absolutely love keeping the routine going wherever you can as far as meal times and.
Sitting around that same family table that’s just been moved into a different place. And on that note, there’s sort of familiar favorites. So whatever their favorite meals are, maybe you’re gonna just double down on those for a few weeks, making sure their books and their toys are out unpacked first, so they have that familiarity.
And I love this idea of citing them up to local sports and activity groups or art classes so that they get to meet locals, especially if they’re going to a school that may not be super, super local. Maybe you could take them to the library and there’s always the bulletin board that’s got great flyers for dance classes or local community services.
I think that gets kids excited. Planning, lots of fun activities, being a tourist in, in new area. And finally, I love this idea of a moving project book. And we do a similar thing cuz I do a photo book every year, but working together with the kids to put this exciting time of moving, Record it down. I think that’s great.
And of course, keeping in touch with all your friends, which is so much easier with social media these days, but making sure that you are gonna FaceTime their favorite friends and things like that. So there we go, guys, some great questions today. I hope you got something out of it and I look forward to seeing you in the booth.
Very soon.
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