EL co-founder & psychotherapist Kelly Hearn sits down with Dr. Safia Debar to discuss the always important topic of sleep. Dr. Debar is a general practitioner at the Mayo Clinic and The Medical Chambers Kensington. In addition to her clinical practice, Dr. Debar runs stress management and resiliency training courses for individuals, groups and corporate clients. She also is the host of a new podcast, Master Stress With Dr. S. Beyond her medical training, Dr. Debar is one of the few doctors in the UK certified to run the Harvard Stress Management and Resiliency Training (SMART) program, which empowers people to leverage their neuroscience and manage stress effectively through mind-body practices.
KH: I’m loving the new podcast Safia! Many people are talking about the topics you discuss – sleep, exercise, burnout, the importance of managing our nervous systems – but you go a lot deeper, get more psychological than I’m hearing elsewhere, and this is a real value to listeners I think. It’s obviously of great interest to me, too, given the psychotherapy work I do, and the ‘whole body’ approach I take to mental health.
SD: Thank you! The podcast has been really fun for me. All the topics are things I’ve worked on with my clients, patients or myself so they all stem from experience and real life stories. I also felt I wanted to merge science and soul as we can often get so rigid and compartmentalised.
KH: One of the episodes that particularly stood out for me was Episode 7 on sleep – the connection you made between sleep and self-worth was a real ‘aha’ moment.
SD: Yes – in many ways I think our relationship with sleep is a real a litmus test for self-worth. I say things like that and some people may roll their eyes or just be confused but I see the connection daily in my work with patients.
KH: Can you give some examples?
SD: A recent one is a CEO I saw in clinic who told me, ‘Safia, I don’t need more than four hours of sleep. I function amazingly well on very little sleep. I think I’m just blessed.’ He wore it as a badge of honour, like we all have, and as a sign of his extraordinary ambition and productivity.
This was the case until the day he found himself standing in front of his team, unable to remember his next sentence. He was embarrassed and petrified. His brain could not remember what he wanted to say, he’d lost his focus and he just felt jumbled inside. His body had been screaming for rest, but he’d been too conditioned to equate sleep with laziness, and so ignored it.
And when we finally were able to sit down and look at his sleep cycles, his cortisol profile, his cardiovascular health, his sluggish testosterone levels, it was so clear. He was like, ‘okay, I’m ready to listen and I’m ready to see what the data show.’ And the data showed that his body wasn’t thriving, it was barely surviving. He’d been convincing of himself otherwise in a kind of ‘mind over matter’ approach, as so many of us do. But ultimately his body prevailed. I see so many cases like this.
KH: ‘Wearing little sleep as a badge of honour’ is so prevalent in our culture, isn’t it? I was SO guilty of this earlier on in life. I used to call my ability to survive on little sleep my superpower too…
SD: Of course! I was the same. And it is our belief system around sleep that gets in the way of prioritising it. We now have the knowledge, know the science of why sleep is so important…but we’re not really acting on this knowledge. I saw this disconnect in myself, and continue to see it in my patients. The gap between knowing that sleep is critical and good for us and that we should sleep more. And then the actual practice – that often sleep is not prioritised, in fact it’s often the first thing to be sacrificed. So it just got me questioning what is this relationship we have around sleep and how is this tied into our self-worth?
KH: I’s a link I hadn’t thought about before, but now that I do, I can see how relevant it is for some of my clients as well.
SD: I think of another patient, a professor client of mine. An incredible brain, like, so smart, so caring. I mean, I just find her awe inspiring. We were talking about sleep, and she, too, told me that she wears her exhaustion like a medal and I just find it so interesting that this common thread – medal, badge of honour, status symbol- around lack of sleep keeps coming through over and over.
My professor client is the go-to for every last task. She never says no. If you need your classes covered, she’ll be there. Even though she is in a senior position by now where she could easily say no, she still says yes. When I asked her about it she mentioned the guilt she feels around not doing enough. And then we probed deeper. I asked her about her relationship with rest, like how does she really view the importance of rest and does she think she deserves this?
KH: So really putting it out there, making it explicit, ‘Do you give yourself permission? Are you allowed rest?’
SD: Yes, and she hesitated, agreed that maybe there was a sense that she had to earn it. That rest is something she does when everything is done. But of course, everything is never done.
KH: Gosh, postponing sleep until all is done means we’ll all end up sleepless zombies!
SD: Right? Can you imagine needing your whole to-do list to be completely ticked off before you give yourself permission to rest? I ask patients if this sounds familiar because many of us have internalised this idea that sleep is something we earn. ‘Sleep is a luxury.’ ‘No rest for the weary.’ A strong belief that if there’s stuff to do, well, you just cut back on sleep instead of seeing it as the necessity it is. And this kind of ties into an ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ culture. It feels to me sometimes like a trauma response leading to overcompensation.
KH: Say a little more about that – the link between the trauma response and overcompensation.
SD: Often we learn early that if we just perform then it’ll make us enough, important, of value, or more loveable. Perhaps we overcompensate in our behaviours to please to maintain attachment. Also, culturally we want to fit in and it’s the “norm” to overwork and hustle. But it’s always worth questioning “who sets this norm” and ‘why do I think, feel and act the way I do?’ – the answers may surprise you.
KH: Yeah, I see this a lot in my client work as well. There is the cultural pressure to be productivity-obsessed, of course. But I see it takes hold even more strongly for those who have been proving their worth from an early age by what they do … because beneath all this activity is a rather shaky sense of inherent self-worth. It makes so much sense, this overcompensation, and yet it is happening unconsciously for so many of us.
SD: Yes, and it leads to us operating on a productivity treadmill without really asking ourselves if all of this motion is aligned with who we want to be in the world. There is often a misalignment of values because what are we truly working to towards? And the way I see it is that sleep is a form of self-respect, respect for our bodies and limitations and our need for refuelling so we can operate as fully functioning humans. But when we fight it, we are often fighting deeper beliefs around our worth. This may be relatable or it may not, and if it doesn’t land with people, that’s absolutely fine, but for a lot of my patients it does – they recognise overcompensation or what I sometimes call productivity shame.
KH: It feels really important to name it, if it is present, because so often our beliefs are what get in the way of behavioural change. We can know what we should be doing to take care of ourselves, but if deep down we don’t think we deserve the rest, or the nourishment, or the care or whatever behavioural change we’re talking about, these beliefs can be a real blocker.
SD: Agreed, so it’s just an interesting spin on things, but I find that it’s very, very important before getting into behaviour changes – the sleep tactics and optimising sleep, you know, all the action stuff– that we start with our beliefs around sleep. And once we see it, we can start reframing sleep, and indeed all rest, as the currency of resilience as I like to say.
KH: I love a reframe, and that’s a powerful one!
SD: I truly, truly believe it is the currency of resilience, and our neuroscience and physiology also prove it. I see it in the tests I run on patients. However, for so many of us, it’s the first thing we sacrifice.
Choosing sleep is a decision that shapes your life because most people think of sleep as something that just happens when we’re tired. But sleep is a choice. A daily micro decision that compounds over time and it influences every part of your health, performance, and longevity because you can choose to go to bed. Or keep scrolling. You can choose to set up your environment for rest or let stress hijack your nights. You can choose to prioritise sleep or sacrifice it for the illusion of productivity. This is where we can go to the science. You think you’re being more productive when you don’t sleep? I can show you that that’s not the case.
KH: Oh I’d love to send you some of my clients so you could show them their data! Also, I talk a lot with clients about the importance of true rest, nourishing rest that restores rather than the kind of mindless rest we take without thinking about it. The ‘I’m too knackered to do anything but look at my phone so I’ll just take these 30 mins of scrolling to wind down.’ That’s the idea, but is it really helping?
SD: So many of us think we are resting when we’re scrolling mindlessly and binge-watching TV. But this is not resting, actually, it’s numbing out. So it’s really about what choices do we make? And it’s not to be hard on ourselves, it’s just to equip ourselves with the true knowledge, the true science around rest and sleep because it’s true that when we choose sleep, we are giving up something else in its place.
Chronic sleep deprivation affects us more than we think. Sometimes in life, we will go through periods where we need to pull an all-nighter and God knows I’ve done that more times than I care to admit to. There are situations in life where may need to work shifts, where we may need to work late in the night, when we are traveling across time zones, where we are caring for a young family and therefore don’t have a choice in the matter. However, in the moments where we do have choice and where we can set up our environment in order to choose sleep, that’s where it counts. Do we hold ourselves in high esteem so that we see sleep as a biological necessity that is linked to greater productivity, recovery and health?
KH: It sounds like you are trying to flip the script on sleep, make getting the seven or eight hours or whatever the real badge of honour, the true sign of a high performer?
SD: Absolutely. In my eyes, sacrificing sleep on a persistent basis, making it your motto for success doesn’t make you a high performer. It makes you a weaker one. Let’s stop glorifying sleep deprivation. Let’s stop seeing sleep as for the weak. I’m not saying that we forever have to sleep eight hours a day. I know life. I know things happen. I know things will get in the way, but it’s our attitude and our mindset and our belief around it.
So yes, let’s flip the script. Let’s rewrite the narrative because elite athletes, the top top CEOs and the high performers who actually sustain success, they aren’t grinding themselves to the ground. They are very strategic with their energy, and they know that deep rest fuels deep work.
KH: Amen to that. I’ve flipped the script in my own life in recent years and it’s made such a difference. One of the tools you mention in your pod – Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR) has been a game-changer for me. For those who aren’t familiar with this practice, it is a guided relaxation technique incorporating breathing and body-based attention which is a great way to get out of the head and any kind of rumination. You may or may not fall asleep, but the benefits accrue either way. The idea of taking this kind of ‘nap’ would have never occurred to me before – I wouldn’t have allowed myself such an indulgence…or maybe like you said, I would have thought of it as a weakness? Not to mention I would have been sceptical of the idea that 10 minutes or 20 or 30 would be able to have a big benefit… but after experimenting with it, I now know that it does. So if I don’t get enough sleep for whatever reason in the night, I find a way to incorporate NSDR during the next day. And let the miracle of rest do its thing. I can actually function on these days rather than feeling like I’m in a jet lagged brain-fog haze.
SD: Yes, if you can’t get enough sleep at night, you can try and cobble together more during the day. It all counts.
KH: So Safia, just remind me and our readers what else you go into in your sleep series on the Master Stress With Dr. S podcast.
SD: Well the rest of the series looks at how sleep really is our currency of resilience – for example, it helps us regulate emotions which is something people often overlook and is so important in a culture of chronic high alert. We also look at why it is the first place I go to when anyone wants to lose weight because sleep helps regulate metabolism and burn fat more efficiently. Many more benefits of sleep we look at, as well as what risks we court when we have chronic sleep deprivation. In the third part of the series, I talk about evidence-based techniques that work for improving our sleep. So together it’s about changing our mindset about sleep, looking at importance of sleep and techniques to help us get enough.
KH: Wonderful. So important as sleep seems to be something that so many of us struggle with these days. Thanks for your time today and I look forward to more episodes of Mastering Stress with Dr. S!
SD: One last thing I would add about sleep is that it is an ongoing process, something we hopefully do every day so the opportunities for continuous improvement and growth are there. Don’t be a rush, and see it as a long term relationship into safety, recovery, blissful rest and, of course, self-worth.
To find out more about Dr. Safia Debar and her work, see her website, IG@drsafiadebar or podcast.
