Sleep is important and it affects everything we do. Soda Kuczkowski says it helps to stabilize our mood, our emotional, physical, mental health and it helps us to lose and maintain our weight and it helps our immune system, so it reduces our susceptibility of getting sick, She says it helps with preventing the onset of a lot of medical conditions; when we don’t sleep well over periods of time, which was my inspiration for opening this place, it can develop into diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease. She goes on to say the quality of our sleep compromises our health which in turn can lead to a lot of these chronic conditions.
Soda says for mothers, we don’t spend enough time taking care of ourselves. We talk about self-care but what does that look like? Soda says that’s why I tell people I’m not a big proponent of necessarily having the same bedtime routine because we deal with stress in different ways but it’s figuring out what you need at different times, and it is often why different sleep products don’t work because you are trying to put a band-aid on it. She says as mothers we have so many different roles and because going to the traditional kinds of means we have to go to look at all these different factors, medical, behavioral, hormonal; it’s talking to someone who really understands what you are going through, because if you are looking for a quick fix, you have to find someone who knows where to look and what to do. She says you can scroll on Instagram, you can buy all these different products, but they are going to be a short-term aid, a band-aid and it’s not going to solve the underlying root cause of it which means it’s going to pop up later on down the road.
What does it mean when you say prioritize sleep? Soda says it’s a really simple formula, most of us suffer from circadian misalignment, we are not operating on that 24-hour clock because there are things that can disrupt or influence our sleep and we love to engage in them. She says whether we are scrolling on our phone, watching TV too late, and little ones are 90% more sensitive to that light. So even if they aren’t watching TV or on their tablet before bed, if you have lights on in the home, if you have the TV on, all those are going to be factors that will affect their ability to fall asleep and maintain their sleep, so they have a sensitivity to that.
Soda says she does consultations, it’s about an hour and a half process because we need to look at everything from behavior, lifestyle, medical history, work, is it someone who lives alone or a caregiver, do they have other people in the home, all of these things are variables that can affect your sleep and can lead to challenges. She says she’s all for sustainable solutions but it’s not about throwing things at someone, it’s about figuring out what’s the best thing for them because what happens with our sleep we have a challenge and it ripples into all these other things so yeah it could be nutrition, sure it can be a hormonal imbalance, sure it could be environmental but what’s the one thing that’s happening that’s going to set all those other things in place. She says healthcare is very disempowering, we love to tell people everything they are doing wrong, and here, I am all about creating healthy habits not restrictions so everything I carry in here, tools, are meant to support that education, support you individually in your challenges and your goals.
Start with Sleep, LLC is located at 1211 Hertel Avenue in Buffalo.
716.235.1505
For more information go to startwithsleep.com
