Why I do this work
Before I was a clinician supporting women with insomnia, I was a patient. I came to this work through a personal breaking point.
For most of my life, I was a great sleeper. And then I got pregnant with my first child, and that changed. What I lost wasn’t just the hours. It was the effortless, automatic relationship with sleep I’d never once had to think about. Suddenly I was monitoring, calculating, bracing. Sleep had become something that could go wrong — and increasingly, it did.
It lasted far longer than my pregnancy, well into the first year of my child’s life. I suffered through it largely on my own, without effective clinical support. No one seemed to know what to do.
It eventually resolved on its own. When insomnia returned in my second pregnancy, I approached it differently — this time, I found CBT-I. It gave me the framework to stop fighting and start understanding, and the tools to allow sleep to return.
My insomnia story started and ended with pregnancy. But the experience of losing your relationship with sleep, and not knowing how to find your way back, arrives through many doors. My sleep isn’t perfect every night — no one’s is. But I have the tools to recognize when patterns are trending in the wrong direction, and to reset before it becomes something bigger.