Ep 49. How to Deal with Unwanted Health Information

The world is FLOODED with health advice. And let’s be honest, not all of it is helpful.

In this episode, I answer a question from Martine, a mentorship student, about how to navigate sleep information that feels overwhelming or fear-inducing.

I share a personal experience of being unexpectedly triggered by health content and how I reframed it into an opportunity for growth.

Listen in and learn:

• How overexposure to sleep advice can fuel anxiety.
• Why avoiding ALL sleep discussions isn’t the answer.
• How to build an internal foundation of trust (so external noise loses its grip).
• Why triggers aren’t setbacks.

Your brain is always adapting. You’re not at the mercy of outside information because you can control how you engage with it.  

 

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FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

About Beth Kendall MA, FNTP:

For decades, Beth struggled with the relentless grip of insomnia. After finally understanding insomnia from a mind-body perspective, she changed her relationship with sleep, and completely recovered. Liberated from the constant worry of not sleeping, she’s on a mission to help others recover as well. Her transformative program Mind. Body. Sleep.® has been a beacon of light for hundreds of others seeking solace from sleepless nights.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

 

When Health Information Triggers You

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast! I hope you’re doing really, really well, wherever you are today.

Before we get going, I want to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who has left a rating or review for the podcast. Every once and while, I check in on my Apple dashboard and read through the comments and I am always so touched when I read your words and it really means a lot to me that you would take the time out to do that, so thank you.

Today, I’m answering a question from Martine, one of my mentorship students. When this question came in, I immediately thought, “You know, this would make an excellent podcast episode,” because it’s something people ask me about all the time—and it’s something I dealt with just very recently myself.

So here’s what Martine wrote:

“I don’t know what it’s like in the US, but here, sleep has been a hot topic of conversation on TV for the last couple of years. I’d prefer not to hear what people have to say about sleep or lack of it, but it’s difficult to avoid completely. I listen to your podcasts and read your Sleep Notes because they come from you and they’re helpful, but anything else makes me feel a little anxious. I’m at the stage in the process where I want to get on with my life and would like to know your thoughts on how to cope with unwanted sleep information. I’d also like to know if this is slowing down my progress, or does my brain rewire regardless?”

First off, Martine, thank you for such a great question! I love that you’re at the stage where you’re ready to move forward, and I can hear so much awareness in what you’re asking already.

I think anyone who’s finding their way back to a more effortless orientation with sleep can relate to the overwhelming emphasis we see on sleep today. There is just SO much information out there, and while it’s all very well-intended, it can create some sleep anxiety in the collective, and I think that’s part of what we’re seeing now. I’ve talked about this in past episodes how this over-focus on sleep has a tendency to turn normal, everyday sleep fluctuations into something much bigger in the mind. So natural sleep disruptions are tagged as something bad or unwanted and it’s easy for a fear of not sleeping to take hold.

So, let’s unpack this question from Martine and talk about how to navigate unwanted health information, whether it’s from TV, social media, or just well-meaning conversations with doctors or family in a way that supports your recovery because like I said, it’s such a common challenge.

So, to give you a bit of a roadmap for the episode—first, I’m going to share a recent experience I had with this exact same issue. Then, I’m going to talk about a few things that helped me in deal with this challenge. And finally, I’ll explain why I don’t think being exposed to unwanted sleep information has much of any impact on the long-term recovery process.

Okay, so I’ll start by sharing a recent personal experience that feels especially relevant to this topic…

And I’ll preface it by saying that this isn’t something I’ve struggled with much over the past several years. Which actually brings me to the first key point of today’s episode—but this is largely because of how intentional I am about curating my own life experience.

What I mean by that is I’m very mindful of the inputs I allow into my brain and where I place my attention, because I think your attention is your MOST valuable asset. One of my favorite quantum sayings is: what we make matter becomes matter, right?

So, I’m one of those people who doesn’t watch news, I don’t have traditional TV beyond Netflix and Amazon Prime, and I try to keep my social media use to a minimum —although, I’ll admit, that this one can be tricky because there’s just so much cool information out there.

But I do make it a point to notice how different sources of information make me feel. If something doesn’t feel right or aligned with my own well-being, I just choose not to engage with it. And that’s the great thing—while sleep itself isn’t something we can directly control, we do have control over where we place our attention. And it’s often by making more intentional choices this way, that sleep gets better as a byproduct in the long run.

One of the ways this has really taken shape is that I don’t expose myself to much health information. And honestly, that’s kind of wild because for so long, that’s ALL I consumed.

For years, I was in this relentless pursuit of getting my health back from Lyme disease. Then I went to school for nutritional therapy, which meant I was constantly immersed in health-related content. And later, I got my master’s in Holistic Health, which was still very much centered around health, though in a much more mind-body way - which is how I now approach insomnia.

But these days? I really don’t take in much health information. I’m just not as interested in it. I think part of that is because I feel healthier than I ever have — I already know I eat well, I take care of myself to the best of my ability, and I actually believe that NOT hyper-focusing on health in some ways, leads to better health.

So, you know, gotta throw in a paradox.

That said, I still have a lot of friends in the nutritional therapy space, and lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about a biologist named Benjamin Bikman. And sometimes, when something pops on my radar more than a few times , I sort of pause and think, Hmm… maybe there’s something here for me to pay attention to. So I decided to take this deep-dive class he teaches on metabolic health and insulin resistance. It’s like this 8-hour class.

So, I’m in bed one night, and I’m on my laptop watching the first hour of the class. And he’s covering all the basics of metabolic health—which wasn’t anything particularly new to me. But about halfway through the class I notice these old worry looops creeping in like: “Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this.” Or,maybe I should be doing more of that.”

And I’m noticing this almost like a fly on the wall, okay.

And then… he starts talking about the importance of sleep. And he’s not doing it in an inspiring way, he’s going on and on about how even one night of poor sleep can have these disastrous consequences. And suddenly, I feel my body go into this anxiety response.

And it kind of surprised me because I hadn’t felt this kind of anxiety in years. But it was a valuable moment, because it reminded me how challenging all this health information can be for my students, especially when it’s presented in such a fear-based way.

So, let’s talk more about how we can approach this and move through a world that’s overflowing with health messaging while still maintaining our peace of mind.

And the first thing I wanted to offer on this is what I just touched on which is being mindful about the information you’re exposing yourself to. Designing your life in a way that supports your well-being versus affirming your fears. So looking for what you do want versus what you don’t.

And remember, no matter how qualified someone is, you are always the expert on you.

And I love this idea of being so intentional about this because it’s so action based. I know my people are doers, okay? We want to do, do, do, so this is something you can actually do.

So, the second thing I’ll offer in terms of how to work with this is building a belief system conducive to trust. And Michelle Weil and I talked about this on the podcast we did a couple of weeks ago.

One of the most powerful shifts people make on this journey is moving from fear to trust with their sleep. When there’s a lot of fear in the picture, your brain is seeing sleep as something that needs to be fixed, or achieved, or protected. But when you trust that your body really does know how to sleep, you really don’t feel the need to be so hypervigilant about it; you know it’s something that doesn’t really need much input from us.

So, with regards to belief systems, you can think about it like this: When you hear information about sleep, whether it’s a scary statistics or a “quick fix solution,” what belief system is that information being filtered through? If your core belief system is built on fear, your brain is going to label that information as a threat, right? But if your foundation is built on trust, you’ll hear the same information but the meaning is different, You’ll know: “That’s not for me. That’s not my story.”

And that’s pretty much what I do now. Except for the other night which truly was an anomaly and actually think was happening in service of this podcast episode.

So, rather than trying to avoid ALL sleep conversations forever out of fear, because we don’t want to teach the brain that these words are somehow dangerous (because they’re not), why not start reinforcing a belief system that allows you to hear these things and remain pretty much unshaken.

And lastly I want to talk about why I don’t think exposure to these kinds of triggers can hurt your progress and how sometimes they can actually be a PART OF the process.

Right now, if hearing sleep discussions feels like a threat, it’s just because there’s some old wiring being activated. And if you’re early in your transformation, that’s completely normal. But over time, these moments can actually become a part of your healing.

And that’s exactly how I worked my way into sleep coaching. I had to start with text based coaching, then I went to one on one coaching, and now I’m doing groups. But it took time for me to build that capacity and I did it in very incremental steps over years. Because if I had just jumped right in to group coaching while I was still getting my sea legs, I know personally that would have been too much for me in not a helpful way.

But these kinds of exposures can be helpful because they can show you where you’re not free, right? They can show you where your mind might still have some fear around not sleeping. And this isn’t a bad thing, it’s more of like “oh well, how interesting that I still have some fear around this.”

No biggie.

If you never hear anything about sleep again, you might feel safe—but not necessarily free. True freedom comes when you can hear any information about sleep and still stay grounded in trust.

So, I hope that this was helpful. Martine, thanks again for the question, you’re doing amazing work. Remember, your body knows how to sleep like a flower knows how to grow — and that’s never gonna change.

Until next time I’m Beth Kendall and you’ve been listening to the Mind. Body. Sleep. Podcast. Bye for now.