The Sleep Advice Every Guru Gets Wrong - Episode 334

Welcome And The Show’s Mission Sandy Kruse 0:02 Hi everyone, it's me, Sandy Kruse. Welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. For many years now, I've been a trusted voice for people in midlife and beyond who want a deeper, more honest conversation about wellness. One that includes the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the esoteric.

Most episodes are solo now because I want to bring you thoughtful research, lived experience, and grounded insight without noise or bias. And when I do bring on a guest, it's because their work genuinely adds something meaningful to the conversation. Here we explore the full spectrum of what it means to be well, how the body functions, how the mind heals, how the spirit expands, and how all of these layers shape life lived with clarity and joy. Thanks for being here.

And if this show resonates with you, please follow, rate, review, and share it. It truly helps the message reach more people. Why Comfort Watching Gets Judged Sandy Kruse 1:32 Hi everyone, welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. Today, my topic is really touching, and I'm going to explain the science and soul about this.

And maybe by the end of this, you're going to get a new show to watch. Most of us are really, really tied to all of our shows that we love to watch. We have so many different networks and so many different programs, but something kind of came up in my brain. And then, of course, I had to dig a little deeper.

So that's kind of what I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about the comfort watch and why we heal in front of a screen that we're told to feel guilty about. You know, we're always told don't watch so much TV. We're told, you know, get your face out of the screen.

But I'm going to make you feel a little better about it by the end of this podcast. I'm going to start by asking you to hit subscribe wherever you are watching or listening. I haven't been very good at keeping up with my YouTube this summer. Hopefully I'll get to it.

But I've been doing this for a very, very long time. I am Sandy Cruz of Sandy K Nutrition. I've been around for nine years on social media and over six years on my podcast. Everything that I talk about this year is science and soul.

And I have changed the entire direction of my podcast because I realized that I want to do more of what's in my heart. And I am a registered holistic nutritionist. I'm also an English literature graduate. I'm a writer.

I'm also an and I'm going to say I've taken a break from practicing with clients. I used to have my own practice with women mostly. But really, my passion is my megaphone, which is my podcast. So I am going to ask you to share this with one person and definitely engage with it.

Even give it a rating or a review. If you're watching it or listening to it on Apple, you just scroll down to where it says write a review, give me a few kind words. Also get in touch with me. I've been around the space and I think I feel like I'm the only one that hasn't lost balance.

I've always been all about the balance. So I'm going to give you a very, very balanced outlook on why you shouldn't feel guilty about watching your shows. Okay. Parenthood During Cancer And Upheaval Sandy Kruse 4:06 I'm going to start with something that's a little bit more uncomfortable.

So think about this. Picture this. Last night, all over the world, millions of people sat down after a long, hard day. Maybe they poured a glass of wine, exhaled, and then they watched someone get murdered for relaxation to unwind.

Maybe it was a serial killer drama, maybe true crime. So I'm not talking about really getting killed, okay? Maybe a war, a heist, a hospital full of screaming. And I'm not throwing stones because I've done it too.

But we have built an entire culture of comfort out of marinating in violence. And here's the thing I noticed about myself, and it's the reason for this entire episode. The two times in my life where I felt like the ground kind of gave out from beneath me, I didn't reach for any of that. Not once.

I actually reached for a show about a family sitting down to dinner. Okay, that's very, very it that's not the whole show, but it's the series called Parenthood. Maybe you're gonna get a little bit of uh, I'm gonna give away a little bit, but really I watched this whole thing through almost twice now. I'm almost finished.

The um the second time watching every episode, the entire series start to finish. So the first time was in 2010, and this was the year that my daughter was diagnosed with cancer, and in 2011, I was diagnosed with cancer. The second time began uh last year, and I put it on every night to slow my heart rate down, to sleep well, and care for my nervous system. When I was going through a lot in life, my hormones had flattened, I had a lot of life changes, and I almost reached the very end.

I'm on the very last episode now. So it's a full circle moment for me. But I finally asked the question that I'm gonna explore with you today. When everything in my life was intense, woven tight, you know, tired but wired, why did I turn away from all the loud, violent, thrilling television instead?

Why did I turn away from that and reach for something Violence Sells Through Negativity Bias Sandy Kruse 6:55 quiet, wholesome, and true to life? Why does that heal us when we've been trained to think of it as the lesser choice? There's real science here. I'm gonna give you the science in the soul, but I and once you understand it, I don't think you're ever gonna feel guilty about comfort shows ever again.

So I'm giving you the exact opposite here of what everyone in the wellness community is telling you to do. So, really, it's just this this, you know, people speak of these extremes. Kill it at the gym, go for a jog. When something all in your body really wants is this quiet comfort.

You know, like I want you to think about what they say to do for stress when you're younger. And I want you to completely flip that now at this stage. Gen X, you know, I'm talking to you. We're actually swimming in violence, and it's not an accident.

Okay. Think of all the shows out there. Let's start with how much darkness we actually consume because most of us have never stopped to count. And when I speak of darkness, these are dark themes, darker themes.

Okay. By some long-cited estimates, the average young person will have watched tens of thousands of on-screen killings and hundreds of thousands of acts of violence before they even reach adulthood. Whether the exact number is off in one direction or not, or another, the shape of it is really undeniable. Violence is the water that we swim in, it's the default flavor of entertainment.

And here's what most people don't realize that's actually not a coincidence. Okay. It's actually engineering because our brains come with something, it's called the negativity bias. Probably a lot of you have heard of this.

So threat grabs our attention much harder and faster than safety does. Because for most of human history, missing a threat could kill you, and missing a nice sunset couldn't. Think of Game of Thrones, right? I mean, if you want to talk violent.

So we are wired to lean toward danger, to look at the wound, to slow down at the accident that we drive by. And every content algorithm, every streaming service, every just one more episode cliffhanger has learned to exploit exactly that wiring. Suspense keeps your finger off the remote, and fear spikes the very arousal that feels like engagement. So the reason our screens are saturated with violence isn't that violence is what heals us, that's for sure.

It's that violence is what hooks us. The attention economy isn't optimized for your nervous system, it's optimized against it. Mean World Syndrome And Bedtime Stress Sandy Kruse 10:14 What all that dread is quietly doing to you. Now, here's where it gets serious.

Especially if you're someone going through a hard season. And I know because I just happen to be that person, I'm a very empathetic person. And I actually speak with a lot of you on Instagram. DM, a lot of you DM me, follow me on Instagram.

It's Sandy Knutrition Everywhere, by the way. But a lot of you have these private conversations with me, and I know so many of you have gone through or are going through hard seasons and continue to do so. This is life. This is the sandwich generation.

Many of us are kind of stuck in the middle between living our lives and the lives of our parents and the lives of our adult kids. So I get it. A lot of you are going through hard seasons. Now, I'm going to talk about this because I think knowing what this um these types of shows do, it's really important to know this.

The the harder, the the violent shows. Back in the 1970s, a researcher named George Gerbner noticed something about heavy television viewers, people that would like to watch heavy television. The more violent content, sorry, content people consumed, the more dangerous they believed the actual world is. They overestimated crime, they trusted their neighbors less, they walked through life a little more afraid.

He called it mean world syndrome. The idea that a steady diet of on-screen threat slowly cultivates the belief that the world is a meaner, more hostile, and dangerous place than it truly is. Think about those people who all they do is watch Trump or watch politics and news and really, really like things that are just not pleasant. Their brains are broken.

I can tell you that right now. I'm sure you know a few. I do. So sit with that right there.

Okay. And think about what that means if you're already grieving, already frightened, already lying awake at night at your own life. Okay. Stuff that's going on with you.

Your threat detection system is stuck in the on position. Your body is already running on cortisol, already braced for the next blow. And then you feed that system two hours of murder and dread before bed. You're not escaping your own fear.

You're confirming it. And you're handing your nervous system more evidence that the world is exactly as unsafe as it feels. That violent, suspenseful content isn't neutral in the body either. It raises your heart rate, it raises stress hormones, it pushes you further into fight or flight, the sympathetic branch of your nervous system, the one that is the whole reason that you can't sleep in the first place.

So the very thing we reach to to wind down is often winding us tighter. Now, everybody's different. Everybody's nervous system is different. Everybody's stage in life is different.

Everybody's difficult hard seasons are different. So, you know, I'm not saying this for everyone, but if you are that person that is going through a hard season, that is having a hard time winding down, who is consuming a lot of this, maybe this will help you think about things. Darkness Draws Darkness Science Meets Soul Sandy Kruse 14:15 So here's where I bring in more the soul, the esoteric darkness draws darkness, where the soul and the science say the same thing. I always blend the two.

The science hasn't quite reached this yet, but I think it will, maybe. And even if it whether it does or doesn't, doesn't matter. I believe that on a soul level, you all know this if you're following my show, that we are energetic beings, and that everything we let into our field has an occupity to occupy space in us, whether we consciously invited it or not. What you watch, what you scroll, what you know, get your put your attention to at the end of a long, hard day.

None of it simply passes through you. It lands, it takes up residence, and here's the harder thing that I've come to believe. Darkness tends to draw in more darkness, and heaviness is magnetic. So when there is fear in the field, it calls to more feel fear.

Like finds like, and that I think is why some of us are pulled towards the dark stuff more precisely when we're already low. You'd imagine a grieving, depleted person would instinctively reach for light. Often we don't do that, often we sink further in, the true crime, the doom scroll, the bleakest thing we could possibly find because a heavy state seeks its own frequency. The field is looking for a match.

So this all kind of goes to a whole other topic. Maybe someday I'll cover. And this is one of the most tender things for us to understand about ourselves with no judgment in it at all. When you are already in the dark, the dark feels like home and it will keep offering you more of itself.

I have recorded podcasts with Brenda Farugh of So Brilliant. And I've done, I don't even know how many beam therapy sessions, but one of the things that she talks about, you can check her out, so brilliant.ca. When you do a beam therapy session, she talks about your clearing layers that are really weighing you down and making you heavy. And I met Brenda two years ago, and she said, there's a lot that's weighing you down, like making you heavy so that your light isn't as bright as I know it is.

And you know what? I'm so much brighter since I've done all these beam therapy sessions. It is fascinating work, and I highly recommend that you go and check it out. Check out Brenda, because much of this is subconscious, which I spoke about in a podcast earlier.

I also did a podcast about beam therapy. So definitely go check this out. Because one of the things that Brenda talks about is like we've got these little storage compartments throughout our whole body. And when you watch something, when you experience something, when somebody says something to you, they call you ugly, they whatever, these cause like little.

Okay, I'm gonna use this analogy. Think of a car that keeps getting hit with rocks. They're like little dents in the car. And unless you pop that out, those dents are gonna stay there.

There. I just gave you an analogy that I made up right on the spot. So here's what stops me in my tracks about all of this. The nervous system is saying the very same thing that I was talking about, the darkness, but just in different language.

So when you watch something, the brain does not hold it at arm's length. Through what researchers call, and I've talked about this, mirror neurons, an embodied simulation, your body partially lives what it sees. You flinch, you know, at the blow. Your gut tightens at the threat.

Neurologically, you're not only observing the violence on the screen, some part of you is rehearsing it, absorbing it, wearing it. And through emotional contagion, which is measurable, documented, real, we catch the emotional states we're exposed to the way that we catch a yawn when somebody's yawning. The dread on the screen becomes the dread in your chest, that heaviness in your chest. And it doesn't evaporate when the episode ends.

The cortisol lingers, the residue is exactly what I would call the imprint that's left in your on your in your whatever field. If you do this night after night and it accumulates, researchers have a name for that accumulated wear. It's called allostatic load. This is the same thing that happens when you're in a group of people that you can feel the heaviness, you can feel the energy from these people, you can feel that it's not supportive of you.

Same thing. I even call it a heaviness that settles right into your bones. You can feel it. Even your threat scanning brain conspires.

When you're already braced and hyper-vigilant, your attention is pulled harder toward threat because your system is hunting for confirmation of the danger that it already expects, which is simply the neuroscientists' way of describing the very spiral the mystics have named a long time ago. A frightened system seeks more fear, darkness draws darkness. So whether you come at it through a soul, a lens that's from the soul perspective or through the science, you land on the same doorstep, and what you allow in does not stay neutral. And if left unattended, the heavy keeps inviting more of the heavy home into your body, which is why choosing what enters you is not being fussy, it is protection and it's hygiene for the soul and regulation for your body at the very same time, which is why choosing what enters you is important.

And and again, it depends on your life stage. Everybody has a different sensitivity level. And now I'm going to bring you to the opposite choice, okay, and why when I feel more fragile, my whole body knows what to do. And the Predictability And Borrowed Belonging Sandy Kruse 21:42 familiar, gentle story is actually more like medicine.

So here's the first piece of the science of comfort, and I personally felt it in my body long before I understood it. So your brain at its conscious state. Is a prediction machine. Every second it's guessing what's going to happen next.

And uncertainty is really, really expensive. It costs a lot of energy. It so it just keeps you activated, right? And most of us, most of you who listen to my podcast, probably don't need that.

So you don't need that stress chemistry running in the background all the time. So when your life becomes unpredictable, difficult, hard times, when you genuinely do not know what the next phone call will bring, that machine goes into overdrive. So a show you already know is the one input in your day that cannot surprise you. Right?

When your life falls apart, if you're experiencing grief or extreme stress, the deepest wound is often the loss of control. And the change, too. And you can't fix it. You have no say.

And a story whose ending you already know hands you back a tiny sphere of mastery. You are, for once, holding an outcome you can be certain of. In a life that has become chaos, that certainty is not small. It's a place to stand.

And there's some research on this. Psychologists have a name for what a child does with a blanket or a stuffed animal. It's called a transitional object, the thing that holds a child's sense of safety when a parent leaves the room. We assume that we outgrow that, but we don't.

We maybe just get quieter about it. A comfort show is exactly that. A secure base you can return to, something that holds your safety for you while you go through the unbearable thing. So here's another piece to this: the people on that screen are keeping you company for real.

And this really fascinated me when I learned this. Since the 1950s, researchers have studied what they call parasocial relationships, the real one-sided bonds that we form with people on a screen. And your brain processes those bonds with a lot of the same wiring that it uses for actual friendship. It's not pretend, it's partial, but it's actually real.

And the researchers went further into something called social surrogacy hypothesis, surrogacy, surrogacy. Why can't I say this? And what they found is stunning. Our favorite shows can actually meet our need to belong.

In their studies, when people felt lonely or rejected, returning to a beloved television program would genuinely buffer that loneliness. It even helped restore people's depleted self-control and willpower afterwards. That's why in our loneliest seasons, we reach for the show with the people that we already love. Just that they're on TV.

We're not avoiding human connection. We're maybe borrowing a family until we're strong enough to face our own again or whatever your situation is. So now here's a question I really wanted to answer. If comfort is the goal, why not pure escape?

These are very different things, my friends. Why not fantasy something a thousand miles from real life? Sometimes that is the answer. Don't get me wrong.

Going away on a week-long Caribbean vacation, sometimes that's the answer. But when I've been at my most uncomfortable stages, I personally never wanted to escape. I wanted a story close enough to my own life that made me feel less alone inside of it. And there's research Meaningful Stories Nostalgia And Survival Sandy Kruse 26:20 on this exact same thing.

Media psychologists separate two kinds of entertainment. Okay. There's the purely fun, feel-good kind. You might have heard the word hedonistic.

And then there's the moving and meaningful kind, the show that makes you cry, the good kind of tears, the one that leaves you tender and cracked open and somehow more whole. That's a big thing right there. Accepting the season that we're in. A lot of times we fight against it, but this is all about acceptance.

Being moved is not the opposite of comfort. Being moved is the comfort, it is the feeling of your own experience being witnessed and made to matter. That's the whole difference. Violence on screen is spectacle, right?

It spikes you and then leaves, right? A real ordinary family that's going through illness and marriage and grief is recognition. Takes a seat beside you on your couch and says, I know this is hard. You're not the only one who has lived this.

Gives you a hug. This is where the series Parenthood did something and does something, almost nothing else does. It isn't about one stage of life, it holds all of them at once. Just so you know.

Ask my family. So it's the family, the Bravermints, they span four generations. There are grandparents in a very long marriage, reckoning with aging, and I'm not going to give away all of it. But then there are parents raising a child whose mind works differently.

So challenges with the kid, learning that there's no manual. Then there's a single mother who's arriving home at midlife trying to figure out her own life and who she gets to become. Then there's the, you know, the boy that has to grow up overnight when he learns that he's a father. There's a couple chasing a career and marriage and family and can't hold it all together.

This is just such a true life depiction for many of us. Childhood, adolescence, first love, midlife, old age, illness, loss. It's all in this one house. So whatever phase okay, not in this one house, but in this one show.

So whatever phase of life is breaking your heart right now, this show has already made room for it. You are never watching from outside, you're watching from inside a life that looks like your own. Even if it's invented proof that the far side exists. There's one last lair, and this is maybe the most tender.

Both times I reached for the show, I was going through some life transitions. So returning to it isn't returning to a happy memory, and yet it steadies me. So why is that? Researchers who study nostalgia found it's not the sentimental weakness we assume.

Nostalgia is a genuine psychological resource, it deepens our sense of connection, it strengthens meaning, and it gives us something that they call self-continuity, the felt sense that across every chapter, every version of you, you're still you. There's a thread that runs the whole length of your life. So when I press play, some part of me is reaching back to that woman sitting there in 2010 who survived what at some time she was sure certain that she couldn't survive. The show is the thread between that woman and me.

It's proof that I'm still here, still whole, still the person who has already made it through some really big life challenges. And that continuity when everything else shatters is its own kind of medicine. So here's where I've landed and where I'm going to leave you. We're handed violence and dread by default all day long because it hooks us, not because it heals us.

And a steady diet of it quietly teaches a frightened nervous system that the world is exactly as dangerous as it fears. Choosing a warm, wholesome, true-to-life show instead is not the weaker or softer or lesser option that we've been taught it is. A little bit. Your Comfort Show List And Closing Sandy Kruse 34:29 You're regulating a nervous system that's probably under some sort of threat.

And you're borrowing belonging until you can feel your own belonging and find your own place. You are letting yourself be moved, which is how meaning gets made. Maybe you're even feeling the feelings that you've been suppressing. And you're reaching back into every earlier version of yourself, who survived, and reminding your body that you will survive this too.

I'm nearly at the end. I'm on the last episode. And I already know that someday when life breaks open another time, because it will, and that's what life is about. Remember, acceptance.

I'll find my way back to the Braverman's, not to escape my life, but to remind myself that it's survivable, and no one, not even me, was ever meant to sit with it alone, even though I do a lot of my stuff alone. So this is not a sales pitch for parenthood. I clearly have no association with it, but I want to hear if you've watched the show, if you're interested in watching the show. Tell me what's your comfort show.

Maybe I'm going to start a list. And definitely, if you do send me that, I will write a Substack article. You guys know I am a writer. Follow me there.

It's sandycruz.substack.com. And it's free. And then you get to be on my mailing list as well. So tell me what's your comfort show?

The one that you return to when the world gets heavy. Send it to me. I have a feeling we all have one, and I'd love to know yours and I'd love to share it with my audience. So definitely get in touch with me.

Email me even sandy at sandyknutrition.ca. Thank you. Thank you so, so much for coming each and every week. I am so blessed to have an amazing audience like you.

Have a great week. Be sure to share it with someone you know might benefit. And always remember when you rate, review, subscribe, you help to support my content and help me to keep going and bring these conversations to you each and every week. Join me next week for a new topic, new guest, new excited conversations to help you live your best life.