Struggling to quiet your mind and fall or stay asleep at night? In this episode, we introduce the “House Tour Hack,” a simple yet powerful mindfulness technique designed to calm racing thoughts and guide you into a peaceful slumber. Learn how to mentally walk through a familiar space—whether it’s your current home, a childhood memory, or a dream location—and focus on sensory details to ease stress and promote relaxation. Tune in to discover how this creative and soothing hack can transform your nightly routine and help you finally get the rest you deserve.
Table of Contents
ToggleResources:
- Zenimal: Kids & Adults Device ree Meditation Device
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- Book a Complimentary Discovery Call
Episode Highlights:
- Why do some adults wake up at 2 am and struggle to fall back asleep?
- What is the “house tour” hack?
- What is the best way to check your cortisol levels?
- What else impacts why adults don’t sleep through the night?
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Podcast Episode Transcripts:
Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.
Welcome to the Kids Sleep Show podcast where we dive into the magical world of sleep and all things parenting. Join us as we embark on a journey filled with expert advice, practical tips, and heartwarming stories that will transform your little ones into sleep superheroes and empower you to navigate the beautiful chaos of parenting.
I’m your host, Courtney Zents, and I’m on a mission to change how the world views sleep and provide accessible sleep coaching resources for all families to build healthy sleep habits in their home for children and adults of all ages. As an award winning speaker, author, and pediatric sleep expert, myself and my team of consultants work intimately with families around the world to teach healthy sleep habits to children.
and adults. I believe wholeheartedly that sleep is the foundation for which a happy home is built. So let’s sleep. Hey everyone, welcome to this week’s episode. I’m your host, Courtney Zent, fresh off of Philadelphia Eagles championship win. So we are going to the NFC, baby. I’m pretty excited. I’m recording this on Monday.
It’s Martin Luther King Day. We did a day of service this morning at our church. My kids are out sledding right now, and I am recording this wonderful episode for you to listen to this week. So welcome. If you’re new here. I talk a lot about sleep, kids, adults, corporate, you name it. I have covered it in my past ten years of owning Tiny Transitions, and I’m excited today to share something that I actually heard this morning on SiriusXM.
It was hits one, and we were talking all about, uh, trouble falling asleep, and The term house tour hack came up, right? So, um, I don’t recall who the VJ was or DJ that was talking about it on the air, but it was on the morning show. And she was saying how she does some visualization because she can’t fall asleep well.
So I thought this was really interesting because it takes me back to a few years ago, my husband, who is an accountant. So just by profession, he’s very type A. Straight and straight and narrow, um, very routine, consistency, predictability, right? Like, he doesn’t want anything crazy going on. He’s the most regimented person I know, and he really had trouble staying asleep all night.
Now, we eat clean, we don’t drink ever during the week, and even on the weekends. We’re having, like, two beers because we’re old, and that’s about it. And, um, he goes to bed at the same time, he falls asleep reading a book. Like, we do all the things that you should do because Because I’m an adult sleep coach, and I understand what you need to do to get good sleep, right?
Our room is conducive to sleep. We have blackout blinds. I diffuse lavender. It’s like super calm, right? Every night, like clockwork, 2 a. m., he is waking up, right? Now, we started to dive into the hormonal side of it, and we did discover that it was Adrenal fatigue. So we put him on some supplements. I use a company called standard process, which I love.
So we put him on some adrenal fatigue stuff called adrenal desiccated, but neither here nor there. I was trying to help him to resettle back to normal. to sleep. And so a lot of times I talk with clients, whether they’re toddlers who aren’t sleeping through the night or, you know, new moms whose mind is going a mile a minute.
Right. And you know, you’re anxious or staring at the monitor, you’re thinking of a million things to do. You’re also not feeling great. Right. And you sometimes have trouble settling back to sleep. So I gave my husband this. Um, kind of hack, right? Which I, it reminded me this morning of it because I heard it on Hits one, and she was saying how when she has trouble falling asleep, she does this one thing and it helps her to quiet her mind.
I think the one thing she also said she does, that I wanna be clear on was she said, oh, sometimes I get on TikTok and I’m like, don’t do that. Blue light is a stimulant. Keep your phone outta your bedroom by an alarm clock and keep the phone downstairs because it prevents that creep where just to get up.
You know, in P, you look at your phone and then all of a sudden your brain kicks in and wants to start doing things or you get a note from somebody or a text that pisses you off or, you know, you see your tag done something like so it’s really easy in the middle of the night to fall into that trap, right?
So if you can kind of alleviate the main things, you can then look at, okay, well, wait a minute. If I alleviate those things. How else or why else maybe I am struggling to go back to sleep and I need to quiet my mind down. So this hack I’m going to tell you, which is something they talked about this morning, and then I also had my husband do, um, is a really cool idea.
And it is really just about mindfulness and meditation. I personally use the Zenimal. It is an adult. And they have a child meditation device that’s screen free. I love it. I’ve used it for probably eight years since Anna founded Zenimal. I was probably one of the first customers and I do love the little meditation turtle.
Uh, but my husband in the middle of the night was like, I don’t want to turn anything on. I don’t want to disrupt you because I can’t sleep, you know, and he’s right next to me. So I said, okay, you have to visualize. Something that calms you and say something in a repetitive nature, right? You’ve got to calm your mind down.
So whether it’s deep breathing, I actually told him to say a phrase repetitively. Okay. And so at the time I was doing a yoga class and we did like a meditation in there and in the class we, we were repeating Sanskrit, right? And we were saying Om Namah Shivaya, right? So it’s Sanskrit. I don’t know what it means.
I’m not going to Google it, but it’s, I know it’s Sanskrit and it’s Om Namah Shivaya. Now I used to listen to this, uh, person called Krishna Das. I started listening to it when I would do yoga classes because that’s what they would play, and I really fell in love with it in the background for working. So I actually had it playing this morning before I started recording this, but it’s repetitive like mantras, and I, you know, it took me a while to like put two and two together after I did the yoga class, and then I’d always listen to Krishna Das.
But regardless, it’s repetitive in nature, right? So it’s calming, it’s soothing. You’re saying the same thing over and over again. I told my husband to try this a few years ago and I have to tell you this first because I laugh every time I think about it because he’s ridiculous. I was like, okay, so I want you to repeat something like Om Namah Shivaya repetitively at two in the morning and take deep breaths and I want you to relax because he gets pissed off and he’s like, damn it.
I’m up for the day. This is going to suck. My day is going to be, you know, when he goes down this rabbit hole, then his anxiety builds, then he gets more anxious and his brain starts going into overdrive. Then he’s thinking of a million things. Right? And so then he just lays there pissed off for the rest of the night.
And so I said, you know, okay, find something repetitive and we’re going to focus on that and say it. Now, again, I was thinking like the hack I’m going to tell you about, I was thinking maybe deep breaths and counting sheep or visualizing like a day at the beach with the family or something like that.
Right? No. His repetitive statement. Was I can’t wait to eat a ham sandwich. I’m not even kidding. I can’t wait to eat a ham sandwich And I was like what I can’t wait to eat a ham sandwich. That is It’s ridiculous. But that’s what he was saying. It did not work, um, for a variety of reasons. We ended up discovering it was not that his mind was racing, it was actually that he had adrenal fatigue, in which case he had a cortisol spike around 2 o’clock in the morning and that was causing it.
So, um, you have to be really mindful even as a man about your hormones, especially over the age of 40. The adrenal fatigue is super common and it can cause your kind of. caffeine, if you will, of hormones to fire at the wrong time, which is what was happening for him. He was very predictable. And yet at 2am, he had his highest level of cortisol, which we tested through a saliva test.
Where they did four samples of saliva over a 12 hour period. So you kind of do one in the morning when you wake up, one around lunch, one around dinner, and one around bed. And then, uh, you ship it off and they kind of monitor your cortisol at all points throughout the day. So it’s a pretty interesting test.
They’re not super expensive. If you need a functional nutritionist to order one for you, I have a great one. But that being here nor there, I want to get to like the actual hack that works. So, the hack that they were talking about this morning, back to SiriusXM, Um, was called the house tour hack. And so what she was saying that she does, and I thought it was really actually a clever idea.
is she said she dreams of a house that she just built and what it would look like and it takes me to like roblox where my kids play and design houses and my daughter’s always like come look at my house and she does a tour and shows me all the hot tubs and pools and stuff she’s built whatever i think it’s cute um but it’s the same idea so you’re essentially thinking about maybe a house that you’re building and it’s going through each room and looking at it You know, the calming space or a space, you know, well, like your childhood home or even your own home and you mentally walk through each room and you nice and slowly observe maybe the crown molding or.
The window trim, right, or the color or the pictures, maybe it’s the way the furniture is laid out or the fire and the big chimney that’s bustling, you know, so you’re kind of focusing on this journey and you’re looking at small sensory details along the way. Like the texture of a chair, the sound of little baby’s footsteps, right?
And so you kind of do this, and it starts to re center your mind. It gives you something structured, something familiar, something kind of baseline to focus on. And that ultimately makes you relax and fall back to sleep. Because I think what a lot of us do is we either Reach for the phone, and we start scrolling, right, or we lay there and get pissed off.
So if you can kind of re channel or refocus that energy on something like, you know, the house tour, um, that can be a really great way to refocus things. I’ll tell you what I do is actually not a house tour. I focus on the outside. I love Flowers. If I could spend 5, 000 a year just on flowers for my outdoors, I totally would.
Because I love flowers. I love the way they make me feel. I love the way they smell. I love the garden. I love walking out there and seeing tomatoes and eating them fresh off the vine and ripping a little leaf off the tomatoes and smelling it. And oh my gosh, I can’t wait till I can plant my garden. I always do it too early and I get super excited and I have four million heads of lettuce, but I don’t care.
I love All the things that are the garden and being outdoors and the flowers. So for me, that’s what I would do. I like the smell of the roses. I tell you at least once a weekend when I’m walking the dog at the beach, down in Brigantine, New Jersey, I will stop and smell somebody’s flowers. Like, usually it’s roses.
Um, cause I know they smell. But sometimes I’ll smell like peonies or even hydrangeas to see if they smell. They’re not as fragrant, um, if at all. I don’t know. I just, there’s something about that that really is soothing and calming to me. So if you are an adult and you are struggling to sleep through the night and you need to reset your mind, take your phone out of your room, create the proper sleep environment, and then try this hack and see how it works for you.
Now, other things with adult sleep that are super important that I think a lot of people are hesitant to do. First, you got to look at your diet. Second, you got to look at your hormones. Third, you got to look at your schedule. Fourth, you’ve got to look at your room and the environment that you’re sleeping in as far as darkness goes, right?
You’ve got to look at caffeine. You’ve got to look at alcohol, right? All of these things impact our quality and longevity of sleep. And they’re one and the same in that they all kind of compound. So, you’ve got to kind of start with things you can control. And get rid of those variables to figure out what’s left that could be causing your challenge.
So, if you’re struggling with sleep, we’re always here to help. We work with babies, toddlers, teenagers. school age kids and adults. We do lots of corporate wellness as well. So thanks so much for stopping by the kids sleep show. Uh, we greatly appreciate you being here and hopefully this week lets you reset your rest for going into 2025 and finalizing January with a good quality restorative night of sleep.
I’m your host Courtney Zenz. Thanks so much. See you next week. Bye for now.
One more thing before you go. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, or share this episode with someone you know who could use a little more sleep in their life. For tips and resources, be sure to visit us at tinytransitions. com or follow us across social media. Here’s to better sleep, brighter days, and healthier habits.