At night, as soon as the sun begins to fade and darkness falls, Jennifer begins to dread going to bed because she knows that she won’t be able to fall asleep for several hours. She begins to worry about another restless night of sleep. Even when Jennifer tries to think positively about getting a good night’s sleep, she has difficulty blocking out negative thoughts such as, “Here we go again, I’m never going to fall asleep tonight” and “If I don’t sleep tonight, how am I going to make it through the day tomorrow?”

I had the privilege of chatting with Dr. Caroline Okorie, a sleep specialist and pediatric pulmonologist who cares for children with various respiratory and sleep issues. She is located at Stanford Children's Health in California.

Dr. Okorie has a great interest in all things sleep medicine and medical education, health literacy, and community engagement. She enjoys working with patients and families to help empower them to optimize their health and well-being. Dr. Okorie and I are underrepresented minorities in the pediatric sleep medicine field, a specialty that is already relatively small and unique.

In this blog, Dr. Okorie shares about herself as a sleep medicine physician, her journey so far, and some life lessons along the way.

While there is more than sufficient evidence on the physical, mental and emotional benefits of good sleep, many families are deprived of this beautiful gift of rest and restoration. 

There is a wide range of problems contributing to sleeping difficulties. Americans spend thousands of dollars investing in devices and other items on improving their sleep and are looking for the best mattresses, black-out shades, weighted blankets, sleep apps, to name a few. Unfortunately, while ensuring we have an ideal sleep environment, this is often not sufficient to address underlying sleep problems or habits that may be getting in our way of restful sleep. In this blog post, I discuss the components of restful sleep.