Welcome to the Newsome Health Menopause podcast.

I'm Dr Louise Newsome, a GP and menopause specialist,

and I run the Newsome Health Menopause and wellbeing centre here in Stratford-upon-Avon.

So today I'm very pleased to have Catherine Pinkham with me, who is a specialist in sleep from the Insomnia Clinic in London. And we first connected several months ago when I was trying

to find experts about sleep because it's

something that a lot of my patients complain about having poor quality and poor duration of sleep.

So welcome, Catherine.

Thank you.

Nice to see you.

So today, rather than talking specifically on menopause and perimenopause and the sleep,

we thought we'd just do a general introduction

about sleep and different ways that our sleep can be affected and simple measures that can really

improve our sleep. So, Catherine, before we start on that, just tell me a bit about you and your

background, if you don't mind. Yeah, absolutely. So my background is in mental health in the NHS. So I originally

started working for the IAP service, so the psychological service part of the NHS. And during that time,

I was lucky enough to do some sleep insomnia training, which is fairly hard to come by. And it's not

part of the standard training for psychological practitioners.

But I was looking at it and straight away, I absolutely loved it. I had a couple of people in my

clinic who had sleep problems and they left session one, they left, they came back session

two and it worked. And so it really clicked for me and I love this sort of idea that actually

it was fairly black and white, unlike a lot of other stuff in mental health, it was quite black and white that actually it was working for

almost everybody. And then when I was made, I was actually made redundant when I was on maternity leave.

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