Midlife sleep complaints rarely present cleanly. Vasomotor symptoms, mood changes, alcohol, and years of accumulated sleep effort stack on top of one another, and the patient in front of you usually arrives asking for something to take — often after months of melatonin that did nothing.
Dr. Shelby Harris joins WNDG to work through the sorting problem. What's hormonally driven, what's primary insomnia, what's a circadian shift, and when a sleep-disordered breathing workup belongs in a perimenopausal patient who doesn't fit the classic phenotype. She'll cover where CBT-I sits as first-line treatment, how to introduce it to a patient who came in wanting a prescription, what to do with the patient already on nightly trazodone or zolpidem, and how wearable sleep data is reshaping the conversation in the exam room.
Shelby Harris, PsyD, DBSM, is a clinical psychologist and sleep specialist in private practice in NY. She is board-certified in Behavioral Sleep Medicine and treats a wide variety of sleep, anxiety, and depression issues using evidence-based, non-medication treatments. In addition to her academic writings and research on insomnia, narcolepsy, sleep apnea, circadian issues, and sleep in older adults, she is the author of two popular self-help books, The Women’s Guide to Overcoming Insomnia and The Essential Guide to Children’s Sleep. Dr. Harris holds an academic appointment as Clinical Associate Professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in both Neurology and Psychiatry. Before going into private practice, she was the longstanding director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the Sleep-Wake Center at Montefiore Medical Center in NYC. Dr. Harris has been an invited columnist for The New York Times and is frequently in the media, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, CBS Mornings, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and The Drew Barrymore Show. Dr. Harris can be found on Instagram at @SleepDocShelby, where she provides evidence-based information about sleep wellness and sleep disorders.