The Story We Tell About Sleep

What if your exhaustion is not a personal failing?

Sleep educator and patient advocate Lindsay Scola lived with symptoms of narcolepsy for 19 years before receiving a diagnosis. During that time, she hid naps in public bathrooms, pushed herself to keep pace with high-performing colleagues, and believed needing sleep meant she was less capable.

In this conversation, Lindsay and I explore the cultural stories that teach us to treat sleep as lazy, inconvenient, or something we can postpone until the work is finished.

We talk about:

• The shame Lindsay carried before her narcolepsy diagnosis

• Why receiving the right language changed how she understood herself

• Common warning signs of sleep apnea and other sleep disorders

• The relationship between sleep, creativity, memory, health, and agency

• Why midlife, hormones, and ADHD can change how women experience sleep

• The problem with rigid sleep routines and obsessive sleep tracking

• Why telling her story became part of Lindsay’s purpose

• What it means to rewrite our relationship with rest

Sleep is not what gets in the way of our lives. It is one of the things making our lives possible.

This conversation is part of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, an exploration of how the stories we inherit and repeat shape our identities, choices, relationships, health, and capacity to change.