Video Transcription

Sleep Ninja® Case Study: Melanie

My name is Mel, Melanie Gotch, and I’m a Registered Psychologist. There’s so much I love and enjoy about being a psychologist, actually. It’s fun! I work with kids and teenagers, so I get to do a lot of fun stuff every day. I try to make things as game-based and story-based as possible.

I was often referred young people with sleep issues, and that was the main thing that they were presenting with. Alongside that, anxiety and mood fluctuations would often come up. Here in my private practice, I always ask about sleep as well with young people, because what I noticed is that it doesn’t seem to be a priority in young people’s lives.

There is so much research that shows us that poor sleep quality and quantity are definitely related to mental health challenges. Sleep affects every part of our body: it affects our concentration, it affects our mood, and it helps us lay down memories when we sleep. So there are so many things going on with our sleep, and we need to get really good quality sleep for all of those processes to work.

Children and adolescents are also at a stage where their brain is developing, so they need more sleep at that time to be able to lay down all of those brain networks and for their brain to continue developing through that phase. So this is a really good time, actually, for young people to set up good sleep habits.

What Sleep Ninja does is actually give you information and understanding about good sleep habits. It puts it into small pockets of information, so you’re not actually there learning for a long period of time. It gives you small amounts of information you can do in less than 5 minutes in the daytime, so that then it gives you some time after that to put some of those practices into your daily routine.

Sleep Ninja is set apart because it’s the only one out there for young people. The rest of the apps are designed for adults. Sure, young people could use them, but Sleep Ninja is actually put out there for young people and developed in consultation with young people.

This Sleep Ninja app can help young people to recognize the patterns that they’re falling into and help them to try to stay on track with their sleep, because in turn, that will help with their mood, their memory, their concentration, and mean that they will probably feel better with their schoolwork too.

Video by Sleep Ninja