Integrating Psychotherapy and Sleep Coaching with Michele Bloomberg
In this episode of Becoming a Sleep Consultant podcast, I’m joined by Michele Bloomberg, a pediatric sleep consultant, licensed clinical social worker, and mom of two girls. After more than a decade in psychotherapy, Michele has seen firsthand how deeply sleep impacts mental and emotional wellbeing, for parents and for children.
While on maternity leave with her second daughter in early 2025, she decided to enroll in CPSM and launch her sleep consulting business. Since then, she’s already supported 10 families, blending her expertise as a psychotherapist with her new work as a sleep consultant.
We talk about:
- Why healthy sleep is one of the most important foundations of mental health
- How Michele is weaving her therapy background into her consulting practice
- What it’s been like to grow her business so quickly since certification
Whether you’re curious about the connection between sleep and mental health or inspired by Michele’s fast start in business, this episode is full of insight!
Links:
Website: The Little Bloomies
Instagram: @littlebloomies_sleepconsult
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Book a free discovery call to learn how you can become a Certified Sleep Consultant here.
Transcript:
Intro: Welcome to Becoming a Sleep Consultant! I’m your host Jayne Havens, a certified sleep consultant and founder of both Snooze Fest by Jayne Havens and Center for Pediatric Sleep Management.
On this podcast, I’ll be discussing the business side of sleep consulting. You’ll have an insider’s view on launching, growing, and even scaling a sleep consulting business. This is not a podcast about sleep training. This is a podcast about business building and entrepreneurship.
Jayne Havens: Today, I’m joined by Michele, a pediatric sleep consultant and a mom of two girls. Michele is also a licensed clinical social worker with more than 10 years of experience. Sleep has always been an incredibly important part of both her professional and parenting journey, and she truly believes that one of the most important, if not the most important, parts of mental and emotional wellness is a healthy relationship of sleep.
While on maternity leave with her second daughter in early 2025, Michele decided to enroll in CPSM and launch her business as a sleep consultant. What’s unique about her work is that she’s blending her background as a psychotherapist with her sleep consulting practice and also weaving her sleep knowledge back into her therapy work. I’m so excited to talk with Michele today about the connection between sleep and mental health and how she’s been building her business so quickly since becoming certified.
Michele, welcome to the podcast. I’m so glad you’re here.
Michele Bloomberg: Hi, Jayne. Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here today.
Jayne Havens: So before we dive in, tell us a little bit about you. Share about your family, your work, and why you decided to become a pediatric sleep consultant.
Michele Bloomberg: Sure. So I live in central New Jersey. I have a husband and two beautiful daughters and a 10-year-old puppy. I have been working as a clinical social worker for 10 years. I started in a non-profit and, over the last five years, I’ve transitioned over to private practice. And with that comes a lot of work with individuals who are dealing with anxiety and depression and lack of sleep. And you know, sometimes it’s hard to leave my work at work. So I can bring it home sometimes, and it can interfere with my sleep.
When I had children, I knew that I needed the best opportunity to get myself sleep and to help give my daughters the invaluable tool of sleep. So since my older daughter was an infant, it was so important for us to get her on a healthy sleep schedule. Then when I had my second and life became that much more chaotic, I decided to sleep train her and basically did that while enrolling in CPSM. So it’s definitely been such an interesting and enjoyable journey.
Jayne Havens: In your experience, what impact does poor sleep have on mental health, both for parents and for children?
Michele Bloomberg: We’ll start with parents. Poor sleep is one of the triggers to different anxiety disorders. It can increase just general anxiety disorder. It can increase phobias. It can increase our cortisol levels, which then can increase our responses, which is, you know, irritability, difficulty sleeping, difficulty with relationships. And it can create a really difficult relationship with our kids too, because we can start to lash out in ways that we don’t necessarily want to.
And for kids, it’s really the same. If our children are not getting enough sleep, we see it during the daytime. We see the irritability. We see more tantrums for the toddlers and elementary school kids. So it definitely can impact all areas of life.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, one thing I tell parents all the time is that parents get on calls with me and they say, “I haven’t slept in, whatever it is, six months. I haven’t slept in two years. I’m losing my mind. I can’t focus. I don’t feel safe to drive.” They go on about all of these things that they’re having a hard time with. One thing that I always point out to them is, if you feel this way, imagine how your child must feel. Because we as adults, our bodies are wired to be able to survive on far less sleep than our children, right?
Michele Bloomberg: Absolutely.
Jayne Havens: My husband sleeps like five hours a night, which I think is insane. But he goes to bed late and sets his alarm for like 4:22 in the morning to get up and go to the gym. He can function that way. But our children, they cannot, right? So for as tired as we feel and how it impacts our lives, I’m always trying to show parents: your children are negatively impacted by this too. This is not just something that we are having a hard time as parents when our children aren’t sleeping.
Michele Bloomberg: Absolutely. And of course, when we’re working with families who are sleep training, a lot of the families are at this point where they don’t know how to get their kids to a point where they can independently sleep. The babies or the children are falling asleep on them and then waking up several times a night, and they’re not getting the sleep. But it feels easier at that point because, okay, at least we can be there to comfort them.
But with healthy sleep comes the ability for parents to be able to co-regulate, which means they’re bringing their emotions down to help meet the baby, or the toddler, or the child where they’re at. So if the parent is not getting enough sleep, the ability to co-regulate is decreased significantly.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, I see that firsthand. I mean, I work with children as young as three months, all the way up to six, seven, eight years old. But I worked with a lot of parents of three, four, five, six-year-old kiddos. And when parents are not getting sleep, they are not positioned to support their children emotionally at the same level. They’re just not. They’re too tired to think clearly. They’re set off by small things. They are just throwing spaghetti at the wall, and their child is super unclear about what the expectation is for the day. They don’t even know how to act because they’re not seeing any sort of consistent messaging or emotions from their parents.
Michele Bloomberg: Right. If we’re not sleeping and our cortisol levels are increased, we’re constantly in this fight-or-flight mode. So being able to make the best decisions for ourselves and our little ones when it comes to any part of the day, especially sleeping, we’re not going to be on point. I specialize in EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. Part of it is this bilateral stimulation that helps us to get in a more stable place so that we can make healthy decisions. The bilateral stimulation is the same thing that our eyes are doing during REM sleep, where it’s just kind of like putting us in this place of stabilization. So it’s sleep and mental health, it’s clear, it is just so closely connected.
Jayne Havens: One of my sort of top referral sources actually is mental health professionals. I have several people who regularly refer parents to me. They’ve told me that the reason they send families my way is because they feel like they can’t properly do their job as a therapist when these parents are so sleep deprived.
Do you find that to be the case in your practice, where if you’re supporting a mom who is not getting adequate sleep due to having an infant at home, and that baby hasn’t been sleep trained, or maybe they have a four-year-old who’s scared to be in their room at night and they’re sitting in there until 10 o’clock at night until their four-year-old falls asleep, then by midnight they have a kid in their bed? Are you finding the same thing, that it’s really hard to get them to a better place from a mental health perspective if they are sleep deprived?
Michele Bloomberg: Absolutely. As families are having babies, it’s kind of like, okay, I know the first couple weeks is going to be tough. The first month or two is going to be tough. A lot of new parents have that expectation. Like, “Okay. I can get through this. I can get through the first six weeks, the first eight weeks.” But what a lot of parents don’t realize is that if we don’t do the shaping and the training, this can go on for years.
It’s really at those later years where I start to realize that the lack of sleep is so impactful on their mental health. That’s why I’ve been starting to incorporate some of my sleep training into my work with my mental health clients. Because if they aren’t able to get onto this good rhythm, I’ll always be here for my clients, but they’re not going to get the effectiveness as they would if they were able to get more sleep. And vice versa, when I’m working with my sleep training clients, I can tell a lot of my clients, too, have been referred from mental health therapists, which is great. There’s so much pushback. Because what we see with mental health disorders is that it’s like the devil you know.
Right? So I know I’m not getting sleep, and I know I’m irritable, miserable. My relationship with my child is suffering. But I’m scared to see what a difference what is going to look like. Because a lot of people, I think, are hesitant. That, okay, we can really help someone’s child, someone’s little one get sleep in two weeks or less. So there’s just so much hesitancy because they know what they’re struggling with now. What is the future going to look like if there’s other struggles? Because there’s always struggle. Parenting is not easy. There’s just always going to be struggles.
Jayne Havens: Right, and sleep training kills hard, right? One of the things that I love to say to parents at the end of discovery calls is, I always like to say to them, “I just want to say out loud—and I know this might be hard for you to hear or believe me when I say this—but what we’re going to do together is exponentially easier than what you’re currently doing.” That’s what I love to say to them. That’s the whole “the devil you know versus the devil you don’t know.” They are up every single hour in the middle of the night and, for some reason, that feels more comfortable than the unknown of what it looks like to actually work on improving sleep, right?
Michele Bloomberg: Right.
Jayne Havens: I love to reassure my clients that what we’re going to do together is going to be easier than what they’re doing. And I feel confident in that. It’s always the truth, you know?
Michele Bloomberg: Absolutely.
Jayne Havens: My clients will say to me afterwards, “Oh, I can’t believe I was so worried about this,” or, “I can’t believe I dragged my feet on this for three months, or six months, or three years, or whatever it is.” Right? And so that I feel really confident to say to them. But I think you hit the nail on the head—that so many parents are just so afraid of what sleep training might look like, or might sound like, or might feel like, that they’d rather live in this state of extreme exhaustion and overtiredness, both for themselves and their child.
Michele Bloomberg: Yeah, another topic that I get a lot surrounding mental health and child development is separation anxiety. There are so many parents that are just afraid that if they engage in the journey of sleep training, the child can then develop like neglect, separation anxiety, or just other anxieties. But it’s really the reverse.
Our little ones are going to be more likely to experience separation anxiety if we are helping them to fall asleep, if we are waking up with them in the middle of the night—several times a night—for years. There’s always going to be research out there that will lean one way or the other, but there are hundreds and thousands of scholarly articles that will indicate that there is no harm in sleep training in terms of the parent-child relationship.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, so let’s switch gears a little bit. I want to talk about what it’s looked like for you to grow your business. Because you only got started in — I think you finished the course in February. You probably launched your business in March, or shortly thereafter. You’ve already supported, I think you told me 10 families, which is incredible. It’s only been a handful of months. What does it look like for you to find those first few clients, support them? Where are referrals coming from? Just give us a rundown.
Michele Bloomberg: So the beginning of launching my business, I definitely tried to establish my website, a little bit of social media presence, getting the business end in order. I’ve been doing a lot of outreach in different Facebook groups, trying to ramp up my social media presence on Instagram. I recently connected with a new mother wellness influencer in South Florida. But a lot of my referrals, I’ve gotten from word of mouth from friends, some referrals from a mental health therapist. In the spring, I did a Mother’s Day tabling event. So it was really great to connect with new mothers, connect with different vendors. It is fun. It’s time consuming, but it’s so much fun to meet different people and experience a different industry.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, I love that for you. I’m so excited for you. Do you want to share maybe a recent success story, a family that you worked with that just jumps out in your mind as being a really special win?
Michele Bloomberg: One of my recent clients, it was an eight-month-old. The family lived in New York City, one-bedroom apartment. I spoke to them, wrote the plan, guided them through it. The first night, it took their daughter maybe three minutes to lay down and fall asleep. They were so fine. They’re like, “She’s been gaslighting us.” This is night one. So it just went really, really well from the beginning because they had my support in bedtime and nap time to talk them through it and to talk them through. Like, okay, do we go in? Do we step out? That’s the difference here, right?
Anyone can find some information on the internet, how to sleep train. But with us, we get to talk them through it, and they have the accountability and the support. Because it can be scary, of course.
Jayne Havens: How are you juggling mom life, working as a therapist and growing your sleep consulting business all at the same time? I hear so often from people who are interested in getting into this field that they just feel like they don’t have time. You sound like a pretty busy person. So how are you making time for this?
Michele Bloomberg: So when I took the course, I was on maternity leave, and I had more time than ever. I thrive with newborn life. I found a period of time where I knew I would have a lot of time to put into building the business. Not everyone needs to do that. Because you can start your business without having everything in order. But I knew, going back to work, I would just have a lot on my plate and figuring out how to manage everything was going to be more difficult. So finding a period of time where I knew, okay, I can dedicate myself to this was definitely very helpful.
I’m in a fortunate place where I do have a flexible schedule with the private practice for therapy, that I create my schedule and then I can just kind of create hours that I dedicate to my business around that. Then I have so much support from my husband. I’m very, very fortunate and I fully understand that not everyone may have that available, but that has been invaluable. I think even if you don’t have a partner who’s able to give you that support with child care, just finding a person, finding someone that you know can take a little bit off your plate is invaluable.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, and I think also what I sense from you is that this work lights you up. So you want to be doing it, right?
Michele Bloomberg: Absolutely.
Jayne Havens: I think that when it comes to growing a business, nobody can make you do it, right? There’s nobody behind you reminding you every single day, “Get to work. Get to work. Who are you talking to today? What are you doing to work on your business today?” I do think that in order to be successful in entrepreneurship, you have to be a self-starter. You have to be doing work that lights you up and brings you joy and makes you happy. And I get the sense that that’s the truth for you.
Michele Bloomberg: Absolutely. You know, there are a lot of nights after bedtime, like 7:38, where I’m on the couch and I’m working on the business. But that’s the beauty of it. I can just be on the couch and working on the business. Whereas, previously, maybe I was just watching TV without doing the business. So it definitely does light me up and I love that. With therapy, it is long-term change. We’re focused on the long term. Like, what are these small changes that you can make that you can see that that long-term change here, it’s okay? Three nights, like we can see the change that we’re making in someone’s life in two weeks or less. But really, it’s mostly a lot less than that.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite parts about this work, too, is that parents come to me at a place that feels like rock bottom. They feel entirely hopeless. They think their baby is broken and that they’ve tried literally everything. We swoop in. We write them a really beautifully written plan. We get onto a phone call and talk them through and empower them to implement something that we’ve put on paper for them. I don’t know what your plans look like, but I typically give my clients a few different options. And so they decide how they want to move forward, and we support them through the process.
Literally, as you said, in three or four nights, usually, there’s a drastic transformation. Then we spend the rest of the time together, 10 or 11 days, celebrating the wins, fine tuning schedules, and just feeling great. Everybody is happy and rested. It just, to me, never gets old.
Michele Bloomberg: Absolutely. That’s my plans too. I offer at least two or three options. Because especially coming from that therapist approach, I come from a very client-centered lens. So the way that I work in all areas in my life, I need someone to be able to buy into it. I need to be able to say like, okay, this is a decision that that we’re making together and help support them through that. With that being said, there are some times where I meet the client where they’re at. I see, okay, what’s working here, what’s not working.
I’ve had a client where we’ve kind of like come up with a method different from any other methods that works for them because they can be so confident. But if there is anxiety for the parent, it’s just not going to work. So we have to be flexible and meet our clients where they’re at. That’s invaluable. It may take a bit longer, or it may take a little bit longer than the typical three days, but it’s going to work as long as there is consistency and as long as the parents feel like, “Okay, I got this because I’m being supported in a way that works for me.”
Jayne Havens: So what are your goals for the future? What do you want your business to look like a year from now or five years from now?
Michele Bloomberg: So I definitely want to continue to grow. I want to be able to have a lot more connections in the area. I definitely want to do some more speaking engagements. Right now, getting back from maternity leave and finding the balance, it’s been hard to go and find the time to do those speaking engagements. But I definitely want to do more of that.
Financially, I’m almost at the point — it’s only been five months, but I’m almost in the green where I’ve paid myself back between the course and the money that I’ve put into it, which is not a ton, which is great. You know, a great benefit of creating this business is: it doesn’t take a ton of money to start it up. It really could be almost nothing after—
Jayne Havens: Enrolling in a program.
Michele Bloomberg: Exactly. I would love to be able to make that amount of money within a month. So that’ll definitely be like a goal. This whole business, it really is what you put into it. But again, like you said before, it excites me. And if it excites someone else, it’s easy to want to dedicate the time.
Jayne Havens: Well, I think you’re off to a fantastic start. Congrats on your early success. I can’t wait to see where you land six months from now, a year from now. So you’ll have to come back, and we’ll have another conversation.
Michele Bloomberg: Absolutely. I would love that. Thank you so much for having me.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, it would mean so much to me if you would rate, review, and subscribe. When you rate, review, and subscribe, this helps the podcast reach a greater audience. I am so grateful for your support.
If you would like to learn more about how you can become a certified sleep consultant, head over to my Facebook Group, Becoming a Sleep Consultant or to my website thecpsm.com. Thanks so much, and I hope you will tune in for the next episode.