Victoria Tucker - Sleep Coach

13/01/2026

This is great! I share the 5 Principles of Sleep in my workshops. They are hugely important for improving sleep and are my go-to building blocks for personalised sleep plans.

😁

Professor Colin Espie on the BBC Breakfast couch this morning talking sleep and launching his animation of his '5 Principles of Good Sleep Health' - something we completely support.

Sleep isn’t just downtime - it’s nature’s most powerful medicine for your body and brain. That’s why we’re excited to get behind these key principles to help you sleep better and live better. These include:

1. Value Your Sleep
Sleep is essential just like air, water and food. Honour it as a crucial part of your health and don’t cut corners when it comes to rest.

2. Prioritise Your Sleep
Make space in your life for sleep. Sometimes it means choosing rest over late nights or screens - and that’s okay!

3. Personalise Your Sleep
We’re all unique. Find your ideal sleep pattern, timing and duration - experiment and discover what works best for you.

4. Trust Your Sleep
Sleep is a natural process. Once you find a rhythm that suits you, trust your body to do what it needs - don’t overthink it.

5. Protect Your Sleep
Shield your rest from disruptions - from late-night tech to stressful thinking. Create a calm routine and environment that supports good sleep.

Why it matters: Good sleep fuels your energy, mood, immunity and daily performance - and following these principles gives you the tools to make sleep work for you.

To find out more, visit https://thesleepcharity.org.uk/the-5-principles-of-good-sleep-health/

04/09/2025

Love this campaign to raise awareness and money for charity.

Happy Sleeptember folks!

07/08/2025

⭐Supporting People with Sleep
📅1st October 2025,
🕤09:30 to 12:30
🤝With Victoria Tucker, Learning and Development Centre Sleep Coach

📍Porteous Groundworks Training Room, 37 Estover Close, Plymouth, PL6 7PL.

This is an in-person training session and refreshments will be provided. The training room is located on the ground floor and there is free parking at the venue.

❓Suitable for: All Healthcare Professionals

Synopsis:

⭐Good quality sleep (and getting enough of it!) is vital for our health and wellbeing. Everyone working in healthcare will have supported patients who are not getting enough sleep, whether this is due to their mental health, physical health, medications, profession or lifestyle. At any one time, 36% of the British population has experienced poor sleep in the last week.

Objectives:
✅Understand the science of sleep and how this can be used to improve sleep quality and quantity.
✅Understand the principles of Sleep Hygiene and how these support better sleep.
✅Be able to discuss simple sleep tips and techniques with patients for them to try at home.
✅Be able to work with patients to build a sleep action plan based on their own feedback, needs and inclinations.

💻 For more details and to book, please go to:
https://www.learninganddevelopmentcentre.co.uk/courses-events/clinical-skills-courses/supporting-people-with-sleep-1st-october-2025/

🙂If you have any questions please contact us: ldc.sentinel@nhs.net

09/01/2025

With my other hat on …. This is an invaluable day for anyone that works or comes into contact with people living with Dementia.

It will be a very open, person-centred day that ultimately enriches personal practice and care.

19/12/2024

NASA has classified Snake plant, now called Dracaena, as an air purifier due to its ability to remove toxic compounds such as benzene, formaldehyde, trichloroethylene, xylene and toluene.
This plant uses the acid metabolism of the Crassulacee to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, enabling it to resist drought.
The microscopic pores on its leaves, called stomata, open only at night to limit water loss through transpiration in the heat of the sun.
Unlike other plants, Snake plant produces oxygen and absorbs carbon dioxide at night, making it an excellent indoor air purifier while we sleep.

23/08/2024

Sleeptember is fast approaching! Our annual awareness month is a fantastic time focus on sleep especially as it's 'back to school' season and the nights start to draw in.

This year, we are focusing on workplace sleep with our campaign, looking at the impact fatigue has on the workforce and their health, safety, and wellbeing.

We have some great events happening, with some amazing partners, and we'd love for your organisation to get involved. Here is our supporter's pack which has loads of free resources, ideas and tips to help raise awareness around the issue and the support available.

https://thesleepcharity.org.uk/get-involved/awareness-events/

17/06/2024

Good morning sleep fans!

As you can tell it’s another early start for me. I think it’s fair to say that I have never slept well in the month of June, even before my sleep problems manifested themselves. June is famously the month when the nights are at their shortest and for some reason, perhaps just at our house, the birds are at their loudest!

At this point in a sleep consultation I might suggest identifying remedies for these two problems. I have got blackout material behind the curtains, so the bedroom does stay darker for longer. We could do with something across the top of the curtain rail perhaps, to prevent morning light from illuminating a strip of ceiling.

And the birds? People at this point are thinking “Earplugs, why doesn’t she just wear earplugs?” But here I have a conflict of interest between my desire to sleep well and my need to be able to hear during the night if there’s a problem with the kids.

Now we’re introducing a whole new layer of sleep anxiety - what if I don’t wake up when I need to? Anyone who cares for others or has dependents will recognise this.

So during the month of June and the early part of July, I have a couple of sleep rules in place, knowing that I am likely to be working to Nature’s schedule;

✅ Go to bed as the light fades, the natural trigger for sleep.

✅ Screens off an hour before bed - I find a little light tidying, reading and self-care helps settle the day’s thoughts.

✅ Make the bed comfy. The nights are warming up! Aim to stay cool in bed for as long as possible, signalling to your body you should be asleep.

By being careful with my sleep schedule I can usually achieve 6 good hours of sleep in the summer months, which is a vast improvement on what I used to get!

Any other tips for summer sleeping gratefully received! In the meantime it looks to be warming up a little this week - enjoy summer when it arrives!

😁☀️🦜🎶🥱😴

10/06/2024

New team shirts arrived in time for our Immunisations Conference in Exeter on Wednesday.

Thank you Andy!

Learning and Development Centre
Exeter Racecourse

09/06/2024

06/06/2024

As well as my coaching activities, I’m very lucky to work with the talented team at the Learning and Development Centre.

We’ve got lots of new courses coming later this year - ideal for all healthcare and social care workers.

Help us share the word about our great training offer!

02/05/2024

Todays Early Morning Thought ….

I’ve Got To Know how it ends. (Not as scary or prophetic as it sounds…. Read on!)

We’re all busy, all the time, aren’t we? Work, family, friends, pets, keeping house, errands, hobbies … there’s always something we can be doing.

I manage this busyness by not doing two things - I rarely watch television, and I don’t do nearly as much reading as I used to. And I don’t do these things because I cannot stop once I’ve started.

Television (drama and entertainment rather than current affairs) and books, and to a certain extent social media, are similar in that someone has already done all the thinking for you. You are absorbing someone else’s skill, talent and creativity and your brain can switch off from problem solving, worrying, planning and hypothesising for a bit.

For me, this sometimes manifests as binge-watching and breaking all the sleep guidelines because I Have To Know how it ends.

If you’re like me and binge-watching/reading/scrolling sometimes gets in the way of your sleep, think about how you can manage your mental recreation so that it doesn’t impact too often.

I’m going to work on better binge-choices for the evening - shorter books, films not series and turning my phone off at the same time each night.

😁📺📕📱🥱🛌😴💤💤💤

27/04/2024

A bit of light reading!

This is a really important piece of work that has been undertaken by The Sleep Charity.

Sleep (or lack of it) is such an integral element of everyone’s health and well-being.

Don’t wait 6 years to seek help if you are having difficulties with your sleep. The earlier it is addressed, the better the health benefits.

If you are a long term sufferer please reach out; sometimes simple tweaks can be instrumental in improving your sleep experiences.

😊

Our report published today cites decades of failures by successive governments to act on evidence linking sleep to serious health problems – including the current government’s failure to deliver on its 2019 commitment to improve preventative care. Five years later and almost half way through the decade and that guidance is still to be published.

Such failures have created a ‘triple sleep deficit’ - read the full report here. https://thesleepcharity.org.uk/get-involved/sleep-manifesto-2024/