Welcome to my column, Pretty Interesting! Capsule has given me the opportunity to write about some truly epic humans I have met who march to the beat of their own drum and who have genuinely inspired me recently.
I feel oddly proud that I have mended my algorithm enough to no longer be force-fed a constant stream of negative news and collective trauma when I scroll. There is a privilege in protecting your mental health this way, even if it means remaining a little ignorant to certain things. And yet, if I am honest, a lot of feel good stories can lack the punch to really hold my attention. There is a strange duality in wanting something juicy and compelling without feeling like you are reading a glossy puff piece.
This column is my attempt to sit right in that tension – human, honest and a little sharp around the edges.
You can read previous columns – a chat with Kiwi writer/director Taylor Nixon, restauranter, Michael Dearth, writer/director Rachel Ross, my own mum, Jill Arkley, Toni Anne Glover, who is one of the geniuses behind the Kinloch Wilderness Retreat, entrepreneur, Nyssa Waters, author of F*ck Up Your Kids with Grace & Humour: The Truth About Parenting, Jacqlin Richards and the woman who leaves a trail of glitter wherever she goes, my sister Rochelle Moffitt.
This week I talk to Kirsten Taylor – a Naturopathic Sleep Specialist, Managing Director and Founder.
There are some people you meet and immediately feel as though you have known them forever. Not in the superficial, “Oh my God, we have so much in common” kind of way, but in a much quieter, harder to explain way. Something about their energy feels familiar. You find yourself relaxing into the conversation faster than you normally would. You tell them things you probably wouldn’t usually tell a stranger, and, more importantly, you listen differently. You become genuinely interested in what they have to say.
I met Kirsten Taylor at Revved, an event in Auckland City, and spent a significant amount of time walking back to my car afterwards thinking about her. There was something about her calm nature and my own feelings of chaoticness that immediately made me feel safe in her presence. She listened in a way that felt rare. Not waiting for her turn to speak, not politely nodding along, but actually listening. The stories she shared felt genuine and interesting and, by the time I drove home, my ears were still pricked up thinking about them. I remember thinking that it felt a little like a good date. I had met this woman for the first time and I was already excited about when I would see her again haha.
The more I have learned about Kirsten since then, the more that first impression makes sense. Her life has been shaped by an insatiable curiosity about people, health, science, sleep, the mind and the strange, often inexplicable things that happen when all of those things intersect. She has spent more than two decades working as a naturopath and practitioner, built a business around sleep, immersed herself in research and clinical studies, and remained deeply connected to the people who use the products she has created. Yet despite all of the science, credentials and knowledge, there is something remarkably human at the centre of it all: she really wants people to feel better.
That instinct has been there for a long time, although the way Kirsten understands it has changed considerably.
“If I met you 20 years ago, would I recognise the woman sitting in front of me today?” I ask her. She thinks about it before identifying one of the biggest changes. “My attitude to stress has changed a lot.”
Kirsten describes her former relationship with stress as a “fear spiral”, where she would become overwhelmed by imagining every possible thing that could go wrong. Her mind would run through the worst possible outcomes until they felt almost inevitable (sounds familiar, haha!) Now, after studying neuroscience and becoming increasingly interested in the relationship between thought and physiology, she has consciously changed the way she approaches her future. “I only think and imagine good things happening.”
It sounds almost ridiculously simple until you consider how radical that shift actually is. Most of us spend an extraordinary amount of time rehearsing disasters that haven’t happened yet. We call it preparation. We call it being realistic. We call it being responsible. Kirsten has begun to question whether constantly imagining the worst is actually doing us any favours. I work on this a lot in therapy as I do have a tendency to engage in catastrophizing thoughts.
It is a question that seems to sit underneath much of her work: what if some of the things we have accepted as normal are not actually serving us?
Kirsten’s career itself is a good example. When she was younger, she thought she would become a lawyer. There is something almost perfectly logical about that ambition when you get to know her. She has an analytical brain, loves information and enjoys figuring out how things work. That instinct ultimately became one of the things that made her a good practitioner. Rather than simply looking at a symptom, she was interested in finding the underlying issue and working out how to solve it.
“I have only ever been a Naturopath and practitioner before the products needed more of my attention,” she explains, adding that even as her business grew, she never wanted to lose the relationship with the people actually using what she created. “I have never given up the connection to the people who are our customers and put them first.”
There was another career that called to her too: midwifery. Kirsten has been fortunate enough to be present at two births, and the experience clearly left an impression. “It’s an amazing process. I am in awe of it and felt compelled to learn more and be able to facilitate it to be as smooth and joyful as possible.”
There is something revealing in that desire. Whether she was considering law, naturopathy or midwifery, the common denominator was never really the job title. It was understanding something complex and then using that knowledge to help another person through it.
The midwifery path ultimately didn’t work out. Kirsten laughs when explaining why. She cannot handle sleep deprivation. Another thing we can agree on!
It is an amusing detail, given that sleep would eventually become such a significant part of her life, but it also brings us to the point where Kirsten’s understanding of health began to shift.
For years, she believed health was the foundation for feeling better and being happier. “I get joy from helping people feel better and be happier. I believed health is the foundation for that. Now I believe differently.”
Her own health was responsible for challenging that belief.
Despite eating well and living in a way that was deeply aligned with her naturopathic training, Kirsten’s health took a turn. Instead of simply doubling down on everything she already believed, she became interested in neuroscience and began exploring the power of what we think and what we say.
It opened up a completely different line of inquiry.
Perhaps our bodies are not simply machines we maintain through food, supplements, movement and sleep. Perhaps our thoughts are part of the system too. Perhaps the stories we tell ourselves have more influence than we have traditionally given them credit for.
That curiosity has remained central to the way Kirsten approaches life. She doesn’t necessarily believe that we have one singular calling that is waiting somewhere to be discovered. Instead, she believes there is an underlying “soul” or life path, which we express through our personalities and the opportunities that present themselves.
“I think we have an underlying ‘soul’ or life path journey and we express that through our personalities. That may change over our lifetime as opportunities for that expression changes and present themselves.”
It is a philosophy that leaves plenty of room for evolution. The person you are at 25 doesn’t need to have the same definition of purpose as the person you become at 45. The expression may change even if something deeper remains constant.
That might sound like the philosophy of someone who simply follows wherever curiosity takes her, but Kirsten rejects that description with a laugh. When I suggest that she seems like someone who doesn’t necessarily operate according to a rigid five year plan, she reminds me that she is now 17 years into SleepDrops.
Perhaps the lesson isn’t that curiosity means constantly changing direction. Sometimes curiosity means committing to something and continuing to ask better questions about it.
Sleep became Kirsten’s thing through her work with natural fertility couples. She began noticing a clear pattern between a lack of sleep and a lack of fertility, and what began as an observation developed into a fascination with the healing power of sleep.
Then she experienced the consequences of sleep deprivation herself.
Just before starting SleepDrops, Kirsten was working as a naturopath and had a falling out with her business partner. The fallout resulted in her losing ownership of her herbal medicines, her furniture and her own database at precisely the wrong moment: the Global Financial Crisis was beginning and jobs were scarce. She was worried about how she was going to feed her son.
She wasn’t sleeping properly.
And she discovered that sleep deprivation wasn’t simply making her tired. It was changing the way she experienced life.
“It sucked the joy out of life in a physical and mental and emotional way that was hard to explain.” As many of my readers are new mums, I am sure that sentence also hits home.
That experience gave her an understanding that no textbook could provide. She knew intellectually that sleep mattered, but experiencing its absence changed the meaning of that knowledge.
As she began researching sleep more deeply, she was surprised to discover just how much was already known. The research wasn’t necessarily new. Some of the knowledge had been sitting in medical journals for decades.
“23 years ago this knowledge was hidden in plain sight – published in medical journals.”
The problem, in her view, is that we still talk about sleep as though it is a single event. We go to bed, close our eyes and sleep. But Kirsten describes it very differently.
“It is not one process. It is a symphony of processes which rely on our whole body being in balance to achieve it.”
That idea fundamentally changes the way you think about your nightly routine. Sleep isn’t the leftover portion of your day, the thing you get to once the work is done, the children are settled, the emails have been answered and the scrolling has finally stopped. It is not something that happens at the end of your life, or even at the end of your day. It is part of what determines how you experience everything that comes next.
Kirsten believes the way we think about sleep is still influenced by an outdated attitude from the 1970s and 1980s, when it was almost treated as an inconvenient interruption to productivity.
If she could make one aspect of sleep common knowledge, she would want people to understand sleep architecture: the idea that not all sleep is equal and that the different stages matter.
“We should all be talking about sleep architecture and getting 5 cycles a night, 25% REM, minimum 15% Deep sleep etc – basically that not all sleep is equal.”
But perhaps the most interesting part of Kirsten’s story isn’t actually the sleep.
It is the way she has managed to hold science and intuition in the same hand.
She is not someone who dismisses evidence. Quite the opposite. She describes herself as a “prove it to me” kind of person. She likes data. She likes being able to quantify things, experiment, test and measure. Her research has been firmly rooted in science, and she is now involved in clinical research and sleep technology.
And yet, in her twenties, something happened that she could not explain.
Kirsten experienced a completely inexplicable healing experience that had no scientific explanation she could identify. Rather than dismissing it because it didn’t fit within the framework she understood, she allowed it to change her perspective.
“It opened my mind to the possibility that there could be more to life and living.”
That moment seems to have given her permission to remain curious about things that don’t yet have an explanation.
She remembers studying naturopathy 26 years ago and becoming so excited about what she was learning that she would go to dinner parties and tell her friends about it. They weren’t particularly interested.
Now, she says, those same friends send her TikToks about the very things she was talking about all those years ago.
“Yeh I know,” she laughs.
The microbiome is one example. Kirsten remembers understanding the relationship between the gut and the immune system long before the concept became mainstream.
But being open minded doesn’t mean believing everything.
In fact, Kirsten thinks scepticism is more important than ever.
“I think science has been manipulated a lot in the last 30 years due to commercial interests and I think we need to be more skeptical than ever.”
So where does she draw the line?
Interestingly, she doesn’t claim to have the answer.
“I don’t know the answer to that. One just has to trust their own judgement of a situation.”
Instead, Kirsten developed what she calls a “maybe shelf”. If something doesn’t quite convince her but interests her enough to warrant further consideration, she doesn’t immediately accept it or reject it. She puts it on the shelf.
Then she waits.
It is perhaps one of the most useful ideas in an age where we are constantly being asked to take sides. Believe this. Reject that. This is true. This is nonsense. Follow this person. Don’t listen to that person.
What if sometimes the most intelligent response is simply: maybe?
Kirsten’s scientific work has given her plenty of reason to value measurable outcomes. Her research was designed to test whether treating multiple pathways simultaneously could achieve better sleep results.
“My research was just straight up science. I wanted to prove that if you treated lots of pathways at once you could achieve wonderful sleep results for people. And I did. Twice.”
The mystical and the measurable don’t seem to be enemies in Kirsten’s world. They are simply different ways of asking questions.
Perhaps that’s why she is so naturally good at connecting people too.
At Revved, Kirsten ended up connecting my sister Rochelle with a shaman, who took us through an incredible visualisation meditation. Kirsten thought she could add another dimension to the event and made the introduction. What happened next wasn’t hers to control.
“I wanted to help,” she says simply. “I thought I could add an extra dimension to her event and I made the introduction but ultimately it was up to her to embrace it – which she did.”
That sentence probably tells me more about Kirsten than any résumé could.
She notices things.
She notices people.
She notices connections.
And then, rather than necessarily needing to be at the centre of them, she opens the door.
There have been plenty of unexpected turns in Kirsten’s own life too. Falling in love and getting married was one of the biggest. She had never wanted to get married before meeting her husband.
She also admits she makes decisions that look completely left field to everyone else.
“I do that all the time.”
But perhaps the more I think about our conversation, the less surprising that becomes. Kirsten isn’t necessarily following a conventional map. She is following a combination of evidence, instinct, curiosity, experience and a willingness to leave some things sitting on the “maybe shelf” until she knows more.
And maybe that is what I recognised in her walking back to my car that night.
It wasn’t that she seemed to have all the answers.
It was that she seemed genuinely comfortable with the questions.
In a world that rewards certainty, Kirsten seems to have built a life around curiosity. She is willing to change her mind when new information arrives. She is willing to investigate what doesn’t make sense. She is willing to take science seriously without pretending it has already explained everything. She is willing to trust intuition without abandoning discernment.
And perhaps, ultimately, that is a pretty interesting way to live.
I thought I would end with a few questions for you to marinate on too.
When was the last time you changed your mind about something you once believed completely?
What is currently sitting on your own “maybe shelf”? Is there something you have dismissed simply because you don’t yet understand it?
What would happen if, instead of rehearsing everything that could go wrong, you spent some time imagining that things could actually go right?
Are you treating sleep as a leftover, or as one of the foundations upon which the rest of your life is built?
And perhaps the biggest question of all: if the person you were twenty years ago met the person you are today, would they recognize you?
Much love
Kim
X
__________________________________
About the Author:
