Laying awake at night and feeling every minute slip past as your mind rattles on and on is almost torturous. The day that is coming can start to feel overwhelming and beyond your ability. You just know that your thoughts are going to come from a far away place, if at all. You can come to dread that time when it is time to sleep.
Sleeplessness or insomnia can be stressful and infuriating. It can impact the rest of your life, such as leading to people dropping off from exercise, struggles with thinking and/or emotional outbursts…Just to name a very few potential outcomes!
You can probably name why sleep is important and list how sleeplessness has impacted your life. These are the reasons why sleep hygiene can be an important component to recovery.
Sleep hygiene is a term used to describe the things we can do that promote or disrupt sleep. It is important to practice good sleep hygiene because medications that promote sleep tend to only be effective in the short term1.
The journey back to restful sleep can be long and disheartening. However, it is possible to return to restful sleep. If you are someone who has struggled with sleeplessness for a long time, you will likely have come across these tips before. I struggled with sleeplessness for a lot of my life and had reached a point of resigning myself to regular bouts of insomnia. However, when I honestly tried some of the below (which means I tried it over a period of time), I did experience a shift in my sleep. I now get to sleep faster, have deeper sleep and my sleepless nights have dramatically decreased.
This list is intended help you highlight what you can change that might help improve your sleep quality. It might just be a starting point for you, or it might even lead to the change you have been hoping for!
| Things to try | Why |
|---|---|
| Make sleep your priority | When it is time to sleep, make sure it is more important to you than anything else. That means committing to sleep instead of reading, watching television or researching your life’s passion. |
| Sleep when you are sleepy | Don’t try to sleep when you are not sleepy. On the other hand, don’t try and stay up when you are sleepy. |
| Get out of bed and try again later | If you have been laying awake for about 20 minutes, get out of bed and do something boring or relaxing. You could sit on the couch (in the dark) with a cup of decaf tea, you could read something boring, or listen to something dull. For example, you could listen to Boring Books for Bedtime, Nothing Much Happens or Get Sleepy.2 |
| Have a bedtime routine | A bedtime routine can help signal to your brain that it is time to wind down. This can be simple, as simple as having a warm drink (no caffeine) fifteen minutes before you intend to sleep. |
| Have a sleep time | Set a time that you intend to go to bed at and stick to it. If you are a shift worker, try to have a sleep time for every shift that you are likely to work and use your bedtime routine to help signal to your brain that it is time for rest. |
| Bed is for sleeping (and sex) | We want your brain to associate bed with sleeping. If it builds associations with other activities such as playing games, it might work against you in trying to signal when it is time to sleep. |
| Nap before 3pm and for less than a hour | If you nap during the day, you might leave yourself with more energy at night. If you do need to nap, try and nap before 3pm and set an alarm so that you don’t nap for more than hour. |
| Have a bath or hot shower | Having a hot shower or bath a couple of hours before it’s to sleep can help signal to your mind that it is time to sleep. |
| Ear plugs and eye covers | If you are a light sleeper or a shift worker, ear plugs and/or an eye cover can help with sleep. |
| Things to Avoid | Why |
|---|---|
| Caffeine and nicotine | Avoid these products for at least 4-6 hours before you intend to sleep. Caffeine and nicotine can increase wakefulness because they are stimulants. |
| Alcohol | Alcohol does promote sleepiness, but it leads to light and broken sleep. |
| Clocks | Clock watching can increase anxiety around sleep and anxiety can wake your body up more. |
| Blue or bright light | Electronic devices like phones emit a blue light that can tell your brain it is time to be awake. You can turn on a blue light filter on your devices to help prevent this, restrict device use before bed time, and purchase red lights3 to help prevent waking your mind back up. A practical example for red light use is to have a motion activated red light in your bathroom so that if you do need to get up in the middle of the night, you don’t need to turn on bright lights that can wake you up further. |
| Daytime habits to try | Why |
|---|---|
| Exercise | Exercise during the day can lead to better quality of sleep at night because you should be sleepier. However, avoid strenuous exercise before bed because it can wake you up. |
| Sunlight | Getting sunlight during the day can help with your wake-sleep cycle and prevent needing to nap during the day. |
| Eat well | Eating too lightly can cause you to become hungry in the middle of the night (so you might consider a light sugar and caffeine snack before bed.) |
It can be hard to know if something is working for you or not. I suggest keeping a sleep diary so that you can track any changes and assess if something is or isn’t helping.
Other resources for insomnia:
- This Way Up is a free evidence based app developed by clinicians in Sydney. It includes practical suggestions to assist with insomnia and a sleep diary.
- The Centre for Clinical Interventions has a freely available Sleep Diary. The Centre for Clinical Interventions is a clinical psychology service in Western Australia.
- Humin has a free app that includes a sleep meditation4.
At the start of this post, I described what a sleepless night could look like for me. Another component of recovery from poor sleep is to recognise how my thinking was promoting fear or anger around sleep, and how those emotions were also helping to keep me awake. Your thinking, your beliefs about you and your emotions around sleep are all components that can be helpful to talk about in therapy.
- Insomnia management by Natalie A Grima, Bei Bei and Darren Mansfield from the Australian Journal of General Practice ↩︎
- I am not affiliated with any of these podcasts. ↩︎
- This is sometimes referred to as red light therapy. Red light therapy alone is not likely to lead to better sleep, but it can provide an environment that is more conducive to sleep. ↩︎
- There are many apps that include sleeping meditations. This is the one that I found helpful. I encourage you to explore others! ↩︎