LONG TERM CHANGES YOU CAN MAKE FOR BETTER REST AT NIGHT
Sleep is good for you. You already know that, right? And you probably don’t need me to tell you that the NHS and the Mental Health Foundation agree. However – sleep can also be elusive. Almost everyone I speak to has had problems at one point or another, and data from 2004 tells us that sleep problems may affect up to a third of the UK population (Groeger et al, 2004). It also has an impact on other areas of your life.
Although we may not sleep less than four decades ago, when we report sleeping less we also tend to associate that lack of sleep with poor performance and quality of life.
Groeger, J.A. et al. (2004).
In 2018, I had a really long phase of terrible sleep. I experienced months of struggling to get to sleep, and then once I finally dropped off, I would wake up throughout the night and lie awake for hours. Eventually, I found what I needed to reset my sleep pattern and finally got back to sleeping 6-7 hours per night without a break. When I talk about this experience, a lot of people are interested in how I turned things around. Here are the results of my experiments!
Two different approaches
Sleeplessness can mean…
- Taking a very long time to fall asleep in the first place
- Waking up in the middle of the night and then being awake for over an hour with no sign of falling back to sleep again, which can lead to a lot of frustration, and tossing and turning
- Both of the above!
A lot of people say, “I don’t have a problem falling asleep. It’s just that I wake up in the early hours, and can’t get back to sleep again.” Whether you struggle to fall asleep, or you wake up during the night, the tools are strategies are the same, and you need to be in it for the long game.
The first thing I learned on the journey back to better sleep is that there are two schools of thought on what you should do in those sleepless moments, whenever they happen – at the beginning of the night, or later on.
Approach #1 – When you can’t sleep, get up
This advice came from a friend who was struggling with sleep at the same time as me, and had invested in a sleep coach. The sleep coach advised giving it 20 minutes to fall asleep once you go to bed, then if you’re still awake and not feeling sleepy after those 20 minutes, get up and do something boring (read a boring book, meditate, etc). Spend around 20 minutes doing that, ideally until you feel sleepy again, go back to bed and try again to fall asleep. Rinse and repeat.
Approach #2 – When you can’t sleep, stay in bed
This advice came from a dear friend of mine, Poora (more on him later). He told it to me straight: Whatever happens, don’t get up! Follow a sleep routine before going to bed, and make sure that you feel sleepy before you get into bed and turn the lights off. But once you’re in bed, stay there. And use some mind tricks to teach your brain that this is actually a really boring time, to encourage it to switch off.
Experimenting with the two approaches
I tried the first approach at first. Over the course of a week, I would get up after twenty minutes, meditate for twenty minutes, then go back to bed and try again for twenty minutes. There was a lot of getting up, and going back to bed, only to lie awake and have to get up again. My husband found it really disruptive, and it really wasn’t much fun for either of us. And one time I fell asleep on the floor while meditating and woke up a couple of hours later, really confused and sore.
Other people have found this approach helpful to them, and I probably didn’t give it enough time to work – so I’d suggest giving it a try.
In the midst of my frustration in trying this approach, I spoke to Poora Singh. Poora is an osteopath that I used to see regularly between 2000 and 2006, when I lived in Birmingham. He is now the osteopath for British Athletics Team GB, The PGA European Tour, and the European Challenge Tour. Not only is he a very knowledgeable osteopath who helped me with some chronic pain, he is also trained in NLP techniques (neuro-linguistic programming) and he helped me to overcome a phobia. Based on this experience, I thought that he might be able to help with my sleep, so I gave him a call. Despite being out of touch for a long time, he picked up on the second ring.
Poora told me that athletes often struggle with their sleep. After working with different athletes over many years, Poora has come up with an approach that he recommends. The keystone of this approach is staying in bed – the second approach I outlined above. He said to me:
I don’t care what you have to do to stay in bed – counting sheep, counting to 1000, whatever it takes – don’t get out of bed.
Poora Singh
That means: Don’t pick up a book to read, or look at your phone or the clock. Avoid doing anything that is interesting or stimulating for your brain. Otherwise, Poora said, you’re getting yourself into a pattern of activity that’s hard to break, and rewarding your brain for being awake when you want to be asleep.
At first, I found that really hard. I was so alert lying in the dark, and it was so boring, and I was so awake. How could this be helping? But I started to use a few different strategies to keep the mental whirl at bay, to prevent total frustration, and to assist my mind and body with falling asleep. What worked best for me was having a task that required some degree of concentration – just counting to 1000 wasn’t quite enough. The task also needed to be repetitive and boring enough that it persuaded my brain that it was better off just falling asleep.
Use these tasks to help bore your brain back to sleep:
- Counting backwards from 1000 – and if you lose your place, start again at 1000
- Trying to keep my eyes open without blinking for as long as possible and saying to myself, “I will not sleep, I will not sleep” (reverse psychology for the win!)
- Counting upwards in sets (1…. 1,2…. 1,2,3…. 1,2,3,4…., 1,2,3,4,5 and on) – and if you lose track, start again at 1
Setting up a sleep routine
Having a consistent, effective sleep routine is key to long term changes. Poora gave me these tips:
- No screens for at least 90 minutes before bed (from e.g. 9pm, 9.30pm)
- Having a drink or snack of something with lipids in it around 30 minutes before bed
- Taking a large dose of magnesium in the evening
One quick trick
If you’re desperate to get back to a good night’s sleep, like I was, you can try a quick trick before you go to bed. Poora recommends it to the athletes he works with. You can read more about that in Getting Cold Feet.
Credits
Groeger, J. A. et al. (2004). Sleep quantity, sleep difficulties and their perceived consequences in a representative sample of some 2000 British adults. J Sleep Res, Vol 13, 359–371.
If you would like to benefit from Poora’s expertise in osteopathy, psychology and motivation, you can find him and his team at the Edgbaston Performance Clinic near Birmingham, UK. This is not an affiliate post.