Why can’t I sleep?
Being sleep deprived can have a huge impact on your mood and day to day functioning. It obviously causes tiredness, but it can also impact concentration, slow thinking, reduced energy, poor memory and lead to low mood, stress and irritability.
Ironically, one of the factors that can cause sleep problems is stress and anxiety. Other causes can include (but are not limited to) having young families, health problems and long term health conditions, changeable routines such as shift work and having bad sleep habits.
What tends to happen when people experience problems with sleep is that changes in lifestyle have caused the brain to become confused about its’ circadian rhythm (our internal clock that follows a 24-hour cycle), the boundaries between sleep time and awake time become blurred and non specific. When we have a problem with sleep, we often need to make a few tweaks to help get our brain back on track to reset its’ internal clock to fit with more regular daylight and night-time patterns.
Top tips to improve your sleep:
Create a routine where you go to bed and wake up at roughly the same time. This is the first step to helping your brain establish a regular sleep/wake cycle.
We also need to create a window of opportunity for the right amount of sleep. So, try to ensure that your bed time and wake up times gives you the opportunity to have around 8 hours of sleep.
Help with the process by creating a good sleep environment, make sure it’s dark and you block out any distracting lights (light tells your brain it’s daytime!), make sure you are comfortable and you’re not too hot. It’s more difficult for us to fall asleep if our core temperature is too high, cooler is better.
Try to limit things that might keep you awake and make your brain think it’s time to be awake like caffeine and things with a bright light like electronic devices.
Turn off half the lights in the house in the hour leading up to bedtime, this helps your brain recognise darkness and associate it with time to sleep.
Make sure your bed is only used for sleep. Your brain can be easily confused if our sleep space is also used as a space where our brain is required to be active i.e. work, study, watching TV, playing video games.
In helping your brain to have a better routine, it’s important not to trip it up by having daytime naps. Sleep should only happen at night (unless you work shifts and if so you might need a few different tweaks so reach out for an assessment and we can discuss this with you).
Hide your clocks. It’s easy to lay in bed and clock watch noticing time slip away while you are still awake. This will just make you feel stressed and less likely to fall asleep.
Finally, if you’ve done all this and you’ve got yourself to bed! Well done!! However, don’t lie awake for too long, if you’re not asleep in 20 minutes, get up! Get out of bed and go do something relaxing (no devices please) and then come back to bed when you’re tired. We want your brain to associate bed with sleepiness, not lying awake feeling stressed about not sleeping.
I hope you find these tips helpful but if you would like more support with your sleep difficulties, please click the link below to get in touch and book an assessment.