Have you ever struggled with insomnia?

Insomnia has become a modern day issue.

We all need sleep as without it we would die. How much sleep we need is dependent on the person but the average is between 6-10 hours. A good way to test if you have had enough sleep is how you feel upon waking. If you feel refreshed and alert then you have had enough sleep!. In a culture that seems to have being busy as a badge of achievement it is easy to become over stimulated and not put in the required time for self care.

Insomnia is an ever increasing problem and at the root of it is often stress- an ongoing feeling of overwhelm due to emotional needs not being met and  this subsequently leads to sleep disturbances. There are also occasions though where capturing a healthy sleep response has just been de-conditioned through unhealthy sleep habits.

 When you sleep, your immune system does its major repair work. Your body’s cells regenerate, rejuvenate, detoxify. Just one or two nights of poor sleep can make us feel fatigued, irritable, emotional, and unable to concentrate.

Sleep is an activity

Until 1950 we believed that sleep was a passive part of our daily lives, but we now know that during sleep our brains are very active. In a typical night, we travel through stages 1, 2, 3, and 4, which is the deep restorative, with dream sleep, called REM, interspersed throughout. For a physically and mentally healthy adult, REM accounts for around 25% of sleep.

During sleep, your brain gathers and extracts meaning from the day’s events, thereby fostering insights into the working of your life. Part of your brain during sleep is busy enhancing & integrating new memories.

Allow downtime” in the evening: relaxing in the evening is challenging for many of us as life can be stressful and demanding, so when bedtime comes, we can still be alert and restless.

Create a sleep ritual, a bedtime routine which means no work or stressful activities for ideally 1-2 hours before going to sleep. 

·      Take a warm bath or shower before bed and add a couple of drops of lavender to aid sleep onset.

•  Epsom salt bath relax your muscles and calm your mind.

The relative cooling and the temperature-drop from getting out of the bath will make us feel sleepy. You can use aromatherpy  and essential oils either as scents in the room or on your body. The key is to find something that makes you feel relaxed, then repeat it each night to help you release the tension of the day.

Stop “trying” to fall asleep – invite sleep.

We need to learn to be attuned to our body, otherwise we can lose the capacity to interpret its signals. We often try to force sleep or expect it to come when we want it to, but we fall asleep, we can’t force it! Sleep is not something we can try to do; all we can do is create the conditions to invite sleep. Just as our body will signal when it’s hungry, it will tell us when it is ready to sleep. Unfortunately we lose touch with this innate signal because we unknowingly interfere with sleep by trying to force it.

It can be helpful to remove any pressure as the more you need to go to sleep…the more awake you may feel. You may think: “ If necessary, stay awake but relax deeply.

Keep the temperature in your bedroom around 60 – 68 degrees F. Many people keep their homes and particularly their bedrooms too warm. Keeping your room cooler or hotter can lead to restless sleep. When you sleep, your body’s internal temperature drops to its lowest level, generally about four hours after you fall asleep. Scientists believe a cooler bedroom may therefore be most conducive to sleep, since it mimics your body’s natural temperature drop.

Establish a positive association with your bedroom: our brain is great at making associations so if you often watch TV, eat, or work while in bed, you may find it harder to relax and drift off to sleep as you associate your bed with “ doing” rather than “sleeping”, so use the bed only for sleep and if necessary, change your bedroom around, put the bed in a different position and so on.

•  Bedtime teas:  calming teas with chamomile flower, valerian root, lavender flowers, lemon balm and lemongrass, have sedative effects, improve the speed at which you fall asleep and overall quality of sleep. Try Celestial Seasonings Sleep-time Tea, which is also soothing to the tummy; Yogi Tea “Bedtime”, Clipper Sleep Easy Infusion, made with organic ingredients, Pukka Night Time.

•  L-Theanine, an amino acid derived from green and black tea leaves, is very effective in reducing mental and physical stress, raising concentration and focus on mental tasks.

A behavioural technique that can help retrain the the habit of sleep is to set a time to sleep depending on when you usually get tired. For example my bedtime alarm is set for 9-30pm which means I have an hour to wind down before bed – then I have an alarm set for 6-30am each morning .

While you are retraining yourself these times must remain the same even at weekends.
If you go to bed and you are not asleep within 1/2 hour then get up and do something boring like cleaning, polishing, ironing, reading a book standing up, whatever nods to a tedious task for you, then as soon as you are tired go back to bed. If after 1/2 an hour you still aren’t asleep get up and do the same thing.

Keep doing this until you sleep through until the morning. This helps to create an association of your bed being a place to sleep rather than be awake and trains the brain by associating a tedious task with being awake. This behavioural technique usually takes approximately two weeks to recondition and capture the correct sleep response. You cannot fall asleep at any other time of the day while retraining either!