Many of us have the experience of lying in bed feeling completely washed-out… ready for those chemicals in the brain to wash over us and send us into slumber. However, for too many people, the slumber seems to be far off in some unknown and distant future. So, they lie there. Thinking about nothing in particular. Wondering if this is a good time to start counting sheep.
Spoiler alert: It isn’t.
The ideal timespan to doze-off appears to be around the 10 to 30 minutes mark, depending on which expert you ask. Less than 10 and you could be suffering from a lack of rest, which results in you feeling tired all the time. Later than 30 minutes and the clues of insomnia start to show.
If you are one of those people who find themselves staring into the dark, wondering just when sleep is going to show-up, this one is for you.
Preparing for Bed
It’s worth noting bedtime starts before bedtime.
Starting a regular wind-down routine an hour or two before you intend to hit the sheets can make all the difference.
Dim the lights
I once knew someone who worked in a boarding school. Actually, they ran one of the boarding houses where students around 10-years old lived during term time. They saw a huge difference in how quickly the children wound-down to bedtime depending on the lighting. If the main big lights were left on, the kids were running around being wild and messing around. However, when these were switched off and softer low-lighting employed, the kids responded and became visibly calmer. This made it easier for them to get to sleep when lights-out finally came.
Try this in your home. Put low-level lamps or side-lights on and turn-off the bright main room lights. Your brain will probably notice the difference and encourage you to naturally relax. It will cost you nothing and is worth a try isn’t it?
Get off screens
Get off digital media, especially social media, around 2-hours before sheets time. This has nothing to do with blue light… that one seems to have been well and truly debunked… it’s due to how it keeps your brain busy. Anything digital and interactive is designed to keep you engaged. This is exactly the opposite of what you need your mind to do.
TVs can be a problem too, but nothing close to interactions designed to have you reply or even take an opinion. Opinions can wait until morning.
Get regular timings
Getting your body used to going to bed at a standard time and waking up again at another standard time will also help you get to sleep on-time, more often. This routing should be stuck to every day of the week, including weekends. Cave men didn’t have weekends off, so your body doesn’t really know what’s happening if the routine isn’t consistent.
Don’t underestimate how much this can help. This is a freebie you can work into your routine before going down the road of medication or paying some ‘expert’ to coach you either personally or via some costly course.
In Bed
All of these will help most people to bring their minds to a place of calm, where the natural processes feel able to do their stuff.
But what if it isn’t enough?
What if you’re still lying their wondering what happens next?
Don’t watch the clock.
It’s completely understandable. You’re lying there for what seems an absolute eternity. It seems like hours since you last checked the time. So, you check again… only to find its 10-minutes later than the last time you checked.
Having clocks, phones, watches anywhere within temptations reach could be enough to ruin any chances you had of nodding off soon.
The sage advice is to leave phones in another room. If you use a phone as a clock, or for apps you need to use at bedtime, maybe for meditation or white noise, they should be old phones that have nothing else on them except the stuff you REALLY need to help in your sleep endeavours.
Personally, I use an old iPhone from when dinosaurs invented Bluetooth. This phone doesn’t have a SIM card and isn’t connected to WiFi. The only things it is good for are telling me the time (which slowly gets earlier than real time as it doesn’t have any signal to correct it) and setting a wake-up alarm. As you would expect from an old phone, it goes dark after a few minutes and if I want to know what time it is then I need to streeeeetch more than an arms length to find the home button on the face of the phone… in the dark. I’ve made it deliberately difficult to check the time.
And it works.
Breathing techniques… a minute or 2 of slowing things down
The mind will follow the body. If you’re body is tense, your mind will try to keep up. Afterall, it thinks something is wrong so it may need to give you some runaway signals any minute now.
Regulating your breathing can help to calm your mind too.
There are many breathing routines but one of the simplest is to breath out for twice as long as you breathe in.
For example, let’s say you choose 3 seconds; the routing would go like this…
Slowly inhale for 3 seconds, hold for 3, breath out for 6 (twice as long as the inhale) and hold for another 3 seconds before repeating the process. That really is it. The better you get at this, the longer you can hold for… and that’s the hardest part.
Why’s the breathing out bit longer? Medical studies have shown breathing out for longer periods can help slow down the heartrate. And slowing down the heart rate can help you slow your mind too.
Try Meditation
Find 10 minutes of quiet time before bed and try meditating. It helps slow down the mind and prepare you for sleep. Now, you can’t watch a YouTube video on mediation while trying to get to sleep but you can watch one during the day to understand the steps you need to take when darkness comes.
There are also some good meditation apps out there too. If using an app on your phone, make sure you don’t need to touch it again after the meditation has stopped. The point here is to get your mind into a relaxed and calm state ready for sleep. Touching your phone or doing anything else at the end of the meditation could break the calm state you have worked hard to achieve.
Don’t Count Sheep.
This reminds me of a clip from a children’s cartoon TV show from the mid-2000s called The Secret Show. As most shows are, this was American but one of the characters was supposed to be German. Named Professor Professor, he once tried to help a child get to sleep by singing a counting sheep lullaby. The first 2 lines were fine but he screamed the last line… to great comedy effect… well, great for kids.
Did it get the child to sleep?... Eh,no.
Anyways, for a completely different reason – but with the same result, counting sheep has been shown, in an Oxford University study, not to work.
Why?
Well, apparently the problem with this scenario is sleep isn’t coming because you can’t get your mind off itself. That is, you’re lying there with lots of thoughts running through your mind.
Now, you may think counting sheep is akin to distracting yourself, but apparently not. What it actually does is give your mind something else to worry about… in that, have you kept counting the sheep?
It’s a strange one as it has probably been passed down for generations (that’s how I got it) but there’s a lot of things previous generations thought and did that we wouldn’t consider good today.
Take a Mental Walk
So, what can I replace counting sheep with?
Well, Dr Allison Harvey of Berkley University suggests taking yourself on a mental walk. This doesn’t involve any work on your behalf (like counting sheep does) as the walk you take is one you already know very well.
Just pick a place you know well and would feel relaxed wandering around. Somewhere like the streets around your home, rather than your office building (as workplaces often create stress), may be a good choice.
To start, close your eyes and start from your home. You may be on your own… or maybe walking your dog. Whatever it is, make sure it is a walk you would feel relaxed doing in real life.
Next go through the preparations in your mind as you would in real time. For instance, if you are walking your dog, notice where you normally leave the lead. What colour is the lead? Do you need to put a collar or harness onto the dog first? Go through the exact steps you would and leave your home to go on your walk, including locking the door behind you… if that’s what you would normally do.
When out on your walk, pay attention to the direction you go and features you would normally see… Is there a home you walk by that is particulary colourful or has perfumed flowers in the garden? Is there an odd-shaped house? Is there an unusual vehicle in the drive. Are you friendly with the people who live there? If so, you may wish to imagine yourself waving to them through the window.
Whatever you choose to imagine, make it as real in your mind as possible.
There are also another few things you can do to give yourself a better chance of falling asleep in good time.
Avoiding caffeine after lunchtime and also avoiding heavy meals within 2-3 hours before bed can help. Some people can even be so sensitive to caffeine that the small amounts in chocolate or green tea can be enough to give them a buzz.
Insomnia?... Get out of bed.
If you are tired, you will eventually fall asleep. However, if you’re sleep difficulties are heading in the insomnia direction, every expert I’ve studied says the same thing… get out of bed.
Being in bed needs to trigger your mind to settle and allow you to sleep. If you connect being in bed with not being able to sleep then you’ve created a link that can only work against you.
So, if this is you, and you’re still staring into the darkness after a half-hour or so, get out of bed and go do something to occupy your mind for a little bit but don’t go getting all excited. Reading seems to be a good one to go for. Maybe you’ll read for a bit and start feeling sleepy again, or maybe you get to the point where you reckon it’s worth another go at trying to snooze. Whatever your reasoning, getting out of bed and giving your mind another chance to start a wind-down routine is much better than staring into darkness.
Try it for a week.
These will work for 90% of people. However, if you are in the 10% it doesn’t work for, please let me know and I’ll dig into more options for you.
All of the above are relevant to both falling asleep and getting back to sleep if you wake-up too soon.
To practice, try doing so during the day. This test-drive may help you to get used to the idea before you actually need it.
Cheers,
Alan