If you are reading this blog post you are probably struggling with your sleep in some way.  You may have a hard time falling asleep or waking up for long periods throughout the night or just not being able to shut your mind off.  All of these behaviors can lead to an overall poor quality of sleep and make you very cranky and tired the next day. 

Let’s look at a very common sleeping habit that impacts your ability to fall asleep and that is staying in bed while wide awake.  You may find yourself ‘willing’ yourself to sleep, hoping it will happen if you lay still enough or ‘wait’ long enough.  As the minutes and hours pass in bed, you start to believe that your sleep function is broken and this belief plays a major role in sleep disturbance.  It is important to remember that we don’t go to sleep, sleep comes to us.  So when you find yourself laying in bed awake for more than 20 minutes or when you feel sleep becomes effortful, you need to leave the bedroom and do something else ( for example, light reading, knitting, doing skin care), until you become sleepy. Sleepiness looks like head nodding, eyes closing, and feeling drowsy – do not go to bed until sleepiness finds you.  This is another important point to mention, people will get out of bed when they can’t sleep, but they return too soon only to find themselves wide awake in bed again. 

This brings me to my next sleeping habit that people do that affects their overall quality of sleep which is spending large amounts of time in bed awake.  It’s common for people to watch tv in bed, talk on the phone in bed, eat in bed, or even doing their work or studying in bed.  This is a terrible idea if you are struggling with your sleep.  Inadvertently, you are teaching your brain to associate the bed with wakeful engaging activities.   When it comes to time to go to sleep, and you head to your bed, your brain now associates the bed with being awake.  This is called classical conditioning. In order to retrain your brain, it’s best to only use the bedroom for sleep and sex.

This now brings me to my last sleeping habit, which is not having a wind-down period before bed.  A lot of people will be busy right up until their ‘scheduled sleep time’ and head to bed, lay down and expect to fall asleep – only finding themselves keyed up from the day.   A wind-down routine prepares our mind and body to be open to sleep, and it’s best to have the same routine every night, because you want to link your brain to step down to prepare for sleep and certain consistent environmental factors can help.  For example, listening to the same relaxing music, or giving yourself a massage, or sipping on the same herbal tea in the same mug.  The length of your wind-down period should be an hour for optimal results.  With this being said, it is also important to mention to not engage in vigorous physical activity before bed or eat a large meal.  These are all activating behaviors and will impact the quality and ability to fall asleep.

I hope you found these tips helpful, and I encourage you to think about ways you can improve your behaviours around sleep.  By making some small changes, you may find that your quality of sleep improves.  If you find you are still struggling with your sleep, you may want to consider speaking with your primary care provider or considering seeking a counsellor who has experience and training with sleep difficulties.