Why You’re Struggling To Sleep
Why You’re Struggling To Sleep
Ever have one of those nights where you just can’t sleep? No matter what you do, nothing seems to help you drift off. Now normally I am world-class at sleeping—if it came to it, I could sleep on a clothesline!
Last night, however, was totally different. I think I saw pretty much every hour and am writing this article today. Well, let’s just say I don’t feel my best!
Fortunately for me, this is a very rare occurrence, but for many people, this is an on-going problem. I can honestly say that I spend more time talking to clients about their sleep then I do about their food and diet. I’ve mentioned before that I am convinced that pretty much everybody knows what to eat and do to change their health and fitness but other ‘things’ get in the way.
9 times out of 10, this ‘thing’ is lack of sleep and feeling just too tired to do anything. We often go to bed when we are “tired and wired” and despite being exhausted, we simply can’t switch our brains off. We often just lie there, slowly getting more and more frustrated.
Of course, this makes things worse! Eventually we get to sleep, only to hear our alarms go off what seems like moments later!
Because we wake up so tired, we tend to unconsciously reach for coffee and sugary cereals to kickstart us. This then leads to a roller coaster of energy highs and lows throughout the day.
So what’s the solution? How can we break the cycle and finally get a good night’s sleep? Well like a lot of things, there is no one cure – these things may be worth a try though (remember, trying once isn’t enough; we need at least 3–4 attempts to see if it is working)
7 Tips To Help Improve Your Sleep
1 – Be strict with technology. Switch off phones and tablets at least 30 minutes before going to bed. The bright light hitting the back of your retina and convincing your brain that it is daytime will shut down the release of the sleep hormone melatonin, meaning your brain isn’t getting the signals to switch off and relax. If you really must use tech before bed, dim the brightness or switch to night mode (Apple’s latest update has this when you swipe up from the home screen). There is also an app called “f.lux” that removes a lot of blue light from your laptop screen, which is well worth looking into.
Melatonin is crucial to getting a good night’s sleep, and using bright light from technology can delay its release by up to 4 hours!
2 – Get off social media and email. Again, it is really good to have a bit of a curfew here to allow your brain to calm down. Whether we like it or not, email and social media updates stimulate our brains—the complete opposite of what we need! See if you can have at least an hour between logging off and going to bed.
3 – Be a big baby! Babies and small children need a regular routine to get settled, and often adults are no different. Try to spend the last hour pampering and winding down—bath, book, bed!
4 – Try melatonin inducing foods. There are some foods that can stimulate melatonin release, including bananas, cherries, and peanut butter.
5 – Avoid caffeine, alcohol and nicotine. Caffeine and nicotine should be obvious things to avoid, as they are clearly stimulants, but many people think alcohol is a good solution. Sadly, it isn’t! Alcohol can suppress our restorative REM phase of sleep as well as disrupt our breathing patterns, meaning that although we may doze off quicker, we get way less quality sleep, meaning we wake up groggy and unable to get going because our body hasn’t fully restored.
Caffeine has a half-life of around 6 hours; this means it takes roughly 6 hours for 50% of the caffeine to leave your system, so if you have 100 mg of caffeine at 9 a.m., there is still 50mg in your body at 3 p.m. and 25mg still there at 9 p.m.
6 – Know your rhythms. The deep REM phase of our sleep comes in roughly 90-minute cycles – so we move between light and deep sleep every hour and a half.
If our alarms go off when we are in deep sleep, we take a lot longer to get going and start the day in survival mode. We then tend to rely on caffeine and stimulants to get us going, which then takes us into our fight, flight, freeze or stress mode.
When we wake up in the light sleep phase, it is much easier to get out of bed. Now, let’s be honest, it is unlikely to be the ‘Disney-esqe’, bounce of the bed singing with birds flying around as your skip to breakfast type wakes up, but it will be a lot easier than dragging your ass out of bed, stumbling to the bathroom, and bouncing off the walls as you go!
So try this… Decide when you want to get up and ‘back track’ 90 minute intervals.
If you want to get up at 6 a.m., your intervals are 4:30, 3 a.m., 1:30, 12 a.m., and 10:30 a.m.So you want to aim to be in bed and asleep at these times.
If you miss the 10:30 one, it can often be more beneficial to stay up until 12:00 to catch the next cycle. So say you go to bed at 11, your ‘intervals’ then become 12:30, 2, 3:30, and 5, and then your alarm goes off at 6 when you are only just out of your deep sleep phase.
7 – Make sure your room is set up for sleeping. Use black-out blinds, de-clutter clothes and ‘things’ and remove TV’s and other technology, and try to make sure your room is set up for one thing, ok, two things, but I can’t help you with the second!
Finally, accept that once your alarm goes off, you are awake and your sleep wave has finished! Hitting the snooze button for another 15 minutes will have very little impact on how you feel and may even make you feel worse.
