Another night has arrived, and your getting prepared for more disappointment. It seems that every night you go through the same struggle; trying to get some sleep, but the very act of trying seems to make it worse. There are a few simple steps that you can take tonight to start changing that cycle of despair. First, we’ll see if you actually have insomnia or not – just by saying that “I can’t sleep” may not be enough. I know that some nights I truly have textbook insomnia and other nights not-so-much. Next, there are a few basic insomnia treatment guidelines that you’ll want to make sure you have nailed before you seek out more help. More often than not, these simple, initial actions can improve your sleep. Lastly, we’ll discuss what to do once you’ve exhausted all the simple stuff – where you need to look to get help for your insomnia.
I Can’t Sleep!
Often, we wake up in the morning and talk about the lousy night’s sleep we just had – in my case sometimes I feel as if I’ve gotten absolutely no sleep at all – maybe a little dreaming if I’m lucky, but the night just seems to linger forever. One of the most important steps to recognize when you’ve had a bad night is the reaction you have to it the next day. Are you more irritable than normal? Do you have a hard time focusing and staying on task? Do you feel sleepy and tired the entire day? If you say yes to any of these, you probably do have clinical insomnia. In my case, I would have a really crappy night but find that I would function just fine the next day – my ability to do most anything wasn’t impaired at all. Mind you it would take an hour or so, and a cup of coffee, to start my day. But from then on in everything was fine. So on days like that I guess you could say that I didn’t suffer from insomnia the previous night. As much as I thought I did.
If your really serious about this stuff, you can take the leap that I did and spend $100 on a Zeo monitor. It tracks your sleep, and when you wake up in the morning you won’t have to guess how much sleep you got, you’ll know. There is a certain psychological benefit to this I’m sure (if you think you had a bad night but the monitor says that you actually got a fair amount of sleep, it’s a real boost to your moral), and they say that after a time, you’ll become a much better predictor of exactly how much sleep you really got.
Insomnia Treatment Guidelines
OK, so you’ve confirmed that you really suffer from this. Now is the time to practice what we call “sleep hygiene”, and see that we’re doing everything at the fundamental level to make sure that it’s all covered. Note that if you ever have to have a professional (doctor or sleep lab) look at you, these will be the very first things they’ll want to cover with you – so it’s in your best interests to have them handled before you go looking for help.
- Is the room dark, cool, quiet and uncluttered? This is really basic, but you have to make sure that your bed is a place of refuge. And to be that it’s got to be dark (light can keep you awake – face your alarm clock towards the wall, and turn down the intensity), cool so you can sleep without getting overheated, quite so noise doesn’t disturb you (or wear earplugs), and uncluttered so it’s a calming place – not a disaster waiting for a good cleaning.
- Make sure that your bed is used for sleep and sex only. You’re trying to retrain your brain into associating bed with sleep and sex and that’s it – no reading and no TV watching.
- No bright lights – like TV’s and computer screens – for at least one hour before bedtime. The longer the better. I’ve gotten into a routine where I’ll leave the TV area about 9pm, and read for 1-2 hours in my office upstairs (not the bedroom).
- Get some exercise during the day. You shouldn’t try to exercise too close to bedtime in the evening – your body tends to heat up too much, and it’s your body’s cooling at nighttime that’s the trigger to sleep. Try and get at least a half hour of some good cardio (walking, biking, running) during the daytime. I’ll try to go for a bike ride, a hike or a walk sometime in the early afternoon. I can tell when I’ve had no exercise – I don’t sleep well that night!
- There are some other nighttime rituals you may want to try – a light, protein rich meal closer to bedtime (warm milk or a bowl of cereal). A bath a few hours before bed (the warmth of the bath counter-intuitively helps the cool-down process), listening to music or binaural/isochronic tones before bed or while you drift off. I do all of this stuff, and am still trying to piece together what’s working and what’s not. At the end of it, though, none of it is harmful, and it may just be beneficial!
Help for your Insomnia
You’ve tried the simple steps above, but you still can’t sleep – and your convinced that you still have insomnia. There are some tools left in the arsenal that you can use that still don’t require going to that sleep lab, but probably the best thing you can do for yourself is to get some knowledge. Go to the library and get a few books on sleep (there are several out there, just go into Amazon.com and read a few reviews of the books before you check them out of the library).
Once you’ve got some knowledge, there are some other techniques you can use to manage this sleep issue. I’m still in the middle of it – I’ve read about ten books and tried some of the more “brute force” methods and have to say that they’re harder to implement, and require more of you to stick with them, but the results can be impressive (I’m especially talking about resetting your body clock and stretching your natural wakefullness – read up about it!).
In the end, as I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, it’s a grand experiment. If your insomnia is cured by using the five easy-to-implement steps above, great! If things get more interesting, you’ll have to find out more about your condition. The great part about all this (as I’ve discovered) is that the only long term solution to the insomnia problem is one that’s completely natural. You won’t need to do anything extraordinary, or involve anyone else (doctors, drugs, labs, etc) to find a cure.
