How To Sleep Better

Tips for getting a good nights sleep

I have had trouble sleep for most of my adult life.  Sometimes I will go a few months and not have too much trouble, but sooner or later something always seems to start interfering.

Of course I always try to do the basics:

 

• Wake up at the same time  - Even on weekends.
• Go to sleep at the same time
• Keep your bedroom dark
• Watch how much caffeine you drink before going to sleep
• Create a bedtime ritual – and don’t break it
• Avoid loud alarm clocks
• Control the room temperature -  don’t let it get too hot

So I have done all these and I still have trouble sleeping.

The Clock

 

This last week I have made a couple changes and I was surprised how much of a change they made.  When I sleep I keep the room completely dark, and so I can’t see my clock.  But I was used to checking the time when I would wake up at night, so I bought a clock and projects a small red image on the ceiling.  Not enough light to disturb my sleep, but easy to see when I want to know what time it is.  I thought this was helping me by keeping track of how many hours I slept, and how many more hours I had left to sleep.

I have been doing this for so long I can’t even remember when I started. But I read something about watching the time being stressful, and I have experienced that.  I will sit and watch the clock for a couple hours thinking I need to get at least a couple more hours sleep before it’s time to get up.  Well last week I got rid of my clock, and it only took me a couple days to get used to not checking the time in the middle of the night.  It was really surprising to me how much less stressful it is not knowing what time it is.  When I wake up in the middle of the night, I just wait until I go back to sleep and I have no idea how long it takes. No clock to watch and keep track of how many minutes I have been awake.

If you have a clock and you check the time your not sleeping at night, try doing without it for a week and see if it works as well for you as it has for me.

The Computer Problem

 

The other problem started when a friend loaned me a smart  phone, this phone has the internet on it and I can always find something on the internet that looks interesting to me:

• Email
• Current news
• New scientific studies
• My favorite tabloid websites
• Local newspaper website
• World stock markets

These are just a few of the things that interest me and I can spend hours and hours checking up on them. Now with the new internet connection on my nightstand, when I can’t sleep I reach over and jump on the internet and off I go. Originally I thought that this was a good thing because for a couple days it seemed to take my mind off things and I thought it was helping me to get back to sleep sooner than if I just laid there thinking about things.

After a couple of weeks, it became clear that I was sleeping less and less, and instead of something that would help me take my mind off things, and let me get back to sleep sooner.  It was obvious that I was now waking up just so I could use the internet, and I was starting to think of more things I could look up in the middle of the night. Now I have all the old stuff going through my mind plus all the new things I could be checking on…

• Did they catch Quadaffi?
• Did that space sattelite crash back to earth yet?
• if it did, did it kill anyone when it landed?
• Is BPA really bad for you?

I have known for a while that it was causing problems with my sleep, I just didn’t want to admit it.

But I decided when I tried my clock experiment I didn’t want to just start turning on the smart phone to check the time, so I gave it up.

These two changes made a really big difference in how many hours of sleep I get each night.