Insomnia

60% of people aged 13 to 64 years old say that they experience a sleep problem every night or almost every night (National Sleep Foundation poll, 2011). There are environmental factors that have been identified through well-being research to improve sleep:

• Don’t drink coffee and eat chocolate before bed
• Don’t use a computer or other electronic equipment before bed
• Turn your cellphone and wifi off overnight. Research is inconclusive as to whether sleep is affected, but it’s a simple precaution to turn them off anyway.  The alarm will still work in flight mode but other reception will stop. I have a timer attached to my router so that it switches it off between midnight and 7am
• Do your night preparation routine slowly to help slow your body down for sleep
• Use blackout curtains on your windows
• Don’t clear your work emails at 3am
• If you’re doing stress before bed, use calm breathing exercises before getting into bed so that you are ready for sleep
• Reading or listening to an audiobook for a while can be a nice way to calm yourself for sleep
• Don’t tell yourself “I didn’t sleep at all last night” because it is almost never true. One of NZ’s leading sleep psychiatrists reported that, out of 10,000 people that he had connected to a sleep monitor overnight, only one did not sleep for three nights, despite most of them thinking that they had not
• We are all designed to wake up every 3-4 hours to roll over, check that we are safe and comfortable and then go back to sleep. Good sleepers are only awake for such a short length of time that they don’t remember it in the morning and claim that they slept right through the night. If you wake, stay calm about it, just check that you’re comfortable and allow yourself to fall straight back to sleep

If these suggestions fix your sleep problems – FANTASTIC!

If these very simple interventions are not enough for you, that’s OK. Come to Empower Therapies for far more strategies and techniques to rewire your neural pathways and remove your blocks to sleeping.