The key to getting more sleep is to carefully train your
brain to the 8 hours that you need. If
you are currently getting 5 or 6 – or less – then you need to plan your evening
so that you are asleep 15 minutes earlier than usual.
Think of your evening as your prep for a big presentation
before a live audience. You hone your
speech. You prepare notes on cards or
pages. You check the lighting and the
sound. You breathe deeply to reduce
nervousness. You hit the loo 10 minutes
before show time. Well, it’s the same
thing with sleeping. You need to
prepare.
1)
Make sure that you get at least 20 minutes of
exercise/movement every day. It helps “tune”
your body to better health on all levels of metabolism and circadian rhythm, as
it improves your brain, and especially memory, function.
2)
Make sure that you aren’t eating a heavy dinner
less than 3 hours before bedtime. When I
worked in a corporate job, and stayed late at my desk, I had dinner in the
office fridge, then came home and had a 100 calorie snack before bed. That snack stabilized my blood sugar for
sleep. I still do the 100 calorie snack.
3)
Stop
thinking about business, politics, doing Facebook, or anything else serious or
potentially upsetting (no email!) for at least an hour before bed.
4)
Two hours before sleep time, use Dump the
Garbage or a similar tool from Take Back
Your Lost Heart or 101 Stress
Busters.
5)
Sometime in the evening, HAVE FUN, something
that engrosses you and genuinely brings joy – which passively watching TV doesn’t,
usually. 101 Stress Busters has lots of ideas.
6)
If you feel resistance to sleep time rather than
joy, take a deep breath or five, and see if you can hear the “I don’t want to
go to bed and you can’t make me!” voice.
The more it sounds like a 3-year old, the closer you are to
Reality. This is the part of you that
will keep you awake until it gets some fun – and no amount of substitutes
(alcohol, sweets, TV, you name it) will really satisfy.
7)
Develop an unvarying Go To Bed routine. Unvarying is important. You want your brain to get programmed to wind
down as you go through the routine. I
cover this in the Kick Weight Loss to the Curb class and will cover it in
my newsletter.
8)
If you have a spouse or partner who snores,
insists on watching TV in bed (a VERY bad idea, because it associates the bed
with TV, not sleeping, to his/her brain) or in any other way disrupts your
sleep, sleep somewhere else. If they
want to sleep with you, then they have to SLEEP in the bedroom and do other
things elsewhere. For the last 3 years,
hubby has had to get up at 3:30AM and of course, goes to bed much earlier than
I. So we have slept apart on commute
days and together on non-commute days.
If your partner doesn’t love you enough to put your needs ahead of their
desires, then you do what you need to do to take care of your health and
safeguard your mental acuity.
9)
If you find your sleep disrupted by trips to the
bathroom, stop drinking in the evening.
I can’t drink anything after 4PM myself.
I gathered data for 6 months before I came to the latest I could absorb
fluids before I had night-waking troubles.
For most people it’s 3 hours, not 6, so see what it is for your body.
Our bodies change and shift over time, usually gradually –
elders have more trouble staying asleep because brains get poorer at releasing
enough melatonin, and the over-55 set gets less exercise, for example. If it’s relatively sudden, first check any
changes in medications; have you started or stopped anything? Then think: are you eating differently or
taking/stopping a new supplement?
Check
with your doc or pharmacist (the latter are easier to get time with), to see if
there is a known sleep disruption associated with the chemicals involved. Supplements are less safe than prescribed
drugs in the sense that there is no quality or purity control imposed by a
government agency focused on our safety, but assuming the pills really are what
the label says, the pharmacist can tell you what is known about effects of the
supplement.
And then there are hormones
of menopause and perimenopause (starting anytime after age 43, on average), which
are known to wreck sleep for a while. Absent
any of these known reasons, sudden sleep changes warrant a medical visit.
Kick Dieting to the
Curb: Get and Stay at Your Healthy Weight – Forever!
