Trouble Sleeping?

Self-Care Strategies

Trouble sleeping? Welcome to the club, for many people these days a good night’s sleep is like a raise at work it feels like it only happens once a year. Fortunately, there are a few things we can do to help ourselves to get to sleep quicker and to sleep better.  And, no before you ask this is not a Sealy mattress commercial. What it is though is Sleep Hygiene. Sleep Hygiene is a term used to describe the attempt to control all of the behavioural and environmental factors that influence sleep. One of the first steps to a good night’s sleep is to get your body on your side. We can do this by establishing patterns and sticking to them. First we should have a scheduled bedtime as well as a set time we get up. As we do this over a period of time our bodies recognize the bed time and respond accordingly. Second have a night time routine that leads up to bed time. We all have those little things we do to prepare for bed. Those little things if done in the same order every night leading up to our set bed time can help send signals to our bodies and start triggering our bodies to relax.  Just like smelling fresh bread makes our mouths water, our little bed time routine can indicate to our bodies it is time to sleep.

In addition to the routines it is important to insure that our intakes match what we are doing. Many people enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning to get them going. However, that same cup of coffee that gets you going in the morning will keep you going at night if it is drunk to close to bedtime. Likewise our water intake has to be balanced to insure that we will not be woken up at night to drink or to relieve ourselves. 

OK so now you have your routine, and you are controlling your fluid intake but else can we do? One of the other factors is our sleeping area. One sleep expert describes our ideal sleeping area as a cave; dark, quiet, and cool. So how do we get that? Dark and cool I will leave up to you, with the understanding that light stimulates our bodies and causes us to wake or at least be wakeful. Now the quiet part can be a challenge especially when we have a partner who snores. One solution to this can be to use a white noise machine or even a white noise app on our smartphone. These apps allow us to choose the type of white noise we use to help block out or reduce the noise coming from around us. So whether it is the sound of rain or a hairdryer that blocks those annoying nighttime noises you have options.

If the Sandman has not been regularly stopping at your house these few simple steps can be the sweet treats you need to lure him in, good luck and sleep well!