Are you one of those people who has trouble getting to sleep night after night? If so, this may be for any (or all) of the following reasons:
1. Trying to fall asleep
That’s right, trying to fall asleep is one of the biggest reason’s that prevents you from actually falling asleep. This is because, you have conditioned your brain to “not sleep” when you go to bed. Therefore, the easiest way to fall asleep is to re-educate your brain into falling asleep as soon as you lie down.
2. Fear insomnia
Did you know that worrying about not getting enough sleep is about the worst thing you can do at night? So tonight, when you go to bed, if you find yourself asking if you are going to have another bad night’s sleep, just think to yourself "so what?" what’s the worst thing that will happen? By not making a big issue of it, you will find it easier to relax and before you know it, you will be fast asleep.
3. Worrying Your Night Away
You don’t need to suffer from depression to find yourself worrying the night away in bed, whatever the problem that’s keeping you awake, it’s usually a lot less of an issue the next morning. This can then become a regular mental association of starting to worry as soon as you turn the light out. The trick is to replace the bad association with an automatic habit of falling asleep instead.
4. Succumbing to tiredness
A trap that many people fall into is to start taking things easy when they are feeling tired. The problem here is what’s known as the body temperature cycle. During the day, as you expend energy, your body temperature rises and you feel wide awake. Conversely, if you have a healthy sleep cycle, your body temperature will start to drop at night, you will start to yawn and feel sleepy. This doesn’t happen with insomniacs, the temperature doesn’t rise high enough during the day, nor drop enough at night, resulting in fragmented sleep. The answer here is to get exercise during the day to raise the body temperature, then just like a pendulum swinging, it will then drop lower at night enabling a good night’s sleep to be gotten.
5. Spending too much time in bed
A very popular myth is that to maintain a healthy lifestyle, everyone needs 8 hours sleep every night. The fact is, around 20% of people actually, get by very well on 6 hours or less per night. Often, when you have had a poor night’s sleep, you will hit the snooze button in the morning to try to make up the hours. What you are actually doing is messing with your biological clock and putting back your sleep cycle. The next time you go to bed at your usual hour, this will be too early for your body clock, you won’t get off to sleep and you’ll start worrying, the whole cycle will start over again.
Further details on these and other sleep related problems and how to overcome them can be found at : How to Sleep at Night
Andrew Charles is a freelance author of articles relating to natural, non-pharmaceutical remedies and remedies.
