Tips for better sleep…
I suffered from insomnia for almost 15 years. I tried everything I could find to help me sleep and none of it worked. A few things helped a little bit a long the way but nothing resolved the issue until I worked on regulating my nervous system and making friends with my thoughts.
Many people think not sleeping is because of some sort of chemical imbalance, when in fact that is a crazy-low number of the population with this kind of thing going on. In my experience of working with hundreds and hundreds of people with troubles sleeping 75% of the time it’s about the nervous system / thoughts and 25% is about not embracing and regulating the our circadian rhythm.
Here are some things that I’ve seen make a huge difference to sleep quality and quantity
Regulating the nervous system. When we make an effort to regulate our nervous system as often as possible and especially before bed and during the night this helps our body to feel safe and relax enough to sleep. I recommend things like ear-wiggling (you can find out more about this HERE) or getting yourself a Vagus Nerve card deck and picking whatever works for you from that. Different things work for different people.
Relax! I know this sounds dumb, as I know you are trying to relax. But creating as relaxing as an environment as you can is key. Breathe and let go of any tension, shake it off if that works, but let go of as much of the day as you can before trying to sleep.
Regulate your circadian rhythm. We are almost all nature deficient (blog about this HERE) and this has a huge impact on all areas of health and happiness. This means going to bed as close night-fall and getting up for sunrise for instance as this has a huge positive impact on our circadian rhythm. Eating real, local and seasonal food, drinking good quality water, limiting blue light from screens and LED bulbs and getting our feet on the ground all help too. Basically living in a way that is much closer to nature than many of us does help this regulate (and easily too). I’ve a whole blog on how to assist this major clock in the body to work how it’s meant to again HERE.
Always get to bed by 10.00 pm, so that you fall asleep before 11.00 pm as this is when your body gets it’s second wind due to our circadian rhythm (which is our body’s nature cycle) and falling asleep after this time becomes much more difficult.
Deal with underlying stresses and anxieties. If you have things around in your mind then consider things like Tapping/EFT to release these and also break the habit of thinking this way.
Believe you can sleep! I know this sounds a little odd or maybe even obvious, but if you lay there thinking ‘I won’t sleep’ or ‘I can’t sleep again’, then that’s exactly what will happen. However, if you think to yourself ‘at least I’m still resting, which will be benefiting my body’ or ‘I’ll drift off to sleep very soon, then it’s MUCH more likely you will.
Learn not to get stressed about not sleeping. This never helps and only makes the ‘not sleeping’ worse as your mind and then body becomes stressed, tense and anxious and produces the stress hormones associated with this, which are usually produced for the body for the exact opposite of sleep, so will not promote you dropping off any time soon. Try listening to some relaxing music, reading a boring book or the best thing is doing a guided meditation like the Body Scan (you can find hundreds of these on YouTube and other similar sites). If you cannot get off to sleep, or wake in the night then listen to one of these (most people never get to the end of them before they are asleep).
Stimulants. Remove or drastically reduce caffeine (for many people even a coffee in the morning can have an effect with sleep come the evening) and other high spiking foods.
Turn the lights down low in the evening and consider old fashion lightbulbs rather than LED lights (which are blue-lights). This helps the body start to get into sleep mode.
Stop watching TV, using computers and playing on phones and tablets etc at least two hours before you want to be asleep. All these items stimulate the brain and also make it believe it’s still daylight. If you must use them then turn screen brightness down, use a screen diffuser and blue-light blocking glasses.
Drink herbal teas that promote sleep, like lavender, chamomile, valerian or any night-time blend.
Make the bedroom a technology free zone. Each electrical appliance around you emits an electromagnetic field. These fields then interfere with your own electromagnetic field. This then disturbs sleep, mood, hormones and creates a whole host of other health concerns, click here for more info on electromagnetic stress. Remove all the electricals you can; the ones you simply can’t do without switch off fully (not standby) and put them the other side of the bedroom (do not have them next to you whilst sleeping, or trying to sleep).
Consider an earthing blanket or a Magnetico ( HERE) So you are move connected to the earth and less connected to appliances etc.
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