Bedtime Rituals

Simply being wound up from your day can make dropping off at night problematic. You lie in bed worrying about a project you're working on or planning what you’ll do the next day. This pattern can set up a vicious cycle, where the fear of not being able to sleep becomes the biggest obstacle. According to a study review in the New England Journal of Medicine, all cases of chronic insomnia have an element of learned anxiety. People who've had problems sleeping in the past can come to fear bedtime, and the resulting arousal of the sympathetic nervous system (the so-called fight or flight response) may prevent sleep, says Derek Loewy, Ph.D., co-director of the insomnia program at the Stanford University Sleep Disorders Clinic.

If this describes you, try to be philosophic. Don't force sleep if it isn’t coming after twenty minutes or so. Get out of bed, read, maybe drink a cup of herbal tea until you feel sleepy enough to try again. And don't worry about lost sleep. According to Loewy, you're better off getting four good hours than tossing and turning for eight. They key is to begin winding down with a regular nighttime ritual before going to bed.

Stop doing any work a couple of hours before going to bed and instead listen to some relaxing music or read a book. Be sure to skip the murder mysteries and thrillers if you find them stimulating. A hot bath may make it easier to fall asleep; it relaxes muscles and the drop in body temperature upon getting out of the tub replicates what happens naturally in the initial stages of sleep. Body temperature also drops a few hours after exercising, which may be one reason that regular workouts improve sleep. (Exercising any less than four hours before bedtime, however, can actually cause insomnia.)

It’s extremely important not to go to bed until you're ready--even if that means staying up way past your normal bedtime. Doing so helps train you to associate your bed with sleep—an association that’s weakened if you do things like bring work into the bedroom or lounge in the sack watching TV. "Anything that's not sleep should be done outside of bed--except sex," says Loewy.

People who live in studio apartments, he says, may want to set up a work area away from--and not facing--the bed. Optimize your bedroom for sleeping. It's best if the room is totally dark, reasonably cool and quiet. Run a small fan or other source of white noise to block out extraneous sounds that may interfere with sleep, and wear an eye mask, if necessary. If you have a clock that's visible in the dark, turn it to face the wall; calculating how many hours to go till morning may only make you anxious and contribute to sleeplessness.

Finally, get up as close to the same time every day as possible. Your body will tell you when you need to go to bed if you can make this a regular habit. Sleeping late on the weekend--even an extra half hour--will disrupt
your body's rhythm and may set you up for a bad case of insomnia on Sunday night.

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