Make sleep a priority by setting a ‘go to bed’ alarm to ensure you get an extra 15-30 minutes of sleep, as even small increases can significantly impact your health and performance.
Prioritize detaching from work at the end of the day by engaging with family, friends, or valuable activities, as this disconnection is fundamental for both sleep and recharging your brain.
Actively manage daytime stress, as how you handle stress during the day directly impacts the quality of your sleep at night.
Keep smartphones out of the bedroom, as their presence, whether used for checking the time or engaging with content, disturbs sleep quality and keeps your mind stimulated.
During nighttime awakenings, avoid checking your phone as the light stimulates your brain, inhibits melatonin, activates cortisol, and the cognitive stimulation pushes you further away from sleep.
Facilitate better sleep by managing caffeine intake, ideally stopping by midday, and exposing yourself to 10 minutes of bright natural light around 10 AM to boost wakefulness and synchronize your body clock.
Dedicate time to be mindful, noticing thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations without necessarily believing everything your mind tells you, allowing them to pass as you act as an observer.
For chronic insomniacs, let go of the struggle to eliminate sleeplessness and start living your life with your insomnia, engaging in valued activities to reduce resentment and break the vicious cycle.
Employ a ‘welcome phase’ where you learn to truly welcome your discomfort and insomnia, rather than fighting it, as fighting often perpetuates the problem.
Instead of fighting or trying to get rid of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings during the night, learn to lean into them and observe them, as the struggle to eliminate them paradoxically fuels wakefulness.
Avoid suppressing fearful thoughts about not sleeping, as this signals danger to your amygdala, increasing anxiety and fear, akin to trying to extinguish a fire with petrol.
When struggling to sleep, emulate the ‘sod it, I don’t care anymore’ moment by practicing letting go of the struggle, which often allows sleep to naturally occur.
Work towards unlearning bad sleep habits and relearning your natural ability to sleep without external aids or excessive routines.
For chronic insomnia, avoid the tendency to over-solve the problem by accumulating numerous sleep aids and techniques, as this can create a reliance and undermine your natural ability to sleep.
Gradually reduce reliance on sleep aids and elaborate sleep hygiene rituals, as these can create inflexibility and erode trust in your natural ability to sleep, leading to anxiety when they are unavailable.
Understand that waking briefly every 1.5 to 2 hours is a normal biological process due to sleep cycles, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you have a sleep problem unless your thinking mind kicks in and prevents you from returning to sleep.
Do not strive for or expect eight hours of completely uninterrupted sleep, as this sets an unrealistic bar and misunderstands natural sleep physiology, which includes normal moments of wakefulness.
Improving your sleep can actively treat mental health problems like anxiety and depression, as sleep deprivation can precede their development.
Recognize that chronic insomnia is often perpetuated by worrying about not sleeping, creating a vicious cycle where worry leads to less sleep, which in turn fuels more worry.
Be cautious of sleep medications as they often provide only short-term solutions and can lead to reliance, trapping individuals and failing to solve chronic sleep problems.
Explore mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as non-drug behavioral treatments for chronic insomnia, as they offer a different approach to breaking the psychophysiological vicious cycle.
For chronic insomniacs, recognize that the bedroom or nighttime can become a conditioned stimulus for arousal, causing the heart to pound and mind to race even when feeling sleepy, due to a learned psychological habit.