Good morning my awesome tribe and welcome to my forty-third blog.

Picture the scene:

It’s 2.36 in the morning. I know this because every few minutes I am checking to see how much has passed. I am not sure what woke me. As I woke up, I heard a bird chirping away so I was hoping that it was about 4.30/ 5.00 because then I could actually get up. Sadly, its not. It is too early to get out of bed. So, the thoughts come tumbling through my mind. Thinking. It is a busy day ahead, so I start worrying that I am going to be tired.  So i make yourself think of something else.  I think of my boys and start angsting over the impact that this Covid year will have on them and their future. Then I decide that I may as well look at social media. That starts me thinking on another path, so I put my phone down. Then I realize that my back is chilly, so I pull the duvet over it. Meantime my favourite sleeps on blissfully unaware and I will never wake him up because that is just selfish and mean. So, I go to the loo and come back to bed and really hope that this time I will fall back to sleep. Sometimes I do, sometimes it takes longer and sometimes I don’t. Sound familiar?

I have spoken to countless people, women, and men, who struggle with this thing called sleep. It is a real problem for many people and we really do need to have those 7 to 9 hours of proper sleep.

Sleep is vital for so many reasons.

1. Sleep deprivation disrupts the daily fluctuations in appetite hormones and may increase the level of ghrelin, the hormone that stimulates our appetite and reduces the levels of leptin, the hormone that suppresses our appetite. This may lead to weight gain over a period of time.
2. A solid sleep can help maximize problem-solving skills and enhance memory.
3. A longer night’s sleep has been shown to improve many aspects of athletic and physical performance
4. Sleeping less than 7-8 hours per night is linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke.
5. Studies show a strong link between short sleep duration and Type 2 diabetes.
6. Poor sleep is linked to depression, particularly in those people with a sleeping disorder
7. A great night’s sleep can improve your immune function.
8. Sleep affects your body’s inflammatory responses.
9. Poor sleep may reduce your social skills and may even affect your ability to recognize people’s emotional expressions.

 

There are several reasons which may cause us to struggle to get to sleep. Age, hormonal changes (the dreaded menopause), and stress may keep us awake. Then our mental health, our eating habits, medical conditions that we may have or medications that we may be on. Lack of a regular schedule and sleep-related disorders will also have an impact on our sleep patterns. A myriad of issues and not ones that are easily solved.

Let us look at the physical ways we can help ourselves to get to sleep.

1. Create a room that is suited for sleep.

• Keep the temperature as cool as you can handle, the recommended temperature is 16 degrees Celsius.
• Turn off any lights. The buzzing and blinking of a cell phone or the light from an alarm can alert your brain even when you are asleep, and you will end up waking up for no apparent reason. Try to get an alarm that automatically dims at night.
• Stop any unnecessary sounds, like the tick-tock of a clock.

2. Eat a balanced meal at least two hours before you go to sleep.

Going to sleep on a full tummy may cause heartburn and acid reflux, both of which may make you uncomfortable whilst trying to fall asleep. Eat a combination of quality protein, complex carbs, and a healthy fat.

3. Try some yoga, meditation, or gentle stretching before you fall asleep. This may help calm your mind before you go to sleep.
4. Medications

• Hormone replacement therapy under the guidance of your gynaecologist will supplement your oestrogen level during the dreaded menopause. A by-product is that some people say it assists them in sleeping!
• Low dose anti-depressants under the supervision of your medical practitioner will alter your brain chemicals and may help you sleep.
• Melatonin may help control your sleep and wake cycles and may improve the quality of your sleep.
• CBD oil (cannabis) treats nerves and anxiety, as well as other mood problems as it interacts with serotonin, our happy chemical.
• Many people are on over the counter and prescription sleeping pills which help them enormously.

5. Magnesium is well-known for assisting sleep. I have recently started taking Neolife chelate Cal-Mag (with vitamin D) every night and I have honestly felt the benefits.
6. Dress in light pyjamas and avoid heavy insulating blankets.
7. Use your bedroom for sleeping and relaxing – the body needs to know that when it is in this room it is time for relaxing, sleep and sex! Try to not work in your bedroom – even in Covid times.
8. Establish a bedtime ritual, a warm bath, listening to music, relaxing bedtime routine ritual.
9. Go to bed and get up at the same time every day even on weekends.
10. Limit caffeine intake, especially after 2 pm.
11. Exercise regularly, but not within three hours of bedtime.

These are all well and good, but what about our mind and our brain? I decided to delve a little further and found an awesome talk by Emma McAdam, a family and marriage therapist, the outlines of which are below.

Our brains and bodies are naturally good at sleeping, and this is what they really like to do. This is sadly not happening to many of us as the moment we lie down on our beds, we start thinking about everything that we are worried about. This habit of ours has got in the way of our normal sleep response. Our brains like to make paired associations. A paired association is a process that involves the brain partnering an emotion or reflex with a neutral stimulus or object. So, for me, I feel a surge of contentment((reflex) when I see the sea (stimulus). What happens with this whole sleep story, is that our brain starts pairing worrying with lying on our bed when we go to sleep. So, the stimulus is bedtime and the reflex is worry.

But never fear, the solution is near!

We can retrain our brain into associating our bed with sleeping.

We can retrain our brain to worry, at another time, in another place. You see, we actually need to worry. It serves a function. It helps us problem solve, take care of tasks, and take action. However, unproductive worry and hypothetical worry flood us with stress and anxiety. So, what to do? We need to learn to worry when we are awake during the day. This is not so easy. We live in a culture of distraction, our phones, our iPad, our laptops. We keep ourselves busy all day and we do not allow ourselves to run those background tasks of worrying. In the same way, as a computer needs to do updates, we need to update our minds and the worries that we have.  If we do not resolve the worries when we are awake, they will pop up at night and they trigger our stress response, and this keeps us awake.

If we want to stop worrying when you lay down at night we need to slow down during the day, spend time away from our devices, and let our brain process through those worries during the day.

There is one small change we can make every day. We need to plan a time to Worry on Purpose. Deliberate worry which means intentionally and consistently making time each day to address our worries and to plan. This sends a message to our brain that we are taking care of it, so it does not have to keep reminding us when we are going to sleep.

The Brain is like a nagging mum asking you to do your chores. If you want to stop her from nagging you to do your chores, if you just do them, she will stop asking.

If you want to stop your brain worrying at night, you need to address the worries during the day.

How do we do this?

1. Write down each of your worries at a consistent time, this should take five minutes, perhaps longer at first. After lunch or after dinner. Set a reminder on your phone. Writing down makes worries manageable. Do this consistently for a few weeks. This is not a quick fix.
2. Sort through your list. The brain is amazingly powerful at thinking through possibilities and imagining outcomes, worst-case scenarios, so you need to highlight which worries are actionable. Separate these from the hypothetical ones.
3. Create a plan for actionable worries. Write these down using a verb, set a reminder to take the smallest actionable step tomorrow. Schedule. Choose the next smallest actionable step
4. Accept that some problems cannot be sorted out. Set these aside, wholeheartedly. We cannot do everything at once. Worry is often unresolved issues, that we cannot act on. So, we need to resolve to accept this. Worry comes up when we have not resolved what to do and our brain keeps prompting us to face it and make decisions. Do I need to do something? This is why it is so important to plan time for deliberate worry.
5. Shift your focus. What is your brain going to pay attention to? Shift your perspective to gratitude. Spend a little time remembering the things that are going well, remind yourself of your successes. Have a routine before bedtime, write your wins for the day, practice gratitude before you go to sleep.

 

However, the above will take time and consistency, so If you are in bed worrying right now and need a quick fix for the here and now, get out of bed and do a brain dump. Write all thoughts on paper and then put the paper aside and say to yourself I am going to face this tomorrow. Re-engage your mind with a book or a distraction, progressive muscle relaxation, or body scan.

 

I am so excited about this approach to improving my sleep pattern and I aim to, very soon, be the very one getting the best night’s sleep ever! Every night. Really hope that you will too.

Sweet dreams!

With additional thanks to Rebecca Hulem, Joe Leech and Kimberly Holland.

Tip number forty-two.

Another way of looking at consistency is to be consistent at always getting back on the wagon when you fall off. How cool is this!