7 Habits for Falling and Staying Asleep
When I work with clients for the first time, one of the first things I look at is how they are sleeping. Sleep is one of the most important factors in our mental health. When we are well-rested, the problems we are facing don’t have as much of an edge as they do when we are exhausted. We can often take a step back, make better decisions, and enjoy life a bit more. Here are some tips to help you fall and stay asleep more consistently.
Only sleep in your bed, and only use your bed for sleep.
It’s easy to pass out on the couch while watching the latest episode of Game of Thrones. It’s also easy to use our beds for things like folding laundry, doing homework, or having fights with our partner. However, our bodies have a hard time shutting down if the place we are falling asleep can also be a place where we need to be alert. By keeping the bed a place that is the place to fall asleep, our brain gets a signal that it’s time to shut down every time we get into bed.
2. Avoid caffeine during the day.
Who doesn’t love caffeine? While caffeine can help us feel more “awake” during the day, it can come with some problems when it comes to our sleep. For one thing, caffeine causes a crash when it leaves our system. This is what causes that 3pm crash when you have had a couple of cups of coffee in the morning. Caffeine has a half-life of about 5 hours. This means that after 5 hours of drinking it, your body will get rid of about half of the caffeine in your system. It also means there is caffeine in your body for about 15 hours after you stop drinking it. Caffeine can make it hard to fall asleep in the first place. It can also make it hard for your body to stay asleep for very long. If you cut caffeine out of your daily routine, or at least limit it at least 10 hours before you want to fall asleep, you might notice a big change in your ability to stay asleep.
2. Avoid screens for 1 hour before you want to fall asleep.
The blue light from a phone or tablet blocks melatonin, the natural sleep hormone, in your body. This makes it hard for your body to begin its “shut down” process, and can mess with your sleep cycle. Some people try to bypass this by using “blue light glasses” or using a “night mode” on their phones at night. While this may lessen the amount of blue light you are getting, screen time is often very stimulating to our nervous systems. Think about how many Tik Toks you can watch in 10 minutes! Our brains need a bit of help remembering to shut down at night, and adding stimulation is not going to help this happen. Try starting with 30 minutes of screen-free time before you want to fall asleep, then increase it in pieces until you can reach a full hour.
3. Add one element of a nighttime ritual.
Anything we can do to help the brain remember it’s time to go to sleep is helpful. Try to think of one thing you can do every night before you go to bed. Maybe it’s brushing your teeth, or washing your face. You might put lotion on your hands and feet, or you may journal a bit about your day. If you already do some of these things, try adding another to your nighttime ritual. You can try the habit stacking technique I mentioned in an earlier blog post to think about ways to link your night time habits together. And, if you don’t use any screens for 30-60 minutes before bed, that gives you a lot of time to do some practices and help your body remember it’s time for bed.
5. Avoid using substances to help you fall asleep.
It is very common for people to try to medicate their way to sleep through alcohol and marijuana use. Both of these are “depressants,” which mean they help your body slow down. However, in the drug and alcohol world, we have a phrase that “what goes up must come down, and what comes down must go up.” When you use a depressant, your body will try really hard to go back to a normal state. This means that the body works really hard to increase your heart rate and blood flow in an attempt to get rid of a substance. It also doesn’t know when to stop at first, so after the alcohol or marijuana wears off, your heart rate and blood flow are higher than normal. This can make it very hard to stay asleep. Many people who use drugs or alcohol at night find they will wake up or have very light sleep cycles. Even though it might be “five o’clock somewhere,” limit your alcohol and weed use in the evening to give your body a chance to stay even before going to sleep.
6. Practice “Containing” your day.
This is an exercise I teach most of my clients. As you are laying in bed, imagine a container that can hold all of the parts of your day. Picture yourself sending the conversations that are running through your head, that homework assignment that’s due, the fight you had with your friend into the container. Practice filing it away, and then picture yourself somewhere where you have no worries as you prepare to fall asleep. All of your deadlines and problems will probably still be there in the morning, but you can set them aside for a bit and let yourself sleep until you are ready to come back to them later.
When I work with clients, I almost always start off by figuring out what their sleep schedule is like. We spend a couple of weeks getting a routine set for them. More often than not, they come back in a couple of weeks saying their problems don’t seem quite as big as they did when they first came in. Sleep is one of the most important parts of taking care of your mental health. I like to think of habits as balancing increases and decreases. What is one thing you can decrease (like alcohol use before bed), and what is one thing you can increase (practice containing your day)? Habits take time to build, but even one change in your sleep habits can make a huge difference in your mental health.
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