Most of us go through periods when good sleep eludes us. Either we struggle to get to sleep in the first place, or we wake during the night and then clock watch, getting more and more anxious about our precious sleep time slipping away and the thought that the alarm will be going off all too soon.

Sleep is vital for our health. Losing a few hours a night can impair our cognitive ability and mood, making it hard to get even the simplest tasks done. Constant lack of sleep can lead to us feeling depressed, anxious, easily over-emotional and more prone to illness.

Often my clients are having patterns of poor sleep when they come to therapy. They have developed patterns of anxious thoughts or worries that go around and around in their heads, making it difficult to turn off at night.

This is a technique that I teach to people, and that I use myself, to take your brain and body into a sleep state:

1. Allow yourself the correct amount of time you need to sleep and wind down. So, if you need 8 hours of sleep and have to be up at 7am, you need to be starting your wind down routine 9 hours before that.
2. Develop a good wind down routine before going to bed. This includes disengaging from stimulants, screens and phones an hour before sleep, making sure your bedroom is cool and dark and having some quiet time with a book or activity that calms your mind. If you are a light sleeper, consider having some white noise in the bedroom such as a fan running.
3. Empty your bladder before getting in to bed. The need to get up and use the toilet several times in the night can often impair our ability to get back to sleep, especially when we are worried about things.
4. If you have worries, once you are in bed ask yourself “Is this a productive worry, is there anything I can do about it tonight?” If not, then let it go and tell yourself you will deal with it again tomorrow when your mind is clear and rested.
5. Begin the process of releasing tension from your body. Start in your shoulders, clench them tight and hold for a couple of seconds, then let go. Then move to your arms and hands, clench, hold and release. Gradually work your way down your body clenching and releasing to let go of tension. Finally clench and release your face and jaw, which is where we often hold a lot of our tension without realizing it.
6. Move your body into its favourite sleep position.
7. Now you need to find a way to stop your mind from wondering and exhausting you! To do this we use a repetitive, calm and focused thought pattern that we find soothing. Some suggestions for this are:
   1. Imagine watching rain gently falling against a window
   2. Imagine sitting on a beach and watching small waves gently lapping the shore
   3. Imagine sitting in a meadow or forest and listening to the sounds of nature
   4. Imagine you are back in a place in your life where you felt extremely happy and safe and watch the movie of that time playing in your head.
   5. If you like numbers, start at 200 and subtract 7 repeatedly … 193, 186, 179 etc.
   6. Focus on your breathing in a 5-7 pattern: breathe in and count for 5, hold for 2, breathe out for 7, hold for two, and repeat. Keep this gentle breathing and counting going. If you find this length of breathing too strenuous then reduce it slightly to 4 - 6. If you are a yoga practitioner, you can extend the breathing to a 7-11 pattern.
   7. Count sheep! It’s an oldie but it works.

 
All these mental techniques take some minutes to work so don’t give up. You want to find a place you go to in your mind that is comfortable, and that with repeated use quickly signals to your body that you are going to sleep. Once you feel the waves of sleep start to wash over you, allow yourself to give in to them and let go.
 
If you wake in the night you can use the same technique to take yourself back to sleep again. Don’t let yourself be anxious and watch the clock, just let go of your worries, tense and relax and then take your mind back to its focused relaxation place. Do not get up and engage in an activity and keep your phone away from the bedroom. Sleep is a habit which we sometimes need to retrain our mind and body back into.
 
Sweet dreams!

Dr Jules
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If the subject matter in this article resonates with you, then counselling might be a good option to help you to move forward. I offer a free 20-minute consultation so we can explore how I might be able to help you. 

Coping with Sleeplessness and Insomnia
Many of us suffer with periods of poor sleep, where we spend endless hours staring at the alarm clock as we struggle to get to sleep and stay asleep, or we find ourselves waking up much too early and then feeling exhausted throughout the day as our time in bed failed to leave us feeling refreshed. When this pattern repeats, these periods of poor sleep can build up into a cycle of anxiety about sleep in general, and thus we can get into a vicious cycle.

The symptoms I have described can be diagnosed as insomnia when they occur regularly each week for at least a month and cause distress, and they are of concern as they can lead to problems functioning during the day. We all know how short tempered we become when we are tired, and how tough it is to get even the simplest of tasks completed. Some days it can feel like we are wading through treacle when all we really need is some good quality sleep. As a counsellor, I often see that poor sleep is additionally associated with anxiety and depression, and therefore disrupted patterns of sleep can be indicative of other problems in a client’s life.

Our dream patterns are also important, as dreams are in effect a form of stress control where the patterns of stress arousal during the day are worked through in the brain and in a sense ‘deactivated’. In normal sleep, we fall into REM or dream sleep about every 90 minutes, with around 2 hours a night spent dreaming; but if a person is depressed they can have excessive dream sleep, which leads to higher stress arousal and exhaustion. Some anti-depressants reduce our amount of dream-sleep, as does a pattern of the brain naturally starting to wake earlier than normal. It is therefore both the amount and the quality of our sleep that we need to pay attention to.

If you are finding that your sleep patterns have been changing for the worse lately, and your GP has ruled out a physical cause, then here are some tips to help you recondition your mind and body back into a good sleep pattern:

• Allow enough time for the amount of sleep you need, and expect that it will take about 15 minutes on average to fall into the first stages of sleep.
• Make sure your room is dark enough for you to get to sleep and stay asleep
• Don’t drink more than two glasses of alcohol or smoke cigarettes before bed
• Don’t drink caffeinated drinks in the two hours before bedtime
• Avoid screens and TV just before bed, as this stimulates your brain rather than helping it to switch off
• Avoid long naps during the day were you fall into dream sleep or interrupt a healthy sleep pattern.
• If you spend prolonged periods trying and failing to sleep, then start with the expectation of a few hours of good sleep, and build from there, rather than aiming for a full 8 hours straight off. This will reduce your frustration and anxiety that can build up as you get closer to bedtime.
• Make sure that you only use your bed for sex and sleep! By this I mean that you need to condition yourself to associate bed with restful activity, and not as a place where you work, spend a lot of time watching TV, or checking your social media accounts.
• Make sure you have a good amount of physical activity during the day so that your body is physically tired. This is particularly important if you have a job where you spend large amounts of the day indoors, sitting or staring at a screen.
• Establish a good wind-down routine before bed, which might include a warm bath, reading and doing some relaxation or meditation.
• Invest in making your bed a place where you feel happy and relaxed. If we spend half our lives in bed, then it’s worth having that be a warm, quiet and comfortable place that you look forward to visiting each day.
• Find a comforting place to go in your mind as you lie in bed preparing to sleep, and don’t allow your thoughts to race all over the place trying to solve your problems, or replay moments of the day that caused you to become upset or excited.
• If you do find yourself waking up for more than half an hour, then don’t just lie in bed getting anxious about not sleeping, get up and do something very low-key and non-stimulating. Don’t put the TV on, check your emails, or make a snack, just sit in a quiet room and read or listen to calming music until you start to feel sleepy again.
• And finally, if you have a lot of stress in your life then your lack of sleep may be a symptom of that, so consider talking to a counsellor about your concerns. Seek help rather than allowing the problems to build up and feel unmanageable.

Sleep is a necessity for human functioning, and good sleep is a pleasure, so don’t allow yourself to be deprived from it for prolonged periods.

Dr Jules

If the subject matter in this article resonates with you, then counselling might be a good option to help you to move forward. I offer a free 20-minute consultation so we can explore how I might be able to help you.