Have you heard of the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine?

It promotes healthy habits like regular exercise, balanced eating, stress control, and building strong relationships. By focusing on these areas, people can enhance their overall health and lower the chances of chronic diseases. One of these healthy habits or Pillars is sleep. Most of us at one time or another have struggled with getting good sleep.

Do you have problems falling asleep? Staying asleep? Waking too early?

I’ve just done a training course with Kathryn Pinkham of The Insomnia Clinic. Very useful for me and now hopefully for you too.

Lack of sleep is linked to increased mortality risk, let alone feeling shattered during the day and just not coping as well with life. But DON’T PANIC! It’s normal to have a few poor nights sleep every now and then. We are designed to cope. Don’t get obsessed, that can increase the likelihood of poor sleep as then you start to worry about not getting enough sleep. Have you woken up and then done the Countdown To The Alarm thing? Has that helped you get to sleep? NO, it normally just makes me feel more stressed about lack of sleep. And this can start off a vicious circle of insomnia becoming more awake and alert as you start to worry about how you will feel all day tomorrow, then that makes you more awake and alert as you start to get frustrated or anxious, guess what? That leads to you being more awake and alert! 😫 And so it goes on and your brain learns a new pattern of being awake in the night. Peri menopause got me waking up at 1 am every night and awake until 3 or 4, no good when the alarm goes off at 4.40!

So what can we do?

Increase our Sleep Drive

Our Sleep Drive or ‘Appetite’ for sleep is created by the time out of bed. And we need our body clock to be in a pattern to get good sleep. To increase our sleep drive we need to decrease the time in bed spent awake. So if you wake up for 2 hours every night in the middle of night, go to bed 2 hours later, (or 1 hour later but get up an hour earlier). This may seem like it’s just going to make you feel more tired but it will be making your body and brain more ‘hungry’ for sleep so that when you are in bed, you will be asleep. And not tossing and turning getting frustrated and making you more awake and alert. It’s better to get good quality sleep for 6 hours than poor quality sleep for 8 hours. It’s also important to stick to a routine. Go to bed at the same time and get up at the same time every day. So if you are going to bed 2 hours later to increase your sleep drive, you will need to keep doing that. Slowly increase the time in bed by going to bed 15 mins earlier every week until you are back in a pattern of sleeping and not waking. If you start to wake up again, go back to going to bed a bit later until you find a pattern that works for you.

Are you able to get back to sleep if you wake up?

Waking up to go to the bathroom is perfectly normal and as long as you can get back to sleep it is no problem. However, it is recommended that if you don’t fall back to sleep in 15 mins, just get up and do something in another room. Read, listen to music or a podcast, anything that you enjoy that isn’t work or looking at your phone/laptop. Only go back to bed when you start feeling sleepy again.

Do you feel refreshed during the day?

Yes sleep is key here but so is stress and anxiety. If you are stressed you will also feel exhausted. You can reduce stress and anxiety with exercise. Also you can use a ‘Worry Diary”. During the day keep a diary of everything that you are worried or concerned about. Write it down, on paper with a pen, not on a phone or computer. Start to notice and feel your worries. Face all those worries head on, during the day so your brain has dealt with them and is less likely to keep you awake going over them at night. Also, learn to separate them into ‘real’ and ‘hypothetical’ problems. I’m sure we have all spent sleepless nights worrying about What If scenarios that never actually happen.

Are you anxious about sleep? Do you track it and obsess over the details?

Our sleep cycles through different phases all night taking roughly 90 minutes to go through them. So it’s perfectly normal to move or briefly wake up every 90 minutes as we come out of a deep sleep. Also, we get more deep sleep at the beginning of the night to maximise our opportunity to get enough. Later in the night and towards morning we may not sleep as deep but get more light sleep and REM sleep. This doesn’t mean we haven’t got enough deep sleep, it means we DID get enough.

If you track your sleep for interest and don’t get obsessed with it then that is fine, carry on. But if you are looking at the phases and worrying about how many hours of each cycle you got then this is probably adding to your anxiety around sleep. Guess what? It will lead you to being more awake and alert!

Do you snore or struggle for breath in the night?

If you do, then you may have sleep apnoea. If this is the case, I strongly advise you to talk to your GP about it.

Quality Over Quantity

EVERY TIME. 6 hours of good sleep is better than 8 hours of poor and interrupted sleep. Waking briefly during the light sleep part of the cycle is normal as long as you can get back to sleep. To sleep well we need to be in a pattern. Good luck!