My favorite myth about sleep is the idea that we can or should “sleep through the night” without waking up. It’s more helpful to have a flexible attitude about sleep hygiene, so that even as you’re giving your sleep a good chance of success, you’re also living your life (e.g., enjoying an extra cocktail sometimes, staying out late with friends). In fact, sometimes focusing too much on sleep hygiene can backfire for those with insomnia, because doubling down on having “perfect” sleep hygiene increases anxiety about sleep, which makes insomnia worse. Sleep hygiene practices can be good habits for preventing sleep problems, but it’s just like dental hygiene–it’s too little too late once there’s already a cavity (or persistent insomnia). Holding a rigid 8-hours-per-night expectation is not only unrealistic but unhelpful, because when sleep doesn’t meet this expectation, we become frustrated or anxious, which makes it harder to get good sleep.Īnother common myth is that sleep hygiene is the answer to insomnia. How much sleep we need also changes over time, as we get older and take on different challenges. Does this apply equally for Lebron James and couch potatoes? For pregnant women and nursing home residents? How much sleep we need differs between people, depending on our individual genes, lifestyles, and environments. Wu: One popular myth about sleep is that everybody needs to have 8 hours per night, every night. Wilding: What are the biggest myths about sleep or insomnia that we need to be aware of? I want them to know that there absolutely is hope, and that some surprisingly simple (but often counterintuitive) changes to their sleep-wake behaviors can turn their nights (and days) around. I wanted to help people rekindle their relationship with sleep, to approach it as if it’s a friend instead of an engineering problem. Breathe into the feeling of gratitude and feel yourself settling.This is why I wanted to write Hello Sleep. Gratitude is a powerful antidote to stress – when you get back into bed, think of what/who you are grateful for in your life.If you have to go to the bathroom, do so and then get back into bed and allow yourself to rest and breathe deeply into your belly to calm your nervous system. When you wake up, know that it's normal.Follow our guide on natural ways to avoid anxiety. Deal with your problems and worries, as much you can, in your waking hours.Give yourself an hour of tech-free time before bed to calm the nervous system.Keep your bedroom technology-free and definitely don't check emails/ social media or news during this time.It can also cause stress if you know you have to get up soon or have an important day ahead. This actually creates a subconscious habit of waking at the same time every night. If you do wake up, do not check the time.How to prevent ourselves from waking up in the middle of the night TCM also highlights these hours as being a vital time for liver detoxification so, if our diet is laden with stimulants such as refined sugars, caffeine and alcohol, this can overwork the liver causing waking and overheating (typically waking-up feeling restless, hot and maybe even in sweats). Ironically, if we habitually miss out on these vital, rebalancing hours of sleep, we can wake-up feeling more anxious and less happy. The idea of the hours between 2am and 4am being emotionally important is supported by Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which dictates that this period of sleep is about emotional rebalancing and dealing with fear, anger and frustration. It's as if our problems and worries pop-up when we are being quiet and still enough to deal with them. It's also a time when, if there are unresolved emotional issues and stresses going on in our lives, they'll often surface for a look-in. However, with us relatively safe from danger in modern life, it is now more likely to be because our mind and body may feel as if we've had enough sleep already. Originally, it's likely that cavemen would have woken-up between 2am and 4am to check for danger and it's a habit that is still engrained for some of us. Our sleep engineering dates back to the days of being a hunter-gatherer when our world wasn't as safe as it is today and we had to maintain a degree of vigilance in order to survive. We asked leading sleep therapist and author of Fast Asleep Wide Awake, Dr Nerina Ramlakhan, to shed some light… That being said, we'd still like to learn some practical tips on how to stop waking-up at inconvenient times and, with National Sleep Awareness Week upon us, there's no time like the present. However frustrating, it's actually very normal to wake-up throughout the night and, if we weren't innately programmed for nocturnal awakenings, we'd probably be extinct as a species. Do you ever find yourself regularly waking-up in the middle of the night and manically wondering how to get back to sleep? More specifically between 2am and 4am?
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