Three Strategies for Overcoming Sleep Difficulties

Please see below for three types of strategies that are used to overcome sleep troubles:

Stimulus Control Theory

·      Think about all the things you do in your bed. Do you eat, read, work, go online, speak on the phone to people, read in bed, worry or lie there awake at night not being able to sleep?

·      What that means is when you go to bed your brain associates your bed with a lot of daytime activities or difficulty sleeping. This dilutes the response between ‘see my bed, sleep’.

·      Ideally you should not be on technology in bed. However, if you are going to go on your phone, then make sure you use one side of your bed for ‘daytime activities’ and one side for sleeping. If you have a single bed, do you what prisoners do who have this dilemma; use the ‘top to tail’ method and use one end of bed for sleeping and the other end for day-time activities. This method is called ‘Stimulus Control’.

Sleep Restriction

This technique includes monitoring your baseline of sleep for a week or two. Let’s say you are in bed for 9 hours a night, but only sleep for 6 hours. If you only sleep 6 hours a night, then you would be limited to staying in bed for only 6 hours a night for a week. This can result in a better sleep relatively quickly. Then you can start to extend sleep time by 15-30 minutes.

Sleep Hygiene

This involves strategies designed to improve sleep and insomnia. Examples include not napping in the day, not having caffeine after 3pm and having a bedtime ritual.

If sleep is a problem for you and you’re located near the Sydney CBD, please reach out today.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash