How to Manage Insomnia

How often do you lie awake, tossing and turning, feeling frustrated and exhausted, knowing you’re going to be tired again tomorrow and will struggle to function? How desperate are you for a good night’s sleep? You need a good solid routine.

The Problem

Insomnia can emerge for a whole variety of reasons and can be so devastatingly frustrating and impact our lives significantly. When we can’t sleep we can’t function to the best of our ability, we find it more difficult to cope with the daily tasks that face us each day, we struggle with our mental health because we’re unable to manage the complexities of life in healthy way due to the extreme tiredness we are experiencing.

I had a client who had struggled to live on 3 hours of sleep per night for the previous 30 years and who was absolutely desperate for a solution. Within 2 weeks of following a strict routine and implementing a personalised visualisation strategy, she was sleeping for a full 5 hours and was ecstatic, this felt like such a luxury to her! She was able to take the strategies away and build on these, knowing she could continue to promote longer and longer periods of sleep to a level that felt right to her.

Just as we encourage a sleep routine for new-born babies, we sometimes need to reset our own sleep patterns to encourage longer periods of sleep without waking. This can take some time to build but, as with babies, it steadily increases and becomes the norm. As adults we have more options in the night than a baby does and this unfortunately gives us ample ways to destroy our sleeping patterns, and we turn to alternative solutions such as alcohol to help get us off to sleep. We can all agree this is not the healthiest of solutions and it can actually make matters worse.

So, what if we get back to basics? 

The Solution

• Set a time for bed and stick to this – try to make this later than usual to begin with in order to ensure a high level of tiredness. Set an alarm for the morning so you are up early and therefore tired again at the night time.

• 1hr prior to bed time, switch off all electronic visual devices (TV, computer, phone), write down anything that is bothering you on a pad and any plans you have for the next day, put the pad aside for the morning and have a warm shower/bath, put on nightwear, and create a calm atmosphere for yourself away from the bedroom– low lighting, calming music, a book to read, mindfulness, colouring etc.

• Have a warm drink. Try to avoid alcohol.

• Take yourself off to bed and switch off the light/switch to a night light. Try to make the temperature of the room comfortable.

• Get into bed and notice how comfortable it is. Notice the weight and texture of the covers, the softness and comfort of the pillow, the feel of the bed supporting your body, and the warmth and comfort the bedding provides you.

• Notice the silence of the room OR choose calming music to listen to.

• Whilst focusing on the textures around you, begin to focus on your breathing pattern. If you can, have something scented in the room so you can enjoy the scent each time you breathe in. Slow down your breathing whilst noticing how your chest and stomach rise and fall. Feel the air filling and emptying your lungs.

• Notice the muscles in your body relaxing, your head, shoulders, arms, legs, etc, all the while taking deep breaths and feeling the comfort of the bed.

• If your mind keeps wandering, acknowledge any thoughts and then let them go, bring your focus back to your breath, noticing the temperature of the air at your nostrils as many times as you need to. Cold air in, warm air out.

• It is useful here to have a visual aid of somewhere truly relaxing, a beach, the countryside, a holiday destination, etc to focus your mind on. This is discussed in more detail further on.

• If you find you cannot fall asleep and are struggling to relax, get up and go back to the calming environment you came from and take some time doing the relaxing activities you were enjoying earlier.

• When you feel ready to try again, go back to bed and repeat the above.

*The bedroom should only be for sleep (and sex), the brain needs to associate the bed with feeling good/feeling relaxed so take any stress/frustration elsewhere.

• If you wake in the night, simply repeat the above steps, getting up only if you begin to feel frustrated.

• Once a routine is established and you are managing to sleep solidly till morning (or are able to get straight back to sleep if you wake in the night), begin to go to bed 15 minutes earlier each night until you are achieving the amount of sleep you would like.

You can obviously add as many relaxing and calming activities as you like to this routine, your preferences are your own and will be different from everyone else’s. Use your imagination. The aim is to simply relax the mind and body and it doesn’t matter how you go about this as long as it works.

Visualisation

The wonderful thing about visualisation is that you can literally take your mind anywhere you want. Consider for a moment the first thing that pops into your head when I ask “where is your relaxing place?” This could be somewhere you’ve been in the past, it could be a room in your house, it could be a completely imaginary scene created in your head. Now consider these things in depth:

• What can you see around you? What colours can you see?

• What sounds can you hear? Is it silent?

• Are there any aromas for you to consider? Café’s nearby, sea air?

• Is there anything to taste? Does your memory/scene involve food or drink?

• What can you feel? Grass, water, sand? What is the temperature of the breeze on your skin etc.

When we spend time considering all of our senses in our imagination, we can quite easily trick our brains into believing we are currently experiencing these things. And when the brain associates these pleasures with real life experiences and ‘remembers’ how this felt, it immediately takes us back to feeling calm and relaxed, as happy and content as we were when it really took place. Even if your scene is imaginary, it is just as easy to build a new experience that your brain can associate with other experiences it can draw upon from memory.

Now imagine how wonderful it would be to go to sleep each night feeling this way, dreaming of our special place, night after night. The more we practice this, the easier it becomes. The more we put our routines into place, the less we have to think about it. Our brains take over and will help us do this automatically. You’ll soon be wondering why you were struggling in the first place!

If you need support in creating your visualisation image or would like to work through some breathing techniques to enhance your sleep experience, feel free to contact us for personalised sessions to help you build this for your own use.