I mentioned in my last post that I was just diagnosed with sleep apnea. Well, that’s not the worst of it. I also have an incredibly hard time falling asleep — it’s not uncommon for me to toss and turn 45 minutes to an hour, or sometimes even longer, before I finally drift off. Because I have problems falling asleep, I get anxious when I try to fall sleep, knowing it won’t be easy. That anxiety keeps me awake even longer, creating a vicious cycle. After meeting with the doctor and nurse practitioner at a sleep disorders clinic, they taught me four major ways to make falling asleep easier.

  1. Try not to take naps. If you do, try to keep them to around 30 or 45 minutes. Any longer and you will make it much more difficult to fall asleep that night.
  2. Use the bed ONLY for sex and sleep. That means no reading or watching TV in bed. The doc said if you toss and turn for a long time at night, you begin to associate the bed with anxiety and frustration. The more you do non-sleep-related activities you do in bed, such as reading or watching your favorite late-night show, the less you associate the bed with sleep. When you try to actually go to sleep, you have a difficult time. Instead, read or watch TV in the living room, and only to go the bedroom right before the lights are actually about to go out.
  3. If you can’t sleep and toss and turn for a while, get out of bed. Surprisingly, the doctors told me the worst thing insomniacs can do is stay in bed when they can’t sleep. Again, it fuels your association of the bed with anxiety and frustration. After you’ve tossed and turned for a while, turn the lights back on, sit on a chair in your bedroom or go back out to the living room. Read or watch TV until you are literally on the verge of falling asleep, even if it takes a long time. Then enter the bedroom and go to bed. This retrains your body and mind to associate the bed with sleepiness and helps you fall asleep with more ease. The docs said even if it means reading on the couch until 2 a.m., it is important to not stay restless in the bed itself. Once you are retrained and it becomes easier to fall asleep, you will be able to go to bed earlier and earlier.
  4. Lastly, as painful as this sounds, you need to wake up on the weekends within an hour of when you wake up on the weekdays. I have to wake up every weekday at 7:20, which is an ungodly hour in my opinion. I am also a night owl by nature, making it hard for me to go to bed early. By the time the weekends roll around, my sleep deficit is so high, I like sleeping in until 11 or 12. I used to do this all the time, but it turns out I was actually screwing myself the next work week. My doctor said pushing your circadian rhythms forward is really easy, but pushing them back is tough. So each weekend it was easy for my body to go to bed later and wake up later, but when the week came and it was time to do both things earlier, my body was extremely slow to shift gears. So lately I have been waking up around 9 or a little after on weekends. As frustrating as it is (even though I should be waking up closer to 8), I know I am in the process of retraining my body. Not only will it be easier for me to wake up earlier during the week, but it will also make falling asleep at night much easier because I will be so tired by bed time. When you have no reason to get up that early, it’s a challenge, but your body will thank you for it. If you’re afraid you’re going to fall back asleep watching TV on the couch, hit the gym or go for a walk outside to pep you up.

After learning these tips and tricks, I realized I have been doing the wrong things for a long time. Last night for the first time I read on the couch for about an hour before going into the bedroom, and I did notice that I fell asleep easier. I will continue to use these methods, and hopefully I will find that even with the apnea issue, I get more restful sleep. If you have sleeping problems, you should strongly consider giving these a try!

Do you have any helpful tricks for sleeping better?