Hi, I am Preston Walker licensed marriage and family therapist. Today I wanted to talk to you about sleep, specifically how you can get better quality sleep? How can you get to sleep faster? Sleep impacts so much of our mental health, just like a child that doesn’t get enough sleep they are grumpy and may cry more. We’re not the much different as adults if we don’t get much sleep, so let’s go over the do’s and don’ts of getting to sleep.

DO’s of Sleep

1) Do go to sleep at the same time each night and get up from bed in the morning at the same time, this is super important to having a regular schedule that your body can get accustomed to.
2) Get regular exercise but not right before you go to sleep, that wouldn’t help you wind down. You want to get exposure to outdoor lights if possible.
3) Keep the temperature in your room comfortable, you want it to be quiet, and dark enough. There may be situations, such as a child wanting a night light and that’s fine.
4) Use your bed primarily for sleeping, for example if you are a student and you use your bed to study you might get in the habit of coming home to climb in bed and want to fall asleep, but your brain associates the bed with time to study.
5) You want a bedtime and morning routine something that helps you slow down, wind down, and lets your body know okay it’s time to relax, and when you wake up its time to get going. If you’re having a hard time, you can use things like white noise, pink noise, brown noise, or some sort of sensory input that can help with wandering thoughts and be grounding and pull you into the moment.
6) You also can use relaxation exercises before you go to sleep, these are very helpful. If you have wandering thoughts and if white noise or some other form of sensory input or a fan is not helping you, you can write down your anxieties. Putting them on paper can sometimes help.

Dont’s of Sleep

1)You don’t want to look at a bright light just before you go to sleep, this lets your brain know it’s time to wake up, that’s why alarm clocks come with lights in them, it helps wake up. So, if you’re staring at your phone immediately before you go to sleep it might make it so your sleep is a little shallower.
2) Don’t lay in bed and use your phone or read in bed because this would require using a bright light.
3) You don’t want to exercise right before bed.
4) You don’t want to go to bed hungry.
5) You don’t want to have caffeine right before you go to sleep.
6) Don’t use things like alcohol to help you go to sleep it interrupts your circadian rhythm.
7) Also, oddly enough you don’t want to take daytime naps, these also interrupt your circadian rhythm.
8) You don’t want to force yourself or lie there staring at the clock, that’s not going to help.

If you’re in bed for 20-30 minutes and you’re staring at the ceiling wide awake still and you haven’t been on your phone, get up and try your wind down routine again sort of like a reset button. In addition to the above listed things these other methods can also help, if you are still struggling to fall asleep muscle relaxation can be helpful, as well as therapy. There are meditations you can find online that can help you do visualization which can help get you into that relaxation state and help you fall asleep. Each of these things that I have talked about have research behind them.

Give these a try and see if they work for you, I hope that they help you have a deeper and better quality of sleep. If you wake up in the morning and you don’t remember your dreams that’s not a bad thing, because if you do remember them, it means got the most rest. If you don’t remember your dreams, you likely had a better rem cycle and thus got better sleep. Give these techniques a shot and let me know if it helps.