3 top tips to sleep better from an Insomnia Specialist

Three Top Tips to Sleep Well.

There is a lot of information out there around how to sleep well but the majority are sleep hygiene. Sleep hygiene is information around creating the correct environment to sleep, for example, giving up caffeine, making sure you don’t watch screens too close to bedtime or reducing alcohol intake and although these tips are useful information to maintain decent sleep they are not going to cure your sleep problem.

These top tips are based on techniques from the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia programme we offer at The Insomnia Clinic and are more likely to provide positive change to your current sleep patterns.

1. Don't spend too long in bed. The first thing we do when we can't sleep is start going to bed earlier to try and increase our opportunity for sleeping. Reduce the amount of time you spend in bed, go to bed later and get up earlier, this will encourage your body’s natural sleep drive to kick in. By reducing the time you spend in bed you will crave more sleep, fall asleep faster and find the quality will improve.

2. Stop clock-watching. It very tempting to look at the clock every time we wake up to monitor how little sleep we are getting however, this increases the pressure to fall back to sleep and makes it less likely. Set your alarm for the morning then avoid looking at the time again.

3. Don't lie in bed awake. If you can't get to sleep or have woken up in the middle of night, get out of bed. The longer we lie in bed trying to fall back to sleep the more frustrated we get. This, in turn, means we begin to subconsciously relate bed to feeling stressed and being awake rather than asleep. Leave the bedroom and do something relaxing like read a book downstairs, then when you are tired go back to bed.

Free Mini Sleep Course:
5 minutes for 5 days to improve your sleep.

Join my FREE mini sleep course and learn the tried and tested methods you need to know to improve your sleep.

Using evidence based and NHS recommended techniques, clearly guiding you through simple steps to improve your sleep, it includes everything you would receive in face-to-face sessions with many seeing improvements in just a few days.