In today’s world of chronic sleep deprivation, the rewards of a good night’s sleep can seem impossible to find. We are no longer like our ancestors, learning to sleep when the sun sets and wake up when it rises.
We have replaced our natural rhythms with artificial ones, generated by the blue light of many screens – televisions, computers, smartphones, gaming devices and more.
To synchronize these sleep rhythms, we need to train our brains to sleep, says clinical psychologist and sleep expert Michael Grandner. He directs the sleep and health research program at the University of Arizona and the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Clinic at Banner-University Medical Center in Tucson.
“Sleep is highly programmable and adaptive to the situation,” said Grander. “So create the situation you want him to adapt to, do it often, and before long your brain will say, ‘Look, this helps me sleep.’”
Here are the top three ways to train your brain to fall asleep.
1. Be disciplined with schedules
Melatonin is a hormone produced by the body to regulate when you get sleepy and when you wake up. As night approaches, melatonin levels increase, making it a key signal to the body that it’s time to sleep. Melatonin production is stopped by light — so levels naturally drop as daylight approaches, preparing you to greet the day.
To function properly, Grandner said, the release of this hormone needs to occur at regular times. So if bedtime and waking time change from day to day or on weekends, your sleep rhythms aren’t predictable and your body doesn’t know how to respond, he explains.
“You have to build a reliable rhythm, much like the drummer telling the band the beat,” Grandner said. “By controlling when you wake up and go to bed, you are setting the pace.”
One way to make this happen is to have a standard time to wake up, even on weekends, vacations, or after a bad night’s sleep.
“We can’t always control when we’re sleepy, but we can control when we wake up, which sets a little timer in the brain that sets our sleep rhythms,” Grandner said.
“The brain likes regularity and predictability,” he added. “Waking up at the same time every day and then adding light and movement as soon as you wake up will set your other rhythms for the day and boost energy and mood.”
2. Don’t lie in bed without sleep
It’s a golden rule of thumb in sleep medicine, backed up by “decades of data,” Grandner said. In fact, he said this tip is so powerful that when used in his sleep clinic, it “might even beat prescription sleep medications.”
“The best sleep tip you can give someone is to get up – don’t go to bed awake, not sleepy,” Grandner said. “Whether it’s early evening or the middle of the night, if you’ve been lying awake for 20 or 30 minutes, get up and restart. Maybe you only need five minutes to sleep, or maybe an hour, but don’t spend that time awake in bed.”
Why is that so important? Because lying in bed awake can form an association in your brain that can lead to chronic insomnia, Grandner explained. Instead of being a resting place where you sleep peacefully, your bed becomes an anxious place where you turn and wake up tired.
“It’s counterintuitive, but spending time in bed awake turns the bed into the dentist’s chair,” he said. “You want bed to be like your favorite restaurant, where you walk in and start to get hungry, even if you’ve eaten recently. You want the bed to do this to sleep.”
Establishing this positive relationship between bed and sleep can be beneficial on nights when your schedule needs to be irregular due to work or travel, Grandner added.
“Let’s say you need to go to bed early,” he said. “Bed now has the power to help overcome your racing mind and allow you to fall asleep.”
3. Change your attitude towards sleep
Many people see sleep as the last thing they need to do on a busy day—and so they put off catching up on chores around the house, school, office, or the latest binge-worthy television series.
That thinking needs to be changed, Grander said.
“Don’t see your sleep as the amount of time you have left in the day,” he advised. “See your sleep as the amount of time you need to prepare for a productive tomorrow.”
It might seem like a small shift in thinking, but it’s important, added Grander.
Most adults need seven to eight hours of sleep to fully rest, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So if a person needed to wake up at 7 am every day, going back eight hours would require sleeping at 11 pm.
“Now you know when you need to stop and get ready for bed, whether you’re tired or not,” said Grander. “The problem is that we don’t stop and we don’t disconnect. And that hurts us and makes the next day more stressful.”
Source: CNN Brasil