7 STEPS TO SLEEP HEAVEN

MAKE YOUR BEDROOM AN OASIS OF RESTFUL CALM

Ask a sleep specialist to try to help fix your insomnia and one of the most effective weapons they will reach for is ‘stimulus control’. This is the scientific term to explain how you break the unconscious connection you might have between your bed and the pain and stress of not being able to sleep.

Taking this one step alone is effective enough to clear up many cases of insomnia completely. But it’s not suitable for everyone. Read the box below to find out if it will work for you.

If you’ve been struggling with sleep for many months, even years, you can very easily find your subconscious starting to associate your bedroom with not sleeping.

The connection might not be obvious to you, but there could be sub-conscious reactions bubbling away beneath the surface which raise your body’s stress levels and make good, deep sleep impossible.

The classic scenario is when you limp through the day feeling exhausted, and get home so tired you struggle to overcome the urge to drop off in front of the TV. But the minute you start heading for bed, something shifts.

The chemistry changes, your brain fires up and sleep eludes you.

It’s not your fault. Your subconscious is making connections between getting ready for bed — rituals like putting on pyjamas and brushing your teeth — and the agonies of night after night of poor sleep. Without you realising it, this association can trigger a stress response, making you suddenly alert and no longer sleepy at all.

In some cases, even just thinking about the bedroom can be enough to trigger a negative response.

Interestingly, it does not end there. The more ‘activities’ (reading, watching TV, listening to the radio) you might find yourself doing in the bedroom, in order to ‘help’ you sleep or to compensate for the time spent awake in the night, the more likely it is that those activities will become ‘conditioned stimuli’ which trigger the stress response that keeps you awake.

It is infuriating and completely counterintuitive, but it happens to tens of thousands of patients — and I know how to fix it.

The key is using the CBT-I technique of ‘stimulus control’ to help train your brain to stay calm and quiet at bedtime, to break the stressful link between bedtime and insomnia, and to help you form good, strong, positive connections between your bed and sleep.

Here’s how to go about it:

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THE first rule of stimulus control is to try to wipe out all the negative associations you might have between your bed and being awake, and set up a healthy new ‘conditioned response’ whereby your brain thinks ‘sleep’ whenever you are in bed. To do this, you need to commit to a new rule: from now on, only use the bedroom for sleep or sex (which is good for sleep).

No reading, email-checking or TV-watching in the bedroom. Clear the room of clutter and ensure you aren’t falling foul of any of the very common sleep saboteurs. It won’t take long, but to help your subconscious make strong positive connections between bed and sleep, you have to be very strict about not giving your brain any opportunity to unwittingly link being in bed with being awake.

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THE second rule is no sleeping anywhere else at all but bed. Not on the sofa, in a car or on the train. The rationale for this is to intensify the ‘bed equals sleep’ message.

Being strict with this rule removes the chance of diluting the strength of that association with mixed messages about where you can and cannot sleep.

Anyway, napping disrupts your sleep patterns, so just don’t do it.

You might feel desperately tired, but I promise you, if you don’t nap you really will be better able to sleep at night. You might find this difficult at first, but stimulus control can work swiftly, and your nights will soon be your own.

However, if you do find a daytime snooze absolutely impossible to resist, discuss this with your GP as it could indicate other health problems that are worth investigating.

And be warned, you may feel extra tired for a few days, until your body and brain adjust. In this case, you should be careful about driving when tired, and avoid longdistance driving for a few days.

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THE third rule is this: if you can’t fall asleep or you wake up during the night and you know that you are not going to be able to drift back off, get out of bed and leave the bedroom.

This seems harsh, and it may take some getting used to, but this is the best possible way to generate a whole new positive association between your bed, your bedroom and sleep.

The idea is if you leave the bedroom before the anger, frustration and misery of insomnia can bubble up, and return only when you are calm and ready to fall asleep, your brain will stop making stressful associations that could be keeping you awake.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that resting in bed, even if you are awake, has got to be a healthier nocturnal activity than sitting in the kitchen, but trust me and stick with the plan. I promise it will be worth it.

When you spend great chunks of time lying in bed, you might think you are awake, but sleep studies show many people with insomnia spend this time drifting in and out of sleep.

This is no better than napping, and it weakens your body’s drive to sleep properly and makes nodding off again a tougher challenge. It won’t be easy to get out of a nice, cosy bed in the middle of the night, but it is vital that you give this powerful CBT-I technique a try.

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Befo Re your first night of ‘stimulus control’, spend the evening getting everything ready so you aren’t scrabbling around in the dark. first, find a suitable space you can use during your times awake at night. This will be your ‘wake zone’.

It needs to be warm (but not hot), so have a hot water bottle ready to fill if

your central heating is likely to be off in the night, and have a blanket on hand to throw over your knees — just don’t get too comfy.

If you plan to read , have your book ready, your reading glasses if necessary and a lamp which gives enough light for you to read without having to put all the room lights on (it’s better to keep every. thing calm and quiet)

If you prefer to watch television, set up a dining room chair (the sofa or a

reclining chair will be too comfortable and you may not be able to resist falling asleep), and get a DVD or missed episode of a favourite TV programme lined up ready to watch.

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Each period spent in your ‘wake zone’ should last a set amount of time — either 30 or 45 minutes. Stick it out no matter how sleepy you feel and only return to your bed when your time is up. The idea is to resist the temptation to drift back into slumber when you feel a bit sleepy, but to allow a good, strong sleep impulse to build.

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You should be prepared initially to make repeated trips to your ‘wake zone’ throughout the night. If you stick with the plan, it won’t take long for your brain to adjust and you should soon find the number of trips diminishes as your insomnia recedes.

But if you return to bed after one break and find that sleep is just not going to happen for you, don’t lie there. Get up and go to your ‘wake zone’, and wait it out for another 30 or 45 minutes.

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on a bad night, if you find yourself in your ‘wake zone’ shortly before your morning alarm, it is still important to follow the process to the letter. Stick out your allotted 30 to 45 minutes, then go back to bed and sleep — even if there are just a few minutes left before you need to be getting up.

It may seem cruel, and it is often tempting just to stay up, but you should stick to your guns.

You will have built a very strong urge to sleep, and this creates powerfully positive associations every time you get into bed and fall straight to sleep.