Last night, I had a pretty hard time getting to sleep.\u00a0 This is not a new phenomenon to me, and I doubt I’m alone.\u00a0 I’ll bet you (yes you) also have trouble getting to sleep sometimes.<\/p>\n
So I thought I would share some of the techniques I use for falling asleep.<\/p>\n
By the by, I’m clearly not a doctor, and this is by no means a definitive sleeping guide – but these tips seem to work for me.<\/p>\n
Here we go.<\/p>\n
I try to avoid consuming caffeine and large amounts of sugar within an hour or so before sleeping.\u00a0 That means tea, chocolate, coffee, cola, sugary cereal, etc.<\/p>\n
That’s just common sense.<\/p>\n
Write down everything that I need to do for the next day.\u00a0 That way, I’ve reassured myself that I’ll deal with those things when I wake up, and I can allow myself to let them go in the mean time.<\/p>\n
Turn my computer off.\u00a0 I actually feel muscles in my body relax when I hear it power down.\u00a0 When my computer is on, I’m alert and thinking.\u00a0 When it’s off, then <\/em>I can sleep.<\/p>\n If I’m lying in bed, and I can’t fall asleep, it makes me tense.\u00a0 Nothing is more frustrating in the night than insomnia, and that frustration usually manifests in me as muscle tension, which keeps me awake.<\/p>\n It’s a vicious cycle.<\/p>\n So, if I’m lying there in bed, all frustrated, I usually ask myself this question:<\/p>\n Is my face all scrunched up?<\/em><\/p>\n I’m surprised at how often the answer is “yes”.\u00a0 And how can I go to sleep with a lemon-sucking face?<\/p>\n If my face is tense, no doubt other muscles in my body are tense.<\/p>\n Here’s a lesson that took me 2 years to fully realize:<\/p>\n The easiest way to relieve muscle tension is through breath.<\/strong><\/p>\n I know, sounds crazy, but it’s true.\u00a0 Here’s how I can prove it to myself:\u00a0 Go into any stretch as far as I can go.\u00a0 Hold it.\u00a0 Now inhale and exhale.\u00a0 I can usually go down quite a bit more by “riding” the exhale.\u00a0 Hmph.<\/p>\n So, anyway, if my face is tense, probably other parts of my body are tense.\u00a0 I try to do a full inventory of these muscles, starting from my toes, up to the top of my head, figuring out what’s tense.\u00a0 If I can’t ease the tension with breath, I give it a good ol’ massage.<\/p>\n I cannot sleep without a clear head.\u00a0 There have been so many times that the only thing keeping me awake was some crazy idea, or a song, or a solution to a problem, etc.<\/p>\n For me, what helps to calm down my overactive brain, is to force myself to only concentrate on one thing.<\/p>\n This is a lot harder than it sounds.\u00a0 It takes practice, and there’s plenty of time for practice if you can’t sleep!<\/p>\n Here’s how I clear my head:\u00a0 I try to picture a black circle on a white background, or a white circle on a black background (some nights, one is easier than the other.\u00a0 Strange…).\u00a0 Then, I just focus my hearing on my breathing, and just focus on breathing in and out.<\/p>\n I try to let myself become absorbed with the act of breathing – trying to find the nuance and uniqueness of every inhale and exhale.<\/p>\n And usually that’ll do it – next thing you know, my alarm clock will be going off, and I’ll be hauling myself out of bed.<\/p>\n Does anybody else have any sleeping tips?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night, I had a pretty hard time getting to sleep.\u00a0 This is not a new phenomenon to me, and I doubt I’m alone.\u00a0 I’ll bet you (yes you) also have trouble getting to sleep sometimes. So I thought I would share some of the techniques I use for falling asleep. By the by, I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[110,6],"tags":[154,155,105,152,156,153],"class_list":["post-306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings","category-personal","tag-focus","tag-muscle","tag-relax","tag-sleeping","tag-tension","tag-tips"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prmTy-4W","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3256,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions\/3256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Tip 4<\/h2>\n
Tip 5<\/h2>\n