If you’re accustomed to long, restless nights, bouts of insomnia, or waking up tired you might be in need of sleep training. We generally think about sleep training in terms of training an infant to sleep on a schedule or to comfort himself or herself to sleep. If it works for infants, can we make it work for adults? No matter what your fitness goals might be, regular, high quality sleep is essential for better health. Sleeping seven to nine hours each night cannot be considered a luxury.
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Create the optimum environment for sleep. Eliminating any outside noise is critical to falling and staying asleep. If your bedroom has external noise, using a fan or sound machine can help you create a quieter, more peaceful environment for sleeping. Also essential for creating a sleep-worthy environment is eliminating any outside work or distractions from your bed. If you generally work in bed, read, watch television, or have telephone conversations, your brain may already be associating your bed with activities other than sleep. Your brain is a powerful machine that creates deep and lasting associations; i.e. your office is for working, your kitchen is for eating, and your bedroom is for sleeping. The sooner you begin to break the habit of bringing work or outside distractions into your bedroom, the sooner your brain can begin to associate sleep with your bed.
Be consistent. If you generally try to “catch up on sleep” by sleeping late into the morning on weekends or every chance you get, you might be doing more damage to your sleep patternsthan you realize. Instead, going to bed and waking at the same time each day establishes a routine, much the same way that children maintain regular bedtimes and wake up times on weekdays and weekends. We know the chaos it causes toddlers to be up too late, but we fail to recognize that same chaos in our own lives.
If you can’t sleep, get out of bed. As you begin to practice sleep training, you might still have trouble falling asleep quickly. When you go to bed and can’t fall asleep right away or wake up in the middle of the night unable to return to bed, experts agree that you should get out of bed. Sit in a comfortable chair and listen to soothing music, meditate, or read a book until you feel sleepy enough to return to bed and fall asleep. The sooner you can begin only associating your bed with successful sleep patterns, the sooner you’ll be able to break the cycle of insomnia.
Implementing sleep training in your own life can end your relationship with the snooze button. If you’ve tried improving your quality of sleep, share your results with us in the comment section.
