Can’t Fall Asleep? 3 Tips to Beat Insomnia

There's nothing worse than looking at the clock and seeing that your alarm is about to go off and you've got three hours to go and you feel wide awake. It's so frustrating, I've definitely been there. So in this video, I'm going to share three tips on how you can beat insomnia and fall back to sleep as easily as a baby in a milk coma. My name is Sarah Jeffries, I'm a registered nurse with experience in ER education, sleep therapy. I'm also a mom to three young girls and I've worked shifts for years so I know what it's like to have a messed up sleep schedule. Now, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than a third of Americans get less than the recommended seven hours sleep a night. But it's not just the states. According to the National Institute of Health, up to 30% of the whole world's population also struggles with insomnia. Just so you know, insomnia is defined as consistent difficulty falling asleep and the inability to return to sleep after going to bed. If you've experienced insomnia, you can have a mixture of a few different symptoms. You can have something called nocturnal awakenings. These are categorized as early morning awakenings. So you wake up like the early hours of the morning, like three o'clock, four o'clock. And according to a 2009 study, it's from the Stanford Sleep Epidemiology Research Center, the study found that some people may experience early awakenings without other insomnia symptoms. So you might wake up really early and think, let's just life the way it is, but it's actually a symptom of insomnia. Also, it's a little bit of a myth that it's only about having difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep, where actually it entails a lot more than that. While typically insomnia treatments can include cognitive behavioral therapy and medication, there are a few other daily tips that you can do that's going to have a positive impact. So let's go over them. Tip number one, don't watch the clock on your phone. If you do wake up suddenly, if it feels like the early morning, please resist the temptation to check your phone or look at the clock. As soon as you look at the clock and you see that it's three o'clock and you've set your alarm for six or seven, immediately your stress response is going to go up. The anxiety and the frustration build when you start the clock watch and it becomes a habit. So if you do wake up consistently three, four o'clock in the morning, straight away the habit is to look at your phone. And when that stress takes over, the cortisol levels increase and the body becomes alert. And this process is kind of productive when you're trying to fall back to sleep. So try getting an alarm that isn't attached to your phone or, you know, try turning the clock away from your bed so you're not tempted to glance at it. So I put my phone outside of my bedroom so I wasn't tempted to look at it. Because another point is that the blue light when you look at your phone, that is going in your eyes and it's triggering the release of hormones, which are counterproductive to sleep. Tip number two is get out of bed. Yes, you heard me right. Even at three o'clock in the morning, you're lying awake, you're getting stressed, you can't go back to sleep. So abandon the idea of trying to get back to sleep. And when you do that, when you let the pressure go, you can distract your brain with a mundane task. Trying to reset your brain, keep the lights low is really going to help. When you mentally assign the bed with sleeping, this helps you associate positive sleep thoughts with that bedroom. Leaving the room when agitation sets in, when you can't get back to sleep, can separate the frustration from the bedroom. So try reading a book, knitting, listening to some soft music, but not using your phone. This can distract the brain. And once the drowsiness sets in again, then you can go back to bed. Tip number three, log what works and what doesn't work for you. A bit like if you have IBS and you're trying to keep track of your diet, keeping track of your sleep habits can help. Even, you know, exercise and nutrition routines that seem to help you sleep that day. Keep a log of that. For me, I use AuraRing, which helps me to do all of that. The perfect sleep is like having a puzzle. You need to do all of the right things at all of the right times. It sounds more complicated than it actually is, but I just want to emphasise that you might just be missing one simple step. You might just be missing muscle relaxation or maybe you need to try a weighted blanket. But if you don't keep track of it, you won't find out what's actually working. If you want to know what the perfect temperature is for sleep, click here where I explain what it is.