Sleep Well - Part 1

Lately, it seems that there isn’t a day that goes by without seeing a post on my personal Facebook page from one of my friends who has woken up at “daftoclock.com” and “cantsleep.com”.  Being unable to sleep seems to be quite an epidemic at the moment.   The time that most people seem to be waking with regularity is between 3 and 4 o’clock and they struggle to get back to sleep, only to drift off 10 minutes before the alarm goes off.  However, when the alarm does go off, they find it really difficult to wake up and seem to wander around the rest of the day in a trance like state.  Sound familiar?

Let’s look firstly at why it seems to be consistently between 3/4 o’clock. 

The Sleep Cycle

There are 3 phases to our sleep pattern:

1.     Light sleep – this is the sleep you fall into when you first drift off.  Our brainwaves are quick and if you were to be hooked up to an EEG and someone mentioned your name, there would be a sharp spike in your wave pattern.

2.     Slow wave – the brainwaves are much slower and even.  We usually enter this pattern about 20 minutes after falling asleep and stay in it for around 2 hours.  In these two hours our bodies rejuvenate and take the opportunity to repair itself (including our immune systems).  This part of sleep is vital for our health and wellbeing.

3.     REM or Rapid Eye Movement – this is when most of our dreaming occurs and our eyes can be seen to move beneath our eyelids (hence the title).  This sleep pattern leads to improved performance of learned tasks and the subconscious uses this time to organise and file new tasks and patterns learned the previous day.  This is the lightest sleep pattern and if you wake quickly from it, you’ll usually be able to remember your dreams quite clearly.

During the night, for the first few hours, we move between light and slow wave and then move to alternating between light, slow and REM.  When you follow the pattern, it shows that about 3 hours into sleep, we move from our essential 2 hours of slow wave to a short light sleep and then a short REM – it’s at that point that most people seem to wake up instead of going into another light sleep followed by slow wave.  So what causes it?  It can be anything, however, alcohol and stress/anxiety are the usual culprits.

Now, there are two distinct types of waking during sleep (actually there are more if you count clinical diagnosis such as sleep apnoea, but I’m just going to cover the two most common types in these posts): 

1.     Occasional waking – on the odd occasion or for a short period of time you wake up, start worrying/thinking and can’t get back to sleep.  This is usually when you have something particular on your mind that you are worried or anxious about.

2.     Habitual waking – this is when your waking turns into a habit ie you wake at the same time every night for a week or more.  This may have started with occasional waking and subsequently (because you haven’t dealt with it)  it’s turned into a habit and your body/mind thinks that’s what you’re supposed to do – in effect, you’ve trained it to be that way.

The first type has a couple of rather simple solutions, the second (which I’ll discuss tomorrow) takes a little more work to resolve, but it isn’t difficult. 

Occasional Waking

As I described earlier, we usually wake when we are in REM sleep.  What causes us to wake is usually that while our subconscious mind is trying to figure out what happened to us during the previous day and is filing the information in different boxes in our mind (that’s the easiest non technical way of describing it so that everyone understands the way the mind processes information), it will come across something that it can’t categorise (it’s usually something that you’ve been worrying about and haven’t dealt with the previous day) and therefore, it doesn’t know where to file it.  That ‘shock’ (for want of a better word) wakes you up so that your conscious mind can deal with it, so that when you go back to sleep again, your subconscious mind can file it.

It’s quite a different concept if you haven’t thought of it before, but it’s absolutely true.  The solution to it is twofold:

1.     Always keep a notepad and a pen by the side of the bed.  When you wake up with a start in the middle of the night worrying about something, write that thing down immediately.  Then settle back down and you will drift off to sleep again.  By writing the issue(s) down, you are informing your subconscious mind that you have dealt with the problem therefore, it will allow you to fall asleep again.

2.     If you action point 1 but are still awake, then as I’ve said in numerous posts – STOP THINKING ABOUT THE THING YOUR WORRYING ABOUT!  You can choose your thoughts, you don’t have to think anything negative unless you want to.  Choose to think about something that’s positive/that you love eg your children, your house, your possessions, your parents, your next holiday/your last holiday, lying on a sun-drenched beach – whatever works for you.  List as many good things/things that you love in your life/things that make you happy as you possibly can (a bit like counting sheep, but a lot more positive).  By doing that, you shift your thinking away from the negative thoughts you were having, to positive ones.  I know that it sometimes seems harder in the middle of the night (everything feels worse at that dead hour), but you can still do it.  You have control over your thoughts – they don’t have to be negative.

These are two very simple things that you can do to help with your occasional waking.  Tomorrow I’ll give you 3 key steps to solving longer term/habitual waking (including insomnia).  Until then, have a great day and sleep well.

Jo