Melatonin is a hormone which plays an integral role in circadian cycles and the regulation of sleep onset. Studies have proven judicious melatonin dosage is effective in easing jet lag and shift work sleep disruptions, maintaining sleep patterns in children with neuro-developmental disabilities and in older adults with natural melatonin deficiencies.

In addition to sleep regulation, melatonin functions as an antioxidant, preventing cell damage and inflammation through elimination of free radicals. Recent studies have shown that melatonin, by virtue of these free-radical scavenging properties, could even be responsible for reducing neuronal damage in cases of stroke, chemical toxicity, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

With all of this evidence stacked up in its favor, why not head for the pharmacy to stock up on the supplement? Wait!

Possible Side Effects of Using Melatonin Supplements for Sleep

First, it’s important to recognize that your body produces its own melatonin. This endogenous supply is produced primarily by a small gland just above the center of your brain, the pineal gland. Retinal [eyes], epithelial [skin], and intestinal cells also produce melatonin, but not in the form that regulates circadian rhythms. While external melatonin, whether from natural food sources or a supplement, interacts with your brain in the same way as the bodily form, the influx of the hormone can flood your system and offset your natural melatonin production.

When you purchase melatonin as a supplement in the pharmacy, you typically get a dose between 1 and 10mg. This is a dramatically large range which reflects the lack of regulation on production and sales. Melatonin is the only hormone in the United States available for purchase without a prescription. And the United States is one of the only western nations that allows non-prescriptive sales of the hormone. Because melatonin can be obtained through natural food sources, it is designated as a dietary supplement alongside vitamins and minerals. This designation absolves melatonin sales from FDA regulation, meaning that the factory-produced, synthetic hormone makes it to the shelf in doses that are much too large and with incredible variance in purity between brands.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, a melatonin dosage of 1mg to 3mg can increase its blood levels to up to 20 times their normal value. This is problematic because in excess, this hormone can cause grogginess and sleep inertia the following day. Sleep inertia is the physiological condition that persists between sleep and wakefulness, characterized by impaired cognitive, sensory motor acuity and persistent drowsiness. Melatonin production by the pineal gland is a single element in an eloquent symphony of hormonal regulation; cranking up the volume on any one contributor will throw off the balance of the entire ensemble and offset your body’s natural cadence. In most cases of insomnia and delayed sleep onset in adults, there is not enough evidence, particularly for long term intervention, to support supplementation.  It is far safer and more effective to promote the body’s natural ability to produce the hormone on its own.

So How Do You Make Your Body Produce the Right Amount of Melatonin?

In order to synthesize melatonin, your body needs access to all the right ingredients, the main one being tryptophan, an amino acid. You may remember hearing this funny word around Thanksgiving, when turkey is held responsible for the drowsiness after the Thanksgiving meal. And there’s something to this. Turkey, like chicken, eggs, cheese, meat, is rich in tryptophan. In a series of reactions, tryptophan is converted to serotonin, which is then converted to melatonin. But tryptophan isn’t the only ingredient needed to synthesize melatonin. Other key players include vitamin B6 and co-enzyme A, a derivative of biotin and amino acid L-lysine.

Both tryptophan and lysine are essential amino acids, meaning they cannot be synthesized by the body and therefore must be obtained in the diet.  Foods such as nuts, seeds, beans, lentils, poultry, and eggs all contain high levels of tryptophan, lysine, and vitamin B6. You can also use supplements to obtain a balanced mix of these crucial ingredients. Adhering to a healthy diet rich in melatonin precursors will optimize your body’s ability to synthesize melatonin and naturally regulate consistent sleep-wake cycles.

More Reasons to Break the Bad Habits

For as much emphasis as you place on putting healthy fuels into your body, equal care should be given to keeping unhealthy substances out. Caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol suppress melatonin production and will result in disrupted sleep patterns. Additionally, surges in blood sugar cause cortisol levels to spike and melatonin levels to plummet. So if you’re trying to kick a sweet-tooth induced habit, this is one more reason to do so. And if you’re accustomed to grabbing a late-night snack, avoid the sweets and make sure it’s low in carbohydrates. Human physiology is dynamic and resilient. Give your body its best shot at wellness and self-regulation by breaking these habits.

Exercise During the Day, Cut the Lights at Night

In general, exercise will improve the quality of your sleep, but exercising at night can decrease melatonin production and delay or prevent sleep onset. If possible, exercise during the morning [not at the expense of your sleep quantity] or in the afternoon. Adopting a consistent schedule will assist your body in regulating hormonal balance and maintaining circadian rhythms.

The most important way to promote your circadian rhythm and your body’s melatonin producing abilities is through regulation of light exposure. Light, registered as an electrical impulse, passes along a bundle of nerves from the eye to the brain, signaling and synchronizing circadian processes throughout the body. This electrical impulse deactivates the pineal gland, inhibiting melatonin.  However in the absence of light, the pineal gland is able to operate in high gear producing melatonin and promoting sleep onset and maintenance. It is important to establish a regular schedule that involves exposing yourself to bright light every morning and avoiding daylight spectrum and blue light within an hour of bedtime.  This means no TVs, tablets, phones, computers, or bright households lights.  Dim the lights and put away the electronics to set the stage for a sound night’s sleep.

Related » Daytime strategies to help you sleep better

Conclusion

While it is a key element in sleep physiology, it is essential to consider supplemental melatonin dosage with proper discernment.  If you regularly travel internationally, work night shifts, or if you’re over the age of 60 and have difficulty sleeping, with the consultation of your doctor, a melatonin supplement could be an effective alternative to prescription sleep aids. However, before visiting the pharmacy, give your body a chance to produce and regulate an endogenous supply of melatonin by adopting a healthy diet, maintaining a regular schedule, and regulating your exposure to light.

The post How to Improve Melatonin Production Naturally and Sleep Better appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Sleep myth 1: During sleep, your brain rests completely

Most people think of sleep as a passive, dormant part of their daily lives. Wakefulness contains only a single brain wave. To be physically, psychologically, and emotionally at your best, you have to experience five different types of brain waves every night during sleep. That’s how much work your brain does while you are asleep. The sleeping brain regulates endocrine, immune, and hormonal functions essential for healthy living. It is also a critical period for memory consolidation.

Sleep myth 2: Sleeping longer makes you gain weight

The opposite is true. Lack of sleep can stall your weight loss efforts. By adding one extra hour of sleep every night, you can lose up to half kg per week. Sleep deprivation causes leptin levels to decrease and ghrelin levels to increase, leaving you craving for sugars and junk food. That’s how, contrary to popular belief, regular and sound sleep can actually help you lose weight.

Sleep myth 3: You can condition yourself to need less sleep

You may want to believe that but you cannot convince your body of it. You can condition yourself to wake up after just a few hours of sleep, but it does not change your need for adequate sleep. Your sleep requirement is hard-wired! Determine the amount of sleep that will permit you to be energetic and alert all day long. You must condition yourself so that the hours in bed correspond to the sleeping phase of your circadian rhythm and the hours out of bed correspond to the waking phase. Therefore, establish a regular sleep/wake schedule, Monday through Monday, including the weekends.

Sleep myth 4: A boring meeting, warm room, or low dose of alcohol helps you fall asleep

Not true, unless you are sleep deprived. These factors simply unmask the sleepiness that is already in your body. If you are not sleep deprived, you may be restless and fidgety, but not sleepy.

Sleep myth 5: Snoring is not harmful

If left untreated, heavy snoring can lead to a higher risk of high blood pressure [heart attacks and strokes]. Heavy snoring with repetitive pauses in your breathing, followed by a gasping for air, is indicative of sleep apnoea. This life-threatening breathing disorder is commonly treated non-surgically by wearing a mask at night that delivers continuous, positive airway pressure through the nose to keep the airway open. Without the mask, these individuals may stop breathing up to 600 times a night and must wake up for a microsecond each time to resume normal breathing.

Sleep myth 6: Not everyone dreams at night

All of us dream every night, although many do not remember having done so. Most dreams occur during rapid eye movement [REM] sleep that occurs every 90 minutes. If you sleep for eight hours, approximately two hours will be spent dreaming.

Sleep myth 7: The older you get; the lesser sleep you need

As you age, the ability to maintain sleep becomes more difficult. This is due to hardening of the arteries or the result of taking medications for rheumatoid arthritis, hypertension, or type II diabetes that may interfere with sleep. We need almost as much sleep in our senior years as we needed when we were of middle age or younger.

Sleep myth 8: Most people know how sleepy they are

The majority of sleepers overestimate the amount they actually have slept by about 47 minutes.

Sleep myth 9: Raising the volume of your radio, air conditioning or drinking coffee will help you stay awake while driving

None of these “remedies” will help prevent drowsiness or falling asleep at the wheel for a person who is sleep deprived. Drowsiness is a red alert—get off the road and take a 20-minute power nap in a safe area. At best you will have another 30 minutes of driving.

Sleep myth 10: Sleep disorders are mainly due to worry

There are 89 known sleep disorders whose causes range from neurological issues to biochemical imbalance and physiological problems. Examples are sleep apnoea, narcolepsy, restless leg syndrome, nocturnal myoclonus, enuresis, sleepwalking, sleep talking, and REM sleep behaviour.

Sleep myth 11: Most sleep disorders go away without treatment

Sleep disturbances that last for more than three weeks typically require professional treatment, ranging from learning good sleep hygiene practices to medicines and psychotherapy.

Sleep myth 12: Men need more sleep than women

On the contrary, women tend to need more sleep than men, especially during premenstrual, pregnancy, and premenopausal stages. Women sleep lighter than men and are more susceptible to bouts of insomnia.

Sleep myth 13: By playing audiotapes during the night, you can learn while you sleep

If you are asleep you cannot acquire new knowledge. However, sleep enables you to process and retain information learned during wakefulness and recall it better the next day.

Sleep myth 14: If you have insomnia at night, you should make up by sleeping in the day

If you wish to cure your nocturnal insomnia you should never nap during the day.

Sleep myth 15: The best time to exercise is early in the morning when you are most alert

Exercise is good for promoting the quantity and quality of sleep whenever done during the day. However, early morning exercise is only suitable for people who have met their nocturnal sleep requirement. Furthermore, it’s best to avoid heavy aerobic exercise within an hour of bedtime.

Sleep myth 16: Sex at night will arouse you and keep you up, delaying sleep onset

Satisfactory sex might help you to go to sleep fairly quickly. However, concerns about performance and unsatisfactory sex can delay sleep onset and make sleep more fitful.

Sleep myth 17: A sound sleeper rarely moves during the night

Most people move 40 – 60 times during the night although they might be unaware of having done so.

Sleep myth 18: A glass of wine before bed helps you fall asleep

A nightcap might put you to sleep but any alcohol within three hours of bedtime is likely to disrupt ensuing REM sleep. Alcohol in large amounts is a stimulant, not a sedative.

Sleep myth 19: Sleeping in late on the weekends is a good way to catch up on lost sleep

You have one biological clock—not one for the workweek and one for the weekends. You must go to bed and get up at the same time Monday through Monday. To do otherwise would have the same effect of dieting or exercising only on the weekends—it doesn’t work.

Sleep myth 20: It is not normal to awaken several times a night

It is rare that people can sleep uninterrupted for long periods of time. However, if you wake up during the night and cannot get back to sleep within 20 minutes, this is indicative of insomnia. Often such awakenings will last for an entire 90-minute wake period before you will be able to resume sleep.

Sleep myth 21: Cozying up under heavy blankets will make you go to sleep faster

An ideal sleeping room temperature is between 65 – 67 degrees Fahrenheit. Being too warm may lead to awakenings and emotionally laden dreams.

Sleep myth 22: You are a good sleeper if you can fall asleep within five minutes

The well-rested sleeper will take about 20 minutes to fall asleep. Going to sleep as soon as your head hits the pillow is a sure sign of sleep deprivation.

Sleep myth 23: Sleeping pills are absolutely safe if taken in correct dose

Many sleeping medications can be harmful, causing memory loss, daytime grogginess, depression, cancer and even death. Cognitive behaviour therapy for solving sleep problems is a much better long-term treatment for insomnia.

Sleep myth 24: Sleep cannot help you improve your athletic skills

In the last quartile in an 8-hour night, the brain secretes calcium into your motor cortex. This permits well-rehearsed good athletic moves to be consolidated into motor muscle memory, improving athleticism, reaction time, and situational awareness.

The post 24 surprising sleep myths and facts appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

When I don’t eat well, I don’t sleep well. Why is it that we feel so poorly when we don’t get a good night’s sleep? The answer lies in our hormones. Our bodies need to work properly, and the best way to hormonal health is through our food. Whole foods! Foods left in their original form like fruits, vegetables, legumes, seeds and ancient grains. This is because processed food in and of itself can cause stress.

Two faced cortisol

Have you ever been late for a flight at the airport? Many of us have had that harrowing experience rushing into the airport, dashing to the check-in counter, and then eyeing the long line at security. All the while constantly looking at our watch and wondering how we can possibly get to our plane on time. You have to figure out how to get on that plane, and fast. Think of the extra energy your body seems to find. It’s commonly referred to as “fight or flight” mode (pun intended). Where does it come from? It’s a so-called stress hormone called cortisol. It makes us more aware and more alert.  It cranks up energy fast.  It helps us perform at higher levels —important for professional athletes. But there’s a downside—stress is not helpful for sleep.

Let’s look at another example. If I cut my hand, the injured area would turn red, swell, and feel warm. It’s the body’s natural response to heal. Like the airport scenario, cortisol is added to the equation to help regulate my injury. Why is cortisol involved in both situations? Stress! Our bodies will respond with cortisol whether you’re late for a flight, cut yourself or—you guessed it—eat a poor diet. Stress is stress. Our body doesn’t know the difference between one stress and another. Each time, our brain’s natural response is to flood our bodies with cortisol.

High cortisol levels and a good night’s sleep are simply not good bed companions. Constant stress creates abnormally high cortisol levels that can cause us to “burn out” and crash. We have trouble fighting off being sick. It reduces our glucose metabolism during sleep and fails to break down our food into energy. Neither I, as a professional athlete, nor anyone else, can be successful if we don’t recover from our daily activities with proper sleep.  A first step to balance cortisol levels and recover during sleep is to eat well.

High cortisol levels and a good night’s sleep are simply not good bed companions

Let our bodies do the work

After a restful night’s sleep, I wake up feeling rejuvenated and strong.  Why? It’s because I gave my body a chance to repair itself. I allowed Growth Hormone (GH) to do its job. It repairs and strengthens our bodies at night during a phase called “deep sleep”. But getting into “deep sleep” is no piece of cake (yes, another pun). We have trouble getting into a deep sleep if we have eaten sugar.

I have trouble sleeping if I have high stress. To avoid stress, I eat foods low or absent in sugar. Sugar is quick energy, and our bodies have a desire to use it immediately. But the body has something in there called insulin that sucks up sugar.  More sugar means more insulin.  High insulin mean lower GH levels, and when you have low GH levels it can’t do its normal repair work. Lower GH levels mean we typically wake up groggy and tired.  And it’s often a product of unhealthy foods. A tired brain is a sloppy brain. That’s why at night we don’t crave a vegetable. We want a cookie. We want sugar.  Our sleep deprived brain resorts to primitive instincts. It wants energy now! That’s why we instinctively reach for comfort foods that are high in refined sugar and unhealthy fat. Poor food choices can cause a rather unhealthy sleep cycle.

Whole foods to the rescue

First and foremost, eating whole foods isn’t about one or two specific foods. Yes, foods like tart cherry juice and kava tea can help you sleep. But that’s using a band-aid when you need a more significant treatment. In other words, you need to eat whole foods throughout the day. Whole foods will keep you energised all day and naturally encourage sleep as night approaches. Eat whole foods rich in fibre. High fibre foods like Savi seeds or almonds help dull the effect of the sugar we already have in our diet.

Secondly, healthy fats are important. They help keep energy levels up during the day. Shawn Stevenson, the author of Sleep Smarter, compares our metabolic system to a fire. Eating simple carbohydrates is like putting strands of paper on the fire. It will quickly turn bright, but it will then burn out equally fast. It cannot sustain the fire. However, eating healthy fats is like throwing a wooden log into the mix. The fire will burn for a very long time. Healthy fats are also healthy for our immune system. Eat avocados, walnuts, Brazil nuts, pecans, flax and hemp seed, olive and coconut oil. They all make for a healthy immune system that can help us recover quickly during sleep.

Eating healthy fats is like throwing a wooden log into the mix. The fire will burn for a very long time

Thirdly, supplement your healthy fats with protein. There was a study in 2008 where healthy men were fed a high fat/protein diet and a low fat/protein diet. (High fat/protein meant 1% carbs, 61% fat, 38% protein. Low fat/protein meant 72% carbs, 12.5% fat, and 15.5% protein.) The diet with higher fat and protein content increased all stages of deep sleep. The second diet did just the opposite; sleep quality was decreased. The following are great examples of meals with a combination of healthy fats and protein:

• Grains with Legumes – Sample Meal: Lentils and rice
• Nuts with Legumes – Sample Meal: Black bean and cashew salad
• Legumes with Seeds – Sample Meal: Lentil Dal and sunflower seeds
• Grains with Dairy – Sample Meal: Goats cheese and rice pasta

I may be small but I pack a punch

It’s time to start talking about some little guys that can really be game changers in the sleep world: Micronutrients. These little guys are the building blocks of healthy hormones and can give you some serious ZZZs. They include minerals, vitamins, enzymes, trace minerals, and phytonutrients. A former doctor of the United States Navy Seals found that emphasising the importance of micronutrients drastically improved his soldiers’ sleep quality. His name is Kirk Parsley and, as a new doctor to the Seals team, he had many soldiers coming to him complaining of sleep problems. They were taking medications so they could sleep. He began by taking blood samples from his soldiers and found shocking results. Physically, they appeared to be in peak physical condition. But Dr. Parsley said that “metabolically, they looked like crap.” The tests came back with low testosterone, low growth hormones, low insulin sensitivity, and high inflammatory markers. He realised his soldiers were lacking proper micronutrients. In addition to promoting the importance of whole foods, he came up with a drink consisting mainly of vitamin D, magnesium and tryptophan. His nutrition plan worked.  The majority of his soldiers no longer needed sleeping pills.

Final thought

All athletes get the same professional advice about eating and sleeping, and the average person might think they’d adhere to the rigid rules. But rules are meant to be broken, even by athletes who should know better. I know some who spend time in the middle of the night eating pizzas. Some have the occasional extra beer. We, too, struggle with always putting the right foods in our bodies. Eating correctly is constantly changing and a lot depends on what’s right for each individual. However, through my career I’ve learned that a good night’s sleep starts as soon as I get up in the morning. Fuelling my body to aid in sleep shouldn’t be limited to a certain meal or snack. It’s a routine. My advice is don’t get overwhelmed and start drastically changing your diet. Change isn’t overnight. Good nutrition habits take time; even for those whose careers depend on it. Improving sleep patterns through nutrition is not about perfection. It’s about being aware.

The post How poor sleep quality affects your life (and what you can do about it) appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

When it began for me, I can’t remember. What I do remember is the following scene, played at various times throughout my youth:

“But I can’t sleep!” I’d protest as my parents tried to wrestle me into bed at what they called a decent hour, meaning any time before 1 am.

“Nonsense,” said my father, “of course you can. “Everyone knows how to sleep. Why, even animals know how to sleep. Just close your eyes, relax, and you’ll get sleepy. It’s the most natural thing in the world, sleep.” My father was a normal sleeper, and to the normal sleeper, sleep is “the most natural thing in the world.”

“But Daddy, I can’t! I don’t know how!”

“Well, you get all wound up. Now if you’d only listen to your mother and go to bed earlier…”

My father was a doctor, an old-style family practitioner who carried a black bag and delivered babies at home, one of a heroic, vanished breed. But that didn’t mean he knew a thing about sleep. Sleep had no part in the medical school curriculum at Yale in the 1930s. Sleep has little part in medical curricula today, when doctors get an average of one to two hours instruction in sleep disorders. The advice he gave me is a version of the advice I’ve been hearing ever since: you’re stressed out, you’re anxious, you’re depressed, you have poor habits, if you only wouldn’t stay up so late… Take a hot bath, drink a glass of warm milk, don’t let it get you down.

We hear a lot of cheer-up-it’s-not-so-bad advice: “Don’t worry about it—you probably just worry too much.” “You probably just need more exercise—try yogi” [that’s not a typo]. I have tried yoga. I swim three times a week and walk on the days I don’t swim.

The well meaning advice that is always useless

When people can see a problem, they can understand and empathise. But when a condition is invisible—and when it goes on and on for no apparent reason—it calls forth a lot of dumb advice. Friends of mine who live with chronic pain, headache, back pain, arthritis tell me they also get advice like this. And insomnia is not easy for us to talk about.

“Oh, you know, a bad night,” I say to a colleague on one of my walking-into-walls days. “Why, Gayle, what do you have to lose sleep about? You’ve got no problems,” says my colleague, eyebrows raised. If I’d been up with a bad tooth or a sick child, that’s something he would understand. If I just plain ‘can’t sleep’, that’s weird.

“Toughen up, get a grip”­—we hear this from friends, family, and doctors. “Nobody ever died of insomnia” is something else we hear a lot. [Actually, that may not be true: insomnia puts us at higher risk for depression, alcoholism, suicide, accidents, hospitalisations; although we may not drop dead of it the next day, it may be cutting years off our lives.]

Some of the least helpful advice I’ve heard comes from the ‘experts.’ “Insomniacs may be naturally short sleepers who are unaware of their lessened need for sleep,” wrote a Stanford researcher in 1993. “Their notion that they need more sleep is an ‘erroneous assumption.’” “Worries by such insomniacs about a ‘lack of sleep’ are unjustified,” says British researcher James Horne, who is himself, as he told me, a good sleeper: insomniacs “just need to be reassured that their sleep is sufficient, despite what they believe in this respect.”

Trust me, if I were a short sleeper, I’d know it by now. I have known such people. I’m not one. I’m a person with a normal seven-hour sleep need, trapped in a body that seems to think I’m someone else.

The invisible problem of insomnia

It’s no surprise that insomnia is not taken more seriously, since sleep itself is not. This is a 24 x 7 culture where “sleep is for the weak,” “you snooze, you lose.”

And yet humans are programmed—or most are—to spend a third of their lives in sleep. Researchers still can’t tell us exactly why we need sleep, but they do know that we need it. They can see what happens when we do without. Studies show that sleep deprivation compromises immune function, ratchets up the stress system and creates hormonal imbalances that predispose us to weight gain and diabetes.

I can tell you what sleep deprivation does to me. It hollows me out, eats me away, takes me apart. These are terms I heard from the insomniacs I talked to while writing my book Insomniac—comatose, spaced out, running on empty, nobody’s home, zombie, zomboid, zombied out—such words describe our feeling that our souls and spirits have taken leave, only our physical shapes are left stumbling around, as in that old movie The Night of the Living Dead.

Lose sleep, lose your ‘self’

When you lose sleep, you lose the better part of yourself. Creative thinking is one of the first things to go, along with mood. Researchers who give sleep-deprived subjects tests that require flexibility, the ability to change strategy and generate unusual ideas, find these capabilities impaired. Neuroimaging shows that the frontal cortex, the seat of “higher order” mental abilities [sometimes called the frontal lobes], is most affected: it doesn’t light up, as it does in the scans of people who’ve slept well. This is the most recent addition to the human brain, in evolutionary terms; on this, the so-called executive functions depend—selective attention, problem solving, decision making, organisation, judgment, reason, abstraction, language. This is where humans are thought to form their sense of who they are, the seat of self-awareness; this is where the self resides. And this is what’s most clobbered by sleep deprivation.

The dreams we miss

When your sleep is as broken and truncated as mine, you’re deprived of REM [rapid eye movement], the sleep stage where we have the most vivid, memorable dreams. Something in nature wants us to dream, since between a quarter and a fifth of sleep is normally spent in REM. That’s six or seven years of a 90-year life. And when we’re deprived of REM, the brain tries to make up for it; there is rebound, an increase in the amount and intensity of REM.

Nobody knows exactly what dreams are for, but recent research suggests that they’re associated with learning, the laying down of new neural pathways and reinforcing of old ones. And the learning that’s at stake here is much more than the French phrases we try to cram into our memory on a flight to France: it’s about extracting meaning from the world around us, making sense of our experiences, making judgment calls, negotiating a delicate situation with a colleague, say, or heading off a divorce. Anything that undermines these processes compromises our ability to deal with our lives.

Sleep repairs your life

If lack of sleep takes us apart, sleep puts us back together again, knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. On days when I wake up after seven or eight hours of sleep [which almost never happens without medication, alas], I’m all there, mended in mind, body, and mood. My head doesn’t ache and my heart doesn’t pound and my skin’s not parched and my eyes don’t sting and tear, and the world comes into focus. I can face the book I’m writing, the classes I’m teaching, the stacks of papers on my desk and floor. I know what goes where and how it fits together, and I have energy to take it on.

It’s ironic that sleep is sometimes feared as the loss or disappearance of the self, when it may actually be the way we become most fully ourselves, our most creative, intelligent, and alive. You might even say: I sleep, therefore I am.

There are many ways people come by insomnia, many routes to this place. Some insomnia is inborn and genetic, some is hormonal, brought on with menopause, and some is conditioned—i.e., we go through a stressful period and then it settles in. But much is simply not understood. People are differently endowed in the sleep department, as in all other departments.

I wrote Insomniac to find out what is known about insomnia, and to hear from others who live with the condition about what they’ve found that works. There are plenty of experts who are ready with glib advice, but we are the ones who live in our bodies—we are the ones who can say what works. So read widely, go on the web, learn all you can—the web is a goldmine of information [misinformation, too, of course]—and find out what people say. Then try things out for yourself, being careful, of course, and knowing that someone else’s experience with a method or medication may not be yours. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution; there is only what you can cobble together that works.

This was first published in the October 2014 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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Very often, insomnia begins when you simply spend longer than usual in bed. What compounds this problem are the natural responses to a bout of insomnia—either to go to bed earlier [before you are even sleepy], or to try to ‘catch up’ by lying in bed for as long as possible. A common mistake is to lounge around in bed in the morning even when you aren’t sleeping, creating a mental association of being in bed with being awake.

Often, when you go to bed the night after a long lie-in, you may not be particularly tired, with the result that it takes hours to fall asleep. To add to this, spending too long in bed means that your sleep is lighter and of poorer quality. If you have been feeling exhausted in spite of sleeping well, it is a good bet that you are spending far too long in bed.

Napping in the day

Daytime napping is playing with fire. 20 minutes can easily turn into 30 minutes and then into an hour. And even a 20 minute nap will mean that when you finally get to bed at night, you may not be very sleepy, making it more difficult to drop off.

For all insomniacs, any napping weakens the connection between bed, night-time and sleep. So remember: A nap in the day lessens your chances of sleeping at night.

Lying in bed awake

All insomniacs have had the experience of lying awake for hours, fidgeting and becoming more and more frustrated. As you lie there, desperate for sleep, you become tense and anxious. The tension you feel makes it impossible to relax and the bed seems to feel less and less comfortable as you toss and turn, trying to find a comfortable position. Your bed has now gone from being a sanctuary of peace and escape, to a place of misery and sleepless anxiety. Every hour you lie awake in bed weakens the association of bed and sleep.

Lying in at weekends

Because they don’t feel the stress of having to get up for work, many people tend to sleep much better on Friday and Saturday nights and may lie-in for hours in the morning, until 11 or noon. This may be the only decent sleep an insomniac gets all week and the joy of a delicious lie-in is a temptation that few can resist. Others find that they do not sleep any better at the weekend than during the week, but even so, they usually get out of bed hours later on weekends compared with week days.

Reading, using your laptop, or watching television in bed

When you do anything in bed, you are creating an association between your bed and that thing. This means that whenever you do anything in bed other than sleep, you are in effect, weakening your ‘falling asleep response’. If you are spending time lying in or on your bed to read, study, work or watch television, then you are weakening the bed/sleep association and creating a bed/being awake association. If your bed has become about everything but sleep, it is hardly surprising that you do not feel ready to drop off when you lie down at night.

Ask your doctor for sleeping pills

Besides the more obvious negatives, sleeping pills can have an insidious yet devastating effect on your beliefs about sleep, so that far from curing insomnia, taking sleeping pills can actually worsen the problem. This is because when you take a pill for insomnia, you make two powerful and negative assumptions:

• There is something wrong with me.
• There is something external that can make me better.

Thus your belief in your own ability to sleep is diminished. Can you see how every time you take a prescribed sleeping pill, or self-medicate with ‘natural’ remedies or alcohol, you weaken your belief and therefore sabotage your natural sleeping capacity, pushing your recovery further and further away? When you go to bed, instead of trusting in your own ability to sleep naturally, in effect, you hand over ‘responsibility’ to the drug. Your belief in yourself and consequently your own ability to sleep is diminished every time you take any artificial remedy. This is why artificial sleeping aids cannot ever help even a moderate insomnia problem.

Trying really hard to fall asleep

Think about it: trying implies effort and unsuccessful effort implies frustration and tension, neither of which is conducive to falling asleep. Good sleepers don’t ‘try’ to do anything and one thing is certain, if you try to fall asleep you will not succeed. This is because sleeping is not something you have to ‘do’. It might be more accurate to describe falling asleep as something you do not do.

Trying to fall asleep is a little like pushing really hard against a door which needs to be pulled—it’s never going to open until you stop pushing.

Obsessing about time

I do not advocate sleep diaries where every detail of one’s sleeping and waking hours is recorded in term of hours and minutes. For people who are trying to stop obsessing about sleep, this is a terrible reinforcing behaviour. Clock-watching and box-ticking can create a horrible obsession with:

• time spent asleep
• time spent awake
• time spent before falling asleep
• time spent trying to fall asleep
• time spent waiting to feel sleepy after having got up after being unable to sleep.

Hence, you might feel tense and anxious in the morning, not because of sleep deprivation, but because of worries about the number of hours one has spent asleep. Clock-watching creates an unhealthy obsession with time.

Telling people about your problem

Watch out for the temptation to talk about your problem. It can turn into a habit such  that it becomes a topic of light conversation; something to mention as small talk or to someone you have just met at a party. Such discussions, far from being harmless, actually worsen your insomnia.

“I’m an insomniac.”

Can you see how destructive and negative and harmful this little phrase is? Labelling yourself with this term creates an identity, categorising you as one who is unable to sleep. By repeating this phrase you are describing yourself, your very being, in terms of a problem and so your insomnia becomes a fundamental part of who you are.

Researching cures in books, magazines and online

If you are a long-term insomniac, chances are that you have tried countless cures and remedies in an attempt to overcome your problem. How many sleep remedies have you tried? How many have failed to work? Do you find yourself buying any magazine or newspaper containing the word insomnia or the phrase how to get a good night’s sleep?

The belief that somewhere, somehow, there is one simple thing that we can take or do which will cure us, combined with the sheer number of remedies out there means that our lives often become like a terrible personal laboratory. We become the subject of our own miserable, pointless experiments into sleeping problems. The more desperate we become, the more combinations and concoctions we try.

Visiting insomnia ‘support’ sites and forums

It’s essential to realise that insomnia forum sites and chat rooms are generally full of people looking for an answer to their problem, not with people offering a solution to a problem.

On internet forums you will also hear from people with real horror stories, much worse than your own. You may hear from people who have been searching for a cure for 30 years, people who have just relapsed after being ‘cured’, some claiming never, ever to have had a good night’s sleep. Such stories can terrify a new insomniac.

When we hear of a person with a situation worse than our own, we immediately begin identifying with them, even if in other ways their lives, personality and problems are nothing like our own.

Why do you think none of them has ever found a cure, pill or remedy which has worked? The answer is simple: they are looking in the wrong place. Chronic long-term insomnia is a problem that is largely caused by the thoughts you have and the beliefs you hold about the problem itself. It reacts to, and is worsened by, suggestion. Before long, this terrible self-fulfilling prophecy comes to be and other people’s problems become our problems.

Recovered insomniacs do not tend to hang around insomnia forums because they have usually worked out just how much this activity contributed to their problem.

Rearranging your life around your insomnia

If you are a long-term insomniac, you are likely to be making many compromises to your life for the sake of sleep. Such behaviours may include special routines; avoiding coffee even in the morning, avoiding scary films or spicy food at night, avoiding holidays or spending nights away from home, never staying out late, avoiding making plans, demanding special behaviours from your spouse or partner, or any other behaviour or special action [and this is the important bit] intended only for the purposes of helping you sleep.

Some insomniacs simply refuse to attend social occasions or important events and so begin missing out on all the good things in life. But there is no greater way to feed, grow and keep your insomnia monster healthy than by letting it dictate and affect your normal everyday activities.

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