Self-Help Toons
Sleep Hygiene Habits to Sleep Better & Treat Insomnia
Sleep hygiene helps us sleep better and treat insomnia by creating routines around sleeping that are more conducive to sleep. And by restricting the amount of time we spend in bed, also known as sleep restriction therapy, we increase out sleep efficiency.
This video presents an overview of the CBT for Insomnia program developed by Dr. Gregg Jacobs at Harvard Medical School. For more detailed information about his online CBT-I program, please visit www.cbtforinsomnia.com. You can find my free Self-Help for Insomnia Course at https://www.selfhelptoons.com/insomnia
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Related Videos:
▶️ Sleep Better And Cure Insomnia With CBTI https://youtu.be/XXplGH5v1P8
▶️ Guided Meditation for Sleep https://youtu.be/8jEIiLXMdBU
➡️ Free CBTI Self-Help Course: https://www.selfhelptoons.com/insomnia
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struggling with insomnia or having difficulty sleeping can have a really negative effect on our quality of life this video presents an overview of the cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia program developed by Dr Greg Jacobs at Harvard Medical School for more detailed information about his online CBT for insomnia program please visit CBT for insomnia. comom in this video we're going to learn how to sleep better through sleep hygiene techniques and with sleep scheduling strategies that help us sleep more efficiently and in my other video on insomnia we learn how to improve our sleep by quieting our minds and reducing our negative sleep thoughts and you'll find a link to that video in the description sleep hygiene involves modifying our behaviors to create an environment and establish habits that make it easier for us to fall asleep and to stay asleep one of the main goals of sleep hygiene is to learn to associate being in bed with being asleep and so the first rule of sleep hygiene is to only use your bedroom for sleeping and intimacy you want to train your mind to associate the bedroom and especially your bed with sleeping and nothing else because most people who sleep poorly associate being in bed with lying awake not being able to fall asleep and we really want to train our bodies to associate being in bed with sleeping because that makes it much more likely that we'll fall asleep when we go to bed so don't bring your laptop or phone to bed don't study or work in your bed don't have a long problem solving session with your partner in bed and don't L around in bed once you wake W up if it helps you to fall asleep you can read or watch TV in bed for up to 30 minutes before you go to sleep but no longer than this if you like to read or watch TV for longer than half an hour to help you wind down at night then start off somewhere else in the living room on the couch and then only move into your bedroom and bed once you're ready to fall asleep and only go to bed once you're already feeling drowsy otherwise you'll just lie there in bed unable to sleep and then if you've been in bed for more than 20 to 30 minutes without having fallen asleep lying in bed any longer is unlikely to bring on sleep anytime soon and you're just teaching your body to associate being in bed with lying awake rather than falling asleep so after 20 to 30 minutes of being in bed unable to sleep get up and move to a different room and do something relaxing for 20 to 30 minutes like reading a book or listening to some quiet music or doing a relaxation exercise like the one I linked to in the description and then return to your bed only once you're feeling sleepy and try to keep your bedroom dark quiet and relatively cool our bodies cool down at night as we prepare for sleep so if we keep our bedrooms too warm it interferes with this process and most people find they sleep best at a room temperature in the mid to high 60 and sleeping well isn't just about what happens once you go to bed the hours leading up are important as well try to St off your computer or phone for 30 minutes to an hour before bed and use a blue light filter on any devices you can as bedtime approaches and don't eat a big meal drink alcohol or caffeine close to your bedtime and nicotine is a stimulant so avoid smoking right before bed and try to have a nighttime routine that involves some relaxation before you get into bed doing some yoga or meditation or taking a bath or just reading or watching TV or even cleaning up the kitchen if you find relaxing we all need something to help us unwind before bed if you're working right up until bedtime or dwelling on things that went on during the day or worrying about tomorrow when you get into bed you're probably not going to be able to quiet your mind enough to fall asleep and now we're going to look at sleep scheduling and how that can help us sleep better one of the most important things we can do to promote good sleep is to keep a regular sleep schedule our bodies rely on a consistent 24-hour routine or circadian rhythm to regulate our sleep wake cycle our bodies get used to going to bed at a certain time and waking up at a certain time that's why if we get up at the same time every day we often wake up just before our alarm goes off our body knows that it's time to wake up it doesn't need an alarm to tell it the more we can stay consistent and let our bodies get into the habit of knowing it's time to go to sleep and it's time to wake up the better our sleep will be and the less regular our sleep schedule is the less less we can rely on our body's internal clock to help us sleep and the more we start fighting against it and so keeping a consistent sleep schedule is one of the best things you can do for your sleep and that's one of the things that makes sleeping so difficult for shift workers or new parents whose sleep schedules are constantly getting disrupted or when we travel across time zones or experience the effects of daylight savings time and it's important to try to maintain the same sleep schedule even on weekends if you're so tired at the end of the week that you need to sleep in try to limit it to no more than half an hour if you're sleeping in a few extra hours on the weekend when you try to get back to your regular routine on Sunday night you're probably going to find it hard to fall asleep and difficulty sleeping Sunday night is one of the reasons we can be so cranky on Monday mornings and if you need to take a nap these are fine earlier in the day but try to keep them to under 45 minutes otherwise it can disrupt your sleep at night and having a nap later in the day makes it more difficult to get to sleep at night so a nap in the morning or after lunch should be fine but a nap after work or after dinner can make it harder to fall asleep when you go to bed so maintaining a consistent sleep schedule is the first aspect of sleep scheduling but there's another element and this involves sleep efficiency sleep efficiency refers to the amount of time you spend asleep compared to the amount of time you spend in bed so if you fall asleep as soon as your head hits a pillow and then sleep right until you're Al alarm goes off your sleep efficiency is 100% if you go to bed at 11:00 and set your alarm for 700 you've alloted 8 hours for sleep and if you sleep 7 hours that's 7/8 efficiency or 87.5% good sleepers average 95% sleep efficiency and the average person has about 90% sleep efficiency which would be allotting 8 hours of sleep and then sleeping for 7 and a quar poor sleepers average only about 65% sleep efficiency which would be for example only about 5 and a half hours of sleep over a period of eight and a quar hours allotted for sleep now as we talked about with sleep hygiene we want our beds to be strongly associated with sleeping and for good sleepers being in bed is a strong cue for sleep but for poor sleepers who might spend 2 or 3 hours or even longer lying awake in bed each night bed becomes a strong queue for being awake so in order to overcome insomnia we need to find ways to sleep more efficient ly and to make our beds a stronger cue for sleep now if you practice better sleep hygiene and sleep scheduling and learn to quiet your mind and reduce negative sleep thoughts like I talk about in my other video on insomnia your sleep efficiency will improve but sometimes it still doesn't improve enough in which case we can further improve our sleep efficiency by reducing the amount of time we spend in bed now usually when people have trouble sleeping they increase the amount of time they spend in bed which makes sense you want more sleep so you spend more time in bed but unfortunately this has the opposite effect of what's desired because now you're spending more time in bed and your sleep is even less efficient and you find it even more difficult to fall asleep once you're in bed and spending too much time in bed interferes with our body's natural Rhythm the longer we've been awake the stronger we feel the pressure for sleep due to increased physical activity and exposure to light and due to increased accumulation of adenosine which is a chemical our body produces that makes us sleepy and our levels of adenosine increase the whole time we're awake and so if we sleep in or go to bed earlier by spending more time in bed we find it more difficult to sleep because our bodies haven't had enough time to do all the things they need to do in order for us to start feeling sleepy again so paradoxically if we're having trouble sleeping instead of spending more time in bed we need to start spending less time in bed and we start by giving ourselves 1 hour longer in bed than we tend to sleep so if you're averaging 6 hours of sleep a night then give yourself 7 hours of time for sleeping and this may result in having a little less sleep at first as your body adjusts to having less time in bed so if you're tired during the day you can take a nap as long as it's before 400 p.m. and lasts less than 45 minutes and if after a week your sleep efficiency hasn't improved you can reduce your allotted sleep time even more but don't ever give yourself less than 5 and a half hours to sleep so you always have enough time to get your core sleep and then once your sleep efficiency has reached 85% for at least 2 weeks you can increase your a lotted time for sleep by half an hour a week as long as you're still maintaining 85% sleep efficiency now I understand that reducing the amount of time you spend in bed when you're already having trouble sleeping can sound a little ridiculous and can be a hard thing to convince yourself to try so you can always use a more gradual approach and try going to bed just 15 minutes later at night or getting up just 15 minutes earlier in the morning so just decreasing the amount of time allotted for sleep by 15 minutes and you'll probably find that you're still getting the same amount of sleep overall and then you can further reduce the amount of time allotted for sleep in 15minute increments until your sleep efficiency has improved to at least 85% and if you follow the Sleep hygiene and scheduling guidelines as well as the strategies for quieting your mind and reducing negative sleep thoughts that I talk about in my other video on insomnia it probably won't be too long until you start to notice at least some improvements in your sleep and please check out my free self-help for insomnia course at selfhelp tunes.com and if you like this video and would like to support my channel and help me make more videos like this I really appreciate it and please check out the donation links in the description and please hit the like button and subscribe to my channel so you don't miss out on any of the videos I have coming up
#Sleep #Hygiene #Habits #Sleep #Treat #Insomnia
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For more on Dr Jacobs' online CBT-I program, please visit http://www.cbtforinsomnia.com. You'll find my free Self-Help for Insomnia Course at http://www.selfhelptoons.com/insomnia. And if you'd like to you'd like to support my channel ⬇⬇
❤ Join my channel with the JOIN button next to SUBSCRIBE
🙏 Become A Patron https://www.patreon.com/SelfHelpToons
☕ Buy Me A Coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/selfhelptoons
Related Videos:
▶ Sleep Better And Cure Insomnia With CBT https://youtu.be/XXplGH5v1P8
▶ Guided Meditation for Sleep https://youtu.be/8jEIiLXMdBU
Excellent video. implementing some of the suggestions here. Definitely improving my Sleep.
Does anyone know where I can find info on how to stay asleep?
I have spent hours watching videos about how to get to sleep, sleep hygiene, etc. None of which I care about- I sleep like a baby. From about 9.30 /10 until about 12.30/1.30. Then that's it for the night.
Smart strategies! 😊
thanks for sharing this
What’s one bad habit that people don’t realize is ruining their sleep?
Such a simple yet very valuable video 😊
What did I do when I wake up? Can I look at my phone? Can I lie on the couch? Do I go for a walk what?
Excellent
i have chronic pain- – i find that i am spending too much time in my bed. Some days i just can t move. i couldn't never sleep at night so i have flipped my scedule , When i sleep – i sleep well, but I'm lucky if i get 3 to 4 hours a day; and i can go 3 days with out sleep. it's crazy . I am not asking for the impossible; but with chronic pain and the only way to stay sane is to lay down – how are you supposed to tell your bedroom -this is where I sleep. I get it but it's not my reality, and i also know it's a problem (and no, i do not have a couch)
What if you live in a studio and the only place you have to hang out while awake and to sleep is a sofa bed?
I stopped using heroin drugs… Since then i cant sleep… Nothing works not even sleeping pills 😭..
Hi, i do not agree with your view about it , what about poor people who do not have their bed room and sleep in crowed still in, only stress free only way to cure of insomnia. though it has not evidence base but experience based. it is for people living in city and going for white color job.
New year resolution is to follow these guidelines. Newborn made insomnia unbearable and even dangerous, has to be fixed for my sake but also for my little boy
K
So nice, I really appreciate your videos
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