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Stop going to bed early
No matter how trite it sounds, but you need to get pillows and blankets only when you want to sleep. As doctors joke, in bed you can only do two things: love or dream viewing. Just lying around and waiting for the arrival of Morpheus is a bad option! There is a rule of 15 minutes. If you haven’t been able to fall asleep during this time, get out of bed. Go to another room, do something calm, not disturbing: you can wash the dishes, read, listen to music, etc. And when you really want to sleep again, go back to bed.
Applying this method for several weeks will definitely help you fall asleep faster.
Don’t make a lark out of an owl
We are told all the time that it is necessary to fall asleep no later than 12 o’clock at night, so more useful hormones are produced by the body, and you get better sleep. Like, all turn into larks – and you will be happy.
“This is perhaps the most common myth about sleep,” says head Alexander Melnikov, Department of Sleep Medicine, Center for Otorhinolaryngology, FMBA. – The production of hormones does not depend on the time when you fall asleep, but on the passage of the necessary stages of sleep. For people of the morning type, we call them larks, it’s really better to fall asleep early. And for people of the evening type – owls – it is harmful to go to bed early. They have not yet reached the peak of melatonin secretion at the moment when it is needed. You can fall asleep at two in the morning, if in the end you get the 7-9 hours necessary for sleep. Sleep in the dark with tightly curtained windows. This is perfectly acceptable. Also systematically fall asleep and wake up at the same time – plus or minus half an hour.
And by the way, there are more owls in the population than larks!
– Alteration of an owl into a lark is possible, but this is the most severe breaking with vague prospects, – considers head of the sleep center Alexander Palman. “It is fraught with big health problems. It is possible to change the chronotype as soon as possible in the so-called intermediate people – there are such half-larks, half-owls.
When people come to me and say: “Doctor, I can’t fall asleep before two in the morning. And before 10-11 in the morning I am not a person, I am regularly late for work. I have constant conflicts with my superiors. What should I do?”, I say: “Change your job to one where you can come later.” This is indeed the best solution in this case. By the way, now many employers are ready to meet the needs of employees: let them come at any time, as long as they cope with the tasks.
Download a dedicated mobile phone application
There are many applications for gadgets now. Including for the normalization of sleep. But what do doctors think of them?
“Yes, there are applications that we recommend to patients,” says psychotherapist of the Center for Sleep Medicine of the clinical sanatorium “Barvikha” Oksana Nazarova. – For example, Sleep on cue. It’s free. And the effectiveness of this application has been proven.
How does it work? You put your headphones on your phone. Every smartphone has a motion sensor. And the phone “checks” whether you are asleep by periodically sending relaxing vibration signals if you are still awake. And when you really fall asleep, it will go into standby mode. And it will wake you up just after the number of hours necessary for a healthy sleep. The application teaches you how to fall asleep correctly and not be afraid of this process.
Note: Instead of an iPhone, read … a boring book
But looking at the screen of the gadget before going to bed is harmful.
“There are two factors at once: excitation of the central nervous system and a blue-white glow directed directly at the retina of the eye,” explains somnologist Oksana Nazarova. It interferes with the production of the sleep hormone melatonin. I can advise you to include reading a paper (!) Book under local lighting in the ritual of going to bed. And an important point: the book should be uninteresting, boring and kind. If you think about what’s next, will it help sleep?