Why Can’t I Sleep? 4 Tips for Better Rest
When we get busy, sleep is often the first thing to go. How many times have you pulled an all-nighter or woken up before sunrise to get a jump start on a project? While an occasional sleepless night probably won’t cause much damage in the long run, chronic sleep deprivation can wreak havoc on your health.
4 Ways to Sleep Through the Night
1. Clear Your Mind Before Bed
Unattended thoughts can percolate and “hum right below the surface” Maldonado says, exhausting our energy and making us even more tired. Regardless of what you do or think about all day long, if you take a few minutes to meditate before you go to bed, you’re allowing your mind to let stuff out. Maybe instead of meditating, you’d rather put pen to paper and journal about your thoughts. No matter what you choose to do, give your mind some time to dump.
2. Try a Body Scan Meditation
Once you do get into bed, Maldonado recommends a body scan meditation that can help you ease into quality, deep sleep.
3. Listen to Your Body
While trying to sleep, you may feel something so intense that you have to get up. It’s normal to put off having to get up in the middle of the night because we know that it sends awake signals to the body. “But sometimes you have to do that, too
4. Activate Your Parasympathetic Nervous System
If you wake up in the middle of the night or can’t get to sleep, you may consider turning to a type of breathing that helps activate your parasympathetic nervous system—”the part of the nervous system that helps calm the body.
There are a few things you can do to help yourself fall asleep, stay asleep and improve your quality of sleep overall. However, experts caution that sleeping pills shouldn’t be one of them — research has shown that the risk of death for regular users of sleeping pills is more than four times higher than for nonusers.
References:
https://www.mindful.org/why-cant-i-sleep-4-tips-for-better-rest/