To Sleep; Perchance To Dream (Week 3)

Are you getting a good nights sleep?

As you’ll recall I decided to use an app called ‘Sleep Cycle’ to help me monitor my sleep over a 21 day period.  Throughout the 3 weeks I was to try different techniques and tips to see if I could improve my sleep.  So, what were my findings?

Firstly the exercise proved to me that my quality of my sleep varies and is, at best, reasonable – not good or great.  This is what I believed and the 21 day test proved this to be the case.

Ideally what I was hoping to achieve is a good night of great sleep!  The app cannot measure your sleep quality but simply your movement throughout the night and this it does really well.  My sleep graphs were really interesting and reflected each night as I remember it.  However the app scored the quality of sleep and apparently I frequently hit 90% and above but this is definitely not my perception of the night!  Over the 21 days I scored 2 nights as good (84% – 94%), 12 nights as okay (between 63% – 96%) and 7 nights as poor (47%- 98%)…. So you see my perception was, and still is, that I have, on the whole, an okay nights sleep or rest on average.  Here are 3 examples of the ‘sleep cycle’ charts, 1 for a good night, 1 for a so-so night, and the chart for my worst night!:

So, what about the results for the behaviour changes etc.  Week 1 was the control week where I did not change my behaviour, Week 2 I started to use certain sleep tips such as bed earlier than usual, no alcohol before bed, no caffeine, no tv in bed, read before bed, bath before bed etc and Week 3 I added exercise in the daytime and listened to a relaxing hypnotherapy cd before bed….

Did this mean that I experienced greatly I proved sleep?  Well not exactly and I believe that the reason why is down to what I call ‘head chatter’.  This is neither good nor bad but it is pretty common for me and consists of things running through my mind. They can be about my day, or about future concerns or ideas, they can be exciting or worrying…

Did the techniques mentioned above help with this?  In parts yes… However the biggest change I noticed was from abstaining form caffeine.  I did this during Week 2 and I must say that I really noticed an improved feeling of calmness, which makes sense… I only have 2 coffees a day, both before midday –  to avoid caffeine in the system later in the day – caffeine can remain in the body for anything up to 14 hours, but it does seem to depend on the individual! Still, when I swapped to decaf, I had a sense of calmness.

I definitely felt improvement with slightly earlier nights and reading in bed, I also noticed that warm baths (including a soak in Epsom Salts) also helped…. The nights when I used relaxing hypnotherapy also sent me off to sleep before the cd had finished! (which is a great improvement) although I did wake with headphones still on but did manage to fall asleep again…. So all in all there were improvements but on the whole the quality of the nights sleep did not dramatically change.  I should also add that on 2 nights I was abruptly woken by the screeching of foxes right outside my window, which was a shame as they were potentially good nights, and also some nights were disturbed by hormonal imbalance/heat but these things can happen at anytime.

So that brings me back to the head chatter…. There is no question that my sleep improves when my mind is in a good place!!… In other words I can do all these lovely things but if my mind is elsewhere worrying about other issues then they are all possibly in vain.

Time, therefore to address my worries and concerns… I have decided to adopt the follow technique – I have written down everything that currently concerns me…. You might be thinking ‘oh that’s just one or two things or you might be thinking oh god, that would take me ages…. well, I found it very interesting and not exactly what I thought it would be…. I made a list… Actually the list was harder to do then I expected… Because I really didn’t have THAT much on it…. I managed 10 things in general but only 2 are real worries right now and the 2 others are concerns – the rest remain ‘stuff’ that needs addressing but is not a huge worry.  Alongside all of them I then wrote solutions…. Now here’s the thing… I managed to write something against everyone of them!! Where I could not find a direct solution I did have an action… Something I can do to help me get towards the solution!!  So as I did the exercise I realised that only 2 things are of real concern to me and that there is always action you can take towards a solution…. Not only that but “nothing stays the same” meaning that I can take some actions now, if no solution is within my grasp then I can pop my list away for say 1 or 3 or 6 months and then have another look and see is other things have changed that may affect my actions/ solutions… hey presto!  I have taken action.  There is no doubt that when we ‘feel’ a little more in control of our concerns then we ‘worry’ less….

Here’s to a good nights sleep!!…  If sleep is a problem for you, please do look at my other Sleep Blogs, Week 1 and Week 2 and try some of the suggestions.  Also do try Hypnotherapy, as this can address specific sleep issues and also Reflexology is a wonderful relaxing treatment and many clients always comment how well they sleep afterwards - if only I could it effectively on myself!

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