Resilience and Wellbeing

It can be helpful to set a routine for sleep. This means picking the same time to go to bed each day and setting an alarm for the same time each morning. This allows your body to form a habit, and to get into a natural sleep / wake cycle or circadian rhythm.

Having naps during the day, can disrupt your ability to sleep at night. Try not to nap during the day or sleep late into the morning to ‘catch-up’. It is better to keep to your sleep routine, even if it is challenging at the start to re-set and find your circadian rhythm.

Caffeine can impact on our ability to sleep. It is a stimulant, meaning it will keep you awake and not allow you to sleep, until the effects of it have worn off. It can be a good idea if you are struggling to sleep, and do drink caffeine, to stop drinking caffeine at dinner time (or even earlier).

It can be a good idea to think about your bedroom environment.

Is it dark, quiet and a comfortable temperature? Are you only using your bed to sleep?

Adjust your environment if you need to, to help you sleep. Using an eye mask or black out curtains can be useful.

If you find that you do lie in bed awake unable to sleep, your body can get into a habit of doing this. It begins to associate your bed and your bedroom with ‘not’ sleeping. 

If this is happening for you, get up and out of bed, do something distracting like reading a magazine and then go back to bed after 20 minutes or when you feel sleepy again. If again you’re lying there awake, repeat this exercise.

Creating rituals, can help our body to form habit maps that support sleep. Doing a ritual such as relaxation or a meditation, writing in a journal or doing something you find relaxing can be a bedtime ritual, that let’s your body know you are getting ready to sleep. 

It is important that your bed time ritual doesn’t include lying in bed with a device, as this may impact on your ability to get to sleep.

Getting to sleep on an empty stomach can be difficult for some people. Having a light snack before bed can help with this. You could also have a warm glass of milk. Milk contains tryptophan, which is proven to induce sleep naturally.

Having a bath or shower an hour or so before bed can help you wind down before bed.

This is because it raises your body temperature, and then as your body starts to cool down again you naturally start to get sleepy.

Regular exercise during the day has been proven to support our circadian rhythm’s and having a good night sleep. Working in a sedentary job, means that we might not be moving as much as we should. Moving will help our bodies to feel more tired and fatigued and ready for sleep.

Sometimes we can’t sleep because our mind keeps going and won’t switch off. In these times, it can be helpful to have some ‘worry time’ or ‘problem solving’ time during the day to think about things that are on your mind. Or by keeping a note pad by your bed you can write it down, and then it is temporarily parked until you can actually think about it or do something the next day. Visualisations can also be helpful, such as visualising yourself putting the issue into a filing cabinet, which you can re-open another day after a good night’s sleep.