SLEEPING BETTER TIPS:  

Are you tired but wired? Unable to wind down the mental chitta chatter to drop into refreshing sleep? Do you suffer with 4am-itis? Then toss and turn until just before the alarm? Or do you sleep through the night ok, but wake feeling utterly exhausted? There is one thing that has the greatest impact on your overall sense of wellbeing:
SLEEP

I’m Linda Stephens and I’m an almost recovered insomniac….so sleep is a subject that is very close to my heart. Sleep, or the lack of it was my Achilles heel for nearly 20 years. It is hugely underrated and undervalued in our society and yet, we are deeply damaging ourselves by not addressing its significance.

Too Stressed to Sleep?

A study published by The Sleep Council reported that millions of Britons are struggling to get enough sleep. It’s not just you. We need a minimum of six hours a night for physical and mental wellbeing, yet one in three of us only get five to six hours a night. Three quarters regularly sleep for seven hours or fewer!

Scientists at Surrey University revealed that just seven days of poor sleep can disrupt genes linked to stress, immunity and inflammation – long term sleep disruption can even lead to premature death. Conversely (and this is worth waking up for) it’s said that an extra hours sleep per day has more impact on overall happiness than a pay rise of £60,000!

When I had chronic insomnia I remember feeling that I would have literally given up my right arm, if it meant I could sleep! So I’m vouching for that statement.

Interesting, and this is linked with peri menopausal hormone changes (especially a reduction in calming progesterone), it seems that women are more sleep deprived than men …and the impact is far reaching.

If you’re only having 4-5 hours sleep per night, it’s like being drunk. Sleep deprivation impairs our creativity, our productivity, our focus, our moral judgement – just like being drunk!And like a shitty hangover….

With a lack of sleep, you physically feel chalky, nauseous, dizzy, wired, jet lagged, cold, achey, shaky…in fact, you can develop symptoms similar to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

What are we trying to prove by not making sleep a priority?

More than anything else, its sleep that’ll fill up our buckets and enhance our overall sense of wellbeing and vitality. But I get it – it’s all very well and good to be told that you need to get more sleep, but actually HOW do you get both quality sleep and the quantity that’s enough for YOU? When you are massively sleep deprived and especially if you are an insomniac, sleep is ALL you think about and yet it can be horrendously elusive.

How do you ensure the sleep you are getting is good quality sleep?

One of biggest clues to disrupted sleep is what you’re doing in the hours preceding bedtime. We live in a very plugged in world and the overall majority of women who have issues with sleeping are on their mobiles, or they’re on the computer catching up on work.

Screen time before bed is one of the most detrimental things for both being able to get off to sleep and also the quality and depth of sleep we might experience throughout the night. Screens emit blue light – which is very damaging to the production of drowsiness causing melatonin. Instead, screen time can cause cortisol levels to spike, waking us up, instead of calming us down.

Now, I can attest to this because I find that I can’t go to sleep within at least an hour of being in front of a screen. Those nights I do slip up and I check facebook too late – it is quite unlikely that I’ll drop off to sleep easily and much more likely that I’ll wake in the early hours with racing thoughts….I definitely need a wind down routine, AND a wake up routine too.

Did you know how important it is to get up in the morning and get outside straight away to get light on the retina? That is the precursor event that will help your whole circadian rhythm get established, starting the cycle of sleep inducing melatonin for the night ahead.I’ve also found that a regular wakeup time and getting natural light HELPS establish a regular, earlier bed time. It’s the regularity that’s key.

There are some key lifestyle and diet disruptors that are really worth addressing if sleep is an issue for you. Addressing caffeine intake, alcohol intake, exercise routine and diet has helped me immensely. So too has working with CBT style self hypnoses and yoga tools that promote the parasympathetic ‘rest and replenish’ nervous system.Addressing sleep has been life changing for me. Especially in peri menopause.

What if you chose to focus on improving your sleep too?

My ‘6 Weeks to Better Sleep’ course teaches a tried and tested sleep routine to help you prepare for sleep, with practices if you do wake up in the night. You’ll learn why your sleep cycle may have become disrupted and how to re-set it in as little as two days. The course recordings are in the Chill Out Tent in WomensWellbeing.me

So ladies, the real question is, what could you do on a full, refreshing 7-8 hours of rejuvenating sleep??

What if you started to get that revitalising injection of sleep pretty much every night??

I challenge you to challenge yourself on when you actually NEED to be awake and what you actually NEED to be doing.

Is it worth your health to stay on facebook, to watch the end of that movie? To reply to all of those emails? Maybe it’s ok if some things just don’t get done, because you’ve proudly prioritised your sleep.
Because you’re worth it 😉