HowDoWhy

Who hasn’t suffered from a period or insomnia now and again? But when it drags on, begins to cause real suffering and prevents you from leading a productive life, insomnia becomes a serious concern. In this, the first of a multi-part post, I’m going to talk a bit about conditioning; specifically, the slow development of bad habits that can lead to a lifetime love/hate relationship with sleep and what you can do to break the cycle.

If you have trouble sleeping, ask yourself this… do you use your bedroom appropriately? In wealthy western society, most of us don’t. Our kids grow up with a gaming platform attached to a TV in their room and an endless stream of chat rooms on computers and text messages on their mobile phones. We read in bed. Some of us do bills or continue to burn the midnight oil doing work in bed. We watch DVDs, listen to music, do our homework and then, when all that other fun stuff is done, we try to actually sleep.

As children, it’s understandable that the bedroom is a multi-purpose facility. A child or teen’s room is their sanctuary. It’s the one place they truly consider theirs and serves as office, play area and a safe haven away from the rest of the family. It’s like a little apartment within the home. When that mentality stretches into adulthood, though, it can result in real problems and condition us to subconsciously lose touch with what our bedroom and our bed are actually for. The solution is reconditioning. Read on if you’d like to know more.

Your first step in addressing insomnia is to recondition your mind to recognize your bedroom as a single-purpose environment. You want to teach your brain to associate entering the bedroom as a precursor to sleep. You want to reprogram yourself to see your bed as a place to sleep. With the exception of dressing and maintaining a loving relationship (you know what I mean) with your spouse, nothing else is permitted in your bed or bedroom. The following are the do’s and don’ts.

• No TV or radio in bed. The TV must go. Not just stay off, but be removed entirely.
• No reading in bed. If you are awake enough to read, do so in a chair in another room. Once you feel yourself growing sleepy, return to your bed (without the book).
• No eating in bed.
• No bills, work or studying in bed.
• No telephone conversations in bed (answering the phone is fine but if a conversation rather than a quick chat results, move to another room).
• No long conversations with your spouse or lover in bed. If your significant other knows you are suffering from insomnia they should have no problem agreeing to moving long conversations to another room in the interest of reclaiming your healthy sleep habits.

The objective is to remind your mind that the bed and bedroom are for sleeping, nothing else. It likely took years to condition yourself into a bad unconscious habit of viewing your bed as something more than a place to sleep so don’t expect overnight results from following these steps. It might take weeks until you begin to see regular results. But remember that what you’re trying to accomplish is the gradual creation of a positive lifetime habit and healthy reconditioning.

For some, TV, music, books and other activities have no impact on their sleep. In fact, some of us actually benefit from a few pages in a book or the sound of the TV (volume low) as we drift off. If you suffer from insomnia, though, take my advice and retrain your brain. It’s just one of the ways I’ll be covering to help you reclaim your nights and, I hope, your sanity.