Sleep Science Academy founder, professional sleep coach, and author Devin Burke shares three reasons you’re not sleeping through the night and, most importantly, how to solve them.
1. Bringing Your Day into the Night
I speak on this subject frequently on my channel, but most people continue making the mistake of bringing their worries to bed, costing them precious time for sleeping. They have no clear separation between their day and night. What happens and why this creates issues regarding sleep is that it leads to fitful sleep and bad dreams that can wake us up.
It is essential to understand that a great night of sleep actually begins as soon as you wake up. All the little things you do throughout your day dictate whether or not you will sleep through the night.
Understanding and managing the ways you are contributing to tension and stress building up in your body, causing you to toss and turn, wake up, and be unable to fall back asleep, is where you want to begin exploring if you have an issue where you wake up with a racing mind.
Awakening with a racing mind is a clear sign of underlying, unresolved tension and stress. You must begin to unpack and deal with these issues during the day so they don’t cause you to wake up or impair your sleep.
2. Poor Sleep Hygiene
Sleep hygiene is an umbrella term for the habits you have around sleep. Some people frequently drink too much alcohol, which heats the body, causing fitful sleep and fragmented sleep leading to frequent awakenings and the inability to fall back asleep.
Limiting alcohol and caffeine and ensuring you’re not using electronic devices late into the evening are simple steps for improving sleep hygiene. Unfortunately, people often don’t adopt good sleep hygiene, causing them to be unable to sleep through the night.
Interestingly, we go through a sleep cycle every 90 minutes where we often wake up but are unaware of that wakening.
Poor sleep hygiene, eating the wrong foods, drinking too much caffeine or alcohol, and lacking a cool, dark, quiet sleep environment all contribute to our inability to sleep through the night. This insufficient rest leads to reinforcing bad habits and patterns. Anchoring your mind and body with the concept of bed equals fitful sleeping, then wakening and being unable to go back to sleep.
You want to begin cleaning up your sleep hygiene and establishing a healthy lifestyle that is good for your health and sleep.
3. Too Much Liquid
Number three is significant for many people, consuming too much liquid too close to bedtime. This problem is frequent, especially for men, as we age and develop prostate issues.
There is nothing wrong with waking up to use the restroom; the challenge comes when you’re not unable to get back to sleep. You should be able to get back to sleep within 10 to 15 minutes or less.
If you cannot achieve sleep within that time, you should remove yourself from the bed and bedroom to avoid anchoring wakefulness or arousal in your bed.
This tactic is crucial, and I want to repeat it:
“If you cannot get back to sleep within 10 to 15 minutes, leave your bed and bedroom to avoid associating this unwanted wakefulness or arousal with your sleeping environment.”
It would be best to do something relaxing with a low light that doesn’t involve technology so you can relax, get sleepy again and then return to bed. This exercise is called stimulus control.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, this information and video will help you address your sleep challenges. You can schedule a free sleep consultation with one of our professional sleep coaches to learn more about the Sleep Science Academy difference and our uniquely successful and empowering program that pairs you with your sleep coach to help guide you successfully to deep restorative sleep.
And you can learn more about Dynamic Sleep Recalibration (DSR) in this article.
Here’s to a whole night of rejuvenating, deeply restorative sleep. Enjoy.