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Sleep Hygiene and Curing Insomnia

Unless my stress is at Alert Level Red, I don’t really have a problem with insomnia. Jen, on the other hand, has “rarely been successful at sleeping through the night” since she was a teenager. She’s written a lengthy and informative post on her rigorous sleep hygiene (a term I hadn’t heard before) routine. Here’s just one of the rules:

The bedroom should be dark, and no looking at the clock when waking up in the middle of the night. I must cover the LCD display of my clock radio before going to sleep so that I can’t see that it’s 4:00am when I wake up in a fit of anxiety and further freak out about that. This has already screwed me over once: the alarm didn’t go off, and I laid in bed (in the dark room, of course) for a good 20 minutes trying to get back to sleep before getting up and seeing that HOLY SHIT I’M REALLY LATE.

I chose that one because it was somehow intuitive for me. I really don’t want to know what time it is until my alarm goes off.

Here’s another thing I do naturally, which seems a little unusual. I close my eyes the moment I switch the light off, and don’t open them unless I have to get up to go to the bathroom or something. I think I developed this habit as a child with a turbo-charged imagination. I didn’t want to see the monsters coming for me out of the closet (and the wardrobe, and the bathroom, and from under the bed).

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Published by dbarefoot

Darren Barefoot is an author, speaker and digital strategist. He’s the co-founder of Capulet Communications, and co-author of “Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook”.

2 comments

  1. Sleep is very natural and non-stressful for me, in general. If I wake up and see it’s 3:23 a.m., I think “oh, it’s 3:23 a.m.” and nod right off again.

    My oldest daughter finds the whole experience much more stressful, although she too can go back to sleep once she’s finally gotten herself into it. She does sometimes sleepwalk, however.

    You might be interested in my link to an October Ideas Podcast from CBC, which speculates that we may have completely disrupted natural human sleep patterns with artificial light, and that if we slept longer with the fade of the sun, we might normally be awake for some hours in the middle of the night — and should not be alarmed about it.

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