Guidelines for Sleeping Well

To regulate your sleeping schedule and get the most out of your time in bed, consider the following guidelines:

• Figure out how much sleep you need every night. We’ve always heard that we need eight hours of sleep per night, but in reality, everybody’s sleep needs are different. My husband is a bona fide nine-hours-a-night kind of guy, whereas my friend Bruce insists he doesn’t feel well if he gets more than seven hours of sleep. The amount of sleep you need is whatever it takes to make you feel rested, refreshed, alert, and ready to face the day. Once you know what you need, organize your life to make sure you get it.

• Go to bed and get up at the same time every day. This may be harder than it sounds. If you have to drag yourself out of bed at 6:30 every weekday morning to get to work on time, you’re probably not going to want to get up at that hour on the weekends. But if you let yourself sleep until 8:00 or 9:00 A.M., you’ll be throwing off your body’s internal clock. Because you won’t feel tired, you’ll probably end up going to bed later than you should on Sunday night (or lying in bed for hours unable to fall asleep). And on Monday, chances are good that you’ll develop a headache due to fatigue. Try to stick to a regular sleep schedule, even on weekends. If you’re tired, take a short nap in the afternoon, but go to bed and get up at your usual times whenever possible.

• Wind down for about an hour before retiring. When I was working a nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday office job, I used to run around on Sunday nights preparing for the week, making and freezing sandwiches, parceling out vitamins, packing my office bag, doing laundry, ironing clothes, and so forth. I was always superbusy right up until my 11:00 P.M. bedtime, when I’d fall into bed exhausted. But guess what? I couldn’t sleep. I finally realized that I couldn’t force my body to jam around at ninety miles per hour, then leap into bed and drop off immediately. It just doesn’t work that way.

I reorganized my Sundays so that my preparation work was done in the afternoons. In the evening, I was free to take a nice long bath, do some yoga, talk to my husband, and read a little. Then when 11:00 P.M. rolled around, I was ready to turn off the light and sink into a blissful sleep.

• Avoid drinking alcohol before bedtime. Alcohol may make you feel sleepy, but it actually robs you of shut-eye by disrupting normal sleep patterns. Since it’s also a known headache trigger, it’s best to avoid it at all times, not just before bed.

• Eat a light snack about an hour before bedtime. A glass of warm milk and a high-carbohydrate snack, like a piece of toast or some graham crackers, can help induce sleep. But avoid eating a heavy meal or drinking lots of liquids before retiring. The digestive process

and the subsequent trips to the bathroom can disrupt your sleep.

• Stay away from caffeine. Coffee, black tea, soda, chocolate, and cocoa all contain caffeine, a stimulant that can keep you awake long after you should have eased off into Slumberland. If you indulge in caffeinated beverages, do so only in the morning and early afternoon. After 2:00 P.M., switch to the decaffeinated variety.

• If you nap, do so with caution. Many elderly people fall into an insomnia trap by taking several catnaps during the day, thus disrupting their sleep during the night. If you’re really tired, take one short nap (sometimes even ten minutes can refresh you) in the afternoon.  Don’t nap in the morning or evening, and don’t sleep for more than one hour. You want to feel nice and tired at the end of the day so sleep will come easily.

• If you can’t sleep, get up. This is a hard one, but it’s absolutely necessary. If you’ve been in bed for more than a half hour and haven’t fallen asleep yet, get up and go do something monotonous, like folding laundry. Don’t do anything that’s too mentally taxing, like writing a report, and try to relax while you’re doing it. Reading or watching TV is fine, but not while in bed. Sit up and wait for fatigue to set in (you want that). Then, when you feel really tired, go back to bed and try again. If you still can’t sleep, repeat the process.

• Don’t use your bed as an office, playroom, or dining room. If you eat, play with your kids, or tackle your office work in bed, your bed will become associated with activity rather than rest. But if you use your bed only for sleeping, your mind and body will automatically shift into sleep mode once you hit the mattress. Make your bedroom a sanctuary of peace, and reserve your bed for two things only:    sleeping and making love.

• Turn your clock toward the wall. If you’re waiting for sleep to come or have suddenly awakened in the middle of the night, one of the worst things you can do is check the clock. It’s an immediate anxiety producer. “Oh no,” you’ll probably think. “I’ve been lying here for forty-five minutes, and it’s not happening.” Or, “Shoot, it’s 3:00 A.M., and I probably won’t be able to fall asleep again.” You don’t need to know what time it is. Either don’t look at the clock, or turnit toward the wall. Time will pass at its own speed, and one thing is for sure: you’ll have to get up soon enough.