Struggling to fall asleep or troubled by middle of the night wakings?
If you’re finding it hard to fall asleep or you’re anxious about middle of the night wakings, here’s what you can do to slip into slumber and maintain your sleep more effectively.
It’s hardly surprising that so many of us are experiencing delayed, broken or poor quality sleep.
The pace of modern life with long working hours and the over stimulation caused by information overload is now part of the fabric of our lives. Our days are constantly disrupted and interrupted by phone alerts, social media, messaging systems, and news flashes, to name just a few. With so much external stimulation, it can become easy to stop paying attention to our bodily cues of hunger and tiredness, instead choosing to ‘push through’ to get things done even it means staying up late to meet work, social or home obligations.
With this, an activated and slightly agitated state continues long into the evenings and our nervous systems are placed in a low level chronic stress mode , which we often discount.
The onset of sleep is meant to take a little time, because we don’t switch off like machines!
We often hope to fall asleep straight away but our minds aren’t like our phones that can be switched off with the press of a button! The autonomic nervous system (responsible for our safety with the ‘rest-digest’ and the ‘fight-flight’ modes at it’s polar ends), needs time to influence the hormonal system for sleepiness to occur in a natural and sequential way, which is usually around 15 - 20 minutes.
If we don’t relax, the nervous system takes much longer to ‘down regulate’, from ‘activated’ to ‘deactivated’, and it’s likely there will be stops and starts along the way, with a second wind sometimes occurring. If you do fall asleep very quickly from extreme fatigue, your mind may not have settled fully. There might be a niggling problem or emotionally troubling thoughts you’ve been ignoring and these may well pop up in the early hours, demanding your attention and disrupting your sleep.
One of the biggest sleep myths is that we should all be sleeping continuously for 8 hours a night
We have been led to think that there is something amiss if our sleep is not a consolidated 8 hours yet the natural human sleep pattern is not monophasic (Foster, Life Time 2023). Records of nocturnal life in pre-industrial Europe describe getting up in the middle of the night, doing something relaxing before going back to bed again as a commonplace routine.
Your brain and nervous system will prioritise the first 3 or 4 hours of our sleep
The first phase of our sleep, which the Victorians called our beauty sleep, is more about bodily repair and replenishment, which is essential for our survival. The second part has more mental and emotional processing, with dreaming increasing in the latter part of the night. It’s likely that there will be awakenings during this second phase, from around 3 am with unsettled persistent thoughts coming out ‘out on parade’.
When we can’t get back to sleep, it’s usually because our minds are busy or we’re worried about something. Most of us don’t have a sleep problem, we have a stress or anxiety problem.
Life Stage, hormones and state of mind are factors disrupting sleep in the middle of the night
Age causes the sleep drive or sleep pressure to be less pronounced, making it harder to fall asleep.
Hormones controlling urine production change with age, so going to the loo in the night as we get older is more common!
Menopause affects sleep in several ways, including body temperature disruption or hot flushes.
Strategies and yoga practices to fall asleep more easily & maintain quality sleep
The recommendations below are based on recent scientific thinking and case studies of clients I’ve worked with, and I encourage you to find routines that are ideally suited to your lifestyle and constitution.
It’s easy to catastrophise in the middle of the night, so try to move away from the idea that being awake in the night is a dreadful thing that’s going to lead to terrible consequences.
Stick to a regular wind down routine
Decide on a regular time ‘to close the day’ and start a relaxing evening routine, dimming the lights, putting phones and screens away. A warm bath or shower is relaxing and raises your body temperature, so that the subsequent cooling of your body, achieves the necessary drop of 1-3 degrees in core body temperature which is needed for the onset of sleep.
Therapeutic journalling:
A few minutes of simple ‘brain dump’ journalling could include writing down any unresolved issues or worrying thoughts which you haven’t given enough attention during the day or even a simplified to-do list for the next day, Close your notebook as a way of setting aside your worries and putting them into a ‘container’ for the night.
A sleep sequence of simple yoga poses to drop into a more relaxed state.
Specific yoga postures are designed to pull tension from the body, helping you to unwind & ‘drop down’ into a more relaxed state. The simple sleep sequence (as developed by Lisa Sanfilippo) practiced on a mat or rug on the floor next to your bed for 5- 15 minutes before bedtime, is effective in shifting the nervous system into the ‘relaxation response’ (the opposite of the ‘stress response’). Due to the relaxing nature of the poses you may start sighing, slowing your breathing or yawning, and is especially helpful if you’ve been inactive during the day. (Read the blog ‘Unlocking the secrets to falling asleep with yoga’ to find out more about this).
Practiced regularly before bedtime, the sleep sequence is helpful in maintaining quality sleep throughout the night and most of the poses can be done on the softer surface of a bed if you wake during the night.
Strategies to get back to sleep and what to avoid
Trying to sleep is an ineffective approach as you’re likely to get frustrated, annoyed and anxious about being awake. It’s more effective to involve yourself in something effortless and relaxing because sleep doesn’t respond well to effort!
Activities that engage the mind without overstimulating it can vary from one person to the next. Listening to a story, relaxing music or a meditative relaxation recording such as yoga nidra involve the mind in an effortless way. Checking the clock on your phone will most likely draw you into checking emails or social media and will be activating and arousing. Reading a book in low level light requires little effort, as long as what you’re reading is not overly stimulating!
If staying in bed approaches don’t work, get up for a while. Non stimulating activities like reading, knitting or listening to music or a book won’t activate or arouse your nervous system, and one or two sleep sequence yoga poses on the floor may bring on a few yawns!
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Sources:
Sleep Recovery, Lisa Sanfilippo, 2020
Yoga therapy for Insomnia and Sleep Recovery, Lisa Sanfilippo, 2019
Life Time, Russell foster 2023
Sleep, Nick Littlehales, 2016
Yoga for Insomnia (Online Course), Nirlipta Tuli