Some nights, no matter how normal your sleeping patterns are, you just can’t do it.
When those nights happen, it’s good to have a couple of tricks in your arsenal.
Here are a few really useful ones, told by experts to Women’s Health.
- Focus on staying awake. This one may sound like the opposite of what you should do, but it may actually calm you down. Instead of worrying about falling asleep, which is guaranteed to keep you awake, you just think about the fact that you’re awake without feeling pressure to be asleep. This allows you to relax enough that you’ll fall asleep naturally.
- Write things down. If it’s your worry that’s keeping you awake, try writing all of them down. This helps you get them out of your head and onto paper. It’s called “constructive worrying,” and it’s great not just for getting the problems on paper, but for brainstorming possible solutions and making the problems feel more manageable.
- Keep your pets out of the room. If you have a little bud, you may love letting them sleep on the bed with you, and their crying when you put them in their own bed makes you sad. But when your cat gets hyperactive at midnight, it may be time for a separation. Even if you can fall asleep with them, their circadian rhythms are different, and their walking around will disturb your sleep in the night.
- Turn on the fan. A temperature between 62 and 70 degrees is perfect for sleeping, because our core body temperature drops at night, and we need to accommodate that. If you’re having trouble falling asleep, you may just be too toasty warm.
- Meditate with a purpose. You don’t have to be a zen expert, but focus on one or two things—maybe relaxing your muscles, or clearing your brain of stress. Once you’re relaxed, sleep will come to you.
