When you can’t sleep, all of your focus is on trying to sleep which actually can make sleeping even more difficult. What makes it worse is when you have something that you can’t get off of your mind, like political worry. Most of what you can do needs to happen before you are even trying to go to sleep.
Limit News
It is important to stay up to date on everything happening in the world, especially if you are feeling like you are on the political chopping block. So how do you counter your need for information and your need to sleep?
Limit your news intake so that you stop watching news at a certain time at least 1 hour prior to sleeping. If this doesn’t help, stop watching/reading the news (or doom scrolling) 2 hours prior to sleeping.
Protect Your Nervous System
Your nervous system needs to rest. If you are getting news alerts all day, your system never gets a chance to fully relax because at any moment, you can get a ping/alert telling you that something awful is happening. If you stop the alerts or have them only alert you at certain times of the day, you can allow your nervous system to rest. If you are constantly on high alert all day long, you can’t expect your nervous system to just turn off at night so you can sleep. You need to give it breaks during the day and remind it how to relax.
Get involved
If you are worried about the world around you, and you are able to focus on the things YOU ARE DOING TO HELP, it can sometimes calm down the chatter so that when you are going to sleep, you can remind yourself that you are doing everything in your power to make the situation a little better. This might mean educating people around you, attending a peaceful rally, calling your representatives, or writing letters to your representatives. There are a lot of places you can get involved to help the current political climate.
Caffeine
Make sure you limit your caffeine intake after 11am/noon. Once you are sleeping well, you can try to re-introduce caffeine slowly to find out when your “cut off time should be” (the time when you should stop drinking caffeine).
Blue Lights
Blue lights are present in many devices that we use every day. Blue light from phones, laptops, and some light bulbs can reduce melatonin and make us more alert—great for daytime focus but it can make trying to sleep nearly impossible. Using these devices late at night is like taking caffeine before sleep. Instead of quitting devices, install blue light–blocking apps or filters that dim blue tones a few hours before bedtime. Your screen may look odd, but your sleep will benefit. You can also switch off or replace blue-light bulbs in the evening.
Socks
Most people hate wearing socks to bed, however even short “ankle socks” can provide compression that can help you sleep. Think about it, we are brought into the world from a womb where we are compressed. Babies sleep better when they are swaddled. For the same reasons and benefits, wearing socks to bed is worth a try.
Heavy blanket on your midsection
A heavy blanket acts similarly as the swaddling described above. You don’t need to necessarily put the blanket over your entire body, just your midsection. Some people like weighted blankets and other people do not, but a heavy comforter should do the trick for most people. The combination of the heavy blanket and socks might help enough to help you get to sleep. If it is hot out, you may need to also turn on a fan.
Environment
Talk to your doctor about essential oils that might be safe. Lots of different smells can help relax people. Try to make sure your room is the right darkness, the right temperature, and as quiet as possible. There are certain things that will be out of your control, but the things you can control can make a difference.
I’m actually in bed and can’t sleep, what do I do?
When you are actually in bed trying to sleep: Focus on closing your eyes. Then go down your entire body (head to toe) to see what adjustments need to be made to make yourself comfortable. Do all this while taking slow, comfortable, deep breaths. It is oftentimes our inability to turn off our brain that causes our inability to fall asleep. Even if you never actually get to sleep, at least your body is resting. Sometimes, just stressing about not sleeping and looking at the clock a million times and estimating how many hours of sleep we are not getting can cause us to worry more and then not sleep. Shifting our focus to relaxing our entire body (as opposed to focusing on our sleeping) helps you enough to sleep.
Still not sleeping
If you are still not able to sleep, consider talking to a therapist. Often times we “work out” at night the things we don’t figure out during the day. Our body can do this in the form of dreams, nightmares or simply not being able to sleep. The more we ignore our problems, the more those problems tend to pop up at night.
Find a Therapist
Please call us at Long Beach Therapy to get help sleeping again. You can call/text us at 562-310-9741 to get more information or set up an appointment.