Not only will those thoughts keep you awake, you also probably won’t make much progress on what’s keeping you up because your prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that excels at planning and analysis, doesn’t get as much blood at night.Īn emerging hypothesis suggests the brain isn’t well suited for cognitive processing in the wee hours, Prichard says. It’s also important to resist the urge to fixate on worries, concerns or challenges, both experts say, especially in the middle of the night. You could use the time to read, listen to calming music, drink some chamomile tea or do breathing exercises-anything that slows and comforts your body and mind, Hutchison and Prichard say. “If you’re unable to fall asleep in what seems like or feels like 20 minutes or so, or you feel your body getting more amped up because you’re getting anxious that you’re not falling asleep, then I would recommend getting out of bed and sitting somewhere quietly with dim light and just relaxing, doing something boring,” Hutchison says. Hutchison and Prichard both say that the key, whether you’re struggling to sleep just as you’re heading to bed or after waking up in the middle of the night, is to limit the amount of time you spend lying awake fretting about not being asleep.
That’s why anxiety and stress are key culprits when people are unable to fall and stay asleep-and why relaxation is a crucial tool for easing into slumber. “If there’s something that you are really worried about, if you are sleeping next to someone you don’t trust, if you’re worried that the newborn that you’re caring for might stop breathing, it’s going to be hard to fall asleep.” “You need to feel both physically and psychologically safe to sleep,” Prichard says. The process of nodding off can also be affected by your emotions. A hot summer night or a bright streetlamp seeping through the window can interfere. This switch is governed in part by environmental cues, such as light or temperature. When conditions are good, hitting the sack allows your brain activity to slow down and become more orderly, and your brain waves synchronize, Prichard says. “It’s very uncommon for people to be able to just transition from being awake and active to falling asleep right away,” says Kim Hutchison, a sleep medicine specialist at Oregon Health & Science University.įalling asleep is a big shift for your brain. Fortunately sleep experts are gaining an increasingly strong understanding of what’s happening in the brain during the process-and they say you can use that knowledge to increase your chances of catching some z’s, even when sleep feels elusive. While having trouble drifting off to sleep isn’t unusual, it still can be frustrating.
“That’s just not biologically supported with how humans sleep.” “There’s this expectation that we should just go to sleep and stay sleeping for seven to eight hours,” says Roxanne Prichard, a neuroscientist at the University of St. In fact, scientists say it’s pretty normal to have a little trouble falling asleep or staying asleep from time to time.
#CALMING MUSIC FOR SLEEP HOW TO#
We’ve all been there: lying in bed wide awake and desperately wondering how to get to dreamland.
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