Why Sleep Matters — And What to Do When It Doesn’t Come Easily
Struggling with insomnia or having difficulty sleeping can have a really negative effect on our quality of life. This video presents an overview of the cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia program developed by Dr. Greg Jacobs at Harvard Medical School. For more detailed information about his online CBT for insomnia program, please visit CBT for insomnia .com.
In this video, we're going to learn how to sleep better through sleep hygiene techniques and with sleep scheduling strategies that help us sleep more efficiently. And in my other video on insomnia, we learn how to improve our sleep by quieting our minds and reducing our negative sleep thoughts — you'll find a link to that video in the description.
If you’re searching for how to sleep better, CBT for insomnia, or sleep hygiene tips, you’re in the right place. These evidence-based strategies are designed to help you reclaim restful nights — naturally, sustainably, and without medication.
Part 1: Sleep Hygiene — Train Your Brain to Sleep (Not Just Lie Awake)
Sleep hygiene involves modifying our behaviors to create an environment and establish habits that make it easier for us to fall asleep and to stay asleep. One of the main goals of sleep hygiene is to learn to associate being in bed with being asleep.
So, the first rule of sleep hygiene is to only use your bedroom for sleeping and intimacy. You want to train your mind to associate the bedroom — and especially your bed — with sleeping and nothing else. Because most people who sleep poorly associate being in bed with lying awake, not being able to fall asleep. And we really want to train our bodies to associate being in bed with sleeping — because that makes it much more likely that we’ll fall asleep when we go to bed.
Don’t bring your laptop or phone to bed. Don’t study or work in your bed. Don’t have a long problem-solving session with your partner in bed. And don’t lounge around in bed once you wake up.
If it helps you to fall asleep, you can read or watch TV in bed for up to 30 minutes before you go to sleep — but no longer than this. If you like to read or watch TV for longer than half an hour to help you wind down at night, then start off somewhere else — in the living room, on the couch — and then only move into your bedroom and bed once you’re ready to fall asleep. Only go to bed once you’re already feeling drowsy. Otherwise, you’ll just lie there in bed unable to sleep.
And then — if you’ve been in bed for more than 20 to 30 minutes without having fallen asleep — lying in bed any longer is unlikely to bring on sleep anytime soon. And you’re just teaching your body to associate being in bed with lying awake rather than falling asleep.
So after 20 to 30 minutes of being in bed unable to sleep, get up and move to a different room and do something relaxing for 20 to 30 minutes — like reading a book, or listening to some quiet music, or doing a relaxation exercise (like the one I linked to in the description). And then return to your bed only once you’re feeling sleepy.
Also, try to keep your bedroom dark, quiet, and relatively cool. Our bodies cool down at night as we prepare for sleep — so if we keep our bedrooms too warm, it interferes with this process. Most people find they sleep best at a room temperature in the mid to high 60s.
Part 2: What You Do Before Bed Matters — Wind Down the Right Way
Sleeping well isn’t just about what happens once you go to bed. The hours leading up are important as well.
Try to shut off your computer or phone for 30 minutes to an hour before bed — and use a blue light filter on any devices you can as bedtime approaches. And don’t eat a big meal, drink alcohol or caffeine close to your bedtime. Nicotine is a stimulant — so avoid smoking right before bed.
And try to have a nighttime routine that involves some relaxation before you get into bed — doing some yoga or meditation, or taking a bath, or just reading or watching TV, or even cleaning up the kitchen if you find that relaxing. We all need something to help us unwind before bed.
If you’re working right up until bedtime, or dwelling on things that went on during the day, or worrying about tomorrow when you get into bed — you’re probably not going to be able to quiet your mind enough to fall asleep.
Part 3: Sleep Scheduling — Let Your Body’s Clock Work For You (Not Against You)
Now we’re going to look at sleep scheduling — and how that can help us sleep better.
One of the most important things we can do to promote good sleep is to keep a regular sleep schedule. Our bodies rely on a consistent 24-hour routine — or circadian rhythm — to regulate our sleep-wake cycle. Our bodies get used to going to bed at a certain time and waking up at a certain time. That’s why if we get up at the same time every day, we often wake up just before our alarm goes off — our body knows that it’s time to wake up. It doesn’t need an alarm to tell it.
The more we can stay consistent and let our bodies get into the habit of knowing it’s time to go to sleep and it’s time to wake up, the better our sleep will be. And the less regular our sleep schedule is, the less we can rely on our body’s internal clock to help us sleep — and the more we start fighting against it.
So keeping a consistent sleep schedule is one of the best things you can do for your sleep.
And that’s one of the things that makes sleeping so difficult for shift workers or new parents — whose sleep schedules are constantly getting disrupted — or when we travel across time zones, or experience the effects of daylight savings time.
It’s important to try to maintain the same sleep schedule even on weekends. If you’re so tired at the end of the week that you need to sleep in — try to limit it to no more than half an hour. If you’re sleeping in a few extra hours on the weekend, when you try to get back to your regular routine on Sunday night, you’re probably going to find it hard to fall asleep. And difficulty sleeping Sunday night is one of the reasons we can be so cranky on Monday mornings.
And if you need to take a nap — these are fine earlier in the day — but try to keep them to under 45 minutes. Otherwise, it can disrupt your sleep at night. And having a nap later in the day makes it more difficult to get to sleep at night. So a nap in the morning or after lunch should be fine — but a nap after work or after dinner can make it harder to fall asleep when you go to bed.
So maintaining a consistent sleep schedule is the first aspect of sleep scheduling.
Part 4: Sleep Efficiency — The Secret Metric That Determines How Well You Sleep
But there’s another element — and this involves sleep efficiency.
Sleep efficiency refers to the amount of time you spend asleep compared to the amount of time you spend in bed. So if you fall asleep as soon as your head hits a pillow and then sleep right until your alarm goes off, your sleep efficiency is 100%.
If you go to bed at 11:00 and set your alarm for 7:00, you’ve allotted 8 hours for sleep — and if you sleep 7 hours, that’s 7/8 efficiency — or 87.5%.
Good sleepers average 95% sleep efficiency. And the average person has about 90% sleep efficiency — which would be allotting 8 hours of sleep and then sleeping for 7 and a quarter.
Poor sleepers average only about 65% sleep efficiency — which would be, for example, only about 5 and a half hours of sleep over a period of eight and a quarter hours allotted for sleep.
Now — as we talked about with sleep hygiene — we want our beds to be strongly associated with sleeping. And for good sleepers, being in bed is a strong cue for sleep. But for poor sleepers — who might spend 2 or 3 hours or even longer lying awake in bed each night — bed becomes a strong cue for being awake.
So in order to overcome insomnia, we need to find ways to sleep more efficiently — and to make our beds a stronger cue for sleep.
Now — if you practice better sleep hygiene and sleep scheduling, and learn to quiet your mind and reduce negative sleep thoughts (like I talk about in my other video on insomnia) — your sleep efficiency will improve.
But sometimes it still doesn’t improve enough.
Part 5: Reducing Time in Bed — The Counterintuitive Trick That Actually Works
In which case, we can further improve our sleep efficiency by reducing the amount of time we spend in bed.
Now — usually, when people have trouble sleeping, they increase the amount of time they spend in bed — which makes sense: you want more sleep, so you spend more time in bed. But unfortunately, this has the opposite effect of what’s desired — because now you’re spending more time in bed, and your sleep is even less efficient — and you find it even more difficult to fall asleep once you’re in bed.
And spending too much time in bed interferes with our body’s natural rhythm. The longer we’ve been awake, the stronger we feel the pressure for sleep — due to increased physical activity and exposure to light — and due to increased accumulation of adenosine, which is a chemical our body produces that makes us sleepy. And our levels of adenosine increase the whole time we’re awake.
So if we sleep in or go to bed earlier — by spending more time in bed — we find it more difficult to sleep, because our bodies haven’t had enough time to do all the things they need to do in order for us to start feeling sleepy again.
So paradoxically — if we’re having trouble sleeping — instead of spending more time in bed, we need to start spending less time in bed.
And we start by giving ourselves 1 hour longer in bed than we tend to sleep. So if you’re averaging 6 hours of sleep a night, then give yourself 7 hours of time for sleeping.
And this may result in having a little less sleep at first — as your body adjusts to having less time in bed. So if you’re tired during the day, you can take a nap — as long as it’s before 4:00 p.m. and lasts less than 45 minutes.
And if after a week your sleep efficiency hasn’t improved, you can reduce your allotted sleep time even more — but don’t ever give yourself less than 5 and a half hours to sleep — so you always have enough time to get your core sleep.
And then — once your sleep efficiency has reached 85% for at least 2 weeks — you can increase your allotted time for sleep by half an hour a week — as long as you’re still maintaining 85% sleep efficiency.
Now — I understand that reducing the amount of time you spend in bed when you’re already having trouble sleeping can sound a little ridiculous — and can be a hard thing to convince yourself to try.
So you can always use a more gradual approach — and try going to bed just 15 minutes later at night — or getting up just 15 minutes earlier in the morning — so just decreasing the amount of time allotted for sleep by 15 minutes. And you’ll probably find that you’re still getting the same amount of sleep overall.
And then you can further reduce the amount of time allotted for sleep in 15-minute increments — until your sleep efficiency has improved to at least 85%.
Final Thoughts: You Don’t Have to Suffer Through Sleepless Nights
If you follow the sleep hygiene and scheduling guidelines — as well as the strategies for quieting your mind and reducing negative sleep thoughts that I talk about in my other video on insomnia — it probably won’t be too long until you start to notice at least some improvements in your sleep.
Please check out my free self-help for insomnia course at selfhelp tunes.com.
And if you like this video and would like to support my channel and help me make more videos like this — I really appreciate it. Please check out the donation links in the description.
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