Q:I have not had a full night sleep for years.
I do not know what to do to try to fix things. I know that I get anxious easily and I always thought that I could fix things sleep-wise if I could simply calm down a bit, but it has never worked.
What might you suggest?
A: I hope your first stop for fixing your sleep disorder will be with your family physician. A great many people struggling with sleep disorders have something called sleep apnea. This is a medical condition, and your doctor can not only diagnose it if it is a problem for you, but also help you overcome it. It is worth a visit.
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Sleep apnea or not, most of the literature is loaded with suggestions for what they refer to as sleep hygiene, or making sure that you are following those recommendations that encourage us to better prepare for the night-time journey into the unknown.
Here are some of their ideas:
- If you are a coffee drinker, don’t have a cup past midafternoon. Coffee is a stimulant and it will keep you awake if you carry it around in your body in the evening.
- If you love television or working on your computer, turn both off at least an hour before bedtime. Computers and TVs have thousands of little pixels in their screens that bounce around and keep your nervous system on red alert, which is not where you want it to be when you try to go to sleep.
- Don’t let anxiety get you down. If you and your wife had a misunderstanding earlier in the evening, try to fix it before going to bed. Apologize to your children if you have been a little bit unreasonable to them that day and put your tools away in the quonset so that when you go back the following day, you won’t have to look around to find everything.
- Look after yourself. Make sure that your bedroom is neat and tidy before going to bed and keep that bed looking as inviting as you can before you slide into it to remind yourself that you are looking forward to a good sleep tonight.
There are no miracles. Sleep disorders do not magically go away.
Sometimes you can hurry the process by taking sleeping pills, but medication comes loaded with its own problems and unless you have the blessing of your family doctor and are aware of the side-effects that you can expect from sleeping pills, you are better off in the long run to leave pharmaceuticals out of your program.
Given time and patience, your program without the pill will work.
