But what of the person who falls asleep easily, but often wakes up in the middle of the night and has difficulty falling back to sleep?
This is a common problem, and it’s one that is more challenging to treat than that of the person who has trouble falling asleep in the first place. But there are two pieces of advice that are most effective for solving this issue.
The first is to reinforce the idea that there is no one set way to sleep. It’s actually normal for all of us to wake up several times per night. Most of the time, we fall right back to sleep, and often don’t even remember waking by the next morning. But sometimes (for just about all of us) and frequently (for far too many) it’s much more challenging and the nighttime awakenings can be torturously long. This may however represent not a problem with you, but rather a problem with our society’s sleep expectations.
As I alluded to in a prior post, there is a lot of historical evidence that humans did NOT sleep in 7-8 consecutive hour blocks for much of history, and that up to a few hundred years ago it was normal for people to get up in the middle of the night for an hour or two and to use this time to read, pray, socialize, etc. If you are in the habit of waking up at 3am every night and being up for an hour, you may find it more helpful to embrace that time rather than to fight it. If for example you sleep like a rock from 10pm to 3am, and then again from 4 am to 7 am, and you generally feel well rested, you should realize that you are in fact getting eight hours of sleep per night and you really don’t have a problem.
The second thing I counsel people on is to be meticulous to not create a “bed-wake” association. Classically, the insomniac who wakes up in the middle of the night will lie awake in bed, tossing and turning, torturing themselves with stress about not being able to fall back to sleep. Of course, this just creates more sleep anxiety, plus an association in the mind between being in bed and being awake and stressed out, which is exactly the opposite of what we want to achieve.
Therefore, if you wake up in the middle of the night and don’t fall back to sleep within 10 minutes, my advice is to get out of bed. Go to another room. Put your amber-colored blue light blocking glasses on, turn on the lights as dimly as you need, and proceed to engage in a relaxing, non-screen based, calming activity. This is a great time to read a book, to meditate, to pray, or to listen to calming music. Avoid stimulating activities such as watching TV, surfing the internet, or catching up on work emails. When you feel really tired again – and no sooner – go back to bed and try again.
While this can be frustrating to the person who has to be up early in the morning and worries they are missing out on their sleep, the fact is that if you lie in bed tossing and turning, you are not sleeping anyway. At least here you get some “me” time. And, most importantly, you break the “bed-wake” association, which – in the long run, if you apply this technique consistently – will lead to fewer nighttime awakenings.
That brings my series on insomnia to an end. As I stated in post number one, I could never cover on this blog everything I know about sleep. If you are having a lot of sleep difficulty, see your doctor or seek out the help of a therapist who is trained in treating insomnia. But for the average person, the steadfast application of the techniques I’ve covered in these five posts will bring significant sleep improvements within a few weeks time. For the mild insomniac, or just the average person who is interested in better health optimization, the techniques I’ve covered may be more than sufficient.
