Insomnia Part Four: What Pavlov Can Teach You About Sleep

The man pictured above is Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936) and if you are wondering why the photo of a long deceased Russian scientist is adorning this post, read on. I’ll come back to it by the end – I promise. 

But I’ll start by recapping my first three posts on how to be a better sleeper. First you have to relieve your anxiety around sleep by remembering that you are not defective if your sleep schedule doesn’t perfectly conform to some “ideal” about sleep, and that the best you can do is set the stage for good sleep and then accept that you otherwise are not in control of your nights. Secondly, you have to understand how to hack your circadian biology in order to optimize your hormones so that you are more likely to fall and stay asleep at night. 

While your circadian biology is crucial to getting better sleep, it is also important to optimize your psychological state so that you are relaxed, and so that your environment leverages the power of suggestion to entice you to fall asleep more easily. 

Your bedroom environment plays a key role in both your circadian biology and your psychological state of mind. A comfortable bedroom is cool and dark (circadian factors) and feels like a comfortable, safe, space that is intimately linked to sleep (psychological factors). So make sure your bedroom hits as many (preferably all) of the points on the following checklist:

• It should be approximately 65 degrees fahrenheit. This temperature has been found to be the most conducive to sleep. Feel free to adjust up or down a little to your personal tastes, but remember, in general a little too cool is better than a little too hot. Your body temperature MUST drop in order for sleep to set in and stick. Just as darkness is important for boosting your melatonin and suppressing cortisol (as I discussed in my last post), so too is this drop in body temperature. 
• It should be dark. Get blackout shades if possible to keep any ambient light (streetlights, the moon, etc) from coming in from the street. Keep nightlights to a minimum, and if you do feel the need for nightlights, use red colored ones and keep them as low to the ground as you can, as this type of lighting has been shown to have less impact on melatonin levels. 
• It should be quiet. Again, take whatever steps you can to ensure this, and purchase a white noise device or use a fan if you don’t have other options. 
• It should be comfortable, so if your bed, pillow, or linens are past their prime and you can afford to do so, invest in an upgrade.
• It should be an inviting space. Do your best to keep your bedroom clean, free of clutter, tastefully decorated, and painted in a color you like. Don’t underestimate the power of this tip. You will spend roughly a third of your life in your bedroom, engaging in one of the most important activities (sleep) that you will ever engage in. (Actually, two of the most important activities in your life, if you are sexually active). Don’t treat your bedroom as an afterthought. It should be a relaxing space that sends you a psychological signal as soon as you walk through the door. That psychological signal should say “this is a safe place, free from the cares of the rest of your life, in which you can feel at peace and relaxed.” 

Once you’ve set up your bedroom to honor the above principles, make sure to follow one more: don’t desecrate this space by abusing it for other purposes. Your bedroom is for sleep and for sex, and for nothing else. 

Your bedroom is not the place to watch television, surf the internet, catch up on work, use your laptop, check your cell phone, listen to the radio, or engage in any of the other distractions of daily life. Use every other room in your house for these purposes if you like, but keep all of this other stuff out of your bedroom. 

One of your goals should be to create psychological cues that make it easier to fall asleep. The way to make your bedroom one of these cues is to, over time, build in your mind an association that says “bedroom = sleep.” You do NOT want to build an association that says “bedroom = sleep + work + watching the evening news + playing video games.” So keep televisions, radios, computers, and other electronic devices out of your bedroom entirely. 

This tip will take discipline and patience, because it will require you to reconfigure your bedroom, avoid temptation, and be consistent. Moreover, this is not a tip that will pay off right away. Make your bedroom as I suggest above and it will have virtually no effect on your sleep tonight, this week, or maybe even this month. But over time, as you become a better sleeper by implementing the other tips that I’ve discussed, the suggestions in this post will help to seal everything together, and make sleeping better something that comes to you as an easy habit, not a nightly struggle. 

Perhaps you know about Pavlov’s famous experiment? More than a century ago, he rang a bell every time he was about to feed his dogs. After doing this for a few weeks, he found that simply ringing the bell would lead his dogs to start salivating. In other words, the dogs had developed an association in their mind: bell = food. And this association was so strong that it actually changed the dogs’ biology – simply hearing a bell rung could make them drool and make their gastric juices start to run. Eventually he found that if he rang the bell and DIDN’T give the dogs anything to eat, they still started to salivate. 

By keeping your bedroom tightly associated with sleep and only sleep, you can “Pavlov” yourself. Eventually, the very act of completing your pre-bedtime routine and walking into your bedroom will be enough to help you fall and stay asleep.