Drop Caffeine (at Least Initially)
First, if you drink coffee, tea (including green tea
and white tea), yerba mate, cola, or any caffeinated beverages on a
semi-regular basis, this method won't work very well at all, so I
strongly recommend that you get off all caffeine for at least 2 weeks
before you attempt to make improvements in this area. I also advise
that you drop chocolate during this time as well, including cocoa and
cacao, since those contain stimulants too.
Even a small cup of coffee in the morning can
disrupt your ability to fall asleep quickly at night. You may also
sleep less restfully, and you'll be prone to awaken more often
throughout the night. Consequently, you may wake up tired and need
extra sleep.
Simply eliminating all caffeine from your diet can
improve your sleep habits tremendously.
The Process
The process involves using short, timed naps to train your brain to fall asleep more quickly. Here's how it works:
If and when you feel drowsy at some point during the
day, give yourself permission to take a 20-minute nap.
But only allow
yourself exactly 20 minutes total. Use a timer to set an alarm."Set a timer for 20
minutes" or "Wake me up in 20 minutes." The first one sets a countdown
timer, while the later phrase sets an alarm to go off at a specific
time. Sometimes I prefer to use a kitchen timer with a 20-minute
countdown.
Begin the timer as soon as you lie down for your
nap. Whether you sleep or not, and regardless of how long it takes you
to fall asleep, you have 20 minutes total for this activity… not a
minute more.
Simply relax and allow yourself to fall asleep as
you normally would. You don't have to do anything special here, so
don't try to force it. If you fall asleep, great. If you just lie there
awake for 20 minutes, also great. And if you sleep for some fraction of
the time, that's perfectly okay too.
At the end of the 20 minutes, you must get up
immediately. No lingering. This part is crucial. If you're tempted to
continue napping after the alarm goes off, then put the alarm across
the room so you have to get up to turn it off. Or have someone else
forcibly yank you off the couch or bed when they hear the alarm. But no
matter what, get up immediately. The nap is over. If you're still
tired, you can take another nap later — wait at least an hour — but
don't let yourself go back to sleep right away.
I think it's best to do your nap practice during the
day if you can, but you can also do it in the evening, as long as it's
at least an hour before your normal bedtime. Perhaps the best time for
an evening nap is right after dinner, when many people feel a little
sleepy.
You don't have to take the naps every day, but do
them at least a few times a week if you can. I think the ideal practice
would be one nap per day.
The next part of this process is to always wake up
with an alarm in the morning. Set your alarm for a fixed time every
day, seven days a week. When your alarm goes off each morning, get up
immediately regardless of how much sleep you actually got. Again, no
lingering.
Now when you go to bed at night, seek to go to bed
at a time that will essentially require you to be sleeping the whole
time you're in bed in order to feel well rested in the morning. So if
you feel you need a good 7 hours of sleep each night to feel rested,
and you plan to get up at 5am every morning, then get yourself into bed
and ready to sleep at about 10pm. If you take 30 minutes to fall
asleep, then you're getting less sleep than you need, and this is a
disincentive to continuing that wasteful habit.
The message you're sending to your brain is that the
time you have to sleep is limited. You are going to get out of bed
after a certain number of hours no matter what. You're going to get up
from your nap after a specific amount of time no matter what. So if
your brain wants to sleep, it had better learn to go to sleep quickly
and use the maximum time allotted for sleep. If it wastes time falling
asleep, then it misses out on that extra sleep, and it will not have
the opportunity to make it up by sleeping in later. Sleep time
squandered is sleep time lost.
When you go to bed whenever and allow yourself to
get up whenever, you reward your brain for continued laziness and
inefficiency. It's fine if you take a half hour to fall asleep since
your brain knows it can just sleep in later. If you awaken with an
alarm but go to bed earlier than necessary to compensate for the time
it takes you to fall asleep, your still tell your brain that it's fine
to waste time transitioning to sleep because there's still enough extra
time to get the rest it needs.
Coffee and chocolate are also crutches because if
you don't get enough sleep, your brain can come to rely on a stimulant
to keep it going when necessary. If you remove these outs, then your
brain will soon connect the dots. It will learn that taking too long to
fall asleep equals not getting enough sleep, which means going through
the day tired and sleepy. By closing the door on potential outs like
stimulants and extra snooze time, you leave only one remaining option
for a solution. Sooner or later your brain will determine that going to
sleep faster is indeed the solution, and it will adapt by transitioning
into sleep much more quickly, so as to secure the full amount of rest
it desires.
Instead of continuing to give your brain the message
that oversleeping is okay or that stimulants are available, begin to
condition it to understand that sleep time is a limited resource. Your
brain is naturally good at optimizing scarce physiological resources;
it evolved to do so over a long period of time. So if sleep time
appears to be a limited resource, your brain can learn to optimize its
use of this resource just as it has learned to optimize the use of
oxygen and sugar.
If you get sleepy during the day as a result of
limiting your sleep time at night, that's perfectly okay. Take naps as
needed. It's okay to take multiple naps during the day if you need to,
but keep them limited to 20 minutes max, and don't have two naps within
an hour of each other. Whenever you get up, stay up for at least an
hour.
Once you get used to 20-minute naps — or if you
don't have that much time available for napping — try napping for
shorter intervals. Give yourself 15, 10, or even 5 minutes for each
nap. I sometimes take 3-4 minute naps (with a timer), which are
surprisingly refreshing, but only if I fall asleep quickly.
Teach your brain that a 20-minute nap means 20
minutes of total time lying down. If your brain wants to ruminate
during part of that time, it always means less sleep.
Also teach your brain that X number of hours in bed
at night is all it gets, and so if it wants to get enough sleep, it had
better spend virtually all of that time sleeping. If it spends time on
non-sleep activity, it always robs itself of some sleep.
Once you've adapted and you're able to fall asleep
quickly when you desire to do so, you can slack off on the training
process, ditch the alarm, and wake up whenever you want. Most likely
the training will stick. You can even add the caffeine back if you so
desire. But for a period of at least a couple months to start, I
recommend being strict about it. Take naps regularly, and use an alarm
to get up at a consistent time every single day.
I still prefer to get up with an alarm most days. I
don't need it to fall asleep quickly, but I tend to linger in bed more
than necessary without the alarm. If this is too strict for you, I doubt you'll
succeed with this approach. If you give your brain an easy out, it will
take that out, and it won't learn the adaptation you're trying to teach
it here.
Everyone is different, so how long it takes you to
adapt depends on your particular brain. I'm sure some people will adapt
fairly quickly, within a few weeks, while others may take significantly
longer. There are many factors that can influence the results, with
perhaps the biggest one being your diet.
In general, a lighter,
healthier, and more natural diet will make it significantly easier to
adapt to any sort of sleep changes. Regular exercise also makes it
easier to adapt to sleep changes; cardio exercise in particular helps
to rebalance hormones and neurotransmitters, many of which are involved
in regulating sleep cycles.
If you eat a heavily processed diet (i.e.
shopping mostly outside the produce section) and you don't exercise
much, just be aware that I rarely see such people succeed with
worthwhile sleep changes of any kind.
