Struggling to fall asleep at night? Discover the principles of good sleep hygiene with practical tips on creating a bedtime routine, limiting screen time, and optimizing your sleeping environment. Learn relaxation techniques and mindful eating habits to enhance your sleep quality. Empower yourself with expert insights and mindfulness practices to cultivate restful nights.
It’s 1am, or maybe 3am, and you’re laying in bed unable to fall asleep. Oooof. There’s something we need and think it should be simple and natural to do, and it’s not. This can feel deeply disempowering.
The early Buddhist teachings point out that our experience arises from conditions – and some, though not all, conditions are ones we can shape and influence.
According to sleep experts (we love interviewing them on our podcast) and the teachers guiding our popular sleep meditations, there are things we can do to end the conditions that keep us tossing and turning at 1am.
Health practitioners call this ‘good sleep hygiene’ – a set of routines and practices that promote quality sleep and help you feel rested upon waking. In other words, create the conditions for a good night’s sleep.
Our bodies love routine, especially when it comes to rest. The brain associates certain activities and environments with sleep, so performing the same set of relaxing rituals each night can prime your body for slumber. A bedtime routine should avoid stimulating activities and include simple, soothing steps like light stretching, listening to music, reading by low light, taking a warm bath or shower, and other comforting habits. By allowing 30-60 minutes for this transition into sleep mode, you're more likely to doze off with ease.
The blue light emitted from electronic screens like TVs, smartphones, tablets, and computers can disrupt our natural sleep-wake cycle. This type of light functions as an environmental cue that signals the brain to stay awake and suppresses melatonin production - the hormone that controls sleepiness. Experts recommend powering down screens at least 1-2 hours before your set bedtime – just in time for your winding down rituals..
For supportive conditions in the room where you sleep, think “cool, dark, quiet.” Hanging blackout curtains, sleeping with a sleeping mask, and taping over the small LED lights on appliances and electronics can all help darken a room. Earplugs or a white noise machine may bring quiet, and breathable fabrics may make a bed cooler.
If you read this and think of all the ways your bedroom will never measure up (the downstairs neighbor who watches TV at high volumes, your sleep partner’s need for a nightlight), you’re not alone. Still, consciously choosing small ways you can make the space where you sleep feel calmer and more comfortable to you signals to ourselves that we care, and this supports relaxation as well.
We’ve wound down the day, darkened the room and are in our comfortable bed when – zap! The mind is full of stressful thoughts. This is a time when you can experiment with different relaxation techniques until you find one that works well for you. Taking some slow deep breaths, lengthening the exhale, or remembering a meditation technique you find relaxing and trying it on your own, may calm anxiety. You can also tense and release each muscle group in your body systematically, progressing from your feet up to your face. We created sleep meditations [link to app] you can listen to in bed that offer different ways to relax the body and mind for sleep. Again, this is a chance to find what works well for you.
What we eat and drink is a powerful variable in creating good conditions for sleep. Digestion is a many-hours process so looking at what we consume throughout the day, in addition to before bed, can be supportive. Mindfulness can help us notice the connections between foods that lead to easily falling and staying asleep, and ones that lead to the opposite. While there’s plenty of advice around what not to eat late in the day (heavy or spicy meals, alcohol, caffeine), we feel most convinced when we see the causal effects for ourselves.
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All things arise due to conditions, and whatever sleep we’re having, we’ve likely been cultivating, and subject to, the conditions for it for a long time. Mindfulness empowers us to see experimental changes, big or small, we can try out to create more supportive routines (like rituals and relaxation techniques for winding down the day) and restful environments (in our rooms and in our bellies). The experimentation might lead to an easier time falling asleep tonight, or it may be small steps that add up to realizing, six months from now, that you feel better rested than you used to. Know you’re not alone, we are here with you on this on-our-way-to-good-sleep train.
“Acute insomnia is normal…
“Seven days a week to fix the clock…”
