We all know that having a consistent, regular routine is better for our sleep.
It sounds pretty obvious. Go to bed at the same time every night, get up at the same time every morning. Ta da! Insomnia solved.
If only it were that simple!
Having a regular routine can work wonders, it’s true. When I graduated university and went back to work full time, I found that the new regular routine of getting up early and being at work for 9am every day really helped me to settle my sleep routine back to something resembling normal.
But we can’t always stick rigidly to a daily routine at the same time every day. What if your job schedule or circumstances are inconsistent?
Many of us work night shifts, or different shifts on a weekly or fortnightly schedule. Many of us are self employed and work around our customers or other commitments.
Vicious Cycle
Insomnia often ends up being a vicious cycle: we can’t sleep at night, we’re exhausted in the day, so we nap in the afternoon and then find ourselves awake all night again.
Even when we stay up all night, and try to “reset” our body clock by going to bed at 9pm the following evening – that might work for a night, but then the next night we’re right back where we started.
So how do we get into a good sleep routine?
Sometimes, a bout of insomnia is triggered or exacerbated by inconsistent bedtimes and wake up times. When I was studying, I found myself staying up late to finish assignments. This only got worse as I progressed through university. The assignments got longer, more frequent, and required more research.
The problem was compounded by inconsistent start times for my lectures each day. Some days I had a 9am start, other days not until 10 or 11, or even in the afternoon. So my sleeping ended up mirroring my inconsistent schedule.
I’d get up at 8 for a 9am start on Monday, then sleep in on Tuesday as I didn’t have to be in untill 11am. Then I’d be up all night finishing an essay until 2am, submit it, and then fall into a deep sleep until 12 on Wednesday. You get the picture.
I knew it wasn’t good for me, and I knew it was messing with my sleep, but at the time there was not much I could do about it – I was partly a slave to the timetable, and partly a victim of the deadline.
Fortunately for me, my uni days came to an end and a 9 to 5 job helped me to gradually ease back into a normal sleep routine.
Irregular Working Hours
But what if we don’t work 9 to 5? What if your schedule is always inconsistent? There are plenty of jobs which don’t follow a 9 to 5 pattern.
One example is shift work, often hospital or care workers, where some shifts are night time and some are early mornings. Another common example is freelance work, where you can set your own hours or work around other commitments like your children’s school hours.
These types of working hours can be really hard on people who have sleeping issues. Although at first glance, late starts and late finishes seem perfect for those who struggle to sleep at normal times, they cause more problems than they solve.
Working From Home
In the past year, more people than ever before have had to change their working habits and adjust to home working or blended working to try to combat Covid. Home working is another working habit that seems great on the face of it, but can actually be detrimental in the long term.
After two years of more or less beating my previous struggles with insomnia, I then began working from home from around April to November 2020. I found that my sleeping schedule began to shift again and I started once again to experience sleep difficulties.
So I know how hard it can be, despite the seeming benefits of home working.
Preparation
Your body likes to be prepared.
I’ve used this lemon analogy before on this blog, but it’s worth repeating.
Think about a lemon. Place the imaginary lemon on an imaginary wooden chopping board. Hold it steady, and slice it in half using a sharp imaginary knife. Watch it fall into two pieces, each half dripping imaginary juice from the freshly cut edges.
Take one half and squeeze it in your hand, watching the juice and a couple of pips run over your fingers and into an imaginary glass. Now take the glass and take a sip, tasting the imaginary sharp, sour juice.
You’re salivating, right?
Your body produces saliva in readiness for the imaginary lemon it thinks it’s about to taste. Why does it do this?
Your body uses cues in the environment to prepare itself for what will happen. This is to save time, and to ensure it’s ready for whatever event happens next. So it starts salivating while you’re cutting the lemon, in readiness for the eating part.
This is because it has seen you cut fruit and eat it before. It remembers the sights, sounds and smells, and remembers what to do to prepare for the next part: digestion.
Sleep Routine
Sleeping is the same. Your body likes things to be predictable. It likes to know what will happen next. Every time you vary your bed time and wake time, it tries to adjust to the new routine, but it’s slow to adjust. And if you’re always changing your bed times and wake times, it never even gets a chance to learn a routine!
But we can use this characteristic of the body to kind of “hack” our sleep routine.
Even if you can’t stick to the same exact bedtime every night, you can make the routine predicable every night.
For example, I mark the “preparation for bed” period by performing the following actions in the same order every night.
My Routine:
- Close the blinds or curtains
- Dim the lighting and put on low lamps instead of overhead lights
- Take a warm bath or shower (not too hot)
- Use calming scents like lavender or sandalwood
- Dress in cosy pyjamas
- Make a warm milky drink (or herbal tea)
- Read a few pages of a book
- Then put on a podcast or a sleep story and listen via a comfortable bluetooth sleep mask
This is just an example of a sleep routine. It takes about an hour in total. The more times you repeat this routine before you go to sleep, the more strongly your body begins to associate these actions and sensations with winding down and falling asleep.
The beauty of a sleep routine is that even when your bedtimes are inconsistent (for example if you have to work shiftwork and sometimes work nights and sometimes mornings), your body will learn to interpret the actions as “prepare for sleep”.
Consistency
It is consistency that helps to establish a routine, and consistency that signals to your body to start preparing for sleep.
And even if you can’t be consistent with the time you go to bed, you can be consistent with the actions you perform in your pre-sleep routine, which will be just as effective.
Make it Easy to Stick To
Whenever we try to establish a new habit, the most common mistake is to try and do too much too quickly. Be honest with yourself and don’t strive for perfection.
The most successful habit is the one you stick to.
That means you should aim for the most realistic and achievable goal to begin with, and take it from there.
When I first started addressing my sleep issues, the first consistent action I started doing was listening to something calming every single night without fail. I started by listening to an audiobook on Audible.
And this was what got me thinking about routines. I found that I was having to rewind the book to listen to the chapters I’d missed. I’d missed them because I’d fallen asleep!
I began to realise that it wasn’t so much the story itself that was sending me off to sleep, but the consistency of listening to it every night. As soon as my brain heard the dulcet tones of the narrator, it knew it was sleep time, and I began to fall asleep much quicker.
It was easy to stick to this routine, because I really enjoyed listening to the story while I was still awake, and it was a passive activity that didn’t involve any hard work.
My next step was adding the bluetooth sleep mask – a total game changer! Not only did I get to listen to my favourite audiobooks, I also found it much more comfortable and it also blocked out the light.
I’ve talked about audiobooks and other listening material in my article Quieting Your Mind At Night. I am a firm believer that just doing this one thing makes a huge difference. If you do nothing else, I fully recommend starting a nightly routine of listening to something calming.
Engage Your Senses
This brings me onto another important point.
When we talked about the lemon, think about the different senses that were involved in that experience. (Even though it was imaginary…)
- Sight: the sight of the lemon being cut in half, the waxy yellow of the skin, the glistening juice.
- Smell: the sharp, tangy scent of lemon juice.
- Touch: the feel of the firm lemon in your hand, the softness as you squeeze it, the cool juice running over your fingers.
- Sound: the slice of the knife, the thud on the chopping board, the trickle of the juice into the glass.
- Taste: the sweet but sourness of the juice, the tingle on your tongue.
Your body doesn’t know the difference between a real lemon and an imaginary one. Let me say that again. Your body can’t tell the difference between real and imaginary experiences!
This has so many implications in the real world, but for our purposes I will focus on two.
One – the more senses you engage with your nightly routine, the more convincing it is to your body. Think about each of the five senses and try to come up with something to relax each one.
Two – the opposite is also true. If you read about, or listen to, or watch something depicting stressful or uncomfortable situations, your body will also prepare for those. I’ve talked about stopping reading or watching the news before bed in a previous article, but the lemon analogy really explains why.
Stop making your body think it is in danger before bedtime! Even if your mind rationally knows you are safe, if you read or watch stressful material, your body will produce cortisol and activate the fight or flight response.
Work with your body, not against it!
Build Up
Start with the easiest thing you can do, and do that every night for a month. Once you’ve established one tiny new habit, you can build on it and add another.
Look for the next easiest thing you can do. Another thing you know you’ll stick to. There’s no point deciding you will scatter rose petals on your pillow and wear only the finest silk, if you know that’s not achievable or will become a cleaning nightmare.
If you’re not a big fan of drinking milk, don’t force yourself to make a warm mug of milk every night. It might seem obvious, but sometimes our drive for perfection means we forget to consider how it will fit into our own lives.
Forget the milk. Forget the rose petals. Just treat yourself to a dressing gown that makes you feel like you live in a spa. (Seriously, I’m not even joking. I bought a white cotton dressing gown from Marks & Spencer and I honestly feel relaxed just putting it on).
If you’re not sure where to start, look at my list of night time activites above and pick the one that looks the easiest. The key takeaway here is to start doing one thing, consistently, every night.
Summary
- establish a nightly routine of familiar, repetitive actions
- aim for a consistent bed time and wake time
- even if you can’t achieve this, stick to the routine
- maintain consistency above all
- engage your senses: sight, smell, sound, taste, touch
- replace stressful thoughts and material, with relaxing ones
- start small and build up
- repeat, repeat, repeat. Every night.
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