5 Ways You Can Fight Insomnia and Fall Right Back Asleep

How often have you had difficulty falling asleep? Or woken up suddenly in the middle of the night, only to find yourself not being able to fall back asleep?

Your mind races everywhere. You look at the clock: 4:07 AM. And you think about work, maybe about the project you are working on, or a complicated situation that you’ve been meaning to address with your friend. Out of nowhere, solutions start coming to you. You can visualize the details in the project coming together, or even hear yourself saying all the right things to fix that awkward situation with the friend. Pretty good, you think.

Your mind does wonderful things at night. Some of my best ideas or solutions to complicated situations have come about from these moments when I am up in the middle of the night.

So, you feel content, one problem solved. Maybe two.

But then you jump onto the next thing. Money concerns, things unaddressed with your family, that deeply traumatizing childhood experience, the terrible things you’ve done that only you know about, your weight, how your skin has been looking different lately, are you drinking enough water, and how that new CBD you’ve been trying hasn’t been doing all that much.

Before you know it, it’s 5:46 AM. You have been ruminating through all these thoughts for almost two hours.

You know that if you ever get around falling asleep again, which at this point seems impossible, you will feel terrible upon waking up. You are ready for another day of coffee. Another day of trying everything under the sun to energize yourself and keep your eyes open. Maybe if you get lucky, you can sneak in a quick nap sometime during the day.

These thoughts about your upcoming day take up another few minutes. It’s 6:21 AM and your alarm will go off in just about 1 hour.

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If you’ve been there, you are not alone.

Insomnia is a very common sleep disorder. Over 70 millions Americans have some variation of a sleep disorder with almost 30–40% of the general population having experienced insomnia.

Insomnia does not stop with the night being over. It lingers on. It saps the energy, motivation, and drive out of you. If it does not result in something as dangerous as a serious accident (yes that can happen), it can lead to poor judgement, impair certain physical functionalities in your body, negatively impact your mental health, and affect your general quality of life.

Studies show that insomnia has long lasting psychological, medical, and economic consequences. This includes costs such as loss in productivity, hospitalizations, absenteeism, and overall medical bills from depression, alcoholism, and other resulting physical and psychiatric illnesses.

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What is happening to your body?

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Technically speaking, insomnia is the presence of polysomnographic evidence of disturbed sleep. This means:

your brain waves, the oxygen level in your blood, heart rate and breathing, as well as eye and leg movements during your sleep are giving concrete signals that your sleep process is being disrupted.

Usually we are expected to go through certain stages of sleep that varies from person to person. It often starts with the non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep where your brain waves slow down considerably as you relax.

At this stage, your eyes don’t move back and forth rapidly. In later stages of sleep, they do. After an hour or two of NREM sleep, your brain activity starts to pick up again. And this is when rapid eye movement (REM) sleep begins. Dreams often happen at this particular stage of REM sleep.

As the sleep progresses, it is expected that a person will go through multiple sleep cycles, moving between NREM and REM sleep in about 90 minutes.

When you have a sleep disorder, it disturbs this sleep process resulting in sleep latency, frequent awakenings, and prolonged periods of wakefulness.

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So what do you when you find yourself up in the middle of the night, unable to fall back asleep?

1. Breathing exercises.

There are multiple variations of those. There is the military method, which as you may guess gets its name from a routine designed at the United States Navy Pre-Flight School. You have to relax your entire body, starting with your face, moving to your chest, legs, thighs, and calves. If that does not work, you are supposed to say “don’t think” over and over again. Sounds very stressful to me. Other more peaceful methods include the 4–7–8 breathing method. Inhale; count to 4, hold; count to 7, and exhale; count to 8. Some people keep increasing the exhale up to 12 seconds. This has worked for me sometimes, but not always.

2. Mental distraction.

From counting sheep, to imagining serene settings (a calm beach, a gentle cliff-side view, or quiet mountains), to vividly imaging soothing sounds of water, or remembering your favorite smells, this involves letting other imagery take up space in your mind so that your mind is less engaged with the concerns or matters keeping you up.

3. Targeted pressure points.

Some people have luck with applying pressure in gentle circular movements to certain areas of the body. The key areas are often right under your palm, the base of your skull, and your temple.

4. Therapeutic cold water exposure.

Also a solution for when you are overly stressed during the day. You have to get up, and splash, or even better, plunge your entire face in ice cold water. This practice is ancient. It has a tremendous impact on your neural pathways and physiology, causing a mini jolt to your nervous system. Once you have plunged your face, your body kicks off cold thermogenesis which means your system tries to produce heat and regulate its core temperature.

Besides the instant benefit of zapping you out of your thoughts, eventually your parasympathetic nervous system is more active. This part of your nerves is responsible for your body’s rest when you are relaxed. Basically, its job is to undo the work that your sympathetic division did when stressed. Remember this is what is active when you are busy with your thoughts and are worrying.

5. Practice mindfulness

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Rather than convincing your mind to stop thinking, or trying to distract it from your thoughts, you acknowledge and engage with your thoughts with compassion and empathy. With negative self-talk overwhelmingly making the rounds in modern society, people spend a lot of time telling themselves negative, dark, and unkind things.

You are up and your thoughts are active because you want to do the right thing. You want to solve that complicated project you are working on, you desire to address the problems that you are facing with your friend, and you care about your family and are thinking about ways to reduce tension. This is why your sympathetic division is stimulated.

When you have been up for a while during the night, you probably blame yourself for being at that point. You feel bitter, tired, and maybe even angry at yourself. I do this all the time, you think. Rather than once again being unkind to yourself, the goal here is to garner as much empathy and compassion for this side of you. A recent National Institute of Health study found a strong relationship between self-compassion and higher self-reported sleep quality.

The exercise is simple and may look different for different people:

Start by paying close attention to yourself:

1. Approach your thoughts with kindness and empathy. Try to understand where you are coming from.
2. Acknowledge that the things keeping you up are usually important to you in some way or the other; else you would not be thinking so deeply for hours.
3. Extend a comforting and caring hand towards that side of yourself rather than being dismissive and angry for being kept up.
4. Let yourself know that you are deserving of rest and calm; that you are doing the best you can and are capable of letting go.

This positive and mindful internal conversation often takes only a couple of minutes and before I know it, I am dozing off. The idea is to calm your mind, allow it to relax, and let go. This lets your sympathetic division slow down and allows your parasympathetic side to regain control and provide space for your body to rest.

I have practiced doing this for a few months now and although I still find myself waking up in the middle of the night quite often, I have been falling back asleep shortly after doing this mindfulness exercise.

Who knew that being kind and compassionate towards myself would be the best way for me to fight my insomnia. And it could work for you too!

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Because a night of rest should not be a luxury.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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