Sleep Hygiene and Curing Insomnia
Unless my stress is at Alert Level Red, I don’t really have a problem with insomnia. Jen, on the other hand, has “rarely been successful at sleeping through the night” since she was a teenager. She’s written a lengthy and informative post on her rigorous sleep hygiene (a term I hadn’t heard before) routine. Here’s just one of the rules:
The bedroom should be dark, and no looking at the clock when waking up in the middle of the night. I must cover the LCD display of my clock radio before going to sleep so that I can’t see that it’s 4:00am when I wake up in a fit of anxiety and further freak out about that. This has already screwed me over once: the alarm didn’t go off, and I laid in bed (in the dark room, of course) for a good 20 minutes trying to get back to sleep before getting up and seeing that HOLY SHIT I’M REALLY LATE.
I chose that one because it was somehow intuitive for me. I really don’t want to know what time it is until my alarm goes off.
Here’s another thing I do naturally, which seems a little unusual. I close my eyes the moment I switch the light off, and don’t open them unless I have to get up to go to the bathroom or something. I think I developed this habit as a child with a turbo-charged imagination. I didn’t want to see the monsters coming for me out of the closet (and the wardrobe, and the bathroom, and from under the bed).
