Lots of good advice here.
As someone who wakes up almost every night between 3 and 4 am my advice is.
Embrace it dont fight it. I just get up, go have a pee and then use my Ipad for 45-60 minutes and then fall back to sleep again. I don’t stress about loss of sleep and dont feel to bad when my alarm goes at 06:25.
See the Sleep Solution by W. Christopher Winter. He is a neurologist who practices sleep medicine and has worked with multiple major league baseball teams. After listening to him on the Flo Cycling podcast, my sleep was revolutionized. (Plus he was entertaining.)
I hit the same wall as yourself a few years back. Went to a sleep clinic and they impressed on me the need for real sleep discipline. We all know what that is but we rarely do it. It really is an attention to the details game.
I finally got the sleep largely under control though like everything there are good days and bad. Getting to sleep now is rarely the problem. I do still have episodic moments like you are having. Pinging alert in the middle of the night… had one last night. Been awake since 3am.
For me the last piece of the puzzle after good sleep discipline was nutrition. I clocked a couple of papers on insulin impact on sleep. Google it yourself. I was already on the road there so I went full LCHF to stabilize my insulin and prevent rebound spikes at night from waking me. I guess you wouldn’t have to go that far if you just dropped simple carbs from the diet off the bike.
The other thing worth getting is a pair of those Geordi laForge style face lights. If your nutrition is good (mine wasn’t yesterday; xmas food = insulin rebound spike = awake at 3am) and you find your self struggling to make it to your nominal lights out time but still pinging awake in the middle of the night then the culprit is usually a tripped circadian clock. It happens a lot at this time of year; dark evenings fool it. To reset it wear the silly lights for 20 minutes at least 1.5 hours before bed. Or when you start to fade in the evening. Do it for three or four days in a row. It should reset.
Then there is the nuclear option. This is the one the sleep clinic did on me and it is a sure thing but it near kills ya. It’s a sleep FTP test…What ever your target sleep cycle is knock two hours off that. So if you are gunning for 8 hours a night set the alarm for only 6. Force yourself up on the alarm. Do this for 10 days straight with normal sleep discipline. You will be wrecked but you will sleep like a baby by the end of it. Then inch it back up in 30 min increments. As soon as the sleep quality dives, back it up to the last good time and that is your sleep cycle fixed. Even for weekends. Sleep discipline, it sucks.
Other obvious stuff…
As a general rule using soft lighting of an evening plays havoc with this. My wife hates the fact I have the lights blazing in the living area.
If you are awake for longer than 20 minutes get up or you will start to associate the bed with sleeplessness. I am so conditioned now that even if I sit on a bed for a few minutes I start nodding off.
Don’t nap! Or at least not after 2pm (The clinic told me not to nap at all but I found that impossible at times.)
Oh yeah I nearly forgot, a sleep tracker is a real boon. More often than not you got enough sleep but the old inner chimp is just giving you grief about it. The data doesn’t lie…
Great thread @TRusername. Lots of good advice in here.
I’ve had generally pretty poor sleep for a good number of years (basically once I had little ones, surprise!) but this year hit full blown insomnia levels and it’s been like that for 6-7 months now.
In an amazing twist of irony, my wife actually has Narcolepsy, so falling asleep is most definitely not an issue!
I have huge sympathy for everyone in this thread who are experiencing sleep issues, because until it happens it’s hard to understand just how much of an effect it has.
I can’t add much that hasn’t been said above, as a lot of the ‘low-hanging’ fruit has been covered.
Coach @chad mentioned the book ‘Why we sleep’ which has also been mentioned above, so that’s worth looking into.
Maybe we can all take some solace in the knowledge that whilst we are lying awake at night that there are a lot of like-minded individuals on this forum fighting exactly the same battle?!
I firmly believe, and have experienced many times, that life comes in seasons. Some last longer than others and some require more intervention on our part, but the most important thing is to try and keep your eyes fixed on the future whenever possible and what lies beyond the struggle.
I’m not sure if anyone’s mentioned this, but On the HeadSpace App there is an exercise for falling back asleep. It’s worked for me and I now use their technique which is to count backwards from 10,000.
A monophasic sleep pattern is actually a fairly new thing in our societies. Before industrialization a biphasic pattern was more common. Sleep for 4-5 hours. Wake up. Do stuff for 2 hours. Go to bed (or if the “stuff” already involved being in bed ) Sleep for another 2 or 3 hours. This seemed to be the norm.
I guess many problems with disrupted sleep come from simply stressing out about. It is normal to wake up several time, we just don’t notice it. However, if we believe this is wrong, we this as stress. Especially with all the talk about sleep and so these days.
By the way, since there is so much talk about that we HAVE to sleep a certain number of hours. And that our modern world is so cruel and we all suffer insomnia. This may offer a different perspective:
Similar to diet, there is not one right way. Humans are adaptable enough to cope with different sleeping patterns. Monophasic, biphasic, or polyphasic. All seem to work. Trying to adhere to a certain norm may be counter productive.
This is 100% me.
I can crash like an absolute rock at the end of the day, but 230am rolls around and I am wide awake. A large part of it has to do with my job, it’s high stakes/high stress, and involves a lot of complicated problem solving which it sounds like @Nate_Pearson and others deal with.
What I have found has helped, but not eliminated the problem, is to make a note on my phone of the problem, thought, or solution that has my mind churning at that hour. Writing it down somewhere allows me to at least move on from that, and i stop mentally iterating on the problem while laying there wide awake.
If I’m really wound up CBD/THC oil is great for knocking me out (i live in jurisdiction where this is legal) and just getting me to relax before bed, and I will often get a much deeper sleep and either not wake up or delay the mid-night wake up.
The funny part, being on the trainer/bike is AMAZING for mental iteration on problems. Gives me 90-120min of uninterrupted time to really get some deep thinking done, and as @chad described a few weeks ago on the podcast, the physical stimulus and distraction actually allows for a much better mental absorption of things.
Been seeing a urologist for a similar thing recently. I get up 1-3 times a night typically. There’s some meds he wants me to try but the cost is a bit high. I’ve heard 64 F is actually the ideal temp to sleep in but that was on a Danica Patrick podcast, never looked into it more. Here’s what I do, right or not;
Bedroom is for sleep and/or sex only. No work, phone, tablet, conversations, TV, etc.
Spend more time in bed to get the number of hours in knowing I’ll get up to pee. I don’t look at a clock when I get up, just go straight back to bed.
Avoid drinking anything after 6 pm, earlier is better if possible.
White noise machine and ceiling fan running.
Get room as dark as possible. Haven’t needed a mask yet but probably will try soon.
Kick the dog out if she’s restless.
No tobacco before bed, preferably 2 hours before.
RELAX. Easier said than done obviously. I find focusing on my breathing the best way.
CBD oil seems to help me relax better and I’ve tried melatonin with varying results.
i heard six months ago that “remembering things from earlier in the day or earlier in your life” helps you fall asleep. I said “no way”, then tried it, and has worked for me numerous times. Something to do with brain waves when you remember being similar to sleep ones; i have zero data, except that I always use that trick.
I find that for me not being able to fall asleep is mental thing, not a physical thing. There are thoughts I have where I can feel my brain click and turn on and I’m awake and that is that.
I avoid thinking about things that are interesting. You can only think about one thing at a time, most of the time I just count. Switching between thoughts is not the same as thinking about multiple things at the same time. Focus on the numbers, sometimes try to visualize them on a chalk board if I’m being kept awake by images. Just count. Slow, focused. If my mind drifts off the numbers to another topic, I go back to 1 and start again. It is weird that thinking hard about something not interesting is relaxing.
Here’s what I use to fall back asleep. When I am having troubles, the usual culprit is my awake, racing mind. I find if I stop chasing thoughts I fall right back to sleep. To get to that point, here’s what I do:
a few big, deep breaths focusing on totally relaxing all the muscles in my body
I stare at the back of my eyelids. Seeing only black, darkness. If any other thought enters my brain I try my best to push it aside (“I can better solve this issue tomorrow; right now I need my sleep”) and go back to focusing on the back of my eyelids.
Being 40 you might consider a test for adrenal fatigue. Also checking your thyroid hormones could indicate what is going on. 40 s is a typical change point for most of us… Then having to deal with a family demands and training just adds up stress.
I used to have quite a bit of problems falling asleep and falling back asleep if I woke at night. The things that really helped me.
White noise (ear plugs bothered me way to much almost amplified internal noise if that makes sense)
2.Going to be when I get tired not waiting (I go to bed pretty early most nights)
3.Routine routine routine (going to bed at close to the same time every night even weekends and getting up at the same time)
4.Breathing (I read the Oxygen Advantage book) this is legit something I concentrate on every night. I think it works because it gets me to focus on breathing instead of just random craziness in my head. If that doesnt seem to work I think about thinks that already have results. Problems I worked through before not new problems or issues. If that makes any sense.
5.Fan on only sleep with a sheet the cooling off helps me get to sleep.
) Sleep for another 2 or 3 hours. This seemed to be the norm.