Make time for a daytime nap

ONE way to tackle daytime tiredness is to take a short nap — this will recharge your batteries without affecting your ability to sleep well at night.

Much like an over-tired baby will not be able to sleep, a ‘tired but wired’ insomniac can’t either, so taking a short nap can lessen excessive tiredness, defuse unwanted anxiety and slow a racing mind in preparation for the night ahead. Follow these tips:

■ TAKE a short, ten to 20-minute nap ideally after lunch or in the early afternoon. Avoid napping past 3pm.

■ FIND a quiet, dark and comfortable place where you will not be disturbed.

■ CLOSE your eyes and enter the pre-sleep phase of quiet wakefulness.

If your mind won’t stop racing, use the time to do the mindful breathing practice we looked at yesterday. If you feel you might sleep too long, set an alarm.

Sometimes, you won’t actually go to sleep — but don’t worry. Take sleep out of the equation and view this time as an opportunity to practise being in a state of quiet wakefulness. Focus on gaining valuable rest rather than trying to sleep.

The key is to nap for no more than 20 minutes — this stops you excessively weakening your sleep drive and prevents brain fog, which happens when you wake yourself from deep sleep.

If you’re pregnant, have just had a baby or have any serious health issues, you’ll have extra demands on your energy levels, so do nap for longer — you could have a whole 90 minutes. It’s important for you to get through whatever additional stress you are experiencing, and then start to work on creating a robust sleep-wake cycle once your health has returned.

A BRISK WALK BOOSTS WAKEFULNESS

WHEN you are feeling really tired in the day, the urge to roll up into a ball and escape from the world sometimes can be overwhelming. Retreating like this can be helpful, especially if you are feeling ill or coming down with a cold.

At other times, however, it can be helpful to be active and to get on with living with your tiredness. You can get a huge boost from going for a 20-minute walk at lunchtime as a way of making it through the day — the natural light stimulates your wakefulness levels and the gentle exercise releases endorphins, helping to boost your mood.

ENJOY BEING IN BED

MANY traditional sleep therapists use a technique known as the ‘quarter-hour rule’ to deal with insomnia.

The aim is to reduce the amount of time you can lie in bed struggling with sleep and so limit the opportunity for any unhelpful association with sleep to be formed. It requires individuals to get out of bed if they have been awake for more than 15 minutes and go into another room and do something quiet and relaxing, such as read a boring book.

The hope is that, by getting out of bed and distracting yourself, it will help to calm any unwanted anxieties and increase your sleepiness levels, so that when you return to bed, you fall quickly to sleep.

While I agree that you don’t want to lie in bed struggling, I disagree that escaping the bedroom is the most effective way to go about building a helpful, long-term relationship with sleep.

If the aim is to limit the amount you struggle to sleep, then surely the focus should be on teaching people how to struggle less, rather than how they can avoid it?

In some individuals who have tried this ‘getting up and out’ approach, it can be seen that they have created a new, unhelpful association that the night-time is about getting up and being active.

In addition, as the act of escaping the bed is often used as a way to avoid the discomfort that comes with insomnia, many clients subsequently report that their unwanted thoughts and feelings are waiting for them when they return to bed and they feel helpless as to what to do with them, other than simply escape again.

Another commonly reported problem that I see with this technique is in its implementation with clients who would rather stay in their beds.

For them, being forced out because they are awake feels most unintuitive and can actually increase anxiety levels and so push sleep further away.

Normal sleepers rarely get out of bed if they can’t sleep, and neither should you.

The aim is to learn gradually how to be willing to be in bed with all of your fears; to build a new, long-term, workable relationship with your bed, bedroom and sleep.

When you are happy to be awake in bed, resting in a calm way, you are already closer to sleep, but with the added benefit of saving your valuable energy for the next day.

DON’T DISTURB YOUR SLEEP DRIVE

IT WILL come as no surprise to you that the longer you have been awake, the sleepier you feel at night. This so-called ‘sleep drive’ is regulated by a sleep homeostat in your brain and explains why a normal sleeper needs to be awake for at least 16 to 17 hours in the day to be able to create enough sleep drive to achieve seven to eight hours of sleep.

Much like a wave on the ocean grows in size and strength, your sleep drive rises through the day, peaking at the point of going to sleep.

While catching this wave should be an effortless process, it can be easily disturbed by a lie-in or sleeping on the sofa while watching TV at night.

Weekend ‘catch-up’ sleep after a hectic week can also lead to insufficient sleep drive for the next evening. This explains why Sunday is often reported as the worst night’s sleep of the week.