Do you sleep well or not ?
What can you do if you don’t sleep particularly well?
The reason I’m talking about this is because so many of my clients after a class comment on how well they’re going to sleep that particular night. Which implies that other nights, the sleep isn’t quite as restful or quite as nice as after a yoga class.
And I remembered that before I first started doing any yoga, I went through a phase where I was not sleeping well at all. And that’s how I got started with yoga, basically.
It was just after Lara, my oldest daughter was born. I went through a phase of, despite being really tired, because I just had a newborn baby, and you know, juggling all of that. I just couldn’t sleep, I would lay awake at night. And you know, just turn and turn and turn. I wouldn’t manage to sleep. And it got to a point where I was busy during the day, I was tired in the evening. But when it came to bedtime and I had to go to sleep, it actually made me tense, because I just knew I was not going to sleep properly. And obviously, being tense about not being able to sleep just makes everything worse. So I just couldn’t asleep. So much so that I went to the GP hoping that she would prescribe a nice little pill and, you know, a nice and easy solution to help me sleep better. And that was that. When I got there, we had a chat.
My GP suggested I try yoga
Rather than just giving me the little pill, she asked me if I’d ever tried yoga, which I hadn’t. And she suggested that I try and find a yoga class. So I did, I found a yoga class. And I think the following Friday or so, off I went to my first yoga class. It was a mummy and baby postnatal yoga class. And I have to say that that was amazing. It was bordering on miraculous how well I slept that particular night. I still remember because I hadn’t been sleeping for ages. And then suddenly that night, I really slept.
And now when I hear my clients saying how, after a yoga class, they sleep so well. I thought, well, what can we do? What can we all do on a day to day basis so that we sleep properly.
Not sleeping is a kind of torture
You know what it’s like when you don’t sleep well. You don’t sleep and so you’re tired the following day. And when you’re tired, you feel uncomfortable physically. You feel colder, you can feel hungrier because you haven’t got as much energy since you haven’t slept well. So you feel the need to compensate by wrapping up warmer, or eating more. And you can feel a bit achy, because you’ve been tossing and turning, so your muscles are tense. Emotionally, you’re tired. So you’ve got a lot less patience, your fuse is a lot shorter, because you haven’t recuperated from the day before. So sleeping properly is really, really crucial to feel good. Just ask any mother of a young baby, not being able to sleep well is bordering on torture. And it actually used to be a torture method. People would stop inmates in certain prisons from sleeping and would keep them awake for days and days and days. And that was a torture method. Sleep is that important that if you take it away from somebody, you are torturing that person.
Try these 3 things:
Well, there are three things that I do every single day. And that helps me sleep peacefully every night. I’ve taught those techniques to some of my clients, and they’ve commented as well that they’ve been sleeping so well.
The first thing that you can do is move at some point during the day. A lot of us have got very sedentary lifestyles where we’re at home, we drive to work, we drive back home or if we work at home, we’re on a chair in front of a computer. If we don’t get out of our way to move, we can go a whole doing without doing any form of exercise. In order to sleep, your body needs to be tired, physically tired, not just mentally. So every day, try and find a time to move, it could be a 10 minute walk in the morning before going to work, it could be a nice walk after work, or going for a walk at lunchtime, especially when the mornings are dark, the afternoons and evenings are dark, going out at lunchtime is a great idea. If you’re finding it too cold outside, you can find a video on YouTube, do something at home, maybe use some weights.
Second thing you can do is establish some kind of a routine in the evening.
For example, my routine is I go upstairs, I get ready for bed, I get into bed, and I’ve got my Kindle. Regardless of what time it is, I’m going to read a little bit, I’m going to put my Kindle down, I’m going to list in my head the three things I feel grateful for during that have happened during the day. I’ll get to that later. And then I switch off the light, and I go to sleep. So that’s my routine. And that works for me.
Having a routine will help your body and your mind to start to unwind. You know, it’s a bit like very, very young children. When you want young children to start sleeping, you establish a routine where they have their dinner, they have their bath, and then maybe a bedtime story. And then it’s time to for bed. And by keeping to those four elements, pretty much all the time, children get into a routine where they know that after dinner comes bath after bath come story after story come sleep. It’s the same for us. If we change our habits every single day, by the time we get to bed, we’re all alert because stuff has happened that wasn’t expected. Whereas if every day, you’ve got the same unwinding/getting to bed routine, you’re going to prepare your mind to switch off a little bit.
So find a routine that, day in day out, you can pretty much stick to regardless of how you’ve been doing today, regardless of how late you go to sleep at night.
Now the third thing you can do, and I mentioned when I was talking about the routine is gratitude. Because a lot of us spend our days solving problems. You can be problem solving at work, you can be problem solving in your family. So we spend your days finding things that need attending to, that need to be fixed in some way or improved on in some way. And that can colour your mind with a negative point of view. You can start looking at everything as needing fixing or needing working out in some way.
We also all have we is called a negative bias, by which we remember the negative stuff a lot more than we remember the positive. It’s an evolutionary thing and kept us alive, but isn’t that helpful nowadays.
One of the most common reasons for people not sleeping well is because as they start trying to go to sleep, they start replaying their day in their mind. And they start thinking things like: I should have done that. Why did he do that? Why did that happened? And all of those why, why why that haven’t got any answers keep you awake. There is a place to review the day in a positive way and build on it. But there is also a place for gratitude.
And that’s what I do every night. I take the time to list three things that either have happened or that I’ve come across during the day and that I am grateful for. And it can be anything. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be flashy. Just three things that you’ve come across during the day, and that you feel, yeah, I’m glad that is in my life.
That is going to shift your state of mind to be much more positive. There will be a lot less worries because you can’t be grateful and worry at the same time. So if you focus on gratitude, you’re less likely to worry. So if you want, you can write those down those three things. Personally, I just list them in my head. And that’s it. But if you like journaling, you can have your journal by your bed, and you can write down those three things. That’s up to you what works.
So these are the three things that you can do every day:
- Do some movement, every single day.
- Create yourself a bedtime routine of some sort, that you stick to pretty much every day. And at some point in your routine,
- Invite that habit of gratitude, and of looking back at your day with in mind to find three things that you feel grateful for.
There are other things that you can do.
Like for example, if you are the type to like and review your day, you can do that. But from a positive point of view. I’ve got a meditation for that, which is called the review the day meditation. It guides you as you review your whole day from morning to night, in a very specific way, that’s a lot more positive than just going oh, this this, this and this didn’t quite go well. And why didn’t I do this? Why didn’t I do that. So that’s a really good tool. And for those days, when you really cannot sleep, what you can do is listen to a sleep meditation. A meditation that doesn’t wake you up at the end and that you can use to drift off to sleep. And that’s something I’ve got recorded as well. Those are two things that I do when really I’ve had a tough day and I’ve got too much in my head. Those two tools, reviewing the day and the sleep relaxation never fail to work for me.
I’ve also just created the Stress Less, Sleep Better course, on sleeping well. Because obviously, the more stressed you are, the less likely you are to sleep well. And in this course, you’ve got more tips on how to sleep well. You also get access to a seated yoga sequence that you can do in bed, the review of the day meditation and a sleep meditation that you can just listen to.
And you also get access to the waves of peace relaxation that you can do in bed before going to sleep. Finally, you’ve got a checklist that can help you establish a routine. It lists what you can do morning and evening to prepare your night’s sleep. And those elements, either put together or used individually, are going to make such a difference in the quality of your sleep, in the number of hours that you sleep and in how you feel the following morning. No more dragging yourself out of bed. You’ll be able to wake up feeling refreshed, feeling rested, feeling relaxed to start the whole new day again.
Find out more here: https://payhip.com/b/lDFq6