How To Improve Our Sleeping Habits

    Although sleep is a normal behavior, sleep disturbance is very common, especially when we become worried and have intrusive thoughts. It is a common symptom when we feel stress, anxiety, depression, or suffer from chronic pains, chronic ailment, or they are just getting older. Sleep disturbance has different manifestations such as, having difficulty falling asleep, sleeping lightly, waking several times during the night, or waking too early in the morning. The fact that sleeping pills are one of the best selling drugs indicates the widespread incidence of the phenomena. The problem may intensify when we develop negative expectations about the coming night. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. The more we worry about having some form of sleep disturbance, the greater the level of stress hormones in our bodies, the greater likelihood the problem will intensify.

    There is a common dominator among all the psychological techniques aiming to improve sleep. There is a Hebrew saying that describes it very clearly: "The more you run after the sleep, the faster it runs away from you." Life experience tells us that even if we sleep very little for two or three nights in a row, it is enough to sleep the following night for seven or eight hours in order to feel OK. So why to worry if you sleep one or two nights very little?

    If it takes us too long to fall a sleep, we need to apply a technique aiming to distract our thoughts. Some people play TV or the radio all night long, some play soft music or White Noise, some meditate and some listen to a relaxation CD. A relaxation CD should never be played while driving. It is recommended to play it while lying in bed, in any comfortable position, with closed eyes. When listening to the instructions, it is important not to concentrate on every word and every sentence. Often, thoughts wonder and the listener falls asleep. It is also recommended to listen to the CD without earphones since is not comfortable to sleep with them. Listening to the CD helps stop intrusive thoughts and reduces the level of stress hormones, as a result, the quality of the sleep improves and nightmares are extremely rear. If we get up in the middle of the night, and are having trouble falling asleep again, or if we tend to wake up too early in the morning, we can restart the CD and it will help us to fall asleep again. Many people, who have trouble maintaining their sleep, set the recording to play all night long, in a very law volume.

    I published four books in Hebrew each of them included a CD of relaxation consisting of two 20 minute relaxation sessions. Since some of my books became best sellers, many Israelis were exposed to my relaxation CDs. Many people sent me an e-mail, describing the effect of the CD on them. Most readers, who used the CD for the purpose of helping them to fall a sleep faster, describe similar experiences. During the first few nights, they had to listen to the relaxation program once or twice before they would fall asleep. Gradually, they fell asleep faster. After a week or two, most fell asleep after listening to the first few sentences. Those who tended to awaken in the middle of the night, or too early in the morning, re-ran the CD and fell asleep very fast.