Waking up in the middle of the night is disruptive, upsetting and can lead to some pretty unhealthy side effects. With that in mind, we wanted to put together a few tips and tricks designed to help you learn how to fall back asleep when you wake up in the middle of the night.
Start Before you Sleep
The best way to make sure you are going to go back to sleep quickly after waking up is by preparing yourself and your bedroom even before you first went to sleep.
By tidying your bedroom, choosing the correct bed and mattress for your body, buying a specialist mattress should you suffer from back pain removing bright light sources, keeping the temperature cool and adhering to a regular sleep routine you are going to find that you have an extremely positive and restful sleep cycle.
However, even with all this preparation, there are times when waking up in the middle of the night (or being woken up) is completely unavoidable, and learning how to fall back asleep when you wake up in those situations is vital.
Calm Your Brain
The worst thing about waking up and being unable to go back to sleep is the feeling of dread at the next morning. It’s easy to start panicking, thinking about how tired you are going to be the next day – and this thought process can quickly snowball into a stressed state of mind that only keeps you up longer.
The best thing to do in this situation is to stay calm. This may sound like obvious advice, but in truth, your mind will already be busy waking up – becoming more alert and going through its usual wake up process. Meaning that you are only going to stay awake longer and longer.
One of the best ways to calm your mind and take its focus away from your restless state is meditation. An incredibly simple process to begin for sleep purposes, meditation begins with controlled breathing, a focus on certain muscles and body parts and an emphasis on clearing your mind and removing stress, anxiety, and panic.
Brain Cut the Association Between Your Bed and Restlessness
If meditation doesn’t work, and you’re still tossing and turning after around ten to twenty minutes after you wake up, then we would advise that you leave your bedroom.
This might sound like strange advice considering that this is an article advising you on how to go back to sleep – but it’s actually very important. This is because you need to sever the association your subconscious will be forming between lying in your bed, and your inability to go to sleep.
Just by moving to another room you are going to be doing a world of good for your mind. Plus, if you followed our earlier advice then you will find it easy to migrate to a different room whilst keeping the lights low and remaining at a comfortable temperature. You don’t just have to move to another room either.
Reading by low light, listening to a podcast or audiobook, cross-stitching, or any kind of low effort task you can accomplish in near dark is a good way to keep your mind from dwelling on the fact you can’t sleep – and once your mind is distracted from that, you are going to find it so much easier to drift off back to sleep.
Avoid Your Electronics
If there is one thing that has become perfectly clear over the past few years, it’s the effect that electronic devices (and screens in particular) can have on a sleep pattern.
We know that it might be tempting to check your notifications, watch a youtube video or even just set up some music to lull you back to sleep – but even a moments exposure to the light from a phone or tablet can set your sleep back significantly.
That’s because the blue light emanating from your screen can have a distinct effect on your bodies hormones – most notably and importantly melatonin. Melatonin works as an indicator for your body, telling it how to regulate its sleep cycle based on the light that is perceived by your retinas. Blue light, however, is interpreted by our eyes as daylight – which means our bodies will begin to emit melatonin as if we have seen the morning light. In short, what our phone screens do to us is trick our minds into believing it’s time to wake up – a huge no-no if you are looking to get back to sleep after waking up.
Whilst there are viable blue light filters that help to suppress the light coming from your screen, we strongly advise that you make sure to avoid blue light from electronic devices up to an hour before you go to sleep – you may even see your overall sleep pattern improve dramatically.
Our Closing Thoughts
We hope that this quick run-through of our tips for getting back to sleep is useful for you, and that you start to see better results in your sleep habits if you are continually plagued with a broken nights sleep.
If you have any other issues with your sleep pattern, struggle to get enough healthy sleep or want to know more about optimum sleep hygiene then please visit our blog section – we continually update it with all the best sleep tips, facts, and stats that can help you improve your mental and physical health with better sleep.
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