You’ve got a big day tomorrow, so naturally your brain decides to wake you up in the middle of the night for no reason. What do you do?
The Wall Street Journal spoke to several sleep experts to find out what to do when you’ve been rudely awakened in the night.
“Go back to sleep,” is the obvious answer, but as anyone who is prone to waking up in the night now and then will know, it’s not always that easy.
So here’s what you should do.
Avoid light
Obvious, yes, but important. Light suppresses the secretion of melatonin, the hormone that helps control your sleep cycle, so you want to avoid it wherever possible.
Luckily the sun rarely makes an appearance at night, so unless you’re working the graveyard shift, you shouldn’t have much bother. Don’t go falling down the stairs on the way to the loo, but if you can avoid turning on lights, do so.
Don’t look at the clock
It’s tempting, but if you’re checking to see how long you’ve got left before you have to get up, you’re only going to stress yourself out.
Jennifer L. Martin, sleep specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, says: “[People] start to think, ‘How many more hours until I get up?’ That tends to create a lot of anxiety. You can’t sleep when you’re anxious and you can’t sleep when you’re doing math.
Do something other than just lying there
If you’re really, fully, 100% awake, it’s no good lying in bed trying to force yourself back to sleep. Instead, get up and do some kind of sedentary activity – a crossword puzzle or reading, something that’s likely to help you nod off.
Screens are best to be avoided, but if you’re going to watch TV, Daniel J. Buysse, a professor of psychiatry University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, recommends that you wear sunglasses to reduce the levels of light being processed by your brain.
Nothing
If this is just a one-off occurrence, don’t try to remedy it in anyway, as you may inadvertently mess up your sleep pattern in the process.
“Don’t sleep in. Don’t nap,” says Michael Perlis, director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “Don’t go to bed early the next day and everything will turn out fine.”
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