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Today I want to talk to you about a strategy you can use to repair the relationship you have with your bed. This strategy will also help decrease the time it takes you to fall asleep or back to sleep if you wake up in the middle of the night.
I call this strategy:
"Just Don't Lie There."
In the world of psychology, they call it “stimulus control” and the basic premise is this: our subconscious connects different environments with different feelings, thoughts and behaviors.
How Stimulus Control Plays a Part In Sleep
Here’s a quick example of how the subconscious connects environment with different feelings, thoughts and behaviors:
I have an Italian mother who loves to feed me (even if I'm hungry or not). Anytime I step into her house — regardless of whether I just ate or not — I become hungry and start to crave food. That's because my subconscious connects her house with eating.
I'm sure you have environments that trigger different feelings and behaviors, too — just like your bed! If you're having issues sleeping, you likely are triggered by being in your bed, whether you're aware of it or not.
Because if you're not sleeping, you start to lie awake in bed and worry. So, your subconscious then connects your bed with lying awake and worrying.
The goal with “Just Don't Lie There” — or stimulus control — is for your subconscious to begin to connect your bed with sleeping and relaxation — and nothing else.
How to Repair Your Relationship with Your Bed So You Can Improve Your Sleep
Step 1
Reserve your bed and bedroom for sleeping and sexual activity — and nothing else.
You don't want to be eating, watching television, or doing work in your bedroom. I know some of us have no choice but to work in our bedroom now that a lot of us are working from home — and that's okay (you gotta do what you gotta do) — but if that’s the case, I recommend creating some sort of partition between your bed and your home office. That way, when you're lying in your bed, you're not reminded of work (which triggers brain activity, and, perhaps, worry.)
Step 2
Make sure when you're in bed that you're actually sleepy.
There's a big difference between being tired and being sleepy.
Being tired is just feeling physically tired or mentally tired.
Being sleepy is when you begin to doze off or your eyes get heavy and you feel like you're going to fall asleep. Wait until you have that sensation before you jump into bed. This will increase your probability of falling asleep.
Otherwise, if you get into bed when you're not sleepy, you're likely going to start worrying about the fact that you're not sleeping. Your brain's going to become quite active and the fight or flight response will kick in, causing the body to produce cortisol (because it thinks it's some sort of danger and needs to be able to fight or flee) — which is counterproductive to sleep.
Step 3
Just Don’t Lie There
If you've just been lying in bed for more than 15 minutes (don't watch the clock — just give yourself a gut check) and you feel like you're more awake than sleepy, or if you start to stress out about the fact that you're not sleeping, I want you to get out of bed and go somewhere else and perform a relaxing activity.
I highly recommend just reading because it's a good activity to take your mind off of not sleeping. Look at it as a time that you can enjoy yourself. No one's demanding anything of you and you get to read this book that you enjoy!
If reading's not your thing, you can listen to a podcast, a book on tape, meditate, or do some deep breathing until you feel sleepy again.
Then, once you do, then you can hop back into bed. If you don't fall asleep within 15 minutes of returning to bed or you start to feel stressed, then repeat the same exercise: get out of bed until you feel relaxed or until you feel sleepy again, and then try again to fall asleep.
You may have to repeat this a few times before you fall asleep, and it may start to feel counterproductive. But what we're looking for is long term gains. You might not fall back to sleep as quickly as you normally would if you were just lying in bed. However, over time, this is what will happen:
As soon as you get out of bed, you're going to feel relaxed because your subconscious is going to trigger getting out bed with relaxing.
Then, once you get back into bed, you are going to feel sleepy because you're only spending time in your bed when you're sleepy.
This is going to increase your chances of falling asleep more quickly.
Some Helpful Tips to Keep In Mind When Practicing Stimulus Control
Prepare your environment
Find somewhere in your house that is calming where you can dim the lights or use a table lamp. You can switch the table lamp's light bulb out with a nighttime bulb, because you want to make sure you're minimizing blue light exposure. Maybe put a pair of blue blockers that block 95% of the blue light next to your relaxing spots.
Prepare your activity
Pick the book you're going to read, or the meditation or podcast you’re going to listen to, in advance. The more that you can have in place, the more likely you're going to be to get out of bed.
Prepare Your Mind for the time
It’s really important that you're patient with this process. Your brain didn't start connecting your bed with being wide awake overnight, so it's not going to break that connection overnight either. It's going to take a lot of consistency. I recommend giving it at least two weeks before you decide if it's working or not.
There May Be Something Underlying
If you find you’re not seeing progress with “Just Don't Lie There”, it doesn't mean that it's not helpful. A lot of times, what I find with my clients is that the negative association between their bed and sleep is only part of the equation. There are usually multiple root causes for their sleep issues, which include physical dysfunction. This is why I conduct functional lab testing with all of my clients so that we can bring their body back to balance and improve function so that their sleepless nights are a thing of the past.
If you're interested in learning more about functional lab testing, please schedule a free 30-minute discovery call with me here to learn more→
Sweet Dreams
Kelly Murray is a certified sleep coach and an award-winning pediatric sleep consultant based in Chicago offering sleep coaching services nationwide.