|
Three letters landed this week from three women who have never met, describing what they think are three different problems.
FROM THE INBOX
|
I fall asleep on the sofa at nine every single night. Then I climb the stairs, get into bed, and I am wide awake. It is almost funny.
Debbie, 52
|
|
I lie there doing arithmetic. If I fall asleep now I get five hours. Now four and a half. It is the only maths I am ever good at.
Marion, 61
|
|
I answer emails in bed now. I am awake anyway, so I may as well get something out of the hours.
Sandra, 49
|
Every list of sleep tips hands these three women the same advice. Cooler room, darker room, wind-down routine. Try harder, in other words, at a thing you cannot try your way into.
All three of them are describing the same mechanism. Their beds have been trained to mean something other than sleep.
| |
Nobody here has a broken brain. You have a beautifully trained one, trained to entirely the wrong thing.
|
WHAT THE THREE LETTERS SHARE
This has a name: conditioned arousal. Your brain learns what places mean. A bell means food to a dog. A pillow means alertness to a woman who has spent four hundred nights on one, awake and furious.
Every night spent awake and frustrated in that bed strengthens the association slightly. Answering emails there strengthens it. Doing arithmetic about lost hours strengthens it. Sleeping soundly on the sofa strengthens the sofa. You have not been failing to sleep. You have been rehearsing something else.
|
THE EVIDENCE
James Trauer's team pooled 20 randomized trials covering 1,162 people with chronic insomnia, 64% of them women, average age 56 (Annals of Internal Medicine, 2015). Retraining the bed cut time to fall asleep by 19 minutes, cut time spent awake in the night by 26 minutes, and lifted sleep efficiency 10%. The gains held at follow-up. No adverse effects were reported.
|
Nineteen minutes and twenty-six minutes, from women your age, with nothing swallowed at all.
WHAT TO DO WITH THIS
| THE 20-MINUTE RULE (FREE) |
If you are awake and annoyed about it, get out of the bed.
Go and sit somewhere dim with something dull until you feel heavy, then go back. It feels like the opposite of resting and it is the best-evidenced piece of this. Every minute awake in that bed teaches it the wrong lesson.
|
|
Stop letting the sofa have the sleep the bed should be getting.
That nine o'clock doze does two things at once: it teaches the sofa it is a bedroom, and it drains the sleep pressure you needed upstairs. When your eyes close in front of the television, that is your cue to go up, not to settle in deeper.
|
|
Turn every clock in the room to face the wall.
The arithmetic is not a symptom of the problem. It is an engine driving it, because every calculation is a small dose of alarm delivered to a body trying to power down. You cannot do the sums if you cannot read the numbers.
|
| THE BED BOUNDARY (SANDRA) |
The bed gets two jobs. Email is not one of them.
Answering work messages under the covers is the fastest way I know to teach a bedroom it is an office. You are not reclaiming those hours. You are paying for them every night after.
|
|
And one more thing...
Retraining a bed takes a couple of weeks, and they are easier if the alarm signal is turned down while you work. Lemon balm is the herb with the most human work behind it for exactly that kind of low-grade, humming agitation, and it has been grown in kitchen gardens for eight hundred years. The trials used a standardized extract, not a teabag. Which is the whole reason it has a reputation for doing nothing. You have almost certainly drunk it as a flavor and never once as a dose.
|
|
QUICK QUESTION
Do you feel sleepy on the sofa and wide awake the moment you get into bed?
|
|