Creating Your Sleep Sanctuary

Bed sleep connection. (soft music) Um. Bed sleep connection. When I hear the words bed sleep connection, I think my head connecting to the pillow on the bed and sleeping. The connection between the bed and the body is just a fundamental piece of ensuring a reliable and predictable sleep experience. The bed plays such an important environmental trigger to bringing on and supporting the feeling of sleepiness. This is actually a really critical piece, both for people who sleep well and for those who don't. For people who sleep well, they may feel sleepy when they go to bed, but the bed itself is an incredible trigger for the feeling of sleepiness. It's like a hammer coming down on them that allows them to let go and fall asleep. For people who don't sleep well, it's almost the opposite. They've had so many bad nights laying in bed tossing and turning, worrying, that they maybe feel sleepy, they get in bed and their brain wakes up. It's become this kind of fractured relationship between the bed and sleepiness, and has been replaced with the bed and kind of this angstiness or concern about their sleep. I think there's a lot of anxiety when it comes to going to sleep, 'cause it's like, am I gonna sleep tonight? It's not something I look forward to. It's really critical to make the bed kind of a shrine to sleep. A place where sleep happens, that you make a place of safety, a place of comfort, and one that you wanna go to, right? Like, not one that you're worried about getting into. And so maybe that requires kind of some changes. Ultimately, it's about pairing that feeling of sleepiness with the bed, wherever that is, and making sure that you're not spending excess time in bed doing other things, like worrying, like doom scrolling, like working. I actually do everything on my bed. I am thinking about watching TV, doing phone stuff, doing computer stuff, doing work, because that's the place I do everything. All of those things undermine the ability to sleep well and perpetuate the experiences of sleep disturbance. Now, if you get in bed and your brain wakes up, or you fall asleep and then you wake up and you can't get back to sleep, give yourself 15, 20 minutes, try to get back to sleep. But if you can't, you wanna get out of bed, you wanna do something quiet, something relaxing for you until you begin to feel that sleepiness, and then try again. Today's daily action is don't go to bed if you're not ready to sleep. Make your bed a space only for sleep. If you wake up and can't get back to sleep, try a relaxing activity out of bed to help you get sleepy. In our next session, we'll break down your sleep window and the importance of maintaining the same wake-up time each day. I'll see you there. (soft music)...