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Don’t forget to buy milk, eggs, apples, and toothpaste at the grocery store tomorrow. We’ve all been there – you’re lying in bed and your thoughts won’t stop spinning around. Put Your Thoughts Somewhere Other Than In Your Head But if sleep is something you struggle with, it might be worth trying this for a few weeks and seeing if it helps. I want to acknowledge that some of these things can be hard – especially the part about setting boundaries with screens. Here is a more exhaustive set of tenets of sleep hygiene. It’s a long list, and these are just some of the key pieces. If you can’t sleep, get up, do something relaxing, and then try again.Stop using screens 1-2 hours before bedtime.This may help you fall asleep, but the quality of your sleep will be lower than average. That way, climbing into bed becomes a cue that it’s time to wind down. The bed should be used only for sleep and sex.
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Here are some of the most important items on the list: These are evidence-based things you can do to improve both your ability to fall asleep, and the quality of the sleep you get. “Sleep hygiene” is a phrase used by doctors and therapists to describe a bundle of factors that make for better sleep. Regardless, here are some things you can do about it when, inevitably, it happens to you. For most people, it’s just something that happens once in awhile. Or maybe, like me, your head is just trying and trying to wrap itself around a problem that it’s determined, 3 AM be damned, to solve.įor some people, this is chronic. Maybe you had an argument with a loved one. Maybe you have some physical discomfort that’s keeping you awake. And I’m sure that from time to time, they happen to you. So if sleep problems can happen to me, they can happen to anyone. I’m out shortly after my head hits the pillow, I clock 8 hours, and then wake up to my alarm clock without issue. The thing is, generally, I sleep very well. Most people have nights where sleep is elusive.
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It was after one of these nights that I sat down in the daylight, talked it through with some loved ones, decided the answer was in Sondheim, and landed on Through the Woods Therapy Center. By 2:30 AM, I’d be gripping a pen and legal pad, scribbling every idea that popped into my head, surrounded by crumpled pages of rejected ideas like the archetypal writers-blocked brainstormer. The worst part was that inevitably, once every few months, my brain would decide to try to solve this puzzle at about 11:00 at night… and not let up for hours.
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That’s a long time to puzzle over something, but the fact that it was a year and a half wasn’t by any means the worst part. So over the course of a year and a half, I wrestled with it. Everything was too trite (Authenticity Therapy Center!) or too dark (Eye of the Hurricane Therapy Center!) or too confusing (Act 2 Therapy Center! Like the second act of a play… you know, act two… not “act to therapy…” oh, nevermind). At the time, I was preparing to hire other therapists, so just using my name wouldn’t work anymore.īut the name didn’t come to me right away. About two years ago, I decided to change the name of my therapy practice.
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