What To Do If You Can't Sleep

What if you could finally conquer sleepless nights and wake up feeling refreshed every morning? This video promises to arm you with practical, expert-backed strategies for falling asleep faster and staying asleep longer. We dive into the importance of getting out of bed if you can't sleep, and why engaging in calming activities like journaling or reading can be game-changers. We also touch on the pros and cons of watching TV or using your phone, offering tips on minimizing blue light exposure to maintain a healthy sleep cycle.

Learn how to enhance your sleep hygiene throughout the day with actionable insights that range from morning sunlight exposure to daily exercise and stress management techniques. Discover why avoiding late-night work emails or emotionally charged conversations before bed can significantly improve your sleep quality. Whether you're struggling to fall asleep or waking up in the middle of the night, this episode is packed with valuable advice to help you create a more restful and restorative sleep environment. Join us as we share personal stories and expert tips on achieving the sleep you've always dreamed of.

Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and Relationships


Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

What do I do if I can't sleep? Such a great question and, as you know, and probably many of the listeners, I love talking about sleep. I love sleeping, I love getting good sleep, but it hasn't always been that way. There have definitely been several years of my life where I have struggled with either going to sleep or waking up in the middle of the night and having insomnia and going back to sleep. So I'll start with the first one.

Speaker 1: 0:28

If you're struggling with going to sleep, the standard recommendation is going to be don't just stay laying in bed, get up out of bed and go do something. Now. Don't go clean the house, don't go turn all the lights on and maybe even don't go and turn on a movie Definitely not the news, and please don't touch your phone. What you really want to do is get up, maybe turn on a low light in your living room or whatever area of your house you can go into and do something calming. Maybe it's journaling which can help you, if you're having racing thoughts or a lot of thoughts or anxious thoughts, to get some of those thoughts on paper and work through them. Or maybe you pick up a book and read it, maybe a fiction or a nonfiction book. What you're really looking to do here is to do something that's going to get your mind calmed down, not riled up. Now you could watch something on TV, but there's a couple of things that you want to consider. Number one is exposure to blue light, and number two is continuing to keep your mind super engaged with something. So I cannot sit here and say that when I've had problems going to sleep, that I never turn on the TV, but I will. My TV has a dimmer on it, so I will turn it down to where it's not as light. Sometimes I will go straight to a certain app on my phone, like the Max app or the Peacock app, and go straight to Friends or the Office, something more funny, something lighthearted that I've seen before and that I can kind of play in the background as I fall asleep. If it's something new or if it's a very suspenseful type of show or movie that you want to stay engaged in. That's just going to keep your brain very active and alert.

Speaker 1: 2:17

But again, you also want to be mindful of the blue light exposure here. So, ideally, start with reading, start with journaling or just turn something on and maybe you don't even look at it on your phone. I've done that several times. I'll turn on friends and then just put it face down to where I can hear it. So it kind of keeps my mind away from racing thoughts and things like that. But it allows me to hear it and then I can kind of doze off to sleep a little bit better.

Speaker 1: 2:41

But the key here is you don't want to stay in bed. Now I won't get into this whole thing here, but of course one of the best ways that you can go to sleep well at night and get better sleep through the night starts with what you do in the morning. So waking up, going outside, going for a walk, getting some of that morning sunlight, begins the process of your body creating ultimately what will end up at the end of the day being melatonin. But that actually starts by by seeing sunlight early in the day and starts that whole mechanism in our body that ends up creating melatonin. Doing workouts, getting exercise throughout the day continued exposure to sunlight throughout the day can help with that as well. So just really be mindful of what are you doing through your day.

Speaker 1: 3:27

And then what are you doing before you go to bed? That may be anxiety producing. Are you catching up on work emails right until your head hits the pillow? Are you constantly thinking of the things that you have to do? Are you doing something extremely stressful, like waiting until right before bed to have a difficult conversation with your husband or with your mom or with a friend? You should do those things earlier in the day, because the closer you get to bedtime, the more you want to allow yourself to wind down.

Speaker 1: 3:57

Now, what if you wake up in the middle of the night and you can't go back to sleep? Well, you can use similar tips, the same tips, actually, that we said at the very beginning Get out of bed. If you find yourself continuing to just lay there for over 20 minutes, go ahead and get out of bed. Go out into the living room, turn on a low light especially not one that's like a super bright white light, but more that amber, yellowish color light I've replaced every light bulb in my entire house with that color light for this reason and do some journaling, do some reading or another thing that you can do. It always helps me.

Speaker 1: 4:33

Now I will say this it always helps me if I wake up in the middle of the night and realize it's going to be a struggle to get back to sleep. I will get out of bed and I will go into the living room, and just being in a different place sometimes helps me to just go back to sleep. A lot of times when I wake up in the middle of the night other than it being racing thoughts or like, oh my goodness, I have to deal with this thing or I didn't get this thing done A lot of times it's actually because I'm hot, and so it's very hard for me to go back to sleep when I continue to be hot. So when I go into a bigger room in my house that has more airflow, that allows me to cool down more and it allows me to go back to sleep quicker. I also have a chili pad on my bed for this reason. The chili pad runs cold water. It's kind of like a pad that you put on top of your mattress and it runs cool water through that pad. That can keep you cool. But because my bedroom, we sleep with our door closed, my husband's sleeping in there with me, we have an air purifier going. There's just a lot of movement and breath. That's happening in that room every night. It just gets hot and I will say.

Speaker 1: 5:42

This is something even more recent, where I was listening to a podcast with Dr Andy Galpin and he was talking about carbon dioxide buildup, not like a crate, not like to the amount of you know what you could detect in a home or anything like that.

Speaker 1: 5:58

But if you're in a closed room at night that you sleep in and there's other people in there, like your husband, or if there's an animal, or if you have a child that sleeps in your room, for whatever reason, then all of those people are breathing out carbon dioxide.

Speaker 1: 6:13

And if there's, and if the door is shut, then you, if you're carbon dioxide sensitive which I don't know that I am or not, but I have a hypothesis that I am and I'll tell you why in a minute then it can actually disrupt your sleep and you wouldn't even really realize that's why.

Speaker 1: 6:28

So, after we heard this episode, one of the recommendations that he made was to either sleep with the bedroom door open or open up a window. Well, as of the time of filming this, it's spring, so it's very cool outside at night. So we've been opening up our bedroom window before we go to sleep, which not only helps the room to get cool, which helps people to sleep, but it continues to allow fresh air to come in and there is not as much of a buildup of just the exhale of carbon dioxide that people have, and we have slept for the past week and a half now like babies, like we have gotten some really great sleep. So I would even recommend that if you find yourself consistently waking up and you have devices that you're running in your room, like air purifiers or multiple people or animals sleeping in your room, you may want to crack a window and see if that helps with your sleep as well. If you enjoyed this clip from it Starts With Attraction then click here to watch the full episode.