An Insomniac’s Guide to Better Sleep

The one trick that made all the cliché advice actually work.

Photo by Megan te Boekhorst on Unsplash

Oh no! Another insomnia guide? I’ve already read a dozen of those. I’ve cut caffeine, exercised more, and even started eating turkey for dinner every night. Don’t even mention meditation. I’ve tried that and it doesn’t help either.

Like many other insomniacs, I did try meditating, therapy, and cutting out caffeine. And none of them worked…at first. A lot of stuff in this guide is probably all stuff you’ve heard before, except for one change that helped all of the usual tips suddenly become effective. This guide is for you if you believe your insomnia is rooted in anxiety. There are a million reasons you could have insomnia, but if you believe it’s from poor mental health, I hope you read on.

Disclaimer: These are methods that worked for ME. I hope they work for you too, but everyone’s different. At the very least, I hope this guide can help you reflect on the root causes of your anxiety.

Introduction

I’ve had insomnia for as long as I can remember. When I was eight years old, I had a clock that projected the time onto the ceiling. I would stare at the bright red digits with wide-open eyes, my frustration growing as my body refused to fall asleep. Going into high school and college, my fear of not being able to fall asleep drove me to go to bed later and later until I was so exhausted I had no choice but to pass out.

Fast forward to present day: the pandemic and other stresses of adult life have caught up to me. My insomnia was worse than ever, and I knew I needed professional help.

What Is Insomnia Like?

Insomnia is defined as not being able to fall asleep in 20 minutes. A typical insomnia-filled night for me means trying to go to bed anytime from 10 PM-12 AM, but not being able to sleep until 2–4 AM. There were stretches of time when I was only getting three hours of sleep a night. Being able to fall asleep in under 20 minutes seemed like an amazing feat.

Most people, myself included, have thoughts running through their head so quickly that it’s exhausting. But apparently not exhausting enough to actually fall asleep. Some people don’t sleep for days on end. I luckily never reached that point.

First Things’s First

Every insomnia article I’ve read has said the same things: don’t drink caffeine, no screens one hour before bed, no late afternoon naps, make sure you’re eating well and exercising. Although these are all important and I will list them in this guide, I have a few thoughts on how much these habits actually improve sleep.

If you’re getting poor sleep, working on these lifestyle habits can affect insomnia, but it may not cure it. Sometimes it IS that simple for some people. They cut back on coffee and suddenly they can sleep. They make sure not to take naps and voilà, that was it. If that works for you, great. You probably don’t need to read through the rest of this guide! But if you’re like me, you’ve tried all of those things. Your insomnia may be more deeply rooted in mental health issues like anxiety. So doing these changes can help; because coffee might make you anxious, and eating healthy improves your mood. But you may have to go a little deeper, which I’ll discuss later.

Even if you’ve tried all of these things, it’s in your best interest to keep up with them. When you have bad sleep, you haven’t built any resilience to factors that may affect sleep. So that cup of coffee you had late might be fine if you’ve been sleeping well for many weeks, but detrimental if your insomnia has been awful.

If you’re getting good sleep and want to get better sleep they will most likely help! But I don’t think having one cup of coffee a little later will break you. Everyone’s different, but I can get away with having coffee at 8 PM if my sleep has been good. Is that caffeine preventing me from getting really good sleep? Possibly, so I don’t make a habit of it. But I also don’t freak out anymore if I can’t keep a perfect lifestyle routine.

Lifestyle Habits

I’ve listed lifestyle habits that are good boxes to check off on your journey to curing insomnia. These are just to ensure that they aren’t the main factors preventing you from sleeping.

Drink Water

If you are in a place in your mental and physical health where you feel numb and every step you take seems to consume all your energy, I get it. I’ve been there. But unfortunately, as hard as it is to get started, you need to start somewhere. So the easier it is to take the first step, the better. I would start by just drinking enough water. Drinking half your body weight in ounces is a good place to start. For example, if you weigh 150 pounds, you should drink 75 ounces of water a day.

Eat Healthy & Exercise

Eating healthy promotes better gut health which helps regulate hormones. If you eat nutritious food, you will boost your serotonin and dopamine (which may help prevent anxiety).

Next, exercise. Staying active also helps improve your mood. Taking brisk walks, lifting weights, and running are all helpful.

Sleep Hygiene

Maintaining good sleep hygiene can also rule out any obstacles that are preventing better sleep.

1. Be sure your room is at a comfortable temperature.
2. Don’t use your bed for anything other than sleep or sex.
3. Sleep in a dark room.
4. Sleep on a comfortable mattress.
5. Don’t do work in your bedroom. Try to avoid being in your bedroom if you’re not sleeping.
6. Give yourself an hour of cooldown time. No screens and no stimulating activities.
7. Establish a bedtime routine. Brush your teeth, shower, read an article, write in a journal, etc.
8. Start turning off main lights, only leaving some lamps on for soft mood lighting.

Hormonal and Medical

Of course, all of these recommendations may be pointless if you have a more serious medical condition. Always consult your doctor if you are having serious issues with your sleep.

I’ve never tried CBD oil so I can’t comment on it. I have also never taken prescribed sleep medication.

My last comment for medical aids: melatonin has never helped me. I think it may help if I’m getting ok sleep and want to get better sleep. But it will not help me fall asleep if I’m experiencing insomnia. But everyone’s different.

A Few More Good Habits

1. No caffeine after 12 PM.
2. No naps after 3 PM.

Tackling Insomnia Head-On

There are two ways to tackle insomnia. You can either manage it (reactive) or prevent it (proactive). I’ll go over how I accomplished both. Knowing how to positively react towards your insomnia will always be helpful for relief, but it will only be a band-aid over the problem.

Reactive

If you are finding yourself not able to sleep, think about what’s keeping you up. Are there thoughts racing in your head? Or is your mind quiet and your body feels restless? No matter the reason, don’t try to force it. Get out of bed if half an hour has gone by and you haven’t fallen asleep. And depending on what’s keeping you up, you can do the following:

If your mind is restless, you can practice meditation. I find that Headspace is really helpful for this. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced meditator, headspace has a lot of different options. After doing about 5 minutes of meditation, I like to journal. Here’s an article from a former insomniac who goes into depth about how to journal if you’re new to it. In fact, the author uses it as more of a proactive technique than a reactive technique, which I also highly recommend. Getting your thoughts out of your head and on paper can help with restlessness.

After meditating and journaling, I like to read something until I feel sleepy. I prefer to read educational magazines. If I read something too dense, I can’t focus. If I read an entertaining magazine, my brain switches gears often since the articles are relatively short. With fiction, I sometimes find it so enthralling that I don’t put it down once I am sleepy. But in educational magazines, my mind focuses on a single subject matter since articles are relatively longer. Also with educational articles, the writing is just sophisticated enough that I have to read it at a steady, even pace.

Above all, if you can’t fall asleep, do not scroll on your phone! I have also found that spending too much time on my phone during the day can be a culprit (more on that in the next section!). Don’t watch TV and don’t do anything that may be overstimulating. It will continue to make your mind restless.

If you find that you feel physically restless and can’t concentrate on reading or meditation and simply have nothing to journal or do not feel it’s helpful, there are a few other things you can do. Stretching is one of them. I also like to raise my arms over my head while breathing in deeply, then lower them slowly when I breathe out. I also love browsing cookbooks when I don’t have enough focus to read a magazine.

Now when you’re back in bed after doing restful activities, try to relax your body and mind. I like to do a breathing exercise paired with relaxing different parts of my body. Starting with the feet, I breathe in, and on the out-breath I physically try to relax my feet. Feel them sink into your mattress. I breathe again, and on the out-breath, I relax my ankles. I work my way up my body, relaxing consecutive parts one by one. When I get to my face, I relax my lips, nose, eyes, forehead. After I’ve relaxed my whole body, I count my breaths until 30. The first in-breath is 1, the next out-breath is 2, and so on.

Proactive

Of course, the proactive path is the longer, more difficult part of the journey. But it is also the most effective. You are dealing with the root cause of your insomnia. Below I will outline my full proactive journey which took six months.

It’s difficult to be proactive about insomnia. You can get caught up in these “vicious cycles of anxiety”. If you’re too tired, you won't have the motivation to work out, eat well, and focus. When you don’t meet these goals, you get anxious. The anxiety makes it harder to sleep. Now you're more tired, which in turn makes you more anxious. “Just getting more sleep” is something that’s very hard to control. But something you can control is what you do during the day when you’re awake.

The biggest cause of my anxiety came from how often I distracted myself with my phone. I sought out a therapist to help me manage this.

Before I continue, it’s important to note that going to therapy and talking about my problems didn’t help at all. It was the actions that my therapist assigned to me to do outside of our appointments that did the trick.

My anxiety heightened when I wasn’t able to focus on work. If I was working on a challenging or less desirable task, I would find myself reaching for my phone and endlessly scrolling on Instagram. But something I realized was that phone scrolling was like running on a treadmill. Have you ever been running on a treadmill and jumped off and you still felt the motion of the treadmill under you? That’s how my mind feels with phone scrolling. Once I had finished scrolling and rapidly taking in all of that information, my brain still sought out stimulation. Not only that, but scrolling too much can negatively affect your mood.

My therapist recommended I put my phone in a different location so I wasn’t tempted to reach for it. Within a matter of days, I noticed myself becoming less fidgety and more focused. Instead of distracting myself, I would take a sip of water or sit quietly and breathe. I also made a “distraction list”. As I worked on a task, I set a timer. While that timer ticked, I couldn’t break from my task. As I worked, if I found myself thinking of a personal task that I wanted to distract myself with (checking Instagram, paying my credit card bill), I wrote it on a sticky note. When my work timer was up, I could complete the items on my distraction list. As time went on, I found fewer of these distracting thoughts popping up.

Sometimes it’s hard to break this habit of distracting yourself. In which case, I like to do a “reset”. It’s my way of starting fresh and ridding myself of the anxiety that’s keeping me from doing my work.

Reset steps:

1. I put my phone in a different location from where I will be working
2. I go to the bathroom
3. Get some water or tea
4. Possibly meditate or journal or both
5. (Optional) Accomplish something that uses my hands i.e. washing dishes or clearing a cluttered tabletop
6. Sit at a different place to work
7. Begin work

Using the Proactive Plan

Here is my Proactive Plan in action over the course of 6 months.

Month 1–2

I started going to therapy. As I mentioned, the first problem we tried to tackle was my lack of focus during the day. My therapist helped me identify that I was seeking human connection through Instagram. However, using Instagram to gain this connection felt superficial: I wasn’t deeply connecting with people on the other side of the screen. I would leave Instagram feeling more unfulfilled than when I started scrolling. I needed to find a way to break the vicious cycle.

He gave me the suggestion that really drove it home: put your phone in a different room. Remove the trigger of the addiction. It took about 2 months to fully form that habit because there would be times that I would forget to do this but not care that I forgot because I loved the increased dopamine that came along with scrolling on my phone.

At this point, I’m having insomnia about 2–4 times a week.

Month 3–4

The next thing I started to do was practice meditation every day. It took another 2 months to develop this habit. Before the habit stuck, I was meditating sporadically and didn’t notice a huge difference. But once I started doing it every day, the full effects kicked in.

In full disclosure, I actually started meditation in months 1–2. But here’s the important part! The meditation didn’t have a powerful effect until I managed my distractions during the day. It kind of makes sense. During mindfulness meditation, you work on gently pushing your thoughts away and focusing on your breath. When you take away phones and other distractions, you are training your mind to focus and not resort to these distractions. It’s like you’re doing the same thing! However, I think controlling phone scrolling distractions is easier than controlling your thoughts during meditation. I believe it's still worth practicing regardless of how your other daily habits are going.

Another thing I started doing was maintaining a sleep schedule no matter how much sleep I was getting. I would lay my head on my pillow at a specific time every night. If I wasn’t able to sleep, that was fine. I would get it up and do my Reactive activities. But the next night I had an easier time falling asleep at that same time. It was like I was preparing my brain to get ready for sleep at that time.

Insomnia 1–3 times a week.

Month 5

I’m in grad school and have evening classes that I attend online in my bedroom. While it’s not ideal to work in the bedroom, it’s my necessary setup due to my work-from-home situation. However, this was ruining my sleep hygiene. After 5 PM when the sun started to set, I decided I wouldn’t go in the bedroom. This way I can associate nighttime with the bedroom and not work. And just like that, it was like a switch flipped.

Around this same time, I decided to get my IUD out and switched back to hormonal birth control. Apparently, IUDs can cause more anxiety than birth control, leading to harder times sleeping. I think getting the IUD out helped as well.

Although this may have seemed like an easy fix, I want to point out that there was a time pre-pandemic when I wasn’t working from home and had a great amount of stress and anxiety. I was getting three hours of sleep a night for 3–4 nights a week. It’s possible that the “switch-flip” wouldn’t have happened unless I already had an anxiety management and meditation plan in action.

Insomnia 0–2 times a week.

Month 6

After I switched my work out of my bedroom, I continued developing my meditation habit and eliminating phone distractions. My days were very productive and I slowly saw my sleep get better and better. Not only could I fall asleep more easily, but my quality of sleep felt better. Eventually, I moved my work completely out of my bedroom and my sleep has been incredible. I get eight hours every night if my schedule allows, sometimes more.

Insomnia 0 times a week.

Conclusion

The biggest takeaway I want you to have is that meditation did work, but it only worked when I was proactive about controlling my anxiety and what triggered it. Although the act of talking about my feelings in therapy didn’t help me, the actions my therapist assigned as a result of my emotions were the key.

Do I still experience insomnia today? I sure do. Every now and then life gets busy and I get out of my meditation practice. Or maybe I let my “phone in a different room” rule slip. But it just takes a few days of practicing my good habits and I’m good to go. I now experience the most beautiful, peaceful sleep I’ve had in a long time. I am more focused throughout the day. I have an incredible amount of energy (and I had a lot of energy before!). I feel like a whole new person. And I sincerely hope if you’re struggling that this article at least gave you a new perspective to contemplate. Good luck, and happy sleeping!