There is always the temptation to try to do everything at once, get over whelmed and then become frustrated when things don’t work out so try to incorporated only one or two sleep tips per week. Zero in on the one you think will most likely solve your sleep problem, then add others as the need arises.

Tips for During the Day

You may want to see a psychologist or psychiatrist if emotional stress in your life is causing you to have a poor night’s sleep.

Exercise in the afternoon to relieve stress and to physically tire yourself out. Avoid exercising later in the evening as it will be too stimulating and it will keep your from falling asleep.

Avoid caffeinated beverages. It could be as late as after dinner or as early at 3pm for some people.

Don’t eat a heavy meal before bed or overeat. That lump in your stomach will keep you awake and you have an increased change of getting heartburn or acid reflux.

If you require 8 hours of sleep in order to feel refreshed the next day, you should go to bed 8 ½ hours before you plan to wake up. This will allow you 20 minutes to read and relax and 10 minutes to quiet down and get to sleep. Adjust this to suit your needs.

You can improve your sleep by quitting smoking. Some heavy smokers can wake up in the middle of the night for a smoke to keep up their nicotine level in their body.

Don’t drink alcohol before bed. Drinking in the evening may knock you out, but your sleep will be fragmented and you may awake in the middle of the night with a hangover or feeling dehydrated.

Tips for Before Bed

You can try a warm bath, light music or a little meditation.

Have a light snack of a small glass of milk and a banana with a little peanut butter.

Turn off the TV and computer earlier in the evening as the light will stimulate your brain. Read a book instead. Pick up some light reading like a novel or magazine. I often do the crossword or the Sudoku puzzles from the days paper.

Establish a regular sleep routine you can follow every night that can act as cues for your body and mind to prepare for sleep.

Go to bed at the same time every night. You body will get used to it and you will naturally start to become tired as your bedtime approaches.

Be positive about getting to sleep. Worrying that you won’t fall asleep can often become a self fulfilling prophecy.

Tips for During the Night

Keep your bedroom dark, quiet and a little on the cool side.

Keep a pen and pad beside your bed so you can write down anything important that may come to you. Then let it go and get back to sleep.

Save solving your problems for the morning. People rarely come up with an ideal solution by ruminating over a problem at night.

Try to take any sleep medication as a last resort and make sure there is an adult in the house who is not taking anything so someone can be alert if there is an emergency during the night. You should also be cautious as the risk of a fall increases for those who have taken a sleep aid and have to get up during the night.

Try a few of the sleep tips tonight and see if they improve your night’s sleep.

What do you do to help you get to sleep? Do you have a tip you can share? Leave a comment below.

Your brain is even more active during dreaming (REM sleep) than when you’re awake. As your eyes are moving back and forth, it’s stimulating the visual cortex area of your brain and your brain is sending out signals to your muscles to move, as if you were awake. Luckily, another part of your brain blocks these signals to move or you would be acting out your dreams.

Adults spend about 90 minutes in REM sleep whereas infants spend half their sleep time dreaming. Dreams are thought to be used by the brain to make sense of the days’ events and to create new memory pathways while stimulating the brain.

Why We Dream

The notion that dreams are predictions of the future later gave way to the idea that dreams are used to resolve personal issues.

Freud believed that dreams explained the working of the unconscious mind and that by understanding our dreams we could better understand ourselves and what motivates us. He believed that our dreams were often symbolic of our unfulfilled dreams and desires.

Freud also had a tendency to reduce most dreams to some repressed sexual desire.

Two British scientists, Christopher Riche Evans and Edgar Arthur Newman compared our dreaming to the working of a computer. Our dreams were used to process the days events, the emotions we experienced and our troubles, and our brains would keep the useful information and store it as a long term memories and get rid of the other junk so our neural pathways would not get clogged up.

If this were true then how do explain people would seem to have perfect memory? They have eidetic or photographic memory and can recall everything that has happened to the on every day in their life.

Maybe our dreaming involves random electrical firings in our brain to maintain the memory pathways. It’s kind of like a classic car collection in an airplane hanger. You can’t just leave the cars there unattended or the batteries would go dead and parts would cease up so you start them up and take them for short drive to keep them in working order.

Our brains have a routine of maintaining our memories during our dreams by recalling them. Since there is not a part of our brain devoted to remembering cats and another for bananas, the random firing in our brains may touch upon may different, unrelated thoughts at any one time. Then the dream is composed of the memories that are available. And as weird as some dreams can be, at the time, everything makes perfect sense.

Dreaming may be an important component in solving our problems as it is often best to “sleep on it” before making an important decision.

Our dreams may be important for the ideas that come to us in our waking hours, known as our creativity.  Where did that original idea come from?

Remembering Your Dreams

If you are interested in finding out if there is any meaning to your dreams the first thing you have to do is record them. Keep a pad and a pen beside your bed and when you awaken, record your dreams with as much detail as you can in your dreams journal.

Some people have found that they can remember their dreams better if they actually tell themselves as they are winding down and relaxing in bed that “I will remember my dreams.”

Speed can also be important. You might want to use a personal recorder to verbalize as much detail as you can before your dream fades and dissolves into the ether.

Rather than there just being one, all encompassing theory for why we dream, I think it’s quite possible that our brain uses all of the above while we are dreaming. One moment our dreams are solidifying memories, at another moment dealing your emotional issues of the day, and later routine memory maintenance or after a dull day, just make something up for it’s own amusement.

Since our brains are so complex, why not all of the above at once? Or in combination one night and in another combination the next.

Maybe our dreams will give us insight into our future or symbolize our desires. And maybe, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Sleep scientists have used a polysomnograph that measures brain activity, eye movements, muscle activity, breathing and heart rate from electrodes attached to volunteers in a sleep lab and have found that sleep is a very active process.

The Sleep Cycle

There are two distinct parts of the sleep cycle making up a complete 90 to 100 minute  cycle that occurs four to five times in an average eight hours of sleep.

The first part is call non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and is further divided into four stages of sleep intensity.

NREM sleep has four stages from Stage 1, a light sleep where a dripping tap can drive you nuts to the deepest Stage 4 sleep where a Mariachi band playing at your bed side may not wake you. Stages two and three are progressively deeper stages of sleep.

Stage 1
This is where you start to move from being awake and into a state of sleep. Your breathing, heart rate and brain activity decrease and your muscles start to relax. You may be aware of noises around you and if awakened you may deny that you were asleep (like what happens when you were in English class).

During Stage 1 your brain activity slows and produces alpha waves, that are occur in 8-14 cycles per second and slow to theta waves that are 3-8 cycles per second.

Stage 2
This is still a light sleep but it is deeper than a Stage 1 sleep. Your brain waves are now at 2-12 cycles per minute and are interrupted by bursts of brain activity called sleep spindles and K-complexes

Stage 3 and Stage 4
In both of these sleep stages your brain is producing delta brain waves of 1/2 –4 cycles per minute. It is during these deepest stages of sleep is where scientists believe most of your body’s repair and restoration occurs. This is also when your body produces most of it’s human growth hormone.

At Stage 3 you are truly asleep and will be difficult to awaken but you spend just a brief period of time here before you go into the deepest part of the NREM sleep cycle, Stage 4.
If you get an insufficient amount of Stage 3 and Stage 4 sleep you will feel exhausted the next day.

REM Sleep
The second part of the sleep cycle is called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep which occurs later in the sleep cycle and is when dreaming happens. REM sleep is a very light, active sleep mode and your body also goes through some dramatic changes.

Your hear rate and breathing increases and your brain becomes more active, so much so that it is almost as active as when you are awake but your muscles are paralysed.

While you are dreaming your eyes move back and forth under your eye lids like they are watching a movie. If it wasn’t for your body being kept motionless you might be acting out your dreams in your sleep.

During REM sleep your brain may be involved with processing memories and emotional events you experienced during the day.

If you don’t get to REM sleep for any reason, you will suffer from brain fog the next day and find it difficult to concentrate. Scientists don’t know why but if we are short changed several nights in a row of an adequate amount of REM sleep, your body will make up for it the follow night.

Your Sleep Cycle
Your sleep cycle is made up of NREM and REM sleep and if you do not get an adequate amount of sleep in either of these two parts, you will feel tired, find it difficult to concentrate and can be short tempered.

So don’t think of sleep as being unimportant and a waste of time. Your body and brain needs the time to recover from the days events and to prepare you for the day ahead.

When we sleep our bodies are remarkably busy. Our brain is active, we dream, all our organs continue to function, blood flows and breathing goes on. You probably change your position many times during the night and you turn over almost two dozen times or more each night.

I toss and turn a few hundred times per night. I am like a fish in the bottom of the boat – flip flop, flip flop. I could judge how well I slept the night before by how torn apart my bed was the next morning; pillows on the floor, sheets pulled out, pyjamas on the lamp shade, drool cup knocked over.

Your body also goes through natural cycles of a light/dark, hot/cold and asleep/alert cycles controlled by our circadian rhythm. Your brain is also busy dreaming which seems to help process information and create memory pathways. You also go through several stages of sleep from stage 1, the lightest, to stage 4, the deepest and REM sleep – the dreaming state where your brain is in a very active state but your body is paralyzed.

During sleep all of your body’s physical processes are slowed down. They allows the body a chance to recover everything from our muscles to cleaning up free radicals and repairing damage our cells.

It’s natural to wake up during the night. The bad news is we’ll awake a few dozen times when we’re young adults to over a hundred times when we’re seniors (not all are bathroom trips, although sometimes it may seem like it). I am finding that I awake more often now and I find it hard to get back to sleep, so my sleep is very fragmented and irregular.

So what happens when you sleep? Are you out to the world or hear every little noise? Are you like a log that never moves or leaf in a tornado? Do you fall asleep right away and stay asleep, or does it take forever only to be awake an hour later staring at the ceiling?

For more information check out: http://www.sleepjunkie.com/circadian-rhythms/

The amount of sleep a person needs is an individual thing. Some people need only 3-4 hours per night while others require 10 or 11. So the number of 8 hours per night is just an average. The amount of sleep you need may be more or less than the average. The key point to remember is that you get enough hours of sleep that allows you to feel rested and alert the next day.

When you don’t get enough sleep, your memory is impaired, you can be in a foul mood, you lack enjoyment of the day and your judgement is off.

The amount of sleep you get can change depending on:

• your heredity
• current lifestyle
• amount of stress in your life
• your physical health
• mental wellbeing
• your metabolism

Another big factor is that affects your sleep is your age. Infants sleep three quarters of the day, adults about 8 hours and the elderly about 6 hours.

Forget the old wives tale (experienced, woman’s embellishment) that an hour of sleep before midnight is equal to two hours after midnight. Each hour of sleep is the same, whenever it occurs.

But what we really need the most of is deep sleep, which is the stage 3, 4 and REM sleep. This happens when we will feel the most refreshed the following day. Deep sleep is also responsible for the brain and body to recover and to prepare for the following day.
There is also some evidence that a lack of sleep can affect your insulin levels and your body’s ability to control blood sugar levels. A lack of sleep has also been shown to make you fat.

So make getting a good night’s sleep a high priority in your life. Your body will thank you.

There are just a few basic categories of sleep problems and if you find the one that defines your sleep then you have a great start in solving your problem and getting a better night’s sleep.

The first category is difficulty falling asleep. You find that it often takes you more than 30 minutes to fall asleep at night. Some nights your mind is racing and it can be hours before you get to sleep. You are getting a poor quality of sleep with too much light sleep.

The second category involves having difficulty staying asleep. You may fall asleep within 20 minutes but you wake up many times during the night and sometimes also find it difficult to get back to sleep. Your night and your sleep is fragmented.

The third category of sleep problems comprises people who can fall asleep and stay asleep during the night but they wake up often very early in the morning after only five or six hours and are unable to get back to sleep.

If you fall into one of the three categories than it is easier to find solutions to your sleep problem.

My sleep problems often bounced between all three categories. Sometimes I couldn’t fall asleep until 2 or 3 in the morning. My alarm clock going off at 6am was sucking around for a beating.

Other nights I’d drop off quickly but I’d wake up over and over. If I woke up with the cure for cancer or with underwear that wouldn’t bind up then maybe it would be worth it but mostly it was caused by worrying about something.

There were other times I’d fall asleep quickly but be wide awake and raring to go at 3am. I’d be up paying bills, washing dishes or doing a few loads of laundry. I felt I was being so productive when the other losers would still be sleeping. By 7:30am when I needed to  get ready to go to work I would feel more like going back to bed.

If you find yourself consistently in one sleep category, your behaviour my just be a bad habit that you’ve had for years. It may take a while to break the habit but you can do it.

What sleep category do you fall into? Leave a comment below.

Everyone has sleep problems from time to time. Over half of adults experienced difficulty sleeping a few nights per week, with a quarter regularly having trouble getting to and staying asleep. As a whole, half the people in our society are sleep deprived, and cut back on sleep to get more done during the day. Sleep is just being seen as an unproductive time. My cat would soundly disagree.

You can be thought of having insomnia if you take longer than 30 minutes to fall sleep, don’t sleep through the night, or both for the last six months. Your insomnia can be bad enough that your sleep/wake cycle is disrupted to the point that you don’t feel rested upon waking and can function normally during the day.

Insomnia is very often a symptom of an underlying problem such as stress, poor sleep habits, depression, lifestyle behaviour, pain or other physical problems.

The good news is that once the underlying problem is identified, the quality and quantity of your sleep will greatly improve. Take solace in that you are not alone, that no one has ever died from lack of sleep and that short term sleep loss will not harm your health.