5 WAYS TO STOP WAKING UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
Tired of waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep? If so, this article is for you as I list 5 ways to help you sleep through the night.
There’s nothing worse or more annoying than waking up during the night and not being able to get back to sleep straight away or even at all.
However, for you to stop waking up in the middle of the night, I’m afraid it’s going to take you a lot more than a quick solution.
In fact, the truth is, it’s going to require two things from you:
Is that you change your lifestyle; and
You change how you think and feel about sleep
Therefore, what you’ll find here.
So, let’s get started.
Why do I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep?
First off, let’s start at the very beginning and look at some of the common causes of not being able to stay asleep at night.
The first one and probably the most common one is needing to wake up to go to the toilet.
And the second one is feeling anxious about not being able to get back to sleep once you’re up that you don’t end up falling asleep fast or at all after that.
Therefore, leading you to think thoughts related to the past or future, which further stop you from being able to get back to sleep.
Needing to wake up to go to the toilet
There’s of course nothing abnormal about needing to get up to go to the toilet.
And this is an obvious one as to why you can’t get back to sleep, since the act of getting up to go to the toilet alerts all your senses that when you attempt to go back to sleep it takes some time for your mind and body to wind back down in order for you to be able to get back to sleep.
As a result, what you’re thinking and believing in terms of your ability to get back to sleep really matters here.
As the thoughts and beliefs you have will either support you in getting back to sleep or hinder you from getting back to sleep.
Therefore, requiring you to potentially get up a second time.
Feeling anxious
If you’re thinking about ‘how you’re not going to be able to get back to sleep’ and how you ‘can’t go back to sleep’, this may lead you to think about other things, including perhaps past, present and future scenarios.
As a result, making you feel anxious, which stops you from being able to fall back to sleep.
You also may have awoken, however, because you felt anxious about something in the first instance.
And therefore, this is what is stopping you from getting back to sleep because our body is often processing information that we may be unaware of.
As a result, the 5 ways to stop waking up in the middle of the night (coming up next) will address these points.
How to stop waking up in the middle of the night?
1. Give therapy the benefit of the doubt
Given that I’m passionate about the work of therapy in resolving your questions and struggles in life over here, my first suggestion is to give working with a therapist the benefit of the doubt.
Why work with a therapist?
The reason I suggest working with a therapist is that working with one over a period of four or five years will enable you to be able to see the power of your own thoughts, feelings and beliefs in creating your reality.
Including (but not limited to), how your lifestyle, along with, your thoughts, feelings and beliefs throughout the day and at night, are contributing to you waking up in the middle of the night, falling asleep fast and getting back to sleep once up, regardless of any other noise that may (or may not) be happening around you.
And, as a result, supporting you in learning how to manage your own mind both throughout the day and at night, to be able to stop waking up in the middle of the night and if you do, be able to get back to sleep within minutes.
Of course, sometimes you might still wake up in the middle of the night when working with a therapist, however, depending on how much progress you’re making in therapy, you’ll notice waking up in the middle of the night will be a lot less frequent.
Example of the power of your thoughts in waking up in the middle of the night
Working with a therapist opens you up to a whole new way of looking at things.
Including (potentially) spirituality centres like the Brahma Kumaris, which I visited at one point in my life when I stopped working with my therapist before then going back about a year and a half or so later.
And on this one occasion, I remember attending a talk with a really engaging speaker who told a story about her experience of having to sleep near a washing machine that was on and washing clothes throughout the night.
Now you’re going to have to bear with me on this story because it was quite a long time ago now and I can’t remember the exact story.
But, what really struck me about this story was whilst this washing machine was stopping the speaker from being able to fall asleep and get a good nights sleep, when she spoke to her roommate about whether the washing machine bothered her, she found her roommate (Likely because she was from India and didn’t have the luxuries that we do in the west) didn’t have any problem with sleeping with the washing machine going.
Therefore, was able to get to sleep without any problems.
And from that day onwards this speaker didn’t have any problems sleeping with the washing machine going nearby.
Now I know, you may not be getting up because you’ve necessarily heard a noise, which has woken you up.
But the point here is that the power of your thoughts, feelings and beliefs towards something really matters to the outcome of that thing, regardless of whether there is noise around you or not.
And that includes whether you’re able to sleep through the night or you wake up in the middle of the night.
2. Have a routine
It’s not only babies who need routines.
It’s also us, as adults who also need routines as this primes our minds and bodies to get ready to fall asleep and stay asleep throughout the night.
Therefore, your first step in stopping waking up in the middle of the night is to establish a routine where you go to bed, eat, breakfast, lunch and dinner AND wake up at the same time every day, regardless of whether you’re an early bird or a night owl.
However, I would say if you haven’t tried going to sleep earlier and waking up earlier perhaps give this a try over 3- 6 months to see how it works for you.
And, if you don’t currently eat your last meal a couple of hours or drink your last drink an hour before you go to bed, you will want to start doing this too so you’re limiting your need to get up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet.
Although I will say, with this if you try it only for a day or a week and resolve it doesn’t work, or you don’t believe you can do it because you’re a night owl, you’re probably not going to be able to do it because it takes time for your body clock to get used to a change in habit.
So you do really have to be open and willing to give it a try, as an experiment, which is where working with a therapist comes in too as they will support you in changing how you see sleep and your whole lifestyle around sleep.
3. Have a self-care and bedtime rituals routine
When I say have routine self-care and bedtime rituals I don’t mean anything long-winded.
Only three to four tools and practices, which might sound like a lot to you right now, but if you were to make time for them, you would see that you do have time for them.
And some changes to your environment to signal to your brain it’s time to sleep.
Meditation
The kind of meditation I’m talking about is called acapella meditation.
WHAT IS ACAPELLA MEDITATION?
Acapella meditation is meditation without any guiding or sound.
In other words, without any guided meditation or guided visualisation.
HOW DO YOU DO MEDITATION ACAPELLA STYLE?
More than not having anything to listen to, acapella meditation relies on you focusing on your breath and sensations in the body (mainly your torso and back).
And noticing what information from the day, thoughts, feelings, beliefs and memories come up (as a result of meditating on the breath and sensations in the body), which when this happens, you stay with for a little while, before then bringing yourself back when you notice you’ve drifted off too much.
How do you bring yourself back? By telling yourself to relax and giving yourself some reassurance that you’re safe and are okay.
This is because often the reason you drift off too much is that the sensations in the body you’re experiencing, are uncomfortable, so as a distraction you’ll get caught up in your thoughts and before you know it, 10 minutes have gone by and all you’ve been doing is thinking.
It’s quite difficult to explain since it’s something you need to experience to be able to understand.
But as with anything, the more you do it the better you’ll get at it.
In addition, you can either be sitting down, cross-legged sitting on a meditation cushion or lying down when you carry it out.
It really doesn’t matter it’s just whatever feels comfortable for you at the time and the area of the body you’re working on at the time, as this will shift and change the more you meditate.
MEDITATION AND THERAPY
Meditation works great with therapy in getting you to sleep through the night because it further allows you to be mindful and aware of any challenging thoughts, feelings and beliefs you may have during the day.
So that you can work on them with your therapist in order for you to be able to resolve them.
And get a good night’s sleep.
WHY PRACTICE ACAPELLA MEDITATION?
The reason I recommend acapella meditation is because in my experience of using guided visualisations and guided meditations they’re great…for the first few times you use them.
But then once you’ve gotten used to them, you get bored of them.
Well, that was my experience anyway.
Acapella meditation, on the other hand, means you never get bored.
In fact, you could go for hours and hours if you really wanted to.
But, of course, probably not a wise decision to make before you go to bed.
WHY PRACTICE MEDITATION BEFORE GOING TO BED?
Meditation is a brilliant tool not only to help you to relax and prepare you for going to sleep.
But also to help you to, as I mentioned earlier, process any information you’ve come across throughout the day that has left an imprint on you.
As well as, any past, present and projected future thoughts, feelings, beliefs and memories.
Plus, if you meditate for up to an hour to two hours before you go to bed, that automatically stops you from drinking any water, tea, coffee or whatever else.
Therefore, preventing you from getting up to go to the toilet during the night.
At most, you’ll need to get up a couple of times before you drift off but that’s it.
Re-scripting exercise
When you’ve had a bad day at the office…
Or you feel a conversation has gone terribly wrong whether with family members, friends, colleagues or strangers…
You can use this re-scripting exercise to completely reimagine the situation that did take place, to a completely new one so you feel better about the situation.
This is important because negative memories can be stored in our bodies and can affect how we feel about ourselves and our lives.
However, when we work on them by carrying out this rescripting exercise, instead of staying in anger or guilt, we can do (as Gabriele Bernstein in her book The Universe has your Back says), return back to feeling love for ourselves and others, which is in harmony with who we are at our core, who we want to be as people and the frequency of the universe.
This means (you guessed it) you get a good nights sleep too because you’re not harbouring any resentment during the night.