If it's gone way beyond the normal amount of time it takes you to fall asleep. I don't
want you to stay in bed. I want you to actually get out of bed and to do something that's
calming. That's relaxing. That's soothing, or that's boring. There's the reason why.
Jamie, it's Dr. Ali Mattu, you are on the psych show. How can I help you?
Hey, Ali, thanks for taking my call. Totally. Well, in the past couple weeks, I've had some
trouble just getting some sound sleep. And I'm finding that it's really affecting how
I feel the next day, oftentimes, I'm only getting about four to about five hours of
sleep. Wow. Yeah, so the problem that I have is even if I go to bed at a reasonable time,
I still find myself waking up around four in the morning or five in the morning and
not being able to go back asleep. So I'm wondering if this is a case of like anxiety, or if maybe
it's my environment, so I was wondering if you had any advice on how to get more sound
sleep, that's
a really great question and something we all struggle with. I mean, the thing about sleep
is it affects everything if you if you aren't getting good quality, sleep and enough of
it, it's harder to harder to remember things are harder to make decisions harder to deal
with your emotions harder to deal with other people like everything becomes harder. And
the other really annoying thing about sleep is everything affects sleep, too. Like the
stuff you go through during the day impacts the kind of sleep you're getting four to five
that worries me because that's not Yeah, a lot of sleep. Um, how long has this been
going on? I'd say for the past three months. And you know what's funny is like when I get
six hours of sleep, I'm like, so happy, but I still feel pretty tired. So I think if I'm
able to get more sleep It's just going to be able to help me be a lot more productive
during the day, and just feel a lot better too. Because when I'm when I'm feeling tired,
I just it affects my performance at work. And then I also I don't have the energy to,
to exercise and work out as well. Totally. So
yeah, I would love which makes you feel less good too.
Yeah. Okay, how much sleep usually makes you feel pretty well rested? Makes you feel alert
and good?
Seven hours. Yeah, is usually pretty good. I usually feel pretty. I'm great. I get seven
hours. When was the last time you got seven hours?
There are some days here in there where I'm able to get seven hours. So I will say maybe
last Sunday. Let's think about a day like last Sunday. When you get seven hours. Do
you feel rested? Or do you get seven hours and you still wake up and feel like crap,
So last Sunday I got seven hours and the next day well up, and I felt great. Okay. And usually
when I don't get that much sleep, I kind of feel it in my chest. So it affects like, if
I go on a run or something like that is it's a little harder to, to breathe for some reason.
So when I woke up and I, after seven hours of sleep, I noticed that I didn't really feel
that fatigue and I felt great.
That's a good sign. So the reason I asked that is the first thing I get worried about
if people are having problems with sleep is if they're experiencing sleep apnea, which
is when like a good sign of it is if you if you snore very loudly, which I know like,
How do I know if I snore loudly? Well, someone else tells you that's one sign of sleep apnea.
And the other side is if you're getting a lot of sleep, but you still wake up and feel
like crap, that could be sleep apnea to it could be depression, it could be a bunch of
things, but I'm glad to hear that on a day like last Sunday you woke up and it was okay.
You also said that one of the problems he is you're not getting enough sleep and you're
waking up pretty consistently pretty early in the morning and it's been going on for
like three months or so.
So yeah, what happened? Like I wonder if it's like, I wonder if it's, it's sort of maybe
anxiety maybe the reason why I'm waking up early is because like I start thinking about
work and I start thinking about my day and once those thoughts start entering my mind,
it's hard not to like keep on thinking about them and then it just I then start waking
up and then I just can't go back to sleep because then I have these thoughts in my mind
and I'm like, you know what, just get up and get my day started around.
What time are you going to sleep? like think about last night? What time did you go to
bed? And be honest, midnight. Okay. So going to bed at midnight. Does that mean I'm laying
down in my bed? Or does that mean I probably fell asleep around midnight but going to bed
at midnight means turning the lights off and I would say maybe falling asleep in about
10 minutes or something. Okay. And is that pretty typical for you? I fall asleep in about
10 minutes after, after getting into bed
kind of varies. There's some days, there are some nights here and there where it's just
a real struggle to fall asleep. And then it might take like, two, three hours sometimes
on a bad night. Usually, yeah, but that's like once in a blue moon. Yeah. Usually, it
takes about, you know, five to 10 minutes to fall asleep.
Okay. So one thing I want you to do, Jamie, is if you, if it's gone way beyond the normal
amount of time it takes you to fall asleep. I don't want you to stay in bed. I want you
to actually get out of bed and to do something that's calming, that's relaxing, that's soothing,
or that's boring. So here's the reason why. Your mind is an association machine. It connects
things together, right? So, what what I don't want your mind to associate is your bed with
restlessness, if you're staying in bed, you're tossing and turning. A lot of times we think,
okay, I'm just going to power through this. I'm going to stay in bed. But that's actually
the worst thing you can be doing for yourself then, if it's been 30 minutes, 45 minutes,
and you're like, Oh gosh, when am I going to fall asleep, don't stay in bed, get out
of there, put on a minimum amount of lights and do something that is soothing or relaxing,
something that doesn't wake you up. That might mean listening to soothing music for some
people, I say, like, get a magazine or a book. I'd like you to stay away from like looking
at your phone because that might activate you. But that's one thing I want you to do.
Okay, so, last night you went to bed at 12 it was good night you fell asleep in about
10 minutes or so. And then what happened after that? and then around 5:30 rolls rolls around.
And
now I will say that the that every Friday morning pretty early, the garbage trucks come
around. Yeah, yeah. So this morning, they came around around 530. And they make a ton
of noise. So almost every every Friday morning, it usually wakes me up pretty early. And after
that, I usually can't go back to bed.
I feel Yeah, I had that exact same problem when I lived on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.
Certain days a week stuff would happen outside and it would always wake me up. It's worse.
So a lot of times we think about how do I get more sleep, but one of the things that
we all can do is improve the quality of the sleep we're already getting. For a lot of
us like let's say you only get six hours of sleep. There's something we can all do to
improve the quality of that. So that might mean getting blackout shades. If there's a
Lot of light coming into your room, it might mean if there is sound getting in the way
in the morning, using earplugs or seeing if you can insulate your windows or a white noise
machine or have a fan on any of those kind of things that you've tried or that might
help you to deal with this garbage truck noise?
from a falling asleep. standpoint I have started using I usually play like a podcast. I usually
find a podcast with kind of like a soothing voice. And I usually play that. And in about
five to 10 minutes I I fall asleep. So that's really helpful. What I can do with that garbage
truck. You know, I just don't think there really is anything any way around that just
because they make so much noise, right? Yes, I've tried using earplugs before and you can
just hear it through the earplugs. I guess. How I want to approach it is, once the garbage
trucks are gone, any any sort of methods that you can recommend to help me fall back asleep?
One of
the things I just want to point out there is you're doing something that I think is
awesome, which is you have some type of sleep routine, or nighttime routine. So for you,
you're listening to this certain podcast and it sounds like it has a soothing voice and
you probably only listen to it when you're getting ready to go to sleep. Is that right?
Totally.
And I probably couldn't tell you what they're talking about connecting a voice. Right? That's
fine. Can you share with us what podcast that is? It's called the ASMR podcast.
I know a lot of people who experience ASMR. It's that kind of soothing tingling sensation
in the back of your head. It can be really relaxing for folks. So you're doing something
right there, which is it soothes you it relax. And it's also associating sleep with activity.
We all need some kind of sleep routine at night that is sending signals to our mind
that hey, we're about to get in bed, start shutting things down, start relaxing. So for
you, it's this podcast. So that's awesome. The thing that you really are looking for
is how do I get get back to sleep? Once I've woken up early in the morning, you mentioned
anxiety to me, which makes me think like, what's, what thoughts are popping up in your
head? So what pops up in your head when the garbage truck wakes you up and you're having
a hard time going back to sleep?
Well, when the garbage truck comes? It's usually like 530. And usually on weekdays, I wake
up for work around like seven o'clock. Yeah. And so I started thinking, well, I only have
like an hour and a half now to like, get back to sleep. And so that causes some additional
stress. I'm just kind of in bed and trying to fall back asleep and it's just not working
and then just thoughts of like, my day start entering into my mind. And I started thinking
about that when this happens on the weekends. You know, for me, I cherish every minute of
my weekends. And I usually don't like to sleep in on the weekends. But then again, I don't
want to wake up at like 5:30 on the weekend, as well. Right part of the anxiety that I
experienced weekend is just wasting time. I just feel like I don't want to sleep in
because I'm going to waste most of my Saturday. And so those thoughts start entering into
my mind and then it's just hard to fall asleep and then I just give up and I just, I just
end up getting up and making myself some coffee and just starting the day,
you're also doing something that is awesome. And something that I talked to a lot with
a lot of folks and have a hard time doing which is in general, you're waking up around
the same time, most days including weekends. What a lot of us do is we try to catch up
on our sleep on the weekend. Which means sleeping in longer than we do on the weekdays, which
kind of gives your body jet lag. And it makes it even harder to wake up on Monday. The best
advice is to wake up around the same time every day, go to sleep around the same time
every day, give or take a couple hours or so. So I really love that you're doing that
you're doing some good sleep hygiene right there. Here's the thing I want to push you
on Jamie. So what? so what if you aren't able to get those that extra hour and a half asleep
in the morning or on the weekend?
Well, then I I kind of feel it for most of the day. And I feel lethargic and don't have
the energy. It's kind of funny because like, on the weekends, I still wake up early because
I don't want to sleep in but then I do kind of want to sleep in so I can get the energy
to like go do stuff because weekends are when you're, you're free right? So oftentimes what
kind of happens is like I wake up on a Saturday morning fairly early and and having you know
maybe gone out with my friends the night before Friday night and got home at like midnight.
So sometimes Friday nights into Saturday I get like four to five hours of sleep where
and and you know, it's like it's not like I have to really wake up for anything the
next day it's just my body and my mind just wakes me up and then I get up and even though
I'm really tired You know, I want to do stuff like go exercise, but I'm just really tired
and don't have the energy to do some of those activities. So I do kind of want to find some
sort of like middle ground. Yeah. Getting some decent sleep but but also not like sleeping
in.
Yeah, the reason I say that and your response is really helpful because It it helps me to
understand what you're worried about. And it seems like what you're worried about is
missing out on the kind of things you want to do or doing those things and just feeling
lethargic and not feeling like you're you're really enjoying them. So I understand why
why this is bothering you so much. It seems like you've been able to deal with it the
nights where you aren't, or the mornings that you're not getting as much sleep as you want.
You find a way to make it work. That's just one thing I want you to remember when you
wake up early in the morning, and you're like, gosh, here we go. Again like another day I'm
not getting as much sleep as I want. Remember that you find ways to make it work and it
might not be ideal. It might not be the perfect day, but you have found a way to make it work
for you. That might take some of the edge off the anxiety that you're having about waking
up early. The other thing that that's really tricky here is it is hard to go back to sleep
especially When your mind's been conditioned to wake up at a certain time, or you got external
things waking you up like the garbage truck, there's two things I think you can try. So
one is, have you tried listening to that podcast again in the morning?
I haven't. So I guess maybe that's something I could try and play again. When I wake up
in the morning. If I need to go back to sleep again, I playing back that podcast,
I would give that a shot because your mind has already associated this podcast with sleepiness.
So that's one thing I try. The other challenge you might have is there's a lot more light
in the morning. And yeah, so your internal clock is really affected by how much light
is in the environment. What's a light look like when you wake up early in the morning
your room
light does come in a little bit, just because the sun shines just the way we're my my apartment
is geographically located. I do get the sun in the morning, but I have invested in a sleep
mask. So Yes.
Jamie, you're doing so much good stuff, man. You know what you do here. I love it. The
other thing I want you to think about is, do you need to start going to sleep actually
a little bit earlier? If for whatever reason, because the internal or external stuff, you're
waking up at 5:30 or something like that. Maybe that means to get all those hours of
sleep. Maybe you need to go to sleep just a little bit earlier. Yeah, like when in the
day do you find yourself getting tired?
I usually get pretty tired.
After lunch, which happens to a lot of people they say, yeah,
yeah, there's a dip in our energy. Yeah,
yeah. So kind of between like one and three o'clock is when my energy goes down a little
bit. Yeah. And what's funny is, I don't know if it's like this for other people. But even
if I'm tired, usually around like nine o'clock to 10 o'clock at night, that's going to get
like another burst of energy. And I feel I feel, I feel good and I feel fine. And so
when you're trying to go to sleep during those hours and getting that burst of energy, it's
kind of hard to like make yourself go to go to sleep during those hours just because of
like the speck of energy that you got,
oh, we do get these fluctuations in energy throughout the day. For a lot of folks like
around dinner time is a point where they get that burst. So seems like you're probably
going to sleep around the time when you're getting tired. How's your caffeine intake
late at night?
I usually don't drink coffee at night. Soda or tea?
Nope. None of that. I usually during the day, we usually have about two to three cups of
coffee at most. Okay.
Okay. Yeah, so that's the only other thing I might experiment with is maybe going to
bed just a little bit earlier, but it sounds like you're probably going to bed when you're
sleepy. You don't want to go to bed when you're not sleepy, because then you're going to toss
and turn. And that's the problem we were talking about before, I might let go of that struggle,
a little bit of what happens if I don't get enough sleep. What happens if you don't get
enough sleep is you get through it, you find a way to make it work. You have been doing
that and just take some of the good sleep habits that you've already developed for falling
asleep and try them if you wake up early in the morning. And then yeah, let me know how
that goes. comment on this video. Try it out a few days. And by the time I get this video
up, Shoot us a comment and let us know how it's going.
Okay, great. I think that's, I think those are some pretty good recommendations. Awesome.
Yeah,
this is all great advice. Thank you Dr. Mattu . Thanks for sharing with us. I hope this
is helpful for other folks to. What did you find valuable from this video? Let me know
in the comments below and share the timestamp of the part of the video that really helped
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