Terminal insomnia, also known as sleep maintenance insomnia, aka early morning waking,
aka "I wake up at 3 a.m and I can't get back to sleep and it's driving me crazy!" This is a pretty
common experience for many people. Now, first off, it is called terminal insomnia not because
it causes you to die but because it happens at the end of your night. So many people experience this.
Maybe your mind starts racing; maybe you worry about everything you need to do, or not; or maybe
you just can't fall back to sleep - at least not until it's almost time to get up, and then you're
tired and cranky and you don't function as well as you'd like. But then the real problem with
this terminal insomnia is that the next night when it starts happening over and over and over again,
and then you're just so tired, and then you start to get stressed out and angry about your inability
to sleep, and that makes things worse because when you wake up and you see that it's 3am,
you get mad, and that makes it even harder to sleep. As the researchers say, this is common but
aggravating. Dude, it is the worst. So if you're here, you're probably desperate for sleep,
you haven't slept well for a long time, you're cranky, irritable, depressed.
I feel you. I have struggled with insomnia off and on. And I come by it honestly: my dad is
almost always up from 2-4 am, and so is one of my babies. There is a genetic aspect to this.
And this early morning waking is also closely linked to depression, both as a cause of
depression and as a symptom of depression. But don't worry your little head; there's
also a lot you can do about it. In this video I'm going to share with you my bag of tricks - six
non-medication strategies you can use to get better at sleeping through the night. And at
the end of the video I'll tell you about a great YouTube video that helps me fall back asleep.
Hey everyone, don't forget, we're doing a giveaway of three therapy lamps from Carex. Now,
each of these is worth about $150. And research shows that light therapy is very effective
at treating seasonal affective disorder and regular non-seasonal depression. So check out
my Instagram page to learn more. Oh, by the way, I do have an Instagram page. Right. I put up quotes,
polls, video summaries, and the occasional dancing baby. So go follow me there too. Okay. Back to
the video. Okay. Let's talk about six causes of maintenance insomnia and what you can do about
it. But first, let's do a quick overview of the sleep cycle. The average adult needs between seven
and nine hours of sleep, and your sleep rotates through a couple of different cycles: light sleep,
deep sleep, and REM sleep (when you dream). Now, most of your deep sleep happens early in
the night, and your lighter sleep and REM sleep happens closer to morning. So this means that
little things will be more likely to wake you up and keep you up. So the first thing that can cause
early morning insomnia is biological factors. So these include genes, gender, aging, and hormones.
So genetically some people are lighter sleepers, and genetically some people are more likely to
wake up early. I got both of these genes. I already knew this about myself, but my 23andme
report verified it. Some people are night owls and sleep much better towards the morning. This
is called your chronotype. And while you can't change your genes, learning about your chronotype
can help you accept it. I think it's helpful to imagine our ancestors living in a small village,
and let's imagine the village needed some people to be on watch all night. So some people would be
on watch at 9 pm, some at midnight, and I'd be the 4am crew, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed - but no
way would I fall asleep on watch. I am literally no fun after 9pm, and I can do just about anything
at 5am. It's a blessing and a curse. So I go to bed early, and that's just how I work. Now,
the second factor of biology is age. As you age, it's more difficult to sleep as well.
You get tired earlier in the evening, and you sleep more lightly than when you were young.
Some things that help are staying active during the day, getting exercise, and delaying going to
bed can all help with terminal insomnia. Now, sleep maintenance insomnia is much more common
for women than for men, especially women nearing midlife. Hormones impact your ability to sleep
as you age. Even when you're pre-menopausal, you have a slow decline in estrogen and progesterone
as you age. Hot flashes, periods, night sweats, peeing a lot - yeah, it's fun. You can work with
your doctor if you want to try and manage that. Also, your body doesn't use melatonin as well
as you age. You can use a prolonged-release melatonin supplement to help with that. And
melatonin really is more of a time regulator than a sleep regulator. It helps to reset your body
clock to know when you should be asleep. Now, when I was writing the How to Process Emotions course,
I was really struggling with stress and sleep, so I worked on both. But I did start to use
some slow-release melatonin, and it worked for me. I used it about seven times over two weeks,
and I was doing a lot better. But there's a lot of factors, right? So this improvement in my
insomnia could also have been in part because of a decrease in stress, but this all could have been
in part because of the change in seasons too. But more on that later. Okay. The second big factor
with insomnia is conditioning. So conditioning means that because sleep is something that your
brain associates with a routine or an environment, we can accidentally train our brain to sleep
poorly by having bad habits. The antidote to this is sleep hygiene. I made a full video about this,
but basically you go to sleep at the same time each night, you don't use your bed for
anything other than sleep and sex, don't watch screens in bed, you know, read a book instead.
Basically, your goal is to associate sleepy time with your bed and not wakey time with your bed.
Now, when it's hard to stay asleep, it's important that you do not associate early morning time with
wakey time. So if you're awake too early, don't do anything too exciting or stressful or stimulating
because that's going to send the message to your brain that it's supposed to be awake at that time
of night. Now, I've set some rules for myself on this. If I'm up before five, I can read a book,
I can write on paper, I can do scripture study, but I can't work on anything too stimulating
before 5 am because that basically just trains my brain to be more awake the next night at that
time. So basically you want to train your brain that the bed is for sleeping and early mornings
are for sleeping too. Make your bedroom a calming place. Don't work in your bed or your bedroom. And
all of these things can help condition your brain to sleep better. Okay. Number three. Let's talk
about behaviors that mess up your sleep. So as you age, you get less active during the day, and that
includes social and physical activity. But a lot of us young folks are lazy Netflix watchers too,
so it's important to try to get in more physical activity, especially in the morning,
and then to do other active things throughout the day. And CBTI is a treatment for insomnia
that research shows to be as effective or more effective than medications, but it takes some
work. The basic idea is to use good sleep hygiene and don't go to bed quite as early,
but then here's the important part: you don't stay in bed awake for more than 10 minutes. So if you
can't fall asleep, get out of bed and do something boring like reading a book for 10 minutes,
and then try 10 minutes back in bed. And you just kind of repeat that cycle until you're able
to fall asleep. Don't try too hard to go to sleep, but in the long run, you can retrain your brain to
know when sleepy time is. And this also prevents you from accidentally training your brain to think
that the bed is the place where you lay there and get angry about not being able to go to sleep.
Also, some medications like antidepressants, beta blockers, corticosteroids, and allergy
medicines like pseudofendrine, and also drugs like caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine, these all
interfere with the ability to sleep. Also, eating late at night can interfere with sleep.
Okay, number four: stress. Now, I'm not going to spend too much time on this one, but you'll
improve your sleep when you decrease your overall stress. Exercise helps with this, as does writing
down all your worries at bedtime. You can check out my video about anxiety and insomnia. Exercise
and gratitude are helpful too. And it can be really helpful to set better work boundaries. When
I first started working from home, my sleep got all messed up. But I've learned to better separate
work and home life. So take your work email off your phone, turn on the "do not disturb" mode,
don't read the comments on your YouTube channel before you go to bed unless you want to debate an
obscure concept of therapy with a random stranger in your head all night. Now, I work from home,
so I set the rule for myself that I can't work after 7pm or before 5am. Okay, number five:
your environment can impact your sleep. Your brain is queued to sleep when it's dark outside, when it
cools off, and when your core temperature drops. So let's start with temperature. Set your room to
68 degrees Fahrenheit or lower. You can also use a cooling pillow or a cooling mat to help cool off.
But also, taking a warm bath opens your capillaries, and then it triggers your
core temperature to drop when you get out, so that can also help you get sleepy. Okay. Now let's talk
about light. The light that enters your eyes tells your brains whether to be sleepy or energetic.
Daylight freaking savings and working in artificially lit environments can really mess with
that. So start by making your room a dim or a dark environment. Limit how much light you are exposed
to in the evening. When I'm trying to get my kids to bed, I always start turning off the lights in
my house, and that can help kind of remind them that it's getting close to sleepy time.
It's also helpful to get a lot of early morning light exposure, so try to get outside in the
morning and see the sun. Another thing you can try is doing light therapy 12 hours opposite to
when you can't sleep. So if you can't sleep at 3 am, try light therapy at 3 pm. Okay. And lastly,
sleep oxygen can be an issue, so try not to sleep on your back. And if you're really
worried about it, you could get, you know, a sleep evaluation at a sleep clinic. Okay. Number six:
if your brain is running wild, you can try all types of sleep meditations. There's a good one
out there called A Robot Shutting Down. And when all else fails, my go-to is to listen to an
archaeology lecture. It's barely interesting, but still quite boring. Or Baumgartner Restoration. So
I'll link those below. These are some channels I watch when I'm really just trying to get
myself bored enough to sleep. If you're still having trouble sleeping, check with
your doctor. There are other health conditions that can cause sleep problems, like sleep apnea,
hypothyroid, enlarged prostate, gastric reflux, arthritis, restless leg syndrome, neuropathy,
and depression. So as you work to treat those, you might be able to help improve your sleep.
Okay. I hope this bag of tricks is helpful. And if not, if you're up in the middle of the night and
you're angry about it, know that at least you're not alone - I'm probably right there with you.