Don’t change your bedtime routine

“If you’ve only just started experiencing sleeplessness, you shouldn’t start doing anything differently: instead, just concentrate on whatever makes you feel better.

“For example, if you’re going through something stressful at work and it’s disrupting your sleep slightly, you need to remember that it’s normal for your sleep to get disrupted. Actually, it’s almost healthy, because all your brain is doing is adapting to the situation. processing the information, and doing the things it needs to do to help you get through this.

“Unfortunately, most people will find it difficult to do nothing because we’re all educated quite poorly about medicine and sleep medicine. And so we start worrying that something terrible is going to happen to us if this sleeplessness continues, and we start changing our behaviour. We start napping, we start going to bed early, we start doing anything we can do to try to allow our bodies more time to rest.

“What this does, though, is move us away from our natural sleep routine, and teaches our brains that we don’t want a nice block of sleep at night time. So we’re actually training ourselves to have insomnia, which isn’t what we want.”

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