A comfortable room and surroundings are beneficial to a good night’s sleep. Noise from the street, or noise from your snoring partner, may be disturbing. Bright light or an uncomfortable bed may distract you from concentrating on falling asleep. A bedroom that is too warm or too cold is not suitable.

Some beds nowadays are not specifically designed for the purpose of sleep. Someone has told me that he gets seasick when he sleeps in a water bed. On the ether hand, some people are so used to water beds that they can no longer sleep in an ordinary bed when they take a holiday.

Bed manufacturing is a huge industry, as everyone needs a bed. Ideally, beds are designed to give good support to the spine and the body during sleep. A firm bed is essential. As discussed earlier, when the sleeper enters REM sleep, the whole body is paralysed. If the bed is very soft and sagging in the middle, during REM sleep the spine will conform to the curve of the sagging bed. In the morning there will be muscle pain because the muscles have been stretched in an abnormal posture for about 25 per cent of the time spent in sleep. For people who have back problems, a soft comfortable bed is not ideal.

The bed should be restricted to two basic forms of activity. Sleep, and the familiar reproductive activity starting also with the letter ‘s’. However, some people use the bed for other activities, such as reading, watching television, drinking, thinking, and planning. All these activities have the tendency to distract you from sleep, and may let you form a habit of thinking about your past and planning your future in bed. This generates unnecessary tension and anxiety, which obviously leads to insomnia. From now on, remember, the bed is reserved purely for the enjoyment of the two activities starting with ‘s’: sleep and sex, or sex and sleep, and nothing else. A bedside TV set or a reading lamp are not recommended in the bedroom of the problem sleeper.

A clock is bad for someone who is conscious of the number of hours they feel is necessary to sleep each night. A common experience for most people who wake up in the middle of the night is to look at the clock by their beds. Some will exclaim, ‘My goodness, it is now one in the morning. This is it, I will be unable to sleep again and will stay awake for the rest of the night’. The worry of what time it is in the middle of the night can give rise to tension and anxiety. Of course, this tension and anxiety will prevent the person from falling asleep again. Then when they look at the clock again after a while, they will panic and say to themselves, ‘It is now two, and there is only a few hours before morning’.

There is a self-fulfilling prophecy for some people. They believe that, once they wake up in the middle of the night, they will not sleep again. Their tension increases as they mark the hours through the night. This tension is in fact reducing their chances of sleep. So, as the night approaches, they already predict that they are going to wake up in the middle of the night and will not be able to fall asleep again. The night comes and they wake up in the middle of the night and immediately look at the clock to find out what time it is. Each time they look at the clock, they generate more anxiety within, which prevents them from sleeping. Each time they fail to sleep, they are convinced once more of their own prediction.

Anxiety is cumulative and their confidence to sleep is reduced with succeeding nights that they fail to sleep. Looking at the clock and marking the hours of the night is to be avoided completely, as this generates tension and reduces the confidence to sleep.

I always tell my patients who have sleeping problems to put their clocks either under the bed or in a drawer, so that they will have no way of looking at the clock when they wake up during the night. It has been discovered in sleep laboratories that it is perfectly normal and healthy to wake up in the middle of the night. A normal sleep pattern always consists of a few awakenings at night. The older we are, the more frequent we wake up in the night. However, it is common that we do not always remember these awakenings, and we fall back into sleep. Next time when you wake up in the middle of the night, tell yourself it is perfectly normal and healthy to do so. Do not bother to find out what time it is or try to work out how much time you have slept or how long it will be before daybreak. I know it is very tempting to look at the clock, but once you get used to putting the clock away you will surely sleep much better. Just lie back, do nothing, practise self-relaxation, and you will fall back into sleep.

*36/23/5*

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• STRESS AND SLEEP: HOW TO COPE WITH ORDINARY STRESS?
• CAUSES OF INSOMNIA
• SLEEP DISORDERS: SLEEP APNOEA