Introduction
What You’ll Do: Your body loves habits. By creating a habit that is strongly associated with sleep, your body will know exactly what to do when you lie down in bed. Now that you have worked to establish a strong sleep habit, this week you will develop a ritual that you will do each night.
How It Works: Remember Pavlov’s dog from your Psychology 101 class? Pavlov rang a bell every time he fed a dog. Before long, he would just ring the bell and the dog would start salivating. Your body isn’t too different. Now that you can fall asleep faster, it is time to create a Nightly Ritual to alert your body that sleep is coming.
Get Motivated: The Nightly Ritual is your way to calm down and focus on sleep at the end of the day. It should be relaxing and end with you falling quickly into a deep sleep. Once established, your ritual can help you secure a lifetime of good sleep.
The Steps
Decide how much time your ritual should take. Most people find 30 minutes a good amount of time, some people have a quicker ritual and others like to take longer. Look at your schedule and choose how long your ritual should last.
Tips
- Other people can disturb your Nightly Ritual. If you are trying to be quiet and your spouse wants to discuss the family budget, that is a problem. Explain to him that for one week you would like to try this experiment. And be sure to make time during the day to pay attention to your spouse/partner/roomate and/or kids.
- Remember to include the other skills you have worked on over the past few weeks. Avoid the Sleep Thieves, use the 15-Minute Rule and increase your light/dark contrast.
- If you travel frequently, be sure that you can still do your Nightly Ritual away from home. Have at least some parts (like a scent) that are portable.
- You can include writing about your day, reading for an hour in a comfortable chair or doing some gentle stretching in your ritual if you want.
More
Taking the Nightly Ritual to the next step includes consciously placing cues in your environment to signal that sleep is coming. At each cue, tell yourself that you are feeling more tired. For example, when you enter your bedroom, tell yourself “I feel sleepy.” When you finish brushing your teeth, tell yourself, “I am almost asleep.” And when you finally lie down, tell yourself “I am about to fall asleep.” By repeating these statements to yourself each night, you can make your Nightly Ritual extremely effective.
Here is the whole program. Give each one a solid one-week try, and then come back and do the next one. If you want a reminder, sign up for the Fall Asleep Faster E-course. It is free and you'll short e-mail reminders each day to help keep you on track.
