Some Final Thoughts About Sleep

Some other questions to ask yourself about your sleeping patterns, do you take medication to help you sleep? How long does it take you to fall asleep? How long do you sleep before you waken and can you go back to sleep? How do you feel in the morning and do you have trouble staying alert during the day?

Taking prescription medication to sleep is not the best thing to do. Yes, most of it will put you to sleep, but it does interrupt the nature sleep biorhythm. This is one of the reasons that many people become dependent upon medications. If you are using a sleeping medication, I would strongly advise you to wean yourself off of it. I know that many of them say they are not habit forming, but in fact they really are because of the chemical changes that occur in your body.

For many of you the problem will be that you can't turn off your brain to go to sleep. Try telling yourself a story of where you would like to be or some peaceful scene that you can play in your head. You can also use relaxation tapes/iPods to help you focus into a relaxed state.

For those who go to sleep the minute their head hits the pillow, the problem may be that you sleep for a while and then waken and can't get back to sleep. Again the relaxation piece can be helpful to get you to focus on relaxing.

Remember that you will want to be shooting for that 7-8 hours of sleep each night.