What advice do you have for insomniacs in college? Fortunately, there are several steps that -- if consistently taken -- can help people sleep more easily. First, take steps to prepare your body for sleep: maximize your fatigue at the end of the day by exercising and by avoiding catnaps and caffeine. Engaging in relaxing activities before bed, such as taking a shower or meditating, also helps your body and mind prepare for sleep. Second, you want to set up a habit of sleep. Maintain a regular bedtime to help your body rhythms to know when to expect sleep, and avoid sleeping pills, as they disrupt sleep cycles. Further, take steps to associate your bed primarily with sleep, not wakefulness. Don't read or study in bed, and if you find yourself tossing and turning at night for more than 10 minutes, get up and do something else until you feel tired. Meditation seems like a good way to relax, but learning how to meditate frustrates me; I can't seem to master it. Are there any suggestions you might have in learning how to meditate properly? One major goal of meditation is to keep your mind relatively blank, or focused on one thing (a mantra, a picture, your breath). For most people with busy and stressful lives, however, it is extraordinarily difficult to shut out all other thoughts, especially at first. Realizing that you are having distracting thoughts and "failing" at meditation leads to even more stress and agitation, making it even harder to meditate. Instead of trying to avoid all distracting thoughts, simply accept that you will have them. Then try to give them as little attention as possible. Some people find it helpful to imagine the thoughts are balloons or clouds, that periodically float through the brain and then float out again. |
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