Day 1 Op. Snooze

Your Sleep Zzzone Audit

Here we are at day one of your seven day ‘back to sleep plan’ . For today and tomorrow, we will focus on improving your sleep environment.

You can read the text ahead and/or dive straight in by downloading the audio tip and audio relaxation for use today and tonight – so click on the download and read no further unless you want to dig a bit deeper.

Your Downloads for today:

Things to consider about your Sleep Zzzone:

Why focus on where you sleep? Well, we are habitual humans, meaning much of our behaviour (including sleep) is rooted in our habits. Our habits, in turn, are triggered by many things such as our behaviour, something someone does or says, and our environment. And, as simple creatures who need to feel safe wherever we are, we take a lot of our ‘safety cues’ from the environment in which we find ourselves.

Since the act of sleeping is, in evolutionary terms, a potentially risky strategy (it can leave us vulnerable to other predators, etc), we are sensitive to the environmental cues which signal whether this (the bedroom for example) is a safe place to rest. This is why a noisy environment, one which is not free from light or is cluttered can be far from restful. It is also important to create some positive and restful signals in the ‘Sleep Zzzone’ as I like to call it. These signals can take many forms, and will depend on your personal preference, but the following are suggestions which have some support in research:

Your task today:

Keep it simple today. Do a bit of an audit of your ‘Sleep Zzzone’ based on the following three questions:

1. Do you have a clutter free room or area? Lots of ‘stuff’ lying about or hanging off doors or shelves can create a sense of work unfinished and can lead to an inability to relax.

2. Do you have a quiet, cool environment? How quiet and how cool is going to be personal choice but there’s plenty of evidence to support the fact that too much noise and being too warm can disrupt sleep.

3. How dark is your room? Pollution from light sources whether from outside (street lights, etc), or inside (gadgets, screens and lights) can really disrupt sleep. It can affect the settling down to sleep, and can contribute to disrupted sleep through the night too

Look for things you can:

a) very easily change/ remove/ tidy or fix.

b) with a small purchase, a short period of time (30 mins max) or a bit of thought and planning – change/ remove/ tidy or fix.

c) big wish list changes/ purchases or fixes.

By making them tangible you will see clearly what you can do to improve your sleep environment over the next month or so. Remember, if you started yesterday’s task of tracking sleep quality, the aim is not to try to fix everything in one go. It is more important to chunk down the cabbage (the challenge) into sprout sized tasks or daily habits and deal with one sprout at a time or even one sprout a day.

Be realistic. You may have limited time and money. So, depending on what you have identified, give yourself permission to leave some of the more time and money consuming items until you have the capacity.

In the meantime, start to identify when and how you might start to deal with each of the items identified and ‘sweat one sprout at a time.’

That’s it for today. Don’t forget to access your audio recording for tonight by clicking on the download button.