We’ve trawled through books, academic papers, the Internet — and drawn on the knowledge of our community of therapists — to compile the ultimate set of tips & exercises for a great night’s sleep. Why? Because sleep and mental health are inextricably linked: when your mind is spinning it’s harder to get to sleep, and when you’re sleeping badly it affects how you feel.
Habits and tips that have been proven by peer-reviewed research studies to help us sleep better. Some of them might not be things you want to hear :/
| Habit | Tip for sticking to habit | Explanation | Peer-reviewed research study | Related fun fact or thing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keep your coffee habit as a primarily morning habit. | 👉 Switch to decaf or caffeine-free tea after lunch. | Caffeine typically has a half-life of around 5 hours.) (although this varies by person depending on their sensitivity to caffeine). The average person drinks 319mg of caffeine a day — that’s a little bit more than two tall Starbucks lattes — which means that, if you have one at 10am and another at 3pm, you’ll still have 77mg of caffeine in your blood at midnight that night, the equivalent of drinking a single espresso right before bed 🤯 | ||
| ** | People who had a caffeine pill six hours before bed slept for 41 minutes less than those who had a placebo pill. |
Journal: Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine Year: 2013 Sample size: 12 people Link here | You can input your daily coffee ritual into this half-life calculator to see a graph of exactly how long it’ll take for that caffeine to leave your system. Read more. | | Go to bed and wake up at a similar time every night. | 👉 Set an alarm for when it’s time to turn out the lights. | The circadian rhythm (your body’s inner 24-hour-clock) sets the schedule for feelings of peak sleepiness and peak wakefulness. If you constantly change the time that you go to sleep and/or wake up, you get out of sync with your internal clock, and end up trying to go to sleep outside peak sleepiness and wake up outside peak wakefulness. The phenomenon of going to bed at different times — especially on weekends vs. weeknights — has been called “social jetlag”, because it has a similar effect in terms of messing with our body’s internal processes. | An irregular bedtime was shown to reduce total hours asleep and increase the time it takes to get to sleep.
Journal: BMC Public Health **Year: 2009 **Sample size: 160 people Link here | The 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine was won for research on fruit flies that discovered the gene and proteins controlling the circadian rhythm. Previously, we didn’t know what controlled it. Read more. | | The last hour before bed should be the most relaxing hour of the day. | 👉 Set another alarm for 1 hour before bedtime to remind you to start your pre-sleep ritual: no screens, dim lights, and a relaxing activity like reading, having a bath, stretching, journalling or listening to a podcast. | A good night’s sleep is most likely to happen when you wind down properly before getting into bed. The circadian rhythm tells your body when to fall asleep based on the amount of light you see, so try to avoid screens and dim the lights so that you’re signalling to your brain that it’s bedtime rather than awake-time. Anything else that can help your mind to slow down is also worth incorporating into your routine, as anything that stimulates ‘psychological alertness’ can affect your ability to sleep. | A review of 67 research papers found that adolescents who had screen time before bed slept worse in 90% of the studies. Why? It’s thought to be a mix of three factors: screen time tends to make people stay up later, increase ‘psychological alertness’, and provides more blue light exposure.
Journal: Child Adolescent Psychiatry **Year: 2018 **Sample size: Review of other studies Link here | Journalling by writing down a list of all your outstanding tasks or worries was shown to be more effective at helping people to fall asleep than writing down a list of completed tasks. The more specifically people wrote their list, the faster they fell asleep. Read more. | | Dark bedroom, quiet bedroom, cool bedroom. | 👉 Get blackout curtains, an eye mask and ear plugs; turn the heating down and wear bed socks (to avoid your feet getting too cold). | Light, including screen light, makes us less likely to sleep well as it tricks our brain into thinking it’s time to be awake. Our body temperature lowers slightly during the night (in accordance with the circadian rhythm), and so we prefer to sleep in a slightly cooler-than-normal temperature: around 18.3 degrees celsius. | The temperature of the bedroom is a key determinant of the body’s ability to regulate its own temperature, which in turn affects the circadian rhythm and your quality of sleep.
Journal: Journal of Physiological Anthropology Year: 2012 Sample size: Review of other studies Link here | Having a warm bath before bed is often given as a tip for better sleep. The reason behind this isn’t what you’d expect, however: after getting out of a warm bath, your core temperature actually drops slightly as more heat escapes from your skin, which in turn helps ‘speed up’ the bodily processes that signal and bring about sleepiness. Read more. | | Don’t stay in bed if you’re struggling to get (or get back) to sleep for more than 20 minutes. | 👉 Get up and go into another room to do something relaxing, like reading or listening to a podcast, until you feel like you’re about to fall asleep. | If you spend a lot of time awake in your bed, your mind can start to associate ‘bed’ with ‘being awake’, which can make it harder to get to sleep in future. You want any subconscious mental associations with your bed to be purely about sleep. The process of conditioning your mind to only have these associations is called ‘stimulus control’. | A review of psychological treatments for sleeplessness found five treatments that were effective — one of which was stimulus control. (The others were relaxation, paradoxical intention, sleep restriction, and CBT.)
Journal: Sleep Year: 2006 Sample size: Review of other studies ****Link here | Combining stimulus control with relaxation techniques like breathing exercises can work well. Read more. |
Because our sleep quality is so often linked to our mental state, trying one of these exercises — to help reduce worries and overthinking — might help before bed.
| Exercise name | What it is | Why it works | How it works in detail / link to exercise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Use a neurolinguistic processing technique to encourage your brain to switch off. | 👉 A mental word-based exercise to try when lying in bed before you sleep. | A bit like counting sheep, listing completely random words — with no links between them — can help our brain to switch off and stop trying to ‘work’. | |
| Try this exercise when lying in bed with the lights out, just before going to sleep. |
Choose any random word, e.g. ‘flight’.
Go through each letter in turn, starting in this case with ‘f’. Think up as many random words as you can that begin with the letter ‘f’: flower, foundation, fabric, farmer... the more unrelated and evocative the words are, the better. The brain can’t find any links between the words and so is encouraged to switch off.
Repeat this for the other letters in your original word, until you start to feel very sleepy. | | Engage your inner child | 👉 A drawing exercise to engage with your inner child before bed. | Critical ‘parent’ thoughts to ourselves can increase our worries, making it harder to get to sleep. | When we have trouble sleeping, we can become focused on “doing well at sleep” and then we can begin to rate, judge, and fixate on sleep.
Often this arises because of meeting new, or increased responsibilities in the daytime. In this case the “adult you”, has to come up with the goods, so the critical parent begins to “tell off” your child self. This combo never goes down well. This can also arise if sleeping issues have been around a while and it becomes a hot spot of worry itself.
Acknowledge that your responsibilities are making you feel somewhat pressured, and work on building your confidence in tackling these new responsibilities. Listen to your inner child and try some light-hearted activities or fun things before bed time to remind your free child that it isn’t forgotten. This drawing exercise is one way to engage your inner child.
Get a sketchpad (any size), colouring pens or pencils, and sit with whatever thoughts and feelings are present for you.
Closing your eyes, reflect on how you are feeling or experiencing and then scribble all over your piece of paper.
When you feel you have scribbled enough open your eyes.
Notice all the different shapes you have created and fill each shape with a different colour or pattern. Try not to use the same colour/pattern in adjoining shapes but also let it be random.
If words or specific thoughts occur, you can add them into a shape or around the edge of your scribble. Allow your emotions to flow into your colouring. | | Breathwork for deep sleep | 👉 A 9-minute audio breathwork exercise to listen to. | Slowing down your breath, especially by elongating the exhale, helps to engage the parasympathetic (”rest and digest”) nervous system. | Link to audio here | | Closing the curtains | 👉 A writing exercise where you jot down everything on your mind and ‘close the book’ on it. | Getting your worries out of your head and down onto paper can help you to distance yourself from them. | This is an exercise you can do when anxious thoughts and life stress keeps you awake at night. It’s essentially a way of worrying on your terms.
Get a notebook (a physical notebook seems to work best for some reason).
Every evening, several hours before bed, sit and write down a couple of things that went well in your day, a couple of things that you felt went badly (if there are any), and anything you are worrying about coming up in the days ahead.
Write your thoughts and feelings about them without trying to solve anything.
Close the book and get on with your evening.
If you wake in the night and those same anxious thoughts come back to you they will tend to be less powerful, because you have already done the work on taking some of the strength from them by acknowledging them head-on. | | Hot thoughts | 👉 A writing exercise where you have a dialogue between your emotional and logical brain. | Giving your anxieties (especially any anxieties you have about sleep in particular) space to ‘speak’, instead of trying to avoid thinking about them altogether, can actually help to lessen their power over you. | A variation on the last exercise, this one seeks to separate what you’re really worried about from what will actually most likely happen.
Again, make sure you complete it several hours before bed.
Write down something that is making you anxious. It could be sleep itself or something that you fear will have a negative impact on your sleep.
Let your emotional brain really go to town on how bad you think things might turn out. Let it go and tell you what catastrophe might lie ahead.
After you’ve done that it’s time for your logical brain to have its say. So, ask yourself what the most likely outcome will be accepting that your emotional brain has painted a worst case scenario.
So, if it is about sleep itself your emotional brain might say,
“We’re not going to be able to sleep and we’ve got a big presentation tomorrow. It’s going to be a disaster. We’ll forget what we want to say and everyone will think we’re hopeless.”
Your logical brain can then counter with,
“OK, we probably will be tired if we haven’t rested properly but even if that’s the case we’ll manage. We’ve coped on very little sleep before and we can do it again. It might be hard and uncomfortable but we’ll get through it and have a good rest afterwards.
Having had this conversation with yourself you have given your anxious mind space to speak (vital) but then soothed your anxiety with some realistic thought.
Even if this moves your anxiety about sleep from a 10 to a 9 you start to remind yourself that the way you think about a situation can always impact it. | | Rewrite your “I must” statements | 👉 A writing exercise to help reframe our own self-expectations. | When we feel under a lot of pressure, which often includes pressures we put on ourselves, our minds are more likely to keep spinning before bed. | Think about some of the things you think you “must” do, and write down as many as you can. These are the demands we place on ourselves, and they’re often incredibly high — sometimes unreachable — demands.
These might include things like the following:
"I must do well at my job" "I must not fail my probation" "I must not have a day off sick" "I must not be afraid" "I must meet all my goals”
Then rewrite them as “If” or “I am” statements. For the list above, it might look something like this:
"I am going to work hard and do my best to succeed." "If I do my best and listen to the guidance I'm given there's every reason to believe that I'll fly through my probation." "If I'm not well it's best I take a day to rest so that I come back fully fit as soon as I'm better. That's grown up behaviour." "I am taking on a new role in an area I don't know, which can be a bit scary, but I'm growing and that's great." "I am clear about what is expected of me and there's no reason I can't meet expectations.”
The second list feels a lot more manageable, right?
Reframing our own demands in this way can help our minds to stop worrying, especially before bed. | | Yoga nidra | 👉 A 30-minute sleep meditation guide that uses visualisation techniques. | Yoga nidra is the practice of ‘dynamic sleep’, creating a state of rest that encourages the body and mind to slow down and switch off. | Link to audio here | | Self hypnosis | 👉 A countdown script to read to yourself before bed. | Hypnosis can help some people to sleep better, and this script is a way of trying out some of the techniques on yourself. | Close your eyes.
Imagine yourself in a comfortable place at a time you felt happy and peaceful
Notice your breathing, but don’t try to adjust it. Let it be what it is.
After you have taken a few seconds to get into the rhythm of your breathing you can begin the count from 10 down to 1.
Count out loud the first few times so that you get the hang of announcing the next number right at the bottom of your breath when your lungs are at their emptiest.
With each count say the following or something similar. After a while you will make up your own words which is even better.
10 - There is nothing to do. No demand and no expectation. It is impossible to get this wrong.
9 - Welcome any thoughts that come into your mind, good or bad, and allow then to stay or leave as they see fit.
8 - Because everything right now is OK
7 - You can feel as relaxed and as peaceful as you choose to feel. No more and no less. You can feel exactly as you are.
6 - There’s nothing to do. No demand and no expectation.
5 - Any sound you can hear going on around you is a signal that however relaxed you are here the world continues to spin and everything continues as normal.
4 - So you can drift deeper. The deeper you go the better you feel and the better you feel the deeper you go.
3 - Further down, all the way down, as far down as you want to go.
2 - Nothing to do. No demands. No expectations. Nothing to do.
1 - Let yourself lie in silence. |
Want to dive into more detail on how sleep affects our mental health, and learn what we can do about it? Watch a Spill webinar (33min) on the topic of ‘Sleep & mental health: why they’re linked and how we can sleep better’, by Spill therapist Graham Landi.
Watch Spill’s sleep webinar (33min) here