Top Ten Insomnia Treatment Tips

For a few people, insomnia can be an extremely serious illness and can affect their everyday life. It can seriously change their mood, make them drowsy during the day, even cause accidents if they lose concentration driving or operating machinery. Fortunately, most of us experience mild insomnia from time to time. It is mainly for this type of problem - occasional insomnia - that we have made up the following list of our top ten insomnia treatment tips.

We have ordered them from 1 to 10, but in fact this doesn’t really reflect their absolute importance. For some people the tips we’ve put at the top of the list perhaps won’t work, while the ones at the bottom will. Moreover, you’ll get best results if you combine more than one of these tips. Our advice is: just experiment and use what works for you!

So, here we go:

1. Set a fixed sleeping routine and timetable - try to go to bed and get up at the same time every day, including weekends.
2. Make sure your sleeping atmosphere is optimum - as little light as possible in the bedroom (so get rid of that alarm clock with the bright display, for example); as little noise as possible; and a moderate temperature, neither too hot nor too cold.
3. Avoid caffeine, alcohol and tobacco - if you can’t avoid them completely, at least avoid them in the latter part of the day.
4. Try to do some kind of activity that will relax your body before you go to bed - this could be taking a warm bath, having a massage, or practicing meditation or yoga.
5. Get some exercise during the day - if your body is physically tired it’s much easier to get to sleep. But be careful not to do the exercise close to bedtime.
6. Follow a regular bedtime ritual so that your body associates it with going to bed (and to sleep) - typical activities to do in a fixed order every night are checking the door locks, turning out the lights, brushing your teeth, etc.
7. Take a drink of hot milk or herbal tea a short while before going to bed.
8. If you’re lying there and simply can’t get to sleep, don’t stay in bed too long - get up and do something (read, listen to music…) until you feel sleepy again.
9. You can listen to music after you’ve gone to bed - there are special tapes and CDs with sleep-inducing music. Most cassette or CD players have a sleep function, so you can program it to turn itself off after a set time.
10. Last but not least, if your insomnia won’t go away and it begins affecting your health, see your doctor.

Sweet dreams!