How to sleep better, more deeply and for longer, naturally.

[English]

Hi guys,

I've thought about writing a comprehensive post for a while now after reading so many times about guys here and elsewhere suffering from insomnia, particularly after messing with hormones or sleeping pills or after a life changing health event of bereavement or whatever. We all know that sleep underpins everything we are trying to achieve, whether it be training or just feeling awake, alert and generally well through the day, and i know from personal experience the hell of insomnia, particularly when coupled with other health issues, and this is why i have taken the time to write this, because i fixed myself, naturally, you can do it too. A bit about me:

I slept like a baby until the age of 38, at which point i suffered what is essentially a nervous breakdown after failing to come up with a calm response to symptoms related to taking finasteride for hair loss. I have fully recovered from that now thankfully and have repaired a disasterous period of insomnia that spanned over a year (repairing sleep was fundamental to recovering from the finasteride issues too). I was initially given sleeping pills and anti depressents which i accepted because i didn't know any different.
Things started changing after i educated myself through what was a year of research, at least 20 hours a week, into all aspects of health and hit every major area of poor health, and in particular sleeping, and the mind/body interactions that result in sleep, or lack of.

Just to be clear, my level of insomnia was fucking monsterous. I slept for maybe 30 minutes or less at a time, and a total of 2 hours tops each night for months. On sleeping pills i slept for no more than 4 hours of broken sleep, 2 hours each time by taking half the pill twice, then doubling the dose as my body built tolerance - fucking crazy.

I now sleep an average of 7 hours a night each night, nice deep sleep, even after being woken up twice a night by my 8 month old baby boy.

First, i will tell you what not to do and why, then what to do, if you are struggling to sleep:

What not to do:

1- Do not take any sleeping pills whatsoever - why? Because doctors are trained to give out prescriptions and most don't know how damaging they are or the fact that every study into all all types of sleeping shows they reduce the quality of sleep, and build tolerance in the body, as well as damaging the area of the brain that receives calming signals by natural compounds such as gabba, which essentially means you need more and more drugs to get the same effect, and when you finally realise your error, you stop the pills and are immediately an anxious wreck in the day and night for months while your brain repairs, making sleep even harder- do not take sleeping pills, no matter how bad it gets. Note: if you are on any drug you should taper off first and/or get medical advice on how to get off it.

2- Do not join insomnia forums, or start buying this or that "wonder" cure for sleeping. Why? Because everying you need (apart from perhaps some magnesium and maybe some other vitamins/minerals (more on that later) is already in your head and body and every extra thing you use or buy will become A- a crutch that you can't do without and B- it may work for a short time due to the "phew!! I can now sleep!" type effect of the short term placebo, but the value will always be completely lost within a week or so, yet you will convince yourself you need it to sleep, even though you still sleep awefully! This is the crazy way our brains work.

3- Do not keep trying to work out why you are not sleeping, or counting the minutes you've slept, or telling everyone around you how bad you are at sleeping like some fucking badge of honour - Why? Because if you tell yourself and others anything repeatedly then it becomes a fact in your head, in your subconscious, and your brain will literally build thick neuroligical thought pathways that fire regularly confirming this negative belief until you are 100% convinced that you are a bad sleeper and that you will never recover, that nothing works, that you're fucked. Stop it, when you get these thoughts or the urge to show off at how bad you sleep to others, don't, just calmely and kindly move to another thought.

4- When you go to bed, stop obsessing over sleep, stop worrying about how many hours left before you get up, stop all this shit - Why? I don't need to tell you this do i, you know it does not help, so move calmly to just lying there happily, knowing that you've survived on hardly any sleep before and you will again if necessary. This will liberate you from worry, and you will be much more likely to sleep.

What to do:

1- Obviously do all the standard stuff of making sure your room is dark, cool, block out all the LED's etc. and make sure you are not worrying about your dog barking or the cat trying to get in. If necessary, shoot the fucking things, turn your phone off, this stuff is called "good sleep hygiene" and it makes good sense, although the effect is tiny compared to the items below. Don't ignore good sleep hygiene though, it is still important.

2- The most powerful thing you can do: Liberate yourself from the worry of sleeping. I know this sounds happy clappy, but sleeping is all in the mind. If you spend the day worrying about sleeping in the evening and then worry when you do go to bed, you will obviously not sleep well at all. So you need to do the opposite. Start engraining the fact that you can sleep like a baby in your head. Yes i know it will be a lie at first, but if you tell yourself anything enough your mind starts believing - just ask any successful politician!!! So when you go to work, or see your friends, instead of being the worlds most dull person and telling them all your sleep issues, tell them you now sleep like a baby, and that you are the worlds best sleeper. Think this a hundred times a day, and when doing so remember when you did. Repeat, repeat, repeat for weeks and months.
When you go to bed liberate yourself from worry by understanding that you've had only 2 or 3 hours sleep many times and still performed perfectly well the next, day - what's the worst that can happen? This will relax you like nothing else. Repeat these mantras until you believe and your sleep will improve - although remember, don't be counting the extra hours and minutes of sleep and celebrating otherwise you will be disappointed if you don't achieve that the next night, and the idea is to be relaxed about sleep over a long period of time, so just calmly allow your sleep to improve and focus on your day, on other things, let sleep as an issue fade into the background.

3- Take a quality multi vitamin each day. Personally i halve it so that i don't have to watch myself piss all the excess out in a bright yellow stream of piss an hour after. I take each half morning and night, and this is logical. Take fish oil daily, and top of the list also take approx 200 mg of Magnesium citrate and 400 to 800mg of Magnesium Glycinate each day, but, leave the glycinate until your final main meal and just before bed (ie split up the glycinate dose). Why? Stress homones signal your body to dump it's own magnesium into your blood, which leads to difficiencies in almost everyone under stress. Magnesium is far and away the most essential mineral to the body with regards to the amount of functions it is involved in (over 300) and in every study on magnesium and sleep, significant improvements in sleep depth and length were found. Most people under stress who take magnesium in the way described report massive improvements in sleep, usually within 48 hours. The difference between taking magnesium and sleeping pills is that magnesium is natural for your body and you will likely be deficient in it, it will also give you permanent long term sleep gains as long as you take it, however sleeping pills are toxic, brain changing and weirdly result in worse sleep despite physically making you unconsicous for some hours. Sleeping pills, like so many other things in life, are a big con, that you are made to believe work by companies making money from you and also because we all call them sleeping pills!
You must ensure you take the glycinate form, other types are cheaper and are not tolerated well or ingested well and this is the reason why the cheaper forms are often within laxative remedies.
The other vitamins and fish oils are required because sleep is the result of a calm mind and a body and brain that has it's requirement of food, vitamins, minerals.

4- Remove all the obvious sources of stress and anxiety from your life, and if you can't remove them, take all possible steps to minimise them. Removing stress includes not doing things like lying, cheating, or generally being a twat, as studies repeatedly show that stress hormones increase when we lie, exaggerate etc. and positive hormones increase when we are kind, and are true to ourselves. So if you are a twat and know it, stop being one, be kind and loving, generous and caring, and when you go to bed you will not be wondering about whether you should have said this or that to someone that day.

5- Remove caffeine from your diet from midday onwards, same for alcohol and drugs, you think they help don't you? They don't. Alcohol acts in the same way as hypnotic class of sleeping pills and relaxes you temporarily whilst making your sleep much lighter and more fitful, it also changes your brain in the same way as sleeping pills so that it takes more to relax you in future.

6- Ensure you exercise in the day, that you are busy and achieving things. If you are obese, then an awful hormone balance is likely what is the issue, but at SS that is highly unlikely to be the issue, so just ensure your body is tired, and that your mind is tired too by the time you go to bed, but from thinking of good things and solving issues and not worrying about sleep. Go to bed tired but happy and relaxed.

7- Go to bed when you are tired, not before, don't make the mistake of thinking that if you give yourself 12 hours in bed then at least you will get at least 5 hours sleep. It doesn't work that way and you know it doesn't! It is important though to get up at the same time every day. When you start out on this protocol, it is hard, because you may only have had 2 hours sleep or whatever, but trust me, getting up at the same time each morning is important and this is backed up by every sleep professional you will find on the planet. I know it is tough but get up at the same time even at the weekend. Once you get all the sleep you need and you've basically morphed back into a cat, then you can lie in at the weekends.

8- Trust me! The above do's and don'ts are enough to bring about incredible improvements in sleep over time. Dependent on how bad your sleep is or how much alcohol or pills you've taken it may take anything from 48hrs to 12 months to take you from almost no sleep to 7 or 8 hours a night (or whatever is optimum for you) But remember sleep is about belief, and about a brain that is recovered from the trauma of excessive alcohol and drugs, so you need to be calm and understand that these improvements should be viewed over weeks and months. You will still have bad nights, we all do, but the above changes will work as long as you invest daily in them over a long period of time, until you no longer view yourself as having any kind of sleep issue at all.

Doing the above requires some degree of intelligence, resilience, trust and will power. It takes will power mainly because it is human nature to keep looking for a quick fix cure and then keep taking it or using it, and my above method requires you to stop doing both. It take intelligence because you need to recognise the fact that everything you've been doing thus far is not working, that you have everything you need already to sleep like the baby you once were. It takes resilience because you need to accept continuing bad nights without worry or straying onto a new "fad" path and it takes trust because i'm a stranger to you.

I've no reason for you to trust me other than to ask you this "How's sleep going for you so far?" - also "will taking some vitamins and magnesium harm you?"
My friend, the answer to these questions is "badly" and "no" respectively, and given that, why not trust a stranger given that this cannot harm you? I'm not making anything from the time spent writing this. I'm not linking to any particular product. Give it a go, and don't tell me it's not working after one week. Do it for a month, then report back.

[WesleyInman]

Actually all very excellent points and spot on. Thanx for posting!