tips promote sleep – Go Retire Psychiatrist

So, what’s on the menu for Mental Health Awareness today? It’s what some experts call sleep hygiene and there are all kinds of lists on the internet telling you how to get enough sleep.

I think you’re OK with focusing on helpful tips that seem right for your age, your temperament, and your life and work setup. I’m going to focus on my age group. I’m a retired psychiatrist in my 70s and maybe AARP is a good place to start for me.

This reminds me. I’ve looked at several lists of sleep aids on the web. Everybody has a list. You know what I notice? Nobody has a list including what to do about a snoring bed partner. We’re on our own here and I don’t have a one size fits all solution. I’ve even blogged about how this is a challenge in our life. Eventually we opted for separate bedrooms. I don’t think it helps to keep this topic taboo and not being able to find solutions for snoring on a list of options for dealing with insomnia is too bad. Psychiatrists have a word for this—denial.

OK, so AARP’s list is otherwise reasonable. Oh, the other thing I need to mention which many people younger than I am might not think of is some kids couldn’t take a nap during rest time in kindergarten. I guess kindergarten still exists as a grade level prior to first grade. It was the only one in which nap time was compulsory. I flunked it. My teachers could not understand that. So, I started out being an insomniac early in life.

Anyway, AARP has 8 tips on the list for sleeping better:

Fret strategically: OK, I admit I’ve been a worrier ever since kindergarten when I could not take a nap when the teachers demanded it. I seemed to get into situations that increased the risk for worrying and insomnia, like going to medical school, residency, and beyond. Actually, because I was born an insomniac, I did OK on call in the hospital—except on slow nights. I was always vigilant for the pager to go off. The first night I was on call on the medical-psychiatry inpatient unit, I didn’t sleep a wink all night. My problem was I fretted non-strategically. I was always worrying about what I was going to do when (not if) a patient with serious acute medical problem and delirium hit the unit. But now that I’ve been retired and I’m never on call—I still have trouble sleeping.
Wind down together: Sena and I do something a little like that although we like to watch different kinds of TV programs in the evening. That’s why we have two TVs. She tends to flip channels a lot, while I tend to stick to one or two channels. We’re not necessarily on the same page when it comes to what to watch either. I watch Svengoolie movies which comes on MeTV (short for Memorable Entertainment Television), which is a network for older folks. Don’t you hate that word “folks”? No? You must be younger than me. It hardly makes a difference what you watch on TV. In a typical hour-long show, after every 10 minutes of program, you get interrupted by about 5 minutes of 8-15 inane commercials. Sometimes the volume of the commercials gets a lot louder. Bottom line here is that I think the suggestion of complimenting each other in the evening is a great idea. It’s better than watching anything on TV.
RISE and shine: The acronym RISE stands for: R to refrain from hitting the snooze button; I means to increase your physical activity level; S to splash your face with cold water, and E to expose yourself (Hmmm, no, wait that’s wrong; that could get you arrested). It’s actually E to expose yourself to sunlight. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive for helping you sleep, but the idea is to get energized right away in the morning and to stay that way until you drop from sheer exhaustion.
Here comes the sun: Trying to get enough natural sunlight can be challenging but it’s important to get you set in the cicadian rhythm. Oops, that would be the rhythm of the cicada, which is a bug that spends most of its life underground and comes up every 13 years or so to drive people nuts with an incessant buzzing noise that keeps you awake. What I mean is the circadian rhythm, the 24-hour cycle which keeps you awake during the day and asleep at night.
Appreciate yourself: Try to focus on who appreciated you and expressed gratitude to you. Forget this if you live in New York City. You need to stay alert because any second someone could try to shove you into the path of an oncoming subway car. Actually, gratitude is a real thing and letting yourself welcome this gift could help you sleep better at night. It could also make you happier during the day.
Can’t sleep? Get out of bed: It’s really common to just lie in bed and maybe try counting sheep or Meerkat turds, but that won’t help you sleep. You need to leap out of bed and do some powerlifting! No, don’t do that. Try sitting up and reading for a while, something that will be dead certain to put you to sleep in seconds, like Robbins Pathologic Basis of Disease textbook, preferably the 7-pound 3^rd edition with 1,467 pages, which I had to slog through in medical school. No one should go unpunished.
Consider your mattress: if your mattress is too soft or too hard it can interfere with sleep. On the other hand, there’s one more hazard. If you get a mattress in a box, and you don’t follow directions about unpacking it, that thing might just snap open and give you a concussion. The one we got for the snoring problem came with a warning note (and I am not making this up): “This mattress knows Kung fu and may unroll itself at lightning speed. Keep small pets and children free from its kick radius. Please be extra careful when cutting it free from its bindings.”
Take baby steps: Don’t expect too much of yourself in changing your old habits too fast just to get a good night’s sleep, especially if you’re an old person. Remember what Benjamin Franklin said: “Sleep is overrated.”