Most of us have read the various news reports about simple things you can do to improve your sleep – go to bed at the same time, eat lightly before bedtime, remove alcohol and caffeine from your diet from mid-afternoon on. We may have even tried to implement these suggestions with sometimes mixed results. Or you may have tried successfully to get to bed on time, only to find that once there, other problems develop. A similar thing happens with our eating and weight efforts. We know what we should do to improve our diet, but we can’t seem to do it and obesity remains a problem.
For many, the general suggestions to change sleep habits are just not enough. We need a targeted map of what will help with our particular sleep issues. This is the roadmap that can only come from a visit to our doctor to rule out medical causes of our sleep problems and the help of a sleep coach who points the direction of which aspects of our sleep problems need focus and how best to go about that. A sleep coach is educated in selecting from an array of treatments which ones will help the troubled sleeper. Is your sleep cycle off track and what can be done about that? Do all your day’s worries surge up in front of you as you go to put your head on the pillow, and what can be done about that? Do you awaken at 3 am every night and wonder if you were meant to have only half a night’s sleep?
The roadmap involves a defined set of goals to help correct our individual sleep problems and the steps that will get us there. But we all know that just identifying the problem and setting out the goals is not enough. We have to take action. And it might seem that just identifying the cause of the problem would be enough to get us to take action, but in many cases, action involves the change of treasured habits. We may like eating our largest meal just an hour or two before bedtime since we get home so late. We may enjoy surfing the web right up to lights out time. And the change of a sleep cycle from later to earlier – what’s the best way to do that? These and other challenging questions are the daily fare of a sleep coach’s repertoire.
In addition to pointing the way, the sleep coach holds us accountable for the goals we set for ourselves and helps us iron out problems that arise from our efforts to try out new behavior. Along the way of changing habits and adding new behaviors, we can encounter a lot of inner resistance to change that will stall our efforts to succeed. Where is Yoda when we need him, or that sage grandmother whose advice we scoffed at then, but remember now? The sleep coach, like any coach, has that optimal balance of push and pull that should help get us to our goal of a great night’s sleep most every night.
Dr. Marcia Lindsey – sleep coach, psychologist, Texas sleeper – coaches by phone those with chronic sleep problems to better, more peaceful sleep. You can follow her on Twitter www.twitter.com/sleepdiva or at her website www.thesleepdiva.com.
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