It’s no secret that sleep directly affects your mental health. Have you ever gotten poor sleep, leading to being very grumpy the next day? Getting quality sleep can make a big difference in your mental health, how you deal with challenges, and respond to other people. Fortunately, there are many ways to get better sleep.

Prioritizing sleep is a great strategy for protecting your mental health. Your brain can’t function as well if you’re tired all the time. Sleep helps to remove metabolic byproducts from your brain, heal, and strengthen memories. Your physical and mental health relies on good sleep.

Sleep and chronic pain affect each other bi-directionally. When you lose sleep, you become more sensitive to pain. However, pain often causes you to lose sleep. This is vicious cycle. When you prioritize sleep, you’re not only improving your mental health, but also your ability to manage your pain. 

If you’d like to learn more about the link between sleep and chronic pain, check out our course: Sleep and Chronic Pain.

Don’t Pass on Sleep, It’s Vital

Some people cut back on sleep to get more done during the day. However, even skipping a few hours of sleep each night can take a large toll on your mental health. Sleep is a necessity! It won’t only negatively affect your physical health, but your mood, energy, concentration, and resilience to stress, too.

Adults should try to get 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night. However, you need time to unwind beforehand, and you can help this process by relaxing and avoiding stimulation. Take a break from screens that produce blue light (e.g., TV, phone, tablet, laptop, etc.) about 2 hours before bed. Avoid stress before bed, too, by stepping away from work, planning, and conflicts. This will help you fall more asleep quickly.

Tips for getting better sleep for your mental health

Getting to sleep can be a challenge. You may be familiar with the experience of lying awake for hours, restless in bed. However, losing sleep affects your mental health negatively. Luckily, there are steps you can take to try to get to sleep.

If you find yourself worrying, with racing thoughts keeping you awake, there are ways to calm yourself. First, allocate time to worry later. Tell yourself you’ll figure it out tomorrow at a specific time, where you can sit down and write down a solution.

Next, you can try to relax. Finding what helps you relax can take some trial and error. Do some breathing exercises, take a warm bath, read a book, listen to calming music or white noise, etc. Try out different techniques to see what works for you.

It might also help to try to strengthen your body’s internal clock signals: your circadian rhythm. This is the 24-hour clock in your brain that tells you it’s time for bed. It is triggered by light and dark. To strengthen the sleep signal, you can stick to a consistent sleep-wake schedule (even on weekends). Be sure to get natural morning light, and switch to lamps in the evening.

Additionally, make sure your room is dark, cool, and quiet. These factors also signal to your brain that is it night. You may want to ditch the fleece pajamas for shorts and a light t-shirt. Using curtains, white noise machines, and fans can also help create a sleep-promoting environment.

To further avoid light that can keep you awake, avoid using bright screens. Turn off your electronics (phone, TV, laptop) a couple hours before bed. If it’s available, you can turn them on a ‘night mode’ which reduces the brightness automatically or adds a blue light filter.

This will help to signal your brain that it’s time to sleep and you may fall asleep easier.

Practice

Below, you will find the worksheets for this lesson: the Sleep Diary and the Sleep Hygiene Checklist. These worksheets will help you identify factors that affect your sleep. Additionally, you can use the checklist to ensure you have good sleep hygiene before bed.

Reflect

Take a moment to reflect on how your sleep, mood, and chronic pain are interconnected. Are you aware of what happens to your mood if you don’t get a good night’s sleep? Is there anything that helps you sleep better when you’re struggling with insomnia (or ‘Pain-somnia’)?

In the next lesson, you will learn about how to support your mental health by setting goals, priorities, and boundaries in your life.