Why can you not sleep when it is hot, and can you catch it up at the weekend? You cannot. Sleep is a skill, and most of us were never taught it.
Cool the room down first. We are not built to sleep at twenty one degrees. I put a cold flannel on my forehead, which looks ridiculous and works. Waking in the night is normal, it is your body checking you are safe, so do not reach for the phone to see the time. Most of us get to the end of the day and simply hope, which is why there are three steps before bed.
One thing to try: If you have been lying awake a while, get out of bed and read something dull. Not the phone, and not a coffee.
In this episode
(0:06) Why sleep matters more than it feels like it does
(1:40) The years I could not sleep at all, in pain and heartbroken
(4:29) You cannot catch sleep up at the weekend, it is a myth
(5:43) Cool the room, and the temperature that actually works
(7:39) The cold flannel, and how daft it looks
(8:43) Waking in the night is your body checking you are safe
(10:24) What to do when you have been awake too long
(11:24) The three steps before bed, instead of hoping
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Why can you not sleep when it is hot, and can you catch it up at the weekend?
You cannot catch it up. Sleep is a skill and most of us were never taught it. We get to the end of the day, put our heads down and hope.
The heart of it
Make the room a cave. Cold, dark, air moving, some ambient sound.
Waking in the night is normal. It is your body checking you are safe.
Bed is for sleeping. Everything else you do in it teaches your body something unhelpful.
I knew nothing about any of this until I hit rock bottom and could not sleep at all. I was in pain, my mind would not stop, and I drank to get down, which does not work past two in the morning.
Two things I learned that changed how seriously I took it. Lose two hours a night for three nights and you have not lost one night's sleep, you have lost something you cannot repay. And three hours short puts you behind the wheel in roughly the state of two or three pints, which most of us would never consider.
Alcohol does not help. It gets you under and then your body spends the night dealing with it instead of repairing you. That is what a hangover actually is.
Now the room. We slept in caves and under stars for a very long time and in centrally heated bedrooms for about five minutes. Get it down to sixteen or seventeen degrees. Kill every LED. Have a fan moving the air, not straight up your nose. Put some ambient sound on, because caves were dark and they were not silent.
I sleep on my back because I am paralysed, and I put a cold flannel on my forehead. I look absurd. It works.
One small thing to try
Give the evening three stages instead of one.
Straight after tea, do everything that needs doing. Kitchen, clothes for the morning, packed lunches. All of it, before you sit down.
Then an hour or so of whatever you enjoy. Phone, television, games, friends.
Then the last hour, wind down. A slightly cool bath, soft music, a book, nothing on a screen and nothing by Stephen King.
Then get into bed when you are ready to sleep, and not before.
Questions people ask
What do I do if I wake at three?
Nothing. Do not check the time and do not touch your phone, because light burns off the melatonin you need to get back down. Tell yourself you are safe and close your eyes. If you are still awake a while later, get up and read something dull.
Any trick that actually works?
Count back from three hundred in threes, and start again from three hundred every time you lose your place. I never get past seventy. The counting is the whole point, and it beats counting sheep, which arrive in ones and twos and threes and refuse to be organised.
What is the military method?
Tense and release everything, section by section, then your whole body at once. Then let your face go, including your jaw and tongue. Then breathe out and relax on each out breath. Then give your mind one dull thing to hold onto so it cannot go anywhere else.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
sleep · stress · breath
Read the transcript
Hey, I'm Steven Webb and welcome to Stillness in the Storms. Your podcast that helps you to have a little
peace of mind when you need it most and you have it least.
Okay, today we're talking about getting a decent night's sleep. And especially during this hot spell and hot weather, it's
really hard to sleep at night. So in this podcast, I'm going to talk you through setting up the perfect
room, ready for sleep. What do you do if you wake up in the middle of the night? How you
prepare for bed? And then finally, we're going to end with tricks to get to sleep and how the military
managed to go to sleep in just two minutes. And don't panic about picking up a pen and piece of
paper and taking notes during the podcast because I will go over it briefly at the end for you to
see what you can do right now, today, in order to get a good night's sleep tonight. So
yeah, let's begin. First of all, when I hit my rock bottom, I knew nothing about sleep apart from I
wanted more of it. And every night when I used to go to bed, I used to just put my
head down and just hope I would go to sleep. In fact, I spent all my life on this basis
of hoping that I would fall asleep the minute I hit the pillow. And the truth is I never learned
how to go to sleep. I didn't even know the importance of sleep. I just knew I felt like crap
when I did not have enough sleep. So... When I hit my rock bottom, I started drinking alcohol. I started
doing everything because I could not sleep. My mind was just too active. I was in too much pain. I
was heartbroken and struggling to sleep was, it felt like the least of my problems, but in actual fact, it
was probably my biggest problem because I couldn't function without sleep. The other thing I learned... If you have two
hours lack of sleep, and then the next night you have another two hours, next night you have another two
hours, that's not only one night of sleep you've lost in three. You cannot catch that up. And
sleeping after two or three hours lack of sleep the night before, something else I learned about sleep, and
that is if you if you have three hours of lack of sleep where you can sleep That's like
driving the equivalent of two to three pints of alcohol. And many people wouldn't drive a car with that kind
of alcohol inside them. They wouldn't even dream of it. Dream of it. Excuse the pun. But...
That was that wasn't an intended pun, but I like it. I'll let it stay in the podcast. But we
do get out of bed. We're totally, totally shattered and we get in the car and drive um And the
other thing with sleep is it's so important because the body uses sleep to repair the atoms.
The body uses sleep to repair, uses the protein that we eat to repair all the things that's going on
inside of our body. From the different connections in our brains, in our minds, to just healing the heart
and healing the different parts of the body. This is why the body needs to sleep. And not only that,
it sorts your thoughts out and everything because that's what dreams are about and So we need sleep. And we
need sleep that is healing. Very
often we drink alcohol. Very often we have coffee and all these other things that stimulate us. Or we have
the alcohol that helps us or we believe it helps us to sleep. The problem is while we're sleeping, the
sleep mechanism in our body is is fighting the poison alcohol as opposed to repairing
the body. So that's why if you ever had a really good night's sleep on alcohol and you wake up
in the morning and you cannot function, it's because your body has been so busy all night fighting. The poison
that it cannot function and it did not do the repairing and the job it needed to do overnight. It
cannot do both things. I'm not saying don't ever drink alcohol. I'm saying, you know, enjoy it. Have like whatever
you want. But just be aware that you do need hours of sleep to repair. And you cannot catch
it up. It's a myth that you can... Burn the candle both ends for the weekend and then you catch
it up on Monday and Tuesday. No, you're not catching up the sleep. You're just repairing the body
until again at the weekend when you do the same thing. So, right, okay. I've spoke now for a little
bit about sleep I want to Let's first go to preparing your room. And one of the things about preparing
your room is we got to think about what we're used to sleeping in. Humans have slept under the stars
in caves for a long, long time. We've only had these centrally heated, artificially warm
homes, quilts and lovely cushion beds
for a fraction of the time of our evolution. And
we're not used to it. We enjoy it. It's lovely. Don't get me wrong. But our bodies are not designed
for it. We're actually more designed to be slightly less comfortable, colder, with wind
moving, fresh air, natural going down of the light and coming up in the morning of the light. We've got
a natural pattern. Here's the thing to do with your room. Cool it down. We're
not used to sleeping in 20, 21 degrees. Hence why in this hot weather we cannot sleep.
So cool the room down.
Ideally 16 17 degrees overnight and warming up in the morning naturally so if you can set your central heating
to come on about an hour before you want to wake up that's probably the best natural alarm clock you
have. As it warms up the body will start to wake up. Hence why you wake up in the night
when it's warm. Have a fan. Move the air around. Don't necessarily put the fan in one place
where it's going to blow right up your nose or across your mouth to dry your face right out. But
ideally if it can be going down over your face in some way and move it around the room, that's
nice. And the sound as well. Caves are dark but they're not quiet. So having some ambient sound and you
can do this on Insight Timer. You can do this on
um So many apps and you can even go to Spotify and just put in nighttime sounds, ambient sounds. There's
so many options out there now that just ask Alexa or something like that to play ambient sounds. You could
have like rivers or forests or
nighttime in the Mediterranean probably. You
can have crickets if you want to. So
noise. Cooling it down. Having a little having the wind moving around. Having the air moving.
Of course, have windows open and things like that um I I put a flannel on my forehead and Because
I sleep on my back because I'm paralysed. I put a flannel on my forehead. A cold flannel. Which is
always nice to go sleep to. Doesn't look overly pretty. My hair looks a bit like um
well What was that film with Cameron Diaz in when she come out the toilet? My hair looks a bit
like that in the morning. Raquel Flannel on my forehead. I'm not sure if I'll leave that in the podcast,
but if you've heard it, I left it in. And then finally, make it dark. Get rid of all the
Leds. Get rid of all the little lights um Put little stickers over them. Turn everything off. Get blackout curtains.
Really lie in bed and see if you can see anything with your eyes open. And
if you can see a light with your eyes open, get rid of it.
So moving on to what do we do if we wake up? Well, first of all, understand that waking up
is a natural cycle of sleep. They now believe that...
Everybody that goes sleep, it's a normal two to three hours later. We wake up to check our surroundings to
make sure everything is okay. So we tend to go sleep we tend to fall through the sleep levels um
The body produces the melatonin needed to go sleep and
And then it starts to reduce it about two or three hours later. And it's in order to check our
surroundings, make sure we're safe, make sure everything's okay. And then it'll reproduce it again to go sleep. Here's the
thing. The body can only produce so much melatonin. It's over a space of 24 hours, it builds it up,
builds up and then it releases it.
The problem with it is it releases so much in order to try to go sleep. But if you wake
yourself up fully, it may not have enough or it may not have made enough ready for you to put
you back to sleep. So when we wake up in the night, realise it's a natural cycle. Take notice
and go, I'm safe. Everything is well. Don't look at your phone. That will get rid of more melatonin so
you cannot get back to sleep. Don't worry about the time. Don't worry about all the other things. And don't
try to go back to sleep. Don't force it because you end up Lying in bed, getting quite wound up.
And the more wound up you got, the less melatonin. The more you think you're under attack.
Because the body doesn't want to go sleep when it's feeling anxious. If it's feeling anxious, it thinks something's wrong
and it's not going to go sleep. It needs to relax to go sleep. It needs to know everything is
fine. If you cannot go sleep after a while, read a book. Get out of bed, go and read a
book. Don't get a coffee. Don't have a cigarette. Don't have the things that you think relaxes you, but they
really don't. So avoid bright light. Avoid anything as stimulus like anxiety or thinking about
things that might go wrong. If you've got something on your mind, grab have a notepad notepad and write it
down. Not in detail. You know, if your mind's thinking that you need to check Facebook, just write down,
check Facebook. But
don't actually check Facebook. Just your mind will think you dealt with it. That's the thing. There's so many to-do
lists that are never done. It's because when we write the to-do list, our mind partly thinks we've done it.
In a minute, we're going to look at the tricks to go sleep and then finally how the military do
it. But just before that, there's like preparing for bed. We often go through the day and then just hope
we fall asleep. So I I I say we have three steps to preparing to go to bed, preparing to
go sleep. And the first step is like have your tea. And then after tea, instead of going and sitting
down, and then later on, ah I gotta go bed in a minute. Yeah, I'm gonna go bed. Okay, I'm
gonna go bed. I'm going to go and sort the kitchen out. I'm going to go and clean up, and
then I'll get ready, and then I'll go back That's no good.
When you've had lunch, when you've had your tea um when you had your dinner...
Clean up everything that needs to be done then before you settle in and start relaxing. Get ready for tomorrow.
Get all your clothes out if that needed or anything you need for the morning, the kids pack lunches and
things like that. Get all that done in the hour after food or before food if it's even easier because
sometimes it's hard to do stuff from a full belly.
Then use an hour or so to reward yourself. Be
on your phone. Be on Facebook um you know Play video games.
Watch Tv. Whatever you want to do. Be on the phone to your friends. Whatever you want to do. Hour,
hour and a half. And then you move on to the final hour before bed. And the final hour before
bed it's have a have a nice bath. Not too warm. Slightly cool. Listen to
some soft music. Maybe read a book that's not not a horror book, not Stephen King.
Something that is just a nice little you
know self-help book maybe or something like that. Whatever you're into, just something that's not going to stimulate you too
much but enjoyable to read. Do an audible book.
You know, something that is not on a screen because you're no longer on the screens now. This is the
problem. The screens keep you awake. So we've now got a nice perfect room to go to sleep we We're
prepared that if we wake up, we know what we're going to do. And we're going through the evening and
we're now ready for bed. Now we get in bed. Then you get in bed when you're ready to go
sleep, not before. Then you can use the bed for intimate things, that's fine, and sleep.
Everything else, leave out the bed. Not watching telly in bed. Not browsing Facebook in bed. Not even reading books
in bed. Not doing any of those things. Because the body relates to the bed as doing those things. So
if you tend to watch telly when you go bed and I know many, many people go, well, I always
watch telly when I go bed I It relaxes me and allows me to go sleep
Not really. It's just you fall asleep watching it, but it keeps you awake for a lot longer. That's all.
The idea is to learn how to go sleep and not to do something until you fall asleep.
Big difference and One's a skill, one's an active skill. The other one is basically falling
asleep. But okay, tricks to go sleep then. Don't count sheep.
And I'll tell you why. Sheep are naughty little beggars. Not really beggars, but they're naughty okay
they They jump over in ones and then twos and threes. Then they come in all shapes and colours. And
they're never really that organized. Do
you ever find one sheep jumps over and then two, then three, then five, then six, and you get annoyed
because you cannot count the sheeps you're creating in your mind? I know it's mental, but it's the reality
you know Just to keep that concentration of one sheep at a time is really difficult. So
don't count sheep. You can use guided meditations. I have a sleep guided meditation on my website. You can head
over there. It's also on Insight Timer. I'll put that link underneath this podcast um It's
listened to over five six hundred people per night listen to that and always leave to it. So I've got
a talent for putting people to sleep. So if you're still here, I'm impressed.
Count backwards from 100 in threes. This is really, really the... And you can put on a
meditation put on some soft music. And turn your screen off when you've done it, by the way, and face
it down. Don't spend hours picking one. You know, get used to using the same one. Boom, put the screen
down. Anybody listens to my deep sleep meditation on Insight Timer, I've
just got to say to them, I'm Steven Webb, and this is my sleep meditation. That's
it. They're gone. Your brain gets used to it. It knows it's safe. It's secure. It recognizes the sound. Go
to sleep. You can count back from 103s the same time. And
the rules are, if you miss count in any way, go back to 100.
If you, even if you pause too much, go back to 100. I bet you never get any further than
70 or 60.
Around those figures. Because I don't. So yeah, they're the things. And I'm going to recap very briefly.
And then I'm going to go over how the military falls asleep in two minutes. So set up your room.
Cool it down. Get rid of the light. Have a fan or something moving and some ambient noise.
Make your head cooler than your body. If you wake up in the night... Don't turn on your phone. Don't
look at the your mobile for the time. Don't even bother with the time. Literally just recognise that you're safe
Close your eyes go back to sleep. If you cannot go to sleep and you're thinking about stuff, write it
down. If not, get out of bed, read a book, do something really quite boring and then go back to
bed.
And prepare for bed. Get everything done right before and after tea so you don't wake yourself up right before
bed. And then in the next hour, hour and a half, reward yourself. Have fun. Tv, games, whatever you want
to do. Be on the computer, Facebook. And
then the final hour, relax. You're preparing your body for bed. Just the same as you warm up when you're
going to do the 100 meters. You prepare the 100 meters the minute you get on the track ready to
run it, but you start warming up beforehand where you're cooling down ready to go bed. And tricks to go
sleep. Insight Timer and use the Sleep Meditations. There's many of them. Many incredible ones. But mine's the
best, okay? And there'll be a link directly to mine underneath this. And feel free to give me a donation.
That would be awesome and amazing, and it helps me to produce more meditations. The other thing is count backwards
from 103s. Or if you find that incredibly easy, count back from 307s. The
idea is to keep your mind busy. It's not about shutting your mind off. So finally, if you're still here
and you're still awake, how do the military go to sleep? I use this in my meditation, and I didn't
know it was the way what the military uses at the time. But lie in bed and tense all your
legs. Hold them. And then let them go. Do
your torso. Hold it. And there we go. Then your arms. And then do your whole body.
Your face, your eyes, your neck, your chin, lips, feet, toes, everything. Tense everything
right up. Hold it for three seconds. And then let it go. And
what this letting go does, it releases a chemical to the muscles to tell them to relax. It's an instruction
to relax. And then imagine your body falling asleep. Imagine your body falling asleep. Relax the muscles in your
face, including your tongue, jaw, muscles around your eyes. Now your body's pretty much asleep now. Your
body doesn't have to do anything more to be asleep. And now breathe out relax in your chest, followed by
your legs. And everything else in your body. Just every time you breathe out, relax. You can even say the
word relax. And if you keep doing that on every out breath, your body will just keep following relaxing. Now
for 10-15 seconds or so, you should clear your mind. Clearing your mind's impossible But let's tell you how to
do it. The irony. The paradox of clearing the mind. You do it by focusing on
something. So you could focus on that your mind's in this vast open space of just darkness. There's nothing else
there. Just awareness. You're aware that there's nothing.
Focus on nothing. You could think that you're lying in a canoe on a lake with nothing but blue clear
sky above you and you're just slowly going over the biggest lake again and again. Or
you could be lying on a black velvet hammock in a pitch black room. And then finally, just
say to yourself, don't think. Don't think. Don't think. Don't think. And then say it in your
mind, don't think.
And the whole idea of doing these things is because to keep your mind focused, instead of thinking about
all the things that keep you awake, that prevent the melatonin coming from your penile gland,
Instead, you're creating the thought process that allows the body to relax and produce the right chemicals.
So don't think. Don't think. Or just breathe in.
Breathe. And then breathe out. Relax.
Relax. Relax relax And whatever you're doing, just focus on that one thing
well Hopefully you'll get some sleep in this nice hot weather and then we can enjoy the days a bit
more. I'm Steven Webb and this is my podcast, Stillness in the Storms of Life. I am after sponsors at
the moment and if you could do that or you know anybody that wouldn't mind sponsoring my podcast, that'd be
awesome. Head over to StevenWebb.com There's a link at the top to my Patreon page for anybody to support what
I'm doing. And if I help you out, perhaps you can help me out by helping me to grow and
record and... Support what I do. Head over to StevenWebb.com and click on the Patreon at the top of the
page. Thank you guys. Take care. I love you all and thank you for all the reviews and all the
nice things you say about my podcast. I will get around to hugging you all one day. Take care. Bye.
