by Mary M. Redoutey

Created on: May 01, 2009   Last Updated: June 29, 2009

We tell each other "Sweet dreams" but unfortunately there are a lot of people who won't be doing any dreaming tonight... They will be lucky if they get any sleep at all because they are committing sleep sabatoge.

Perhaps you have done some of these things or perhaps a freind or family member has... These are five sure ways to ruin your sleep:

1.) Have a place to sleep that is uncomfortable. If you can make sure that there are bright lights streaming in the window from a local neon sign or from your partner's bedside light... If you can make sure that you are surrounded by plenty of noise from a radio or television set blaring, a snorer, a baby crying or freeway noise that has not been reduced by sound proofing... If you can make sure that your bed feels like a slab of granite or a lumpy mess; and that you are either too hot or too cold, then I am sure that sleep will be hard to find.

2.)Turn your bedroom into a home office, game room or television room. Having electronic equipment to play with in the bedroom provides such a wonderful temptation to stay up until the wee hours of the morning as well as messing with the body clock and decreasing the relaxation that should take place in the bedroom. And having your work around you does a lot to encourage you to think about work instead of sleeping.

3.) Drink plenty of water and eat plenty of spicy food prior to going to bed. If you have to get up a lot during the night because you did not refrain from drinking water and other liquids for about a half hour before bedtime, then you will indeed kill your sleep. If you eat spicy foods, and you have to get up to grab something to take away the stomach discomfort and heartburn that results from it, then of course sleep will be elusive. To sleep... perhaps mild foods and plenty of starches and protiens mixed together like mac and cheese or drinking scalded milk or cocoa, etc. an hour before bedtime might be better choices.

4.) Focus on your problems while you are in bed. Actually the truth is that good sleepers just sleep in bed. If you ask a good sleeper what he or she thought of prior to going to sleep, their answer is normally "nothing. I just fell asleep." If a person who knows how to sleep thinks about anything at all prior to sleeping, it might be thanking God for his blessings, going over what happened in the day and offering it up to the Creator to enter sleep with an untroubled mind. If the mind needs to have something to do and is unused to being quiet, using the mind for a mantra or something that one says over and over again like "peace, peace" might be a way to relax it, as is visualizing boring rolling hills, clouds in the sky, a forest, etc. might help as does sometimes reading a boring book.

5.) Go to bed late and sleep in late. There is some research that indicates that it is better to try to follow the natural cycles of the body... One employee of a sleep clinic in Orange County, California, told me that the advice he would give to anyone who wanted to get a better night's sleep is to get up early and go immediately into the early morning sunlight. Get that sun on the face, the hands and other parts of the body that are safe to expose. This resets the body clock and should help a person sleep better, he said.

I am certain that if you refrain from the five things that ruin sleep and do some of the things that I mentioned in this article that encourage sleep, you will have much better sleep tonight and every night.

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