Relaxing Rituals to Induce a Great Night Sleep

You know it’s time to go to sleep, but you just can’t close your eyes. These little, instant, delicious, bursts of pleasure you get from sending and receiving social messages make it hard for you to put your phone away.

Each second you tell yourself: it’s time to sleep! But you can’t obey. You’re being…hypnotized.

The blue light emitted by the screen plays a hard game with your mind: it sends to your reptilian brain a veiled message, that it’s still daylight, and your mind answers appropriately – it’s still not time to go to sleep because there’s still daylight.

These little bursts of pleasure build a Pavlovian reaction in your head.

Each time you hear the sound of an incoming message, endorphins flow through your brain. You become excited, wanting to hear more, longing for more social approval.

This is how our brains work, and we can do nothing about it.

The Myth of Self-Control

Self-control is a myth. You can impose it on yourself once, twice, even for a whole week, but you can’t keep on relying on self-control every day. Instead, you need an ingrained habit, an automated routine that is part of your personality.

"I try to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what to eat or wear because I have too many other decisions to make. You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You don’t want to go through the day distracted by trivia."

Barack Obama

Disconnect through routines

Learn how to disconnect and manufacture the best night’s sleep of your life. Put a veil between yourself and the devices that are robbing you of a great night’s sleep.

How can you do this? One simple action: change your environment so that it forces you to replace this bad habit by a healthier one.

Rituals to reprogram your brain for sleep

Just choose one or two, you don’t have to do all of them. In fact, overwhelming yourself is another trap you can easily fall into. Remember our first law: Start Small.

Close down the Internet

Close down the Internet just before you go to bed, maybe by shutting down the router. This way, you will not be tempted to check your emails while in bed.

Some routers can even be programmed to stop automatically at a certain hour, say, for example, at 11pm. This way, you’ll be too tired to dabble with the router settings, and you’ll choose the easier option of just going to bed.

Breathe!

The Fabulous includes several breathing meditations. You can use this to disconnect just before sleeping. Breathing will relax you, and you will grow to like these intimate moments where you can regain control of your own self.

Play some ambient sounds

Ambient sounds can hide the variation of sound in your environment, and they can help you to sleep better. You can even buy a fan that will accomplish a double duty: creating an ambient sound and increasing the circulation of air.

Listen to audiobooks

One very effective wind-down technique is to listen to an audiobook. To make this work, keep the volume barely audible so it’s easy to drift off when you’re ready.