You just can’t fall asleep or wake up too early. One of the first pieces of advice you often receive is to do relaxation exercises. You know what it’s like: breathing in and out deeply, meditating a little, or relaxing all your muscles very consciously. However, according to new research, this doesn’t help at all and may even be counterproductive.
Not being able to sleep is so annoying that you are willing to do everything: from hot milk with honey to reading a book, from taking a bath to deep meditation, you have surely already tried all the lists of advice you find online. But with all this well-intentioned advice, you can no longer see the forest through the trees. Reason for the Japanese researchers of it Tokyo University Hospital to list many studies on insomnia to find out what really works. “We included 241 studies with more than 30,000 participants,” said researcher Yuki Furukawa. Scientias.nl. “Everyone received some form of behavioral therapy for insomnia.”
Counterproductive
However, many parts turned out not to work at all. “Relaxation techniques, such as breathing exercises or muscle relaxation, are often part of behavioral therapy, but our meta-analysis shows that this is usually counterproductive. This means that such techniques even reduce the chance that insomnia will be resolved,” says the sleep researcher.
But what should you do if you stay awake for an incurably long time? This has also been examined. “Sleep restriction works.” You stick to a fixed sleep schedule. For example, you always go to bed at 11pm and get up at 7am, regardless of how long you actually sleep. So it’s a bad idea to think: I stayed up so long last night, I’ll set the alarm for an hour later.
Not too much stimulation
“What also helps is the stimulus check,” the Japanese said. This means you should no longer expose yourself to too much stimulation or other bad habits late at night. So no drinks to help you fall asleep quickly and no chocolate before going to bed and it is better to reduce the use of your smartphone. It’s also important to only use your bed for sleeping, so no more TVs in the bedroom.
A third effective method is cognitive restructuring. This is a well-known psychological trick where you try to change what you think. For example, you learn to convert negative thoughts into positive ones or replace stress-inducing thoughts with more relaxing thoughts. “A combination of these methods works best. Then the probability that insomnia will disappear is almost 50 percent,” says the researcher.
Sleep restriction
Why can’t relaxation exercises help with this? “When treating insomnia, it is important to keep waking time as short as possible. Relaxation techniques actually keep you awake in bed longer, which can counteract sleep restriction and stimulus control,” explains Furukawa.
No surprise
The researcher wasn’t really surprised by his findings. “Sleep restriction and stimulus control are considered the most important parts of insomnia treatment. It was reassuring that this also emerged from our analysis. The surprising thing is that changing your mind works well too.”
The results may not have been that special to the sleep scientist, but they probably were to many insomniacs who try breathing exercises every night. If you wake up again, it is better to choose other solutions.
Insomnia: the numbers
According to CBS data from 2022, as many as a quarter of Dutch people suffer from sleep problems. These people indicated in the study that they had had “some” or “(many) many” sleep problems in the previous two weeks, such as difficulty falling or staying asleep, or waking up too early. In five years the number of people with sleep problems has increased dramatically, from 20 to 25.3%. Women have trouble sleeping much more often than men, 29% versus 21%. Older people generally sleep worse than younger people. Sleep problems are especially common in the 50 to 64 age group.
2024-01-18 07:35:40
#relaxation #exercises #sleep #dont