Hi, it's Allison, and I'm back for a minute to tell you about an awesome new audio experience that I think you're going to love. It's a series of new audio courses from the Washington Post called Try This. Each course is three to five episodes where we teach you some refreshing new tips for the kinds of problems we all tend to have. Like the first course is on how to get better sleep. I think a lot of us could use that. And the best part is it's quick. The episodes, or classes if you will, are each 15 minutes or less. I've been working behind the scenes with my colleague who's the host of the show, Christina Quinn, and it's pretty much impossible not to immediately feel like she's the one you want taking you on this journey. Anyway, enough from me.
Hey, I'm Christina Quinn. Welcome to Try This from The Washington Post. Try This is a series of audio courses to help you take on common challenges and learn something new without having to make a big time commitment. And I'll be learning with you. Each course will have two to five classes or episodes. This first course, which is about sleep, will have five. We'll cover sleep performance anxiety, how to manage those nagging thoughts that keep you up, what to do when you wake up in the middle of the night, why sleep is like pizza dough, and finally, the melatonin factor.
All right, class is in session. Let's try this. It's easy to obsess over sleep because if we don't get enough of it, it can be all we think about. As humans, we're built to sleep at certain times. Societies and economies function around a clock that includes time for sleeping. And yet it eludes so many of us. There are approximately a bajillion books and series out there dedicated to sleep, but we wanted to learn from a particular expert because she has this way of cutting through the noise. Trying to sleep is at best a futile attempt and at worst it obstructs sleep.
Lisa Strauss is a psychologist and sleep therapist based in the Boston area, and she says we need to stop trying to sleep. Lisa sees about 40 patients a week just for sleep issues and disorders, and she's written some great columns for the Post about shifting expectations and habits around sleep. She's one of the experts we'll be talking with who will give you some concrete steps to take. But first, I want to be clear about something. This is a no-pressure zone. Lisa says a lot of people think if they're not sleeping, it's their fault. But it's not your fault!
If you were on a boat in the ocean and it capsized and you knew for a fact that you were in a well-traveled lane so that rescue would be forthcoming, but it might be a long time, what would you not do and what would you do? I guess I would, you know, I'm guessing like I shouldn't be doing things like panicking, hoping that there's some sort of some piece of boat to hold onto to wade through the water, especially if I'm expecting some help to come around. Yeah, I think we would all panic, but we would try our hardest not to panic. And we would also try to tread water or to float because we would quickly exhaust ourselves if we tried to swim and we would be fighting against a force that is much more powerful than we are. So no flailing, no panicking. To translate that over into sleep, what does that look like?
When we try to sleep, we can't sleep. Trying to sleep, pressuring oneself to sleep, worrying about how you're going to be the next day. If you don't get enough sleep, looking at the clock to calculate how terribly long you've been lying there, how precious little time is left for sleep, feeling desperate, feeling exasperated. Now we're having feelings of failure. These are very common manifestations. And the key in areas that lend themselves to performance anxiety is to get out of the way of sleep. And one of the things that can help with that is recognizing that sleep is actually out of your control.
Sleep is essentially a bodily function. There are things you can do to incentivize the body and the mind, and you should do those things. But ultimately, it's a bodily function, and you need to wait for it to come to you the way you need to wait for the boat to come to you for rescue. Let's pause here for a moment. This is counterintuitive in some ways, right? In most areas of life, if we're having trouble with something, the harder we apply ourselves to the task, the more likely we are to succeed. That mentality is really baked into our culture. But when it comes to sleep, Lisa says, that can really work against you.
One of the things that people do when they have performance anxiety about sleep is that it's as if they're walking around with a clipboard, taking notes on environmental conditions, like is the thermostat set just so on their own sleep habits, on their level of sleepiness, on the time, on how much time has elapsed. And there's a lot of monitoring that is not good for sleep. And it's not to say that none of those things matter. Like there is research on the optimal temperature for sleep. You know, that's why they talk about a cool, dark room. You know, 67 degrees or whatever is going to be, you know, better than 75 degrees. But you have to be very careful.
if you're going to try to optimize environmental conditions, sleep habits, etc., that you not get all focused on the result, first of all. But second of all, that you don't try too, too hard to optimize. I mean, if you think back to a time when you were a better sleeper, you probably weren't engineering every aspect of your environment and your sleep habits. Now, admittedly, it may have been a time in your life where you were under less stress, where, you know, your biology was more supportive of good sleep because you were a youngster or whatever. But the reality is that you don't need to perfect your sleep habits in order to be a good sleeper. All right. So far, Lisa has told us what not to do.
Don't blame yourself for not sleeping. Don't try to will yourself to sleep. Don't be goal-oriented and don't panic. So what should you do? Well, we do want strategies for dialing down our performance anxiety because just knowing that you shouldn't try to sleep or that anxiety is counterproductive is not sufficient for dialing down that anxiety. And believe it or not, there are a whole lot of daytime strategies that make it so that people have less on their mind to begin with.
In order to sleep better at nighttime, there are daytime things that we can be doing. Absolutely. There's a technique that Lisa teaches people to do first thing in the morning that only takes a few minutes, a method that preempts the anxiety that can keep you up at night. You would do it first thing in the morning because you really do want to catch yourself before thoughts have come crashing in on you. But this is not a daily technique. It doesn't even need to be a regular technique. It's sort of an as-needed technique, but it's very much a listening task. And what you do is you prompt yourself with half sentences that you go in prepared with. These prompts can help you get in touch with hidden feelings or anxiety that could be keeping you up at night.
such as what I'm feeling really scared about is, or what I'm feeling really sad about is, or what I'm feeling really insecure about is. You get the idea. And then you wait and see what comes up. It's a mindfulness exercise. And once it comes up, you validate it with just a sentence or two, something along the lines of, of course, you're feeling sad. That was really painful when that happened. And you make a commitment to yourself to work on it later in the day, therapeutically. It's really a question of getting in touch with buried feelings. Sometimes nothing comes up. Sometimes something surprising comes up. Sometimes something completely unsurprising comes up. But the idea is to be present for one's own feelings.
And sometimes that's just what we need, a moment to acknowledge and validate what's bothering us and potentially keeping us up at night. So try it out tomorrow morning. It just might work. I hope it does. Okay, so let's recap. Sleep is a bodily function. Address what's troubling you earlier in the day with prompts like what I'm feeling really scared about is or what I'm feeling really sad about is or whatever it is that is often gnawing at you throughout the day. Just tackle it early in the morning so you can get it out of the way and move on with your day. Okay, that's it for our first class. I think you can manage that. Up next in our second class on sleep, what to do when you wake up in the middle of the night.
If you're looking for more advice from Lisa about getting better sleep, check out her columns for The Washington Post. We linked to them in our show notes. And if you're enjoying Try This, let us know by rating and reviewing the series in Apple Podcasts. To share ideas for future audio courses, send us an email. The address is trythisatwashpost.com. I'm Christina Quinn. Meet me in class two. Did you know you can play The Washington Post's games for free? Find the crossword, keyword, ridges, and on the record in The Washington Post app or at washingtonpost.com slash games. No subscription required.
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