 Hello and welcome back. Today I am talking about sleep. We all need more of it. It's something which a lot of us let slip and many of us don't realise quite what an important thing sleep is in terms of underpinning our mental health and emotional resilience. So you might think this video is not for you but it is it's for everybody. So it's for you personally whether you have or don't have any mental health issues at this time. It's also for you if you're a parent or someone who works with young people and you might be able to help them to develop more healthy sort of sleep habits. It's also for you directly if you are a young person and you want to do everything you can to get yourself in the best most resilient place. These kind of things become even more important at tricky times so in things like the lead up to exams for example or if we go through other periods of stress in our life then sleep can be one of the things that first slips. So sleep is one of the three key underpinnings to our physical health and our physical health underpins our mental health so as well as sleep then we also need to eat healthily and we also need to make sure that we get active and get ourselves out and have fresh air and keep our bodies moving. So sleep is one of those kind of three key pillars of good physical health which underpins our mental health and just gives us a better chance of staying well or getting well. So when it comes to sleep the number one most important thing that we can do is try and get a good routine that means trying to go to bed at a similar time each night and trying to get up at a similar time each morning. Lots of us will take the opportunity to lie in and kind of binge sleep at the weekend actually our bodies really really like a good regular routine and we find that if we go to bed and get up at the same time each day that it's much easier to fall asleep at night and it's also much easier to get up in the morning. So if we're able to try and establish a good steady routine even despite the weekend even despite the holidays then that's one of the ways that we can get the best quality of sleep when we're sleeping. The next one is to have a think about the kind of routine that we have of the evening so in that time kind of leading up to bedtime so we want to be planning sort of relatively calm activities in the evening. So we shouldn't be doing any kind of really heavy exercise just before bed we should be avoiding things like caffeinated drinks and sugar and other sort of junk foods in the run-up to bedtime as well. So we want to be thinking about what activities we can be doing that are essentially preparing us for sleep and sometimes we can learn a lot about this when we think how we would kind of work with a toddler. So if you're a parent or someone who has experience of spending time with young children then you know that you know in that time leading up to bedtime if you're going to manage to get them down to sleep on time you do have to do things like do more gentle calming activities reading coloring and that sort of thing is in the leading to bed and you're not going to be feeding them junk food or you know anything that's going to send them up high. Those exact same principles we should be applying to ourselves whether we're four 14 44 104 it continues to apply we just become worse at applying it later on so if necessary we need to treat ourselves like a toddler. The next one is that where possible and I appreciate this isn't always possible but where possible we should keep our bedroom for sleeping so we want our bedroom to be somewhere that is associated with sleep for us and that means both that we don't carry out lots of other activities in the bedroom so if possible we might do homework or work in other places it might not be the place that we carry out other kind of hobbies and activities we might try to do those somewhere else in the house I do appreciate not everyone has the room to be able to do this if that's the case what you can think of doing again if you have a large enough room is to kind of zone the room so you might have your kind of sleeping zone where your bed is and it's very calm and then you might have another area is perhaps safe for doing homework or hanging out with friends or whatever you might want to do in your room that isn't kind of sleeping and again this is about giving our body kind of a good connection with this place of sleep as yes this is where I sleep this is somewhere that's nice and calm when I'm here I kind of feel ready to sleep and the other thing there is that if you struggle with sleeping you want to try and break the association of your bed as somewhere where you can't sleep and that actually means that if you are having a night where it's difficult to sleep giving yourself a break from trying and saying if you've tried for half an hour get up go to the different part in your room or a different part in the house and do some calming activities forgive yourself for the fact that you can't get to sleep do some calming activities and then try again now those activities will depend on you you might read you might color you might have a kind of calm quiet hobby that you like to participate in you might have a warm drink you might listen to some music it really depends on you but what you really don't want is to get to the point where you've spent so long in bed trying to sleep and getting stressed about the fact that you can't sleep that your body then begins to associate your bed with not sleeping so we're trying to make nice warm sleepy associations with bed and trying to keep those when it comes to not sleeping a key thing to remember is that whilst it's very important that we do get enough sleep and we try and get into this regular routine and this will improve over time if we really can't sleep then the worst thing we can do is get stressed about the fact we're not sleeping lying there thinking oh god it's only three and a half hours now till I have to get up how am I going to manage I'm going to be really really tired it's not going to help at all you're actually much much better off saying okay this isn't working right now there's too much stuff going around in my head sometimes just take going and writing down whatever it is that's in your head and giving yourself permission not to think about it it's helpful but otherwise just going doing something else calm down and then come back and try again it's fine you're not going you know you might feel a bit tired the next day but one night of broken sleep isn't going to cause you any great harm and the other thing is that you don't have to catch up as much sleep as you've missed out so your body will catch up but if you've missed five hours of sleep so you don't have to catch up that five hours the next night your body's very very good at kind of resetting relatively quickly and that's great news generally if you're looking to get a better sleep routine because you might have months and months behind you or years in some cases of poor sleep but actually if you begin to put good habits in place then your body will get used to that quite quickly that routine will set in and actually you will find a change to how you feel and your resilience and your well-being relatively swiftly and then the final thing and this is one that's going to be one of my big pushes for the next year is thinking about what devices you keep by your bed do you keep a phone or a tablet or any kind of online device next to you in bed do you check it last thing at night or first thing in the morning or sometimes even through the night have a think about that connectivity and whether that's a good thing think about maybe setting a limit at night at which point you're going to try not to go online anymore and try and actually kind of break yourself away from that so that you're ready for sleep and that you're not you know try not to be worrying about kind of missing out on things that kind of FOMO fear of missing out can be a real issue with our online devices so try and become a little bit less connected at night this is something that's particularly important when we're working with adolescents who studies show they will check their devices throughout the night for social media this is obviously going to mean that their their sleep is going to get really disrupted and they're going to really miss out on that that good quality deep sleep that we get when we've been asleep for several hours okay I hope that gives you a few ideas these are things that I'm personally working on really hard myself as well and they're things that if you struggle with anxiety with depression with other mental health issues that can become harder but when we're looking at ways to help ourselves to improve our mental health no matter where it is on the spectrum at the moment one of the easiest wins that we can have is to work on our sleep so give it a go think about what small changes you might be able to make and see if it makes you feel better I hope it was helpful please leave a comment down below with any additional suggestions you have thanks buddy as I was saying any additional suggestions you might have give it a thumbs up if you liked it and if you'd like to hear more from me please subscribe bye until next time