T I M E M A N A G E M E N T
Six Steps for Getting a Good Night’s Sleep
If you encounter sleeplessness in the form of onset or terminal
insomnia or both, you may be able to treat yourself with one or
more of these remedies.
1. avoid Nicotine, Caffeine, and alcohol
Nicotine is a powerful stimulant. It’s also addicting, and it car-
ries harmful tars and other impurities causally linked to lung can-
cer and other life-threatening diseases. You’re clearly better off
without it. If you can’t go cold turkey, try to avoid smoking within
a few hours of bedtime.
Caffeine is also a powerful and pervasive stimulant, present in
coffee and cola, of course, but also in chocolate and aspirin tablets
and lots of other less obvious sources. Caffeine reaches its peak
effect about four hours after you ingest it, so that after-dinner cof-
fee at eight may be hurting your sleep at midnight.
Alcohol is certainly not a stimulant. In fact, it’s a powerful
depressant. It just doesn’t feel that way, because the first thing it
depresses is our inhibition. But it still belongs on the short list
of sleep disrupters. That shot at bedtime may help ease you into
sleep, but alcohol blocks your descent into deep and restful sleep.
2. take Sleeping pills Short-term or Not at all
Sleeping pills and tranquilizers may help you fall asleep and
may in the short term help you get through stress-induced insom-
nia. But these drugs have some serious drawbacks.
- They don’t work for everyone, and even have the opposite effect
on some, causing prolonged wakefulness. - They, too, block descent into deep sleep.