DR GUY MEADOWS on how to guarantee a good night's rest

He is the top doctor who runs a sleep clinic and on Saturday told how he, too, fell victim to insomnia. 

Today, in part two of our illuminating series, Dr Guy Meadows reveals the ultimate guide to a good night’s rest...

Ask a good sleeper what they do to get to sleep, and chances are they’ll shrug their shoulders, look at you blankly and say: ‘Nothing.’ They simply put their head on the pillow.

If they wake, they might turn over, have a sip of water or go to the loo, but generally speaking they just sleep without thinking about it.

But if you ask someone who struggles to get to sleep what they do, you’re likely to hear a detailed list of daytime dos and don’ts, their description of a lengthy wind-down period before bed and various techniques they use in order to cope with periods of wakefulness throughout the night.

Yet despite all that, they still don’t sleep. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?

Getting a good night’s sleep seems to have become something of a national obsession. Couples argue who has the biggest sleep debt; mothers compare notes on the depths of their exhaustion. Saying ‘I’m so tired’ has become the mantra of our generation.

What’s more, research seems to back this up. A report by the Mental Health Foundation, aimed at raising awareness of the importance of sleep, found only one-third of respondents were ‘good sleepers’, while more than a third had symptoms suggesting chronic insomnia.

Shockingly, NHS statistics for England show the number of sleep disorder admissions for under-16s in 2017 was almost 10,000 — an increase of around a third in four years.

Of course, there’s a huge difference between having sporadic bad nights and full-blown persistent insomnia. The tipping point is experiencing poor sleep three or more nights a week for more than three months, and this is affecting your ability to function properly the next day.

As a nation, we do seem particularly bad at switching off — but then we do work some of the longest hours in Europe and it’s becoming ever harder to relax and unwind.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that an entire industry has sprung up offering quick fixes that promise to help us sleep. The problem with this, though, is that there isn’t an overnight solution when it comes to sleeplessness.

So much of what we’ve traditionally been sold as surefire techniques when it comes to helping ourselves fall asleep are actually counterintuitive and can make the problem worse.

The milky drink, the lavender-scented bath, the eye mask, earplugs, counting sheep … They all seem to make perfect sense when it comes to helping you switch off — but these actions, along with other bedtime rituals, are what I call ‘amplifiers’. 

Instead of fixing the problem of your insomnia, they end up feeding it and making it bigger.

The fundamental flaw in this approach is the way it encourages you to start doing so many things to achieve something that, in reality, requires nothing in order to achieve it.

This inadvertently puts insomnia on a pedestal, so your brain sees achieving sleep as the be-all and end-all, and so it begins to obsess about it even more.

Of course, if you are an insomniac, being offered an easy-to-follow fix-it list is exactly what you want to hear.

‘Change this, do that and then you will sleep,’ sounds like manna from heaven to someone who, night after night, sees every nocturnal hour.

What’s more, many of the suggested changes really do sound like the right things to do — such as giving up caffeine and alcohol, avoiding late nights, slowly winding down and using relaxation techniques before bed.

But the problem is that sleep then becomes more about doing stuff and less about actually sleeping — which, remember, for normal sleepers is effortless. It produces an unhelpful rigidity that only feeds the inevitable anxiety surrounding the issue.

If you’ve dutifully done all the things supposed to help you drift off into blissful repose, yet you still can’t sleep, then you’re likely to feel even more wretched about your situation. 

Wrestling with the feelings of failure, frustration and anxiety that are likely to follow is only going to keep you even more awake. 

Most of us have experienced one of those fitful nights of wakefulness only to find yourself finally falling asleep just before the alarm went off.

Asked why you finally slept at that point, you’d probably say that the night was ruined so there seemed no point in struggling any more. ‘I gave up,’ is a common refrain I hear from clients.

Falling asleep just before you must get up is incredibly frustrating. But for someone like me, trying to get to the nub of what causes sleep problems, it is illuminating.

Indeed, what I have learnt from listening to countless people who suffer from sleeplessness, combined with my own sporadic experiences of it, is that if the focus of your life becomes getting rid of insomnia, then, paradoxically, you can end up becoming stuck with it.

Good sleep comes from doing nothing other than getting into bed and putting your head on the pillow. The secret to good sleep is to relearn how to do precisely that. It’s not about tricks and rituals that will induce sleepiness; it’s about letting go of efforts to force it.

When you can accept being awake at night, then — and only then — do you create the mental and physical landscape for sleep to emerge. Over the past 13 years I have worked with more than 5,000 insomniacs, helping them face whatever it is that’s stopping them sleeping so they can enjoy good-quality sleep on a regular basis and enjoy life again.

But as I explained in Saturday’s Mail, it was my own experience of sleeplessness that provided my greatest breakthrough in achieving that for my clients. It revolutionised how I approached their treatment.

It made me realise that it’s the fear of not sleeping that becomes the real obstacle; that you can try too hard to get to sleep.

I tried everything from warm baths to hot milk, but as each technique failed, my thoughts became increasingly dark. A disturbing mantra began playing inside my head: ‘I’m the sleep expert who cannot sleep.’

The effort I was putting into getting to sleep had not worked.

And then it hit me: I was trying too hard. I realised that if I was going to return to normal sleep, I had to retrain myself to do what good sleepers do — and do nothing.

This experience was hugely enlightening and gave me a fresh way of looking at the problem. I could now see why conventional sleep fixes weren’t fully effective. In future, I had to dedicate my work to developing a sleep aid-free approach to beating insomnia.

The programme now offered by my sleep consultancy, The Sleep School, is the culmination of this work. It works on the premise that you can’t make sleep come to you: it’s a natural biological process that arrives of its own accord if you allow it.

The good news is that sleep is a skill and you can train yourself to be better at it. It doesn’t matter whether you have struggled to sleep for four days or suffered insomnia for 40 years, following my entirely natural approach can dramatically improve the quality of your sleep. 

We each have our own risk factors when it comes to insomnia, including gender (females are more at risk than men), family history, a tendency to worry or just being a light sleeper.

Take the ITN news anchor Tom Bradby, who has spoken openly about his experiences with insomnia, which he puts down to an underlying mental health disorder.

Then there are the subsequent triggers which often manifest as stressful life events marking the start of a troubled relationship with sleep. It’s no surprise that when Sky Sports presenter Simon Thomas became unexpectedly widowed last year after his wife, Gemma, died three days after being diagnosed with leukaemia, he found it incredibly difficult to sleep.

Yet for some people, like Linda, a client of mine who had suffered crippling inomnia for years, something as relatively trivial as a bad day at the office can be the trigger. For others, a more slow-burning, residual stress, such as planning a wedding or house move, will set things off.

Meanwhile, it was the hormonal fluctuations of the menopause that made sleep extremely difficult for TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson.

But in the end, it’s not the triggers that keep most insomniacs awake, but the persistent worry about not sleeping. It’s a vicous cycle whereby the more you worry about not sleeping, the less you sleep — and the less you sleep, the more you worry!

So how do you learn to overcome your insomnia? Well, the answer lies in learning to stop struggling against sleeplessness in the first place.

That sounds counterintuitive. But once you realise that at the heart of insomnia lies the way our primordial brain works, it makes perfect sense. 

A few years ago, Linda came to me in despair. Despite employing every potion, pill, rule and ritual that conventional wisdom told her would help her sleep, her life remained blighted by a chronic lack of it. 

She was an extreme case, yet when we reached back through time, looking for what had triggered this problem in the first place, all roads led to one particularly stressful day at work.

Linda described how she had left the office that evening her mind full of worrisome thoughts, which were still mulling around her head at bedtime. She subsequently had a sleepless night, finally nodding off just before her alarm went off.

The next day she felt shattered, but also worried that it might happen again. Her mother suffered badly from insomnia and Linda was afraid she was in danger of falling down that same rabbit hole. 

By the time she climbed into bed on the second night, she was filled with anxiety. And despite having spent the day exhausted, when her head hit the pillow she immediately felt wired with adrenaline. Indeed, her heart was pumping so quickly that at one point she thought she was going to have a heart attack.

‘I’d never experienced anything like it,’ Linda told me. Three years later and the restful sleep Linda once took for granted felt beyond her grasp. Night after night, she lay awake tormented by her racing heart and a stream of worries.

‘I did everything right,’ she insisted, citing the military operation that had become her wind-down routine, including a warm bath and yoga stretches. She even took sleeping pills, yet still, night after night, she couldn’t sleep. 

I’m sharing Linda’s story to show how insomnia can take hold in a very short time. It took

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