Home Pastors Articles for Pastors 10 Sleep Tips That Will Hit You Like a Tranquilizer Dart!

10 Sleep Tips That Will Hit You Like a Tranquilizer Dart!

5. Avoid chemical stimulants before going to bed.

Avoid caffeine within five hours and chocolate or sugar of any kind within three hours of retiring.

6. Eat an early dinner, moderately sized.

If you eat a large dinner or a late dinner or a big snack at 8 p.m., your body is still trying to digest it when you go to bed. You can’t give your body a chore to do, then expect it to sleep at the same time! On the other hand, if you eat like a bird you may be unable to sleep because of hunger pangs.

7. Avoid working on problems and reading or watching distressing things late at night.

Don’t try to balance your checkbook or do anything that requires deep thought late at night; it just causes frustration and leads to sleeplessness.

A few years ago I was at the beach by myself for 10 days of writing. Each night I slept soundly and woke up refreshed—except one night when I was fitful and restless, and woke up exhausted. That one night was the only one I had watched the 11 o’clock news.

The best cure for insomnia may be to avoid the late news. It invariably features murders, hijackings, kidnappings, wars and natural disasters. Just thinking of these things will tighten you up. The same is true of watching violent or tense movies, or reading about distressing events in the newspaper just before going to bed. Your last dominant thoughts before the lights go out set the mood for your night’s sleep. If you want good sleep, make sure you close the day with good thoughts, such as words from Scripture.

8. Develop a bedtime ritual.

We are creatures of habit. If we can associate sleep with a certain routine, then going through the routine can help induce sleep. A bedtime ritual might involve a warm bath, a cup of warm milk, soft music or light reading. Some people read till they begin to nod off then turn off the light and go right to sleep.

9. If you just can’t get an idea or problem off your mind, get up and do something about it.

Sometimes we really need to get something off our minds. Keep paper and pen (and perhaps a little light) by your bed to jot down anything you might need to think about tomorrow, but don’t need to do tonight.

10. Learn when to nap and when not to.

There are two kinds of fatigue. Hypertonic fatigue is the nervous stress-induced fatigue in which you are tired but unable to relax. Hypotonic fatigue results from hard physical labor. The muscles are relaxed and the mind drifts quickly into sleep. If you experience hypertonic fatigue during the day, the best cure is exercise, not a nap. If you take a nap, it might not refresh you, but even if it does it will usually make it more difficult for you to sleep at night. (Sometimes this creates a vicious cycle in which you nap in the afternoon because you can’t sleep at night, but can’t sleep at night because you napped in the afternoon.)

If you’re fatigued, and especially if you have a big evening ahead of you, by all means, nap if you can. For most people, a short nap of no more than 20 minutes works best.

In his article “Three Reasons to Get Some Sleep,” Jonathan Parnell writes, “Just like oxygen and food, we need sleep to work right. It won’t look the same for everyone, and some are in situations where their care for others inhibits a solid snooze, but know for sure that we need sleep. It was God’s idea.”  

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Randy Alcorn is the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries (www.epm.org), a nonprofit ministry dedicated to teaching principles of God’s Word and assisting the church in ministering to the unreached, unfed, unborn, uneducated, unreconciled, and unsupported people around the world. Before starting EPM in 1990, Randy served as a pastor for fourteen years. He is a New York Times best-selling author of over fifty books, including Heaven (over one million sold), The Treasure Principle (over two million sold), If God Is Good, Happiness, and the award-winning novel Safely Home. His books sold exceed ten million copies and have been translated into over seventy languages.