Over the years, people who are desperate for a good night’s sleep have come up with a number of ways to try and trick themselves into nodding off. The following self-treatments you shouldn’t try at home, because no matter what your friends and coworkers tell you, these are bad sleep habits.

Watching TV or Reading In Bed - No matter how boring, if you have insomnia, books and TV just won’t make you fall asleep. They may take your mind off the struggle to fall to asleep, but if you want to read or watch TV, do it in another room.

Keep your bedroom activities confined to sleep and romance so that you’ll associate your bed with rapid sleep onset. If you bring a lot of other activities like reading, talking on the phone, eating, or TV viewing into your bedroom, you may associate them with the bed and bedroom instead of rapidly falling asleep.

Taking Naps - Even if you’re utterly falling over into your coffee, taking a daytime nap just make falling asleep that night that much more difficult because it reduces your homeostatic drive to sleep. Thus, when it comes time go to bed, you aren’t sleepy enough to enter sweet dreamz.

The Alcohol and Cigarette Cure - Alcohol is sedating and may help you fall asleep but no, drinking won’t solve your problem with insomnia. It only will add the problem of alcohol dependency. In fact, drinking on top of extreme insomnia included fatigue makes a dangerous mix.

Smoking won’t solve your sleep problem. Nicotine is a stimulant and although it may reduce your cigarette withdrawal discomfort, it keeps you buzzed and wide awake long after you wish you’d fallen asleep.

Eating or Drinking Late At Night - Foods like turkey and milk contain the sleep enhancing amino acid L-tryptophan, some people think that loading up on such foods close to bedtime will help them to sleep. However, if you read Your Insomnia Cure article you could realize what the opposite effect is having a late dinner.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 6:55 am and is filed under Insomnia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.