Health & Medicine
Snoozing Without Help
By now, most insomniacs know what they're supposed to do: go to bed at the same time every night, get up at the same time every morning, use the bedroom only for sleep and sex (no reading!), and lay off the caffeine. If you've spent years violating these rules, reforming is hard.
Besides, says Gerard Lombardo, a New York sleep doctor and author of the just published Sleep to Save Your Life , there's another strategy that might be even more important: winding down before going to bed. "We take our day's stress, and we drag it right into the night," says Lombardo. "And then we wonder why we don't sleep." Parents know how to do this for their children, he says: reading stories and singing lullabies to help them relax and get ready for bedtime.
For grown-ups, warm milk, breathing exercises, or a bath can be similarly calming. Lombardo personally favors tea--decaf or herbal--because it makes you slow down: "You have to boil the water, you have to wait for the kettle to whistle. You steep the tea, you hold it in your hand, you breathe slowly, you breathe in the steam." After a few nights, he says, your body knows a cup of chamomile means that sleep is coming.
This story appears in the October 24, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.