“If you’re still awake twenty minutes after going to bed, get up.”

Going to bed and starting to toss and turn while watching all the early morning hours pass by on the clock is something that may be familiar to more than one person. Right now, the truth is that the simple act of closing your eyes tightly and thinking about falling asleep doesn’t work too muchbut it further increases anxiety and frustration due to not being able to be rested the next day. But here the experts suggest that it is better to get up.

A simple rule. Beyond breathing techniques and treating a blank mind, we have a good ally with us: the “20 minute rule.” A practice that, far from being viral advice on social networks, the truth is that it has scientific support behind it that indicates that the best strategy against the inability to fall asleep is to get up.

Its operation. To understand it, we must first descend to the substrate of associative learning, where the human brain is, above all, an optimizer of environmental patterns. In this way, when a healthy person goes to bed, the central nervous system interprets the physical stimulus of the mattress, pillow and darkness as a signal to initiate a transition to sleep.

However, if we spend long periods awake in bed experiencing anxiety or having the same idea running through our minds all the time, the pattern becomes corrupted. Here the brain already associates the bed with frustration, and the bedroom stops being a parasympathetic sanctuary and becomes a way to activate our body.

Your defender He is currently Dr. Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. And it is so important that he includes it as another piece of advice in one of his published books titled ‘why we sleep’ that says the following:

Don’t stay awake in bed. If you’re still awake twenty minutes after going to bed, or if you start to feel anxious or worried, get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy. The anxiety of not being able to sleep can make it harder to fall asleep.

What must be done. To follow the rule, it is important to get up and, logically, not turn on all the lights in the house, but rather use dim lights and, under no circumstances, look at screens such as television since it can activate us more. The ideal here would be to read a somewhat monotonous book (or in the case of students, notes), do breathing exercises or mechanical hobbies.

From here you should return to bed only and exclusively when you feel sleepy again to try to sleep again.

The guides say it too and, more specifically, the Clinical Practice Guide on Insomnia in Primary Care which specifically points to the following advice for patients:

If it’s been 30 minutes since you went to bed and you’re still not sleeping, get out of bed, go to another room, and do something that doesn’t activate you too much, like reading a magazine or watching TV, for example. When you feel sleepy again, go back to your bedroom. The goal is for you to associate your bed with falling asleep as quickly as possible.

Images | Magnificent

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