Sleep is often the hardest thing to get under control when dealing with a cocaine addiction. Given the circumstances, it's understandable to feel like you're all over the place, maybe sleeping too much during the day, not sleeping well at night, getting too much or too little sleep. Let's talk about how you can get a better night's sleep. Eventually, you're going to want to aim to get around eight hours of uninterrupted sleep every night. But that's not going to come immediately. You need to retrain your body on how to sleep.
To begin with, figure out your current sleep patterns. Take note of what time you're going to bed or what time you're waking up and how much you're sleeping during the day. From there, you want to gradually adjust your bedtime and wake up each day to get seven to nine hours of sleep. That's the goal. So for example, if you currently go to bed at 2am and you went At 8am you're not getting enough sleep. A lot of people may feel like six hours is enough.
But science has shown that most bodies need seven to nine hours for their brains to fully repair itself each night. Since your sleep has likely been so out of whack, it's even more important that you work towards that seven to nine hour goal and continue to sleep seven to nine hours, even after you've kicked your addiction. So how do you do this? Once you've taken inventory on your own sleep, then work backwards, you likely know what time you need to wake up every morning. Let's just say at 7am you'll know that eventually you'll need to go to bed somewhere between 10pm and midnight. Let's say you currently go to bed around 2am.
Each week you'll want to set your bedtime back by 15 minutes until you've reached your goal. But remember to keep your awake time the same in addition to that There are some things that you'll need to do as well. In order to get better quality of sleep, and to be able to fall asleep faster, about 30 to 60 minutes before bed, you should create what I call a bedtime ritual. This is time you should be carving out every evening so that you can take good care of yourself without the use of screens. You can do this by maybe doing some yoga or reading a book, meditating journaling. Just make sure it's calm and relaxing.
If you enjoy tea at night, be sure it's caffeine free. If you have a problem staying asleep, then look at things like your caffeine intake, and maybe adjust that to stop caffeine early in the day while you work on getting onto a good quality sleep schedule. It's important, though that you're patient and you give it time. If after about 12 weeks of working hard in your sleep schedule combined with good nutrition And fitness, you're still not able to sleep well, then you should contact your doctor to talk about ways and alternatives. There might be some sort of underlying medical issue that is causing you to sleep too much or too little. Good luck with your sleep.