GET A LINK TO DOWNLOAD
Give us your digits and we’ll text you a link to download the Attain® app.
Message and data rates may apply***
My name is Dr. Meredith Broderick. I am a board-certified neurologist, specializing in sleep medicine and behavioral sleep medicine, and today I’m going to share with you one of the most important tips for optimizing sleep so you can get the most out of your day.
A lot of people know that they feel best when they allot eight hours of sleep for each night, but they don’t make it one of their highest priorities. So let me show you a quick demonstration for how making it your highest priority can elevate your health and wellbeing.
Let’s imaging this empty jar represents all of the time you have in a single day – 24 hours. Now let’s imagine that these large purple balls represent the most important priorities, like sleep, health, relationships with family and friends. These medium pink balls represent intermediate priorities, like work, hobbies, community service. And these small glass pebbles represent small priorities, things like surfing the internet, shopping, watching TV, washing your car. You get the point.
So what happens when we fill the jar with our small priorities first, and then we add medium balls, and then we try to add our biggest priorities, and they don’t fit?
What happens when we fill the jar with highest priorities first, then our medium priorities, and last the small priorities? We can make everything fit!
I’m Dr. Meredith Broderick, I’m a neurologist specializing in sleep medicine and behavioral sleep medicine. I’ll see you next time!
As a neurologist specializing in sleep medicine and behavioral sleep medicine, my work involves evaluating and treating people with sleep disorders but also helping healthy people to optimize their sleep-wake cycles.
A common difficulty I see people fall into is misdirecting their energy towards ineffective solutions. This works about as well as trying to catch water with bare hands. (Hint – it doesn’t!) The best strategies will direct our energy on the factors we can control. If we find ourselves thinking or worrying too much about sleep, it is important to remind ourselves that we cannot force sleep. When we become aware of the worry or the racing thoughts, we can work on relearning better strategies. A simple writing exercise can make it easier to follow through on new behaviors in later times when it might seem impossible, for instance, while lying awake in bed.
Try this exercise to help build a framework for a new way of thinking about improving sleep:
Completing this exercise will help you to focus your attention on the factors within your control. The next time you find yourself pre-occupied by wanting to optimize your sleep, imagine the circle and remind yourself of the things you wrote down inside of the circle and take time to implement those items. You might even try numbering your priorities with the most important one at the top. Here are my 5 top tips for optimizing sleep:
Using the Attain by Aetna App can be helpful to track your efforts and hold yourself accountable to the goals you wrote down inside of the circle. Habits like wake times, caffeine intake, alcohol, and allotting 8 hours for sleep are easy to log daily. By completing this exercise, we are preparing ourselves to respond more constructively at times when it may be more difficult to think this way. In summary, it is important to differentiate the factors within our control for optimizing sleep from the factors outside of our control. By recognizing the difference, we can use our energy towards the most impactful actions. Sweet Dreams!
Give us your digits and we’ll text you a link to download the Attain® app.
Message and data rates may apply***
It looks like you’re using a browser with a sub-optimal user experience. Translation: you won’t see all the bells and whistles. To change that, try using another browser. Chrome, Firefox, Safari — your pick.
Fill out the info below, and you’ll hear from our team soon.