Here are some expert tips on how to get the best night’s sleep every time

If you struggle to fall asleep at night, wake up feeling groggy, or even just fall victim to the ‘always on’ culture we’re living in, you need to make 2024 the year you prioritise your downtime.

A woman who struggled with insomnia during years of burning the candle at both ends, Anne Marie Boyhan set about creating a solution in the form of The Sleep Care Company. A certified Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner and sleep coach, Anne Marie wrote a Sleep Journal to help build a consistent evening routine and nourishing sleep rituals, developed an Insomnia Solution private coaching programme, and prides herself on helping her clients take control of their sleep.

We sat down with The Sleep Care Company founder Anne Marie Boyhan to chat about her business, sleep hacks, and top tips for overcoming insomnia.

For all of us chronic overthinkers, how can we ‘switch’ our brains off at night? Does the Sleep Journal help with this?

Find your off switch that will get you into the parasympathetic or ‘rest and digest’ mode. For some, that’s meditation, for others, it’s breathing. I recommend sleep journaling. When I struggled with sleep, I couldn’t find everything sleep-related in one place, so I created the Sleep Journal. It’s got meditations for when you can’t sleep, bedtime yoga poses and sleep tips from the world’s top sleep experts.

The main pages are for ‘brain dumping’, which is based on a study by Baylor University and involves writing a list of all the things you need to get done the next day. Writing the list allows you to ‘dump’ everything that’s swirling around in your head onto paper, which in itself is proven to help sleep rather than using a digital format. The study showed that people who wrote to-do lists fell asleep nine minutes earlier than people who wrote about their accomplishments the previous day. Plus, the more specific the lists were, the sooner the people fell asleep.

Anything else you’d like to add?

No one should have to live with insomnia. If you’ve tried everything and still can’t sleep, consider The Insomnia Solution at The Sleep Care Company, a one-to-one sleep coaching health program using testing and assessments to find out what’s causing your insomnia in both the mind and the body to get you sleeping well again.

Anne Marie Boyhan, a sleep expert and functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, is a member of the IMAGE Business Club. For more information, visit The Sleep Care Company website.

Feature image via Tony Gavin