1 Strategies for sleep
These strategies have been found to be very useful in assisting people to sleep. They can be particularly helpful if you are experiencing pain which interferes with your sleep.
    Preparing for sleep

• Establish a routine. If you go to bed at the same time every night, you are training your body to know when it should be ready to sleep. No matter how much sleep you have had, try to get up at the same time in the morning. Use an alarm clock for this. The body needs to experience hours of daylight in order to distinguish night from day, which triggers the message for sleep.
• Keep to the routine even on weekends and holidays if you are training yourself to establish a routine; you need to at least for a few months until your sleep habits are established. Staying up until after midnight will trigger the old learned habits of sleep difficulty. You may be able to sleep in, once you have retrained your body into the new habits for a sufficient period of time.
• Sleeping in the daytime is not a good idea as this confuses your body clock, and makes It more difficult to sleep at night.      
• Do some physical exercise during the day (walking is especially good). This means you are physically, not just mentally, tired at the end of the day.
• Avoid stimulants in the evenings, e.g. drinking caffeine or alcohol. These inhibit getting to sleep. Instead, a small warm milk drink or herbal tea can help you to settle to sleep. You may have a light snack.
• Keep your bed as a place to sleep, not anything else. When you get into bed, say to yourself, ‘Now I am going to sleep.’ It is not a good idea to watch TV, talk on the phone, or do homework in bed. If you keep your bed for sleeping only, your body gets the message that when you get into bed it is time to sleep. 
• If you are unable to sleep after 10–15 minutes, get out of bed, go to another room and do a quiet activity until you feel sleepy, then begin again. You may need to do this several times to start with.
• Avoid stimulating activities near bedtime such as exercise, having stimulating chats or      arguments, eating heavy meals (a light snack is OK), or doing demanding intellectual work. Give yourself wind-down time. Calming activities that can help some people settle to sleep include: reading a book or magazine, listening to easy music or the radio, having a warm (not too hot) bath or shower. Try to notice any signs of tiredness in your body, as this is the best time to go to bed.
• Use the relaxation strategies you have learnt before you get into bed, or if you wake up during the night. Focus your mind and use breathing or mindfulness techniques to let go of any worries.  Although this focus may seem difficult to start at night, it can be surprisingly more effective, especially if you have been practicing at other times. If focus seems especially hard, limit yourself to 10 or 20 breaths to start. Mark these off by moving a finger with each breath. Don’t use numbers to count, as this is distracting from the focus on breath. This is helpful in the middle of the night to assist getting back to sleep.
• Use your imagination positively. This is like creating your own movie (or dream) behind your eyes. Imagine a quiet place or activity you love, fill in all the physical details including colour, texture and smell of the place. Put yourself in the movie and freely move about. The place or activity you create can be whatever or wherever you want, in the country, by the sea, at home – what matters is that it is peaceful and feels safe and interesting to you.
• Keep a notebook by your bed, so if your thoughts are racing or worrying, you can write them down. Tell yourself that it is unlikely that you will find a solution right now and that your mind is just on repetitive ‘tram tracks’. It’s OK to stop thinking about them now because you can think about them in the morning when you are more likely to find a solution.

   Remember 

• If you don’t sleep tell yourself it is OK. Whilst lying in your bed your body is resting and you will be all right in the morning.
• Make sure clock faces are not visible so that you are not ‘clock watching’.
• A routine may take several months of persistent practice to establish.
• In general, no harm will occur if you do not sleep for one or two nights. Remember you are still resting and will catch up on sleep later because you are tired.
• Accept that progress may be slow, especially if the problem has been there for a while. If it seems hard and you are losing heart, keep a log of your sleeping patterns and compare them with your earlier baseline. You can gradually move your going-to-bed time back by 15 minutes at a time for a week or so. To keep yourself on track, record whatever factors are affecting your sleep, such as difficulty getting to sleep, how long you slept for, how many times you woke in the night and how you felt when waking up in the morning.
• If sleep issues or pain are extreme or continue to get worse, you may benefit by visiting a sleep clinic or discussing with your pain specialist doctor pain medications that can also assist sleep.  But remember that medications are only a short-term answer; retraining yourself is the long-term solution.