Dr. Micaela

So, if you just had a really intense social experience, and you've done your journaling, sometimes what can be best is do something physical, maybe that's run up and down the stairs of your apartment building, maybe that's walk your dog which is awesome because you were just out with your friends and so your dog probably needs a walk, but instead of doing your, your quick like oh I'm just going to go around the block.

maybe walk faster, maybe do a longer walk, maybe pick a different route than you usually do so that you're getting that physical kind of like movement with the stimulation of, oh, it's something different.

And so I'm able to kind of like pay attention to things.

Outside activity, for some reason that I'm not aware of,

And I haven't researched this recently, so I don't know if the literature knows this yet, but exercise outdoors gives your brain way more benefit than exercise indoors.

So obviously if you get home at like two o'clock in the morning from being with your friends, please don't go outside unless that's actually safe for you.

But yeah, physical activity might be the thing that would be helpful for you to then transition into your bedtime routine.

Okay.

thinking about I've got all right so I am going to kind of back up for a moment because I said bedtime routine um and I'm not going to go into a whole bunch of sleep techniques because I feel like that's one of the things that the internet has a lot of um in spades and actually I wonder if

I'm guessing Healthy Gamer might have something fantastic around sleep.

But I'm just going to focus on one thing around sleep because we started this whole thing with sleep.

And so other than you have to do you and figure out what works for you, right?

So that includes bedtimes, that includes waketimes, that includes patterns, that includes naps, right?

You got to do you on all of those fronts.

You have to figure out what works best for you.

Not what you want, but what works best, which isn't always the same thing.

One of, in my clinical practice, the most useful interventions for helping people sleep is developing a sleep, like a bedtime routine.

So looking at something that's about 20 to 30 minutes.

And this can be whether maybe you work a rotating shift schedule, so you actually can't have a regular bedtime.

If you can do a regular bedtime routine of 20 to 30 minutes before you go to sleep, that can be the thing that helps you fall asleep more consistently.