Managing sleep difficulties

Why is sleep important?

• Sleep is a natural part of our internal biological rhythm. We need to sleep to help process memories or information, and also to rest and repair parts of our body that need it.
• Most people need around 8 hours of sleep a day, but this also depends on how old you are. If you’re older or younger, you may need more or less. Some people naturally need more sleep, and some less.
• If we don’t get a good night’s sleep, we don’t necessarily need to catch up the next night by sleeping for longer – it’s important instead to just be able to get to sleep.
• If we don’t sleep properly for several nights, or for a long period of time, our thinking skills, mood and behaviour can change.
• If someone doesn’t sleep at all for a day or two, they may start to feel very strange, and may even see or hear things that other people can’t, and feel paranoid – like someone is watching them or coming to get them.

Sleep difficulties and LGBTQ+ people

• For Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning (LGBTQ+) people, sleep difficulties are not uncommon.
• This can be for a variety of reasons, including the bedroom not feeling safe, worrying more than usual and playing lots of video games.
• We also know that eating and drinking habits can affect sleep, such as drinking coca-cola or coffee in the evening, or snacking late at night.
• Sometimes LGBTQ+ people may have experienced stressful or traumatic things, such as being assaulted, and may have nightmares as a result.

Tips to manage sleep difficulties

Catching sleeping patterns

In order to understand how sleep difficulties can impact us, it is helpful to keep a record. Think of it like a sleep diary. This helps us to “catch” sleeping patterns and anything connected to them, to help us understand what may be going on. It can be helpful to repeat this every day for a week or two.

• What was I doing in the hours before bed? (Include smoking, eating, drinking, video games, phone etc)
• Did I do anything in bed other than sleep or sexual activity?
• What time did I go to bed, and what time did I actually fall asleep?
• Did I wake up at all during the night? If so, for how long?
• What time did I wake up the next morning?
• When I woke up, how rested did I feel out of 10? (1 = exhausted, 10 = super rested)

Checking out sleeping patterns

Once we have begun to catch any sleep patterns, we need to try check out if there’s anything else going on we need to be aware of. This is because we know that things such as our physical health, or worry thoughts in our head, can affect our sleeping patterns

Changing sleeping patterns

OK, we have caught some of our sleeping patterns, and checked out some of the things that could be affecting this from our sleep diary. The next thing to do is try to change what we are doing.

Contextualise sleeping patterns

One important thing to consider with sleeping difficulties and patterns is context – what is going on? Importantly, is it within my control, and is it affecting my safety? As LGBTQ+ people, we sometimes can’t change big things like laws and policies very easily, though we can consider how we interact with our context, and protect our own bubbles.