Following a breakup, the absence of that person can result in disrupted sleep. Photo / Getty Images
Post-breakup insomnia can happen to anyone. Here’s how to deal with it.
Q: I recently broke up with my longtime partner and am having trouble falling and staying asleep. What can I do to improve my sleep?
You are not alone in struggling with this problem. Trouble with sleep after a relationship change is common.
Our brain makes associations between our environment and our behaviours. Just like a quiet room can promote peaceful sleep, or listening to a certain audiobook may help with relaxation at bedtime, the presence of a bed partner can also become associated with restful sleep.
Following a breakup, the absence of that person can result in disrupted sleep. Acute insomnia occurs in about one-third of adults every year, and most people experience acute insomnia following a breakup.
For many people, this can be temporary, but if the change prompts negative sleep associations or habits, then the sleep loss can persist long after people move on from other aspects of the breakup.
Breakups can affect sleep on two levels.
First, healthy sleep depends on a reliable routine, which includes sleep habits (activities before getting into bed and before going to sleep) and the sleep environment. A breakup typically interrupts these routines: the former partner is no longer present in the bed or part of the bedtime routine.
Second, break-ups are often emotional and stressful, and acute insomnia is a common – even normal – response to stress.
Thinking about the factors involved in the relationship change, and the emotions associated with it, keep the brain busy, and busy brains have a hard time falling asleep. Also, feelings of loneliness or loss, which may be kept at bay during the day, can emerge at night.
Getting into an empty bed at night is itself a physical reminder of the change and its accompanying emotions – which alone would be enough to disrupt sleep. But there is an additional, more basic, reason that contributes to post-breakup insomnia: the sleep environment has changed from co-sleeping to sleeping alone. By habitual co-sleeping, the brain learned to associate the presence of another person with falling asleep; after a breakup, the brain must relearn how to fall asleep without another person nearby.
Reclaiming your rest following a breakup may require adaptations to your sleep environment, routines and perspective.
To disconnect your sleep space from a former partner and make it yours again, try an intentional physical change.
Move from the side to the middle of the bed, use a body pillow or a blanket with a new texture, or change the arrangement of the bedroom. These tweaks can help create new sleep associations to minimise the impact of the loss of a habitual bed partner.
Some people find it helpful to spend time in a guest room or a different sleep area through the transition because that space is not immediately associated with a former partner.
Missing a component of the typical sleep routine – a former bed partner, for instance – changes how people wind down and settle into sleep. This often results in trouble falling asleep or feeling that sleep is less restful throughout the night.
A breakup may be a good time to create new routines that help to make sleep a positive and restful experience.
Try calming or mindfulness practices, gentle stretching exercises or a cup of warm tea. A new habit around bedtime can then feel like a “new” or “positive” change that optimises your comfort, rather than just trying to make up for the loss of a partner.
At night, ruminations can loom larger than during the day – when there are distractions and routines that move us forward. Also, loneliness can feel deeper, stress more consuming and frustrations more acute.
Finding an active distraction strategy can be helpful. For instance, a calming podcast or audiobook can refocus your thoughts away from the breakup.
The key to an effective distraction strategy is identifying something interesting enough to hold your attention, but not so fascinating that you can’t fall asleep while reading, listening or thinking about this topic. Ideally, this is something not associated with a prior bed partner.
These techniques also prevent your current disturbed sleep from becoming a long-term problem. For example, if emotions such as frustration and anxiety become a habit once your head hits the pillow, then your brain learns to associate bedtime with these stressful thoughts.
To set yourself up for success, don’t get into bed until you are really sleepy. This is good advice in general, but can be especially helpful when there is something unsettling about the sleep space (such as a reminder that someone isn’t there).
Reminding yourself that difficulty with sleeping through a breakup is normal can minimise the anxiety associated with poor sleep.
If you find yourself focusing on the sleep loss, staring at the ceiling in anger or desperately counting the diminishing hours of potential rest, tell yourself that rocky nights are allowed while you adjust to new circumstances and that sleep will fall back into place.
Try to avoid spending the time you can’t sleep ruminating on stressful topics, and allow yourself time to rest, even if you are not sleeping perfectly. As your sleep routines adjust to the new circumstance, you will start getting more restful sleep.
And know when to ask for help: if post-breakup sleep difficulties become a pattern, sleep is troublesome more nights than not, or if the sleep disruption impacts your daytime function, it might be time to talk with a clinician to get the support you need to get back to a good night of sleep.
Margaret Blattner, MD, PhD, is a neurologist and sleep medicine physician in the Department of Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and clinical instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School.