If you have just had open heart surgery, you might be feeling more vulnerable and weaker than normal. This is very normal. Unfortunately, it is also relatively normal to experience insomnia after open heart surgery. The anesthesia that you were put under might cause you to have a hard time sleeping. The necessary change in your routine, discomfort from the procedure, and stress from not being able to work might also cause you to have a hard time sleeping. This is problematic because you are going to need to rest in order to recover as quickly as possible from open heart surgery. Here are some tips for sleeping.

1. Schedule Your Pain Medications

Force yourself to develop a routine where you go to bed at the same time each night. This will help you prime your body to sleep and allow you to fall asleep a lot more easily. By making a routine, you will also be able to more easily schedule when you take your pain medication. You want to try to take it around a half hour before you go to bed. This will give the medication time to kick in by the time you are fully ready for bed, making it easier for you to drift off.

2. Keep Your Chest Elevated

Try to avoid muscle strain, which can increase your pain while you are laying down, by keeping your chest elevated above the rest of your body. This will allow the fluids that your heart is pumping to rely on gravity to more easily travel down to your head and to the rest of your body. It will decrease the overall amount of work that your heart has to do, which can more easily decrease pain.

3. Try to Not Nap

You are probably tired during the day because you are not sleeping at night. Go a few days in a row where you force yourself to not nap. This will help ensure that you are truly tired by the time that you go to bed.

4. Increase Activity

Talk to your doctor about exercises that you can do while you are healing. Try to increase the amount of activity that you are getting each day to help wear yourself out by the time that you go to bed. But be careful to not overdo it.

For more information, talk to a company that specializes in open heart surgery or go to sites of local health care clinics.