This post is part 2 of How To Get Better Sleep: Sleep Tips Guide.
If you haven’t already read the previous post, check that out here.
Sleep Tips (Continued)
Alcohol
First, let’s cover the myth of alcohol helping you to sleep. It might help you to fall ‘asleep’, but alcohol is actually bad for your sleep.
Alcohol is a sedative or depressant, which is not the same as a sleep aid. Taking a ‘nightcap’ knocks out part of your brain. This sedates you rather than inducing natural sleep.
During sleep, alcohol interferes with your brain’s ability to sleep. It also interferes with both your body’s and your brain’s ability to repair themselves.
Further, alcohol fragments your sleep. It makes you wake up for brief bursts throughout the night. This means you won’t feel as restored or refreshed in the morning.
The worst part is that these brief awakenings are hardly ever remembered. Many people don’t draw the parallel between alcohol and poor-quality sleep.
Alcohol damages the second half of your sleep – the more REM focused sleep. This disrupts our dreams and sometimes even suppresses them.
REM sleep is important for our minds and mental health. Damaging this sleep can have a harmful impact on our wellbeing.
Food
Food before bed isn’t a good idea. Don’t eat too close to bedtime, because your body needs time to digest the food. Anything that can cause heartburn or indigestion can interfere with sleep. Avoid fatty and rich foods before bed.
But, hunger can also make it difficult to sleep. If you have to eat, eat something natural and filling, such as peanut butter and a banana.
Warm milk can be as effective as many sleep medications, so consider drinking that to help you drift off.
Drink A Calming Tea
Drinking tea can be an enjoyable part of an evening routine that also helps you to relax. If you’re going to do this, ensure that the tea you drink has no caffeine in, for reasons discussed earlier. Some great calming teas include:
- Chamomile – the most popular, most common, and most easily available
- Valerian Root
- Lavender
- Lemon Balm
- Passionflower
- Magnolia Bark
Exercise
Exercise, in the day, helps you to fall asleep into a deeper rest faster at night. But, don’t exercise several hours before bed, as doing so may result in it taking longer for you to fall asleep.
Exercising puts stress on your body and gets your blood pumping. Both of these make it more difficult to sleep.
Naps
Naps are usually ok, but here are three things that you need to consider.
First, if you struggle to sleep at night and often nap during the day, try cutting out your nap time. This will make it easier to fall asleep at night as your body needs the sleep more at bedtime than if you had napped.
Second, try to limit your naps to 30 minutes or less. 10 minutes seems to be the ideal amount of time.
Finally, if you’re going to nap, don’t nap for several hours before bed, or from mid-afternoon onwards. This provides enough time for adenosine to build up, making you feel tired.
Get Hot, Then Keep It Cool
To fall asleep and to stay asleep, your body needs to drop by 2-3 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is why it’s easier to fall asleep in a cold room when compared to a warm room.
To get cool, try some of the following:
- Turn down the internal heating
- Take some clothes off
- Keep a window open
- Turn a fan on
- Sit in the fridge for an hour (still testing this one)
Or, you could take a hot shower or bath. When the body is hot, it struggles to hold on to that heat, so your blood rushes to the surface, giving you a red look.
After leaving the source of heat, your blood vessels radiate the heat out from your body and into the surrounding environment. This results in a drop in your core body temperature, making the body cool and the brain think that it’s time to sleep.
Before Bed
The time before bed is all about relaxing. Include in your evening routine practices that promote relaxation. This could include inhaling lavender or drinking chamomile tea.
Additionally, try to reduce stress at this point. You can do this by:
- Turning off notifications
- Avoiding email
- Staying away from the news
- Staying off of social media.
Two other ways to relax before bed are reading fiction and meditation. If your brain is super wired and overactive, it will be difficult for you to get to sleep. It first needs to be calm.
Reading is great as it gives you something to do while helping you enter a relaxing state. Meditation will help to calm the mind and relax the body.
Stretching before bed as part of your evening routine will help you to fall asleep faster. Putting tension into your body and muscles allows them to then loosen and relax.
Create A Friendly Sleep Environment
One of the best things you can do to help prepare for sleep is creating a friendly sleep environment. What I mean by this is putting in place systems that will help you to drift off quicker.
This can include some of the following:
- Increasing the darkness by dimming the lights
- Getting blackout curtains
- Cutting out stimulants
- Avoiding screens late at night
- Using earplugs or a white noise machine to counter noise
- Cooling your body temperature or bedroom
In Bed and Waking Up
Sometimes the issue with sleep arises when already in bed. This could be either struggling to fall asleep or waking up in the night.
For the former, try turning any clocks away from you. Checking the time in bed can cause anxiety and stress, making it more difficult to fall asleep.
If you’ve been awake in bed for more than 20-30 minutes, get out of bed and go to a different room. After roughly 30 minutes, your brain will begin to associate your bed with wakefulness instead of sleep.
Try going to another room, keeping the lights dim, and engaging in a boring or uninteresting activity until you feel tired enough to fall asleep. Then, return to bed.
If waking up in the middle of the night is your problem, try meditation to help you to get back to sleep. This will help calm your mind and help to quiet unwanted thoughts. It will also help you to relax.
The Snooze Button
Having an alarm can be useful to help you wake up. It’s good to promote regularity.
But, hitting the snooze button can be dangerous. Every time an alarm wakes you, your body is shocked. This prompts a stressful cardiovascular response.
Each time you snooze, you are putting stress on your body, which is damaging to your health. By hitting snooze you are assaulting your cardiovascular system. If you’re tired upon waking, try going to bed earlier and getting more sleep.
Supplement – If You NEED To
If you struggle to fall asleep, supplements can help. Try taking a melatonin capsule before heading to bed, as this will tell your brain it’s time to sleep.
But, only consider supplements as a last resort if none of these other tips work. This is particularly true with artificial supplements. You should try to avoid these at all costs – you may begin to rely on them for sleep, which is bad.
Some other (natural) supplements to help you sleep include:
- Ginkgo Biloba
- Glycine
- Magnesium
- Lavender
Wrapping Up
That’s the end of this post! You should now have a much better understanding of sleep.
If you follow some of these tips, you’ll improve the quality of your sleep. Sleep is one of the best ways to ensure our bodies are working efficiently and is available for free!
Congratulations, you’ve now reached the end of this ultimate guide. You now have all the information you need to begin getting better sleep!
Thanks for reading.
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