5 Useful Tips to Sleep Better: Sleep is a natural, healthy and necessary thing for our life. It is so elementary that everybody – from a one day baby to a 90-year-old does it. Without sleep, nobody can live for long. It is an essential function of life.
5 Useful Tips to Sleep Better
Table of Contents
Here are five easy tips to help you sleep better:-
1) Get up at the same time every day
This is a rule which you should follow every day, including on weekends. Here the important thing is not the time of getting up but being regular about it. Sleep is a natural process, and we should allow the wisdom of nature to work on us in setting regular body rhythms. The human body dances with rhythms of the natural world, and we only need to sync our body rhythm with the other rhythms of nature like the rising and setting of the Sun, the ups and downs of temperature, and the change in seasons, etc. Once we become regular in our wake up time, our body will start regulating its natural rhythm as per the new schedule.
2) Create a Proper Ambience for your Bedroom
It is essential to make your bedroom distraction-free so that it can convey only one core message when you enter into it- sleep. It is crucial to ensure that your body gets the right message for going to sleep as and when you enter the bedroom. If, while entering into your bedroom, you encounter a treadmill, a pile of bills, a telephone answering machine, unattended laundry, a table full of scattered documents, then your mind will get mixed messages and will start calculating giving priority to these items instead of focussing on sleep.
The naturally occurring hormone melatonin, which is secreted by the brain in the pineal gland, is responsible for controlling sleep-wake cycles and the natural circadian rhythms in the body. When our body starts preparing for sleep, melatonin is secreted and helps in inducing sleep. However, if our mind is distracted in too many directions, the secretion of melatonin would not have any effect, and we will not be able to sleep properly. Many people try to curb this problem by taking an additional dosage of melatonin as a supplement. However, taking extra melatonin for better sleep has its own set of side effects. Especially for pregnant women seeking melatonin as a sleep supplement is a controversial issue as this article on melatonin and pregnancy would tell us.
Therefore, it is crucial to keep our bedroom distraction-free and simple so that it can serve its intended purpose – providing safe and sound sleep to us.
3) Set a fixed time for sleep
Your bedtime should also be the same every night so that you sleep for sufficient hours. While it is true that we can’t fall asleep instantly at the same time every day, by adhering to a routine, your body will set its biological rhythm accordingly. This way, you will provide adequate priority to your sleep. We all must admit that our life has become hectic, demanding, overscheduled, and hyper-stimulated. As a result, sleep has taken a backseat to everything else. However, it needs to be given the respect it deserves; otherwise, we will be taking a big risk. You must not allow 10,000 other distractions of life to eat into your sleep schedule.
4) Allow enough time for sleep
Most humans beings need close to eight hours of sleep for proper rest and restoration. Around 7 to 8 hours in a day is a good range to adopt for yourself. Some people will require 7 hours and others may need 9. But what is certain is the fact that most of us will die early if we do not take at least 6 hours of sleep every day. The figure of 6 hours is a bare minimum; it is not the ideal range – just enough to keep us going.
Here it needs to be understood that what we call sleep is not a passive process akin to “downtime”. Instead, it is a vital activity of the body that enables it to heal, build, restore, and re-balance our internal body mechanism and tissues. In the absence of good sleep, the simple but extremely significant process of maintenance functions of the body will severely get affected. Some of the most important hormones of our body, like human growth hormone and testosterone, are produced most efficiently only when we are asleep. The brain also performs some vital repair and synthesis of the neuron area during sleep. It is not confirmed from research now that the process of memory consolidation in the brain is best done during sleep. As such, you should allow sufficient time for rest to ensure that your body gets the opportunity to heal and repair itself.
5) Follow an exciting ritual before sleep
People do this every time with their children. When you have kids, you are bound to ensure that they get enough sleep and wake up full of energy the next day for School. For this, a majority of people use a routine of rituals with kids, which include giving them dinner at a regular time in the evening, changing their clothing, make them brush their teeth, giving them a warm bath if needed, taking them to bed, and telling them stories about fairies, etc. This routine indicates the minds of little kids that it is time for sleep. Slowly their bodies get to adapt to this ritual, and it becomes a robust signaling system for them to go into a state of deep rest soon.
The thing is what most people do with the kids; they can do for themselves also. You can set a daily routine for yourself consisting of 3-4 tasks to do before going to bed. This would benefit you in two ways: First, the daily ritual of doing 3-4 tasks before sleeping will act as a signal to your body rhythm that it is time to sleep. This will create a sort of self-regulatory process of going to sleep every day after the ritual, where your system will prepare itself for going to sleep by ignoring all other distracting activities. Secondly, as these activities will be of a very relaxed nature, the same would give your body a chance to ease into rest and proceed from the active zone to the resting one. Such rituals may include activities like relaxed reading, listening to calm music, taking a bath, a massage, or an intimate moment with your partner. These activities can create an effective prerequisite that will transition you from an active wakeful state to a resting and relaxed sleepful rest.
So there were five useful tips for a better sleep we discuss in this article. I hope they will help you in improving your sleep routine.
