Sleep is essential to both your health and performance. Inadequate rest can lead to many negative consequences, including reduced productivity, memory loss and depression.
Sleep hygiene involves developing healthy habits to ensure optimal quality sleep, such as avoiding stimulants like caffeine and nicotine, adhering to a consistent sleeping schedule, limiting screen time and overexerting oneself during physical activities before relaxing prior to going to bed.
1. Create a Comfortable Environment
Sleep is vitally important to our wellbeing, and lack of it can cause both mental and physical complications. Therefore, creating an environment conducive to restful slumber is paramount.
Good sleep hygiene involves creating an inviting bedroom environment, following regular bedtime rituals and forgoing caffeine, nicotine and alcohol before sleeping. Additionally, good hygiene may include restricting tech usage before bedtime as well as using ear plugs or white noise to help sleep come faster.
Research suggests that sleep hygiene education can improve sleep quality in those who forgo more intensive clinical treatment for their sleep issues, without resorting to more aggressive strategies like surgery. More research needs to be conducted into how best to teach sleep hygiene; including its utility within clinical settings and whether it serves as an effective first-line intervention, including its potential ability to alleviate anxiety, stress and psychosis in individuals diagnosed with mental health disorders.
2. Limit Your Screen Time
Sleep quality depends on many factors, including how much time is spent using electronic devices such as phones or computers before bed. Many experts advise limiting screen usage at least an hour before sleep is due so as to give your body time to unwind before falling asleep – helping prevent insomnia and other sleeping problems in turn.
Too much screen time can also hinder melatonin production, essential for healthy sleep. Blue light from electronic devices can suppress its production, making it harder for you to fall asleep.
Limit screen time in your bedroom and avoid watching or playing high-octane content like violent video games and gripping TV shows that stimulate your brain, making it hard to relax and fall asleep. Instead, choose relaxing or soothing content; alternatively try reading a book, magazine or using red light bulbs in your room as ways of aiding relaxation and sleep.
3. Limit Your Alcohol Consumption
Alcohol has been shown to negatively influence sleep when consumed before bedtime, even if this reduces latency for falling asleep faster and reduces latency latency overall, but can still disrupt the sleeping architecture by leading to frequent awakenings and diminishing overall quality of rest.
Alcohol consumption also disrupts non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, the most restorative stage of the night. According to studies, even one drink before bed can significantly diminish NREM sleep and increase frequency of awakenings throughout the night.
Sleep hygiene education can be most effective when tailored specifically to an individual’s current sleep/wake habits, with suggestions like eliminating caffeine and alcohol intake, creating a prebedtime wind down routine, and creating an environment which is dark, cool, and quiet. Such tailored instruction can lead to improved quality sleep for increased performance at work.
4. Get Regular Exercise
Physical activity during the day and avoiding too much caffeine at night are both key to good sleep, while it is helpful to have a relaxing bedtime ritual with no long naps during the day and no caffeinated beverages like coffee, tea, cola and chocolate before sleep (see Sleep Health Foundation Factsheet on Napping for more info).
Achieving better sleep takes many forms, yet effective sleep hygiene habits are usually simple to implement. Sleeping in on weekends may have negative consequences on your cycle and repeatedly snoozing the alarm can leave you feeling unrested in the morning. Experimentation will help identify which methods work best for you – quality restorative sleep contributes to overall improved health so it is worth making small lifestyle adjustments to find what works for you!
5. Change Your Sleep Schedule
Your sleep schedule plays an integral part in helping you obtain restful nights of restful slumber. To optimize this aspect of your health, try setting an alarm at roughly the same time every night (including weekends! ): this reinforces your body’s internal sleep cycle and promotes more consistent restful slumber.
However, if you aren’t quite ready to commit to an exact bedtime yet, try gradually shifting it by 15-minute increments. This may also help limit how long you spend in bed when not feeling sleepy – this technique is known as stimulus control and may make falling asleep easier for you.
Avoid caffeine and stimulants six hours before bedtime, and stick with moderate-intensity workouts instead of vigorous ones late in the evening.
6. Keep a Sleep Journal
No matter the cause of your difficulty sleeping or frequent awakenings during the night, keeping a sleep journal can help uncover what’s preventing restful restful restful. By providing detailed documentation of what causes discomfort for each night of restful restful restful sleep you can help your doctor identify potential remedies and provide effective recommendations.
Use of a sleep journal allows you to track various factors that contribute to poor rest, including what time and when you go to bed and wake up, diet, alcohol and caffeine consumption, exercise regiment, etc. By tracking these aspects over several weeks, you may identify bad habits which prevent good restful slumber.
Keep a sleep journal to help your doctor identify the source of your discomfort, since they cannot observe all your behaviors all at once. This allows them to recommend an individualized treatment plan tailored specifically for you.
7. Turn Off Your Phone
Experts advise avoiding electronic devices in the last hour or two before sleep, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and TVs, because their blue light can interfere with your circadian rhythm and decrease melatonin secretion – ultimately impacting sleep quality negatively.
Consider using a bedtime app or setting a specific bedtime on your device, such as using a sleep-themed lock screen to minimise distractions.
If you find it difficult to sleep well at night, it may be worth reviewing your habits and making changes. Consistency is key in improving sleep hygiene: diet, activities, and schedule all play an impactful role on its quality; making small adjustments each day can have a large effect in time – even if there’s an underlying mental health condition present – there’s always hope of improvement!
8. Avoid Over-Exercising
Regular sleep can have tremendous advantages for your health. It can improve focus and concentration, lower risks for chronic diseases and even boost memory retention.
Practice healthy habits throughout the day and before sleep time in order to ensure a restful night’s rest – like getting up at the same time each day, limiting caffeine after 2 p.m., and restricting alcohol consumption. This will ensure a good night’s rest for you!
Exercise regularly. But be wary of exercising too close to bedtime as this can increase energy levels and make sleeping harder. For optimal results, try exercising earlier in the day or at a moderate intensity; this will encourage your body to prioritize producing melatonin and prepare for restful slumber.
9. Change Your Diet
At the core of sleep hygiene lies eating right – eating properly can play an integral part in whether or not we find restful night’s rest. In particular, it’s essential to refrain from caffeine-containing food and beverages prior to bedtime and focus on foods rich in melatonin-promoting nutrients such as cherries, tuna sardines eggs sunflower seeds oats apricots milk potatoes bananas as sources.
Sleep hygiene changes can help improve your sleeping habits and lead to overall better health, but should not replace medical treatments such as melatonin supplements if you are having difficulty. Talk to your physician if this is an issue for you – and get that restful sleep you deserve!
10. Take a Relaxing Bath
Sleep is essential to overall health and wellbeing. An insufficient night’s rest can negatively impact your mood, memory and learning capabilities, immunity system functioning, creativity and weight. Many sleeping issues can be solved by improving habits and routines for better restful slumber.
Preventing insomnia by taking a relaxing bath before bed can be beneficial to sleep quality and quantity. A 2019 meta analysis discovered that bathing in hot water one to two hours before sleep time can shorten your time spent sleeping by 10 minutes!
Add soothing oils such as lavender, chamomile, rose or sandalwood oil to the water to enhance its relaxing effects and create an atmosphere conducive to self-care. Play soft music or meditation recordings in the background while dimming lights for an ideal atmosphere. Consider purchasing a special towel so your self-care ritual won’t be interrupted during bathtime.
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