Sleep hygiene involves creating habits to promote restful restful slumber. This might mean having a regular pre-bed routine and creating an inviting bedroom environment.
Sleep hygiene applies to everyone; however, its implementation depends on an individual’s unique needs and characteristics. Here are 10 effective methods of improving your own personal sleep hygiene: 1. Set a regular bedtime and wake time.
1. Set a fixed bedtime
Consistent sleep scheduling can help enhance your overall sleep hygiene. Aim to go to bed and wake up at approximately the same time every day – including weekends!
This helps synchronize your body’s natural circadian rhythm and regulate hormone release such as melatonin which signal to your brain that it’s time for bedtime.
Limit your exposure to light in the hours leading up to bedtime, including from electronic devices and televisions, which emit blue light which stimulates your brain and keeps you awake.
However, gradual adjustments should be made to your sleep schedule; starting with 15-minute increments every two or three days should help create new habits over time.
2. Make your bedroom a relaxing place
Ensuring you get enough sleep is critical to good health; it can help combat obesity, heart disease and many other medical problems. But many factors can impact sleep quality adversely – including diet, daily habits and environmental influences in which you sleep at night.
One effective way to increase sleep hygiene is making your bedroom an inviting and restful environment, helping you fall asleep faster and experience superior quality rest.
Begin by selecting a relaxing color scheme. Dark hues like blue and gray can help calm the eyes and provide a calming sensation, and adding soft pattern-print rugs or hand-scraped wood flooring can add warmth and coziness. Noise should also be kept to a minimum by using white noise machines as much as possible.
3. Get rid of distractions
Sleep issues can negatively impact our emotions, concentration and ability to complete daily tasks. By getting enough high-quality restful sleep each night, you may find that your day-to-day focus improves and mental health improves as well as weight gain and potential diseases avoided.
At night, it is essential to remove distractions in your bedroom in order to create an ideal restful environment. This includes turning off all televisions and electronic devices as well as stashing away cell phones. Furthermore, having an evening routine such as taking a warm bath or reading under orange light may also help.
As caffeine crosses the blood-brain barrier and induces wakefulness by blocking its effects, limiting your consumption to just one cup a day may help improve your sleep quality.
4. Change your sleeping position
While many may believe their sleeping position reflects either their personality or mental wellbeing, in reality your chosen position can have more of an effect than just comfort – in some instances even leading to or exacerbating conditions like acid reflux, back pain or sleep apnea.
Sleeping curled up in a fetal position can be excruciatingly uncomfortable and result in pins-and-needles sensations in your arms, due to capillary crush. This causes compression that reduces blood flow to those areas that need it the most, cutting off vital oxygen flow to them.
Stomach sleeping should also be avoided as it puts unnecessary strain on your neck and back, leading to breathing issues like snoring and obstructive sleep apnea. For optimal health, try sleeping on your back with a pillow between your knees instead.
5. Create a healthy bedtime routine
Bedtime routines are an effective way to ensure you’re getting enough restful slumber each night. Just as breakfast becomes part of your morning ritual, so too should bedtime routines help your body recognize when it is time for bed.
Avoid eating heavy meals or drinking alcoholic beverages before bed, as these could lead to indigestion and wakeful bathroom trips in the middle of the night, disrupting your rest. Instead, opt for light snacks like fruit or non-caffeinated herbal tea as alternatives.
Your bedroom should be free from distractions by dimming its lights and unplugging electronics, including journaling or reading a physical book to relax the mind before sleep. Establishing healthy routines over time with consistent work hours and weekend schedules to help build healthy habits while guaranteeing you wake up feeling rested each morning.
6. Limit your screen time before bed
Electronic devices keep us alert at times when our bodies should be resting and relaxing, leading to sleep deprivation with potentially detrimental results for both mental and physical wellbeing.
Stimulating content and excessive blue light from screens may also interfere with your body’s natural ability to produce melatonin, an essential chemical for sleep. Therefore, it’s recommended that any electronic devices be turned off at least one hour before bedtime.
Before bed, try reading or listening to soothing music instead. Red lights have lower blue light levels that may help facilitate melatonin production – these lights can often be found at hardware or lighting stores.
7. Limit your caffeine intake
Caffeine can be an addictive stimulant that disrupts sleep. To achieve better restful slumber, caffeine should be avoided at least six hours before bedtime; however, this may not always be practical or achievable for some; simply cutting back can often suffice; perhaps switching to decaf or herbal tea beverages instead or limiting daily caffeine consumption may help.
Internal body clock (circadian rhythm) is partially controlled by the secretion of melatonin, which promotes sleep. For optimal health, it’s essential that we adhere to this rhythmic cycle.
Current evidence on individual sleep hygiene recommendations regarding caffeine, smoking, alcohol use, exercise, stress management, noise reduction and sleep timing is limited and often limited to acute effects tested in laboratory environments. Additional replication and extension of research in naturalistic settings are necessary as changing sleep hygiene habits can be challenging but should be made gradually for maximum effect.
8. Turn off the lights
Electronic devices should not be brought into the bedroom at night to ensure optimal sleep hygiene, since their blue light emitting screens can keep your mind stimulated and delay onset of sleep. They may also affect circadian rhythm and melatonin production levels that contribute to quality restful slumber.
Establishing consistent “screens off” and “lights out” times will help your body adjust to using electronic devices less before bed. A set deadline can help stop procrastinating and promote faster sleep. As part of good sleep hygiene, keeping lights low and using blackout curtains to create a dark and quiet bedroom environment are important parts of keeping sleep hygiene. Doing so will signal to your body it’s time for bed, giving it enough restful restful slumber as recommended by health authorities.
9. Get out of bed if you can’t fall asleep
Finding enough sleep is essential to your overall health and wellbeing, yet can often prove challenging for many individuals. Achieve this through practicing good sleep hygiene – including going to bed at the same time each night, shutting off devices before going to sleep, and keeping the room dark – which are proven strategies.
If you are having difficulty sleeping, try getting up and doing something relaxing such as reading or listening to music. Sitting too long in bed may lead to insomnia as your brain comes to associate the mattress with wakefulness; therefore it’s wiser not to watch the clock as this could keep you up; rather put it somewhere out of sight so you won’t be tempted to gaze upon it; doing this can also reduce stress when trying to fall asleep.
10. Exercise
Exercise has long been known to lower the risk of chronic disease, extend life expectancy and slow cognitive decline – yet many don’t recognize its synergistic effect with high-quality sleep.
Studies have revealed that regular moderate exercise can improve your sleep quality and make falling asleep easier at night. Timing of exercise is crucial; vigorous activity can increase physiological arousal and delay its onset; late afternoon or early evening exercising is best as vigorous activities may increase physiological arousal and delay its onset; regularly exercising can also trigger your body to prioritize melatonin production – though many experts advise against doing any vigorous activity before bedtime as caffeine consumption interferes with its natural sleep cycle.
The Sleep Loft - Online mattress showroom 