Quality sleep makes you feel better, increase your energy and productivity, promotes weight loss, improves heart and immune system health. The importance of sleep goes beyond just boosting your mood or banishing under-eye circles. To maintain a healthy lifestyle, it is important that you have adequate and quality sleep. A lot of things can result to not having quality sleep, like dealing with emotional or financial problem, or a drop in the levels of sleep-promoting estrogen during menstruation and menopause. While these may be valid excuses for not having a sound sleep, you really don’t have to deprive yourself of sleep. Below are some ways to get a better sleep every night.
1. Keep a sleep diary
Keeping a sleep diary will help you understand how your habits affect your rest and also track your sleep everyday. You can run this diary for about two weeks or more, and write about everything revolving around your sleep. Write about things you think of before sleeping, how your mood was, what time you go to bed, how long it takes you to fall asleep, how many times you woke up during the night, and how you feel after waking up. You can also include the meals you eat before going to bed and major things, that happened during the day. This will help you know days you had a better sleep and what influenced it.
2. Exercise, but not within 4 hours of bedtime
Exercising helps to improve the length and quality of sleep. After a vigorous workout, your body temperature is elevated for about 4 hours and this can hinder you from sleeping. When the temperature begins to cool down, the body signals to the brain to release sleep-inducing melatonin to help you sleep better.
3. Eliminate sneaky light sources
Light passes through the retina into the hypothalamus and delays the brain’s release of melatonin sleep-promoting hormone. This is why it is often recommended, that you turn off your devices that is cell phones, laptops and so on about an hour before bedtime. You can get a sleep face mask to help shield your eyes from any glow at all. A dark room can help you sleep better.
4. Write
One of the most common excuses people give for not sleeping well is that they have a lot of things going on in their minds. You can get a pen and a paper or the notepad on your device and write everything down. Write down those plans scattered in your mind and how to go about them. This will relieve your mind of too many bothering things and help you sleep better.
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