The sleep you get has a direct effect on both your mental and physical health. Consistently pull up short of those recommended 7–9 hours per night, and you’ll find it takes a serious toll on not only your energy, but your mood, productivity, and even your weight.
A good night’s sleep doesn’t just mean lots of it — like most things, it comes down to quality over quantity. Even if you’re sleeping the recommended amount, you will not feel well-rested if you are tossing and turning in the night and experiencing frequent disruptions. This can compromise your ability to comprehend instructions, communicate, sustain your attention, and maintain your interpersonal relationships.
Given that we spend approximately one-third of our lives sleeping, we may as well apply ourselves to become experts in the field! Here are 10 things you can do to ensure that you’re sound asleep by the time your head hits the pillow at night.
Wind Down in the Evening
Most people have night-time routines to help them unwind after a long day — it could be beneficial for you to develop or improve your own to help prepare your mind for a night of rest.
There are so many different strategies out there that have been linked with an improved quality of sleep. Just to rattle off a few that you can incorporate into your evenings: listen to soft music, take a hot bath an hour or two before bed, or engage in some light reading to relax your mind and ease that transition from awake to asleep. Make sure you keep a note of which particular strategies create the best results for you so that you can establish the most soothing night-time routine there is!
Keep a Sleep Diary
Ideal conditions for sleep vary significantly from person to person. You might fall asleep easier wearing an eye mask, for instance, while your friend prefers to keep a nightlight turned on. It is important to work out what methods and routines for getting to sleep work best for you. Keeping a record of your sleeping patterns and habits is a great first step towards figuring out your particular dos and don’ts for achieving a good 8 hours!
Every morning when you wake up, make a note of what time you went to bed, how long it took you to fall asleep, how many times you woke up in the night, what disturbed your sleep, any medications or caffeinated beverages consumed, and other criteria that can be found in useful online resources such as the NHS daily sleep diary.
Keeping a sleep diary helps to give you a better idea of the effectiveness of any particular methods or remedies you may use to get yourself to sleep. And if you keep a diary for a few weeks without seeing results, it can even help your doctor give you a proper diagnosis if necessary. The important thing is that once you begin tracking your sleep through a diary, you become more proactive about your sleep, working harder to do more of the things that promote it and fewer of the things that suppress or inhibit it. Try making your sleep diary or using sleep-tracking apps to keep a record of your sleep cycle and incorporate techniques conducive to sleep that you can tailor entirely to your requirements.
Maintain Your Sleep Environment
If you don’t feel relaxed in your bedroom, you’re going to find it much harder to drift off. Your brain should always associate your bedroom with sleep, and this association can become blurred if you’re using your bed for activities other than sleeping or sex. If you’re eating in or working from your bedroom, your brain will begin to associate your bed with non-relaxing activity and remain active when you’re trying to wind down. According to the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard, keeping work materials and any electronics such as computers or TVs out of your bedroom is a sure-fire way to strengthen your mental association between your bedroom and sleep.
The most common factors affecting the quality of our sleep environment are noise, light, and temperature. Keeping your room cooler (between 15–18°C) and using a thicker duvet or opening a window if you regularly find yourself too cold or hot (respectively) can help your body to relax at night. If there are sources of light or noise present that are out of your control when you’re trying to drift off, like streetlights or noisy neighbours, then try using blackout blinds, eye masks, or white noise machines to drown out the distractions.
You should also make sure you’re well-equipped with a comfortable mattress — which should be replaced roughly every 8 years — and pillows, which tend to have a lifespan of around 2 years. Take a look at this useful guide to designing a sleep-friendly bedroom, and catch some Zs in your relaxation room!
Exert Yourself
It’s no surprise that exercising tires us out — but regular physical activity can help to improve sleep quality through an increase in the amount of time spent in deep sleep — the most physically restorative phase of sleep. Physical exertion works to expel any excess energy we have, as well as relieving our anxiety and stress, helping us wind down and sleep undisturbed — even improving sleep quality in those with cases of severe insomnia.
The more vigorously you exercise, the more pronounced the effects on your sleep. Even light exercise, though, such as a 10-minute walk every day, helps to improve sleep quality. After administering a sleep and exercise survey to 200 random men and women, researchers observed a strong association between light-to-moderate exercise and ease of falling asleep, the deepness of sleep, and feelings of alertness when waking in the morning.
While exercising is a powerful method of securing a good night’s sleep, you must work out at the right time. Physical exertion speeds up the body’s metabolism, elevates temperature, and stimulates the production of adrenaline and stress hormone cortisol. This is no problem if you’re exercising in the morning (in fact, it should improve alertness and productivity), but for some people, vigorous exercise too close to bedtime can interfere with sleep. Try to finish your workouts at least 3 hours before going to bed for the most powerful results. Different methods work for different people, though, so be willing to experiment with different workouts at different times to see what works best for you.
It’s important to remember that it can take several months of regular exercise before you begin to fully experience its sleep benefits. Just be patient and remain focused on building an exercise regime that you can stick to, and you’ll soon find yourself nodding off with ease.
Don’t Eat Yourself Awake
As satisfying as a midnight snack maybe, it could be what’s keeping you up. Night-eating has been proven to harm both sleep quality — being linked with restless leg syndrome and sleep apnoea — and the body’s natural production of the sleep hormone melatonin. Try to avoid big meals at night by scheduling your dinner time for earlier in the evening — it’s generally advised to stop eating around 2–3 hours before you go to bed.
It’s not just when you eat that influences your sleep, it’s what you eat too. Eating lots of spicy or acidic foods can cause heartburn and make us more likely to wake up in the night. Foods high in sugars and refined carbohydrates such as white bread, pastries, and pasta stimulate wakefulness and interrupt the deeper more restorative stages of sleep. Brown rice, oats, and dairy products, on the other hand, help with the production of various chemicals increasing our desire to sleep. Eating a meal high in unrefined carbohydrates 4 hours before bedtime has been found to decrease the amount of time it takes to fall asleep.
Everyone is different when it comes to their eating and sleeping habits, and some people claim that a light snack before bed helps them to drift off. If you’re a die-hard night-eater, try a small bowl of wholegrain, low-sugar cereal, a pot of yogurt, or any of these snack ideas thought to promote sleepiness.
Digital Detox
How are we supposed to get to sleep when we’ve got texts to respond to, tweets to tweet, and virtual farms to tend to? It’s no surprise that engaging with our smartphones has been linked to shorter sleep duration and a higher perceived feeling of insufficient rest.
The blue light emitted by devices such as tablets, smartphones, and laptops not only strains our eyes and gives us headaches, but also inhibits our production of the sleep hormone melatonin. Using these electronic devices late at night has an impact on our circadian rhythm, tricking your brain into thinking it’s still day time and keeping your mind active and engaged.
Sleep disorder specialist Dr. Harneet Walia recommends that you stop using your smartphone and other blue-light emitting screens between 30 minutes to an hour before bed to effectively reduce their impact on your sleep. If you find that you just can’t drag your eyes away from your phone, though, try to make use of the ‘night mode’ feature on most modern smartphones, or free light-altering software such as f.lux.
Stick to a Schedule
If you find struggling to get to sleep a regular occurrence in your day-to-day life, you may benefit from sticking to a sleep schedule, with the same or similar waking and bedtimes every day. Your body’s circadian rhythm tends to run on a loop, aligning itself with sunrise and sunset. Studies have shown that those with irregular sleeping patterns report higher levels of daytime tiredness, attentional deficits, and problems with emotion control and productivity. Try to set yourself a time to go to bed and a time to wake up, and avoid differing too much from these times on the weekends. The more your weekday/weekend sleep schedules differ, the worse the jetlag-like symptoms you will experience.
If you have a particularly poor night of sleep, it is often tempting to catch up on it by taking daytime naps. Unless you’re feeling dangerously tired (while driving, for instance) or running on less than 5 hours, this usually does more harm than good. While shorter power naps of 30 minutes or less can prove beneficial and enhance wakefulness, frequent and irregular nappers were found to experience higher levels of daytime fatigue. It’s best to avoid napping altogether, but if you have to, try to limit yourself to 15–20 minutes in the early afternoon, if possible.
Cut Back on your Vices
It’s always the worst things for you that are the toughest to give up! Alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine intake have all been linked to a poorer quality of sleep.
Although you may feel it helps you get to sleep quicker, alcohol significantly impairs your quality of sleep and makes you more likely to wake in the night as its stimulant effects begin to kick in. Alcohol also dehydrates you, making it more likely that you’ll wake up for water or to go to the toilet. Increased consumption of alcohol has also been linked to increases in symptoms of sleep apnoea and altered melatonin production, furthering its ability to mess up our slumber.
There are a lot of people out there who claim they couldn’t live without their daily coffee. A single dose of caffeine can enhance your energy, focus, and performance — acting to keep your body from naturally relaxing by stimulating your nervous system. Caffeine can stay in your bloodstream for up to 8 hours, though, and when consumed later in the day, it can cause great difficulty in getting to sleep and staying asleep. Similar to caffeine, nicotine also acts as a stimulant — smokers report significantly less time spent in deep sleep and being woken up earlier in the morning due to symptoms of nicotine withdrawal.
Giving up chemically addictive substances is naturally going to be difficult — but knowing it can lead to a better night’s rest might encourage you to take a step in the right direction. Sift through the various resources available on quitting or cutting back on smoking, drinking, and caffeine and start striving towards a night of restful and uninterrupted sleep!
Rule out a Disorder
While the act of sleeping occurs naturally for almost all of us, sleep deprivation is something that every individual will most likely experience at some point in their lives, varying in severity and longitude from person to person. The bottom line is there isn’t too much use in making lifestyle changes to improve your sleep if it is an underlying health issue causing the disruptions.
One of the most common issues is that of sleep apnoea — characterised by inconsistent and interrupted breathing that can cause the afflicted individual to wake up several times per night. Sleep apnoea is known to be prevalent among the middle-aged and affects 24% of men and 9% of women.
There are a multitude of disorders known to cause declines in sleep quality, and if you continuously experience problems with sleep for a month or longer, the best course of action would be to consult your GP or relevant health professional, who may refer you for CBT or recommend different supplements to help with your symptoms.
Don’t Lie Awake!
One of the most common mistakes people make is continuing to lie in bed when you’ve been struggling to get to sleep for over 30 minutes. Lying in bed awake, particularly the night before an important event such as a job interview or presentation, can increase our anxiety and cause us to create new worries relating to not being able to get to sleep. This can form a harmful cycle of lying in bed awake every night worrying about not sleeping, and it’s best not to stick around working yourself up even further when this starts to happen.
To get out of your head, get up and make yourself a warm glass of milk, practise some breathing exercises, and make sure you only return to bed when you’re feeling sleepy again to avoid further restlessness. You’ll get nowhere fast by attempting to force yourself asleep.
Getting Drowsy?
If any of these pointers have you feeling inspired, it’s important to remember that researchers have long-observed significant individual differences in sleep patterns and behaviours.
Don’t be disheartened if you can’t find the perfect technique right away — take note of what works and doesn’t work for you, and design your method of escaping to dreamland!
