Mary Ward writes about various health care career topics, including how to obtain an online masters in healthcare.
Getting a good night of sleep is something that we all need to run at our best the whole day through. To sleep more soundly you don’t have to spend a fortune on any accessories for your bedroom, you can just incorporate some good habits and make some necessary modifications.
7 Tips For Better Rest
1. Avoid Napping Whenever Possible
Though your impulse when you feel exhausted is to take a nap, this can interfere with sleeping at night. If you want to get a good night of sleep and stay asleep, try to avoid napping whenever possible as it can disrupt your natural sleeping patterns.
2. Avoid Caffeine and Alcohol
Any consumption of either caffeine or alcohol, particularly late in the day, can cause a major disruption of sleep. Caffeine acts as a natural stimulant and as you use it to wake you up in the morning it can also keep you from falling asleep at night. Alcohol can cause you to wake up a lot at night leaving you feeling sluggish the next morning. Limit your amounts of both substances and try to avoid them later in the day for best effects.
3. Exercise Regularly
We know that any form of exercise can be good for your health and body, but it can also be of great help in your sleeping as well. Incorporating regular exercise into your day can allow you to fall asleep more easily and stay asleep more soundly, so it’s yet another health benefit to this important part of your health regimen.
4. Be Sure that Your Bedroom is Dark Enough
Even the slightest amount of light in the room can interfere with you drifting into a deep sleep. It’s important to keep the room as dark as possible and eliminate any night lights if you wish to achieve the best sleep possible.
5. Get Rid of the Television
Many people are inclined to watch television until they fall asleep at night but this can cause some detrimental effects on your overall sleep patterns. You may be able to fall asleep but you are not getting to your optimal level of sleep as the TV emits rays that interfere with that ability. So watch TV in another part of the sleep and then when it’s time to drift off be sure to do so without any interruption in your bedroom.
6. Know What You’re Eating
Eating a light snack just before bed can help you to quickly and easily drift to sleep and stay sleeping soundly. Eating foods that contain the amino acid tryptophan can be of great help in achieving the best sleep possible. Combining calcium with these foods helps you to absorb the amino acid and get the best sleep possible. Consider a snack such as a half a turkey or peanut butter sandwich with a glass of milk as an instant recipe for the best sleep possible.
7. Set a Bedtime and Stick with It
Listen to your body and go with it for setting the best bedtime for you and stick with it as often as possible. Your body gets used to going to sleep at a certain time and will send you cues when it’s time. This routine helps your internal body clock work by falling asleep faster and keeping you sleeping throughout the night.
Sleep is elusive for far too many. Even those who do not normally suffer from insomnia or sleep troubles may have occasional bouts with it. For the best rest possible, follow these tips for a good night’s rest, and an even better day to follow!
I usually don’t have a hard time falling asleep (I once fell asleep at a nightclub, and another time fell asleep at a 4th of July concert complete with fireworks), but when I’m tired and stressed, ironically, I have the hardest time winding down and falling asleep. My solution is to take a shower before bed. What’s your frugal sleep finding solution?
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{ 5 comments }
White noise – my fan is my bedtime buddy! Also, a cool room and a warm blanket help so much. And a snuggly – my Leila lamb. 34 years old, and still sleeping with a teddybear? Yup!
And I pray myself to sleep. I get a chance to talk to God, and He eases me into dreamland.
Thanks for the tips – I now have an excuse to indulge in pb! Yay!
.-= Emily´s last blog ..Exploring Our Options – Homeschool =-.
Interesting tips, although I don’t agree with all of them when it comes to sleeping 🙂 I looove sleep psychology and spent a lot of time at uni during my degree studying sleep, especially how to establish and maintain good sleep patterns so I know a few things that seem a bit counter-intuitive but have been shown to be pretty effective.
When it comes to sleep, the frugal methods are also the most effective! Medications are more expensive and also alter the sleep architecture and leads to worse overall sleep than not having medication at all, in general!
Avoiding naps, caffeine and alcohol is great advice.
So is exercising regularly, but not too close to bedtime as exercise arouses people which will make them less likely to sleep – especially if they work out in a brightly-lit area such as a gym with lots of lights and mirrors.
Getting rid of the tv, and having a small snack before sleeping is also good advice (although for some types of anxiety preventing people from sleeping, tv can be quite an effective relaxation strategy if it’s something like, say a david attenborough documentary and not Die Hard.)
On the other hand, I don’t entirely agree with your other two points.
The dark bedroom one is interesting. Because whilst it’s definitely true that a dark room can help us to sleep, the biggest factor in changing/resetting the timing for sleep is light, especially bright light. A small amount of light won’t make too big a difference. What will tend to make a larger difference in my opinion is having a room with black-out curtains that doesn’t let light in during the mornings. If people don’t get light not too long after waking and get light later in the day instead, it can really impact on their sleep patterns and lead to morning grogginess. I find that many people sleep better with the blinds open if there aren’t too many lights outside, such as country towns. In the city, the noise, lights and bustle definitely needs to be eliminated for sleep though!
The bedtime tip isn’t right though from a sleep-science perspective as far as I understand. In terms of maintaining sleep, setting a bedtime doesn’t tend to work very well at all, especially for people who have insomnia or issues with not being able to wake up in the morning. This is because if people aren’t sleepy at a particular time, it’s because their body clock doesn’t actually think it’s bedtime. Going to bed earlier tends to lead to people just laying in bed feeling stressed out because they feel they should be asleep when they’re not. Going to bed earlier doesn’t have much of an impact on your body clock.
What is really important is the time that you get up – and what will really alter and then stabilize ones’ body clock is exposure to bright light! In countries/times where there is lots of sunshine, this means getting up and getting out into the light. For me, that’s spending 15 minutes or so walking to the bus stop, which does the trick nicely! The timing of the light is very important as light at different times will alter the timing of sleepiness (and several other functions, like core body temperature, which follows the same 24ish cycle as the body clock).
To maintain the best sleep, don’t set a bedtime. Don’t worry about sticking to going to bed a certain time. If you’re not sleepy, don’t try to go to sleep. If you’ve ever been awake in bed for what felt like hours thinking ‘I should be alseep. Why am I not asleep? I NEED to be asleep or I won’t get enough and then I’ll be tired and have a horrible day tomorrow’ you should understand why it’s good not to go to bed unless you’re sleepy. That worry makes people more awake and less likely to sleep.
Set a waking up time and stick to it. This is much more important than a bed time! The waking up time will have a much bigger impact on your body clock 🙂 If you want to go out at night, do it. But get up at the same time as usual the next morning. YOu’ll find that your body will tell you when you should go to sleep quite readily if you maintain a waking up time every week. If you go to bed and don’t get to sleep within 10-15 minutes, you probably don’t need to be in bed at all 🙂 Not everyone needs 8 hours of sleep. Anything from 6-9 hours of sleep needed is pretty normal and some people need even less whilst there are others who need more.
I’m happy to explain exactly why waking up time is more important than bedtime, but it’ll take a while.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_response_curve
This article gives a little more information about the timing of light, which is all about shifting the body clock 🙂
1. Earplugs. They go for about $5 a box at Target. It’s a reasonable price for a good night’s sleep! 🙂
2. Light-reducing curtains. Actually, that’s not really a super-frugal option; our light-reducing curtains cost somewhere around $70. That said, they also help trap in cold or heat, depending on the season, so I suppose they’re sort of frugal-friendly in that respect.
.-= WAHMy´s last blog ..Stuffed =-.
Nice tips. I had a friend who had serious sleep issues that she wanted to have diagnosed and her insurance didn’t cover. I wonder if she tried this regimen before. It’s worth a try at the very least. It could lead to good night’s sleep!
Jerry
Hmmm…. When an adult falls asleep in a very noisy, social environment — such as a nightclub or fireworks — it’s suggestive of sleep apnea.
Most people who suffer from sleep apnea are unaware that they’re waking up scores of times during the night. My ex-, who had such a severe case he was observed to awaken a couple hundred times during one night, had no idea. I sure did, though: I used to watch him stop breathing and then jerk and gasp when his body finally managed to inhale enough to stop him from suffocating. And I couldn’t miss the loud snoring, which made it impossible for me to sleep.
He was so exhausted during the day that when we had guests over to our house, he would fall asleep in the middle of conversations. Interestingly, though, because for him this was “normal,” he wasn’t even especially aware of how tired he was. It took a second wife who was more assertive about finding a doctor who would take her complaints seriously to get a diagnosis.
This is a dangerous illness. It leads to heart attack and stroke. If you’re not kidding and you seriously do fall asleep at odd times like that, you should have yourself checked for sleep apnea.
.-= Funny about Money´s last blog ..What IS frugality? =-.