How to Sleep Better at Night Naturally
After several sleepless nights, the mental effects become more serious. Your brain will fog, making it difficult to concentrate and make decisions. You’ll start to feel down, and may fall asleep during the day. Your risk of injury and accidents at home, work, and on the road also increases.
Sleep Boosts Your Immunity
If you seem to catch every cold and flu that’s going around, your bedtime could be to blame. Prolonged lack of sleep can disrupt your immune system, so you’re less able to fend off bugs.
Sleep Help with Weight Loss
Sleeping less may mean you put on weight! Studies have shown that people who sleep less than 7 hours a day tend to gain more weight and have a higher risk of becoming obese than those who get 7 hours of slumber.
Sleep Boosts Mental Wellbeing
Given that a single sleepless night can make you irritable and moody the following day, it’s not surprising that chronic sleep debt may lead to long-term mood disorders like depression and anxiety. When people with anxiety or depression were surveyed to calculate their sleeping habits, it turned out that most of them slept for less than 6 hours a night.
How Much Sleep Do We Need?
What matters is that you find out how much sleep you need and then try to achieve it. If you wake up tired and spend the day longing for a chance to have a nap, it’s likely that you’re not getting enough sleep. A variety of factors can cause poor sleep, including health conditions such as sleep apnea. But in most cases, it’s due to bad sleeping habits.
Tips for a Better Night’s Sleep
1. Drink Tea: Herbal tea can help you relax before bedtime.
2. Read a Book: Meander your way through a favorite book to help power down from a hectic day.
3. Put Away Your iPad: The blue light from tech devices tricks your mind into thinking it’s the day, so turn off gadgets 30 minutes before you need to go to sleep.
4. Have a Snack: Honey, nuts, and dairy all have something in common: they contain compounds that may induce sleep.
5. Stretch it Out: Stretching relieves aches, but it can also calm you and prep you for sleep.
6. Meditate: Clearing your mind allows you to drift off to sleep.
7. Hide the Light: If your room is not dark, you will not secrete enough melatonin to get a restful sleep. You should also dim the lights in your house 2 hours prior to sleep to start the hormonal transitions needed for quality sleep. Electronics, alarm clock, street lamps — all of these can prevent deep sleep. Cover up anything that is contributing to light pollution.
8. Take a Warm Shower: A warm bath or shower can soothe muscles’ it’s also great if you’re suffering from a cold or allergies.
9. Exercise: Regular physical activity can help you fall asleep faster, get better sleep and deepen your sleep. Just don’t exercise too close to bedtime, or you may be too energized to go to sleep.
10. Eat an Earlier Dinner: Going to sleep with a full stomach can make lying down uncomfortable. Go with an earlier, lighter dinner.
11. Sooth with Smell: Lavender and tea tree oil are soothing scents; add a few drops of these essential oils to your shoots.
12. De-stress: Worrying keeps you up; learn to take time to de-stress—both during the day and before bed— to clear your mind.
13. Put Away the Wine: Nightcaps often lead to restless nights.
14. Find the Right Temperature: The best temperature for helping you get proper sleep is between 65 and 72 degrees.
15. Do Yoga: Besides the stress releasing stretch, yoga helps relax the mind before bed.
16. Avoid Napping: Restless sleep makes you want to nap during the day, but it may be just what’s keeping you from catching your night Z’s. Naps decrease the ‘Sleep Debt’ that is so necessary for easy sleep onset. Each of us needs a certain amount of sleep per 24-hour period. We need that amount, and we don’t need more than that. When we take naps, it decreases the amount of sleep that we need the next night – which may cause sleep fragmentation and difficulty initiating sleep and may lead to insomnia. Some recent data shows that if you nap, it should be less than 7 minutes.
17. Invest in a Better Mattress: If you’re waking up with aches and pains, then your mattress may be the thing that is keeping you from much-needed rest.
18. Skip The Afternoon Coffee Break: Caffeine affects people differently, but if tossing and turning correlates to your afternoon coffee run, now is the time to give it the boot.
19. Try a Natural Remedy: Many people utilize supplements like melatonin for helloing the get to sleep naturally.
20. Have a Routine: Taking time to wind down in the night can help you prep your body and mind for a good night’s sleep. Pick a few items from this list to create a pre-bedtime routine.
How You Can Help
When you become a Certified Sleep Science Coach, you will learn how to help your clients dramatically enhance their metabolism, memory, creativity, immune function, hormone balance, hunger management, disease prevention, sports performance, accident avoidance, memory, reaction time, good judgment, surgery recovery, happiness and over 100 additional functions and behaviors.
Our programs are open to anyone with a desire to learn and help others. There are no prerequisites.
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