Getting A Good Night’s Sleep
Maintaining a good quality of sleep can feel impossible these days. Between work stresses, constant news streams, and trying to look after our own health and wellbeing, we can find ourselves up late at night or stuck in fitful sleep. The horrible irony of this is that it greatly limits our ability to tackle the day ahead of us - keeping us in a perpetual cycle of poor sleep and high stress!
How can we break the cycle and achieve better sleep - both in nodding off, maintaining sleep, and waking feeling rested? Low quality sleep for only a few nights can substantially affect our quality of life. Fortunately, we’ve put together our top tips for improving sleep that are not only easy to implement, but quick to work. Let’s take a look.
Cut Back On Screen Time
We’re all used to having access to our phone, tv, and laptop screens essentially 24 hours a day. But excessive screen and electronic use could be seriously hindering your sleep. The particular light that comes from electronic screens, as well as the constant mental stimulus of social media or streaming services on our devices, can turn our minds away from calm, restful sleep, and leave us up all night, exhausted the next day.
The body is used to sleeping in a dark, quiet environment. Try to limit the amount of screen time you give yourself, particularly after work and into the evening. Making the bedroom a no-screen zone could be a great step to achieving a healthy sleep environment, too.
Avoid Caffeine & Alcohol
Caffeine is one of our favourite stimulants - aside from being delicious, it can wake us up, and keep us going, throughout the day. However, even if we think we’re limiting the amount of caffeine we take in later into the afternoon and into the evening, we can easily underestimate how long caffeine remains active in the body.
The half-life of caffeine can be anything from three to seven hours - so that mid-afternoon pick me up could be doing a lot more than getting you through the afternoon, it could be keeping you up all night, too.
Alcohol, too, can cause fractured and unsatisfactory sleep throughout the night, as it dulls and relaxes the mind without allowing full, deep sleep to take hold. Try to keep alcohol and caffeine to a minimum, or at very least avoid regular consumption from late afternoon, to minimse a disrupted night’s sleep
Take A Hot Soak
If you have access to a bath in your home, a long hot soak can make all the difference to your sleep quality. The time out, privacy, and warm water can be a great relaxant, allowing you to breathe out from the stressors of the day and prepare for a restful night ahead.
Adding in essential oils, gentle music, or candles, can further help you destress - lavender oil is seen to be particularly helpful in creating a calming environment and promote sleep, while classical music and flickering candles can lift you out of your memories of the day, and allow you to truly unwind in a fresh, quiet space.
Relaxed and free from stress, you can then fall into bed and wake up refreshed and rested in the morning.
Try A Yoga Flow
Yoga has been long used to promote connection with the body and calm the mind. Whether you’re well-versed in yogic teachings and asanas, or a complete newcomer, yoga welcomes all abilities and everyone can benefit from its practice.
From Child’s Pose to Cobra, gentle movement in and between yoga poses can help you release the stresses of the day, breathe more deeply, and focus on the body. As we allow ourselves to move into the body and out of the mind, we can release the high-focus concentration of our work day and prepare for a calm, restorative night’s sleep.
Start Your Mornings With A Run
We know - half the year the mornings are too cold, the other half it’s too hot. But, if you’re able to adopt even a brief jog or walk into your routine each morning, you may find yourself sleeping better at night.
Regular exercise in the morning can help focus the mind for the day, whilst reminding us how to connect with the body. This combination can mean we are more productive during the day, which alongside the physical exertion of exercise can leave us adequately tired from the day to fall into restful sleep. The practice of connecting with the body also trains us to shift out of the mind and into the physical, allowing us to reach rest easier after the stresses of the day.
Try implementing gentle daily activity into your every day and see how your stress levels and quality of sleep improves.
