Top 8 Tips for a Healthy Sleep

Some nights, sleep comes easily, and you cruise through the night with minimal interruption. Waking up after a night of good sleep is wonderful—you feel refreshed, energized, and ready to take on the world. Other nights, sleep comes slowly or not until the early morning hours. Or you may fall asleep, only to awaken throughout the night.

While you sleep, your brain is hard at work forming the pathways necessary for learning and creating memories and new insights. Without enough sleep, you can’t focus and pay attention or respond quickly. A lack of sleep may even cause mood problems. Getting enough sleep makes people feel refreshed, energized, and ready to start the day.

In fact, as many as almost 70 mln of people in the United States regularly experience the sleep troubles. Not getting enough sleep can have serious consequences, that impacting your health, memory, and well-being. So make sure to fit in at least seven hours of rest each night with these simple life hacks for a healthy sleep. These are my favorite and I believe, they are really effective:

1. Create a sleep schedule and stick to it. Go to bed and wake up the same time daily. As creatures of habit, people have a hard time adjusting to altered sleep patterns. Sleeping later on weekends won’t fully make up for the lack of sleep during the week and will make it harder to wake up early on Monday morning.
2. Avoid caffeine and large meals & beverages late at night. Coffee, colas, certain teas, and chocolate contain the stimulant caffeine, and its effects can take as long as 8 hours to wear off fully. Therefore, a cup of coffee in the late afternoon can make it hard for you to fall asleep at night. A light snack is okay, but a large meal can cause indigestion that interferes with sleep.
3. Don’t take naps after 3 p.m. Naps can help make up for lost sleep, but late afternoon naps can make it harder to fall asleep at night.
4. Relax your muscles and your mind. Your muscles need to be as relaxed as your mind to fall asleep. Soak them in a hot bath before bed and allow them to unwind. For your mind, try meditating. It’s been proven to help people relax and increase focus and productivity. Focus on the “Now”, breathe in, breathe out. You might even fall half-way through.
5. Have a good sleeping environment. Get rid of anything that might distract you from sleep, such as noises, bright lights, an uncomfortable bed, or warm temperatures. You sleep better if the temperature in your bedroom is kept on the cool side.
6. Switch off your devices. All those phone calls, notifications, and texts keep the brain active. So make sure your Airplane mode or “Do not disturb” function is on before you go to bed.
7. Exercise is great but not too late in the day. Try to exercise at least 30 minutes on most days but not later than 5 or 6 hours before your bedtime.
8. Don’t lie in bed in the morning. If you find yourself still awake after staying in bed for more than 20 minutes, get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy. The anxiety of not being able to sleep can make it harder to fall asleep.

Some of these sleep hacks ask you to do something differently from your normal routine. Others suggest that you think about things differently than you have in the past. Take the sleep hack challenge and choose one of the sleep hacks that you would be willing to try. Make a commitment to try to make the change for just 1 week. Reward yourself if meet your goal of trying something different for just one week. And just like that, step by step, I believe you will get used to all these healthy rules.

I hope these simple hacks will be useful! Better sleep means better health.