If you want to know how to get good sleep at night, you’ll love this article.
Research conducted by several renowned organizations like National Sleep Foundation reveals that sleep has a direct impact on the health and wellbeing of a person.
The ones who sleep well have been found living a healthy, wealthy and stress-free life than those who are suffering from sleeping disorders or fail to manage time for their sleep.
Studies have proved that an adult requires at least eight hours of sleep each day to live a healthy life.
It means that you should spend a maximum of sixteen hours daily on average in your activities during wakefulness while your body needs rest in the remaining hours of the day to stay hale and hearty.
To maintain a proper health, it is extremely important to get enough sleep. When you fail in getting a proper sleep, this may give birth to several complexities including heart diseases, obesity, diabetes, mild headache and so on.
How To Get Good Sleep At Night:
In this article, you will learn about 17 ways that will help you sleep well.
If you are suffering from the condition of disturbed sleep, the insomnia, or if you are just feeling that you aren’t getting a good night’s sleep, then some of the practices recommended in this post (if not all) will surely help you.
Several reasons are tied up with sleeping disorders.
Sometimes environmental stresses become a hurdle in getting a good sleep while harsh incidents in life, consumption of poor diet, alcohol or any health disorders and many other factors also make it difficult for individuals to get a full, peaceful sleep.
It does not matter what kind of an issue is snatching your peaceful hours from you, solutions are always there.
Go through this text, read this advice and see which ones are going to help you in improving your sleeping hours’ peacefulness.
1. Buy Blue Blockers
Melatonin is a hormone produced by our body which controls our sleep mechanism. When this hormone is produced in little quantities, then you can’t get a good sleep.
To ensure that you get the full sleep without and disturbances, level of melatonin production must be normalized and BluBlockers can help you in achieving this goal.
Blue radiation in sunlight suppresses the production of melatonin in our body so the level of melatonin production can be increased considerably by wearing BluBlockers a couple of hours before bedtime.
The best idea to use BluBlockers is to wear them in afternoon so the production of melatonin will initiate and make you feel sleepy by night followed by a peaceful and uninterrupted sleep.
2. Use a Sleeping Mask
Production of melatonin hormone initiates when the light around you fades out. BluBlockers will make the pineal gland in your body start releasing melatonin and you can improve your sleeping experience further by using a sleeping mask.
Wearing a sleeping mask will block the light entering into your eyes and thus the melatonin production will increase further.
The rising concentration of melatonin hormone in your body will take you through a deep sleep where you will find peace of both your body and the mind.
3. Do Not Stare at Things
To avoid any disturbances in your sleep, don’t stare at things like mobile and TV screens once you enter into your bed.
If you need to do so for some reason, reduce the brightness of the screen to its minimum level at which you could read things comfortably without any extra amount of light.
The bright light where keeps your nervous system active as a strong stimulus, it inhibits the production of melatonin too about which we have discussed earlier in this article.
It is a common practice that most people watch TV before going to bed. But watching TV or any movie closer to your bedtime isn’t a good idea.
To ensure that you fall asleep at your scheduled bedtime, you must keep an interval of at least half an hour between TV watching and the bedtime.
4. Take Manmade Melatonin
Sometimes your body fails in synthesizing the required amount of melatonin hormone and in such a scenario, even a BluBlocker is not going to help you in getting a peaceful sleep.
Manmade artificial melatonin is available at chemist shops across the globe and you can take a dose of this artificial melatonin to balance its level in your body.
Taking this kind of melatonin is safe and it does not give birth to any complications in ordinary situations.
Still you may consult your family doctor about this so he will guide you about the proper dosage of this artificial melatonin to get you a more comfortable sleep.
For some people, melatonin produces stronger results by getting them a very good sleep but for several others, its usage may not bring as strong results as we expect.
Research has shown that although melatonin shortens the duration for a person to fall asleep as well as it reduces the number of awakening instances in midnight but if the sleeping difficulty isn’t caused due to improper melatonin production in body, then taking this hormone externally does not help the person in treating the complexities.
Melatonin’s usage has been found safe in treating insomnia in different ages but its effectiveness in treating other sleeping disorders haven’t been documented yet.
More research is needed to understand melatonin’s usage and its results under certain circumstances.
If taking melatonin does not help you in improving your sleeping experience, then you must consult your doctor to talk further about the troubles you are facing with your sleep.
5. Expose Your Body to Light During the Day
We have already learned that the amount of melatonin regulates your sleep-wake cycle and this hormone’s increasing concentration in your body makes you feel sleepy.
Exposing your body to brightness in daytime helps you a lot in getting a peaceful sleep at night. When your body is exposed to the sunlight or brightness in daytime, it inhibits the formation of melatonin and thus you stay active all day.
To achieve this, allow as maximum light as you can into your office, at your home or at the work place. Use any light therapy boxes where necessary.
These tools produce artificial light similar to the sunlight and light up darker places where they are used.
In short days of winters, these light therapy boxes help the consumers a lot in illuminating their darker homes and work places to get the necessary amount of light their bodies need to perform activities optimally.
After staying active for the whole day, when you will adapt proper approaches to stimulate the formation of melatonin at night, it will take you through a peaceful journey of the sleep too quickly and you will be able to enjoy a very good sleep throughout the night.
6. Do You Smoke? Quit it
Smoking where leaves very disastrous impacts on your health in long run; it snatches the peaceful hours from your present too. If you smoke too often, then you can’t get a full and uninterrupted sleep.
A recent German case-control study explains that the smokers mostly have sleepless nights as compared to those who don’t smoke.
Although the actual relationship between smoking and the sleep mechanism hasn’t been understood fully yet but it is believed that this trouble is caused by the stimulant nicotine that is present in cigarette smoke.
So if your peace of the night is being sacrificed on a few minutes’ joyful and relaxing puffs of cigarette smoke, then you should quit it right away.
By saying goodbye to smoking forever, where you will save your health from the disastrous results of smoke like lung cancer and heart diseases, you will be able to find back your relaxing nights too.
SEE ALSO: How To Fall Asleep Easily At Night And Wake Up Refreshed Every Morning
7. Adjust Your Room’s Temperature
“Your bedroom is your sanctuary from the stresses of the day. Use your senses to create the best environment for sleep.”
These words at the official website of National Sleep Foundation speak a lot about the importance of a sleep-friendly environment in your bedroom.
In addition to several other factors, temperature of your surrounding plays an important role on your body’s physiological processes.
An optimal temperature of around 70°F (21°C) keeps your body’s state normal and you feel comfort at a temperature like this.
If your room’s temperature is either lower or higher than this optimal level, then you may consider adjusting it to get a peaceful sleep without any possible discomforts.
The logic behind an optimal temperature for getting a better sleep is that your body should not need to do any efforts to adjust its temperature according to the surroundings.
For example if your room is too cold, your body will start shivering and several metabolic activities will initiate in your body to generate the heat.
On the other hand, if your bedroom’s temperature is too high, then your body will try to get rid of the extra heat by producing sweat. Both of these circumstances are distractive for your mind and as a result, you will fail to fall asleep easily.
8. Avoid Noises
Unnecessary sounds around you distract your mind and you can’t fall asleep easily. To avoid distractions in the way of your peace, eliminate noises around you.
If you can’t eliminate them completely, try to avoid them by putting some kind of ear plugs over your ears or start playing some kind of soft music.
This will make you feel sleepy and you will be able to avoid the noises around you to get a better sleep.
Studies have shown that natural sounds like that of rainfall, gentle winds and several others don’t annoy us; instead they help us fall asleep easily. If possible, try to concentrate on the gentle wind blow outside your bedroom by keeping windows open at night or listen to the sweet sound of raindrops in a rainy day.
These sounds will bring you a peace of mind and the heart and they will help you in fall asleep in no time.
Natural sounds are peaceful, but when these sounds are produced artificially, they may annoy you a lot.
For example you can fall asleep easily by listening to the sound produced by raindrops, but when a similar sound (with a little higher intensity) is produced by the water drops dropping down from your bathroom tap, then this scenario will surely annoy you.
Studies have shown that in addition to distract your mind and keeping you awake, this kind of sound may make you feel the need to use the bathroom too.
To avoid any such instances, make it sure that unnecessary, artificial and disturbing noises don’t reach to your ears in your bedroom.
9. Buy a Luxury Bed
Your bed is the place where you spend some most peaceful hours of your life each day, so it should be as comfortable as possible. In ordinary life, we buy expensive cars and other things which are used occasionally or rarely by us.
So spending some good money in buying a luxury bed isn’t a bad investment at all as a more comfortable bed will make you sleep more comfortably.
Agreed with my idea? You must!
Go and buy a bed you find more comfortable than the one available in your bedroom right now and feel the difference between your sleeping experiences on the two beds.
While you spend almost 1/3rd of your life in bed, invest as much as you can in buying luxury bedding. Try to find pillows, mattresses and other material that is made from 100% cotton.
Thread count in the used material as well as fabric construction also contributes to the quality of the sheets, pillows and duvet covers. Pay your closest attention to recognize and find the best quality in them to get a comfortable bed which will get you a very peaceful sleep at the end.
10. Switch Off Your Room Lights
Light is a strong stimulus which disturbs your sleep in several different ways, so you should switch off all lights in your bedroom to get a comfortable sleep.
If you can’t eliminate all light in your room, try to minimize its intensity to the lowest possible level. In case you need some light around you, use low-intensity light sources.
You can find a good bedroom lamp to produce necessary light in your bedroom without disturbing your sleep.
If light is coming from outside, then try to block its way to your bedroom. In case you can’t block it for some reason, use some sort of sleeping masks to make your eyes feel darkness around you. We have talked about sleeping masks already in previous paragraphs.
It is advised to not turn on lights when you wake up middle of the night.
Even if you need to go to the bathroom, still use a low intensity light, otherwise the strong light will suddenly lower down melatonin level in your body and your nervous system will get active again resulting in a disturbed sleep.
By using low intensity light when needed, you can resume your sleep easily.
11. Get a Bigger Bed if You Share it With Someone
So are you sleeping with your life partner (1), with your baby or someone else? Get a bigger bed to increase the distance between you and the other person.
Keeping a considerable distance between the two bodies will keep the temperature lower and you will be able to get a better sleep.
Keeping a considerable distance between the two bodies assists a peaceful sleep in several ways. Firstly, when you sleep apart by keeping a good distance to the other person, his physical movements will not disturb you.
Secondly, the radiation of the other body will not make you feel warm. Both of these reasons encourage a better sleep than the scenario where you will be lying down just next to the person who is sharing the bed with you.
So use a wider bed, keep some distance between you and the other person and have a good, undisturbed sleep.
12. Avoid Alcohol Before Bed Time:
It isn’t a good idea to drink alcohol before bedtime as it will disrupt your sleep badly in late night hours.
Although you will be able to fall asleep easily soon after drinking alcohol in evening; but the heavy metabolism of alcohol in your body in next few hours will disturb your sleep strongly.
For example if you drink alcohol and fall asleep around 10 P.M, chances are that you will wake up around 2 or 3 A.M and then you will fail to fall asleep again.
Sounds too harsh, right?
Yes it is extremely annoying when your sleep is disturbed in middle. To avoid any such disturbances, you should not drink alcohol before you go into your bed.
13. Find the Most Comfortable Position to Sleep
Your body position in bed always plays a major role in getting you a comfortable sleep. If you haven’t noticed the best position of your body yet to get an undisturbed sleep, then start experimenting now.
Find out the best position you are feeling most comfortable with and then adapt it in your bed to fall asleep quickly.
Research has shown that sleeping on back is the best position for most persons but if you snore, then this position isn’t recommended for you.
The persons who snore don’t feel comfort while sleeping on their back as the instances of snoring further increase with this sleeping position. In such an instance, you can try side sleeping.
According to doctors, sleeping on left side in pregnancy is the best for both mom and the baby’s health as this position improves the circulation of blood towards heart.
As the position of sleeping plays an important role in getting a comfortable sleep, start experimenting now and find the best position you feel most comfort with.
This will help you a lot in getting a peaceful sleep in case you are struggling hard to avoid discomforts in your bed.
SEE ALSO: 15 Reasons Why You Can’t Sleep At Night [And Solutions To Fix Them]
14. Do Not Watch the Time
Watching time in middle of night sometimes stress you up and you cannot get a good sleep.
For example if you need to get up early in the morning, say at 5:00 A.M, then watching the time at 3:00 A.M (in case you wake up for some reason) wont going to let you fall asleep again. It will stress you up by letting you know that you have to wake up after just two hours.
Instead watching at the clock just set an alarm. Forget about the time to wake up until it reaches and get up when the alarm alerts you.
By doing so, you can get an uninterrupted rest even if you have just a few hours to sleep.
15. Get it Scheduled
Getting organized helps us doing all kinds of things perfectly in our lives and the same is applicable with our sleep. You must set a specific time for your bedtime to ensure that you get your full sleep each day.
Several smartphone apps and online services are there which can help you in managing time for your bedtime.
For example Google Calendars (2) notify you about the events right on your smartphone via their application.
Simply set your bedtime in your Google Calendar and you will be sent a notification on your smartphone 30 minutes prior the set hours of your bedtime notifying you that you have to sleep in next 30 minutes, so round up all kinds of activities to get relaxed.
Scheduling hours like this for your sleeping time will always ensure that you don’t stay awake in extra hours, thus you will be able to get a full sleep each day.
16. Avoid Exercise Before Bedtime
Research has shown that hard workouts before bedtime lead to insomnia in some cases.
Dr. Stuart Quan, a sleep medicine professor at Harvard Medical School, has explained in a CNN report that late-night workout increases the metabolic activities in human body, rises up the body temperature, increases the level of adrenalin hormone and it also increases the brain activities.
All these make it difficult for the person to fall asleep easily who has done a hard workout just an hour or two before his bedtime.
Adrenalin hormone is responsible for body alertness thus the increased levels of this hormone prove to be a hurdle in sleep in case you do a workout before going to the bed.
It is advised that you must keep a period of at least three to four hours between your workout and the bedtime to ensure that the workout does not put your sleep in trouble.
Alternatively, exercise in morning or evening on a regular basis makes you sleep better at night.
Studies have shown that people who spend a couple of minutes each day in any kind of exercise get a good night’s sleep as compared to the ones who don’t do any such workouts.
So instead doing workouts just an hour or two before your bedtime, get it scheduled at evening or morning sessions and you will be able to sleep well.
17. Keep Your Bedroom Clean
In a cleaner bedroom, you will get a better sleep as compared to the one that is dirty or unorganized. Both your room’s environment and the bed need to be clean to get you a perfect peace.
Always try to keep things organized in your bedroom. Keep the room clean. Also consider making the bed each day before going into the bed instead using the same making for multiple days.
Moreover, consider washing your bed sheets and other material on a regular basis; at least once in a week. These practices will leave a strong impact on you psychologically as well as physiologically and you will be able to enjoy a better sleep each night.
So these were the 17 proven ways to get a better sleep.
If you are unable to enjoy a peaceful sleep for some reason, then these practices will surely bring you a full and uninterrupted sleep.
I hope that my suggestions will help you in getting relaxed in your bed.
