Getting a good night’s sleep is essential to our overall health and wellbeing. Too many of us aren’t ensuring that we maintain good sleeping habits and are paying a price for it. Here are some simple life hacks anyone can use to improve the quality of their sleep.
Try Some Sleep Aids
If you aren’t getting enough sleep or your sleep is low quality, there is a plethora of sleep aids out there. Many of these are designed to help you breathe while you’re asleep, while others are designed to prevent light or sound from disturbing you. If your problem is with excessive snoring, you should give these a try.
Set a Sleep Schedule
This is perhaps the most important thing you can do to improve your sleep and it’s the simplest hack of all. You should be aiming to get around eight hours sleep every night, and you should be trying to go to sleep and wake up at roughly the same time each day. If you do this, your body will fall into a natural rhythm of preparing for sleep and waking up at the same every day.
Developing a natural rhythm means that you will have an easier time getting off to sleep and will find it much easier to wake up in the morning too. There is no other hack that can replicate the power of a sleep schedule. However, in order to unlock the full potential of this technique, you will need to experiment until you find the times that work best for you.
Create a Sleeping Environment
Your bedroom should ideally be mainly used for sleeping. Try to avoid the temptation to have your laptop with you so you can work in bed. Not only does using your laptop at night hurt your sleep (more on that later) but you will be introducing stress into a space that is supposed to be all about relaxing.
There are a number of things you can do to make your room a better sleeping environment. First and foremost, make sure that your bed is physically comfortable. A sub-par or uncomfortable bed will make it much harder to get to sleep at night and will lower the quality of your sleep.
If you have a television or any other electronic devices in your room, ask yourself if they really need to be there. If you don’t need electronics in your room, don’t waste space on them. They will only provide a distraction when you are trying to sleep.
Choose Background Noise Carefully
Some people are convinced that they will be unable to sleep without some kind of background noise. Many of us find that when we turn out the lights that’s when our minds decide to start racing over the day’s events. Even when our thoughts aren’t particularly stressful, they can still make it difficult to get to sleep.
Having some noise in the background can definitely help with a good night’s sleep, but there are some caveats. First of all, if your background noise is being made by a TV or laptop with a bright display, that’s a no. Any artificial light in your room at night will make it harder to sleep.
Ambient music and sound effects are the best choices for getting to sleep, but music is fine as well. Just make sure you have something you can set playing and then leave without having to keep checking it.
Use Blue Light Filters
Our smartphones and other electronic devices keep us from getting proper rest because they emit light at the same frequency as the natural sunlight that tells our body it’s daytime and time to be awake. There are particular frequencies of blue light that trigger a wakeful response in us and can interfere with the physical processes our body uses to prepare us for sleep in the evenings.
Most smartphones and tablets today offer blue light filters. These will automatically tint your display color to be more red in the evenings, and therefore easier on your eyes.
Once you have worked out the right sleep routine for you, you should find it completely changes your outlook on life. Getting the right amount of sleep is vital to our emotional and physical health; the above are just some of the ways you can enhance your sleeping experience.
A professional writer with over a decade of incessant writing skills. Her topics of interest and expertise range from health, nutrition and psychology.