The new year is the best time to make changes to your life, you can start the year with a clean slate and work on improving yourself and your habits. One area where people commonly look to improve is sleep, studies have shown that most people do not get enough sleep as they should be, which leads to a sizable portion of people always feeling tired and worn out as they haven’t had enough sleep.
There are a wide range of reasons why you may not be getting enough sleep at night, so today we’ll be looking at a few of the common causes of a bad night’s sleep and look at ways you combat this and improve your sleeping habits, to help you live a more fulfilling life with more energy and enthusiasm.
Use Relaxation Techniques Before Bed
Studies have shown that one of the biggest contributors to poor sleep is stress, with heightened stress levels you will find it hard to sleep and find yourself having restless nights tossing and turning. Where possible, the best solution is to remove stress from your life, but that’s not always possible.
So, if stress is keeping you up at night and you’re not in a position to remove your stressors from your life, you should try practicing relaxation techniques to help lower your stress level and get in the right mindset to easily fall asleep. When it comes to relaxing before bed, meditation has been shown to help with sleep issues, so spending 10 minutes to half an hour before bed meditating in a relaxed state will help improve your sleeping.
Hide Away Electronic Devices
If you find yourself using electronic devices like a mobile phone or laptop before bed, you’ll notice that it takes a bit longer than usual to fall asleep. This is because electronic screens emit something called ‘blue light’ which tricks your brain into thinking that it is still daytime and delays the processes your body goes through in order to sleep.
Luckily, there is a simple solution to this issue, don’t use electronic devices in the run up to your bed time. Blue light exposure can delay your sleep by u[p to an hour. So, if you put your devices away around an hour before you intend to go to bed, you’ll find that falling asleep is a much easier affair!
Keep To A Sleep Schedule
If you don’t have a usual bed time and go to sleep and wake up erratically, you’ll notice that you find it much harder to sleep. Human beings love structure, our internal clock and body processes start to line up with schedules when repeated, so if you’re sleeping erratically, it will be harder to fall asleep as your internal clock is essentially not calibrated.
By adding more structure to your sleeping habits, you’ll find it a lot easier to both fall asleep and wake up as your body now has a schedule to follow. You should try make sure that you go to bed and wake up roughly the same time every day. The occasional late night or lay in shouldn’t be an issue, but by keeping to your schedule, your sleep will be significantly improved.
Keep Your Bedroom Dark
Another thing that can cause sleep issues is light pollution from outside, light from streetlamps or passing cars can disrupt sleep, make it harder to fall asleep and even wake you up during your sleep.
This is a rather modern problem, but luckily there is a solution for it, if you remove your bedroom’s curtains and replace them with a new roller blind made with a blackout fabric, you can keep light from leaking into your bedroom, which will create a much better environment for you to fall asleep in and stop light pollution from waking you during the night.
