A healthy sleep at night is as essential as a healthy diet and regular exercise. Our behavior during the day and before going to bed impacts our healthy sleep. Most of the time, because of any stress and unexpected life challenges, you may not be able to get or maintain your healthy sleeping habits. According to studies, it is proven that if your sleeping habits are not good, then it will negatively affect your hormones, brain function, and exercise performance. Because of not properly sleeping at night, you may gain weight and increase disease risk in your body. Some people do not get proper sleep and restless nights if there are any changes in their daily life schedule.
Healthy sleep means good sleep habits that can increase your ability to stay asleep and fall asleep. Excellent and healthy sleep helps you to exercise correctly, stay healthy, and eat less. If you face an unhealthy sleeping problem and want to improve healthy sleep, follow these below-mentioned tips to maintain healthy sleeping habits.
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Pay Attention To What You Drink And Eat
To sleep properly at night, you should never go to bed without having your meal or some healthy diet. No doubt, before sleeping, you need not go to bed hungry, eat something but never take large and heavy meals before a couple of hours to go to bed for sleep. Along with meals, also give attention to the drink you are taking before going to bed. Try to avoid drinking caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol before going to bed because they need several hours to wear off, and these also affect your quality of sleep badly.
Crafting A Pre-Bed Routine
Craft a routine where you can do only easy transition or relaxing activities. Do relaxing activities like: read books, doing relaxation exercises, taking a bath, and watching television. These pre-bed routine activities will help you get to sleep fast. Avoid doing stressful activities and discussing emotional activities before going to sleep because it causes stress hormone imbalance and increases alertness. If you want to go to bed without keeping your problems in your mind, just take a journal and pen, write them down, and put them aside. It will help you to sleep properly without any stress.
Create A Relaxing And Inducing Environment
To create a relaxing environment where you sleep, keep the room dark, quiet, and calm. For creating or maintaining the peaceful environment around you:
- Lower down the volume of outside noise with white noise appliances or earplugs.
- Avoid light-emitting screens before going to bed.
- Use blackout shades, heavy curtains, keep the room temperature cool and comfortable, use an eye mask to block light, and equip your bed with comfortable pillows and a mattress.
And one more thing, to create a relaxing and sleeping environment in your room, always keep your work material, computers, and televisions outside your room.
Increase Bright Light Exposure In The Daytime
We have a natural time-keeping clock in our body known as circadian rhythm. This helps us stay awake and tell our body the time to sleep, and it also affects our hormones, brain, and body. The bright light and sunlight exposure in the daytime keep circadian rhythm to stay healthy, improve your daytime energy, and help get quality and entire duration sleep at night time. For the people who face the problem of insomnia, the bright light exposure in the daytime helps them take or improve their quality of sleep. Most research proves that bright light exposure increases your sleep even if you experience average sleep.
Reduce Long Daytime Naps
No doubt, short naps in the daytime are beneficial for you, but irregular or long naps can affect your healthy night’s sleep. Sleeping long in the day puzzles your internal clock. According to studies, it is proven that 30 minutes of naps in the daytime is enough to enhance your brain function, but if you sleep more than 30 minutes, then it harms your quality and healthy sleep. However, if you get naps regularly in the daytime of the exact timing, you do not experience any disruption in night sleep. But remember that if you change your daytime naps scheduled for one day, it will indeed affect your night sleep on that day because your body is habitual for your daily routine.
Stick To A Sleep Schedule
Set your sleep schedule eight hours a day, not more than that. Because according to doctors, eight hours of sleep is healthy sleep for adults. Always try to go to your bed and get up from there at the same time every day. If you are going to parties on weekend nights, try not to make a big difference in your sleep schedule.
If you want to make a difference on weekends and weeknights, do not make more than one hour because changes in the sleep schedule create problems for you to get healthy sleep. If you are going to bed and not falling asleep within 20 minutes, wake up and do some reading or listen to soft music. And when you feel tired, try to sleep again.
Include Physical Activities In Your Daily Routine
Try to include regular physical activities in your schedule because it will help you to improve your healthy sleep. Spending every day outside and doing challenging activities might be helpful. Exercise helps reduce night wakefulness by 30%, anxiety by 15%, and time to fall asleep by 55%, and improve sleep time by 18%. Exercising early in the morning or early evening helps to promote good sleep. Still, if you do exercise too late, it will cause sleep problems. This happens because exercise increases hormones such as adrenaline, epinephrine, and alertness.
Do Not Drink Alcohol
Having alcohol at night can affect your sleep and hormones negatively. Alcohol is famous for increasing or causing snoring, disrupted sleep patterns, sleep apnea, and increased nighttime melatonin production. In addition, studies have proven that alcohol consumption at night reduces the natural nighttime altitude in human growth hormones, which play a crucial role in circadian rhythm.
Conclusion
Nowadays, most people face the problem of not getting a healthy sleep at night or not maintaining healthy sleep habits because of stress, unexpected happenings, changes in daily life schedule, etc. We mention some tips that help you to maintain your sleep habits correctly. But if you are facing trouble sleeping even after doing those tips, we recommend you consult with your doctor; he will help you know about the problem and treat it well.
