Quality Sleep
Posted by Canadian health care on June 9th, 2009
By focusing on quality sleep, it is possible to sleep less and increase your energy. It’s not the quantity that counts, it’s the quality of sleep that is important. It’s easy to improve your sleeping habits, here are seven simple steps to improve your sleep.
Optimize your sleeping environment.
Your bedroom should be pitch dark when you sleep. As well as cool and quiet, although you may not be able to completely control these things. Also make sure that your mattress and pillow are comfortable.
Teach your brain that the bed is for sleeping.
Don’t read or watch television in bed. If you are not going to sleep, stay out of your bed. Your brain should know that when you go to bed, it’s for sleeping. This means that your body automatically starts to relax when you go to bed. (The only exception to this rule should be sex)
Do not drink coffee, Coca-cola or alcohol late in the evening.
Caffeine makes it more difficult to fall asleep. It is the same problem with smoking, nicotine will make just make it harder to fall asleep. While alcohol may help you fall asleep it will prevent you from getting the deep quality sleep you need.
No heavy meals just before going to bed.
If you eat a lot just before bedtime your body will be busy digesting the food which will prevent you from getting quality sleep. Eating heavy meals in the evening is also an unhealthy habit.
Go to bed only when you are tired.
Forget about ‘I’d better go to bed now, it is time to sleep.’ If you are not tired, you will not fall asleep. Do not worry if you are getting to bed later than normal. It could mean that you don’t need to sleep as much as you have been doing in the past.
Teach yourself to get out of bed when you wake up.
When you wake up in the morning, get out of bed. Don’t stay in bed half sleeping, it will only drain your energy. Make it a habit to get up at once when you wake up, it takes some effort the first couple of mornings but you’ll soon get used to it.
Regular physical exercise!
It has been scientifically proven that exercise improves your sleep. Avoid heavy training in the evening, your body needs time to cool down. Needless to say, regular exercise does improve much more than your sleep.
Once you have established good sleeping habits, you can try to cut down on your sleep. Many people find that they can sleep less and have more energy. But everyone has his or her own sleeping pattern, so you need to experiment to find out what suits you. If you sleep one hour less per night, you get seven extra hours every week. So it is well worth trying to optimize your sleep.