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Tips on getting a good night’s sleep

Getting a good night’s sleep can be a luxury to most people: a new mom who needs to get up a couple of times a night to feed the baby, a struggling student who needs to pull an all-nighter to study for an exam or a call center agent working on the night shift.

But there are things you can do to make sure that when you do have the time to sleep, you’ll get the most out of it.
It all has to do with these three factors:

1. What you do before you sleep
2. Where you sleep in
3. What surrounds you when you sleep

Keep these three factors in check so you can get the most benefits from getting good sleep.

What you do before you sleep

• Eat at least 4 hours before you sleep. This ensures that your body will have time to digest the food you ate before you go to bed. If you eat too close to bed time, your digestive system will be working overtime too. If you really, really feel hungry then just take a light snack to ease the hunger. It is said that food with tryptophan like milk, honey, egg whites and tuna can help you sleep better. Of course, avoid alcohol and cofee.
• Avoid watching the late news or violent movies. If you’re the type of person who begins and ends your day watching the news, don’t be surprised if you have a bad day and an even worse sleep. More often than not, news is mostly bad. And you tend to carry all those negative vibes with you long after you watch them. Sames goes with violent or scary movies. If your “get to sleep” technique is to watch TV, then at least have a feel-good happy movie on. That way, you’ll have positive vibes when you sleep until you wake up the next day.
• Read an inspiring book. Reading is also a great way to make yourself get into sleep mode. But just like the tip above, keep your books in the inspirational, positive and happy category. If you’re into affirmations, say them out loud or read them before you sleep and let your mind soak in all that positive goodness.
• Journal. This is my favorite go to sleep technique because I get to dump all the thoughts of the day in my journal and just release them completely. Sometimes, our overactive thoughts keep us awake in the night and journaling can help to avoid that. When you write in your journal, make sure to add a thank you list for the day too.
• Go to the bathroom and “empty your cares.” This would help to avoid sleep interruptions caused by bathroom breaks.

Where you sleep in

• Keep the room dark. Dark surroundings send signals to the body that it’s time to sleep. This is a must especially for shift workers who need to sleep at day time. Put blinds or heavy curtains on the windows to make sure that light coming from the outside is completely blocked. If you’re afraid of the dark, get a soft night light that is soothing to the eyes.
• Regulate the room temperature. Too cold and you’ll be kept awake shivering, too warm and you’ll spend all night sweating. So strike a balance and measure what temperature suits your body and meets your comfort.
• Get a comfortable bed. If you have cash to spare invest it in a luxury mattress. These mattresses have special coil springs that makes the mattress conform to the contour of your body. This helps you to sleep comfortably and to maintain good posture too. Click here for selections of an afforable luxury mattress.

Your sleeping surroundings

• Play some soothing music. Some people find it easier to sleep when there’s soothing music played in the background. Some also resort to White Noise which many find calming. White Noise gathers all the sound frequencies together to produce a pleasant sound that blocks off other disturbing sounds in your surroundings.
  
  
• Get a sleep-friendly alarm clock. Ever been jolted awake by the shrill ring of an alarm clock? I guess we all agree that it’s more dizzying than energizing. Get an alarm clock that has a pleasant ring to it. Come to think of it, if you get good sleep, you will just wake up automatically and you can ditch your alarm clock altogether.

Any effective sleep tips?

Posted in: Miscellany

Tags: sleep

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.