How to Get a Good Night's Sleep

How Sleep Deprivation Affects Your Brain

While you sleep, your body goes through several different stages of sleep. One of these stages is called Rapid Eye Movement, or REM sleep. This is the stage in which you dream. During sleep deprivation, the amount of time spent in REM sleep decreases, but the amount of time spent in another stage called slow-wave sleep, or SWS, stays the same. What this means is that your brain never gets to complete the process of forgetting the day, and therefore doesn’t get the chance to process the information from the day, or learn new information. Sleep deprivation also affects your mood. It can cause irritability, increased anxiety, and a decrease in decision-making ability. Sleep deprivation also affects your ability to focus and pay attention.

7 Tips to Help You Fall Asleep Faster and Stay Asleep

These tips are geared towards people who are experiencing sleep troubles. If you feel like you’re having trouble falling asleep, try these tips so that you can fall asleep faster. If you feel like you’re waking up too often during the night and not getting enough sleep, try these tips to help you stay asleep.

- Make a Bedtime Routine: Your body loves consistency, so if you want to get better sleep try establishing a bedtime routine. Your bedtime routine can include things like putting away your phone, reading, or listening to calming music.

- Get Some Sun: Getting some sun during the day can help you fall asleep better at night. A study found that people who got at least 30 minutes of sunlight during the day are able to sleep around 20 minutes more than people who didn’t receive sun.

- Take a Cold Shower: Taking a cold shower can help you fall asleep better at night. A study found that people who took cold showers fell asleep around five minutes faster than people who took warm showers.

- Eat Your Last Meal Earlier: Eating your last meal earlier in the day can help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. A study found that people who ate their last meal three hours before bedtime fell asleep around 20 minutes faster than people who ate their last meal six hours before bedtime.

- Turn Off Your Blue Light: Spending a lot of time looking at blue light from your phone or computer late at night can make it harder for you to fall asleep. Turn off your blue light two hours before you go to bed.

Stay in Bed

When you’re sleep deprived, it can be really hard to stay in bed. You might want to get up to do things so that you can get more done. It’s important to stay in bed. You don’t want to waste the dark hours of the night because once you start to fall asleep your body goes into different sleep stages. The longer you stay in bed, the more sleep stages your body completes, and the more sleep you get. Try to stay in bed even if you have a lot on your mind. If an idea pops into your head, write it down so that you can revisit it later.

Set Morning Alertness Behavioural Intentions

If you have trouble falling asleep, you might be tempted to take medication. However, there are other things you can do that are much better. If you have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep, try setting an alertness behavioural intention. You can do this by writing down a specific behavioural intention that you want to keep in mind to help yourself fall asleep. For example, you could write, “I want to stay in bed and fall asleep as quickly as possible.”

Exercise Helps TREMENDOUSLY

Exercising during the day can help you sleep better at night. It can help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and sleep more deeply. Plus, exercising during the day releases endorphins, which can help calm you down and make you feel less stressed. Exercising at night, however, can make it harder to fall asleep because you’ll likely be more energized at that time, which is the opposite of what you want when you’re trying to fall asleep. So make sure that you exercise during the day and not at night.

Conclusion

Sleep is an important part of our health, and when we’re sleep deprived it can affect our ability to function and thrive. Getting enough sleep can help you stay calm and focused, improve your mood, and lower your risk for certain diseases. There are many things you can do to help improve your sleep. These include creating a bedtime routine, making sure your bedroom environment is conducive to sleeping, avoiding stimulants before bed, avoiding blue light at night, and exercising during the day. With these things in mind, you can have better sleep.