Quick Day-Time Tips For a Better Night’s Sleep
Start in the morning
The best things to do as soon as you wake up are drinking water and exposing your eyes to sunlight. While water won’t really affect your sleep that night it’s too important not to mention. You only lose water while you sleep through breathing and sweat so it’s important to replenish the water you’ve lost which you will need to function properly throughout the day.
Sunlight after you wake up really helps your brain and body sync up your circadian rhythm more effectively. Your eyes have been experiencing mostly darkness until now, and this large boost of bright light signals to your brain that it is in fact daytime! This is a simple but often overlooked tool. Most people stay inside and use their phones and house lights, but the amount of lux, or amount of light, that you get from being outside with the sun is many times more than these other sources. You do NOT need to look at the sun or near the sun, there is so much light being reflected off everything you see, simply being outside is enough. Since you have a 24 hour clock of hormones and brain chemicals running, this is an important signal to keep everything in sync. This tip alone will make it easier to fall asleep at your desired time. Get outside in the morning! You only need about 10-15 minutes to be effective. I myself like to drink water outside, walk around, stretching can help wake you up even more, exercise, meditate etc.
Exercise
Exercising is critically important for many aspects of life with many benefits to gain, from hormone balance to brain health, not to mention a healthier body. Another great benefit is that working our bodies during the day can make it easier to fall asleep at night, and provide us with more deep sleep. Deep sleep is where our muscles rebuild and many other critical restorative processes occur. If we have more muscles that need rebuilding from a hard workout, it makes sense that we would stay in these stages longer.
The ideal times to workout are going to be in the morning, lunch, or early afternoon. Working out closer to bed time pumps your body up a bit too much and can actually prevent you from falling asleep easily.
Food and drink
In general it is best to avoid any food or drink in the approaching hours leading to bedtime. This is because you don’t want your body and brain to have to spend energy digesting food or drink while it is supposed to be deep in sleep. This is especially true of foods that are hard to digest, can cause inflammation, or acid reflux.
- Midnight snack – Avoid
- No food 1 hour before bed – Good start
- 2 hours of no food – Better
- 3-4 hours no food – Best!!
Lets go ahead an talk about an obvious culprit: caffeine. I’m a huge fan of coffee and drink it pretty much everyday. But what most people don’t know is that coffee can stay in your system for up to 7-10 hours after consumption. This means that at the latest I will finish my last cup around 3-4pm. Caffeine is one of those things that affects everyone a little differently so it’s important to experiment yourself to determine just how much it can affect your sleep.
Alcohol is another notorious nighttime beverage. While it can certainly help you fall asleep quickly, it unfortunately prevents you from really getting those crucial sleep stages. This is because your digestive system and liver and brain have to process the alcohol instead of lying dormant and recovering.
The last tip in this section will be about types of food. Consuming protein actually raises our alertness levels, so it’s best to eat protein in the morning or for lunch. Carbohydrates on the other hand can promote sleepiness so I like to have a carb rich dinner to help me fall asleep that night. Highly recommend NOT eating any type of sugar in the two or three hours leading to bed as it will almost certainly disrupt your sleep.
Misc
Some people love napping and they can be a great tool for learning. For others napping can make it harder to fall asleep when they are ready for bed. You need to experiment for yourself to determine if naps will be right for you. Naps later in the day are more likely going to affect your ability to sleep than naps say before lunch or right after. You cannot “catch up” on sleep so do not nap for this reason. Personally, the only reason I would ever take a nap is to increase my ability to remember what I have just been learning or performing.
The last tip is about managing stress and concerns for the next day. Stress causes an increase in cortisol which is a hormone designed to wake us up from sleeping, among many other things. We get a large burst of cortisol in the mornings to help wake us up and keep us awake. This is a very important event to help our bodies continue with circadian related functions. If we are chronically stressed or experiencing stress near bed time our body is going to have a lot of cortisol. This can prevent us from falling asleep, getting deep sleep, and staying asleep. Anything we can do to lower our stress will not only increase our sleep quality but will also improve our quality of living in many other areas (blood pressure is an obvious example). In a similar way we don’t want to pump our bodies up too much before bed by watching an intense movie or video game.
