Four tips for better sleep

Four tips for better sleep

In addition to back pain and problems in the neck and shoulders, poor quality of sleep is one of the things that significantly affect our wellbeing. Some of us find it difficult to fall asleep in the evening, and others fall asleep easily but wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep. Why is sleep important for our wellbeing? How can you improve the quality of your sleep? These are the things we will look at next.

Why do we need sleep?

We have billions of cells in our bodies and brains, which need to rest from time to time to be able to maintain their optimal functions. Lack of rest makes the cells tired and weakens their activity. The better we sleep, the more effective the body is in performing daily tasks. We also need sleep for both our physical and mental health:
With sleep
-the body and mind are refreshed
-we recover from the efforts taken during the day
-energy stores are replenished
-muscles and the nervous system get to rest

Sleep deprivation causes, for example, tiredness, loss of focus and motor skills, lowers immunity, and in the worst case, causes fatigue. And did you know staying up for 24 hours has effects that are equal to those caused by a 1 per mille blood alcohol content?
How much sleep we need is, of course, unique to each individual – someone can be fine with 7 hours of sleep and others might need an hour more. The real problems start to form when the amount of sleep is consistently too low. How many hours you use on sleep is in your own hands, but in addition quality of sleep plays a significant role. Even if you sleep for nine hours, if the quality of sleep is poor, you won’t feel refreshed when you wake up. Next, I will give you four tips which can help you improve the quality of your sleep.

Take care of the basics
You might have read about different ways that people use to try to affect the quality of sleep.
Unfortunately, none of these great tricks will be useful if the basic things are all wrong. If you want to increase the amount of deep sleep you get, focus on taking care of the following basic things first.
After this, we can think about additional tricks like supplements and different “sleep drinks”.

A regular bedtime
The first thing you should take care of is a regular bedtime. Deep sleep generally takes place
according to the sun’s cycles, so around 10 pm-2 am. If we go to sleep after midnight, we have lost two hours of deep sleep already. You should also note that the transition to deep sleep doesn’t happen instantly and normally takes around an hour. So a person who goes to sleep after midnight can kiss deep sleep goodbye. The recommended bedtime is before 11pm but preferably already by 10 pm so you can make sure you get enough deep sleep during the night.

No blue light
Our brains are constantly receiving information about our surroundings. Everything we watch on television, on the phone screen or computer drives the processing in our brains. Thoughts work the same way. Sometimes you might overeat until you feel too full, but did you know that the same applies to information? Even though the information doesn’t affect our stomachs, we can cause a similar state for our brains with too much information.
It doesn’t matter if the information we get is negative or positive, because the brains handle both the same way. There are still some small differences between different types of information: electronic information like watching television makes us more exhausted than, for example, reading a book. This is why it’s good to avoid blue light one hour before bedtime and do something relaxing instead.

Try following these instructions before going to bed and see what effect they have:
1. Switch off all devices an hour before bedtime (avoid blue light)
2. Instead of watching TV and surfing online, read books or magazines
3. Do relaxation exercises
4. Practice active recovery. You can actually use any activity that you feel is relaxing. Some
might like to go to the sauna and others stretching.

A light snack in the evening
Have a light evening snack an hour before going to bed. Avoid heavy meals just before bedtime as they keep your digestion active for a long time. A light evening snack, on the other hand, has time to move on from the stomach before you go to sleep. We are all individuals, and there are small differences in what macronutrients we need, but everyone should get some good fats and a small amount of protein before going to sleep.

Physical activity
I’m sure you have sometimes trained late in the evening and falling asleep has felt like a lot of work, because the body is still active after the training. If the day has been very active and physically stressful, and we engage in high-intensity training at nine in the evening, this has a negative effect on deep sleep. In the ideal situation, you should stop any physical activity at least three hours before going to sleep. If this isn’t possible, I recommend making the required changes to your training program so you can recover and improve more.

Remember, if you neglect sleep, you won’t be able to make progress in your training in an optimal way.

The opposite of physical activity – the lack of physical activity – is not optimal either. If during the day you haven’t done anything physical, that the body needs to recover from, getting any deep sleep will be difficult.

In terms of physical activity, it’s important to find a balance that helps us to sleep better.

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