Are you getting optimal sleep at night? Struggle with staring at the ceiling, or waking up your spouse with the night light and fingers crinkling pages of a book, magazine, or newspaper--or worse yet illuminating the room in an eery glow with the screen of your mobile phone or tablet?
A good night's sleep is critical for personal health, productivity, and overall happiness. But what are the key ingredients to ensuring your catch the optimal amount of Zs?
1. Reduce caffeine: Seems simple enough--till you decide to finish up a early movie with a meet up at Starbucks; or you're tired from the night before and are staring down the barrel of work you just have to complete that night for which you need another double espresso. Either way, you need to quell your caffeine intake to ensure a good night's sleep. A friend of mine in Milan was able to knock back a double espresso (extra-forte) at 12am--but he was an anomaly.
2. Ban the nightcap: Some claim that alcohol is a good thing to go to bed on; but while it may relax you to sleep, it almost always leads to a rocky sleep of waking moments and attempts to get lapse back into soporific unconsciousness. You'll sleep better when you put a cap on the night-cap to several hours before going to bed.
3. Exercise: Regular exercise will get your body tired enough to demand sleep. And while your mind may be fired up from work or all the media you've gorged yourself on, when you hit the covers, your body will feel pressed firmly into the mattress--it'll beg for sleep.
4. A boring book: Reading before bed is a great way to fall asleep, but you must choose the right kind: One that has just enough intrigue to keep you interested, but with more than enough detail to bore you to sleep. Some have sworn by Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, while others Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
5. Cut screen time: There are countless studies out there showing how the screens of our phones, tablets, and laptops mess with our sleep patterns. If you can't sleep, read a book or magazine rather than your computer or phone. And don't read things that will stimulate you like macabre news stories or recent posts on Facebook that prove to increase feelings of envy. You want to leave a good hour or so before bed of non-screen time activity.
6. Write down thoughts and worries: Often it's our worries that keep us up at night: finances, job decisions, children's issues, etc; and usually all we need to do is acknowledge them and let them go. One way to do this is keep a notebook or pad of paper at your bed table, and before going to bed write down what's on your mind. It doesn't have to be grammatically correct; it doesn't have to be 'good' writing that your English Prof would approve of--it just needs to be effective enough for your thoughts to get down on the page. Usually the act of writing will also wear you out enough to want to dash between the sheets.
There are myriad ways to improve your sleep. If sleep is an issue for you, make it a habit to research and try out different ways of and routines for sleeping. The famous novelist, Mark Twain, was obsessed with all the different soporifics that would ensure a good night sleep (he was a rampant insomniac): once it was a certain kind of beer, at other times a type of champagne, at others it was a specific time of night, and another was even sleeping on the bathroom floor--finally he resolved to sleeping in his own bed at around 10pm, which proved to be the most effective.
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