What is sleep hygiene?
Sleep hygiene is a series of behavioral habits that allow us to conciliate and maintain restful sleep. Like many of the induced activities that we do throughout the day, falling asleep requires guidelines to achieve the optimal level of activation, or “deactivation” of the nervous system, or what is the same, we need to prepare our body and mind to sleep.
1. Take care of the environment in which you sleep
In order to fall asleep, we need the environment to be conducive to it. Sleeping with background noise, with cold or heat, with lighting, will not help us. Prepare your room properly to sleep. Don’t turn on the TV, minimize noise, put on comfortable clothes, and keep the room at a comfortable temperature.
Use the bed to sleep. When we use the bed for activities other than sleep, if we study, watch TV, eat or do any other activity in bed, what we are doing is establishing a connection between the activity and the bed. That is, the bed becomes an activating stimulus and therefore when you lie down your nervous system will tend to activate.
2. Ritualize your rest
Before going to bed, you can do a series of activities that will help you fall asleep. You can read something light (other than in bed), take a shower, have a hot drink. These activities induce relaxation so that sleep will appear more quickly.
Many of us can make the mistake of crawling into bed while we are still activated by not giving our bodies enough time to “slow down.” What we achieve is that, until this happens, we toss and turn in bed anxious about not being able to sleep, and with this we manage to activate our nervous system more, creating a circle of anxiety-activation-insomnia. Therefore it is important to establish a transition activity between activation and sleep.
3. Watch what you eat
What we carry on our stomachs to bed will also have an effect on sleep. Large meals will make our body have to work at night to digest food. If we take into account that during sleep the metabolism slows down. Forcing the body to digest is overexposing it to metabolic activity.
On the other hand, going to bed hungry will not allow us to rest either. Therefore, light but satisfying meal is the best way to help the body naturally decrease metabolic rate.
4. Outside stimulants
As we have been saying, a fundamental activity to be able to fall asleep is to reduce the excitement of the nervous system. When we take stimulants what we achieve is to increase this excitement. Do not take stimulants after mid-afternoon, avoid drinking coffee, tea, energy drinks, and stimulants.
5. Avoid alcohol
Contrary to what we may think, alcohol does not help us rest. Although it is true that alcohol makes us drowsy and can induce sleep more quickly, this sleep will not be restorative. During the night we will have more nocturnal awakenings, reducing the quality of sleep.
6. Control the schedule
You may have noticed that before lunchtime, your body prepares for this activity, guts begin to “pop” and the feeling of hunger appears.
Normally we eat in the same time range and this routine gives our body a clue that this activity is approaching. The same thing happens with sleep, if we go to bed at a more or less similar time every day we get used to our body to anticipate this activity and prepare for it.
7. Get some exercise
Exercising helps us fall asleep, but we must take some considerations into account. The first is that it should be a moderate exercise, exercising in moderation helps us to fall asleep, on the contrary when we do a high-intensity exercise we will be able to activate our body and we will need a long recovery time. We will need hours to return to normal heart rate and regain electrolyte balance.
Another consideration to keep in mind is when to do this exercise. Exercising in the afternoon or night, that is, around bedtime will activate our body.
8. If you don’t fall asleep, get up
As we said before, doing activities in bed other than sleeping leads us to involuntarily establish an association between activation and bed, the same happens with insomnia.
When we go to bed and insomnia appears, tossing and turning increases anxiety and will establish a connection between bed and insomnia. If you see that in 15 minutes you have not fallen asleep, get up and do some relaxing activity, you can do a relaxation technique or read something light when the drowsiness reappears go to bed.
9. Be careful with the nap
Napping is comforting, that’s for sure, but it can interfere with your night’s rest. Control the nap time, do not sleep more than 20 minutes of nap, and do not do it in the afternoon. You can also consider spending time without taking a nap and see how this change influences your night’s rest.
10. Keep your head calm
Worries, stress, anxiety, and negative emotions in general for many become a bed partner. When this happens, we focus on turning the head by focusing our attention on them and driving away from the feeling of drowsiness.
If this happens, before going to bed take some time to reflect to see what worries you and see what are the possible solutions that you can give to the problems. If you are worried about the tasks you have to do the next day, before going to bed, write a list of all of them.
If your thoughts and emotions still haunt you at bedtime, insomnia may be a symptom of something deeper like anxiety disorders, depression, or emotional problems. In these cases, the most effective way to reconcile yourself to rest is psychotherapy, which will help you manage your automatic thoughts and emotions by developing strategies and techniques to keep them under control.
