Getting a good night of sleep is just as important to your overall health as regular exercise and eating healthy food. If you don’t sleep well, it can impact your overall health and impact your quality of life. It can also disrupt your daily mood, your career, your relationships, and even cause you to age faster. To help you get a better night of sleep, consider trying the following tips.
1. Stick to a Consistent Schedule
One of the easiest tips for better sleep that will make a huge difference in your quality of sleep is a consistent sleep schedule. By sticking to a consistent sleep schedule, your circadian rhythm will become more regular which will help you fall asleep much faster. This means you must go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, even on the weekends. Once you stick to a consistent sleep schedule for a few weeks, you will notice how much quicker you fall asleep. In addition, you might not even need an alarm clock to wake up on time anymore.
It’s important to also make sure you don’t nap during the day, or it will throw off your consistent sleep schedule.
2. Reduce Blue Light Exposure Before Bedtime
Although it’s great to expose yourself to lots of light during the day, it’s not so smart to experience light exposure, specifically blue light exposure, before bed. Our circadian rhythm relies on changes in brightness to function correctly. If you’re exposed to blue light before bed, it can prevent your body from releasing melatonin which is necessary to feel sleepy and fall asleep. By reducing blue light exposure two hours before bed, you can fall asleep faster.
To avoid blue light before bed, consider wearing blue light glasses and/or using night filters on any of your electronic devices. What’s even better is turning off electronics and reading a book instead.
3. Optimize Your Sleep Environment
If your sleep environment isn’t optimized, it can affect your quality of sleep. For instance, if you sleep with the TV on, the noise can wake you up while you sleep. In addition, if it’s too bright, it can also wake you up.
To optimize your sleep environment, consider investing in blackout curtains and some sort of white noise machine. You can use an app on your phone or simply turn on a fan.
In addition, you should make sure your mattress, sheets, blankets, and pillows work best for you. Your bedroom temperature should also stay on the cooler side with 68 to 70 degrees being the most optimal temperature for sleep.
4. Exercise Daily
Not only is exercise good for your physical and mental health, but it also benefits your sleep health. Regular exercise has been shown to cut the time it takes to fall asleep in half and helped generate 41 more minutes of sleep per night. Exercise also offers more benefits to those with insomnia than drugs. For instance, it cut the time it takes to fall asleep by 55%, reduced wakefulness by 30%, anxiety by 15%, and increased the total amount of sleep by 18%.
With that said, if you’re lacking proper sleep at night, getting in daily exercise is essential. Just make sure you’re not exercising too close to bedtime. Otherwise, it can raise your level of alertness and make it more difficult to fall asleep.
5. Avoid Caffeine After 3:00 PM
Another way to help yourself get a better night of sleep is by avoiding caffeine too late in the day. For most people, avoiding caffeine after 3:00 PM offers the most benefits. The reason you should avoid caffeine before bed is because it’s a stimulant that stays in the bloodstream for 6 to 8 hours. Therefore, if you drink it too close to bedtime, it can cause you to have a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep. If you’re extra sensitive to caffeine, you might have to adjust your cutoff time for optimal results.
6. Rule Out Sleep Apnea
If you’re waking up in the morning feeling like you didn’t sleep a wink, it might not be your bedtime routine, or lack of exercise causing it. Instead, sleep apnea might be the cause. If you suffer from any other symptoms like loud snoring, choking, coughing, or snorting during sleep, daytime irritability, difficulty concentrating, or morning headaches, you might have sleep apnea.
In this case, we highly encourage you to seek a sleep apnea diagnosis with a sleep test. Once you get diagnosed, our Aberdeen dentists can help you find the right sleep apnea treatment for your needs.
Have Sleep Apnea? No Problem. Get Sleep Apnea Treatment in Aberdeen
Getting sleep apnea treatment in Aberdeen is the first step to a better night of sleep if you have sleep apnea. After just a few days of using an oral appliance, you will wake up feeling refreshed and ready to take on the day. Contact our dental office at (910) 692-4450 to find out if oral appliance therapy is right for you.
