6 tips to enhance the quality & quantity of your sleep

By Priti Kumari - September 07, 2020

Good night sleep is incredibly crucial for our health, it is as important as eating healthy and exercising.

Let us first consider some of the points to understand why sleep is that important for us.

Poor sleep can link to higher body weight. In fact, short sleep duration is associated with an increased risk of weight gain and obesity in both children and adult.
Poor sleep affects hormones that regulate appetite. Those who get adequate sleep tend to eat fewer calories than those who don't.
Good sleep can maximize problem-solving skills and enhance memories. Poor sleep has been shown to impair brain function.
Long sleep has been shown to improve many aspects of athletic and physical performance.
Sleeping less than 7-8 hours per night is linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke.
Sleep deprivation can cause prediabetes in healthy adults in as little as 6 days. Many studies show a strong link between short sleep duration and type 2 diabetes.
Poor sleeping patterns are strongly linked to depression, particularly for those with a sleeping disorder.

Sleep deprivation may reduce your social skills and ability to recognize people's emotional expressions. How can we try to improve both our quality and quantity of sleep? Here are six scientifically granted tips for better sleep.

1. Regularity:

Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time. Regularity is the king, and it will actually anchor your sleep and will improve both the quality and the quantity of sleep no matter its a weekday or the weekend. Because deep inside our brain we have a master 24 hours clock, it expects regularity and works the best on the conditions of regularity, including the control of your sleep-wake schedule. Many of us use an alarm to wake up very few of us use the biological clock deep inside our brain.

2. Temperature:

Keep it cool. It turns out that your brain and your body need to drop the core temperature by about 1-degree celsius in order to initiate sleep. And this is the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that is too cold than too hot. So the current recommendation is to aim for a bedroom temperature of around about 18-degree Celsius, it sounds cold but cold it must be.

3. Darkness:

We need darkness especially in the evenings to trigger the release of a hormone called melatonin. Melatonin helps regulate the healthy timing of our sleep. In the last hours before bed, try to stay away from all those computer screens or mobile phones. Dim down more than half of the lights of your home, you will be surprised to know how sleepy that can make you feel. You can also wear some kind of eye mask, that will help regulate the critical sleep hormone of melatonin.

4. Walk it out:

Don't stay in bed awake for a long period of time. The general rule of thumb is, if you have been trying to fall asleep and it has been 25 minutes or you have woken up and can't get back to sleep, the recommendation is to get out of bed and go and do something different. The reason is that your brain is an incredibly associative device, the brain has learned the association that the bed is this trigger of waveforms and we need to break that association. And by getting out of bed you can go and do something else, only return to bed when you are sleepy and in that way gradually your brain will re-learn the association that your bed is the place of sound and consistent sleep.

5. Monitor alcohol and caffeine:

Try to stay away from caffeine in the afternoon and in the evening and certainly try not to go to bed too tipsy.

6. Wind down routine:

Many of us in the modern world expect to be able to dive into the bed at night, switch off the light and we think that sleep is also like that light switch and we should immediately be able to fall asleep. Unfortunately its not quite like that for most of us, sleep has a physiological process and is much more similar to landing a plane, it takes time for your brain to gradually descend down onto the firm bedrock of good sleep.

In the last 20 minutes before bed disengage from your computer and your phone, try to do something relaxing, find out whatever works out for you and once you have found it out stick to that routine.