Insomnia can be a real pain in the butt. It keeps you from getting a good night’s sleep, which ultimately affects your overall health and quality of life. This condition may seem harmless at first, but over time it can really hurt your relationships, impact your daily life for things like work, and of course, hamper your health. Things like alertness, heart health, and muscle fatigue become very real problems that will impact your life when you are not getting the right amount of sleep.
Battling insomnia does not need to be difficult. For all the problems that this condition can pose, it is not as impossible to overcome as people feel like. There are of course medical ways to get past it, like medicines and doctor-recommended solutions. These work, but you might be wanting to do something that is more natural or better to include in your daily schedule. If you need some really simple steps to help you, then check out this advice.
Change Your Mattress
First things first, your mattress could be the cause of your discomfort. A bad mattress can make all the difference and the folks at myisense.com show how important a comfortable, and personalized mattress experience can be. Adjustable sides and heat-controlled features are helping people get personalized sleep comfort which is improving their ability to fall asleep and stay asleep which could be a good way to combat your insomnia.
Set a Sleep Schedule
Being consistent with your sleep schedule is going to help you beat your insomnia and improve your life. It might feel good to want to fall asleep whenever you feel tired, but all you are doing is prolonging your sleep issues. Being able to sleep and wake up at set times will help you develop a good habit of being punctual with your sleeping which is key for getting over insomnia.
Reduce Alcohol and Stimulants
Alcohol is a depressant and while it can help you fall asleep, it is not a healthy way to do so. Similarly, coffee and caffeine are normal parts of people’s diets, but these stimulants will make you too wired to sleep. These might be regular parts of your diet, so reducing alcohol gradually over time will allow you a much more clear and healthy sleep. Similarly, keep caffeine intake to a minimum and consume in the morning if you do drink coffee or tea, and not before bed.
Eat Less Before Bed
Just like reducing your alcohol and stimulant intake, you want to cut down on your eating before bed. While a nice midnight snack might seem like what you need, eating before bed can make you feel full which makes it harder for the body to digest and focus on sleep. Carbohydrate-rich foods like bread are notorious for making you feel full, as are foods high in fat content. Avoiding eating too close to bedtime is a good way to help your body focus on the act of sleep rather than breaking down nutrients and causing an upset stomach.
Control Your Stress Levels
Stress plays a big role in how well you can sleep. Insomnia, along with stress, makes a very difficult combination to fight off. Reducing your stress can be easy with simple things like yoga, meditation, and reading. Activities that take your mind off of your troubles will reduce your heart rate so that you are not working overtime to calm down and get to sleep. Another good tip is to journal your needs for the next day so you are not up at night thinking about what needs to be done in the morning.
Improve Your Sleep Environment
Where you sleep plays a big role in how you sleep. Just like your mattress, or pillows, or beading, you want to make it a much more comfortable place. If your bedroom has too much light, you should consider blackout curtains to get a truly peaceful environment to sleep in. Other things to consider are noise as well. Some people enjoy white noise machines to help drown out any noise pollution, or at least insulating from outside distractions to stay sleeping. Whatever it is, you need to make your bedroom a really peaceful place to get to sleep.
Make the Bedroom Exclusively For Sleep
In addition to improving your bedroom environment for sleep, you need to know that this space should be exclusively for sleep. That means taking out the TV, laptop/desktop, phones, and other digital distractions. These can make it a lot harder to drift off to sleep so it is important to get them out of there. You also should keep any work outside the bedroom. Set up a dedicated office space or make it a place where you can do work separately because the more non-sleeping activities you do in your room the less it feels like a place to sleep. This can trigger your insomnia and give you more ways to stay up when you should be sleeping.
Increase Your Daily Physical Activity
Physical activity plays a tremendous role in how well you can sleep. Adding more physical activity to your daily life can make it easier to fall asleep as your body needs more rest to recover. Physical activity also produces more dopamine, the reward chemical in your brain. Walking, light jogging, running, cycling, rowing, swimming, weight lifting, and sports are good ways to get the blood flowing and help stimulate your body with activity. The more active you are, the better you can likely expect to keep insomnia in check.
Insomnia does not have to control your life. Waking up in the middle of the night and feeling like it is impossible to sleep is causing you an inordinate amount of discomfort so you need to find solutions that can work for you, and work fast. There are plenty of ways to do this with things like medication or sleep therapy, and they can work, but if you want simpler steps, then the ones listed here should help you find productive ways to improve your health and your sleep standards and take back your nights from insomnia.
