How to naturally sleep better at night

In extreme sleep deprivation, death can occur. While unhealthy sleeping habits will not cause one to perish, it does cause physical and emotional duress. When it happens over an extended period of time, both mental and physical states start to deteriorate. How then, can we sleep better at night and cultivate good sleeping habits?

Sleep at the same time every night

This sounds like a simple idea but it’s horribly hard to execute. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in uni or if you’re a young parent, it seems that humans on a whole enjoy fighting sleep. Students often have late nights either cramming or going out for parties, parents too, stay up in a bid to hold on to some control or “me time”. However, in order to sleep healthily, we need to learn to nod off at the same time every day.

Doing so will train your mind and body to expect bedtime and it will be easier for you to enter dreamland.

Keep it very dark

Now, it might be tempting to reach for a laptop or phone, scroll through your social media feed or watch a movie until you fall asleep but this is a bad habit because the blue light emitted from your screens will keep you up, and before you know it, you’ve pushed your bedtime to 2am in the morning.

By keeping your sleeping area dark, you will be able to detach quicker and fall asleep faster, since there are no distractions.

Meditate or perform simple stretches before bed

While you don’t have to be full blown Yogi to experience the benefits of stretching. Gentle stretching before bed can help achieve deeper sleep. However, you don’t want to do a full and intense workout. That would have the opposite effect of what you want to achieve with stretching as you’ll be getting your blood pumping which will wake you up even more.

Yoga or meditation can help you clear your head so you don’t stay up thinking about all the things you haven’t done or worrying about what has happened. It will put you in a relaxed state of mind.

Don’t take naps

As babies, we need naps to have better sleep at night. But as we grow older and our minds are fully developed, we no longer need these restorative naps. If you are truly tired, you can call it an early night and sleep earlier than you usually do. That’s a better alternative to taking a nap because this might cause you to stay up at night staring at the ceiling.