World Sleep Awareness Day: 5 Top Tips To Improve Sleep Quality

The 19th March is world sleep awareness day and it’s time to highlight and discuss the best tips and tricks for getting a night of good quality zzz’s.

Having a good night’s rest can often result in major benefits such as getting sick less often, staying at a healthy weight, lowering your risk of serious health problems, and reducing stress while boosting your overall mood. These are just a few benefits that you might notice after a week of good night’s sleep.

5 Top tips to getting a good nights sleep

1.  Expose Yourself To Light During the Day.

Our natural circadian clock is sensitive to light, meaning if you expose yourself to light early in the morning, around an hour after waking up, this will affect when your body naturally gets sleepy. So, ensure you expose your body to light around an hour or two after waking up.

2.  Don’t Drink Caffeine After 5.

As we all know, drinks such as coffee, soda and tea all contain small or large amounts of caffeine; which can negatively affect your quality of sleep. Caffeine is notoriously known for giving you that boost of energy and can remain in your blood for up to 8 hours! Therefore, I recommend you do not drink anything that contains caffeine after 5 to ensure when night time comes, you are ready (and able) to get to bed.

3.  Get into a Routine.

Your sleep quality can be greatly increased if you stick to a schedule. Similar to what we discussed about the circadian rhythm, to help set your body straight it needs consistency. Being consistent in your sleeping patterns can help you in the long run with sleep quality.

4.  Don’t Eat Large Meals Near Bedtime.

Eating large meals before going to bed can cause many symptoms, which result in poor quality sleep. After eating a meal your body gains an increase in blood sugar which could result in a boost to energy levels and therefore resulting in delayed sleep.

5.  The final sleep tip – Exercise Regularly

The amount of research done on exercise and sleep quality is quite dense and results from one study show that doing at least 30 minutes of exercise daily has shown to relieve symptoms of insomnia in middle-aged adults. Although daily exercise will help you get a good night’s sleep, exercising later on in the day can have negative effects and make you feel more awake and give your body an adrenaline boost. So, make sure to exercise early in the morning or late afternoon to increase your chance of a good nights sleep.

Want to keep reading? Check out our 5 Life Saving Techniques Everyone Should Know HERE.