Tips for Better Sleep – Insomnia Treatment

Tips for Better Sleep

Preface

After a tiresome day, nothing is as relaxing and refreshing as a full night of quality sleep.

While for some people, getting enough sleep requires no effort besides turning off the lights and lying on the bed, it's one of the most challenging tasks for others.

People from the latter group have a hard time falling asleep.

Even after falling asleep, people suffering from this condition don't get enough sleep because of mid-sleep awakenings and subsequent difficulty in sleeping again.

This condition is technically called 'insomnia'.

A day or two without enough sleep occasionally is pretty much normal. It's a problem if it persists.

The general recommendation for healthy adults is to have 7-8 hours of sleep every night. But that's not very true.

To most experts today, if you don't feel sleepy during the day and can perform your daily activities normally, you are completely fine. So, how much sleep is needed can vary from person to person.

Benefits of Enough Sleep

Sleep is vital for health. During sleep, your body restores itself, repairs its damaged tissues, and cleans the brain off the unwanted substances produced during the daytime.

It refreshes the brain and restores your cognitive skills and memory processing, whose performance declines towards the end of the day.

Lack of Sleep

Sleeplessness has been linked with both individual and social life problems.

Sleeplessness increases your chances of road accidents, mood swings, irritability, aggressiveness, and poor performance at work. All of these can deteriorate your productivity and the quality of relationship with others.

How Common is Insomnia

Insomnia is not that uncommon.

Around 20% adults have insomnia, and the number is getting higher because of some modern life's essentials, like mobile phone and noise pollution, as well as stress caused by a much higher competition nowadays, rise in unemployment, and lack of financial security.

Some people are more likely to have insomnia than others. People going through stressful situations and those already affected by certain neurological or mental disorders, e.g., depression, autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and physical health problems, e.g., chronic pain, asthma, heart disease, etc., are at a greater risk of developing insomnia.

Suggestions for Good Sleep

If you are continuously dealing with sleepless nights, fortunately, this article is going to fix this issue of yours.

I have a set of suggestions for you if you want to improve the quality of sleep and enjoy your life at its best.

These are general suggestions anyone, regardless of the cause of insomnia, can adapt in one's lifestyle.

If your insomnia is caused by or related to any of the above-mentioned mental or physical health issues, seek treatment as early as possible, along-with my suggestions for quality sleep given below.

Note that in some cases, the cause of insomnia is unclear, or insomnia is very severe. In these situations, proper medical treatment is required to solve this issue. But firstly, experiment with these tips and analyze the results. Sometimes, few lifestyle changes can be enough to save your time and money!

- Know your circadian rhythm

- Sleep in a quiet place

- Reduce your screen time

- Your dinner should be light

- Avoid caffeine in the evening

- Don’t drink too much water close to bedtime

- Sleep cool

- Have sun exposure

Know your circadian rhythm

Your body has an internal clock of 24 hours, similar to a normal clock (except that clock doesn't tick).

As we evolved on this planet Earth, which takes 24 hours to complete one rotation around the Sun, our body knows that there is a sunlight-darkness cycle repeating itself every 24 hours.

During the daytime of roughly 12 hours, our body is active and alert to gather food and resources for survival using the bright light and warmth of the Sun. This state of awakedness is signaled by the bright sunlight.

During night or darkness, i.e., the following 12 hours, our body produces a hormone called melatonin, called sleep hormone, which makes our bodies calm and relaxed and initiates & promotes sleep for some rest and restoration. This state of sleepiness is signaled by the absence of light.

But this internal biological clock doesn't need to be synchronized with the daily sunlight-darkness cycle.

As we have access to artificial light, thanks to scientific and technological revolution, we don't depend that much on natural light to perform many of our daily activities (although we still need sunshine for many health benefits discussed later).

But the cycle of 24 hours still applies as before.

So, a person working at night who regularly wakes up at sunset will remain active till sunrise, and the body will start producing the sleep hormone at sunrise.

To conclude, whether you are an early bird or a night owl, your body follows the same cycle of awakedness-sleepiness lasting for about 24 hours.

Your circadian rhythm changes as your lifestyle changes. So, if you shift from working at night to working in the morning, your circadian rhythm will also adjust itself according to your needs.

But this shift in circadian rhythm is slow and gradual.

Hence, if your working time changes almost everyday, like a pilot flying during daytime one day and at midnight the other day, it will become difficult, if not impossible, for your circadian rhythm to adjust itself to these irregularities.

As a result, your sleep cycle will be adversely affected, leading to insomnia with long-lasting effects on overall health and productivity.

For this reason, people are advised to prefer having working hours during daytime and sleep at night, or, at least, follow a consistent schedule everyday.

Make a schedule for your normal day, and strictly follow that. When to wake up, when to eat breakfast, when to finish work, when to exercise, when to eat dinner, when to be in the bed, all these times must be fixed and acted upon.

But people working at night who sleep during daytime are at an increased risk of insomnia. Because of too much bright sunshine flowing through the windows into your room, your body can’t produce that hormone, thereby interfering with your sleep. For such people, it is advised to have curtains thick enough to block all sunlight entering the windows.

Furthermore, as most people and other living organisms are awake during sunlight, the collective noise from birds and vehicles etc. may disrupt your sleep. The ways to deal with such a case are described hereafter.

Sleep in a quiet place

Noise pollution has worsened in modern life. Motor vehicles, construction machinery, loudspeakers, etc., all are proud inventions of science, but not very friendly for your sleep.

Loud noises deteriorate people’s sleep quality. It can cause trouble sleeping or inability to get enough sleep.

People living in large cities are significantly more vulnerable to this problem.

If you live in a very noisy neighborhood, e.g., your house is on the verge of a busy road, the place you live is densely populated with under-construction buildings, or your neighbors make a lot of noise, and the noise is annoying for you at night, you should:

Sleep in a room where noise doesn’t reach.

Or close the windows, if possible.

Or turn the fan on, if possible. Fan produces white noise, which can make outdoor sounds less loud. If there is no fan in the room or the temperature is cold, the best alternative to a fan is the fan-like noise which can easily be downloaded online in your mobile phone.

Or use earplugs. You can purchase earplugs from a pharmacy or online.

(There are many apps available for downloading on your smartphone, which have different types of white noise saved, like fan noise, rainfall noise, etc.)

(Earplugs come in different sizes. Choose the right size for your ears. Or buy an adjustable pair, which can easily be adjusted to fit any size. Additionally, keep your earplugs clean and dry, and wash them with water, and occasionally light soap, after every use to protect your ears from infection.)

Reduce your screen time

Keep your mobile phone’s screen brightness to minimum after you are in the bed.

Modern smartphones also have an option to filter blue wavelength. Keep that filter on, especially a few hours before sleeping.

Too much light from a laptop or phone inhibits the release of the sleep hormone because too much light is perceived as daylight by our body, thus keeping us awake.

Or better avoid all screens once you are in your bed to sleep.

Your dinner should be light

Ideally, your evening meal should be the lightest meal.

Consume more food in breakfast or in the afternoon, so that your body has ample time to process all the food, and your digestive system also gets some rest along-with the rest of your body at night.

As heavy food is hard on our stomach, the resulting discomfort, like heartburn and gas, will render you painfully awake for a large part of the night.

Not just that, your food choice in the dinner also matters. There is my separate article in which I have described foods to prevent too much heat in your body while you’re sleeping. In short, avoid calorie-dense and high-protein foods in your last meal.

Avoid caffeine in the evening

While a cup of hot tea is the best thing to kick-start a quality day, such drinks should never be consumed in the evening.

Tea, coffee, etc., have caffeine, which is well-known for its sleep-inhibiting effect.

It is generally recommended to avoid these drinks after sunset.

Don’t drink too much water close to bedtime

Although water is the healthiest thing for our bodies, too much water close to the bedtime is not a good idea.

Drink plenty of water throughout the day, but limit it to a few glasses after the end of the day.

A glass of water with your dinner and a small glass before bedtime (or a bit more if the weather is hot and the room is not air conditioned) are fine.

Too much water can lead to frequent awakenings at night for urination, which is detrimental for your sleep health.

Sleep cool

The room where you want to sleep should be thermally moderate.

What feels moderate varies from person to person.

People from warm regions are comfortable at slightly higher temperatures than people from cold regions.

Generally, 20s (20-29°C) are the most moderate temperatures for human beings. People from cold regions are thermally comfortable in the lows of this range, while the highs of this range are more pleasant for their warm counterparts.

If the weather is hot, you need a fan, evaporative cooler, or air conditioner depending on the severity of heat. In case of cold, a blanket or a quilt should be used, and heating is also needed in frigid temperatures (0°C or below).

Have sun exposure

Let your body know it’s daytime by exposing it to the Sun’s direct rays in the middle of the day, so that it yields enough amount of melatonin at night.

Although we have access to electric bulbs now, and we don’t need sunshine for most of our activities, our body still longs for the sun’s warmth during daytime to generate more amount of this hormone for better sleep.

Additionally, sunshine has lots of other benefits.

A human body can produce vitamin D on its own if exposed to direct sunlight, a vitamin our bones need. Sunshine can also be very beneficial for you if you are struggling with depression.

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