Just like eating healthy and exercising, a good night’s sleep is incredibly vital for your wellbeing. Studies show that not getting enough sleep causes weight gain, affects your mood causing you to be easily irritable and grumpy and even put you at a higher risk of getting strokes and heart diseases. If you usually find it hard to get quality sleep here are 9 tips for maximizing your sleep environment in the bedroom.
1. Clean out all the clutter
One way to create a sleep-inducing bedroom is to associate it mainly with sleep. Setting up your work desk in your bedroom or having a television mounted there creates a lot of distractions. For instance, having a television makes you associate your bedroom with movie nights, and as a result, you find yourself binge watching till late. To associate your bedroom with sleep, get rid of anything that might be a potential sleep distraction such that whenever you go there, all you do is sleep.
2. Power down all the gadgets before you sleep
Even though exposure to light during the day is healthy, exposure to light during the night is unhealthy as it tricks the brain into thinking it’s daytime. As a result, this reduces the levels of a hormone known as melatonin whose function is to help your brain to relax enabling you to sleep. Blue light emitted from electronics such as your computer or laptop often mimics natural light causing your brain to stay alert. Thus ensure that you power down all the gadgets in your bedroom, to create a sleep-friendly environment.
3. Get heavy curtains
As expounded above, any exposure to lighting, causes your brain to stay alert. You should, therefore, strive to keep your bedroom as dark as you can, allowing your brain to relax and drift into dreamland. One way to keep your room dark is by getting heavy curtains to eliminate external light. If heavy curtains aren’t your ideal option, you can also use blackout blinds to serve the same purpose.
4. Get a better mattress
Even though you might ditch your bedroom’s television, power down all the gadgets and get dark curtains, if your mattress isn’t comfortable, then you will undoubtedly have a hard time getting sleep. Besides the inability to get good sleep, a bad mattress causes you to wake up tired, with an aching back and sore muscles. If you find yourself waking up feeling like this, then you need a new mattress to create a better sleeping environment.
5. Better beddings
Besides having a good mattress, you also need better and much comfortable beddings for a night of undisturbed sleep. Some beddings are made of unbreathable materials which cause you to sweat excessively thus disrupting your sleep. To prevent this from happening, ensure you get exquisitely soft, breathable and hypoallergenic pillows, duvets, bed sheets or any other items that you use as beddings for a better and uninterrupted night of sleep.
6. Use aromatherapy
With all the above said and done, it’s now time to turn to nature for help. Studies show that the scents of certain essential oils usually help in relaxing and calming the brain, thereby allowing you to get sleep. Essential oils such as chamomile, ylang-ylang, marjoram, and several others have been scientifically proven to aid with sleep. The most effective way to use essential oils is by diffusing. For this reason, ensure you take your time to check out the guide of top essential oil diffuser for your bedroom. And once you get the ideal one, just add a few drops of the mentioned oils in a diffuser, a bit of water, turn it on and set it by your bedside and within no time, you will be in dreamland when you sleep.
7. Paint your room with calming colors
Another way to create a sleep-inducing environment in your bedroom is by painting it with calming colors. Research shows that colors such as blue, yellow and green often help create a feeling of relaxation and calmness while colors such as purple, spark off creativity causing the brain to be active. In respect to that, painting your bedroom with the earlier mentioned colors will also help in creating a much better sleeping environment.
8. Check on your bedroom’s temperature
When you go to sleep, your body naturally starts to cool down as it prepares itself for the next eight hours or so of inactiveness. If the temperature in your bedroom is too high, it interferes with this process hence disrupting your sleep. The best temperature for sleeping is around 700F/200 C.
9. Ensure your room is quiet
Lastly, apart from natural noises such as crickets, artificial noise from outside your bedroom such as a television noise from the next room will likely keep you awake. To avoid this, ensure you shut down any digital devices and if possible install sound barriers on doors and windows.
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