Your sleep routine is so important to good quality, natural sleep. Try these five simple tips to help you develop that healthy routine and see if you can improve how well you sleep.
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Try These Steps To Improve Your Sleep
There are lots of things you can do to improve your sleep, from winding down before bed, or taking a bath. Even magnesium can benefit sleep. If you’re suffering from poor sleep, you don’t have to put up with it. Following these steps, you can help to improve your sleep routine and feel better rested. With the help of sleep supplements too, there is no reason why anyone is still struggling to sleep well.
1. Get Good Quality Sleep
When it comes to a good sleep routine, what matters more than how much sleep you get, is how well you sleep. Quality of sleep is hard to measure, which means many of us judge a good night’s sleep on how long it lasts. It is easier to generalise that we must have an 8 hour sleep routine than to talk about individual sleep needs. Six and a half hours of good quality sleep is far better than eight hours of poor quality, broken sleep. This of course relies on your body going through its natural sleep cycles in a healthy consistent way. Either way, the quality of your sleep routine is much more important than how long you sleep for. Minerals like magnesium play a role in sleep, so making sure you aren’t suffering from magnesium deficiency can help you establish a good quality sleep routine.
2. Go To Sleep When You’re Tired
It may seem obvious but people often fall into a trap of thinking the quantity, not quality, of their sleep routine matters. If you’re tired of being tired, you may end up going to bed far too early. This can lead to tossing and turning for a couple of hours. Ultimately, this leads to raised stress levels which can inhibit your ability to produce Melatonin. Melatonin is the hormone which tells your body to prepare for sleep. If you are finding that this happens to you then go to bed half an hour before the time you go to sleep and the quality of your sleep routine will undoubtedly improve. The same goes for anyone who might resist going to bed for the sake of getting something done. There’s a reason you’re tired, so go to sleep; you’ll feel better in the morning.
3. Wind Down Before Bed
A great step in your sleep routine to help your body start its Melatonin production is to take a bath with relaxing Epsom salts or magnesium flakes. The fall in body temperature we experience when we get out of the bath or shower is a signal to the body to start producing Melatonin. This can help your body’s internal clock know it’s time for sleep. After your bath, applying a magnesium sleep lotion can help you relax and unwind in time for bed.
The hour and a half before you go to bed should be seen as a ‘golden time’ in your sleep routine to ensure that you get the sleep you need. Make sure you turn off all your devices that emit blue light, such as your phone, tablet or e-reader. The blue light from these devices tells your brain that it is still daytime and inhibits the production of Melatonin. This will affect your sleep routine. Thus it’s a good idea to have dedicated time away from screens as part of your sleep routine. You need to ensure that you have eaten at least two hours before bed. This is because digesting food raises your body temperature and inhibits your Melatonin levels. The same goes for exercise. Often after exercise we are physically tired but mentally alert and the quality of our sleep routine suffers if we go to bed too early after exercise.
4. Wake Up at The Same Time Everyday
Another tip to ensure that you create the perfect sleep routine, is to try and wake up at the same every day, including weekends! Although you may be horrified at the idea of giving up your lie-in on your day off, it is worth it! Going to bed at the same time, and waking up at the same time every morning helps your circadian rhythm develop a healthy cycle. Even when the clocks change, it’s a good idea to stick with your everyday sleep routine. This can dramatically improve the quality of your sleep routine.
5. Wake Up to Natural Light
To really make your wake up as beneficial as possible to your sleep routine, then wake with natural light. In the summer this can be by throwing open the curtains and in winter try a sunshine alarm clock. When we wake with a conventional alarm, it can be a shock, and adrenaline surges through the body. We press snooze, our adrenaline levels drop and we fall back to sleep only to be woken feeling awful by the alarm again. Natural light pulls your body out of the sleep cycle slowly, inhibits the production of Melatonin and sets you up for feeling energetic all day long.
Add Magnesium to Your Sleep Routine
You can help your sleep routine along by adding magnesium to your bedtime routine. Magnesium helps the body relax by ensuring the GABA receptors in our brain and nervous system are working as efficiently as possible. GABA receptors help the brain switch off and without it our brains would continue to race. Magnesium supplements are even easier to add into your sleep routine because they are easily available in transdermal magnesium form. Taking a bath with magnesium flakes and soaks is a simple way to apply magnesium while contributing to the wind down part of your sleep routine.
Supplementing with BetterYou
At BetterYou, we specialise in natural health and easy supplementation. With pill-free vitamins and supplements, you can support your body in getting the correct dosage of vital nutrients. With vitamin D supplements to support healthy bones, iron supplements to boost energy, and health test kits to check your levels, BetterYou can help support a healthy lifestyle.
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