Add to : 
Like eating right and exercising, sleeping well is also essential for a healthy lifestyle. It affects how you feel, your relationships, productivity and quality of life. While you sleep, your brain goes to work, consolidating the day’s learning and re energizing the body.
The following tips can help you achieve a good sleep.
● Relax yourself – It is important to relax your mind before you go to sleep. Avoid activities that can cause anxiety or stress. Indulge in soothing activities such as a hot water bath, reading or listening to soothing music. These activities helps the brain to easily transit into sleep.
● Comfortable sleeping environment – Create a suitable sleeping environment by making the room dark and quit. Exposure to bright lights signals the neurons that it is time to awaken, not to sleep. Avoid any kind of noise and ensure your bedroom is cool, quiet, dark, comfortable and free of interruptions.
● Make sure your mattress and pillows are comfortable – Ensure that the mattress and the pillows are comfortable and supportive. Make the bed inviting by spreading clean, soothing colored sheets made of comfortable material.
● Go to bed light – Have your meals at least two to three hours before you go to sleep. Avoid heavy meals as eating too much shall make it difficult to settle down. Also, spicy food may cause heartburn and causes discomfort. Stick to smaller simpler meals.
● Avoid caffeine before bedtime - Caffeine is a stimulant and has an alerting effect. Caffeine products, such as coffee, tea, colas and chocolate, remain in the body on average from 3 to 5 hours, but they can affect some people up to 12 hours later. Even if you do not think caffeine affects you, it may be disrupting and changing the quality of your sleep. Avoiding caffeine within 6-8 hours of going to bed can help improve sleep quality.
● Avoid nicotine and alcohol close to bedtime - Nicotine is also a stimulant. Consumption of cigarettes and tobacco products makes it more difficult to fall asleep. Nicotine can cause difficulty falling asleep, problems waking in the morning, and may also cause nightmares. Although many people think of alcohol as a sedative, it actually disrupts sleep, causing nighttime awakenings. Consuming alcohol leads to a night of less restful sleep.
● Avoid exercise before sleep time – Exercising regularly makes it easier to fall asleep and contributes to sounder sleep. However, exercising sporadically or right before going to bed will make falling asleep more difficult. In addition to making you more alert, your body temperature rises during exercise, and takes as much as 6 hours to begin to drop. Finish your exercise at least 3 hours before bedtime. Late afternoon exercise is the perfect way to help you fall asleep at night.
● Maintain a routine – Our sleep-wake cycle is regulated by a “circadian clock” in our brain and the body needs to balance both sleep time and wake time. A regular waking time in the morning strengthens the circadian function and can help with sleep at night. That is why it is important to keep a regular bedtime and wake-time, even on the weekends and holidays.
Tags: alcohol, caffine, execise, healthy lifstyle, sleep
