Skip to content

How to get better sleep and wake up refreshed in the morning

You know those suspiciously energetic people who walk around saying, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”? Yeah, we can’t stand them either. Sleep is the best thing ever. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to quit our jobs because it requires us to get up in the morning, or that we’re saying no to a weeknight concert because the opening band doesn’t go on until ten. Fortunately, there’s new research to support the idea that good sleep, like everything else, is more about quality than quantity.

“There is no magic metric for how much sleep people need,” says Safwan Badr, a former president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. The important thing is to stay in bed long enough to pass through several distinctly different phases of sleep that, together, promote the rest and recovery we need for the day ahead. Fortunately, there are things you can do to get a better night’s sleep — starting tonight.

1. Determine how much sleep you need.

Less than one percent of the population can get by on six hours of sleep per night. That means you are probably not one of them. Most adults do best in eight hours, but some need ten and others are fine on seven. To find out how much is best for you, take a weekend off from going out and set up your own personal sleep-monitoring clinic. On Friday night, go to sleep at your normal time and let yourself wake up naturally. This won’t be your optimal sleep duration since you’ll probably sleep longer to make up for weekday sleep deprivation. Saturday night is the true test. Go to sleep at your normal time, and let yourself wake up without an alarm clock. However many hours lapse in between is how much you should be sleeping. Every. Single. Night.

2. Put in your earplugs.

Judging by the racket they make in the predawn hours, it would seem that all birds are early ones. Eliminate ambient noise, which is the most common cause of sleep disturbances, with earplugs. Everyone’s ear canal is a special snowflake, so you might have to shop around, but Howard Leight Max earplugs are a favorite of construction workers and sleep expert Joyce Walsleben, an adjunct associate professor of medicine at NYU School of Medicine. If foam plugs tend to fall out of your ears, try silicone ones, like Mack’s Pillow Soft Silicone Earplugs, which practically require an excavator to remove in the morning.

3. Get some air on your feet.

If you’ve ever spent a night with your little footsie peeking out of the covers, you were probably making your sleep better. Our bodies like to be cool during sleep, so getting overheated in bed can make for a restless night. Uncovering a foot or even two is a good way to cool down the body and keep you comfortably asleep, a spokesperson for the National Sleep Foundation told New York Magazine. Feet are particularly good at giving off heat. Not only are they hairless, they’re filled with special blood vessels called arteriovenous anastomoses, which dilate when the body gets too hot to allow heat to dissipate.

4. Take a bath.

Your body temperature naturally drops as you fall asleep. You can make that drop more dramatic, and therefore more sleep-inducing, by heating yourself up first. Take a hot bath about an hour and a half before bed, says Penelope Lewis, the director of the Sleep and Memory Lab at the University of Manchester in England and the author of The Secret World of Sleep. While you’re in there, mix in a quart of whole milk. Not only does the milky water just look dreamy, but the fats soften skin, so you’ll wake up with a clearer mind and a smoother body.

5. Don’t freak out.

On those nights when you can’t seem to nod off, it’s tempting to scream and cry and count the dwindling hours before you have to get up for work. Not only is this useless, it actually diminishes the quality of whatever sleep you do end up getting. When researchers told people they would get a financial reward if they fell asleep quickly, they slept for less time and woke up more frequently than people who had been given no sleep incentive, according to a 2014 study in the Journal of Sleep Research. In other words, pressure equals insomnia. There are a few things you can do to stop the cycle. First, turn the face of your alarm clock away. “Don’t look at it. It’s none of your business,” says Walsleben. Second, accept that waking up throughout the night is normal — most people actually do it about five times per hour. And third, think about something else, preferably something pleasant but kind of boring, like redecorating a friend’s living room or reminiscing about a hike you took on a recent vacation.

 

Taken from Allure US. Click here to read the original. 

Share this article: