There are many factors that affect sleep quality and quantity. Some improve it, while others make it worse. This video explains 10 habits to avoid for better sleep.
Video by BetterThanYesterday
Key Takeaways
Sleep can be complicated. There are many factors that affect your sleep quality and quantity. Some improve your sleep, while some make it worse.
Just a few simple habits can make the difference between a good night’s sleep and a night spent tossing and turning. This video explains which habits you want to avoid, as they are ruining your sleep.
Some habits are worse than others, but if you can avoid all of them, then a good night’s sleep is almost unavoidable.
If you want to know which habits will improve your sleep, then check out the Sleep Resources. It’s important that you know and understand both.
10 Habits That Could be Destroying Your Sleep
1. Caffeine and Nicotine
Cola, coffee, certain teas and chocolate contain the stimulant caffeine. It’s perfectly fine to have it once or twice a day. The problem is when you have these caffeinated drinks 6 times a day and the last cup is with dinner at night.
- Caffeine stays in the body for a relatively long period of time, as it takes up to six hours for just half of the caffeine to be cleared out of your system.
- So if you’re a regular coffee or cola consumer, it’s possible that your caffeinated drink is causing you trouble when falling asleep or staying asleep.
Because of this, it’s best to have your last cup, 8 hours before bed. This way you give your body a chance to clear most of the caffeine out of your system and prevent it from interfering with your sleep.
Nicotine is mostly found in cigarettes and just like caffeine, it’s also a stimulant. That’s why smokers often sleep very lightly compared to non-smokers.
- Smokers often wake up too early in the morning and they don’t get enough sleep. That’s because of nicotine withdrawal. A smokers body is so accustomed to getting that nicotine that the body wakes them up, wanting more.
Sounds kinda like a drug, doesn’t it? Because it is a drug.
If you’re a regular smoker (nicotine user), you might want to cut down on your habit if you care about getting better sleep.
2. Drinking Too Much Liquid Before Bed
Although hydration is vital for your health, it is wise to reduce your fluid intake in the late evening. That’s because drinking too much fluid at night can cause frequent awakenings to urinate.
- Typically, your body knows that nighttime is time for sleep, not time for trips to the bathroom. But if you drink a lot and your bladder is full, you’ll wake up to take a leak.
- You don’t want that to happen, because it could be right in the middle of a sleep cycle, which will result in messing with the quality of your sleep, therefore you’ll wake up already tired in the morning.
Try not to drink any fluids 1–2 hours before going to sleep. You should also use the bathroom right before heading to bed, as this may decrease your chances of waking up in the middle of the night.
3. Electronics
There are two ways in which electronics mess with your sleep.
1. They are stimulating.
- A lot of people watch TV before bed. It might seem like a relaxing and mundane activity. However, parts of your brain are going off like fireworks. Watching TV or Youtube on your phone, is actually putting a stressor on your brain, instead of letting it wind down for bed.
- It’s suggested that you replace this activity with something not as stimulating. A few suggestions are: reading, solving puzzles or crosswords, journaling, sitting and listening to music or just thinking.
- None of these activities are as stimulating as browsing through your phone or watching TV, so you’ll find yourself feeling sleepy much faster.
2. Electronics produce blue light which messes with your circadian rhythm and negatively impacts your sleep.
- This happens, because the blue light mimics the sunlight. You basically confuse your body into thinking it’s day time. The result is that the natural production of a sleep hormone called Melatonin, is suppressed.
- Melatonin is one of the reasons you feel sleepy at night. Take that natural release away, and you’ll be tossing and turning in your bed for a while. That means no TV, no smart phone and no computer screen prior to sleep.
If you have to use your computer or phone for something important, it’s wise to block out all that blue light.
- Use blue light blocking filters; f.lux for your computer, and Twilight for an Android phone. Apple’s IOS already has an app called Night Shift, although it’s not as prominent as other filters. These apps block out most of the blue light, by turning your screen orange or red.
- You can also use blue-light blocking glasses, which add another layer of protection.
- If you’re serious about your sleep, at least 1 hour before going to bed, you should avoid all screens.
4. Using Any Kind of Light At Night
It’s not just the blue light from your electronics that messes with your sleep. But normal overhead lights do so as well, because they tend to be too bright.
Back in the day, our ancestors had only one source of light and that was the sun. With the invention of electricity that has now changed. But our bodies haven’t changed, that’s why they confuse artificial light for sunlight.
The problem is not the exposure to artificial light itself, but the timing.
- The goal is to control the timing in a way that mimics the natural cycle of day and night. That’s why 2 hours before bed, you should turn off all the bright lights in your home.
- Instead you should use atmospheric lights that allow you to turn down their brightness.
- If possible, replace your normal light bulbs with red ones.Why red? Because red light doesn’t disrupt the release of the sleep hormone Melatonin, like other light does.
5. Lying in Bed Awake
If you find yourself still awake after staying in bed for more than twenty minutes or if you are starting to feel anxious or worried, get out of your bed.
- Being worried about not being able to sleep can make it harder to fall asleep.
- Instead go into another room in the house to do a relaxing activity, while waiting for sleepiness to come. The activity should not be stimulating, so avoid computers and television.
- Choose to read a boring book or an old magazine. You may also choose to meditate or breathe slowly, allowing any tension to dissipate.
- Whatever activity you choose, do it away from your bed, and only return when you’re feeling drowsy. That means when your eyelids get heavy and they start closing by themselves.
Just don’t lie in bed awake, as it can create an unhealthy link between your sleep environment and wakefulness.
6. Your Alarm Clock
The alarm clock is one of the reasons most people wake up tired in the morning.
Your sleep is made out of sleep cycles, which last 90 minutes on average. When you let your body naturally wake up, it means the sleep cycle just ended.
- If the alarm rings at this time, you’re lucky and you won’t feel tired when you wake up.
- However if you’re woken up in the middle of the sleep cycle, you’ll definitely wake up tired.
Your alarm doesn’t know whether the cycle just ended, or if it’s still going. It will ring no matter what.
- One good substitute for a standard alarm is an app you can download on your phone called “Sleep Cycle”.
- It uses your smartphone’s microphone to detect your movement which helps determine which sleep stage you’re in. It will then try to wake you up softly when the cycle is ending. Emphasis on try, it’s not a perfect app.
If you have an option, you should sleep without any alarms at all.
- That’s because even if you’re woken up at the end of the sleep cycle, it doesn’t mean you actually got enough sleep.
7. Daytime Napping
We know from evidence that naps can do wonders for your mental and physical stamina, especially if you’re fatigued. They can help you recharge your energy when you need it the most.
But napping can actually be a double-edged sword for two reasons:
1. If you accidentally drop into deeper stages of sleep, you’ll wake feeling worse than before you took the nap.
- You’re essentially starting the process of sleep, but then not finishing the whole thing. That’s why a quick power nap is okay, but avoid naps longer than 15 to 20 minutes.
2. When you’re awake during the day you build up something called sleep pressure. This is a chemical called adenosine which makes you feel tired as the day goes on.
- When you try to fall asleep at night, you fall asleep quickly thanks to the sleepiness from adenosine.
- When you do fall asleep, your brain clears out that sleep pressure, so that you wake up the next morning feeling refreshed.
- But if you take a nap during the day, especially if you take it too late in the afternoon, you will actually release some of that sleepiness and it will make it much more difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep throughout the night. You’re not as sleepy because some of the adenosine was cleared out.
If you don’t struggle with your sleep at night, then naps are just fine.
If you do find it difficult to fall asleep or stay asleep at night, then you should avoid naps and try and build up that sleep pressure in the evening.
8. Alcohol
Anyone who drinks alcohol from time to time knows that beer, wine or spirits leave you feeling drowsy. In fact, as many as 20 percent of Americans use alcohol to help them fall asleep.
While alcohol, can help you fall asleep faster, it also contributes to poor sleep quality. Especially in the second half of the night, the sleep becomes more disruptive.
- Instead of getting restorative sleep, alcohol keeps you in the lighter stages of it. And the more you drink before bed, the more noticeable these effects are.
Another problem is that alcohol is a diuretic. This means you’re more likely to wake up in the middle of the night, because you have to go urinate.
- Mentioned in a previous points, that leads to an interruption of your sleep cycle, which means you’re more likely to wake up feeling tired and groggy.
- You also tend to wake up in the middle of the night, not just because you have to go to the bathroom, but also when the effects of alcohol wear off.
That’s why you should avoid drinking alcohol before bed, even if it might help you fall asleep faster.
9. Bad Eating Habits
What you eat has an impact on your nighttime sleep.
- In a carefully controlled study of healthy adults, a four day diet high in sugar and other carbohydrates, resulted in less deep sleep and more awakenings at night.
- This is why it’s recommended that you shy away from diets that are excessively biased toward carbohydrates, especially sugar.
- I think there is no surprise there. Sugar has been compared to poison and that’s not far away from the truth. But how much you eat also affects your sleep.
Severe caloric restriction, such as reducing food intake to just 800 calories a day for one month, makes it harder to fall asleep normally, and decreases the amount of deep sleep at night.
- That’s because if you’re hungry, your body doesn’t want you to sleep. It wants you to get up, and find some food so you don’t starve.
- That being said, you should also avoid large meals at night. A light snack is okay, but a large meal can cause indigestion, which again interferes with sleep.
- If you’re too full, your stomach will have a harder time digesting all the food, because digestion is slowed down exponentially during the night.
- You should go to bed, neither too full, nor too hungry.
10. Taking Sleeping Pills
In the past month, 10 million Americans have swallowed some kind of a sleeping aid.
But it needs to be noted that sleeping pills don’t provide natural sleep. Instead, they stop the brain cells in the higher regions of your brain’s cortex from firing.
In other words, sleeping pills knock you out. But that doesn’t mean you’re actually sleeping. You’re just sedated.
- A meta-analysis of all published studies about sleeping pills, has shown us that there was no difference in how well the individuals actually slept.
- I’m not even going to get started on all the side-effects that sleeping pills bring. It’s best to avoid them all together.
- I am not anti-medication, but currently a drug that would help us get better natural sleep does not exist. At least for now.
Sleeping pills simply can’t replace healthy sleep habits.