One thing that always comes up in regard to overall health is making sure that you get enough sleep. With the stress of work or school and all the other things that eat away at you during the night, a good night sleep is becoming increasingly difficult.
As a result, there is absolutely a tendency to over caffeinate yourself to get through your day. This starts the cycle of not being able to sleep all over again, causing your body to have troubling relaxing and falling asleep.
Sleep is important for all parts of your life.
Emotionally, getting a good night’s sleep helps your brain work properly. While you are asleep, your brain makes decisions, creates and consolidates memories, makes creative connections, clears out toxins, and learns and remembers how to perform physical tasks. All of this combined generally makes you smarter.
Physically, sleep allows for a healing process to your heart, blood vessels, and immune system. This is why when you are sick, the doctor tells you to get some rest. Also, sleep helps with the production of hormones and development. In general, getting enough sleep is important in order to function properly throughout the day.
With a lack of sleep comes many risks, some include falling asleep while driving a car, not being able to complete your work, and for students, falling asleep during that important lecture.
With all of this in mind, it is beneficial to know some ways to help yourself fall asleep. Many people have come up with remedies and other ways to make you fall into a deep sleep faster. When looking into it, these remedies range from something that you should begin at the beginning of your day straight to the end.
One simple stride that one can take to fall asleep is to simply lower the temperature of their room. Before falling asleep, our bodies tend to lower in temperature. Some scientists believe that this cooling of the body helps you fall asleep. As a result, by lowering the temperature of your room, you may be helping yourself cool off and fall asleep quicker.
Another way to help you fall asleep quicker is to pop in some headphones and listen to music. But, this music shouldn’t be the kind that you would hear at a party or crazy, loud concert. Studies have shown that by listening to slow, calming music, such as classical music, while trying to fall asleep is a big help. Three scientists decided to do a study to see if there truly is a correlation between music and falling asleep. In their study, they used ninety-four students between 19 and 28 that all had sleep complaints.
Participants of the study were split into three groups. Group 1 and 2 listened for 45 minutes either to relaxing classical music or an audiobook in a span of 3 weeks. The third group was the control group, which received no intervention. Having a control group in this study would serve a large purpose in order to show a true change in sleeping patterns of all the participants sleep quality before the study and weekly during it. By the end of the three weeks, the data showed that classical music is an effective way to reduce sleeping problems.
Over the years, other studies have been done to show effective ways of getting more quality sleep.
Another group of scientists decided to study the correlation between sleeping and flowers. Sounds weird, because why would smelling a flower help you sleep, but it makes perfect sense.
The scent of Lavender’s oil helps ease anxiety and insomnia with its calming and sweet scent. One study investigated this with the help of thirty-one young healthy sleepers aged from 18 to 30. The participants, like in the music study, slept over night for three weeks, having their brain waves measured while they were sleeping.
One group received lavender oil and one group received distilled water. After three weeks of collecting data, the scientists proved that there was a correlation between lavender and sleep when they reported more deep sleep and less rapid eye movement with exposure to the flower.
Using these three tactics alone is both cheap and hopefully efficient to help you get the sleep that you deserve after a long day at work or school.
These are just two examples, but there are hundreds more. For example, some people do things as simple as taking a hot shower before bed, wearing socks to bed, and hiding their clock, to help them fall asleep.
With the variety of remedies out there, one is bound to cure your late night insomnia!
