Stop relying on lavender essential oil and sleeping pills!
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Editor’s note: Living in a fast-paced city, people’s pressure is becoming greater and greater, and many people are facing insufficient sleep, difficulty falling asleep, mental fatigue, etc. Various sleep problems, especially the feeling of wanting to sleep but not being able to fall asleep, make people suffer. In the absence of a change in life and work status, everyone is looking for an effective way to treat insomnia. In this article, the author, as a former severely ill patient with insomnia, shared with readers many of the following sleep tips, hoping to help everyone. This article is from Medium, author Madeline Phang, the original title is Tips to Sleep Better From an Ex-Insomniac.
Photography by Adrianna Calvo | Image courtesy of Pexels
Have you ever experienced such a situation: you obviously need to get up early the next day, but no matter what, you have trouble falling asleep, tossing and turning, tossing and turning in bed?
To be honest, this kind of life has been “accompanying” me for several years. I believe that if you have had this kind of experience, then you will be able to empathize with my pain.
It seems that I suddenly started to lose sleep one night. I can’t sleep well, let alone keep a deep sleep. So every time I wake up the next day, I always feel that I didn’t fall asleep at all the night before. In the following whole day, I will often be in a state of dizziness and listlessness, which has had a serious impact on my study and work.
And to be honest, I think my poor memory and poor test results are largely due to insomnia.
Therefore, I spent 5 years collecting various methods for treating insomnia on the Internet. Hard work pays off, now ICan also be regarded as a good hand in the treatment of insomnia.
Failure is the mother of success. On the road of self-treatment of insomnia, I have tried many methods. For example, I once wasted a lot of money on the purchase of some products introduced in adverts, such as chamomile tea or lavender oil. But I finally found that there was no significant effect. This made me realize that using these products alone is not enough.
Actually, to this day, I still don’t know why I suddenly suffer from insomnia. I can only guess that it is caused by many different factors such as life pressure, anxiety and some unhealthy lifestyle habits.
But I want to remind everyone that if you don’t pay attention to it, the problem of insomnia will only get worse. Bad lifestyles in daily life-such as working overtime for a long time, staying up late, etc.-will cause the body’s circadian clock to be disordered and fall into a vicious circle of insomnia.
Similar to the experience of most netizens I have read on the Internet, I also improved my insomnia without the guidance of any doctor or medical prescription. What I did was to solve some of the root causes of insomnia, and made some small changes to my daily habits and sleeping environment.
In this article, I will list all the tips for treating insomnia that are effective for me. If you combine these tips, you will greatly improve your sleep quality.
Cultivate your own biological clock
Many people believe that cultivating a biological clock means going to bed and getting up on time every day, regardless of wind, rain, Saturday and Sunday. Obviously, if this is the case, this advice will be very difficult to implement for some people who work shifts or work irregular hours. Therefore, I suggest that everyone stick to a fixed number of hours of sleep instead of a fixed schedule.
The National Sleep Foundation (National Sleep Foundation), based on expert research results, has given sleep time recommendations to people of all ages-for a healthy adult, the daily sleep time is 7-9 hour. After gradually exploring, I found that 7 hours of sleep is just right for myself, so I established a sleep schedule that suits me based on this number.
I go to bed on time at 10:30 every night to give myself plenty of time to brew sleepiness. Get up on time at 6 o’clock the next morning-this is my sleep schedule.
Even on Saturdays and Sundays, stick to a regular sleep schedule, and don’t think about “Nothing to do on the rest day, let’s get some more sleep”.
It’s more important to get up early
For the past few months, I have insisted on getting up at 6 in the morning every day. I have to say that this kind of life is really wonderful. Not in everyone yetBefore waking up, the world was quiet, which allowed me to focus more on my work efficiently. In addition, getting up early in the morning gives me time to do more things, which helps me feel sleepy before going to bed. Wake up before the sun rises, so that I have more time to enjoy the sun, and my mind becomes more open.
Of course, getting up early is not for everyone, because some people are born night owls and like to fall asleep after 12 in the morning. So, as mentioned in the first point, when to get up depends on your sleep schedule. In my opinion, having the same length of sleep every day is more important than getting up early. But having said that, I still strongly recommend that you try your morning life.
Change the alarm ringtone
Research data has shown that suddenly being woken up by an alarm clock often makes people feel more tired after waking up. But because we still have things to be busy every day and cannot oversleep, even if you have adjusted your personal biological clock according to the first point, you still tend to set an alarm to remind yourself, just in case.
Here, I suggest that you can change the alarm ringtones to light instrumental music with gradually increasing volume, which can help you feel more energetic after waking up.
Insist on daily exercise
Photography Isaac Wendland | Image courtesy of Unsplash
Since the COVID-19 outbreak, I have been at home at least exercise30 minutes. I find that exercise helps me fall asleep easily.
The National Sleep Foundation once suggested that everyone do some exercise every day. For some housesFor men and women, this advice sounds terrible. Fortunately, you only need to do 10 minutes of aerobic exercise a day, for example, jogging or cycling, you can greatly improve the quality of sleep.
Be more in the sun
Why do you suggest that you bask in the sun more during the day? Because sunlight will stimulate the human body to produce high levels of hormones and neurotransmitters, including a neurotransmitter called “serotonin”.
What is serotonin? It is very important for regulating the internal biological clock of the human body. It does not automatically produce, but is affected by diet, activity level and natural light exposure. Moreover, the serotonin produced in the human body can be converted into melatonin-when the outside is dark, the body will automatically secrete melatonin-helping to maintain a good sleep cycle.
In other words, the more serotonin you produce during the day, the more melatonin your body will produce at night, which will help you fall asleep and get a good quality of sleep.
For me, I would choose to sit by the window so that there is natural light on my body even when I work. Or I will try to relax by drinking as much water by the window as possible, and at the same time I can rest my eyes.
Limit caffeine intake, especially after noon
Since I discovered that caffeine intake will greatly affect my sleep quality, I seldom drink caffeine-containing beverages, and I have been doing this for several years. After several experiments, I finally found that the latest time I can drink caffeinated beverages is 12 noon.
This is because the half-life of caffeine for a healthy adult is about 5-8 hours. (Translator’s Note: The half-life of caffeine is the time it takes for the body to convert half of the caffeine intake) In other words, it takes so many hours to metabolize half of the caffeine intake, so if you drink half of the caffeine, It still takes the same time to leave your body.
Therefore, if you take any caffeine-containing foods at night before going to bed, they will not have time to metabolize cleanly because of the short consumption time. This will reduce the quality of your sleep and make it difficult to sleep.
