An Successful Sleep Guide in the New Year!

From eating right, more productive work/task motivation or even more quality times with our loved ones we often see on people’s new year resolutions list, but we often leave off having healthy sleep cycle habits as a part to improve ourselves for the new year. From various and countless research studies about the human sleep cycles, it has been shown that having healthy sleep habits is beneficial for our overall whole body health and mental wellness and the harmful effects of sleep deprivation and an unbalanced sleep schedule, so here are some ways to have a successful sleep in the new year…

Dimming the lights and yes, even on your phone

Dimming down the lights in our bedroom and on our phone can help our minds and bodies get ready for a restful sleep. Various scientific research has shown that our phone brightness can affect or even disrupt your circadian rhythm, it's like a natural, biological sleep clock that helps you fall asleep and keeps you asleep. Like Dontell, had a hard time falling asleep at night after working all day on the computer but after reading an article about how to get more sleep, he discovered that prolonged screen time throughout the day and into the night can affect your sleep habits.

Creating an Bedtime Routine

With habit, comes routine. Create a bedtime/winding-down routine that you would like to do such as reading a book, meditating night yoga to name a few activities to get ready for bed. My bedtime routine is taking a long, hot bubble bath then sipping some Sleepy-time tea while listening to natural or motivational sounds throughout the night, putting me right to sleep and I feel refreshed as ever when I wake up in the morning. Also, using a sleep calculator to figure out how much and when to go to sleep can be a beneficial tool in your sleep health.

Prioritize the To Do's and tasks in manageable time slots

You are wondering what about managing your day to day tasks has to do with your sleep schedule…it has to do with everything about sleep! If you have a big deadline or test you have do that week, you won't be sleeping anytime soon because your focus is on the task at hand and our brains are hardwired to see this through to the completion of this task, Unfortunately that takes a toll on our circadian rhythm, mental wellness and energy levels. So to combat this, is to break the bigger task(s) into smaller chunks and working on one or two smaller tasks at a time until its complete and ready to submit just like Armintha has to do an big biology paper by Friday but not to worry, she makes an plan to break up each point of her topic, into subtopics for the paper and each day until Friday, she can work on an paragraph of each subtopic.

Having Proper Nutrition for better sleep

Eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and drinking plenty of water/healthy fluids everyday is very vital for every aspect of our health, even our sleep. My own sleep/eat observation I've noticed is that if I eat sweets or have caffeine products close to my bedtime, I have a harder time going to sleep than spreading out the sugar and caffeine products throughout the day wouldn't affect me as much coming close to my bedtime.

Conclusion

In all, having a healthy sleep cycle and habits can be beneficial to our overall health and wellness for our minds and bodies by making small changes in our daily routines we have discussed today so you can have a great new year of healthy, restful sleep!