Mar 23, 2021
3 Science-Backed Ways To Sleep Like a Baby Tonight
These small changes can add up to something very big.
After a long, tiring, and stressful day, everyone just wants to go to bed and sleep all night long.
But…
What if you have trouble sleeping at night?
What if you periodically wake up throughout the night?
What if you keep tossing around your bed?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t call that high-quality sleep. It doesn’t matter if you slept for 8 or even 10 hours last night if your sleep wasn’t high quality.
You can’t expect your brain and body to support you each and everyday if you don’t get enough AND high-quality sleep.
For most people, their #1 complaint about sleep is that they don’t get enough of it. However, let’s not ignore the other subset of people out there that even though they do get enough sleep, it’s not high quality.
Fortunately, here are some excellent ways to sleep better at night:
Make sure your room temperature is set between 60–67 °F
Consider this scenario and choose one:
Would you rather sleep in an hot environment with no ceiling fan or in a cold environment with no blanket?
If given the option to choose neither, I believe 99.9% of people will choose neither.
The human body is most comfortable at a temperature that is neither too cold or too hot. Room temperature becomes even more important of a factor when we sleep.
When we are awake and we feel hot, we can do something about it like take off our blankets, change our clothing, take a shower, etc. When we feel cold, we can put on more layers of clothing or grab a blanket.
However, when we are asleep, we can’t do any of those things. If you go to sleep at night with a big blanket on and you start to feel hot, then your body is going to wake you up to force the blanket off.
That disrupts sleep.
If you start to feel cold when you are asleep, your body is going to prompt you to wake up to grab a blanket.
That again disrupts sleep.
If your room is set at a comfortable temperature, then your body will most likely remain stable and content at that temperature.
When you go to sleep, the set point for body temperature goes down. It acts like an internal thermostat that aims to reach the temperature that the brain wants.
This slight drop in body temperature helps cause sleep which is why it’s easier to fall asleep in a cooler room rather than a hot room.
Most doctors recommend a room temperature between 60–67 °F with the best often being 65°F.
If you don’t have a thermostat at your home and you don’t know what temperature your room is, there are many apps available on the App Store and Google Store that can measure the temperature. However, it may not work on all phones.
Additionally, if you have no thermostat to maintain the room temperature, then experiment with the right ceiling fan speed, whether or not windows should be open, etc. to get the right temperature.
Stop drinking alcohol and caffeine at least 4 hours before bedtime
Alcohol
When a person consumes alcohol, it quickly gets absorbed into the bloodstream and it slowly gets metabolized by liver enzymes. However, this is a slow process so any excess alcohol will still circulate around the body.
As this metabolization continues and blood alcohol level decreases, people who drank alcohol before bed are more likely to experience sleep disruptions and an overall worse sleep quality.
Alcohol depresses the central nervous system and has sedative properties which causes a person to feel drowsy. This may explain why people who drink before sleeping can fall asleep faster but this doesn’t last for the entire night.
Sleep is divided into 4 cycles which are:
- Stage 1 (NREM)
- Stage 2 (NREM)
- Stage 3 (NREM)
- Stage 4 (REM)
These 4 sleep cycles repeat throughout the night with each cycle lasting around 90 minutes which translates to around 4–5 cycles for an average of 8-hours of sleep.
Drinking alcohol before bed suppresses REM sleep for the first 2 cycles and this can result in an imbalance between NREM and REM. When there is an imbalance present, sleep quality goes down while sleep disruptions rise.
A review of 27 studies found that alcohol does not improve sleep quality and while it does allow healthy people to fall asleep quicker, it reduces REM sleep.
During REM sleep, cognitive restoration, consolidation of memory, and emotional processing occurs. This is also the stage where dreams occur.
A lack of REM sleep results in slower cognitive processing, difficulty concentrating, and inability to consolidate memories effectively.
To avoid alcohol interfering with sleep, it is recommended that alcohol should not be consumed in the last 4 hours before bedtime.
However if that still does not work, try bumping the 4-hour mark to 6 hours.
Caffeine
Caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant and is the world’s most widely consumed psychoactive drug. Caffeine is known to stimulate your nervous system which increases alertness and wakefulness while at the same time decreasing drowsiness and fatigue.
It should make sense that consuming caffeine close to bedtime can wreak havoc on sleep. Caffeine acts as an adenosine receptor antagonist meaning that it binds to these receptors.
Adenosine is a substance in the body that promotes and induces sleepiness. Because caffeine binds to these receptors instead of adenosine, adenosine can’t exert its potent sleep promoting effects.
Caffeine affects the body very quickly with it reaching a peak level in the blood within 30 to 60 minutes.
Caffeine has been found to disrupt the circadian rhythm which is the internal biological clock that regulates the body’s sleep time and wake-up time. This can delay total sleep time and affect sleep quality.
It is often recommended that caffeine should also not be consumed in the last 4 hours before bedtime.
However, there was a study done where 400 mg of caffeine was administered to participants at 0, 3, and 6 hours before bedtime and it was found that caffeine had significant effects on sleep disturbance for all time intervals even at the 6-hour mark.
However, the average caffeine content of an 8-oz, brewed cup of coffee is 95 mg and this study used 400 mg of caffeine.
As long as you don’t drink too many cups of coffee, stopping caffeine consumption 4 hours before bedtime is a good way to avoid caffeine interfering with sleep.
However, if this still doesn’t work, then try moving it to 6 hours.
Minimize blue light exposure in the evening
This is something that has become more of an issue in our modern age where digital devices such as phones, laptops, tablets, computers, etc. dominate our daily life.
But what is blue light?
The visible light spectrum is the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can see. It is made of different colors where each color of light has different amounts of energy and wavelength. Blue light is also a part of this spectrum where it has the shortest wavelength and highest energy.
One-third of all visible light is blue light with sunlight being a significant source of blue light.
Before the invention of digital devices and the lightbulb, the sun used to be our only significant source of blue light. In the modern era, that has changed to now include LED lights, fluorescent lights, computers, smartphones, television, etc.
Blue light, in itself, has health benefits such as boosting alertness, elevating mood, helping with memory and cognition, etc. That is why it’s best to open your curtains in the morning to let a ton of sunlight enter your room so you feel more refreshed and energized.
However, blue light exposure at night disrupts the body’s sleeping pattern and blocks melatonin which is responsible for making us sleepy.
Nowadays, people have become so occupied with their digital devices that it’s impossible to live life without them.
Due to COVID-19, our use of these digital devices has skyrocketed. Additionally, a majority of people use their devices before going to bed. Whether it’s completing that last minute assignment, scrolling through Instagram, text messaging friends, attending a video call, or playing games, all of this occurs throughout the day and at night.
We are constantly bombarded with blue light and it’s wreaking havoc on our sleep. To avoid blue light affecting our sleeping patterns, the National Sleep Foundation recommends that we stop using electronic devices at least 30 minutes before bedtime.
Some other excellent ways to minimize the impact of electronic devices are:
- Enable Night Shift (iOS devices) or a blue light filter on your phone. Night shift essentially shifts the color of the screen to an orange hue which decreases the amount of blue light emitted by the phone. Some android devices also have a similar feature with a different name such as blue light filter, Night Light, etc.
- Enable Dark Mode. If your phone doesn’t have night shift, something that may help is dark mode. Dark mode essentially darkens or blackens the phone’s screen so it’s easier and lighter on the eyes at night. Even though it won’t make a difference in the amount of blue light emitted, it will still be far easier on your eyes which can reduce eye strain and headache.
- Lower your screen brightness. This is something that a lot of people don’t do. Most people have their screen’s brightness turned up at night which leads to eye strain, headaches, blurred vision, etc. By lowering your screen brightness, your eyes can feel more relaxed and relieved.
These are just some of the ways to minimize the impact of electronic devices at night. If you stop using your electronic devices 30 minutes before bed and it still doesn’t work, try moving it to one hour.
Takeaways
Sleep is absolutely crucial and critical to our health. It is literally the only way we give a chance to our bodies to repair, heal, and energize itself. If the sleep we are getting isn’t high quality, then what good are we doing to our bodies?
By following the points that were mentioned in this article, you can drastically improve your ability to get high-quality sleep.
Even if you feel energized and refreshed after a good night sleep, chances are improvements can still be made.
We spend so much time trying to craft the perfect lifestyle so I think we can all dedicate some time to improve our sleep.
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