Sleep Hygiene – What is it?

Sleep hygiene is a variety of factors, practices, and habits that are necessary to getting quality sleep every night and achieving full daytime alertness. The term “hygiene” is often misunderstood as strictly being synonymous with “cleanliness,” but it really means the practices aimed at preserving your health. It includes the things you eat and drink, the types of over the counter and prescription medications you take, how you spend your days, and how you spend your evenings. Each of these elements can significantly impact your quality of sleep.

What causes it?

There’s an excellent chance that you have bad sleep hygiene if you wake up feeling unrested in the morning, frequently awaken during the night, suffer from daytime sleepiness, or have trouble getting to sleep at night.

Like many people, you may believe that because you’ve slept between the traditionally recommended 7-9 hours of nightly sleep, you’re doing things right. However, it’s not the amount of time you sleep that matters so much, as it is the quality of sleep you’re getting. When you’re doing things that are disruptive to your sleep, your body and mind are not truly resting enough to repair and prepare themselves for the next day.

The two most common sleep hygiene issues stem from your sleeping environment and your personal habits. What you do throughout the day and leading up to sleep at night can have as big of an impact on your sleep quality as the environment in which you choose to sleep does. Optimizing both your sleep environment and personal habits play an essential role in achieving a good night’s sleep.

Possible solutions

The great news is that making a few minor adjustments to better your sleep hygiene can mean less restless nights and more good quality sleep. Making these changes to your personal habits and sleep environment is a great first step in your search for better sleep.

Personal Habits

• Establish a consistent sleep schedule. Try and go to sleep and wake up each day around the same time, allowing for 10-20 minute variances on each side as needed. Also, try to avoid sleeping in on the weekends because this will disrupt your schedule and make it difficult for you to wake up on Monday morning.
• Exercise helps you to fall asleep and sleep better through the night. However, exercising close to your bedtime has the opposite effect. Exercise naturally boosts your energy and attentiveness so exercising within two hours of your bedtime will have a negative effect on your sleep, making it difficult to fall asleep.
• Avoid eating large meals especially spicy or fatty foods before bed. These types of food can cause indigestion, and a large meal may make you uncomfortable as you lay down to sleep. If you are hungry and must eat something, a light, healthy snack is a good idea and can help induce sleep.
• Avoid caffeine and nicotine. Both are stimulants and will make it difficult for you to fall asleep and comfortably enter into all of the sleep stages during the night. Also, both drugs stay in your system for a long time so even late afternoon coffee, cola, or tea can make it difficult to fall asleep at your usual bedtime.
• Avoid drinking alcohol before bed. Although alcohol may make you drowsy and seem like a relaxing way to wind down an evening, it actually disrupts your sleep. After consuming even small amounts of alcohol, it becomes difficult for your body to enter the deep sleep and REM sleep stages. You end up sleeping lighter and often waking up multiple times during the night, eventually waking up feeling tired and unrefreshed.
• Use natural light to control your circadian rhythm. Expose yourself to bright light when you wake up and need to be alert during the day. Gradually and appropriately, according to the time of day, reduce your exposure to bright light as you approach your bedtime. Eventually going to a dark bedroom ready to fall asleep.
• Establish a relaxing wind-down routine before bed. Turn off electronics like your TV, laptop, and cell phone an hour before bed and replace them with relaxing activities such as taking a warm bath or shower or reading a paperback book. This will help prepare your body to sleep by reducing stimulus and replacing busy activities with relaxing ones.
• Keep a notepad and pen by your bedside so when you can’t fall asleep or wake up in the middle of the night with your mind racing with thoughts of brilliant ideas or things you need to get done or forgot to do, take a moment and write them down. This will let free your mind from fixating on them, allowing you to drift back to sleep.
• Try to avoid napping especially in the late afternoon and evening. But if you must nap, make sure and limit them to under thirty minutes, twenty is optimal. Napping for long periods of time or napping too close to your bedtime may make it difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep through the night.
• If you are taking medicine that may delay or disrupt sleep as a side effect, talk to your doctor about alternative options. Some medicines used to treat high blood pressure or asthma may disrupt your sleep. If you are unable to switch your medication talk to your doctor about taking the medication at a different time of day, so your needed medicine doesn’t aid insomnia.

Your Sleep Environment

Create the most comfortable sleeping environment as possible and help yourself fall asleep faster and enjoy a more satisfying sleep by following these tips:

• Limit your bedroom activities to sleep and sex. Avoid watching TV, working on a laptop or tablet, using e-readers, and spending time on your mobile phone. Associate your bedroom with sleep and sex only. These are the only activities that your bedroom should be designated for. When you enter your bedroom, your body should know it is time to sleep.
• Make sure your room is dark. Light is a natural signal that it is time to wake up and dark is a sign that it is time to go to bed. Any light disturbances could throw off your circadian rhythm, stopping your body’s natural release of melatonin, and make it difficult to fall asleep.
• Make your room colder. In order to fall asleep and stay asleep, your body temperature needs to lower. Give it a hand by turning on a fan, opening a window, or turning up the AC to make your room cooler. You may find that the combination of a heavy blanket or comforter and a cold bedroom has a soothing, swaddling feeling that nurtures sleep.
• Try out a more comfortable mattress. Sometimes the cause of your trouble sleeping through the night is simply your mattress. While any type of mattress can work for you, it must provide the right balance of both support and comfort. If you can see compression in some part of the mattress, find yourself shifting positions a lot, or have back, shoulder, or any other type of joint pain waking you up, it’s time to look for a new one.
• Pick the right pillow. Sleeping on the wrong type of pillow for your preferred sleep position could be the cause of your awakenings thanks to the discomfort and chronic back and neck pain they can cause. Use pillows to position your body properly – If aches and pains are waking you up, using pillows to provide better support to your body can greatly improve your chances of achieving restful sleep.
• Set an alarm. But place your alarm away from your bed, whether your phone or a traditional alarm clock, that way you must get out of bed to shut it off and will avoid the temptation to hit the snooze button continually.

Why Get treatment?

The ability to fall asleep—and stay asleep long enough to feel restored and refreshed in the morning—is vital to your overall health and well-being. Sleep is also essential in helping your body heal from an injury, process memories, cope with pain or illness, and do its housekeeping.

Establishing healthy sleep hygiene is critical to your overall health and quality of sleep. The more bad nights of sleep you have, the more likely you are to feel anxious around bedtime making it difficult to fall asleep, perform poorly during the day at work or school, have difficulty remembering, develop sleep disorders, and develop health issues like high blood pressure and hypertension.

If you’ve tried a variety of self-help solutions without much success and think you may have a sleep disorder, it’s time to talk with a sleep specialist, especially if your poor sleep is starting to impact your mood and health. Use your Sleep Profile to provide your physician with as much supporting information as possible.