A good night’s sleep affects many different aspects of your daily life. Family, work and education are severely affected if you are unable to get some good peaceful sleep. When you have good and enjoying sleep throughout the night, you are completely energetic for the whole next day. On the other hand, when you are not sleeping around properly, you feel lethargic, lazy and tired throughout the next day. Usually, people don’t know how to get some good sleep. As a result, they suffer from irregular and fitful sleeping patterns. In this article, we will give you some basic tips about enjoy a peaceful sleep.
Maintain a Bedtime Routine
You should always try to maintain a strict bedtime routine. Most of the children are pressurized by their parents to sleep on time. In fact, this is the reason why children always sleep peacefully and don’t have irregular sleeping patterns. If you have a specific routine, where you try to perform the same kind of activities at a specific point of time, your brain and body get used to it. Similarly, when you have a habit of sleeping at night, your body and brain will persuade you to sleep and you will be more relaxed on bed. You can also consider a hot bath, foot massage, reading a book or some other activity around ten minutes before going to bed.
Don’t get Addicted to Television at Night
It is very important to turn the television off. According to most medical experts, gadgets like computers, televisions or radios can be serious distractions and cause sleeping disorders. In order to get a peaceful sleep, you need to stay away from all these gadgets at night, especially television. When you are bothered by music or lights, you can stay up late unnecessarily. Your brain will be unable to rest when you have so much on your hands. You will be unable to rest when you are watching a video or have the urge to check your mails. You should always turn off all gadgets at least half an hour before going to bed.
Use Lavender Aromatherapy Spray
According to many health experts, spraying lavender aromatherapy spray on your pillow can do wonders if you want some peaceful sleep. Lavender aromatherapy can significantly slow your nervous system’s activity and help you get completely relaxed. This usually results in a good peaceful sleep. You can easily purchase lavender aromatherapy from the internet or local supplements stores.
Deep Breathing and Visualization Exercises
If sleeping around peacefully does not come easily to you, deep breathing and visualization exercises can help you completely relax. They can prepare your body for a good and peaceful sleep. You should try to imagine a quiet and peaceful place you like. This will bring your body to a state of complete relaxation.
Avoid Caffeine
It is very important to avoid drinking too much caffeine within four hours of your bedtime. Caffeine can keep you awake for a long time. It can also result in a fitful sleep that is not peaceful or relaxing. If you are used to drinking something before going to bed, you should drink a glass of warm milk. This can help you sleep peacefully throughout the night.
Nikki says
“How to get to sleep and wake up refreshed in the morning?”
The sleeping habits discussed in this article are practiced by Americans and other western societies. If someone from a different part of the world were to read this blog they may not agree with any of it, or even read it because not every culture stresses the importance of sleep the way people in the United States do. In our culture being able to sleep during the night is extremely valuable and if we cannot get the right amount of rest it can be quite frustrating. However, this is not the case for many other cultures around the globe. Sleeping patterns vary throughout the world, so while some of the suggestions made in “The Sleeping Blog” on how to get a good sleep may be helpful in the North American culture, they may not be beneficial or even necessary in other parts of the world.
In T.M. Luhrmann’s article “To Dream in Different Cultures,” he discusses the sleeping style in the village of Toraja, located on an Indonesian Island. The people of this village sleep in groups and huddle together to stay warm. They often wake up throughout the night, due to people turning over or talking with one another. Many of the sleeping suggestions made in this blog would be irrelevant for Toraja people and others in cultures similar to theirs. Our culture has created this obsessed idea that we need hours of continuous sleep each night and it is our culture that struggles the most with being able to go to sleep. “The National Sleep Foundation reports that more than one in five Americans has difficulty falling asleep almost every night, and a 2013 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that about 4 percent of adults in the United States had taken a prescription sleeping pill in the previous month. In 2012 Americans spent $32 billion in the sleep assistance industry,”(Luhrmann). This stress over a good night’s rest has created anxiety that prevents us from being able to fall asleep. Perhaps this is evidence that our culture may be too concerned with getting the perfect amount rest and as a result it is backfiring.
Our typical sleeping pattern has not always been the way it is today. Much like wild animals, we use to sleep in segments and we woke up throughout the night and either “talked, read, prayed, had sex, brewed beer or burgled,”(Luhrmann). This ideal 8 hours of sleep is something the people of western culture collectively created. “We think about sleep as a problem that interferes with more important things,” (Luhrmann). In other words if we can’t get a “healthy” amount of sleep we won’t be able to efficiently complete our daily task..This blog mentions that “Six hours of good sleep are worth more recuperatively than eight hours of light or disturbed sleep,”(Fisher). While this might be true in our culture, other parts of the world may disagree. The Toraja people for example, are disturbed often throughout the night and they believe it benefits them. They report that they are able to remember their dreams vividly. Luhrmann reports the experience people have when they wake up during the night, “That half-aware, drowsy state is a time when dreams commingle with awareness.” During this daze state Toraja people explain that they feel spiritually closer to God. To their culture this is more important than stressing over a “good” sleep each night. When an individual from Toraja’s sleep is interrupted they take advantage of it and view it as an opportunity to connect with themselves and their religion, where as an American might view this as a disturbance from their highly valued rest.
This blog begins by describing the ideal bedtime scenario, “the bedroom is quiet, dark, safe, soothing,”(Fisher). Again this description is not accurate for non-western cultures. Many other cultures sleep on the ground outside, or on cots much less luxurious than the beds we sleep on. Ecological variation could play an important role in the difference between some cultures sleeping styles. This blog also recommends having a sleep schedule, which is another idea that is primarily only practiced in Western cultures. Often families have a nightly routine for themselves and their children. In many other cultures however, people simply go to sleep when they are tired and sometimes that means falling asleep in a place other than a “bed.”
The suggestions in this blog for getting a good, refreshing night’s sleep may be helpful for people in western cultures, but it’s important to know that our cultures standards for sleep and other habits differ from other cultures around that world. The tips in this article could be helpful for some people in western cultures, but in most other parts of the world these sleeping “hacks” would not be needed. Perhaps if our Western cultures were more aware of the interrupted sleeping patterns that occur throughout other parts of the world we wouldn’t stress and experience anxiety over getting a perfect night of sleep.
Nikki Adams