A quality night’s sleep is essential. It helps you feel well-rested and awake the next day. If you constantly feel tired upon waking up or during the day and can’t properly focus, you need to experience some underlying issues that can impact your night’s rest. Knowing factors affecting sleep quality can help you avoid mistakes and promote healthier sleep, making you feel energised, happy and less stressed.
Heavy Exercise at Night
Even though exercising can help improve health and promote healthy sleep, it can also disturb inner clocks, making it really hard to fall asleep. This usually happens when you exercise at night.
When we fall asleep, our heartbeat and body temperature naturally drops, making falling asleep easier. The same happens when we take a hot shower. However, incentive workouts greatly stimulate both these functions, which makes us stay energised and awake for longer. If you need some physical activity before sleep, we recommend choosing meditation or yoga, which will calm you down and promote relaxation.
Light Sensitivity
Light exposure is also a big factor affecting how you sleep. For some, even a large amount of light during sleep is normal, and they feel okay about not having dark curtains at night. However, others have light sensitivity, so even the smallest amount of light from the window can make them wake up. If you are one of those people, buy dark curtains to black out all the light.
Caffeine Intake
Coffee is considered the most popular beverage in the world. It helps people stay more energised during the day and makes it easy to focus and concentrate when needed. However, extensive caffeine intake and especially drinking coffee before sleep is bad if you want to achieve healthy sleep.
If you like the effects of coffee and want to reduce its intake, we recommend you choose specially formulated medication to wake you up. Such pills work by releasing active ingredients like vitamin B5, vitamin B12, zinc, and caffeine after 7-8 hours of intake. They should be consumed before going to sleep, and they will slowly release caffeine in the morning. This is safer and more beneficial to your health.
Stress and Anxiety
Stress is the key factor in poor sleep quality. It causes racing thoughts and tension in the body, so you can’t relax and fall asleep. According to a 2013 APA survey, 43% of people reported lying awake at night due to stress in the past month.
While stress can be cured by meditation and racing thoughts can be eliminated by writing your thoughts down, anxiety is a mental health disorder that requires professional help.
Eating Wrong
Poor diet and constant cravings can damage your sleep. Too heavy dinner or hunger are two key factors of not being able to fall asleep and feeling tired in the morning. That is because all those fats and proteins you eat before going to sleep send your digestive system into overdrive which can even cause heartburn. Since falling asleep hungry is not an option as well, we recommend you make lunch your key meal and choose something light for dinner, which should also be eaten at least 3 hours before going to bed.
