If you’re reading this article, you probably already know how important sleep is to your health, but you’re looking for a way to improve its quality. The good news is that you can easily achieve this goal by changing some of your daily habits.
Better to sleep with the 10-3-2-1-0 rule
The simple method that will make our nights more peaceful and our most productive days:
10 hours before bed: Avoid caffeine
Caffeine can affect the quality of sleep if consumed before bedtime. Within 45 minutes of its consumption, 99% of caffeine is absorbed by the body. But the time it takes for your body to reduce it to half its original amount varies from 1.5 to 9.5 hours.
And it’s not just coffee. Your soft drink, chocolate or tea may also contain caffeine.
Sleep effects from caffeine consumption can include restlessness, insomnia, and feeling tired even after a full night’s rest.
3 hours before bedtime: Do not consume another meal and alcohol
Ideally, the last meal of the day should be eaten before the body begins to release melatonin. This happens when it is already dark outside.
Eating later in the evening, when the brain is already preparing for sleep, puts you at risk of circadian rhythm disruption and increased body fat. This, in turn, can increase weight and potentially some long-term health problems.
As for alcohol, it can help you fall asleep faster, but a study published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research shows that it seriously disrupts sleep quality, as the body’s alcohol metabolism prevents both initial deep sleep and the next phase of REM sleep. , where we see dreams, so we wake up more easily.
Additionally, alcohol can alter our circadian rhythm, our body’s internal biological clock, which regulates some very necessary and important biological functions, such as the sleep-wake cycle.
2 hours before bed: Stop working
To prepare your mind and body for relaxation, stop all work activities two hours before going to bed. This time limit creates a positive mental separation between work and sleep.
Meditation and deep breathing exercises are great ways to calm your thoughts, slow your breathing and slow your heart rate to relax.
1 hour before bed: close screens (TV, computer, tablet, cell phone)
Exposure to blue light from screens at night can “trick” the brain into thinking it’s still daytime, thus delaying the internal clock and causing a change in sleep patterns.
This disorder can lead to difficulty falling asleep, shorter sleep duration, and a reduction in the restorative quality of sleep.
0 snooze the alarm the next morning: sleep more!
According to experts, by snoozing the alarm several times, we “confuse” our brain.
All we get this way is just a few more minutes of fragmented sleep, since during this time we are neither fully awake nor fully asleep. In other words, we begin a sleep cycle that never ends.
Therefore, we damage our brain and therefore our attention, mood and cognition.