Sleep Hygiene Definition
Despite what the name suggests, sleep hygiene has nothing to do with cleanliness. It simply refers to optimising your bedtime routine to ensure a long, unbroken sleep cycle. There are many ways you can optimise your bedtime routine.
- Do not eat less than 2 hours before you sleep.
- No screens for 1 hour before sleep.
- Try to keep your bedroom to a cool temperature.
- Try to keep your sleep schedule the same for every night, e.g always sleep 12-
8am. - Limit caffeine to 12 hours before you go to sleep.
- Reading before bed has shown to improve how much information you retain from a book but also will help send you to sleep faster.
- Meditation has also been shown to improve sleep.
Benefits
Sleep hygiene allows for deeper sleep and moving through sleep cycles at the correct rate. This translates to a whole host of wellbeing benefits.
- Strengthens your immune system.
- Reduced risk of heart disease.
- Reduces stress and anxiety.
- Improves attention and productivity.
- Better recovery from training.
- Regulates hormones better.
- Many studies have linked sleep with life expectancy.
Improving your sleep hygiene will improve your sleep cycles and routine, leading to the health benefits above. However, this isn’t viable for everyone. For example, many people work shifts that change each day, so a routine becomes impossible. Or you suffer from insomnia or have a new-born that gets pleasure from keeping you up at night. Sleep isn’t about perfection it is about maximising what you can from your lifestyle and context. If you can only get 6 hours of sleep before work, you can still employ a sleep hygiene routine to make sure those 6 hours are good quality.
