Is it a challenge to fall asleep every night? Do you end up rolling around half the night before drifting into restless sleep?
Here are seven handy tricks that will have you nod off in no time.
Practice Your Downward Dog
Yoga stretches the body and the mind, a dual exercise to tire you out before bed. By physically exhausting your body and draining your mind of its worries, you’ll find it easier to fall asleep.
Count Sheep
Counting sheep is popular advice for people who can’t fall asleep on time. If you’ve ever wondered where the analogy came from, it comes from a long story involving white sheep and a counting Shepard trying to sleep. Either way, counting sheep is the kind of mindless activity that eventually numbs the mind to sleep.
Can’t fall asleep? Picture a row of fluffy white sheep leaping over a fence, then count them until your alarm wakes you up.
Take Some Melatonin Supplements
Melatonin is a hormone the body secretes in high quantities at night time. Researchers have discovered that it plays a key role in maintaining the circadian rhythm. The body produces high quantities of this hormone in the dark, hence the warnings about using your devices right before bed because the bright light inhibits melatonin production.
If you’ve tried a lot of sleep tricks and they don’t work, a melatonin supplement might be the right nudge you need to fall asleep.
Use A Fall Asleep App
Fall asleep app is an app that helps users fall asleep faster using the study of psychoacoustics. These apps often use white noise, somnolence-inducing music, and other helpful tools to encourage sleep in users.
Other apps like the sound of rain app also include guided meditations, different stories, and ambient music, all of which can be layered on top of rain sounds to create a perfect mix for everything from sleeping and relaxing to focusing and meditating.
Take A Cool Shower
Body temperature is an integral part of falling asleep. When you fall asleep, your body temperature reduces. A cold shower reduces body temperature and tricks the brain into believing it’s time to sleep. A cold shower right before bed can help if you struggle with falling asleep. Also, for people with a bedtime routine that includes showering and using sleep-friendly oils, having a shower often kickstarts the entire routine and psychologically preps the body for sleep.
Set The Mood
Ambience is everything. It can transform an ordinary space into something beautiful. When setting the mood with ambience, it’s not only restaurants and romantic getaways that need attention to the little details. Your bedroom needs ambience and not for the reasons you’re thinking. Sometimes, it takes you setting the mood for sleep for your body to shut down at night.
Low lights, a dark room, and even sweet-smelling candles can put your room in the right mood for sleep. Even science backs this. According to research, white, bright light contains blue light that prohibits the production of melatonin, a hormone that enables sleep. A little advice, the light from your devices also emits this blue light, so keep your room blue and white light free. If you need a night light, look for night lights that help you fall asleep easily. You can find them on Amazon.
Get Cozy
The little things make a difference, like setting the mood and getting cozy in bed. As much as sleeping occurs naturally, it is also affected by specific actions. For example, lying in bed or listening to certain music is a trigger that tells our body that it’s time to sleep. These triggers are usually learned from habits cultivated over time. If you only lie in bed when you want to sleep, anytime you lie down, the body is wired to think it’s time to fall asleep.
One of the triggers for falling asleep could be staying cozy. This means snuggling under a warm or weighted blanket and being in your sleep clothes. So, if you’re having difficulty falling asleep quickly, getting cozy could help you.
