Sleep is incredibly important for your health and wellbeing; a good night’s sleep will recharge your body and mind to get you ready to take on the next day. But if your sleep is regularly being disrupted, you’ll end up feeling fatigued and increase the likelihood of being affected by a myriad of ailments and diseases like heart disease, diabetes and respiratory infections.
So, if you want to keep your mind and body in good shape, it is important to make steps to ensure that your sleep will improve, so that you can reap the numerous health benefits of sleep. To help you do this, we have identified common sleep disruptors and solutions you can implement to reduce their impact on you and your sleep habits.
Avoid sleep disruption by blocking out light pollution
Light pollution can be a big sleep disruptor for many people, our bodies need darkness to fall asleep, so the lights from a streetlamp outside or passing cars can be disruptive to your sleep, making it harder to fall asleep and even wake you up during the night.
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An easy solution to this is to invest in a blackout window covering for your bedroom’s windows, these blackout blinds or curtains will block light pollution from entering your room and create a nice dark environment, which is perfect for sleeping in.
Keep your room cool at night to beat the heat
Temperature is another incredibly common sleep disruptor, especially when it is warm out. Hot temperatures will cause you to feel clammy, uncomfortable, and restless, which will ultimately end in you having a very disrupted night’s sleep. Ideally for sleep, your bedroom should be around 18°C, so if it’s any warmer than that, you’ll struggle to sleep.
The easy solution to this is to cool your bedroom down, a lot of the time this can be done by keeping your curtains closed during the warm hours of the day then opening them and your bedroom window during the night to let cool in. Alternatively, you could invest in a room fan or air conditioning unit to cool the room.
Beat noise pollution with a white noise machine
If you live near a main road, airport, or industrial estate you’ll more than likely find that there’s some level of noise pollution outside during the night. While some heavy sleepers can deal with this noise, most people would have their sleep disrupted by loud noise pollution outside.
If you find that noise pollution is disrupting your sleep, you could replace your bedroom’s windows with new double-glazed windows, but that can be pricey, so we’d instead recommend that you get a white noise machine to drown out the sounds of outside noise pollution at night, with calming white noise.
Lower stress levels by practicing mindfulness
Finally, we move onto stress, which is unfortunately a big sleep disruptor for a large group of people. Stress has been shown to disrupt sleep, which in turn will make you more stressed, creating a viscous cycle of increased stress and decreased sleep which can spiral out of control, if left unchecked.
While the simple solution would be to remove stress from your life, that is unfortunately not easy for most people as stress is often related to work and family issues. Instead you should look to counter your stress levels by practicing mindfulness, with: breathing exercises, meditation, self love and reflection you can reduce your stress levels and in turn, improve your sleep habits.
