The Top Seven Things To Avoid If You Want To Sleep Well

With indulgence at an all-time high during Christmas and New Year, your sleeping pattern is likely out of whack as you embark on a fresh start for 2024....CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

A combination of late nights along with lie-ins and for some, more alcohol than usual can have a knock-on effect. Have you found yourself tossing and turning worrying about work or falling asleep quickly but waking up with a start hours before your alarm?

It may not just be the festive period affecting sleep and some of your usual everyday bad habits could be sabotaging sleep.

Here is what you can do to combat them:

People who eat meals late at night could disrupt their rest because burning off calories raises body temperature. Sleep expert Dr Neil Stanley tells the Times that you should finish evening meals three hours before going to bed and avoid any foods that could upset your stomach, give you indigestion or heartburn.

Spicy, fatty and sugary foods were proven to be particularly detrimental in a 2019 study in the journal Cureus. Stanley does caveat this by saying going to bed hungry could also keep you up, so if you find your tummy rumbling later into the evening, then go for “something plain such as a couple of pieces of toast.”

While it is true that exercise improves sleep by relieving stress and regulating the circadian rhythm, you may run into trouble if you do intense workouts close to bedtime. Research in 2018 from the journal Sports Medicine, found HIIT (high-intensity interval training) done less than one hour before bedtime could lead to poorer sleep quality.

Further proving this, a 2020 research published in Frontiers in Psychology also found that HIIT performed too late in the day could counteract “the potential beneficial effects of exercise on sleep and [tip] the balance towards inhibiting, rather than promoting, sleep.”

If you want to exercise before bedtime, you are better off trying Yoga which has been proven to increase levels of the hormone melatonin and reduce cortisol levels. The Times reports that a study published in BMC Psychiatry in 2022 found that people with chronic insomnia who practised yoga daily for 14 weeks may experience better sleep.

It’s no secret that alcohol disrupts our sleep, despite that one in four still uses booze to help us nod off. The science behind it? In the short term, the Times reports: “It works as a sedative by boosting the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid, which inhibits impulses between nerve cells.” But then through the night when alcohol levels drop, stress hormones kick in, which can often jolt you awake.

Most experts advise you need to leave around four hours before bedtime for the effects to wear off. One study on middle-aged men found that even moderate doses of alcohol taken six hours before bedtime reduced sleep time and doubled wakefulness in the second half of the night. Choose to end your night with a cup of herbal tea instead.

As much as we might not want to admit it, the disruptive impact of smartphone scrolling before bed well-documented. The blue light in electronic devices has been found by Harvard researchers to shift circadian rhythm by three hours after six and a half hours of exposure.

Stanley says scrolling on short videos on social media is the worst thing to do on your phone before bed. A study in the journal Health Communication also found that 16.5 per cent of 1,100 participants showed increased stress, anxiety and poor health after reading “severely problematic” news. Stanley advises switching off devices 45 minutes before bed.

You may think you are doing the right thing by reading instead of going on your phone, but Kindles still emit blue light. One study by Penn State and Harvard universities found that participants who read electronic books for four hours before bedtime had reduced levels of melatonin and took nearly ten minutes longer to fall asleep than those who read a printed book.

More electronics causing problems! A 2019 study in the journal Cureus found that REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the final in our four-stage sleep cycle and key for memory consolidation and emotional processing, was reduced by 10 minutes if video games were played before bed, while research from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that more than 67 per cent of gamers reported missing sleep because they were gaming, which delayed their bedtime by an average of 101 minutes.

Arguing before bed can place your body under stress and on high alert, making it impossible to relax. The amount of time spent in deep sleep, as well as disruptions during REM sleep, are reduced as a result. “Individuals with highly reactive sleep systems experience drastic deterioration of sleep when stressed”, the authors of 2018 research on the subject in the Journal of Sleep Research said.

Stanley says: “If you go to bed het up and ruminating, your blood pressure and heart rate will be up. Also the last thing you should be doing late at night is ruminating with any problem.” He suggests setting aside 30 minutes early in the evening to have adult conversations about grievances in the hope they clear up in plenty of time before bed…CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ARTICLES>>>