In addition to nutrition, sleep is one of the most impactful things we can work on when it comes to our health.

It’s the time our body gets each day to rest and recover from all the stressors we face, and not only will it allow us to rejuvenate but it will also make us more resilient against that day-to-day stress.

Unfortunately so many of us don’t get in those 7- 9 recommended hours!

So if you’re unable to log the time that you need, let’s try and make the hours you do get as effective as possible.

5 Tips to Take to Bed for Better Sleep: 

1. The bed is for sleeping!

Your bed should be only for sleeping. If you’re doing other things, like binging Netflix, or answering those work emails from your bed, your body can start associating those activities with being there. Rather than falling asleep, your system might be getting stimulated to stay awake instead.  

I’m a big proponent of not having a TV in the bedroom, and if you charge your devices in another room and use instead a basic alarm clock, you can even keep the temptation out of the room to scroll and get absorbed in something other than sleep. 

If you have a hard time turning off a spinning mind at night and falling asleep, this is definitely something you should be looking into. It might take some time to break the negative connection your body has with the bed, but over time you should notice your sleep coming a bit easier! 

2. Have warm feet 

A study back in 1990 from the University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland, actually showed that people with warm feet were able to fall asleep around 15 minutes faster than those with cold feet. If you’re getting less than 7 hours in bed each night an extra 15 minutes can be a serious game changer!  

You can do this is a few different ways. The easiest is to just pull on a pair of warm cozy socks (maybe warmed on a heater beforehand?). But if that isn’t enough, you could use a hot water bottle under the covers at your feet. Or try a warm foot bath, maybe even add in some epsom salts and essential oils for ultimate relaxation!

3. Keep the room cool 

While it might seem a bit counter to tip #2, our body actually prefers a cooler ambient temperature during sleep. Having a lower temperature in your bedroom will help promote deeper sleep, so try and keep your room below 20C / 67F.

This doesn’t mean you have to be cold while you’re sleeping! You can still cozy up with all the blankets or the fuzziest PJs, but having the air temperature on the cooler side will just help your body with it’s own natural transition.

4. Get some blackout blinds

Light is what triggers our body to start producing cortisol in the morning to wake us up, so we don’t want to be getting triggered by it in the middle of the night! Most of us don’t live in the middle of nowhere, so street lights, car lights, or maybe your neighbours motion detector lights (this one is me!) can shine right into your room. 

Especially if you’re finding that the overall quality of your sleep isn’t great, then this one is for you. Extra light coming into the room could be the cause of your not falling into a deeper level of sleep. So get those blackout blinds to keep any pesky extra light out!

5. Use a white noise machine

A white noise machine is a sound machine that will create a consistent ambient noise. It’s made so that the noise will be unobtrusive to hear and after a few minutes will be barely noticable.

If you find yourself sensitive to noise, or maybe have some family members on different schedules than you, you can use a white noise machine to keep those sounds away from you while sleeping. Even if you don’t fully wake up from these noises during the night they could be pulling you out of deeper levels of sleep.

And there you have it! 5 tips to take to bed for better sleep. 

Which tip are you most excited to try out? Drop me a comment and let me know!