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Sleep is a critical part of a healthy, balanced life. That’s why it’s important to be aware of what you might be doing to negatively affect your sleep. If you’re disturbing either the quantity or quality of your slumber, you’re going to want to take stock and address the situation. Here are a few of the most common ways that people sabotage their sleep.
1. Eating Recklessly
If you’re a late-night snacker, you may want to pause and consider what you’re doing to yourself before turning out the lights. Eating a meal before bed, especially a large one, can have a negative effect on the quality of your sleep. Drinking caffeine too late in the day can have a negative effect as well.
You also want to consider what you’re fueling your body with. A clean, balanced raw food diet, for instance, can enhance sleep quality and even reduce the total hours of sleep needed. However, an unbalanced raw food diet can throw off your digestion and lead to poor sleep.
2. Snoring
Snoring may sound like a natural habit that comes right along with your sleep, but it can actually have some pretty nasty side effects. For instance, uninhibited snoring can increase the likelihood of both strokes and acid reflux.
It also can be a sign of something more significant, like sleep apnea, which is a known sleep saboteur. If you suspect that you may be suffering from a sleep disorder like sleep apnea, ask your doctor or even your dentist for a referral to a sleep specialist in order to properly diagnose the issue and consider what steps can be taken to address it.
3. Sleeping in a Stressful Space
Stress and anxiety are both symptoms of bad sleep, and they can be created by more subtle situations than you might think. Even if your life is fairly serene, the simple fact that your bedroom is cluttered can lead to increased levels of stress.
This is part of why minimalism has gained so much momentum in recent years. Shifting to a minimalist lifestyle can have a positive effect on many of these small yet significant areas, such as stressful sleep caused by your surroundings.
4. Taking Unplanned Naps
It’s tempting to let yourself unwind, relax, and take a quick nap at the end of a long day of work or school. Just because you want to take a quick catnap to recharge, though, doesn’t mean you should. Sleeping at random or unplanned times in the day, especially later in the day, can throw off your sleep cycle and lead to difficulty falling asleep at night.
5. Untimely Exercising
Exercise and activity are excellent ways to enhance sleep — when they’re done at the right time of day. Critically, though, you shouldn’t get moving too much right before trying to go to sleep. If you exercise right before you get into bed, you’re much more likely to end up laying their awake for a while before your body slows down and allows you to drift off.
6. Spending Time on Your Phone
Phones, and technological gadgets, in general, dominate everyone’s attention these days. If you find that you’re uncontrollably tethered to your phone, though, you may want to make an effort to decrease the amount of time you spend looking at that phone screen — or any other device, for that matter.
Research has shown that prolonged exposure to blue light — the light let off by most screens — tends to suppress the sleep hormone melatonin for roughly twice as long as other light. In other words, all of that screen-time is literally, actively suppressing your ability to sleep.
7. Not Sticking to a Schedule
This one goes hand in hand with the issue of unplanned naps. If you don’t make an effort to structure your sleep patterns, you may find yourself suffering from inconsistent, low-quality sleep.
You don’t need to time your sleep to the minute, but setting general “sleep hours” and then trying to stick to them can be a critical way to allow your body to find a rhythm to its rest. Simply going to sleep and waking up whenever you decide to is a surefire way to upset your body’s rest and make it less effective.
Don’t Let Your Sleep Suffer
There are several different ways that you can cause your sleep to suffer. Some are more obvious, like avoiding schedules and recklessly eating right before bed. Others, though, can have a bit of a more subtle effect and can be much harder to diagnose.
Snoring and sleep apnea, for instance, are notoriously difficult to diagnose, as they happen while you’re sleeping. An untidy bedroom is another quiet yet disruptive element that can increase your stress levels and directly contribute to poor quality rest.
That’s why it’s essential that you take the time to discover what elements are actively working against your sleep. Once you figure these out, you can take steps to address them in order to reclaim that peaceful, effective rest and all of the benefits that good sleep offers.
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