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By Maria Azzurra Volpe
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A good night's sleep is not just great for the body; it's also essential for our general well-being. It helps you get sick less often; maintain a healthy weight; reduce stress and improve your mood, as well as helping you think more clearly; and do better at work or in school.
Getting enough sleep every day is proven to lower your risk of developing serious health problems, like diabetes and heart disease, and it also helps your memory and your creativity. But, increasingly, more people have trouble sleeping, with the average American getting fewer than seven hours of sleep every night, which is the bare minimum amount advised for an adult.
Newsweek spoke to sleep experts to gather tips that will guarantee you a good night's sleep. Below are the top three secrets that will have you sleeping like an angel.
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No Heavy, Protein-Rich Meals Right Before Bed
Lauri Leadley, clinical sleep educator, founder, and president of Valley Sleep Center in Arizona, told Newsweek that, to sleep better, you should avoid heavy, protein-rich meals right before bed.
Leadley said: "Eating a protein-rich heavy meal before bed can actually cause your body to work harder to digest the food, which can lead to discomfort and difficulty falling asleep. Additionally, protein can stimulate the production of certain neurotransmitters, making it harder to relax and fall asleep. Give your body two hours after dinner to wind down for sleep."
Johns Hopkins Medicine says high-protein foods like steak and chicken before dinner can disrupt the quality of your sleep because they take a long time to break down. Your digestion slows by up to 50 percent when you sleep.
Avoid Overwatching the Clock
Cali Bahrenfuss, sleep technologist and owner of Delta Sleep Coaching, told Newsweek that overwatching the clock to check how much time left you have in bed can also affect the quality of your sleep.
"If you are someone who wakes in the middle of the night, automatically looks at the clock, and gets discouraged or frustrated right away, eliminating the clock from your view may be a great way to minimize negative thoughts before they happen," Bahrenfuss said.
"For example," she added, "you might wake up and see that the time is 3 a.m. and think to yourself, 'Here we go again, this is the time I always wake up and I can never get back to sleep right away. If I would just go to sleep right now, I could get two more hours of sleep.' You've now just put extreme pressure on yourself to go back to sleep right this second, and when sleep doesn't happen right away, it makes you even more upset."
Bahrenfuss added: "Now you have created a stress response that can worsen the situation. If we turn the clock around and don't know what time it is at all, you may eliminate this stress response from happening."
According to Bahrenfuss, if you don't know the time, you can always assume that there's more than enough time to fall back to sleep and not put too much pressure on yourself to fall back to sleep right this minute.
"This may take a few nights to get used to, but patience and consistency will help to make not knowing the time a relief instead of a stressor," Bahrenfuss said.
Get Out of Bed When You're Not Sleeping
While you may think that laying in bed will help you fall asleep faster when you're not sleepy, it may have the opposite effect.
Bahrenfuss said that If you've given yourself 30 minutes or so to fall asleep and sleep just isn't happening, it's better to just leave the bedroom and go back later.
She added: "This can help remind your body that the bed is for sleep only, and it can allow you to reframe your thoughts from a negative space into a more relaxed space. Our bodies are wonderful at adapting, and they may have accidentally associated the bed with things other than sleep. Leaving the bedroom and doing a relaxing activity until you're sleepy again can help remind your body what the bed is for.
"Leaving your bed to positively reframe your thoughts until sleepy again can help break negative associations you may have when you're not sleeping. Lying in bed for too long while awake may ultimately lead to accidental negative associations, and we do not want that to occur," Bahrenfuss said.
Other Tips to Sleep Better Include
Leadley said another tip to sleep better is to keep your bedroom at a cool temperature. "When it's a scorcher out, don't feel like you have to make your room an icebox. Just make sure it is quite a bit cooler than the outside temperature. If you turn down the thermostat and still have trouble sleeping, try taking a quick shower. The change in temperature can make your body feel like taking a snooze."
Another factor to take into account is the type of bedding you're using. Leadley said that using a light quilt or blanket instead of your usual comforter, and using sheets made of a lighter material, can help you sleep better. If your room gets too hot, she added that you should some ice packs in the bed an hour or two before you go to sleep, to cool down the bedding even more and keep that heat from building up.
Last but not least, another golden rule for a good night's sleep is no devices an hour before bed. Leadley said that blue light can suppress the production of melatonin, which is a hormone that helps regulate sleep.
"Exposure to blue light before bedtime can make it harder to fall asleep and can disrupt the natural sleep-wake cycle. However, there are ways to mitigate the effects of blue light, such as using blue light-blocking glasses or adjusting the settings on electronic devices to reduce blue-light emissions," Leadley added.
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