Practicing great sleep hygiene requires a few things, but it can be hard staying the course to make each night a success. Your bedroom should be a sleep sanctuary for relaxation and Grade A snooze. To make things a little easier for yourself, The Huffington Post suggests you ban 5 items from your bedroom:
1. Your Smartphone: Whether you are using it as a landline phone or alarm, the temptation of picking it up to work or scroll through Facebook is undeniable. Receiving a call or notification can easily ruin an perfectly good night’s sleep and not to mention the blue light that you are exposing yourself tricks your brain into thinking that it’s daytime.
2. Work: It’s hard to power down after a stressful work day, but it’s even harder when you bring work into your bedroom. If you are using a blue light emitting device, such as a smartphone, laptop or iPad, you are also slowing the production of your sleep hormone melatonin. Working in the bedroom will also train your body not to relax in bed; it will believe it’s in a secondary work space.
3. Pets: This one mostly comes down to a personal preference, but sharing your bed with your little furry friends may cause poor sleep quality and a shorter sleep duration. Since animals have a different sleep cycle, it’s more than likely that Spike is going to move around throughout the night and wake you. Plus, pets don’t come to bed alone, they bring pollen, dust and dander from their busy day, causing those dreaded nighttime allergies.
4. Food: It may look great on television, but dining in bed may not be as comfortable as you think when those leftover crumbs seem to take over the sheets. Keep food away from your sacred place of slumber.
5. Books: While cuddling up with a good book may sound like a great idea to lead into sleep, it’s not exactly foolproof for shut-eye. Any stimulating material, including tearjerkers and intense thrillers, can keep up wake longer than you need to be as you try to finish up an extra chapter. Try to stick to light reading outside your bedroom and avoid intellectually and emotional reads to avoid poor sleep quality.
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