Did you know, if it takes you less than five minutes to fall asleep at night you’re probably sleep-deprived? Falling asleep should take at least 10-15 minutes, given that you are taking care of your body and mind in the right ways. Sleep is one of the most underrated parameters towards health.
How do you sleep? That’s right, we aren’t kidding about a sleep tutorial.
Just being in bed for several hours at night is not the right way to sleep if you find yourself tossing and turning, lucid dreaming, and running through the thousands of thoughts in your mind.
It’s not all “I slept and woke up in 6 hours”.
Instead, there are important stages of sleep that you go through. Time to learn about these stages of your sleep:
Stage 1- This stage of sleep refers to the transition from being awake to a light sleep period. This is where you can observe your heartbeats, breathing, and eye movements slowing down. You can also observe your muscles relaxing with the occasional twitches (yep, the ones that give you the fake sense of falling for no reason).
Stage 2- This is the stage just before you enter a deep sleep zone. You find your body relaxing even further. Your body temperature drops and your eye movements stop. You spend more of your sleep cycles in this stage than any other.
Stage 3- This is a deep sleep stage that occurs in longer periods during the first half of the night. Your muscles are even more relaxed here, making it harder to wake yourself up. Brain waves become even slower. This is the stage of sleep you want to enter to feel completely rested and fresh in the morning.
REM Sleep- This occurs about ninety minutes after you fall asleep. There is a rapid eye movement behind your eyelids, breathing becomes irregularly fast, and your heart rate and blood pressure increase to a near waking state. Now, this is the most interesting stage, as here is where most of your dreams occur.
Fun fact- you spend around two hours dreaming each night but you may not remember most of your dreams. Your limbs become temporarily paralyzed, creepy right? Though this is what prevents you from acting out on your nightmares. Dreaming aids in processing emotions, this is yet another reason you need to give yourself the required amount of sleep and if you are not meeting up this requirement then it might be one of the causes behind you frequently feeding your anxiety.
Reasons sleeping comes as a challenge for you:
- Your mind is always preoccupied with multiple thoughts, especially at bedtime.
- You have anchored the bed to everything else but sleep (eating, over-thinking, binge-watching, working, etc)
- You eat at hours very close to bedtime.
- Staying caffeinated is your hobby.
- You often excite yourself during bedtime with music or movies, etc, and confuse your mind and body.
- You don’t have any fixed time structure or schedule for your sleep.
How lack of sleep can lead to lesser success and more distress much to your surprise:
- Memory Issues, both long-term and short-term.
- Thinking and concentrating don’t come easily.
- Not the best aid for depression or anxiety and can in fact make you moody.
- Weakens your immune system.
- Can cause high blood pressure and a higher risk of diabetes.
- Might make you over-indulge due to chemical signals being off-balance and hence causing you to gain weight.
- Lower sex drives due to a drop in testosterone levels.
- Poor balance in the body.
Sleep train with us implementing these following easy to-dos:
- Practice breathing methods before bedtime to calm your mind.
- Anchor the bed only to sleep and not to surf through the internet, waiting, working, or overthinking.
- Keep a healthy gap of a few hours between your last meal and bedtime.
- Avoid the intake of coffee post afternoon hours.
- Fix a bedtime schedule and build habits like some light reading or listening to calm music, anything doesn’t excite you but calms you down.
- If nothing helps, then find ways to consume calming agents like moringa, chamomile, melatonin, etc.
Sleepless nights can never make you healthy, only a zombie. We at BBETTER kept you, the hard-working ones having trouble sleeping, in our minds while designing our special sleep supplement. Now we don’t want you to lose out on your beauty sleep or even make you dependent on supplements. Hence, we relied only on all-natural sources like Chamomile, Melatonin, Valerian while formulating our special sleeping aid.
Here’s hoping you beautiful people get the sleep you deserve, dream the dreams of a happy life, and wake up fresher than a sunflower with that glow, without coffee being the first thing on your mind and content (the satisfied kind) consuming your heart.
