How Small Changes to Your Sleeping Situation Can Revitalise Your Life

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Many people don’t realise the kind of impact sleep has on your day to day life. Aside from waking up tired and feeling fuzzy in the head, the many symptoms of poor sleep are not known to most. Because of this, many people will put up with bad sleep night after night, rather than make the small changes necessary to slip into a deep and restorative slumber regularly.

These changes can be as small as updating your linens, or as complex as exploring the possibility of sleep studies to investigate your sleep patterns. To help motivate you to discover what changes you can make to your sleeping situation, we’ve put together an article exploring the benefits of these small changes.

Posture

Posture problems are the kinds of issues that never go away, and only get worse with time. A slight lean turns into a sore neck, which turns into a full-blown hunch within a couple of decades. Nipping these problems in the bud is essential to stopping them from becoming long-term issues, and the beginning place for these issues is the bed.

A bad mattress can mean that you’re stuck in the same position, straining your back for eight hours at a time, which will continue to degrade your posture as long as you continue to sleep on that mattress. Saving up enough to allow you to buy a mattress online might take a while, but the expense is worth it when you consider the alternative.

Wakefulness

Your wakefulness is usually dismissed as something that comes and goes by it’s own volition. However, as anyone who understands the basic ins and outs of brain chemistry will tell you, the amount of wakefulness you have is directly linked to how much sleep you get, and the quality of that sleep.

If you find yourself half asleep all day, that could be occurring because of a lack of sleep, or poor quality sleep going all night. A full eight hours is no longer the gold standard for being awake and alert the next day, but rather a full, restful eight hours, without tossing and turning or regular waking.

Mindfulness

You know the feeling of absolute exhaustion that overtakes you after an all-nighter, and you know the feeling of being physically energetic while being mentally tapped out. These two things are distinctly different and come from different sources.

The absolute exhaustion that overtakes you with a complete lack of sleep is an all-encompassing, heavy feeling that leaves you unable to function physically and running on fumes mentally. Alternatively, the physically rested, mentally tapped-out feeling is more of a vehicle-out-of-control feeling, in which your forethought and logic goes out the window and you spend the day not thinking before you act. The former can be readily avoided by sleeping naturally, or taking naturally occurring sleep chemicals like Melatonin, and the latter stems from REM-less sleep.

Ensure that your room is at the optimal sleep temperature, update your mattress, and these factors combined will lead to better quality sleep that can offset these kinds of tiredness.

Mood

Everyone knows someone who gets moody when they don’t get enough sleep, and this is the perfect example of why this is affected by the amount of rest you create for yourself on a daily basis. Mood comes from the amount of clarity you have in your day, and it grows from that point based on what you experience.

If you wake up from a little amount of sleep tired, you will be less sharp, and therefore surprised by more things, including bad things like heavy traffic on the way to work, or a hot day you would have otherwise expected if you’d been well rested.

Muscle Fatigue

Your body needs sleep to rejuvenate itself, and not just your brain chemicals either. Your muscles and joints go through repair processes while you sleep, and not allowing them enough time to do the repairs necessary will mean you are achy and sore the next day.

Sleep Schedule

Finally, good sleep begets good sleep. Starting to work your way towards a healthy sleep schedule is the only way to get to a healthy sleep schedule. Start going to bed half an hour earlier than you normally would, and once that time becomes your norm, roll it back again.

With these tips you can start sleeping longer, deeper, and more reliably, and all without needing to make too many big changes to your life.