Start your week by getting motivated by three women champions who value their sleep and sleep schedule, and consider good sleep to be one of the reasons behind their success.
Make meditation part of your bedtime routine – Oprah Winfrey
Meditating every night before bed can help you improve your sleep quality. Stress is one of the biggest causes of poor sleep and other sleep issues. Meditation helps you calm your mind, letting you drift not into concerns about your life, but instead to dreamland.
How to:
To inculcate this sleep tip into your bedtime routine, first, find a quiet area where you can relax completely. The place has to be low on noise and any other sort of distractions. Now sit comfortably or lie down. Close your eyes and bring your attention to your breathing. Inhale and remind yourself of all that you are grateful for. Exhale and let go of everything that refrains you from your highest self. If thoughts start flooding in, then just observe them and they will leave. Keep your attention on your breathing.
The other meditation technique that you can try for better sleep is the body scan meditation. Lie down in bed and close your eyes. Now take your attention to your toes, stay with them for a while. Slowly take your attention to all parts of you until you reach the tips of your hair. Most of the time, you will be fast asleep before you have even reached the hips!
Take a luxurious bath before hitting the sack – Arianna Huffington
The second suggestion on this list of sleep tips is from none other than the author, columnist, and entrepreneur, Arianna Huffington. She suggests a lukewarm bath before sleep. She is not the only one though. According to a study, taking a warm bath an hour before bed can help you drift off to sleep faster.
The temperature of our body starts falling after sunset. This is crucial for sleep. By taking a lukewarm bath an hour before bed, you help your body temperature lower faster, thus helping you fall asleep quicker than usual.
How to:
To make the ritual luxurious so that you look forward to it every night, Arianna Huffington suggests that you draw yourself a luxurious bath with Epsom salt, some light background music, and fragrant candles. This will lift your mood and help you sleep faster and better.
Bid goodbye to devices an hour before bedtime – Gwyneth Paltrow
Sleep tip three comes from Gwyneth Paltrow, the Academy Award-winning actress, businesswoman, and author. According to her, devices are sleep thieves and not keeping a check on them can leave you robbed of good quality sleep.
Using an electronic device before bed affects your circadian rhythms by delaying your sleep. The blue light from devices fools the brain into believing that it is still day time. As a result, the brain skips on producing melatonin, the hormone that is responsible for us to feel sleepy. This delays our body’s internal sleep clock.
How to:
Replace your habit of scrolling through your phone or tablet or your laptop with a reading habit. Read from a book and see how it helps you fall asleep instead of stealing from your forty winks. The other sleep rituals could be the ones we just discussed, that is meditating and a warm bath. The other rituals could be drinking a cup of chamomile tea while listening to some soothing music, or jotting down your thoughts in a gratitude journal.
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