Wake Up to Better Sleep: 7 Unconventional Daytime Rituals for Dream-Worthy Nights
Boost Your Sleep Quality: Daytime Habits for Improved Rest
Do you find that you tend to spend more time star-gazing at your ceiling than actually sleeping? That you’ve gotten tired of tossing and turning until sun rays break through? Well, my friend, it’s time to look beyond the usual sleep tips.
If you were to Google “how can I make my sleep better”, you’re going to be flooded with a ton of tips and tricks on how to improve your sleep quality. But once you click into a few results, you realize they all seem to talk about the same few. Today, I want to focus on 7 lesser-known habits to unlock better sleep.
You know the drill with sleep hygiene and have tried cooling the temp, blackout curtains, and other sleep-friendly rituals. They just haven’t quite cut it yet! And that may be because a key piece of getting good quality sleep has to do with what you do during the day, not just around bedtime.
Get ready to sync up with your body's internal clockworks for deep, restorative sleep that leaves you continuously refreshed. Here are 7 lesser-known daytime habits to promote deeper, more restful sleep.
Optimize Your Daytime Habits for Improved Nighttime Sleep Quality
These 7 unexpected habits can help to finally click together your body’s natural sleep-wake systems so that you feel rested when you wake up! While good sleep habits are still crucial to good quality sleep, these daytime tweaks will do wonders for better sleep. So perk up those tired eyes and read on!
How to Get Better Sleep at Night: 7 Simple Daytime Habits
Soak Up Some Morning Rays
Exposure to natural light first thing in the morning is magic. Bright, natural light helps to synchronize circadian rhythms in the sleep-wake cycle. Stick with me here - but think about breakfast. It’s important for digestion to break your fasting with food at some point. Once we eat, our body recognizes that we are awake and in motion and switches into other systems. The same is true for sleep! Spending time in natural light upon waking helps to reinforce that you are now up.
Natural light suppresses natural melatonin production in the brain helping you begin to feel more alert throughout the day. It also helps your sleep drive build up at night as you spend less time in natural light throughout the evening and night.
So sit in front of a window while you eat or have your morning beverage, go for a walk, exercise outside or do whatever your heart desires while making sure you’re exposed to those sunny rays. The best is if you can get a solid 30 minutes of strong exposure, but don’t stress if you can’t. Some will say an hour is best, and while the more you can get is helpful, there’s also a lot of support for consistency of smaller amounts of time than infrequent large chunks.
If starting your day with sunlight is tough, try to get a good half hour in by noon to help your brain and body optimize for better sleep at night.
Eat Like a Private Chef Made It
The good old afternoon crash. We all know it. The trick to avoiding it starts with your first meal. Research suggests that starting with a smaller, protein-dense meal is the kindest to the sleep-wake cycle.
This is because sugar-heavy foods give us an energy burst, but don’t typically provide a lasting energy source and create that crash later in the day. Alternatively, protein takes more work to metabolize which helps to prevent blood sugar dips aka crashes.
The short of it is: what and when you eat impacts sleep in several ways. Eat smaller, balanced meals throughout the day to prevent energy crashes and maintain regulated production of serotonin and melatonin.
Hydrate Like a Camel
Dehydration is the silent killer to good sleep. Even mild dehydration can mess with melatonin release and trigger rest-disruptive symptoms like headaches, muscle cramping, and snoring.
Without enough water, our body can’t do what it needs to do! This included producing melatonin. We’ve heard the advice of avoiding caffeine after a certain time of day and minimizing alcohol content right before bed. This, at least partially, boils down the fact that they’re very dehydrating liquids. So yes, limit your intake of diuretics, but also make sure you are hydrating throughout the day. (And having extra if you took ingest diuretics.)
However, don’t be too hydrated. Frankly, this is for a lot of reasons. But in terms of sleep, excessive fluids can also disrupt quality sleep because, well, you’ll have to let it out. To avoid poorly timed bathroom breaks, spread out your fluid intake steadily throughout the day.
Sweat It Out
We all know exercise is good for us for a plethora of reasons, but getting your heart pumping is also one of the sneakiest sleep-friendly tricks. Physical activity helps to regulate your sleep-wake cycle by raising your body’s temperature rhythm a few degrees from the raised cardiovascular efforts.
Your body recognizes when your core temperature drops following a workout (usually a couple hours later) which sends signals to your brain to switch into restfulness. This is not to say morning workouts are no good; in fact vigorous workouts are best in the morning or afternoon. However, moderate bodily movement can be beneficial to do a few hours (no less than 3) before wanting to sleep - especially if it is your only exercise.
Even 10-15 minutes of routine movement can help reduce stress hormones and calm the body and mind making peaceful sleep more accessible. People who exercise regularly are known to fall asleep faster, experience better sleep quality, and spend more time in the restorative stages of sleep, and who doesn’t like the sound of that?
Treat Yourself to a Pre-Sleep Spa Moment
A cool biohack to getting your body ready to sleep is to send really strong temperature cues to it. When you temporarily raise your body's thermostat then let it cool down gradually, you're rigging your internal sleep system to make you deliciously calm and maybe even drowsy.
Take a hot bath or shower before bed. Or be fancy and get one of those in-home saunas. Like with exercise, short-term heat exposure causes a regulated lowering of core body temperature as you cool down. This follows natural temperature cycles in the body when sleeping and therefore signals to the body that sleep is incoming.
So enjoy a spa moment no more than 2 hours before you’re ready to sleep. Indulge in some undiluted relaxation and prime your body and brain for a dreamy evening.
Do Relaxation Practices
For some reason, the brain loves to overload us with thoughts right when we’re wanting to be totally free of them and get some nice shut-eye. Redirecting the brain helps to shift from the merry-go-round of thoughts to a calm, serotonin-filled readiness for sleep.
Take 15 minutes immediately before rest to practice relaxation, mindfulness, and/or gratitude to move into a calmer mindset.
Chronic stress takes a major toll on sleep quality by keeping the mind racing and making it hard to relax and unwind at night. Taking part in daily relaxation habits like meditation, gentle stretching, journaling, deep breathing or progressive muscle relaxation can buffer the effects of stress and prime your body for restful sleep.
Auditorily Massage Your Commute
If you work, a commute is a part of your day, for better or worse. It can be a great time to get ready for the day ahead, or release some of the day you’ve just had. While it’s easy to zone out and go on auto-pilot until you’re suddenly slightly unsure how exactly you got home, you can optimize this time without much effort.
Destress by listening to calming music, nature sounds, audiobooks, personalized chill playlists or your favorite fun podcast. This is particularly helpful on your journey home as it helps to prime your body and mind to enter a more peaceful state (which helps the slow progression towards sleep).
Instead of getting home still kind of frazzled with your mind still occupied by racing thoughts from the day, start to bypass evening anxiety by being more intentional with this time that is already built into your schedule.
And, listen, as a work-from-homer myself, this is still possible! Building a few moments into your routine can make a big difference.
TLDR: Enhance Well-Being with Healthy Daytime Habits for Better Sleep
It cannot be overstated how important sleep is for our health. By front-loading your days with these healthy daytime habits, you can biohack your way into frequent good quality sleep.
Start building in some of the habits into your daily routine to help reset your body's sleep-wake cycle and optimize the conditions for quality sleep at night. With some small but consistent changes to your daytime habits and patterns, you can set yourself up for the high sleep quality you deserve.
If good sleep is a constant puzzle for you, I’d love to help you get some restful sleep! I provide therapy in New Jersey and Massachusetts and would love to support you. Reach out to me here to get started.
As always, take good care of yourself
-Elise
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