Daylight savings time doesn't have to throw your whole body clock out of whack. You can help to maintain your body's natural rhythms even as the clock jumps back and forth by improving your sleep. Use these eight tips to help.
You'll have a much easier time falling asleep and a deeper, more restful sleep if you go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning. Your body has its own natural clock, called its circadian rhythms, which control all sorts of physiological and neuro-chemical reactions, including the release of hormones to trigger sleep and wakefulness. By setting that clock on a schedule, you help it to regulate the release of the right hormones at the times when you want them.
Increase the amount of blue-light exposure you get during the daytime and decrease the amount of it you get at night. Your body responds to light, and blue light, which simulates morning light, makes your body think it's time to be awake.
Similar to how going to sleep and waking up at the same time helps your body to maintain its circadian rhythms, so too does keeping a bedtime routine. By going through the same set of actions every night before you go to sleep, you help communicate with your body and brain that sleep-time is impending. Your body then responds accordingly to help you achieve that sleep on time.
Make sure your bedroom supports a good night's sleep. That means keeping it free of extraneous noise or light and between 60 and 67 degrees.
A little bit of exercise every day has been shown time and again to help reduce insomnia, cutting down on the amount of time it takes to fall asleep. It also reduces wakefulness throughout the night as well as total time asleep. Just don't do it before bedtime, because it also stimulates the release of hormones like adrenaline and epinephrine associated with alertness.
Needing to urinate can help keep you from falling asleep as well as wake you up frequently throughout the night.
If you're not tired enough when you go to bed, you're less likely to fall asleep.
Toxicity can interfere with your ability to relax and sleep deeply, soundly, and uninterruptedly. By the reverse token, detoxifying can help to promote deeper, sounder, and more uninterrupted sleep. There are several ways to detoxify, including adding certain natural herbal supplements into your daily routine, such as Farlong Pharmaceutical's InnerPure. InnerPure promotes a healthy colon, which is the key to your body's natural ability to detoxify.