Do you sometimes take hours before you can catch some sleep? Different strategies can be used to trigger sleep. You should work towards improving the quality of your sleep so that you wake up in the morning ready for the day’s activities.
You may have heard about the usual tips such as keeping fit during the day, not taking caffeine at night or using melatonin. These are only a few of the techniques you can use to fall asleep. Today, we focus on some weird sleep tips that work to give you several options for you to try. Enjoy!
Go camping
Camping with friends is not only fun, but it can also help you boost the quality of your sleep. The natural rhythms can help you set your sleep cycle. During camping, you expose your body to natural sunlight which has an impact on your circadian rhythm.
Your body aligns itself as per the sun’s natural rhythms. This makes it easy for you to rise early in the morning and sleep at the right time at night. While camping, avoid bringing electronics which can interfere with your sleep cycle. Instead, you can carry card games or board games to help you challenge your mind.
Make use of the in-built tranquilizer in your body
Everybody has an in-built tranquilizer within themselves which is the breath. Different emotional states have corresponding breathing patterns. For instance, anxiety makes you breathe fast while relaxation causes slow and deep breathing.
You should be able to control your breathing to help you relax the mind. Box breathing for about 15 minutes achieves a calm effect. Ensure that you sit upright during the process then start inhaling deeply and exhaling slowly through the nose.
Get rid of your clocks
When you are trying to sleep, looking at the watch after a few minutes adds your stress and makes the sleep disappear. Remove any clock in your bedroom so that you don’t keep track of the time. You should not worry about what time it is when you are experiencing delayed sleep.
Practice storytelling
Do you remember the bedtime stories your parents told you when you were young? Storytelling should not be limited to kids alone. When struggling with insomnia, you can read a fiction story you like from a novel. Avoid non-fiction stories since they activate your brain to start solving problems at night.
Fiction stories provide meaningful insights into life and help us develop imagination and creativity. We often experience dreams through stories. During the REM phase of sleep, you can dream about fictional scenes based on the things you read or life experiences. Reading at night, therefore, helps your brain recognize that its sleep time and puts you in a relaxation mode.
Breathe in through your left nostril
Place a finger on the right nostril and allow yourself to breathe through the left nostril. Take deep but slow breaths. Experts report that the left nostril provides a soothing and calm effect to help you relax before sleeping. The left nostril activates the parasympathetic response while the right side should make you more active in the morning. You can get more energetic by breathing through the right nostril in the morning.
Try the mental rewind
As you lie down in bed unable to sleep, try practicing a mental rewind. Reflect upon all the activities of the day from when you woke up to the current state. The mind makes sense of your life through compiling various sounds, sensations, conversations as well as sights that you experience the entire day. By recalling every scene during the day, your brain can get to a restful state which helps you fall asleep.
Consider progressive muscle relaxation
This involves squeezing different body muscles to help you relax. Lie down on a comfortable mattress and breathe in as you press the toes before releasing the tension. Squeeze the feet as you curl them in the direction of your shins. Proceed with other areas such as the tights, calves, entire legs, shoulders, buttocks, neck and arms.
At the end of the exercise, your body cells feel relaxed and allow your body to doze off. If you don’t have a comfortable mattress to try the exercise, check out Simba mattress review and choose one that gives you maximum relaxation.
Write
Our thoughts can be a hindrance when it comes to sleep. As soon as you lie down, you may start thinking about life stressors that affect the quality of your life. Instead of dwelling on your thoughts, get out of bed and write them in a journal. This helps your mind relax since it prevents you from overthinking.
Writing also allows you to comprehend your emotions. You can process your thoughts better when you write them down. It allows you to see emotional events from a new, healthy perspective. It can boost your mental health and also the quality of your sleep.
Work on your past
It is impossible to change things that occurred in the past, but you can modify your perspective towards past events. They can affect how you sleep since they sometimes haunt you in the form of dreams. You should reframe past experiences that disrupt your sleep and change them into positive ones.
You can reframe negative experiences to positive ones by assessing the situation and looking at the good that may have come from it. We all go through negative past events, but at the end of the day, we learn crucial lessons that can help us be better versions of ourselves. Change the stories in your mind so that you can stop perceiving them as negative and find the good in them. This will help you find peace of mind so that you sleep well.
Roll the eyes
During sleep, the eyes move so that you can transition from one sleep phase to the next. Rolling your eyes is the same as the movements you make during the transition. It stimulates the brain to produce the sleep hormone, melatonin, therefore, triggering sleep.
