It’s never too late to make a clean start of things so start off your new year cleanse with cleaner sleep habits in five simple steps:
1. Tidy up your bedtime routine
Your bedroom can look spic and span but, with untidy bedtime habits, you still won’t be getting what you need from it. A tidy up of your bedtime routine is essentially putting things in order, literally – doing the same things in the same order at roughly the same time each night to help your brain compute when it’s time for sleep.
2. Caffeine and sugar cleanse
In the same way we’d cleanse our homes of dust to limit our body’s reaction to the allergen, cleansing our bodies of caffeine and sugar can help limit our reaction to these chemicals well known for contributing to sleep disturbance. You don’t have to take it to extremes, even small steps such as gradually reducing the number of lattes you knock back each day and avoiding sweet treats in the evening will have some impact.
3. Disinfect bedroom of tech
Working, Instagramming and gaming in bed late into the evening are all examples of how easily technology creeps into areas of our life where it doesn’t really belong and, for some people, has the affect of compromising their sleep quality.
4. Scrub away sleep disturbances
Interestingly, we can sometimes be more conscious of modern sleep inhibitors such as excess caffeine and blue light from devices and less accustomed to recognising more basic inhibitors such as noise and light pollution in our bedrooms. Take a fresh look at your bedroom environment and consciously scrub away shafts of light from ill-fitting curtains, turn off the landing light and – as a parent – lower the tv volume when your children are going to sleep.
5. Refresh your mattress
There’s few better ways to make a clean start with your sleep than by investing in a better quality mattress. Quality sleep begins and ends with a quality mattress – in a literal and metaphorical sense. If your mattress is aged or poor quality, upgrading your mattress may even have an immediate impact on the quality of your sleep.