How to Prep For A Great Night's Sleep.

Getting a great night’s sleep doesn’t happen by chance. Like anything worthwhile, it takes planning and preparation. The pay off, in terms of enhanced bodily recovery, energy and general well being, though, is huge. Here are 4 things you can do each night to prepare for a great night’s sleep.

Stop Eating After Dinner
For many of us, the evening is down time. It’s time for us to destress, to switch our minds off and do something for ourselves. For many people that equation has resulted in the habit of consuming calorie laden non-foods just before bed-time. It’s also a smart idea to ensure that you have a decent length of time between your last meal of the day and your first meal of the next day. This gives your body ample time to heal and restore itself. This typically occurs in Phase Four of deep sleep.

Lying down in your bed is not the ideal position for your body to digest food. Yet, that’s exactly what will happen if you eat after dinner. It’s a far better idea to have a relatively early dinner (think 6:00pm) and go for an easy walk around the neighborhood about an hour later.

Winding down at the end of the day, without forcing your body to cope with digestion late into the night, gives your body the best opportunity for quality sleep. On the other hand, eating before bed can result in indigestion, which will interfere with a person’s quality of sleep. There is a growing body of research that links weight gain with lack of sleep quality. To get better sleep you have simply got to develop the habit of not eating after dinner.

Replace Coffee with Tea
Consuming caffeine in the evening will potentially amp you up, making it harder to calm your mind and get to sleep. Coffee has been shown to lessen the time spent in stage four sleep, which is the deep state when most of the body’s recuperation takes place. 

Having a cup of herbal tea in the evening is a far more sleep friendly beverage option than coffee. Herbal tea has muscle relaxant qualities and can make you feel more drowsy and calm as you prepare for bed. The best bedtime herbal teas are chamomile or lavender.

Ban Technology
Your bedroom needs to be a place of calmness, darkness and quiet. The last thing you need in there is stimulation from your tablet, laptop or phone. So, in order to achieve a good night’s sleep you simply have to ban all screens from your bedroom. In fact, you should go even further than that and stop looking at screens an hour before going to bed. This is especially so when it comes to backlit screens, which will overly stimulate your brain, making it that much more difficult to get to sleep. Instead try reading a book or magazine before nodding off.

Yoga
It may sound counter intuitive to do exercise to get ready for a good night’s sleep. Yet there is one form of exercise that has been proven to help you to get to sleep more easily and to enjoy a better quality of sleep - yoga.

Yoga is a gentle, meditative form of exercise that helps to reduce stress levels.  Breathing is key to successful yoga practice and this also helps to ease the body into a state of sleep preparedness. Get into a comfortable restorative yoga pose and practice breathing exercises for 3-5 minutes prior to bedtime just before going to bed.