5 Easy Tips for Good Sleep

We all know the importance of sleeping well, but many people find it very difficult. Regardless of whether or not you’ve been plagued by such problems, you’ve probably heard all the prototypical advice given to insomniacs. Unfortunately, “exercising more”, “listening to relaxing music” and the child favourite, “counting sheep”, don’t always work out. Before you resort to wolfing down sleeping pills, give some of these less well-known tips a try.

1. Change Your Sleeping Posture

In order to get a refreshing rest, your body needs to be well oxygenated while you’re sleeping. In other words, you need to be able to breathe well while you’re snoozing, or else you could end up with sleep apnea. One of the best ways to do this is to make sure you’re sleeping in a healthy posture.

According to Peter Nuland’s book, How We Die: Reflections of Life’s Final Chapter, 25% of people die in their sleep. You might think this is a peaceful way to end your life, but epidemiological studies indicate that the act of sleeping itself could be a contributing factor. The problem is that most people sleep on their back; this posture, known as the supine position, restricts the oxygenation of blood.

The most effective posture is actually sitting up, but most people will find this quite uncomfortable. The next best thing is sleeping on your tummy (the prone position), followed by sleeping on your left side.

2. Wear a Sleep Mask or a Pair of Moisture Chamber Goggles

This probably sounds a bit strange, but an alarmingly large number of people sleep with their eyelids very slightly open without even knowing it. This condition, known as nocturnal lagophthalmos, results in waking up in the morning with dry, irritated eyes, often with lots of eye goop. Although it doesn’t directly affect the quality of sleep, it’ll leave you feeling quite cranky and tired in the morning.

Unless you’ve got a very severe case, you probably won’t know whether or not you’ve got this problem until you get someone to watch you while you sleep. Fortunately, if you do indeed have nocturnal lagophthalmos, the solution to better sleep is actually very simple. By wearing a pair of moisture chamber goggles or a sleep mask specially designed to keep your eyes in a humid environment, you can prevent your eyes front drying out. Even if you sleep with your eyelids closed, it feels great to wake up with your eyes nice and moist. I occasionally sleep with Thermoeyes goggles, and I find it very refreshing.

3. Read a Good Novel

Not much to be said here. Nothing gets your mind off the day better than a good story. An hour of fiction before bed is my favourite way of getting to sleep.

4. Regulate Your Sleeping Schedule

Contrary to popular belief, the most important part of a good night’s rest isn’t how much you sleep, but when you sleep. Our biological processes are synchronized to the 24-hour clock in something called the circadian rhythms, and this is why we experience things like jet lag. Thus, if you go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, you’ll be maximizing the efficiency of your internal systems such as hormone production and brainwave activity.

Personally, I’ve found that it takes me less than a week of maintaining a regular sleeping schedule before I can wake up fresh in the morning at the desired time without the need for an alarm clock. This will obviously take longer the less sleep you allot for yourself. Although I don’t recommend that you sleep for less than seven hours, many people with regular sleeping schedules sleep very little while still being highly alert during the day.

The extreme example of this would be polyphasic sleeping, which involves minimizing the amount of sleep to just two to five hours a day by taking strictly scheduled naps instead of prolonged sleep. Believe it or not, some people claim to have experienced remarkable benefits from this sleeping pattern, despite its inconvenience.

5. Listen to Binaural Beats

I’m not sure how well this works because I haven’t tried it myself, but I do find it very intriguing. When you listen to binaural beats, you wear headphones so that a different sound is played into each ear. These two sounds are very similar, but they actually differ by a very small frequency. This miniscule difference is perceived by the brain as a third sound, even though our ears normally wouldn’t be able to pick up something with such a low frequency. The idea is that we can create an imaginary frequency in our mind that is very similar to the frequency of our brainwaves. We can use this imaginary frequency to synchronize and slow down our brainwaves, thus allowing us to enter a relaxed state of consciousness.

Different frequencies of binaural beats give different results. For sleeping purposes, the “Delta” frequency is the one most people recommend.

I’ve got my doubts about this method, especially when I see products like the Brain Evolution System which claims to be able to solve all your life’s problems by listening to a few fancy noises. However, the theory of slowing down your brainwaves to help get to sleep seems feasible. It wouldn’t hurt to give it a shot, but be wary if this involves shelling out hundreds of dollars for the “latest and greatest” binaural beat technology.