It’s true, humans are creatures of habit. Especially our sleep!
That’s why it’s important we focus on when we go to bed, and not just how long we’re going to bed for.
Our primal ancestors would sleep with the sun, but now that we have the luxury of technology and power, we’re not bound by sunlight. Although this has our benefits, we must keep in mind that our nervous system and our hormones have been designed to be awake when the sun is up. Our cognitive and physical performance can be inhibited if we’re fighting our primal body clocks.
When we include this into our sleep habits, it means that we’ll be better off by going to bed and waking up at the same time, everyday! Meaning that weekends and holidays are no exception!
It can be thought that as long as we’re ‘asleep’, we’ll be recovering. Unfortunately, if you have less patterns in your sleep and wake times, then your sleep quality (the amount of genuine recovery while you’re sleeping) will decrease as well. Meaning that sleeping/waking at the same time, will improve your overall ability to recover and perform.
Physiologically, sleep patterns are optimal for our bodies. But sleep patterns can be optimal for our minds and lifestyle as well.
If you have an irregular sleeping pattern, it’s more likely that your nutrition is less than optimal, you feel rushed or busy a lot of the time, valuable relationships may be unstable and you may not feel in control of your life.
By arranging and focusing on our ability to sleep regularly, it may allow all of these other factors to ‘fall into place’.
Here’s some tips to improve your sleep pattern routine:
• Set gentle alarms to send you to bed and wake you, with a repeat everyday of the week.
• Make your room as dark and as cool as possible to get to sleep faster to take advantage of the time that you’re in bed.
• Restrict/eliminate caffeine past midday to improve your sleep quality.
• Keep screens outside of the bedroom.