Kick These Four Habits that Affect Your Sleep

Do you feel exhausted and unmotivated? Stress, responsibilities, deadlines, and unexpected events take up a lot of time and can lead to exhaustion, especially if you aren’t sleeping well. Identifying habits that affect your sleep is crucial if you want to have more energy, fulfill your obligations, and enjoy your downtime.

In general, a rested mind is more focused and more likely to be in balance. For this to be possible, you have to try to disconnect when you go to bed. However, this can be quite complicated. This is because, right when you close your eyes, thousands of thoughts start to race through your mind and make it hard for you to fall asleep.

A Marche Polytechnic University in Italy study highlights the dangers of sleep deficiency. The results showed that sleeping less than the minimum recommended amount on a regular basis can permanently affect the brain. What’s more, they also show that chronic sleep deprivation can cause the brain to feed on itself. Consequently, a sleep-deprived individual has a greater risk of developing neurological disorders.

Habits that affect your sleep

To help you avoid these problems, you should be aware of these four habits that affect your sleep. When you free yourself from these bad habits, you’ll be able to enjoy restorative sleep once again.

1. Living a sedentary lifestyle

One habit that negatively affects sleep is a sedentary lifestyle. When there’s a lack of physical activity, the body isn’t expending energy. That tends to interfere with sleep patterns.

What’s more, exercise can help balance your sleep cycles. This is because exercise stimulates the release of substances like serotonin and melatonin.

That’s why experts recommend that you do at least an hour of exercise every day. If you do intense exercises, however, you should do them at least 3 or 4 hours before you go to bed. That way, your body will have time to relax and adjust.

2. Using electronic devices

These days, most of us spend a large part of our day using electronic devices to check notifications, surf the web, and look at social media, among other things.

This hyperconnectivity makes it hard to enjoy the moment. Not only that, but numerous studies suggest that the blue light from your screens interferes with quality sleep. That’s why they suggest that you don’t use electronic devices before bed.

Instead of using your cell phone, you should grab a book an hour or two before bed. Reading before bed can have a positive effect on sleep.

3. Having really high stress levels

Everyone has a certain level of accumulated stress that result from work responsibilities, family problems, financial issues, or even something as mundane as a traffic jam. The issue is that stress makes it hard to relax and disconnect.

According to psychologists, normal s tress levels are healthy. Tension makes your system release norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that improves your mood and your memory.

Nevertheless, being way  too stressed out can lead to high cortisol levels that can affect the brain. In fact, one of the first things that stress tends to affect is sleep. So, if you think that your stress levels are getting in the way of your sleep, try to reduce them as much as possible. Relaxation techniques like yoga or meditation can help.

4. Being too busy

The last habit that affects your sleep is excessive multi-tasking. Without realizing it, you might have become addicted to being busy. As you might imagine, this has repercussions on your sleep. If you’re always juggling to keep your personal and professional life going, this will sooner or later affect your sleep routine.

To that end, take a careful look at the things you do every day. Which ones are necessary and which are superfluous? If you think you need more hours of sleep, only concentrate on tasks that absolutely require your attention.

If you’re overly exhausted, you won’t be able to rest properly or relax. That’s why you have to reduce your workload if you want to enjoy your downtime. If possible, we recommend delegating some of your responsibilities to other people.