Do you know that a perfect quality sleep starts long before you get into bed?
Well, many factors impact your night’s sleep, including your body’s natural sleeping patterns.
And not only your sleeping patterns, but also any of your daily activities and stress levels.
When you do a task at a specific time, for an extended period, your body starts to develop a natural pattern for the task.
If it’s the time for the task, your biological alarm will ring. This is how our body functions. We have patterns for almost every task we do each day.
In the same way, we have a pattern for sleeping.
Following our body’s natural sleeping patterns is an excellent way to maintain your health, and not just physically, but mentally as well.
So, in this article, we will talk about the sleeping patterns and their impact on our health.
Ready?
Let’s begin with a definition.
What is Sleeping Pattern?
In reality, sleeping pattern depends on your schedule for sleep and wakefulness.
The Internal biological clock and the sleep/wake homeostasis are two major factors that decide your sleeping patterns.
Everybody has their own biological clock that does not mimic of any other’s.
If you follow a consistent schedule to go to bed and to wake up, you have a pattern of sleep.
As time goes, your body starts to alarm you — when you are nearing the bedtime or wake up time.
If you obey this alertness, you keep up with your body’s natural alarming system.
Otherwise, you are likely to develop some sleep disorders and finally sacrifice your overall health.
So, how important is maintaining sleep patterns for our healthy-living?
Importance of Sleeping Patterns
We already knew a fact that, sleep plays an important role in one’s overall well-being.
Stealing 1 or 2 hours of your sleeping time seems nothing at all, but you sacrifice your mood, mental sharpness, energy and stress managing skills.
And, when you miss the sleeping patterns, you get poor sleep. A lot of sleep disorders arise due to the poor sleep.
Regular poor sleep shortens your life span by causing many serious medical conditions, including heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, obesity etc. And the mental aspect has been talked about time and time again by local therapists who have done studies on brain function and sleep disorders.
In order to prevent consequences due to poor sleep, you need to embrace a better sleeping habit, especially to get quality night’s sleep.
Many studies suggest that, almost, most adults needs 6-9 hours of quality night’s sleep to rejuvenate, however, your sleeping habit should not rely only on quantity of sleep.
So, it’s most important to have a quality night’s sleep to your health.
…and it needs a proper schedule to sleep and wake consistently.
Therefore, a sleeping pattern is inevitable for your healthy living.
But, how to develop a better sleeping pattern that suits you?
Ways to Adopt a Sleeping Pattern
Tracking your current sleeping habit is vital in re-tuning your sleeping patterns.
There are lots of tools available to help you to track your sleep, mostly in two forms – smart phone apps and dedicated sleep tracking gadgets.
These tools record went to bed time, woke up time, average sleep time for a period, and how long you had a deep sleep.
Keep a record of these figures along with diet, physical activities, incidents that took place in a particular day, and how you felt the next morning.
Then the chart will clearly show you some of the things that negatively affect your sleep.
These things, actually, known as “sleep disturbances”.
The following list shows sleep disturbances that most people have in common;
- Teeth grinding
- Restless leg syndrome
- Allergies
- Pain
- Snoring
- Nightmares
- Shift work
- Deep emotions due to relationship break up or so.
- More frequent urination
- Digestive problems
- Uncomfortable sleeping atmosphere
If your records show some similarities with the above said reasons, you should take proper actions to ease them off.
But,
How to Overcome the Sleep Disturbances?
Well, it’s not really that hard.
Let me show you:
If your sleeping disturbances are due to any underlying medical conditions, you should talk to your health care provider first. Otherwise, consider the following tips to fall asleep as fast as possible.
- Stay away from bright-screens: (TVs, computers, and smartphones/tablets) at least one hour before you go to bed. Because these screens emit light of all colors, but the blues, really prevent the melatonin secretion.
- Avoid fat before bed: a study published by the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine says that saturated fat and sugar intake is associated with less sleep. So, it’s better to cut down your fat and sugar intake long-before to go to bed.
- Limit Alcohol intake: research confirms that Alcohol disturbs your sleep if taken within 2 hours before bed. So, avoid alcohol at least 2 hours before bed.
- Restless Legs syndrome: take proper action to relieve your symptoms. National institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has a fact sheet for RLS.
- Limit your fluid intake to prevent more frequent urination.
- Find a professional to get rid of teeth grinding, pain and snoring.
- Make a better sleeping atmosphere: when it comes to the environment for a good night’s sleep, light plays an important role. The darkroom is the best place to fall asleep. So, always limit the light in your bedroom. The National Sleep Foundation has a dedicated page for bedroom preparation.
So in conclusion, we can see that getting into a natural rhythm of sleeping patterns can be very beneficial to your overall health. Getting rest is one of the most important aspects of exercise as the body needs time to rest and muscle needs sleep to rebuild itself. This is just as important as going to the gym to work out. They literally go hand and hand.
Getting rid of any sleep disturbances can help you get quality night’s sleep.
Natural sleeping patterns will help you to have a better on and off sleeping time consistently.
If you miss the sleeping patterns regularly, you are developing one or more sleeping syndrome.
Take the above advice to heart, and decide for yourself whether re-tuning the sleeping patterns worthwhile or not.
Have you struggled to sleep well? What were your actions to rectify the situation?
