To Sleep Or Not To Sleep?
Sleeping is the most essential and mysterious part of our lives. Sleep affects overall the quality of life as it has a major impact on how we feel and perform our daily activities.
However, we often neglect the importance of healthy sleeping giving priority to endless deals. In particular, students face the problem of lack of sleep especially during session periods when deadlines are looming. Does the ideal balance between studying and sleeping exist or is it always a question of choice? Where is this happy middle?
The most common reasons that might lead to lack of sleep are stress and bad time management. People who under stress suffer from insomnia more often. In addition, stress is a root of troubled sleep when you toss and turn all over the night. If you have to deal with stress during studying, it might be difficult to wind down at the bedtime.
Below are my tips that will help you to develop your sleep habits.
Everyday exercising
The best way to control your well-being is to do sports. There is no matter whether it is swimming, jogging or basketball, any physical activity provides stress reduction and may become a pleasant ritual before bedtime. However, everything is individual and if such activities negatively affect your sleep, it is better to pay attention to practices of mindfulness.
Mindfulness meditation will help you to improve sleep quality and increase sleep time
Meditation practices will help you to reduce anxiety and to benefit your emotional well-being. Meditation provides focusing on the present and turning off your negative thoughts that will help you to calm down and asleep. However, it is quite important to keep in mind that the more you try to force sleep the less chance you have to fall asleep. Therefore, it is more productive to mediate without any goals and expectation. Here you can find some guides that will be useful if it is your first experience.
Find time of relaxation and winding down
All of us have a bad habit to fill our free time by doing small stuff like checking email, doing home chores or even continue thinking about our deadlines. Stop it! It is very important to set aside time for relaxation when you forget about all problems and do things that you really like. Otherwise, such lifestyle may lead not only to problems with sleep but also to burning out.
Time management failure results in bad quality of sleep.
Here are golden rules of how to manage your time, which leads to good quality of sleep:
- Set correct goals
If you want to manage your time correctly, your tasks have to be:
- Specific (simple and sensible)
- Measurable (easy to track)
- Achievable (the way of achieve)
- Relevant (reasonable and realistic)
- Timely (time limited)
Be smart and sleep well!
Text by
Ekaterina Baranova