Sleep is an important factor to consider if you intend to enhance your overall productivity. A good night’s sleep can ensure that you remain energetic throughout the day.
Here are five sleep tips to get more out of your time while you’re awake:
1. Power Naps Work
A power nap of 15 to 20 minutes during the day is great for recharging your mind and body. Read more about how napping can increase brain power.
2. Know How Much Sleep You Need
For some, a sleep of 6 hours is enough while people like me need to sleep 8 hours in order to stay productive. The bottom line — it’s important to know how much sleep you need before you can start working on your sleep pattern.
3. Get to Sleep Faster
People often complain that sleep for them usually arrives an hour after they hit the bed. This is not an uncommon problem. To get rid of this problem, you need to try out things that might help you get to sleep faster. Like reading a book before going to sleep, listening to music or taking a shower.
4. Follow a Sleep Routine
An erratic sleep pattern could be the reason why you suffer from sleeplessness. Try to follow a sleep routine that includes a fixed time when you hit the hay and a fixed time when you rise and shine.
5. Comfort Ensures Better Sleep
A crumpled bed or sleeping in jeans isn’t a great idea if you want to sleep well. So make sure you’ve got a well-made bed (you could make your bed immediately after you wake up) and be sure to change into cozy pajamas before you hit the sack.
(Image courtesy of kaibara87 under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)
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To improve the sleeping, one can do the following:
An hour before you normally go to sleep, prepare. Brush your teeth, lighten the bed lamp and prepare the bed. This puts your body and brain in a calmer mental state where it knows it’s soon time to sleep, thus it’ll be easier to actually sleep.
Also, if you want to sleep less – try to sleep 10 minutes less per night until you’ve gotten used to it. This way, you can go from 8 hrs sleep to like 7.5 hrs in a week or two.
Great post, btw!
4. Is very important for me although is quite difficult to hold on to that routine.
Very true post. People, especially college students, have grown accustomed to running on very little sleep. Therefore they are not near as efficient as they could be, but may not realize this because it has become normal to them.
The importance of a good nights rest is far too often overlooked. The mind functions so much better when it is nourished.
Thanks for these awesome tips. I must admit that I too often find myself lacking sleep. I’ve been meaning to incorporate power naps into my days, as I have read before how much they truly do help.
I love it. I recently blogged about power naps myself. It’s a practice I should pay more attention to more often because it can be so powerful. I would also agree with Sanne that number 4 is critical but so often overlooked – especially for freelancers who work odd hours.
Taking a shower before sleeping is very effective (I can easily sleep after shower) but now, I can’t take a shower because I almost end my work at 10pm. It is even hard for me to sleep after 10pm and usually I can sleep at 12mn. I have to wait for 2 hours for me to sleep. Reading is also effective but listening to music, I can’t sleep because it keeps me to get awake. Tsk tsk tsk…
Power naps are my favorite. I find 10 minutes of sleep can recharge my battery and over time the amount of daily sleep I needed went down while my productivity levels went up.