Sleep Information

How Your Sleep Impacts Your Overall Well-Being

You may be unconscious while you sleep, but there’s a lot going on. Every night, your brain keeps on working while your body rests—restoring and repairing your muscles, committing new information to memory, and replenishing your hormones. When you wake up after a good night’s sleep, you feel focused, alert, and energized. That’s the power of good sleep.

Healthy sleepers spend nearly a third of their day asleep. It’s no surprise then, that sleep health makes such a big difference on other aspects of your life. Without adequate sleep, you become cognitively, physically, and emotionally compromised. You increase your risk of developing serious health conditions, and you’re more likely to gain weight. On a day-to-day level, you may find you have difficulty focusing at work or school, or that you feel more grumpy or sad for no reason.

Good sleep essentially serves as your first level of defense against illness, bad mood, and a lower quality of life. People who sleep better have better health overall, as their body is able to more easily regulate their hormone levels and biological functions that control appetite, sexual desire, mood, and more.

How Your Lifestyle Impacts Your Sleep

Sleep issues are quite common in modern society. Even without a diagnosed health condition, the pleasures, stresses, and expectations of modern life can all interfere with sleep health.

We may live in a 24/7 society, but our bodies still operate on a daily circadian rhythm that requires us to get at least 7 hours of sleep. When we engage in behaviors that defy that circadian rhythm, our sleep suffers.

Top culprits include staying up late and using electronics, whether it’s for binging Netflix or answering your work emails. The blue light in these devices tricks our brain into thinking it’s daytime, so we stay up even later. Then there’s the things we use to “wind down,” such as exercise, alcohol, and again, our tech devices. We tend to overindulge in these, especially at night, which disrupts the quality of our sleep.

Overworked, overstimulated, and underslept, many of us have no idea how our lifestyle choices impact our sleep—positively or negatively.

Natural Methods to Improve Sleep

Fortunately, getting better sleep does not have to be difficult. There are many life changes, sleep products, and natural sleep aids you can use to improve your sleep health.

Improving sleep often starts with improving your sleep hygiene. Sleep hygiene is like dental hygiene, but for your sleep. Common tips include: following the same sleep schedule every day (even weekends), powering down your electronics well before bedtime, reserving your bedroom for sleep and sex (and no work), and creating a bedtime routine.

There are all sorts of other behavioral hacks for making it easier to fall asleep, and ensuring that the sleep you do get is as restful as possible. For instance, you can boost your body’s natural thermoregulation by sleeping naked with socks on, or taking a warm shower about an hour before bed. Track your sleep cycles with a smartwatch or sleep diary, and you can set your alarm to wake you up when you’re most likely to be in light sleep.

Speaking of sleep trackers, there are plenty of sleep health products and supplements you can use to boost your sleep health, from sleepytime teas to melatonin.