Having a healthy sleep routine is the backbone of a healthy lifestyle. A healthy sleep routine improves a lot of aspects of the rest of your life. Once you get the right amount of rest from building good sleep habits, you will have more energy through the day, be more focused, and wind down after long days more easily.
Tailor your sleep routine to your needs like these athletes do. There is going to be a list of similarities in everyone’s nightly habits. Turning the screens off an hour before lying down and deciding on a bedtime are the two main steps to building a healthy sleep routine. Other methods of getting to a relaxed state can differ for every person. You could meditate, take a bath, or do light exercise. When you get enough sleep, you have more energy and are more motivated, and your routine will become a habit.
You might always intend to get to bed early, but there will be circumstances that will throw a wrench in your plans. You may still go to bed but toss and turn through the night. That is not a recipe for a restful night of sleep. Having a routine is the first step in fighting off these types of nights.
Why Having a Routine is Important
Using a combination of small steps and large steps builds a healthy sleep routine. A healthy sleep routine will reduce your stress and keep you from having nights where you toss and turn – making sure that your methods are the same every day will teach your body when to start relaxing and get your mind ready for bed. You will start going to bed more consistently and falling asleep more quickly.
Once you set your routine in stone, you will wake up more refreshed. Waking up more refreshed will lead to higher energy levels throughout the day. Higher energy levels will lead to you being more focused and accomplishing more each day.
Routines and Their Impact
Routines make life more predictable. And while predictability sometimes gets a bad rap, it can be useful for us in many ways. A solid plan can help our bodies learn what to expect and know when they need to start winding down from the day.
When you keep the same routine every day, especially when you are going to bed, you can feel the effects. Your work quality will increase because you can maintain focus instead of thinking about any sleep you lost from staying up too late or tossing and turning the entire night. Your mood will improve. Routines are the first things to go when you change to a more sour disposition. They are the best thing to help fight against falling into a bad mood as well.
Giving yourself something to rely on helps you plan your day and week and offset unpredictable things that will increase your stress and possibly stop you from doing everything you need to do. There are still going to be times when unexpected things arise. They are called surprises for a reason. But, by having a routine you can fall back on, you can diminish the impact those surprises will have on you.
How do you build a routine? If you don’t have one, it can seem like a daunting question. And if you have one, you’re probably wondering if you can add anything to your current routine to get better rest. It can seem pretty close to impossible to start a nightly habit, especially if you try to implement too many changes all at once. Doing that can cause you to get unmotivated very quickly and end up abandoning the routine just one or two days in.
Building Your Routine
Building a routine from scratch can be a challenging task. It is much easier to continue not having a plan than it is to start one. But making that change is one of the easiest ways to start improving your nights and days. Starting small is helpful. It gives you attainable goals, and you see your progress quickly. Once you see your progress in the small steps, you can start to build on them with larger steps or adding more than one of the small steps to your routine.
Choose a Bedtime
Having a bedtime is an essential first step in building a healthy sleep routine. It gives you a specific time on the clock when you need to start getting ready to lie down. Having a bedtime also lets you know when you need to take anything during your routine like CBD or other supplements that promote relaxation. It does not have to be an early time. If you run at your peak on fewer hours of sleep, you can choose a later time. You do have the freedom to go to bed earlier if you need those extra hours of sleep.
Turning Off the Screens
Screens are a part of your everyday life. You work on a computer and have a phone in your pocket. They damage the amount and quality of sleep you get. By emitting blue light, they can trick your brain into thinking that it is daytime. Your brain will suppress melatonin production and keep you awake.
Turning off your screen roughly an hour before your chosen bedtime will help stimulate your natural melatonin production. You’ll be able to fall asleep quickly and stay asleep.
Taking Supplements
Adding supplements like CBD that promote relaxation before bedtime is another easy step to add to your sleep routine. One of the main benefits of CBD is a sense of calm and peace after it has interacted with your system. Be sure to take any supplements around the same time you turn off your screens to give them ample time to interact with your system.
Building Onto Your Small Steps
Once you are in a good place with your small steps, you can add to your nightly plan. These steps will require a larger time investment. Once they become integrated into your daily life, they will be staples of your routine.
Meditation
Meditating helps you to relax and release the tension that has built up over the day. By controlling your breathing, your body will start to relax. Your relaxation will begin the process of you going to sleep. Using some CBD about an hour before you start meditating can help boost your meditation. Meditation might seem forbidding because of the time investment, but you can start with just a few minutes and progress to longer meditation sessions.
Light Exercise
Doing some light exercise like stretching at night can help with relaxation. It will physically release tension that has built up as well as lactic acid. Light stretching can help you get a night of more restful sleep and even prevent cramping.
Take a Warm Bath
Taking a bath is one of the best ways to reduce your stress. The heat of the bathwater can melt your stress away by relaxing your muscles. You can increase the bath’s effectiveness by adding scents in the form of bath bombs and bath salts that help relaxation. Bath salts and bombs in scents like eucalyptus and lavender help you relax and are useful with other ingredients like CBD to promote further relaxation.
A Healthy Sleep Routine Helps You Every Day
Knowing when you will turn the screen off and start the rest of your sleep routine helps immensely. Having that constant to fall back on every day gives you a sense of relief from anything that might be going on around you, no matter what. That one thing in your life will stay as a constant and not shift and change rapidly.
Remember starting a routine from scratch needs to be a gradual process. It will be very tempting to go all in and make huge changes to your life and already set routines. You can get discouraged very quickly by doing this. But implementing your plan isn’t as easy as it seemed at one in the morning.
Starting with a consistent bedtime is the perfect way to build your sleep routine. From there, you quickly find the time you need to turn your screens off and allow your body to produce its melatonin. Once you have those two things in place and do them consistently, you can add more small changes or one big change like stretching or meditating to ease you into a relaxed state. If those aren’t your thing, a warm bath is a foolproof way to relax, and you can amplify the experience with aromatherapy scents like lavender and eucalyptus.
Having a solidified sleep routine will positively impact the rest of your day-to-day life. Make sure that you have a mixture of large steps and small ones so you can wind down. You will have more energy and more focus; knowing you have a steady routine will reduce the amount of stress you feel. The steps in your healthy sleep routine will wind you down and relax you. Going to sleep will be easier when you are relaxed and know when your head will hit the pillow.