Bedtime Routine/Temperature Control

Yesterday I wrote about doing a warm up for our 2021 sleep improvement challenge (you can read that here).  The idea is to do one technique for a month to try to increase our quantity and /or quality of sleep and achieve your needed amount of healing rest.

Poor sleep and lack of sleep can cause or aggravate a number of emotional, mental and physical health problems.  From something as harmless as being in a bad mood or a little tired from having a few nights of poor sleep.  To something as serious as a heart attack.  Chronic sleep deprivation has been linked to many serious health conditions.  If you’re not getting enough sleep your immune system doesn’t work as well.  If that doesn’t get you motivated to improve the quantity and quality of your sleep, how about this.  Not getting proper sleep may lower your sex drive and lead to weight gain. 

The purpose of these challenges and trying them for a month is to see if that technique works for you.  Some of these techniques require adjusting and you will need the time to figure out if it is working.  Some of these techniques require time to become a habit and a way to retrain your brain.  More than likely it will be a layering of several techniques and tips that result in consistent successful nights of good sleep.

Since the typical complaints I heard were “I having trouble falling asleep”, “I can’t stay asleep” or in the worst cases both.  These challenges will consist of one thing for falling asleep and one for staying asleep.  You can pick the one to try for the month and see if there is any improvement. You can also try both, if you are in that worst-case scenario.  You can also try both if you one of those over achieving challenge takers.  I am going to promote two tips or challenges that work together easily.

First up.  Something easy.  Building a bedtime routine.  If you have suffered from sleep issues, I’m sure you have heard this before.  The best way to build that routine is backward from when you have to get up.  I suggest while doing this challenge that you follow this routine on the weekends too.  For example; if you have to get up every day at 6am and you need 7 hours of sleep to be healthy you might want to start winding down around 9pm.  You can push that wind down routine out later as you start falling asleep faster and waking up refreshed earlier. 

When I first started to tackle my sleep issue which was a bit of trouble falling asleep, I had a wind down routine, that had built into it an extra hour, I need a good 7 hours of sleep, but my routine was set up for 8 hours.  After a year or so of tweaking that and adding a few other layers, I now fall asleep in about five or ten minutes after I lay down.  It took awhile to figure out what worked for me.  Lack of sleep was really hurting me emotionally.  Once I realized that, I was determined to find a way to get better sleep.

At first it will seem hard, but if you make a routine and make it a night time ritual that can help. Doing it long enough to make it a habit also helps immensely.  My ritual includes washing my face, washing & flossing my teeth, wandering slowly thru the house turning off lights, checking door locks, casually putting items away. 

Work out a 30 minute slow down routine for yourself, maybe you do some of the same things I do.  Maybe incorporate some relaxing yoga poses or some easy stretching.  Some people find light reading or journaling before lights out helpful.  Use your smart phone, smart watch or your homes virtual assistant and set an alarm telling you when to start winding down. 

For staying asleep, well this first challenge is even easier, by easier I mean you don’t have to change your routine or develop a new habit.  If you fall asleep fine, but can’t stay asleep, try lowering the temperature in your room, if you can.  Somewhere between 60-70 F (16-19 C).  You don’t have to keep it that low all night.  If you have a programable temperature control, have it the lower temp when you go to sleep and program it to move higher about an hour after you would normally have had your sleep interruption.  You may have to play around with that a bit, find the temperature that works well for you.  This is one of the layers I use, my sweet spot for temperature is 73F or below.  Living in Arizona it’s only hard to keep that going thru the summer.  As an example: In the summer I have my thermostat drop to 73F around 9pm, then released to go back up to 75F around 4am.  If it gets warmer than that I wake up.  When our AZ temps are under 80F in the days, I can leave my thermostat alone.  You will find your sweet spot.

If you don’t have that kind of temperature control in your home.  Taking a warm shower or bath as part of your wind down routine, can set up your internal body temperature to mimic that lowering and may help you stay asleep.  In the studies I read you can take that shower or bath up to 2 hours before bedtime and they don’t have to be long, just a quick 10 minutes seemed to work. 

If you want to track your success and failures while taking on these challenges here is a simple sleep chart template.  If you want to use it you can copy it, download the pdf, or use it as a guide to mark up your personal calendar whether its paper or digital. 

If you have a watch or ring type fitness tracker – many of them also track your sleep and that can collect valuable information for you to include on your chart.  Using one of those trackers can be a more scientific way to see if you are having improvement and if you should keep up that particular strategy. 

Sometimes we don’t notice the small improvements if we are not looking closely enough.  Then when you layer a new strategy on top of that one that is working a little bit, you can see if they compound to work better, or if there is no change. 

In my opinion, if you try to do too many new things at once and that combination works, you don’t know which one or two might have been the key.  Or it can overwhelm you and you stop doing some of the things.  Maybe you stop doing the one that worked and your back to the beginning. 

Sleep improvement challenge 2021, sleep is our quest, mental and physical health will be our reward.