Hi again. Kirstin here. For those of you who haven’t seen me around, I’m a social worker working with the Native timber industry to help affected workers to focus on and prioritize their mental health and wellbeing.
Today I wanna focus on being better in bed at sleep. We’ve spoken about sleep as being an important part of our foundation for our wellbeing, so I wanna spend some time talking about it. Specifically.
For a lot of us, sleep can be the first thing that suffers when we’re under stress and when our buckets feeling really full. Lots of people find it hard to fall asleep or to stay asleep. And for an adult, we need between seven to nine hours of sleep every night. If we work nights, shifts, or super long hours, this can be pretty hard to come by.
So we need to work on getting as much good quality sleep as possible, and heaps of things can impact on our sleep. Stress being overstimulated by technology, noise, light, as well as substances like caffeine, nicotine and alcohol.
Caffeine and nicotine are stimulants which ramp up our central nervous system and can make it tricky to sleep. In fact, even if we have a high tolerance for caffeine and nicotine, our sleep quality can be impacted. Alcohol also affects our sleep.
Alcohol’s a depressant which slows our central nervous system down. This can make us feel sleepy and help us to fall asleep, but it impacts on our ability to stay asleep and get good quality deep sleep.
For an overview, I wanna give you a rundown about how sleep works. When we first fall asleep, we enter stage one sleep. This sleep is super light. Think of that light nap you have on the couch while watching a movie.
You may not even know that you’re asleep, even though your partner tells you that you’re snoring. Our brainwaves are still pretty active, pretty short and sharp, and we’re easily woken in this stage. Stage two comes next, a light, but slightly deeper sleep than stage one.
Our breathing slows down and we’re less easily woken. Stages three and four are our deep sleep, and this is the good stuff. Our brainwave slow. Our immune system is boosted and helps our muscles repair.
It helps our brains to heal too rid our brains of the chemicals that induce sleep and helping us to consolidate memory. The last stage of sleep is r e m, rapid Eye Movement, and this is a very deep sleep and often where we dream.
Stage three, four and REM are really important and can be inhibited by consuming substances. So if you’re looking to increase your sleep quality, reducing these things is a good place to start.
Sleep hygiene’s super important as well, and this is another name for a pres. Sleep routine, brains love habits, and if we can start doing a similar routine before bed, this can help us to fall asleep. It doesn’t need to be super fancy, as long as it’s consistent and ideally doesn’t involve a lot of stimulation or technology. An example routine might be 30 minutes before bed, turn on lamps rather than overhead lights. Turn off the tv, get your lunch ready for the next day, have a shower, brush your teeth, maybe read for 10 minutes before going to sleep. Other things which can help us to fall asleep is ensuring that we have less light coming in a temperature that’s not too hot or too cold.
Our bedrooms being clutter-free and quiet and trying to limit our bedrooms to being for sleep and sex only. If, for example, you read and send emails in bed, this can send a signal to our brain that our bedroom is for work.
Give some of these things a try and see if you can get better and longer sleep.