Improve Sleep Quality

Quality is important as quantity

It is commonly accepted that an adult normally needs seven or eight hours of sleep. This is a rule of thumb only.  Based on my personal experience, quality also matters.  Long enough of rem and deep (1.5 hours and above) stages is more important than the total duration of sleep.

For those who mediate regularly,  they can literally gain time by sleeping less without affecting their daily function and increase their alertness during the day. Moreover, they can rise naturally right way after opening their eyes in the morning without any grudge or wanting to stay in bed longer.

 Meditation improves sleep quality because that it helps quiet the mind, and shortens the duration of light sleep and lengthen the duration of deep sleep.  According to Chinese traditional value, a saint has no dream (rem) stage in his/her sleep. Few can achieve dreamless sleep, but a peaceful mind can certainly turn off/on thoughts much more nimbly than a mind that is agitated or constantly stimulated by external stimuli (such as social medias).

No Screen Time at Bedtime

Winding down time is not screen time. Many people have the habit of turning to cellphone, tablet, laptop or whatever digital gadget for an episode of favorable show, or a youtube video clip for relaxation just before going to bed. This habit is sleep killer.   First,  blue rays from screens will excite you up; moreover, the contents of the video/blog will also activate your brain’s natural association ability. Both will interfere with and lengthen the time for you to wind down and fall into asleep.

Suggestions: leave gadgets alone or outside your bedroom after a pre-specified time, say 30 minutes before you go to bed.

Diet

If you are caffeine sensitive, do not drink coffee or any other drinks that contain caffeine after lunch. Even if decaffeinated coffee, it still contains certain amount of caffeine. If you do not have the habit of coffee drinking, do not start one.

If you are not used to certain stimulating food, pay attention and eat a moderate amount. For example, if you are not used to garlic/hot pepper, your stomach may feel funny when you lie down son bed at night; a funny stomach is not a good company of sleep. During the day, you are distracted, so more or less you will not notice to the effects of stimulating food.

At the other spectrum of stimulating food, fermented food such as yogort, kefer, kumbucha can help digestion and thus is beneficial for a good night’s sleep.

Timing of dinner is also important. Avoid a big meal that is only 1 or 2 hours before bedtime. A full stomach does not help with sleep.

Physical exercises

Use and move your body, rotate the form of physical exercise.  A running beginner will find jogging/running helps his/her sleep. However, a few months into regular run/job, this helping effect tapers off because your body gets used to it.  The trick is to change the form of exercise routine. You can add strength training or doing yard work that require move or life heavy objects–such as soils for gardening etc.. You can alternative running with cycling and swimming. A physically tired body will naturally slow down the churning of mind/brain.    

When I grew up, I seldom heard complaints from relatives or neighbors about sleep.  Toiling in rice paddies for more than 9 hours a day, brains are devoid of fuel to churning up incessant conscious thoughts.

One warning though, do not work out rigorously just before bedtime. To help body to wind down, you can stretch gently,  slow yoga/taichi/qigong/sitting meditation is best suitable for bedtime. 

Mental work

Avoid doing work that requires intense concentration. Light reading is OK. When I was a graduate student, I often worked on mathematical derivations at night.  The consequence was that the mind becomes too active to slow down., so I lied in bed sleepless the whole night. Even if I managed to doze off, I kept working on the problems even in my dreams.  Working hard definitely cannot help one become a saint who sleeps dreamless sleeps.

Anchoring your thoughts to wind down your brain

If you lie in bed and are aware of the fact your brain is running with streams of thoughts, try to focus on your breathing, a mantra, this will quiet down the streams of thoughts, gradually reduce them from raging rivers to quiet creeks to silent lakes–before you know it, you fall into sleep.

If you are a side sleeper, you can sleep on the left side and slightly press your ear lope on the pillow till you can hear your own heartbeat, and concentrate on it, it will help you fall into sleep too.

Whatever anchor you use, breathing, mantra, picture, pulse, or heartbeat,  if you wander away from it, simply return to it. Do not blame yourself for drifting away.

Form a routine

Try to sleep at the same time every night, your body then will form a subconscious habit, when sleep time comes, it will slow down—temperature drops, breathing slows—to prepare for sleep, i.e., temporary death, in order to be renewed the next morning.

Bedroom Size

 If you live in the US, and your master bedroom,  is huge.  Additionally, if the bedroom has more than four sides of walls (irregular corners), it will negatively affect your sleep.    A right-sized bedroom of rectangular size facilitates sleep. If you check out bedchambers of Chinese emperors, they are of moderate size, not huge.  Beds are often big with layers of canopies. At sleep time, canopies are dropped and tucked in to make sleeper feel secure, because such sleep arrangement somewhat mimics  so  a mother’s womb which symbolizes love, security, and warmth. If your house have multiple bedrooms, sleep in a smaller room. If you cannot or don’t have more than one bedroom, use bed poles and put on a canopy.

I moved into a new house that has a huge master bedroom, but not an office.  I use a corner of the master bedroom as office. The result is that my biology tempo also mixes work and sleep together.  On top of the big size of the room, my sleep is not good.

Since I moved to a spare bedroom of moderate size where the only furniture is a bed, a side table, and a dresser, my sleep has improved much.  

Additionally, if you have a mirror in your bedroom, do not position the mirror so that you can see a vague reflection from it when you asleep or get up from your bed. Whatever reflected from the mirror does not help calming your mind.

Curtains and blinds, and room temperature

Back to the basics of sleep environment beside bedroom size: light and temperature.  Set the room temperature at the level you are comfortable with. It is usually lower than  daytime comfortable temperatures. Just like nature, night temperature drops down, so is our body temperature. 

Pull close light-blocking curtains. Even dim light will lengthen the time needed to fall into asleep and wakes up earlier in the morning.