Relieve Stress at Bedtime and Sleep Better

The truth is, many of us are stressed. There are all kinds of sources for this stress, but once you’re under stress, it permeates everything else. The good news is that there are some techniques to relieve stress at bedtime so that it does not affect your sleep

It’s great that there are several ways to approach the solution to stress without going down the medical route. Some of these are new, while some are very ancient. Let’s consider some other means of relieving stress and getting some decent sleep. 

Meditative Practices

All around the world, cultures and religions have come up with various forms of meditation. It’s a feature of almost every regional anthropology and thus practically uniform across the entire globe.

In European cultures, many refer to the practice as “praying,” while Eastern cultures use the term “meditation”. Ultimately, these are the same basic concepts, and the point is to enter a mindful state. 

With all meditative and mindful practices, the idea is to go through whatever is on your mind and try to work through it in the right way. If there are stressors in your life, this method is a wonderful way to deal appropriately with them.  

Some people like to combine prayerful or meditative practices with some low-impact form of stretching and exercise, which has been shown to help. However, many people benefit greatly from the mindfulness routine on its own.  It helps them clear their mind and relieve stress at bedtime.

Leading Up To Sleep

Try to cultivate an increasing state of calm and restfulness in the hours leading up to bedtime. There will be many personalized variations on this theme, but the underlying idea is to leave behind the hectic day and enter a restful state of mind. 

We often tend to pack our modern evenings with excitement and thrills where we can, but this is somewhat detrimental to our sleeping patterns. Where possible, leave the more exciting evenings to the weekends to get some shuteye. 

Lowering the volume in the house is a great start, as is dimming the lighting where you can. Turning off the more emotionally hyped inputs like news headlines, dramatic films, and the like is another good move. 

The basic idea is just to lower the emotional impact of your surroundings so that you can properly destress. If you’re constantly barraged by high-octane material flying at you from everywhere, sleep will elude you often.

Eating and Drinking

Of course, part of the eventful nightlife many people crave is a medley of interesting foods and intoxicating liquors. These things will definitely generate a lively atmosphere in the most happening places but will not produce decent sleep. 

Wherever you’re able to, you should try to steer clear of potent food and drink choices in the evening hours. At a minimum, people should limit the intake on weekdays. On these days, it is critical to be well rested.

Coffee, highly sugared drinks, heavily spiced food, and alcohol will all seriously affect sleep in pretty much everybody. You may not even notice when you’re younger, but it all begins to catch up with you in the end. 

Again, this is not to say you should never indulge in these foods and drinks, but rather that you should limit their use where you can. There are always those weekends, after all. 

All Those Devices

It has been conclusively shown that our electronic devices, have a negative impact on sleep in at least two distinct ways. First off, the content on the devices is almost always of the brain-grabbing kind. It’s either work, or a film, or something else that activates the brain. This hurts your ability to relieve stress at bedtime.

Secondly, electronic devices emit light that interferes with sleep-promoting brain activity. All of the light emitted from them is either on the blue end or the red end of the light spectrum. 

If you’re unable to put down your device in the evening, for whatever reason, opt for the red light choice, which is widely available on devices now. As a much broader and slower frequency, the red light is far less energetic and can assist a bit here. 

It’s not the ideal option (which would be avoiding the device altogether), but it certainly counts as a mitigation of a kind. The less intense the energy and frequency of the light, the less detrimental its effects will tend to be. 

However, there are some devices that can actually help you sleep better. Lately, there’s been a rise of wearable health monitoring devices that can track your sleep quality and duration. Some can even signal your body to relax and wind down. For example, Hapbee biohacking device is using low-power electromagnetic signals that can help you fall asleep faster and increase the amount of deep sleep.

Patterns and Routines

We are very much creatures of habit, we humans. When we mindfully create good habits, patterns, and routines, it can be very helpful to our overall health too. 

It may not seem very “rock and roll”, but being strict with things like mealtimes and bedtimes can be highly beneficial. Your body loves to know what’s going on, and particularly what’s going to occur next. 

This is because of how complex your bodily functions actually are. For example, livers do different tasks during sleep and waking cycles. If your liver expects you to be awake when you’re trying to sleep, you will find it harder to nod off. 

The same is true in a heightened sense for your brain. The patterns you live by will determine the patterns your brain adopts, so if it is winding down in preparation for sleep in the evenings, you’ll find sleep easier to come by. 

Some Final Words

We’re all unique in our own right, and there’s little doubt about that. Nevertheless, we tend also to function in similar basic ways. If you can engage in some combination of mental, emotional, and physical calm leading up to sleep, you will relieve stress at bedtime and sleep better. This is extremely because we know how important sleep is from physical, mental, and emotional standpoints.

It’s about creating and maintaining a healthy mode of life that fits you well so that you can be the greatest version of yourself. Remember, when you don’t get proper sleep, you are not just damaging your sleep time. This damage will carry over and you will be damaging your waking hours as well.

Finding out how your mind, spirit, and body work is a big part of the whole process. You can learn a great deal about yourself in this kind of journey, and you might end up benefiting yourself at the same time.