Your bedtime (and daytime) habits and environment can play a big role in your sleep quality.
Sleep hygiene, however, is a little bit different from the typical grooming and cleanliness of everyday hygiene.
What Is Sleep Hygiene?
Photo:Emmanuel Faure/Getty Images
These practices include both behavioral and environmental factors that can impact sleep quality, he explains.
I emphasize the importance of good sleep hygiene to virtually every client I work with, he says.
Its fundamental to physical and mental health.
Even foods like chocolate, some sodas, and teas contain hidden caffeine.
Spicy foods can exacerbate upper gastrointestinal discomfort; and high-fat, sugar-filled foods can disrupt sleep as well.
And as great as it feels to sleep in, its another driving factor in poor sleep hygiene.
In fact, most mental health professionals I know do not keep a TV in their bedrooms.
you’re free to receive the biggest return on investment by adopting this strategy, he says.
This means the next night, youll want to go to bed at a reasonable time.
How to Improve Your Sleep Hygiene
Worried you have less-than-stellar sleep hygiene?
Instead, use a slow-and-steady approach to create change.
Once youve started breaking these behaviors, you could then replace them with new, sleep-promoting habits.
A great place to start?
Choose one or two of your subpar sleep habits to work on.
Do you drink caffeinated tea in the evenings or soda with dinner?
Switch to more soothing, caffeine-free optionsor just hit the water instead.
One key to success is monitoring and logging your progress daily, Allen recommends.
Mendelson WB.The Science of Sleep: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters.
University of Chicago Press; 2017.
Accessed April 4, 2023. doi:10.7208/9780226387338
NIH News in Health.Poor Sleep Linked With Higher Blood Sugar.
Accessed April 4, 2023.
Diekelmann S.Sleep for cognitive enhancement.Front.
Neurosci.2014;8:46. doi:10.3389/fnsys.2014.00046
American Heart Association.Sleeping less than 6 hours may raise risk of cancer, even death.
Accessed April 4, 2023.
Accessed April 4, 2023.
