It may be common knowledge that missing out on sleep can leave you feeling cranky the next day, but some may not realize the depth of the connection between how well they sleep and the rest of their health. The reality is that there’s a lot more to getting a good night’s rest than just going to bed early. There are a lot of things that can impact your quality of sleep, as well as your ability to fall asleep in the first place, your stress levels being one of them.

Your Body’s Stress Response and Sleep

To understand how your ability to sleep is impacted by stress, it can be helpful to understand your body’s stress response. When you experience any kind of stress, whether it’s emotional, mental or physical it triggers the stress response in your brain. When your brain senses stress, it releases a cascade of stress hormones, like adrenaline and cortisol.

These hormones are designed to keep you alert and aware of your surroundings, so, when there’s large amounts of them in your system it can make it difficult for you to relax, let alone sleep. Because of this, finding ways to reduce stress response, whether its through a healthy diet, helpful supplements like le-vel thrive reviews or daily exercise can be a good idea when trying to improve your sleep quality.

Daily Habits That Interfere With Sleep

While you might think it’s mostly what you do at night that hurts your sleep, the truth is that your daily habits can be just as harmful. One big disrupter to sleep is a poor diet full of inflammatory foods like refined carbs, sugar, and bad fats. These foods create irritation within your body that your body has to work extra hard to heal. When your body is doing this extra work to fight inflammation, it makes it harder for you to fall into restful states. Additionally, substances like caffeine and alcohol can be damaging to sleep cycles, even if they are drunk early in the day.

Another daily habit that can hurt your nightly rest is taking long naps during the day. While some may be able to nap and still fall asleep at night, there are many who can’t. Napping during daytime hours can be great if you’re exhausted and they’re brief, but if not, it can disrupt your natural sleep cycle. So if you do decide to take a nap, keep it short and do it before 3pm so it won’t disrupt your sleep come bedtime.

Nightly Habits That Interfere With Sleep

The things you do or don’t do right before bed can often have a direct and strong impact on your ability to sleep well. If you spend a lot of time on your cell phone or watching television before bed, the light from these devices can send signals to your brain that it is time to wake up, which will then make it difficult for you to shut your mind down when it’s time to sleep.

Another thing that can impact your ability to rest is eating too close to bedtime. Digestion is a bodily process that requires a lot of effort and energy, and when you eat before bed, your body will be doing a lot of work to digest your food, which can disrupt the natural rhythms that your body would fall into before going to sleep.

How to Improve Your Sleep Hygiene

To get the best rest you can at night, taking care to develop a bedtime routine can be important. By doing relaxing things like reading a book, meditating, or deep breathing exercises every night before bed, you can signal to your body that it is time to sleep. Additionally, making sure that your bedroom is dark, cool, and free of noise can make a big difference in sleep quality, too.

Final Thoughts

Most know that good sleep is important, however, they may not realize how many things they are doing that are secretly sabotaging their sleep. By finding ways to reduce stress, as well as practicing better sleep hygiene, you can start reducing stress and improving your sleep quality today.

Starting with the tips above can lead you to healthier sleep patterns; and a sleep diary or journal can keep track of changed habits. Quite often patients have a sleep study without adequate information into their nightly habits and get diagnosed with Insufficient Sleep Syndrome, which is basically having terrible sleep as a result of voluntary (albeit unintentional) behaviors that impact their sleep negatively.

If you start to notice a negative pattern that could be corrected by your own choices, make changes after a week and see how your next week goes. If there is a vast improvement to your sleep, you may be able to correct the behavior yourself and avoid having an unnecessary sleep study.

A sleep study may still be the best choice though the type of sleep study varies by a patient’s symptoms. Healthcare providers will monitor your sleep either in a lab or at your home using portable home sleep apnea testing equipment.

If you live in Alaska and are ready to take back your sleep, contact The Alaska Sleep Clinic and receive a free 10-minute phone consultation with a sleep educator who can help you determine if a sleep study is right for you.