Women should follow these four tips to help get the sleep they need (photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com)
If you have a spouse or a significant other, you may have realized by now that sleep seems to be different for men than it is for women. For example, men seem to have fewer sleep disruptions and almost half of all women wake up feeling like they didn’t get enough sleep. Since it seems like women are having the most trouble snuggling in to get the sleep they need, here are 4 tips specifically geared towards helping women get a good night sleep.
1. Cool Off
Women can be especially sensitive to temperature shifts while sleeping. This is especially true during that time of the month because the body’s core temperature can run higher than normal. Manage this more effectively by managing the temperature of your sleep environment. Experts agree that a constant temperature of between 60 and 67 degrees is perfect for sleeping which means you may need to open a window, turn on a fan, or take some other measure to get the temperature of your room just right.
2. Keep Calm
If you are struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep, you may be sabotaging yourself with what you are eating, drinking, or doing in the hours leading up to bed time. Anything with caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol will make falling asleep much harder. Exercising too close to bedtime can also cause problems because it elevates your body temp in a way that takes longer to come down.
3. Warm Up
Now this might seem counterintuitive to the #1 above but sometimes the best thing you can do to get the sleep you need is to warm yourself up right before bed. Taking a hot shower or warm bath might be just what you need to slip off to sleep faster. This is all because of what happens in our bodies in the time just before we fall asleep and while we are sleeping. One of the signals our body sends out that lets every body part and process know that it is time for bed is a drop in temperature. If you artificially raise your temperature with a hot shower in preparation for bed, your core temp will drop faster which may help you get to sleep sooner.
4. Tune Out
We also make it difficult for ourselves to sleep because we have trouble tuning out. This means turning off all the electronic devices that keep our brains active and emit bluish light. Taking these things into the bedroom with us can act as a double whammy in terms of getting a good night sleep. First, they keep us active or wake us up with their chimes and ringing. Second, they emit the kind of light that tells our bodies it is time to be awake which makes it hard to fall asleep at all.
Getting a good night sleep might be easier to achieve than you think. Start by making sure you have a sleep environment that is supportive of healthy sleep and then check to make sure you are not doing anything to sabotage the sleep you need to be healthy.
