How to sleep well – 3 Yoga tips for adult bedtime routine
In this second article on Tips for Yoga for sleep, I would like to introduce you a few changes in your routine that can help you sleep well.
The main hormone that contributes to your good sleep is melatonin.
You may have heard of that, it’s actually available in these days to buy over-the-counter for example and to actually help good sleep is really really helpful for avoiding jet lag for example.
We reduce melatonin in the mornings and so actually it’s really important if you possibly can to stimulate it by daylight. To get outside in the morning is really helpful for building up the store of melatonin in your body so that when you come to want to go to sleep, there’s enough to help you go to sleep.
In order to achieve this, one thing I’d love to invite you to introduce into your routine is just going outside in the morning.
Especially in the beautiful sunshine that we’re experiencing at the moment, go out and get those melatonin stores.
Also, exercise is a fantastic contributor to sleep – so long as you’re leaving a three or four-hour gap between any really energetic exercise and your bedtime.
Make sure you got that through three or four-hour gap between going to the gym and when you want to go to bed.
This relates to a general point about timing that I wanted to share with you. If you think about a car, it takes a few seconds to get from nought to sixty. It’s not completely instant. It might take 10 seconds or 15 seconds, according to the different cars.
What I find when I’m working as a meditation teacher and a yoga teacher is that people do expect an instant switch! They stop work or looking after the kids, they stop making dinner and they sit down and expect an instant stop or an instant start in the morning. Either way, we don’t work like that.
What I see works best for people, for example, in meditation practice is actually really giving time for relaxation.
That has a very specific application in yoga for sleep which is actually building in a good hour of time to just do the wind-down and that needs to not be screen time.
I know that’s really frustrating and in fact, you shouldn’t be sleeping with your phone or any other Ipad or computer in your bedroom.
I’m going to be a bit strict here in thé. If your complaint about that is that you use your phone as your alarm clock, so do I but I just put it on a plug outside the bedroom. I could get a little desk just in the hall where my bedroom is, not in the bedroom with me I still use it as my alarm clock, although you can buy a specific alarm clock.
The problem is that screen light, blue light is stimulating for the brain.
Even just five minutes are enough to delay your sleep cycle by up to 90 minutes! So you might think that quick moment checking Facebook before going to bed isn’t having an impact, but it can have up to a 90-minute delay on your sleep time! So that is something I’m banning from the bedroom.
Recapping, we have 3 tips on how to sleep well today:
- Please get outside in the morning and, if you can, combine that tip number 2:
- Exercise is fantastic for regulating mood, to promote the right balance of hormones in the body that work amazingly well for sleep. Exercise in the morning would be awesome but have at minimum 3 to 4 hours without exercise before bed;
- No more sleeping with your phone in your room, no more screentime in the last hour before bed!
