How to Sleep Better Naturally
The benefits of sound sleep enhance our mood, decrease our stress and anxiety, and strengthen our immune systems. A good night’s sleep, however, is often obstructed. Healthy and natural sleep patterns are improved when sleep disruptors are identified and mitigated. The (mis)use of unnaturally occurring consumer products may trick the body and mind, with varied success, into sleeping better through the night. Though the healthiest means of sleeping better is through a combination of natural practices.
Disconnect from Electronic Devices
Smart phones do not grow in forests. And our phones are certainly not found in nature (though we harvest various elements of nature to mass produce electronic devices). Our personal devices are not a part of our human evolution, and our device use has polluted our natural sleep cycles.
Blue light can confuse the sleep-wake cycle and act as a venom that infects our circadian rhythms. Electronic device use prevents us from falling asleep and social notifications may wake us in the middle of night before REM is reached.
But do not recycle your electronic devices into oblivion. Rather, practice nighttime device disconnection. I do this by charging my smartphone at night in a separate space from where I sleep. The physical distance between the sleepy mind and the electric device ensures the blue light stream of Reels, Snapchats, and Tiktocs do not block the gateway to dreamland. However, there are valid objections to nighttime device disconnection.
A prominent excuse for failing at device disconnection is that a smartphone is useful as an alarm clock. When I began charging my phone at night in a space separate from my bedroom, I needed a means to wake up in the morning. My girlfriend, luckily, still possessed her old, digital clock radio from her days at university.
I usurped her clock radio and no longer relied on my phone and its alarm app to startle me out of a sound sleep in the morning. Electronic stores still sell inexpensive alarm clocks. It is a simple solution for successful nighttime device disconnection, so long as you aren’t up all night listening to terrestrial radio.
Smartphones make good alarm clocks, but they are still better at being telephones. Nighttime device disconnection still presents a problem when an emergency occurs. Family members arrive in hospitals, teenagers need late night rides home, and sometimes someone having a mental health crisis needs to talk no matter what the hour is.
Though phone calls may interrupt your sleep, emergency phone calls still need to be answered. I feared missing an important call while I slept. So I adjusted my notifications so I only heard the device’s telephone ringer at night. Social media’s trivial notifications were aptly muted. As a test, I asked my girlfriend to call my phone to ensure that I could hear the ringer from the bedroom. A simple experiment removed my fear that I would not be able to hear my ringing phone while it was in the other room.
Personal electronic devices are the antagonists of sound sleep. Sleeping better naturally means you have to practice nighttime device disconnection. Charge your blue light device in a separate room while ensuring that the telephone’s ringer is still heard in case of an emergency.
Exercise Regularly
Exercising regularly has improved my ability to fall asleep. On average I would say I hit the gym three to four times a week, usually for a solid hour in the evening. I use weight training as a means of mediation and to manage stress and anxiety. Sometimes, and this is a habit I am still developing, I jog for twenty to forty minutes once or twice a week when the weather (and my motivation) allows. One natural side-effect of regular exercise is the ease in which sleepy time arrives at night.
Your body recovers when you sleep. Whilst sleep deprivation impairs muscle recovery. Sound sleep becomes crucial to repair and develop cells and tissues, which may have been strained or damaged throughout your day. And your body has an excellent natural means of letting you know when you need to sleep (or nap) to recover — you feel tired. It is perfectly natural to feel tired and to lack energy, so acting on your body’s natural notifications is important.
Sometimes you feel more tired one evening than you did the night before. Our bodies are often metaphorized as batteries that need to be recharged like our electronic devices. The level of exertion during regular exercise dictates how much recovery and sound sleep our body needs. Through the gradual increase in the frequency of exercise and intensity of the routine, sleep will come earlier and earlier each evening, because your body will require more sleep to fully recover before your alarm startles you out of sound sleep in the morning.
Exercise is natural and it naturally promotes sleep. Humans were hunter-gatherers longer than we were farmers and grocery store consumers. Our evolutionary development was propelled by the exercise we performed to survive.
Regular exercise does not mean you need to become an athlete. It could mean that you go out for a light walk or run for fifteen minutes in the evening. The human body was made to move, and that extra bit of exercise over and above your daily, modern consumer routine may be enough to get a natural notification from your body to go to bed a little earlier than you did the previous night.
Maintain a Routine of Sleep
Circadian rhythms are our bodies’ natural way to manage the sleep-wake cycle. They promote our sleepiness when it is time to go to bed, and they stir us awake, sometimes even before our alarm, when it is time to wake up. Circadian rhythms help keep sleep consistent and restorative. But we may disrupt these naturally occurring rhythms simply because it is a weekend and the weekday responsibilities are on hold. It is important to recognize the significance for maintaining a regular routine of sleep no matter what day of the week it is.
The weekend is a social construct. There is nothing innately special about the weekend because it is Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. The patterns of human socialization make the weekend seem different. Bars and restaurants are open later on the weekends. Events and promotions are scheduled for the weekends. Shopping centers and grocery stores host consumer sales on the weekends. The capitalist marketing system is at work. And because the system enhances the subjective feel of the weekend, we often believe that the rules of the week do not apply to the weekend. We sacrifice our routine of sleep to make time for consumption and consumerism.
Our bodies’ circadian rhythms may be preserved if we take steps to acknowledge that one or two days of misplaced sleep disrupt our natural sleep cycle. Staying up late and sleeping in late once or twice on the weekend is enough to impact our sleep cycle. Worse yet is when the festivities of the weekend shorten our sound sleep, which creates a sleep debt. It is important to acknowledge our bodies’ naturally occurring notifications even on the weekend to ensure a good, efficient routine of sleep is maintained throughout all days of the week.
During my first year of university I worked as a bouncer at a nightclub on the weekends. I started my shift at 8pm and I worked till 3am. This caused a major disruption to my sleep cycle. I usually napped before my shift and only slept for a few hours after my shift. Monday mornings meant I had to be in class for 8am. My sleep cycle was hemorrhaging valuable hours of sound sleep throughout two terms of classes. I began to nap when and wherever I could. But I kept working as a bouncer through the spring and summer even after my first year of university.
Keeping my job meant I kept odd hours on Friday and Saturday evenings, but they were not odd to me. I adjusted my weekday sleep routine to accommodate my shifts as a bouncer to essentially become a full-time night owl. I woke up around 4pm and went to bed as late as 8am (blackout curtains in my bedroom were essential). It was unconventional, but it kept my sleep cycle intact week to week.
Regardless of when you sleep, a consistent sleep cycle preserves your circadian rhythms and helps you sleep better naturally without the fuss of staying up or sleeping in to align with the weekend’s marketing system.
Recap
There are three essential natural practices that will help any person sleep better naturally: disconnect from blue light emitting electronic devices in the evening; perform regular exercise throughout the week; and maintain a routine of sleep no matter what day of the week it may be.
Devices interrupt sleep, exercise promotes sleep, and a consistent sleep schedule preserves the routine of sleep. You may determine that one essential natural practice needs more care and attention than the others. I recommend taking a measured approach to repairing unnatural habits and patterns that are affecting your ability to sleep naturally.
Good, natural sleep will come.
