by Gabrielle Abelard | Feb 16, 2015 | Better Sleep |
As a nation littered with coffee shop chain restaurants and energy drink-lined store shelves, Americans’ obsession with caffeine and a host of trendy supplements promoting increased energy, indicates a deeper issue: a widespread lack of restful sleep. Maintaining a regular sleep schedule promotes physical and emotional health by providing our minds and bodies the time to process the past day and prepare for the next. Like anything, humans require a period of “recharging” – a restful sleep promotes mental clarity, stable metabolism, hormonal balance, and cell restoration throughout the body. These things affect the whole person; they allow for clear decision-making, emotional regularity, healthy organ functioning, resistant immune system, capable learning and memory making, among numerous other crucial functions in our day-to-day lives. When you consider this, it seems ludicrous the disregard our society has for sleep’s importance in leading happy, fulfilling lives. While everyone experiences occasional bouts of insomnia, perhaps the most concerning sleep disorder is chronic sleep loss: a disorder which overtime can cause learning/memory difficulty, weight gain, cardiovascular problems, weakened immune system, and overall amotivation and stagnation. The lowered functioning caused by sleeplessness results not only in personal health and emotional difficulties, but also causes a surprising amount of motor vehicle and other heavy machinery accidents. However dismal your struggle to sleep may be, there are a plethora of things you can do to combat insomnia. These include: cutting down on caffeine consumption (4-6 hours before bedtime at least), maintaining a regular sleep schedule, avoiding heavy meals or alcohol before bedtime, limiting smoking near bedtime (or during the night), get regular exercise, and try to keep...
