Our 6 top tips for a good night’s sleep
However, The Independent found that as many as 38% of adults in the UK do not get enough sleep on average. In fact, the average British adult only gets just over 6 hours of sleep on an average night. The most common factors that were inhibiting a proper night’s sleep are a busy day, technology and lingering feelings of stress.
There are a wide number of reasons why you should prioritise your sleep. In fact, according to the NHS website, the benefits of getting the right amount of sleep - around 8 hours a night is recommended for most adults - include:
- Improving your body’s levels of immunity, so that you are in a better position to fight off illness.
- Helping you to maintain a healthy weight.
- Keeping your mood positive, and decreasing the likelihood that you will suffer from feelings of anxiety or depression.
- Decreasing the likelihood that you will suffer from diabetes.
- Helping you to fight heart disease.
- Increasing your life expectancy.
So, we’d recommend that you take action, and work to improve your routine in order to secure yourself a better sleep pattern. In this blog, we will be sharing our top six tips for sleeping for longer, and more deeply. We will be covering the following factors:
- Eat dinner earlier
- Mindfulness exercises
- Relaxing scents
- Weighted blanket
- Soothing sounds
- Invest in an iKettle
Thankfully, there are a lot of easy techniques and methods for improving your sleeping patterns, which you can incorporate into your daily routine without much difficulty. We hope that these pointers help you to sleep more fully, and improve your all-round health, too.
1. Eat dinner earlier
After a day of snacking (when in lockdown, we’re all entitled to a few extra treats here and there) we can often find that we’re not hungry at the usual time that we’d have dinner. As a result, there’s a tendency to push dinner back later and later into the evening.This might only sound like a small thing, but actually it can have a highly detrimental impact on your sleeping pattern. This is because going to bed on a full stomach can inhibit your ability to reach a state of deep sleep, and the fact that you have to keep digesting your food into the night can leave you feeling restless, or make it more difficult to fall asleep at all. So, be sure to keep your dinner times to a reasonable time of day, and finish eating at least one hour before you go to bed.
2. Mindfulness exercises
We’ve all had those nights where our brains are whirring at a million miles an hour. When we’ve got so many thoughts going round in our head, it becomes almost impossible to switch off and get to sleep.This is where mindfulness exercises can help. Practice techniques to calm your mind, quieten those thoughts, and lull yourself into a state of peace before you go to sleep.
You could do this by trying deep breathing exercises, meditating, or using phone apps like Calm or Headspace.
3. Relaxing scents
Creating a sense of calm before bedtime can be achieved by targeting several different senses at one, one of the most important being smell.
By infusing your room with natural scents, you will find it a lot easier to relax before bed. Aromatherapy is all about identifying smells which our brain associates with relaxing and peaceful feelings. The scents which are most commonly used to evoke these sensations are lavender, jasmine, vanilla, lemon and rosemary.
You can fill your room with these wonderful natural smells with pillow sprays, reed diffusers, by making your own lavender pouches, or by investing in a specialist essential oil diffuser.
4. Weighted blanket
It might sound like a needless expense, but there’s a reason why these innovative blankets have taken off lately. Over lockdown in particular, weighted blankets have become a super popular, trendy option amongst people of all ages.These blankets create the sensation of getting a warm hug. Who doesn’t love that? As well as being remarkably snug and cosy, weighted blankets are designed to help individuals who suffer with anxiety to get a calmer, deeper night’s sleep.
5. Soothing sounds
We’ve already tackled smell, and now another key sense to consider is sound. If you are a light sleeper, and you find that your sleep is constantly being disturbed by noises occuring in your house, you could see whether ear plugs help rectify this problem.
Alternatively, playing some calming music can help you to both get to sleep easier, and sleep for longer too. Music apps like Spotify have a number of playlists filled with dedicated sleep music. These calming tunes help your brain to shut off from the day’s worries, and naturally reach a gentle state of calm.
6. Invest in an iKettle
We’ve got two key reasons why an iKettle is just the thing to help you improve your sleeping patterns.
Firstly, a cup of aromatic herbal tea is a wonderful way to take a pause, and allow your mind some time to reach a peaceful state before you settle down for some shut-eye. With our smart kettle, you can set your water to heat to the optimum temperature for your herbal brew so that it tastes exactly right. We take cups of tea seriously, you see.
Secondly, if you are a new parent, you’ll be well aware of how many times you’re having to get up in the night to feed your newborn. Thankfully, the assistance of a smart home will enable you to complete these night time feeds quicker, so that your sleeping pattern receives as minimal an interruption as possible. You can use the Smarter app to boil your kettle remotely, so that when you head down to heat the formula, the device is good to go.
The iKettle is now available in a sleek new monochrome design, which you’ll find exclusively on our Smarter online store. So have a browse of our collection now to find out more about its intuitive range of sleep-aid features.
Written by Josephine Walbank