[Disclaimer: This is a collaborative post but all words and opinions are still mine and honest]
What tends to keep you up at night?
Do you know what keeps me up at night? trying to remember everything I have to do tomorrow. The sudden motivation to write a blog post at 1:30am. Remembering that I forgot to reply to an email. Putting my phone to charge and then reaching over to look at it to see if that boy who hasn't replied to me for 6 hours has finally sent a message.
Apart from the latter, these are all things that I can control when it comes to getting a better night's sleep. It's definitely something I've been working on and I never thought I'd become a morning person (my mum and housemates at uni can confirm that), but recently I've found myself naturally waking up at 6am. These are a couple of things we can tweak to ensure we're getting a good night's sleep.
1. Write it all down before you go to bed.
This doesn't mean you have to go out and buy a diary and lock and write about your feelings everyday (but that's totally ok too), but just making a list of everything that's currently on your mind will clear the clutter in your brain. A survey by beds.net found that '73% of Brits are being kept awake by stress' and it's no surprise why! My generation especially loves this idea of being 'busy' all the time but there's only so much your brain and body can handle. If at the end of the day you haven't done everything you wanted to do, chances are you'll lie in bed thinking about it all. So the best thing to do is get a pen and paper, or make a note on your phone of everything you need to get done in the week or to worry about tomorrow.
2. Stop drinking at least two hours before you go to sleep.
Getting 3 litres of water in a day is great, what's not so great is getting up to pee at 4 in the morning after you told yourself at 10pm you didn't need to go that bad because you were too comfy in bed. Try and get most of your water intake earlier in the day, and then maybe switch to a cup of tea at night because you won't be able to drink that as quickly.
3. Put your phone on silent/do not disturb when you're winding down.
I know every article out there on sleep tells you to get off your phone an hour before you're going to sleep, but I enjoy having a scroll and laugh through twitter before bed and hey, sometimes it can be educational. Instead I make sure that once I'm going to sleep I put my phone on silent and put it facing down so even if I'm facing it the light of a notification doesn't tempt me to look.
4. Buy an eye mask
I think part of the reason why I'm naturally waking up at 6am is because even with the blinds down I still get sunlight coming into my room, and I've lost my eye mask. If you're someone who's easily woken up by light or needs to sleep in complete darkness then get your hands on one!
5. Don't snooze.
For the longest time, I'd always set two alarms in the morning. One for the time I actually had to get up, and one 30 minutes earlier to give me a heads up that I only had 30 minutes left to sleep. I thought this was a good idea at the time but found that if I fell back into a deep sleep again it only made it harder to get up. Now I only set one alarm and as soon as it goes off I don't even think about anything, I just get up and get ready.
What tends to keep you up at night?
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