Sleep is one of the most important things you can devote yourself to. Sleep is the way your body recovers. It is also while you sleep that many of the body's necessary metabolic processes take place, such as clearing toxic proteins out of the brain. The conversion of short-term memories into long-term memories also happens while we sleep.
Given all these important processes, it is hardly surprising that a lack of sleep is linked to a whole range of health problems. Too little sleep and rest increases inflammation in the body, affects your focus and makes it harder to lose weight. It also disturbs the signals for insulin secretion and testosterone production, and affects your cardiovascular health.
Getting enough (quality) sleep affects more than just your health, too. It is also necessary for feeling good mentally, physically and sexually. It makes you happier as well. So let us look at what you can do to get that long-awaited sleep.
What disturbs your sleep? Five things you might overlook
Let us start by going through 5 things that can disturb your sleep without you knowing it.
Light: How your evening environment affects your sleep
Light has a big influence on your sleep because it governs the production of the hormone melatonin, which tells the body it is time to sleep. It is above all the sun's blue light that disturbs our hormone production. What complicates matters is that all our electronic screens (TV, computer, tablet, phone) also emit blue light, and that these have become an ever more common part of our everyday lives. You may not think about it much, but the truth is that even the small screen on your phone can disturb your sleep and throw your circadian rhythm out of balance.
If you are used to using electronics before going to bed, it is worth thinking about ways to gradually reduce the amount of blue light during the evening. Most screens today have a built-in function for reducing blue light (the Night Shift function on Apple products, for example). Sometimes you may not be able to adjust the light on your screen, or you may be somewhere where you cannot influence the light level in the room. In those situations, glasses with a blue light filter (blue light blockers) are a good alternative. Remember, though, that even if blue light is the big sleep thief, it is wise to avoid all strong light sources for a few hours before bedtime.
Finally, it is worth bearing in mind that even if you fall asleep on time, light can still affect your sleep quality while you sleep. So if you live in an area with a lot of light in the evenings (natural or unnatural), blackout curtains or a sleep mask can be a good investment.
Sound: Why some noises wake you more than others
Sound can also have a big influence on your sleep quality. Not all sounds affect you the same way. Sustained, monotonous sounds such as the rumble of a tumble dryer or the hum of a fan usually do not disturb you and can even mask other disruptive noise. Sudden sounds, on the other hand — the tumble dryer starting up, or the sound of something falling on the floor — can disturb you considerably while you sleep.
The sounds that disturb you most are the ones that have a particular meaning for you. You are more likely to be woken by the sound of a conversation between two people than by music played at the same volume. In the same way, you might sleep through loud traffic noise (although it will affect your sleep quality), but if you are a parent, a small whimper from your child will be enough to wake you.
So if there is a lot of noise around you when you sleep (and you are not a parent), it may be worth getting earplugs. Although they mainly filter out higher frequencies and cannot protect against lower ones, that means they will give relatively good protection against sudden sounds.
Heat: Why a cooler bedroom can help you sleep
A raised body temperature has been linked to difficulty sleeping. That means if your bedroom is warm enough to raise your body temperature, you may have trouble falling asleep and experience poorer sleep quality. A bedroom cool enough to lower your body temperature, but not cold enough to be uncomfortable, can help you both fall asleep and reach deep sleep faster.
Alcohol: Feeling sleepy doesn’t mean sleeping well
Alcohol has a numbing effect on the central nervous system. By binding to GABA receptors in the brain, alcohol gives you a feeling of calm and relaxation, and it is easy to believe it could improve sleep. Research shows that this is not the case, however. Alcohol's calming effect can help you fall asleep at first, but if you keep drinking around bedtime the effect will wear off within just a few days. On top of that, alcohol has a negative influence on your sleep quality from the very start. In the long run it has even been shown that people with alcohol problems often suffer from insomnia as well.
Caffeine: Why your coffee can affect sleep without you noticing
There are certainly many benefits to caffeine, but also some drawbacks, among them ones linked to sleep. Caffeine blocks various adenosine receptors in the brain, and that is how we experience the effects we associate with coffee, for example. By blocking A1 receptors, which make you sleepy when activated, caffeine makes you more alert. By blocking A2A receptors, caffeine can raise your dopamine levels, which gives you stimulation and improves your mood.
It appears that the A1 receptor does not lose its sensitivity to caffeine, and so the invigorating effect does not diminish over the long term. The A2A receptor, on the other hand, becomes less sensitive to caffeine over time, which may explain why committed coffee drinkers feel no stimulation when they drink coffee. That absence of stimulation is the reason many habitual caffeine users do not believe their intake affects their sleep. In many cases they can even fall asleep right after drinking a cup of coffee. But the truth is that even if you have no trouble falling asleep, the caffeine makes you more alert and your sleep is therefore not as deep. A good piece of advice is therefore to try to avoid coffee for at least 6 hours before bedtime.
What improves your sleep? Five ways to support a better night’s rest
Now that we have gone through what can disturb your sleep, it is high time to look at 5 factors that can help you both fall asleep more easily and sleep better through the night.
Exercise: How moving during the day supports sleep at night
The links between exercise and sleep have long been debated. Some argue that better sleep leads to more training and exercise, while others say that more training leads to better sleep. But which is actually true?
Whether better sleep leads to more training is hard to say with certainty. Obviously it can be harder to motivate yourself to go and train if you have not slept well. Studies show that even people who make time to train get tired more quickly if they are short of sleep. They also show that people suffering from chronic pain more often avoid training and exercise if they have slept badly. A bad night's sleep has also been shown to lead to poorer workouts.
That training leads to better sleep is a considerably safer claim. Even though the exact reason is still unclear, many studies have shown that physical activity during the day improves sleep quality, particularly if you are exposed to a lot of stress in everyday life.
There has been debate about whether training late in the evening can affect sleep negatively. Physical activity does raise your body temperature and also increases adrenaline in the body. These effects are temporary, however, and do not affect sleep very much unless you train right before you jump into bed. What can cause problems is if the training affects your circadian rhythm by making your body associate training and movement with daytime. It does seem, though, that when it comes to the effect on sleep, training in the evening is better than not training at all.
A regular sleep schedule: Give your body a rhythm it can follow
Most of the physiological processes in your body follow a 24-hour schedule and are triggered by things like temperature and light. This schedule is your circadian rhythm, and it can be thrown badly out of step by irregular bedtimes. By going to bed at roughly the same time every evening you can improve your sleep considerably and also shorten the time it takes you to fall asleep.
Other ways to support your circadian rhythm are to have a recurring bedtime routine that signals to your body that it is time to turn in. The routine can be as simple as brushing your teeth and changing clothes, or you can set aside time to read and meditate — you set the bar yourself. The most important thing is simply that the routine makes you feel calm, and that it preferably does not involve screens and blue light.
Melatonin: Understanding your body’s bedtime signal
The absence of blue light signals to your body to start producing the hormone melatonin, which in turn tells the body it is time to sleep. This is the reason you should avoid blue light in the evening. If you have reduced your blue light and followed the other advice in this article but still find it hard to fall asleep, you can try taking a melatonin supplement.
Melatonin as an over-the-counter medicine can help against insomnia and improve sleep. It can also be helpful with jet lag. A melatonin supplement cannot help you change your sleep schedule, however; there the circadian rhythm and the body's own melatonin production play a considerably larger role.
It is also important to mention that you cannot always trust what it says on the packaging when you buy melatonin abroad. Such tablets can contain both higher and lower levels of melatonin than what is written. There are also several studies showing that some melatonin supplements contain substances that should not be there, such as serotonin. When buying melatonin within and from Sweden, on the other hand, it is generally in the form of a medicine, where that problem does not arise.
Magnesium: Why the form of your supplement matters
Magnesium is a mineral that plays a major role in brain function and therefore also affects your sleep.
There are many foods that contain magnesium, such as pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, spinach and almonds. It is also possible to take magnesium as a supplement to counter a deficiency — which is common among older people and people who train a lot, among others. Something to be aware of when taking a magnesium supplement is that you should as far as possible avoid the magnesium oxide form, since it can cause stomach problems (gas and diarrhea, among others), and on top of that absorption into the body is very poor compared with other, better forms of magnesium. It is also wise not to exceed the recommended intake where magnesium is concerned.
Magnesium comes today in many different forms, and in buffered as well as non-buffered form. Prefer non-buffered magnesium glycinate, chloride or citrate here, as these often give the best absorption and are gentle on the stomach. To promote sleep and relaxation specifically, the glycinate form is recommended — or bisglycinate, as it is actually called — because besides magnesium it also contains plenty of glycine, which plays a role as a neurotransmitter in the nervous system.
A buffered magnesium supplement is, put simply, a product where a better form of magnesium (glycinate, for example) has been “seasoned” with the poorer magnesium oxide. The purpose is often financial, so that the magnesium content on the ingredient list can be written up to as high an amount as possible using as little raw material as possible — but in reality this makes for a poor end product in which the majority of the magnesium comes from magnesium oxide.
Lavender: Exploring a calmer way to wind down
Among all the things that can cause sleep problems, stress is one that affects many of us in today's society. Something that can reduce your stress at bedtime and help you fall asleep is lavender — a beautiful purple flower with a lovely scent. The scent of lavender has been shown to relax us, help us fall asleep and improve our sleep quality.
Studies carried out in recent years have also shown that lavender in supplement form can help against anxiety and thereby improve sleep.
