3 Ways to Make Sure You Get All the Sleep Your Brain Needs to Stay Healthy!!

3 Ways to Make Sure You Get All the Sleep Your Brain Needs to Stay
Healthy

It seems like insomnia is a modern epidemic. Whether you deal with insomnia
or you are chronically sleep-deprived, it’s likely that poor sleep is affecting your
performance.
Sleep deprivation feels terrible. You will have noticed that if you’ve had a bad
night’s sleep, you feel sluggish, heavy, and slow, as though you’re trying to
walk through syrup. You’re clumsy and confused, you drop things, and nothing
seems to go right.
As well as making you feel bad, a chronic lack of sleep can have physical effects
on your brain. Sleep deprivation impairs your ability to process and store
memories and can even increase your risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Two proteins
associated with Alzheimer's, beta amyloid, and the tau protein, increase with
chronic poor sleep. There is some evidence in laboratory tests on mice that
sleep helps to clear these proteins from the brain.
The good news is that there are things you can do to improve your sleep health
to keep your brain in tip-top shape.
1. Find Out Your Own Best Sleep Levels
Everyone has their own individual sleep needs. Famously, British politicians
Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher needed very little sleep, but only
getting four or five hours a night is not recommended for most people.
Whether you need seven hours or ten, find out what is enough sleep for you.
Enough sleep means waking up without needing an alarm, feeling rested and
energetic, and not needing coffee to get you through the day.

2. Improve your Sleep Hygiene
Studies have shown that the hour or two before bedtime has a powerful effect
on the quality of your sleep. Schedule in some proper downtime, and stop
using blue light-emitting devices like smartphones, computers, tablets, and
television an hour or so before you plan to go to bed. Read a book, take a
relaxing bath, or listen to calming music—or all three—instead.
3. Don’t Lie There Trying to Sleep
If you can’t sleep after ten minutes, get out of bed and do something else.
Lying in bed, getting stressed because you can’t sleep is a recipe for poor sleep
and insomnia. You’re also likely to start brooding, mulling over problems or
running over the events of the day.
Get up do something relaxing like reading or meditating until you feel sleepy.
It’s okay to do this more than once, even multiple times. You’re trying to train
your brain to think of bed as a sleeping place, not a thinking place.
Improving your sleep will help you to feel calmer, be more productive, and
may lower your risk of Alzheimer’s later in life.