Getting a good night’s sleep and maintaining wellness come hand in hand. The quality of sleep you get at night can severely impact how you’ll approach the following day. When you wake up, your mood and disposition can easily overflow into the rest of your daily operations.
Unfortunately, there has been a massive surge in people experiencing sleeplessness or insomnia since the outbreak of the global pandemic. This trend has caused a significant decline in their overall wellness. However, there are fairly simple tricks that can help to mitigate this growing issue. After all, nobody should bear this burden, especially during a crisis.
Sleep and Wellness
Before arriving at the solution, it’s important to understand how sleep can affect your wellness. It shouldn’t be surprising that sleep is an essential activity that provides various benefits to your body. Whenever you’re asleep, you actually go through different stages in the sleep cycle.
There are two primary categories of sleep: Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM, or quiet, sleep. During non-REM sleep, you go through four different stages. Each of these stages, particularly the third and fourth, performs various health-promoting tasks like strengthening the immune system, cell regeneration, and tissue repair.
On the other hand, REM sleep is just one stage that’s been known to stimulate the brain to enhance learning, memory, and contribute to mental and emotional health. This is also the period when you dream. This entire cycle occurs every 90 minutes. Any persistent disruption to this cycle, like insomnia, can lead to long-term health complications ranging from chronic illnesses to mental health problems.
Preparing for a Good Night’s Sleep
Constantly adapting to the changes and transitions that the pandemic has brought led to this surge in insomnia cases. More aptly, people have dubbed this global phenomenon as “coronasomnia”. The unfortunate circumstances inhibit any variety in people’s daily lives.
Now, there is a certain sense of repetitiveness that looms over them. Not to mention the increasing trend of people accomplishing work and sleeping at irregular hours. Don’t worry; there’s still plenty of time to counteract this growing threat. In fact, the solutions are much easier to implement in your own home. Here are simple things you can do to increase wellness and defeat coronasomnia for good.
Relax Your Mind
Performing different relaxation techniques a couple of minutes before you go to bed can help relieve all the stress and anxiety you experienced throughout your day. Meditation or even deep breathing exercises can go a long way in calming your thoughts and improving sleep quality.
Being able to maintain a healthy mind-and-body connection is extremely important. It’s been proven to significantly reduce stress hormones and stimulate positive changes in the brain. The effectiveness can vary from person to person, but the practice you’ll put into it will surely be worth it. This can also be done anywhere with little to no equipment at all.
Get Moving
Home gyms were all the rage at the beginning of the global pandemic. People knew that physical exercise could be a good coping mechanism during the current crisis. That still holds, especially when it comes to your sleep.
Regardless of whether you have extensive equipment or not, squeezing in a few moments to exercise throughout your day can prove to have an impact on your sleep cycle. Physical activities regulate your body’s rhythm, allowing you to fall asleep faster. It will also help you spend more time in deep sleep, meaning there’ll be less time for you to be awake at unnecessary hours of the night.
Go Through the Motions
Simply creating some semblance of your established pre-pandemic routines will help you sleep at the right time. As work-from-home and online schooling become common, it’s also easier to sleep in or sneak a few naps in between breaks. Avoid doing these as much as possible.
Maintaining a healthy work-life balance has been one of the toughest challenges for people during the pandemic. When planning out your day, you shouldn’t let the pandemic alter when to accomplish your work. Wake up at the right time, take all the breaks you normally would, and sign off at the end of your shift or class. This will condition your brain to function just like it used, leading to better sleeping habits.
Break the Cycle
Losing sleep is usually an issue that perpetuates itself. It’s fairly easy to fall into the rabbit hole of stressing over insomnia, which can actually cause you to have insomnia, and so on. Yet, it’s also effortlessly reversible. There are plenty of basic activities and lifestyle changes you could do to combat the threat of coronasomnia. You don’t have to lose sleep worrying about it, literally and figuratively.
