9- Megan U: 6 tips for better sleep

 

439

Personally, having to improve my sleep schedule is one of the hardest tasks I could ever go through because stuff like school and chores get in the way of everything. Not even just that but sometimes I lose track of time which ends up me going to bed at like 3 or 4 am in the morning. The funny thing is that my sleep schedule worsens during the school year, but never during breaks or in the summer. Still don’t know why it’s like that but I find it really weird. The ted talk by Matt walker, he provides 6 scientifically informed recommendations for better sleep. As a person who’s unable to sleep at a reasonable time, you know I had to pick this topic right away. 

All of the tips he provided were stuff I'd never heard of before or never truly looked into. Things like temperature, doing something else and then going back to sleep,darkness, a wind down routine, and avoiding caffeine. It provided me a better understanding of how to get myself weary rather than forcing myself to sleep because that’s how I typically do it.

 Every night, for no apparent reason, i have random bursts of energy that i could’ve used throughout the day but for some reason it comes when i don’t need it.Rather than going to sleep, i try to use that energy to get myself tired by playing video games or binge watching movies on netflix. Now I know that the video said something about keeping yourself away from electronics before going to sleep since darkness is key, but with the energy that I have there’s not really much to do to make myself go to sleep. 

With the recommendations he gave out, I feel like i’m capable of doing everything but this ONE thing that i doubt i can do which is, regularity. It’s just really hard for me to pick a right time to go to sleep and be consistent with it everyday because I have projects and assignments that are unnecessarily  long and hard to do. I do try my best though to get everything done in time my the procrastinating side of me always tries to dust it off and say “ah well you can always do that later, we have time before the deadline anyways”. I say that to myself everytime but it always leads me to a point where i end up doing it the night before the deadline (like i’m doing right now) Its hard trying to do all these adjustments just for a good nights sleep, but i know i’m capable of doing it