Improve Your Sleep, Improve Your Mental Health
July 26, 2021
4 min read
The science behind the benefits of sleep as well as proven methods to get more of it.
Written by Simon Spichak
Ever find yourself doom-scrolling until 3:00 am on Twitter? No doubt you feel the toll it takes when you wake up groggy the next day. Getting a good night’s sleep is hard to achieve. A few bad nights turn into a feedback loop of exhaustion that affects your emotions, memory, and mental health.
Sleep scientists, psychologists, and researchers find that 7–8 hours of sleep is optimal for our health. Yet this is quite difficult to achieve. A few bad nights of sleep turn into exhaustion and take a toll on your mental health. Sleep is critical for regulating emotional thoughts and memories later in the day.
Many of us with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder are all too familiar with intrusive thoughts. They keep us up at night, making us ruminate over the day's events or other negative emotions and memories. Some prompts or triggers bring these thoughts to our attention.
It turns out that our brain has a switch to decide whether we should bring up a certain memory. If there is a problem with this switch, then we constantly remember and ruminate on these intrusive emotions and thoughts. Often these impact our sense of self-worth and disrupt our daily activities.
Sleep deprivation makes it harder to block out these intrusive thoughts. Sleep is an important part of maintaining your emotional health and well-being. I've compiled some of my favorite tips and tricks so that you can get to sleep fast. Adding these habits to your routine will help you keep intrusive thoughts at bay.
Getting to Sleep Sooner
Your phone is an amazing contraption, but it becomes a hindrance when you are trying to rest. There is always the temptation of checking your social media feeds for just two more minutes. But I promise you aren’t missing out on anything if you turn off your phone’s internet connection while you sleep.
You might miss out on doom-scrolling. You won’t be stuck staring at the screen for three hours. Besides turning off your Wi-Fi or Data overnight, you can also use screen-time management apps like Focus. With this app, it becomes trivial to shut off this distraction overnight. Another reason that checking your phone ruins your sleep relates to a signaling hormone called melatonin.
The light from your screen disrupts your sleep-wake cycles in the body and brain, by stopping melatonin production. By producing melatonin, our brain can help our body get to sleep. But melatonin itself is light-sensitive (or in other words, sensitive to your phone screen). To paraphrase a song I love, hello darkness, my old friend. I need you to help me fall asleep again. Keep the melatonin flowing.
While I love coffee, probably more than the next person, it has a major downside. If you’re sensitive to the effects of caffeine, it can make it hard to get to sleep fast. Throughout the day, a molecule called adenosine builds up in the brain. By night, there is enough adenosine to send the signal to the rest of the body that it needs to sleep. Caffeine blocks this signal from going through. Skip the caffeine in the evening and late afternoon for a better night’s rest.
Make Sleep a Consistent Habit
Have you ever spent a lot of time around cats? They are creatures of habit, who find the best spots to take a nap. Often, they might designate a part of your bed for their daytime rest. It might be the only time they use that part of your bed the entire day. Cats may designate certain areas for sleep, which is something we can all take a lesson from.
We need to make sleeping into a habit. Our bed cannot be our office space, we cannot work from it any longer. We do not want to associate watching movies, working, or studying with our beds. It will make it harder for our brain to switch off into sleep mode at the end of the day. Make your own bedtime ritual, where you close the curtains to maximize darkness and shut the internet off your phone. Try getting to bed at the same time every day and waking up at the same time every morning.
After a while, sleeping will become easy. You will notice a change in the quality of sleep that you are getting, and you will wake up refreshed in the morning. Disrupting this cycle will make you tired and sluggish throughout the day. It could make it harder for you to regulate your emotions and intrusive thoughts. Cultivating a good night of sleep is critical for maintaining our mental health.
**Please note that this post is written for educational purposes, it is not therapy. If you need to talk to a professional please book a consultation with a psychotherapist through Resolvve. **
