3 Bad Habits that Affect YOUR Sleep

Can’t sleep at night? Always tossing and turning without reason? I feel your pain. The constant rolling around in bed trying to find the perfect position (even though you never will) is incredibly irritating. The worst is when you constantly look at the clock, hour after hour, just waiting for that annoying alarm to go off! Ughh..... The wonders of sleep.

This week I will cover some of the bad habits that are associated with poor sleep. Stick around and you will learn about the specific issues that are affecting your sleep patterns. 
Don’t you want to know why you can’t sleep? Actually, wouldn’t you ALL want to learn about ways to have a better nights sleep? Well if the answer is yes, then you better keep scrolling down. There is nothing worse than desperately wanting to sleep after long hard days and not being able to. 
Here we go:

1. Freaky sleep patterns

Some of you may not know what I mean when I say “freaky sleep patterns", so let me shine a bit of light on the topic. When you go to bed at a reasonable hour every night and you wake up at the same time every morning, that is a good sleep pattern. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to keep this pattern up, especially on weekends. The same person that has just spent the whole week establishing a good sleep pattern will suddenly screw this up on the weekend by staying up all night, then sleeping all day! What are you? Bats? This is not healthy. Do you know why? Because it effects your  “circadian rhythm”¹. This rhythm represents the 24 hour cycle that will link activity in the brain to other activities that the body performs, such as hormone production or even cell regeneration. ¹ It is crucial to keep good and consistent sleeping patterns in order to “optimize” ¹ your sleep.
My advice? Start by deciding on a time when you should go to bed and when you should wake up. This, of course, is more difficult for some than for others. A lot of people like to stay out late on weekends, or have jobs with odd hours, which makes it hard to be consistent. The trick is to get at least the same hours of sleep in. What I’m saying is, don’t go to bed at 11:00 P.M. everyday during a school week and wakeup at 7:00 A.M., then go to bed at 4:00 A.M. and wakeup at 4:00 P.M. on the weekend, if you can help it. Hear what I’m saying? Good. 
I have been trying to maintain consistent sleep patterns, which makes people think I’m crazy for waking up at 8 or 9 on weekends. I can’t help it, when I have consistent sleep patters, I don’t need to sleep until lunch. 

2. Being a social butterfly at bedtime

Here is a VERY common habit that I can almost guarantee we all do. Most teens, and maybe even some adults, will sleep with the phone next to the bed. I understand that most people use the phone as an alarm clock and that's fine. What you should not be using it for is social networking. Constantly texting while laying in bed before you decide to sleep, or checking emails, is another habit that will affect your sleep. 
“Your bed should be used for sleep and sex-- that's it,”¹, a funny quote by William Kohler, medical director of the Florida Sleep Institution in Spring Hill, Fla.¹. He also states that “the brain likes routine,”¹ . Basically what this means is that when we see our bed, our brains should immediately associate it with sleep and not other activities that will keep our brains on all night long. According to the Doctor, if we are unable to fall asleep in the first 15 to 20 minutes, we should get out of bed.¹ This may sound counterproductive, but read on. He says this because when we stay awake in bed, we are training our brains to be active while we are in bed (which is a place for sleep). The Doctor believes we should instead get up and write our thoughts down, or do some other activity until we are actually ready to go to bed and sleep.¹ 
No need to keep our brain wired all night by texting every time we can’t sleep. 

This explains a lot about why I can’t sleep. I constantly check my phone in bed. It is just more relaxing to lay there and scroll through my phone instead of sitting at my computer. We almost all do it. Who would have thought that THIS is why we can’t sleep!? I’m definitely going to have to stop this. Now that I do think about it, a screen that close to my face is probably not good either.
Thank goodness for William Kohler and his tips on good sleep.

3. Eating before or in bed

This is the last bad sleep habit I will be covering, although there are a lot more. 
Do any of you get sudden cravings right before you go to bed? I know I do. Sometimes I just want to snack on something before I have to brush my teeth. I, unfortunately, should know better, but I am still somewhat a victim of it. If any of my readers are a victim of this habit, let’s see if we can figure it out. It is quite brief. 
We all know that eating before bed (or in bed) can cause cavities or weight gain. But it also creates crumbs in your bed that can keep you scratching all night.² This will no doubt keep you up. But it can also be an invitation for little house guests that want to spend a night in your bed.² You know who I’m talking about. BUGS! Ew... I’m pretty sure that fact alone should stop us from eating in bed... 
Everything else aside, it is important for our health that we eat no less than four hours before we go to sleep, because we need to help regulate our digestive system so it too can go to sleep.² 
If you suddenly have these cravings, I suggest drinking a glass of water or just staying out of the kitchen all together. Unfortunately this advice is much easier to give than to follow, because a glass of water has never stopped my cravings. The other drawback to drinking water before bed is the need to go to the bathroom several times a night. But that's less of an issue than gaining weight from eating late night snacks. 
That’s just my opinion!

Unfortunately this post has gotten a bit on the long side so I will end it here. If you want to learn more about this bad habit click here. 
Furthermore, if you want to learn even more about the effects of bad sleep habits you can click on the word effects. 
Last but definitely not least, you can click this final link (coping methods) to read a pretty extensive list on ways to cope with bad sleeping habits! I found the list pretty helpful.

Sleep is probably one of the most important things for me and when something disrupts it I will find the cause and find ways to fix it. Hence the reason why I covered this topic for my blog. How ironic that my blog topic fits right in with the reasons I cannot sleep! If you guys are anything like me, read about these different habits and try to use a coping method that works for you. The bad habits we perform are different for everyone, so I tried to cover the ones I find most common. If you click on the links I’ve provided you will find many more ways to stop your bad sleeping.
Hope you all have a great sleep tonight! I know I will.

6 down, 2 to go

Happy sleeping!

¹ http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/225741 

² http://voices.yahoo.com/5-bad-habits-effect-sleep-5807094.html?cat=5