Everybody craves a good night’s sleep when you spend eight hours completely relaxed and restful. Sadly, many things more often than not interrupt our restful sleep. Sometimes you have a bad dream that jolts you awake. Sometimes you need to empty your bladder. Kids often wake up in the middle and the night and drag their parents with them.
The big problem about waking up in the middle of the night is trying to get back to sleep. For restless sleepers, getting back to dreamland is just impossible when you’re unwillingly woken up. You’re exhausted but the sleep fairy just isn’t around anymore to help you out.
How to Get Back to Sleep Quickly
Don’t worry though. The sleep fairy and sandman may have clocked out, but we haven’t. Here are some tips so you can get back to sleep, pronto.
#1. Use deep-breathing exercise
One popular breathing exercise that can help you fall back to sleep is the 4-7-8 breathing technique. Here’s how you do it:
- Open your mouth slightly, lips barely touching.
- Exhale completely through the mouth.
- Close your mouth, inhale through the nose for 4 seconds.
- Hold your breath for 7 seconds.
- Exhale completely through the mouth in 8 seconds.
- Repeat.
#2. Keep off the blue lights
Don’t play with your phone or tablet when you find it hard to get back to the dream zone. The blue light from those gadgets inhibits the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates the sleep-wake cycle.
#3. Turn off the heat
People fall back to sleep easier when the bedroom is cool. Why? Well, it all comes back to melatonin. When the room is warmer than 70 degrees Fahrenheit, your body stops producing melatonin and you become restless.
The warm bedroom may well be the reason why you woke up in the first place. Science says the best room temperature for sleeping is between 60 to 67 degrees. Play with the thermostat to keep the temperature within that range.
#4. Walk around
Light exercise such as walking around the house can reduce stress and anxiety. If those two are the ones responsible for startling you awake, then you should definitely do some light exercise to get back to sleep.
#5. Listen to ambient sound
For some people, listening to the static coming from the old tube TV is enough to help them sleep. Too bad CRT televisions are pretty much extinct nowadays.
All is not lost though. You’ll find that listening to ambient sound can also drop you back into dreamland in a jiffy. If you check out ambient-mixer.com, you’ll find various ambient sounds from nature to unreal atmospheres. Just let the sound play on loop on your laptop and you will get back to sleep in no time.
