Good rest: how to learn to fall asleep quickly and sleep soundly

Deep sleep, bliss­ful rest — oh, how sweet it is to sleep well! But some peo­ple have prob­lems with this. How to help your­self fall asleep quick­ly and rest until the morn­ing? There are some tricks for this.

Sleep and health

What does sleep do to the body?

Sleep is a state dur­ing which the body relax­es as much as pos­si­ble, its reac­tion to the out­side world is reduced to a min­i­mum. Sleep is vital because it helps the body per­form many tasks. In par­tic­u­lar:

• it pro­vides adap­ta­tion of the body to the cyclic change in illu­mi­na­tion (change of day and night),
• dur­ing it rest, regen­er­a­tion and recu­per­a­tion take place,
• in a dream, the pro­cess­ing and assim­i­la­tion of infor­ma­tion received by the brain takes place (for exam­ple, fix­ing the stud­ied mate­r­i­al, etc.),
• dur­ing sleep, vari­ants of expect­ed events are sub­con­scious­ly mod­eled,
• Accord­ing to research, in a state of sleep, a per­son is able to recall for­got­ten infor­ma­tion,
• in a dream, immu­ni­ty is restored, lym­pho­cytes are acti­vat­ed that pro­tect the body from viral dis­eases,
• in this state, tox­ic waste prod­ucts are excret­ed from the body.

Sleep does not come imme­di­ate­ly. It is pre­ced­ed by a state of drowsi­ness, which occurs as a result of a decrease in brain activ­i­ty. Sleepi­ness is char­ac­ter­ized by the fol­low­ing man­i­fes­ta­tions:

• yawn,
• low­er­ing the lev­el of aware­ness of what is hap­pen­ing,
• decreased sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the organs of per­cep­tion,
• decrease in heart rate,
• slow breath­ing,
• decreased secre­tion of glands.

How much sleep does a person need

With­out sleep, full health is unthink­able. It is believed that it should last at least 8 hours. But this is an aver­age. In fact, it depends on many things: age, health sta­tus, pro­fes­sion, lifestyle, degree of stress, liv­ing con­di­tions, noise, etc. Some­times an adult needs 12 hours to recov­er from hard work, wor­ries, sleep­less hours. But with patholo­gies of sleep, its dura­tion can vary from sev­er­al min­utes to sev­er­al days.

As you know, chil­dren sleep more than adults. A new­born baby stays in this state for 18 hours a day. With age, this time decreas­es and by ado­les­cence, the dura­tion of sleep grad­u­al­ly comes to the 8‑hour norm.

It is wide­ly believed that rest­ing before mid­night is health­i­er than after it, so doc­tors rec­om­mend going to bed no lat­er than 10 pm. Recent­ly, var­i­ous sci­en­tists have con­duct­ed research on this sub­ject. The results of some exper­i­ments did not show much dif­fer­ence between sleep com­ing before 12 at night and after this time (assum­ing the same dura­tion). How­ev­er, accord­ing to oth­er stud­ies, the best time for a night’s rest is still between 22:00 and 6:00 in the morn­ing.

Why is sleep deprivation dangerous?

When a per­son is delib­er­ate­ly deprived of sleep (for exam­ple, dur­ing inter­ro­ga­tions, tor­ture), it is very hard to bear. If this hap­pens for a long time, the con­scious­ness becomes con­fused, the per­son invol­un­tar­i­ly turns off. Fur­ther sleep depri­va­tion is fraught with seri­ous health con­se­quences.

How to deal with lack of sleep dur­ing the work week and then a long sleep at the week­end — how harm­ful is it? In Swe­den, research has been done on this sleep pat­tern. Sci­en­tists have found that it does not have much effect on health. How­ev­er, Amer­i­can researchers refute these con­clu­sions. Accord­ing to their data, those who did not get enough sleep dur­ing the week, and then “gained” sleep on week­ends, blood tests were worse than those who slept at least 7–8 hours all day. This was espe­cial­ly true for cho­les­terol lev­els.

I must say that over the years, the qual­i­ty of sleep dete­ri­o­rates. Old­er peo­ple sleep worse, wake up more often and then can­not fall asleep for a long time. They can­not fall into a deep sleep, which gives a com­plete recov­ery of the body. This neg­a­tive­ly affects the abil­i­ty of the brain to regen­er­ate.

Medications: benefit or harm?

Doc­tors have repeat­ed­ly warned that sleep med­ica­tions that a per­son takes with­out a doc­tor’s pre­scrip­tion can be dan­ger­ous. First­ly, with pro­longed use, the body adapts to them and an increase in the dose is required. Sec­ond­ly, these drugs are addic­tive, and sub­se­quent­ly depen­dent on them.

As ear­ly as the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tu­ry, mor­phine and opi­um were pre­scribed as sleep­ing pills. How­ev­er, at present, the use of these drugs as sleep­ing pills is pro­hib­it­ed, as they cause drug addic­tion and are includ­ed in the list of drugs whose cir­cu­la­tion is strict­ly con­trolled.

Rules for falling asleep quickly

The Amer­i­can sci­en­tist R. Budzin rec­om­mends adher­ing to the rules he devel­oped for falling asleep quick­ly. Here they are:

• the bed should be asso­ci­at­ed with fast falling asleep, for this it is nec­es­sary to devel­op a con­di­tioned reflex,
• you need to use the bed only for sleep­ing (do not lie in it at oth­er times),
• if you can’t sleep, don’t stay in bed and get up after 10 min­utes,
• you need to devel­op the habit of get­ting up in the morn­ing always at the same time, using an alarm clock for this,
• you can’t sleep dur­ing the day.

For quick falling asleep and deep rest, doc­tors rec­om­mend not to eat too much at night. You can eat no lat­er than two hours before going to bed. In the evening, kefir, yogurt, light cook­ies (crack­ers), apples, etc. are best absorbed. To fall asleep quick­ly, there should not be either a strong feel­ing of hunger or overeat­ing.

Getting ready for a night out

To help your­self fall asleep, there are dif­fer­ent tech­niques. If you have trou­ble falling asleep, try these and you will find a method that works for you:

• A glass of warm milk at night helps to fall asleep (it is pos­si­ble with hon­ey). The tem­per­a­ture of the milk should not be hot, but warm enough.
• A warm show­er with a gen­tle jet has a relax­ing effect.
• A hot foot bath works the same way. It “diverts” the blood from the head, and also relieves leg fatigue.
• Before going to bed, you can take a small amount of moth­er­wort tinc­ture (1/2 tea­spoon of the tinc­ture with a lit­tle water). Moth­er­wort calms the ner­vous sys­tem and nor­mal­izes the heart rhythm.
• Qui­et, med­i­ta­tive music pro­duces a calm­ing effect (make your­self an audio selec­tion).
• Lying in bed, count to ten, then again to ten, and so on until you fall asleep. If you get con­fused, return to the account again. Monot­o­nous count­ing leads to falling asleep.
• Anoth­er trick is to focus your atten­tion on your feet. Repeat: my feet are heavy and hot, my feet are heavy and hot, my feet are heavy and hot, etc. This caus­es blood to drain from the brain, which caus­es sleep.

Sleep and beauty

The famous Ital­ian film actress Sophia Loren says: “The main thing for my beau­ty is a good sleep. For me, it is very impor­tant, it is not a pity for time. I need to sleep 9–10 hours.”

Indeed, female beau­ty needs a good rest. How­ev­er, accord­ing to doc­tors, sleep­ing more than 10 hours is not nec­es­sary and even harm­ful. For the body, a reg­u­lar 8‑hour sleep is enough. But reduc­ing this rate below 6 hours is unfa­vor­able for health, since the body will not be deeply and ful­ly restored. This will affect the appear­ance.

Dur­ing a good night’s rest, blood cir­cu­la­tion improves, skin cells are restored. But if this does not hap­pen, skin tone decreas­es, wrin­kles appear, com­plex­ion wors­ens, beau­ty suf­fers. One of the adverse effects of insuf­fi­cient sleep is the dila­tion of blood ves­sels under the eyes, which man­i­fests itself in the form of dark cir­cles.

Before going to bed, it is nec­es­sary to cleanse the skin of the face and apply a nour­ish­ing or mois­tur­iz­ing cream on it — this helps to relax the skin cells.

Lack of sleep neg­a­tive­ly affects not only the con­di­tion of the skin, but also the shine of the eyes, the beau­ty of the hair, etc. If a per­son does not get enough sleep, his gas­troin­testi­nal tract does not work well, swelling of the abdomen, gas­es, and con­sti­pa­tion appear. The con­se­quence of this is a bad com­plex­ion, bad breath and oth­er phe­nom­e­na that cause dis­com­fort.