Tips for a good night's sleep

When you lack sleep, you will increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, causing panic, anxiety, and loss of concentration. How to sleep well?

You should also create a relaxed mood to easily fall asleep. Illustration photo

Why can't you sleep?

Insomnia or difficulty sleeping is a disease that causes difficulties in the lives of many people. Insomnia has many forms, difficulty falling asleep, restless sleep, waking up early and not being able to fall back asleep or waking up many times during sleep, each time lasting more than 30 minutes. Many research results show that women suffer from insomnia more than men, especially near menopause and the older they are, the more likely they are to suffer from insomnia. Not only the elderly, recent records show that insomnia and difficulty sleeping occur even in teenagers.

There are many causes of insomnia. For example, you encounter an event in your life. That event directly affects your mood and emotions, causing you to lose sleep. Irregular living habits are also a cause of insomnia. Unreasonable sleeping and waking times. Maybe you sleep too much at noon and can't sleep at night. Or it could be because you go to bed too late or oversleep. If you abuse stimulants such as alcohol, beer, coffee, cigarettes, or because of external environmental factors such as a bedroom that is too hot or too cold, too loud, too bright, etc., it can also cause you to lose sleep.

In addition, there is another reason that many people ignore, which is that lack of blood to the brain also causes you to lose sleep, not sleep well. Lack of blood to the brain also causes numbness in the limbs or sweating in sleep.

British researchers say that just one week of sleep deprivation is enough to change the activity of hundreds of genes. Derk-Jan Dijk, Director of the Sleep Research Center at the University of Surrey (UK), said that researchers have monitored the activity of genes in the human genome and found that sleep deprivation (sleeping less than 6 hours/night) affects the activity of more than 700 genes, including genes involved in controlling inflammation, immunity and stress response. Moreover, the number of genes affected by sleep deprivation is 7 times higher if the lack of sleep lasts for up to a week.

Lack of sleep leads to a series of health problems including: Obesity, heart disease, cognitive decline. For children, lack of sleep will have negative consequences on health and psychology. Children who lack sleep are prone to irritability, grumpiness... If this condition persists, it is easy to develop mental problems.

What to do when you can't sleep?

According to Dr. Minh Huong (Minh Huong Health Consulting Center, Hanoi), when you go to bed, you should only sleep and not do anything else (like reading, watching movies, etc.). If you can't sleep after 10-15 minutes, you can get up and do something else. Chronic insomniacs are often afraid of the evening because they think they might not be able to sleep. Usually, the more you fear, the harder it is to fall asleep, so think about sleep in a gentle, peaceful way and it will come peacefully.

When you have insomnia, the first thing to do is to eliminate the subjective causes of insomnia, such as drinking too much coffee in the evening or before going to bed, eating too much spicy food, eating too much, traveling to a place with a large time zone change, due to work stress... After knowing the cause, you can adjust yourself to sleep. You should also create a relaxed mood to easily fall asleep.

To fall asleep easily, you should: Go to bed as soon as you feel sleepy, don't try to resist; Don't eat dinner too late (dinner after 8pm) because eating dinner late makes the stomach work and work, affecting the secretion of sleep-inducing hormones. Dinner should not be too greasy, leading to indigestion, bloating will affect sleep; Do not abuse stimulants such as coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, beer because these substances are the cause of nervous tension, making it difficult to fall asleep. Before going to bed, you should not play strenuous sports and limit watching too attractive movies. Reading stories with too many emotions that stimulate the nerves will make it more difficult to sleep.

According to Gia dinh.net