We all need a bit of beauty sleep. The right amount of kip helps to ensure we are fresh and ready to meet the challenges of the day ahead and is important for our health – physically and mentally. Latest thinking suggests that adults need somewhere between seven and nine hours sleep a night to properly recharge batteries.
Many things can stop us from sleeping – illness, stress at work for example – but sometimes our bedroom really doesn’t help. By creating the right environment, you’ll be able to encourage your body to relax and drift off smoothly.
So, how do you create that environment?
THE RIGHT COLOUR
Some colours are naturally more soothing than others. You’ll find it much easier to sleep in a room that is decorated in soothing light pastel shades, for example, than one adorned with dark, bold tones. There’s always something to be said for giving a room a fresh lease of life with a lick of paint too. A tin or two could be the key for helping your room to feel cleaner, fresher and more relaxing.
COMFY BED
You’ve got no chance of getting a good night’s sleep if you’ve got a bad bed. You need to find a bed and mattress that can give you the right balance of support and comfort – get this right and you’ll be relaxed and in the land of nod in no time. If your current bed isn’t up to scratch check out places such as the Divan Beds Centre and invest in something that is probably the most important piece of furniture in the whole house.
LACK OF CLUTTER
Is your bedroom full of ‘stuff’ that doesn’t appear to have any proper home? Are there clothes draped here there and everywhere? This won’t be helping you to relax. If you lie in bed at night and can see clutter, there’s a danger you’ll be thinking about this instead of switching off. Take a look at this guide from Freshome to see some space-saving furniture items you could invest in to help, especially if you’ve got a small room and find it hard to find a place for all of the items you own.
REMOVE THE TECH
One surefire way to ensure that you’ll struggle to get to sleep is if your room is full of distractions. Many people are so hooked to their smartphone that they take it to bed with them, scrolling through their Facebook and Twitter timeline well into the night. There’s no doubt that it’s easy to get hooked on modern digital communications but if you do this you aren’t going to make it easy to get to sleep. Even when you’ve put your phone down, you only need the screen to light up with a message or for the device to buzz for your sleep to be disrupted.
It can be hard, with many people using their phones as an alarm, but you can make your room a lot more sleep friendly by removing items such as this. The same goes for a television. Do you really need a set in your bedroom – or does this just tempt you to stay up into the wee small hours binge watching the latest television series that you are hooked on?