Mental Health and Sleep Hygiene: Get Your Beauty Rest

Your mental health and sleep are closely linked. When you don’t get enough sleep, you’re more likely to be irritable or depressed. These qualities don’t make for pretty personalities. However, a little attention to sleep hygiene (habits to increase your quality of and time spent sleeping) can make a large difference in your happiness and overall health. Studies show that lack of sleep can raise the likelihood of developing depression, trigger a bipolar episode, and contribute to anxiety, according to a Harvard Mental Health letter that synthesizes multiple studies.¹ How, then, can we improve our sleep in order to experience more of life? Turns out there’s an entire industry around sleep hygiene we can turn to for guidance because improving your mental health through sleep is entirely possible.

Prioritize Sleep and Mental Health with a Sleep Hygiene Makeover

Set a Bedtime

The first thing to do when prioritizing your mental health and sleep hygiene is to set a bedtime goal. When setting goals or a schedule for the week, include a specific bedtime as the first step in your sleep hygiene makeover. Create an agreement with yourself that wherever you are at that chosen hour each night, it’s time for bed. That focus will help plan your evening so that you’re wrapping up social exchanges, arriving home, or putting kids to bed before your rest time.

This beauty sleep guideline can be even more effective with a little accountability; try setting the guideline together with a partner or friend, putting a reminder in both your calendars, and checking in the next day to discuss results of your sleep on mental health. Soon, your new bedtime will become a habit.

Use Sleep Hygiene Technology

Many apps focus on improving your sleep. You can do everything from monitoring your sleep (free apps like Sleep Better can help as can a FitBit or other fitness tracker) to reminding yourself when it’s bedtime (such as the built-in features on the iPhone). Pillow is another free app that turns an iPhone into a sleep tracking device as well as keeps you accountable for your chosen bedtime. 

Prepare for Sleep

When you want improved sleep and mental health, prepare for it hours before bedtime. Sleep hygiene includes the environment you’re sleeping in (your bedroom and general living space before bed), consistency, food intake, and exercise. For the hour before bed, try not to look at any screens. I know that one is hard, but relaxing your eye muscles helps calm the rest of your body in preparation for bedtime; try setting your phone to airplane mode at one hour before bedtime to help lower the temptation to check it. Also, avoid exercising within a few hours of bedtime other than some light stretches. Eating close to your bedtime can also keep you from that deep beauty sleep, so try to end dinner two hours before bed or keep the food nice and light if you can’t avoid close timing.

Even changing just one of these items can make a difference in your quality of sleep, and therefore your health and happiness. 

Sources

1. Harvard Mental Health Letter, Sleep and Mental Health. July 2009. Accessed April 29, 2018.