One of the most notable health and wellness trends to have emerged over the last year, is a renewed focus on sleep.
Although professionals in the health and wellness space have always had a general understanding that both the quantity and quality of sleep are important to an individual’s overall sense of wellbeing, it is only in the last couple of years that we have truly begun to understand just how important these two factors are.
This has been helped by the work of the self-proclaimed ‘Sleep Diplomat’ Matthew Walker — a renowned neuroscientist currently affiliated with UC Berkeley — which has focused on the impact of sleep on human health and longevity.
When Walker’s best-selling book ‘Why We Sleep’ first hit the shelves, it had a relatively modest impact. However, over the course of the last two years, his message has finally begun to pick up momentum. This has been helped, in part, by a relentless media schedule Walker has adopted to promote the book and to get the message out there.
Walker’s writing and public outreach have helped to spread the message loud and clear that a lack of quality sleep can have a profound impact on your overall health. A lack of sleep has been associated with chronic health problems, such as heart and kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, incidences of stroke, obesity and depression.
This is in addition to the more immediately noticeable impacts of poor sleep on a daily basis, such as irritability, lack of focus and concentration and decreased motor skills.
Thanks to his work, not only are we more focused on sleep than ever, but a whole world of ‘sleep hacking’ has emerged, which looks to use an assortment of technology to optimize our sleep.
For those of you not wanting to shell out a fistful of cash on the latest gadgetry that will help you snooze through the night, recent research shows that there are a range of activities and hobbies that will help improve the quality of your sleep. This research involved asking individuals to use sleep tracking apps to monitor how well they slept after doing certain activities.
The results of this experiment are illuminating and hint at some hobbies you can pick up in the new year to help improve the quality of your sleep. But what are five hobbies you can try today to improve your sleep wellbeing?
Doing a facemask
Another interesting result from the survey was that putting on a facemask was shown to have a noticeable impact on the overall quality of sleep participants were able to get. Although the participants used a facemask, any form of selfcare will likely reap the same rewards. This includes things such as personal grooming or taking a bath.
Unwinding with a game
Perhaps one of the most interesting results of the survey was that playing mobile games, such as those found on the online casino Betway, were positively associated with high levels of quality sleep. This might be somewhat counterintuitive as games are often thought to be stimulating rather than relaxing!
Despite this, however, the results are clear. The participants who played games such as online casino games tended to report better quality of sleep, including higher levels of deep sleep.
Meditation
Perhaps unsurprisingly, meditation was shown to have a huge impact on overall sleep quality. Even just a short meditation session of around 30 minutes or less gave participants an incredibly restful night! With this in mind, we would recommend combining meditation with some gentle yoga to gain both physical and mental benefits.
Listening to music
Winding down by listening to music also proved to have a positive impact on the sleep patterns of those taking part in the survey. The survey respondents tended to listen to lower tempo music that was softer, rather than something that over-stimulated.
Reading a book
A classic pre-bedtime activity is diving into a good book. Unsurprisingly, this ranked relatively highly among the hobbies and activities that were positively correlated with good quality sleep. The research tends to suggest that fiction rather than non-fiction tends to be better for this.
Reading before bed has been shown to relax, reduce stress and to eradicate the mental chatter that so often keeps us up at night! As the Sleep Doctor has noted, it is not the reading itself that induces sleep, but its ability to distract us from focusing on events during the day that might keep us up.
