Give your spine and nervous system quality time to heal and recover. You can set yourself up for a lifetime of better night sleeps by making some important changes in your bedroom. Here is how:
- Get the right pillow: One of the most common causes of neck pain is poor sleeping posture. Having the right pillow for your sleeping posture can be an important step towards restoring normal function in your neuro spinal system.
- Create a pitch-black bedroom: Street lights, digital alarm clocks and stand by lights on electronics can all cause interference to your quality of sleep. Making permanent changes like block-out curtains or putting electrical tape over stand by lights on your electronic equipment can be one-off changes that keep paying a dividend in the form of deeper more rejuvenating sleep.
- Be a cool sleeper: As the surrounding temperature drop at night your body should ideally get cooler too, but obviously not so cool as to wake you up. An effective way to improve your sleep quality is to get your bedroom temperature just right. You can experiment with different bedroom temperatures through thermostat settings on your cooling/heating devices to find what works best for you. An interesting new device that could help is the “chilli pad”, a mattress pad that can heat or cool your bed to maintain your ideal sleeping temperature throughout the night.
- Set-up a sleep routine trigger: There are several things you can do to change your environment to help you to set up a good bedtime routine. For example, you could set a PowerPoint timer that lit a reading lamp and kettle to boil so that you get triggered to sit down and read with a chamomile tea at the same time every evening to condition your body to wind down for good night sleep. Be creative with what routine will work for you. Never the less if you want consistent good sleep and spinal recovery then you need a consistent routine.
- Get some calming rose coloured glasses: If you going to lie in bed for 1/3 of your life then you might as well make the most of it and ensure that you get deep rejuvenating sleep. Common habits like watching TV or working on phones, tablets or computers at night stimulates the secretion of awake hormones that interfere with the quality of your sleep. If you can’t see yourself doing a technology curfew, then a simple solution could be to get some rose coloured glasses to tint your surrounding into a sunset red to tell your brain and hormonal system that nighttime is around the corner (there are also some apps like F-lux that can help to change your computer screen colour at night). That way you can get better recovery time for your spine and nervous system.