Benefits of sleep

Sleep has several important benefits such as reducing the incidence of illness, maintaining a healthy weight, lowering our risk of serious health issues, reducing stress, improving our mood and helping us make good decisions.

Experts recommend adults need 7 or more good quality sleep… key word being good quality. Interrupted, bad quality sleep can leave us feeling unrested, tired and irritable, despite the duration being adequate.

Setting good sleep habits can help improve our sleep. Here are a few tips on improving your sleep quality:

• Creating a comfortable sleep environment. Making sure your bedroom is cool, dark and quiet can assist us getting to sleep, and more importantly, staying asleep.
• Setting a bedtime routine. Going to bed at the same time each night helps our body know when to expect sleep.
• Changing what we do during the day. The bed should only be used for sleeping, try avoid laying on the bed at other points during the day. Adding in more physical activity throughout the day can help our body wind down in the evening.
• No devices in bed. It can be very tempting to doom scroll through Instagram just before going to sleep, but it only ends up stimulating our brain and making it harder to fall asleep. Try reading a book instead