Actually it was at least one week of tests on myself and yesterday I was pretty sure that I can publish my results.
I always believed that sleep is very important part of our life (although I would like to avoid it, but it turns around this is impossible, so you have to deal with it and actually sleep). And my question was how to sleep less and take maximum of those hours.
First my encounter was sleep cycle. So actually you have to wake up in the light phase of your sleep to feel energetic in the morning. Each phase is around 1,5 hour and it leads to the amount of hours you need for sleep, which will be 1,5 – 3 – 4,5 – 6 – 7,5 – 9 and so on. I tried all of those and the optimum is 6 hours – it’s enough to get rest and it leaves you 18 hours for productive activities. 4,5 wasn’t sufficient in a long run – when I tried this for a week, I was too exhausted by the end of the day – additional 1,5 hour wasn’t worth it. Once in a while when you have a lot of work – perfect solution, but not more and definitely not always. This is a short not scientific explanation that works for me, more detailed info can be found in Google 😀 or in this article.
Next: sleeping cocktail. To prepare it you need a cup of hot water, one table spoon of honey and two table spoons of apple cider vinagre. Put honey and vinagre into the water and stir it well. Done. This one I just love. My friends laughed at me when I started to drink it before bed, but it works. It just does. When I began I was able to fall asleep faster, do not hear anything during the night and wake up easier. Maybe it was just because of sleep cycles, but I believe this is a combination of methods. So give it a try.
And last but not least is how to fall asleep fast, silence your brain and get full rest without wondering why unicorns don’t exist or do they? 😀 I have fantastic imagination so it usually trapped myself for long time before actually falling asleep. Ooooohhh, what was happening in those parallel universes of my mind 😀
But back to the turning off technique. Some time ago I found a very interesting article on Medium about falling asleep in two minutes. It says this is a military-tested trick for guaranteed slumber. And it is. After one week of following the steps from the article, now I usually fall asleep in the middle of the way described there. But I really want to master this skill and would like to learn to turn myself off in the loud environment, uncomfortable places or when I am full of energy and excitement, but have to go to bed. So will keep improving. Here is the link to the article (“How To Fall Asleep in 120 Seconds”) – go read it (it’s 4 minute read only), understand it, save it, give a clap to the author and after that come back – I still have some valuable info for you.
Now you understand this trick was tested in tough conditions, which 97% of people won’t face in their day-to-day life, which automatically means it will work for you. So give it a try as well.
Additional tips will be to go to bed and wake up at the same time (no clue if it works, but now it just automatically happens with me, so I guess it might have some effect), keep yourself busy during the day and try to discharge your inner battery as much as possible (we all know that when we are tired falling asleep is usually easier), practice meditations (when you in control of your mind military trick works even faster), essential oil difusor humidifier (I bought one on Amazon and it is really amazing thing) and keep healthy style of living. No idea about turning off electronic devices (laptop, smartphone, e-reader) – before bed I might comment few posts in Instagram, Alexa would play my favorite Melodic Death Metal, but still I would be able to fall asleep fast. Maybe, if I don’t touch those one-two hours before bed it would improve my night experience, but it doesn’t make sense for me personally.
These are my tips for better sleep and if you have something to add, please comment below, I will try that as well if I haven’t yet. Also, I truly believe that if you use just one thing from above listed it won’t work. The combination of all these is the real key: something may have bigger effect, something lesser, maybe something doesn’t have an effect at all. But all together is the exploding mixture.