Techie Sleep Tips 3: Improve your Sleep Quality

A study conducted by the University of California, Berkeley found a correlation between MRI brain scans of people with severe sleep deprivation and documented emotional disorders.  The scans of sleep deprived began to mimic those of clinically depressed. Tired participants also began showing greater involvement with negative thinking.  Here are some tips to reduce/avoid these complications by improving the quality of your sleep.

Photo from ChugginMcCoffee

1- CUT THE LATE CAFFEINE & ALCOHOL - Some obvious things to generally avoid before sleep are caffeine, heavy meals, heavy liquids, and alcohol.  Alcohol may help you fall asleep faster, but excess can fragment sleep and especially reduce the quality during a hangover.  Caffeine also has a half life of relatively 5 hours in your system so try avoiding it after 3pm.

Photo from GreenLife

2- DRINK DECAF TEA - Drink decaf tea to reduce stress and balance your mood during sleep.  Many teas, particularly green tea, have something called theanine that contains healthy efficient stress reduction (almost sedative) for the mind and body when it comes to sleep.  Oddly enough, it also combines very well with caffeine during the day to counter its side effects like anxiety and tension. Drinking Kava tea during the day can also help combat daytime stress that interferes with sleep later.

3- CUT THE LIGHT & NOISE - Reduce as much light and noise as possible in sleep environment – that includes even the most subtle light and noise.  Shutting off those LED lights on many electronics and buzzing fans of computers. In fact, one study actually discovered certain colors of light (like white and blue LEDs) suppress our melatonin production which can seriously disrupt our quality of sleep.  You can read more about melatonin here.  It might be tough, but take a week or two to train yourself sleep with the TV off before going to bed and see if you feel a difference.  If need to run a lot of overnight computer tasks, I recommend running them on a laptop or desktop in another room that doesn't interfere with your sleep environment.  Laptops are usually quiet but the fan(s) do cut on and off unpredictably and noise-proof desktops require expensive cases and fan controllers.  Your best bet is to just not have them run overnight in the same room.

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