Improving Your Sleep

A good night’s sleep is absolutely essential for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Sleep allows our bodies to rebuild and repair themselves, reduces inflammation, improves attention and concentration, lowers stress levels, helps maintain a healthy weight, supports heart health, and strengthens our immune system. It also plays a role in our ability to think clearly, our life expectancy, and whether or not we will experience significant age-related cognitive decline later in life.

You can improve your sleep by making simple, small changes; however, as with most simple solutions, it’s not always easy. Many factors in our modern lives contribute to sleep deprivation. These include a poor work-life balance, pregnancy and parenting, hormonal fluctuations, alcohol and drugs, digestive issues, environmental stimuli, stress, pain, and much more. And as you may have noticed, sleep deprivation can make some of these issues even worse, leading to a downward spiral.

Of course, there will be times when you simply can’t get consistent sleep due to travel, shift work, social commitments, etc. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to “catch up” on lost sleep; it needs to be a consistent habit, so that when you miss a night here or there, you’ve built up enough of a reserve to make up for it.

The good news is that there are a few tools you can use to improve your sleep, how easily you fall asleep, your ability to stay asleep, and the quality of your sleep.

The next time you're here, pick up a copy of our Q1 newsletter, which covers sleep in more detail, or ask for a copy of our sleep toolkit.