The things you do before bedtime or shortly before sleeping can have a significant impact on the quality of your sleep. These routines and behaviours around sleeping time collectively constitute your sleep habits or what some prefer to call sleeping habits.
In this digital age everyone has a device such as a smartphone, tablet or laptop. Even little children are not left out. Yet, these devices significantly affect our sleeping habits.
Some, if not most, of us always go to bed with a device because we have made ourselves believe that it’s much easier to fall asleep while watching a movie or playing an online game. While this might be true for some people, it does not work for others and indeed, it is not a healthy habit.
[bctt tweet=”Put away your electronic devices at least one hour before going to bed. Learn why.”]
The truth is that we go in and out of sleep when encumbered with background sound. This makes our brain to remain in practically the same state as when we are awake. We should try and stop using our devices one hour or one and half hours before we go to bed.
We are so used to the sound of our ringtones and message alerts that picking up our calls and replying to messages have become reflex actions, even when we are supposed to be sleeping. This affects our sleep in many negative ways. Among other things, it causes us to lose some minutes of sleep. Some people even find it difficult to immediately go back to sleep thereby waking up with a headache the following morning.
We should learn to use our devices in such a way as not to affect our sleep pattern which could translate to negative effects on our health.
