24th August

Completed morning program.
10 tips for ensuring good sleep, essential for good health  
"Maintain Your Biological Clock

1.  One of the important keys to having a good night’s sleep is to set a routine for slumber and get your body and brain adjusted to it. Maintaining a proper biological clock – waking up and going to bed at the same time, will regulate the clock accordingly and help you feel sleepy every night. Don’t break this routine even during the weekends in order to make your body keep following it.

2. Engage Yourself in a Relaxing Activity Before Bedtime

A little relaxing activity like meditation, which can be done lying on bed only; reading a book or just closing your eyes and secluding yourself from any thought that can trigger stress, tension or anxiety in you, will cater to your relaxation and make you sleep well.

3. Keep Yourself Busy and Around Activities

A little exercise in the morning, or going out, or doing anything that will cease your body from fatigue helps you from not feeling drowsy at the end of the day, but also follow your biological clock. It’s not necessary that you need to exercise only in the morning only, but even when you exercise at night never do it by sacrificing your sleep.

4. Say No to Bright Light

A normal cycle for your day should be to receive sunlight during the day and darkness at night. Keep this in mind, and cut down your disclosure to light before going to bed. This will lower your melatonin levels, which is an indicator to brain about the time of sleeping. Therefore, when your brain tells you to sleep, you know you’re already sleepy.

5. Avoid Medications

Taking sleeping pills in order to have sleep is a very bad habit, and damages your natural ability to sleep. For the moment, they might be relaxing as it at least helps you to forget the stress and offer you sleep. However, it has several side effects like direct impact on the central nervous system, slowing down of brain’s response to attention and memory, dizziness, and involuntary shaking of body, among others, as reported by WebMD. It might give you short-term pleasure, but once you quit it your body will become so dependent on it that you’ll lose your ability to feel sleepy, naturally.

6. Cut Down Caffeine, Munch on Some Snacks

Consuming foods that is filled with rich carbohydrate is a definite no-no when it comes to eating them right before bedtime. Like them, caffeine should also not be consumed long hours before bedtime because it is such a stimulant that remains inside in your system for no less than 8 hours and either restricts you from having sound sleep or any form of sleep, entirely.

According to Prevention.com, studies have indicated that munching on a little snack indeed helps you to fall asleep. Biscuits or cheese-crackers or anything that contains a mixture of carbohydrate and either calcium or a protein that has amino acid tryptophan, shoots up the production of serotonin that is a naturally forming brain chemical, helping you to feel calm and relaxed, and eventually fall asleep

7. Keep Your Bed Only for Sleeping and Sex

If you’re a person who works on his laptop, reads books, watch television and sometimes even chews on the snacks, all sitting on bed then those are your reasons to experience lack of sleep. By spending majority of the time on bed, you’re giving your brain the notion that it’s sleeping time whenever you’re on bed. In this way, it’s not only disrupting your sleep routine, but also affecting your non-sleep activities and eventually, affecting your sleep. Therefore, keep your bed solely for sleeping and sexual purposes to avoid missing out on a sound sleep.

8. Keep Your Room Cool

Before bedtime, try and arrange things in the bedroom in a way that drops the temperature of the room. You can lower the air conditioning temperature, turn up your cooler, draw the curtains, quit turning off the lights, and change the bed sheets into fresh and cold ones, to keep your room cool. Taking a hot shower is also a good idea right before bedtime and entering into your cool room as this conveys a message to your brain to release melatonin – the sleep stimulator.

9. Quit Smoking Before Bedtime

Smoking causes you to have difficulty in breathing by aggravating sleep apnea and worst case scenario, breathing disorders if you already suffer from that. These already damage your ability to sleep and you end up staying awake the night, lighting up more and more of those deadly puffs.

10. Go Ancient, Drink Milk

All those grandmotherly and motherly suggestions of drinking milk before bedtime actually work. Milk contains calcium that shoots up the production of melatonin and helps you to fall asleep. In order to get better results sprinkle some of those delicious almonds, which are good for your skin anyway and you’ll sleep like never before.

Experiencing irregular sleep patterns or having no sleep whatsoever is a common problem these days. You end up looking like a walking dead with round dark circles encircling your eyes and an irritated mood that repels everyone around you. With these simple remedies you’re certainly in safe hands get abundant of good sleep and feel fresh."  MF Monitor, dated 24th August 2015

Quotable Quotes : " Only those who work hard can think of achieving something. Sitting idle or hoping for results without making any effort is nothing but foolishness."  Sam Veda quote
Retired to sleep at about 10.30 pm.