Health & Fitness

5 Ways to Sleep Better for Greater Memory and Recall

Image credit

The days of “cramming” are over. Science has now conclusively shown that sleep is crucial to memory and recall. Want to learn something well? Then you had better get your eight hours.

Here are five ways to do that and to boost your ability to store and retrieve information.

Take Sleep Seriously

The first and most important point is simply to start treating sleep with the respect it deserves. Don’t go to bed late thinking you’ll ‘make up for it later’. Sleep will impact every aspect of the way you feel, look and perform and the negative effects can be cumulative with time. Make getting enough, high quality sleep a priority.

Drink Less

If you are drinking even a couple of glasses of wine or beer a night then this will be badly hurting the quality of your sleep. Alcohol leads to dehydration, it increases your heart rate and it prevents you from getting fully restorative deep sleep. If you aren’t out socializing, pick a fruit juice instead.

Oh, and the same goes for caffeine past 4pm as well!

Take a Hot Shower Before Bed

This is one easy change that can have a huge impact on your sleep. A hot shower will stimulate the production of melatonin (the sleep hormone) in your body and thus help you to sleep like a baby. It also naturally relaxes the muscles.

For an hour before bed, avoid looking at computer screens or phones. Your brain registers this wavelength of light as sunlight because it’s a similar point on the spectrum. Spend the last hour reading quietly and you’ll reduce your cortisol and sleep much better as a result! Many unnatural lights can cause this problem too – in fact, just going to the bathroom in the night can trigger the release of enough cortisol to have quite profound negative effects on your sleep subsequently.

Consider a Daylight Alarm

While you want to avoid screen time during the evening though, this same ‘blue light’ is actually very beneficial when you’re just waking up. That’s because cortisol is one of the things that helps us wake up and it’s a lack of this natural light that often makes it hard to get up in winter. Try getting a daylight alarm which works by simulating the effects of a sunrise first thing in the morning by producing light at just the right wavelengths and then getting gradually brighter.

 

13 thoughts on “5 Ways to Sleep Better for Greater Memory and Recall

  • ty 4 sharing i needed these tips to get a better nights sleep

    Reply
  • Thanks for sharing this post, since so many people have trouble sleeping and you give good advice about PREPARING for sleep. I especially agree with your comment on blue-light TV, computer monitors, and cell phone – need to turn these off well before bedtime.

    Reply
  • A hot shower definitely helps me relax before bed!

    Reply
  • I agree with the caffeine thing. I cannot sleep if I drink any after 5pm. That’s my official cutoff. I am really bad with drinking coffee all day. After one night of horrible sleep I learned my lesson….lol

    Reply
  • Thanks for sharing looking good

    Reply
  • Hot shower, always works!

    Reply
  • Hot shower works perfectly.

    Reply
  • tricks that work~

    Reply
  • I definitely needed to come across something like this. My memory stinks. lol

    Reply
  • No caffeine for me in the afternoon or evening. A hot shower sounds like a good idea.

    Reply
  • Great tips! Thank you!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *