If you want to get the best grades possible, you need to ensure you get a good night’s sleep. Here, Ieva Baradouska, a Comfort Expert at the memory foam mattress specialist Dormeo, shares her top tips that will help you to wake up each morning feeling well-rested.
When you’re at university, it can be difficult to consistently get a good night’s sleep. There are so many parties to attend, early-morning lectures to catch, and assignments to finish that getting a full eight hours can fall to the bottom of your to-do list. However, if you’re frequently missing out on sleep, this will begin to affect your performance at university, as well as your general well-being. So, it’s important that you make it a priority.
Here, I’m going to offer my top three tips for getting a good night’s sleep. Read on to find out more.
Make sure your bedroom is tidy
If you’ve ever tried to work on an assignment while your desk is untidy, you’ll know that clutter can add some serious stress to a situation. In fact, it’s a scientific fact that living in a messy space can make it difficult for us to relax: according to SUCCESS, coming home to a mess can increase your levels of cortisol — AKA the stress hormone — and affect your ability to focus. So, if you struggle to nod off at night because you can’t stop your mind from racing, tidying your room could be the answer.
Ensure your mattress is serving you well
According to the Sleep Council’s guide to knowing when it’s time to change your mattress, many of us fail to recognise that updating our mattresses could have a very positive effect on our sleep quality. So, if you spend many a night tossing and turning and you haven’t yet worked out why, you should consider whether your bed could be doing a better job of supporting you.
Of course, if you live in a student flat or your university halls, you won’t have a lot of say over when your mattress is replaced. As a result, I think memory foam mattress toppers make a great investment for students: you can take it with you whenever you move so, even if you’re in a house share that’s definitely due an update, you can ensure you bed is as comfortable as can be.
Devise a bedtime routine you can stick to most days
The key to getting a good night’s sleep is to have a wind down routine that you can follow each evening. If you can devise a ritual that you can go through just before bedtime — whether it’s taking your makeup off and getting into bed to read or changing into your pyjamas and putting your phone away for the night — your brain will soon start to associate this with sleep.
This isn’t a quick fix, as it will take a little while for your mind to learn that, when you’re going through your evening routine, it should be preparing to sleep. But, after a few weeks, you’ll definitely start to see an improvement. So, if you often struggle to relax enough to nod off when you need to, it’s well worth persevering with this.
And, there you have it: three top tips that will help you to get a better night’s sleep, so you have plenty of energy to tackle your classes and assignments. Take these on board and it won’t be long before you’re waking up feeling well-rested almost every day (I can’t make any promises about the mornings after nights out).
