Beauty Sleep: The Key to Making You Look and Feel Younger
“I’ve got to get my beauty sleep.” It’s a saying we’ve all heard before, or maybe you’ve even said it yourself. While sleep isn’t a measure of beauty, it can make you look and feel younger.
The key is getting enough quality sleep that you wake up looking and feeling refreshed, bright-eyed, energetic, and mentally sharp. Unfortunately, sleep doesn’t come easily for everyone, but the following tips should help revamp your sleep cycle.
But First… Beauty Sleep at a Glance
If you were to look up the benefits of sleep, you’d find things like better memory, improved mood, and a reduced risk of heart attack. All of these things are huge benefits, but it doesn’t explain the idea of beauty sleep.
After a night’s rest, your skin is elastic, supple, and taut as opposed to having dark circles and bags. Sleep can help you manage your weight and ward off weight gain, not to mention you’ll have more energy to exercise and take part in activities you enjoy.
Human growth hormone (HGH) levels increase during sleep as well, helping you maintain that youthful glow. Deficiencies result in lower muscle mass, a slower metabolism, weight gain, and sagging skin, all of which come with aging.
Bedtimes Aren’t Just for Kids
Adults can benefit from a bedtime too, as it helps you maintain a consistent sleep schedule. According to My Joy Online, sticking to a bedtime will “create a habit that the body then wants to stick to, so it tells you that it’s tired at the chosen time.”
So, what is the ideal bedtime? Well, it depends. To calculate your bedtime, you need to know your wake up time. The average sleep cycle is 90 minutes, and a night’s sleep generally consists of five sleep cycles, equaling 7.5 hours of sleep. Count back 7.5 hours to arrive at your bedtime.
Be sure to factor in the time it takes you to fall asleep and how many times you wake up during the night.
Set the Bedroom Mood
Falling into bed should be enough to get a good night’s rest, but that isn’t the case. Quality sleep requires an optimal sleep environment, and this starts with making it a relaxing, peaceful haven. Rid the bedroom of any clutter, including anything work-related, and invoke a sense of calm by painting walls with earth tones or light blues as opposed to bright colors.
If colors are too bright it can leave you feeling energized — the opposite of what you want when you are trying to fall asleep. Relax further with essential oils such as lavender, cedarwood oil, or Roman chamomile to relax your mind and body and reduce any feelings of stress and anxiety.
Before you snuggle up under the covers, drop the temperature down somewhere between 60 and 67 degrees so that the room is cooler. Your body temp drops as it prepares for sleep, so the cooler temps help speed up the process.
You could also benefit from adding a hot bath or shower to your pre-bedtime ritual so that cooling off is more prominent, lulling you to sleep.
Put Away the Phone
Browsing social media and watching countless funny videos is part of many adults’ winding down ritual, but it does more harm than good. Your phone, laptop, tablet, and television emit blue light, and direct exposure is linked to retinal damage and macular degeneration.
Blue light also lowers your body’s production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates your sleep cycle. Should you find yourself lying awake after a phone browsing session, only to grab your phone again while you wait to feel sleepy, the phone could actually be the problem.
If you can’t seem to put the phone down, at least take advantage of the Night Shift feature (iPhone) or Twilight app (Android) to minimize the amount of blue light your phone emits.
So, beauty sleep isn’t a myth after all. If you want to continue looking and feeling young, sleep is your best line of defense. The tips above will help you positively change your sleep routine, leaving you to be Sleeping Beauty.
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