These Tricks Are Helping Seniors Sleep Better

A good night’s sleep makes all the difference the following day. You feel energized and happy, ready to get up and go. Conversely, spending eight restless hours in bed can ruin the next morning, afternoon, and night. Sleep medications are easy enough to come by, but they don’t always work and sometimes can have adverse effects. Instead, consider these helpful sleeping tips to get the rest your aging body craves.

Make Your Room Sleep-Friendly

Does noisy traffic keep you up? Are street lights glaring in through your blinds? Are there too many nightstands and chairs between your bed and the bathroom? Any number of little things that you used to ignore might be keeping you awake or making it harder to fall back asleep.

You can’t move your bedroom, but you can invest in a sound machine or blackout curtains, and a little rearranging to make a clear path to the bathroom will make those nighttime wakeups that much more manageable.

You might also consider adding a bed rail so getting up and down becomes an easier task. Stop pretending you can just suffer through these nuisances and do whatever you can to make them go away.

Get Outside During the Day

Our bodies want to operate on a natural rhythm—out cold when it’s dark and up and at ‘em when the sun is out. If you don’t get any sunshine on your skin or natural light in your eyes, those circadian rhythms get all out of wake and it’s harder to fall into a natural sleep cycle.

Getting out for a walk or two, even just sitting on the patio to read the newspaper, can go a long way toward helping your sleep schedule.

Keep a Routine

Beyond the rising and setting of the sun, it’s also helpful if you can stick to the same order of events at night. If you go to bed at 8 PM one night and then stay up watching TV until 11 PM the next, your body won’t really know what’s coming the third night.

Aim for the same time, and also try to create a fairly set schedule. Read a book, take a shower, take your pills (easily accessed in a weekly pill organizer), and then get under the covers. What you do during your bedtime routine isn’t as important as it becoming a nightly ritual that you do your best to stick to.

Eat Well

What you put into your body makes all the difference. If your evening meals are too heavy and full of foods that are hard for your body to break down, it’ll be much more difficult to get comfortable and fall asleep.

If you’ve got a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and healthy fats and proteins, you’ll feel satiated and ready to drift off to sleep. At the very least, try to take it easy on the bad stuff right before bed. Sleep is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle. If you’re struggling to catch the Zs you need, try addressing some of these issues and see if it makes a difference.