How To Get More Rest For Less Hours Of Sleep?

In order to feel fresh, well rested and ready for the action you need to acquire proper rest for both your body and mind. So, you need a sleeping environment that will complement both your physical and mental well-being.

Second, you need to stimulate your mind and body the right way while you are awake. When you wonder how to get more rest for less time, this second thing is the one that is crucial. In this article, we are going to talk mostly about that, how to manipulate your energy levels the right way so that you can get more rest for less time.

In general, there are two main types of methods to spend your energy in a healthy way during the day. The first way is through intellectual work and the second is through physical activity. Combination of these two is the best method to prepare your body and mind for the nighttime rest.

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Let's get to the point - How to get more rest quicker?

So, in following paragraphs, we are going to discuss healthy intellectual and physical lifestyles that will secure and promote quality rest during the night. The best way to get more rest for less time is to prepare your body and mind to fall asleep faster, go through undisturbed sleep and wake up alert and ready. Since we established that these three things are our goal, let’s talk about methods for achieving it!

Exercise

Working out on regular basis is vital for quality sleep. Physical activity gets your whole body in balance, meaning your blood pressure, sugar levels and hormones. Besides that, regular exercise benefits your brain, alertness, reduces stress and helps your metabolism to burn fat more efficiently.

But not every physical activity is good for quality sleep. Also, you need to time and pick different activities in order to get maximum results. So, if you want to know how to get more rest by manipulating physical activity, keep reading this section.

Cardio

Cardio training regulate blood pressure efficiently and don’t burn a lot of calories after the training is done. This is a great upside of cardio training when you want to use it as a tool for getting more rest. After cardio you are not going to feel so hungry, hence, your sleep is not going to be disturbed by sudden urges for food. Also, you can just take a protein shake after some serious cardio and restore enough energy. Plus, by lowering your blood pressure with cardio you will help your body to initially hit the relaxed stage. This means that you can easily fall asleep but not out of exhaustion, but of healthy and pleasant energy use. Also, because cardio doesn’t demand special calorie intake before training, you can do cardio the moment you wake up, on an empty stomach. This is also important for getting quality rest. You wonder how to get more rest at night with morning training? There are two ways, either choose jogging or cardio on an empty stomach or a strength exercise later, after some protein breakfast. Of course, the best is if you can manage both if your work schedule allows you to. So, let’s explain how this works.

Morning Exercise

By exercising in the morning boost your metabolism rate and energy level significantly. Especially if you do the strength training in the morning. This way you would leave your body craving proteins during the whole day and promote fat burning. But there is more to it than simple weight loss. Your daily energy level will not be a usual roller-coaster if you fill your day with training sessions. It would rather be a straight, rising line that peaks in the evening with your last training for the day. That last training should be less demanding cardio that boosts your energy one more time but doesn’t require increased calorie intake afterwards.

That way, when a few hours pass after your evening cardio you are going to feel pleasantly sleepy, relaxed, not hungry and without the full stomach that can disrupt your sleep. It’s a win-win situation.

So, exercising is important to answer when you wonder how to get more rest with less sleep. But, you need to do it right, the time it the perfect way. Spread out your exercises as we said earlier. This timing thing is crucial because with wrong workout schedule you can mess with your quality sleep. For instance, if you do strength training during the night or late evening you can find yourself waking up out of hunger or having a difficult time to fall asleep because of hunger. On the other hand, if you do decide to solve that urge for food, you can feel bloating or heartburn during the night, and nobody wants that. Also, some serious strength training can make you wake up so early feeling too tired, and you would experience sudden energy drops during the noon or late afternoon.

To sum up, waste your energy on healthy training in order to get more rest in the evening. Do train regularly but do it smartly.

Diet

Certain foods promote sleepiness, others keep us wired. When you want to know how to get more rest faster you need to make a use of both types of foods. So, in order to avoid daytime sleepiness and unwanted napping, avoid foods that relax us during the day. For breakfast, lunch and snacks take protein-based foods in small portions. Healthy fats are extremely useful for this also, like avocado. Just beware of avocado’s big calorie count, don’t let it fool you. When the evening comes you can eat some carbs to cool you down, but don’t go overboard with it. Carbs late at night can mess with your weight and looks. This doesn’t mean that you should avoid them completely in the evening, just choose whole grain food and watch your calories. Besides small dose of carbs, warm meals also relax us and make us sleepy. Soups, tea, warm milk, all these can settle you down in the late evening. Here is the list of evening snacks that won’t disrupt your sleeping pattern

Lifestyle

Due to the modern lifestyle, people tend to waste their energy on wrong things the wrong way and then develop sleeping problems. Getting too exhausted or not spending any energy during the day are both harmful for your quality sleep. So, if you recognize yourself in the first sentence of this paragraph, you need to change your lifestyle immediately.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to turn your whole world upside down or change your routine completely. This just means that you need to organize your daily activities better.

Your lifestyle should have two main aims when you want to improve your nighttime rest. The first aim is to dedicate more time to social activities and outdoors and the second is to strive towards personal fulfillment. Both aims have to do with human health in general, meaning physical, mental, social, intellectual. Fuller life brings more relaxation in the night and the much-desired quality sleep.

Spend time on your hobbies, outdoors activities and activities that will involve people close to you. All these advice have some hidden agendas. Let’s bring them out on the open!

Hobbies

First, enjoying your hobbies will stimulate your brain, and maybe your body also if your hobbies include sports. Then, spending time on your hobbies will release you from that unused energy that keeps you awake at night. Third, when you dedicate your time passionately on something useful you will have less time on your hands to do something time wasting like watching TV or surfing the net or wasting your time on social media. Finally, enjoying your hobbies will bring you that important feeling of accomplishment. When you feel fulfilled and satisfied you will find it a lot easier to relax and fall asleep at night.

Outdoors

Now, we mentioned also the importance of spending time outdoors. Sun triggers hormones in our body that make us energetic and alert. That is why we feel sleepy when the sun is out. The lack of sunlight can really seriously mess with our circadian cycle and general health. Deficiency of exposure to natural light can worsen or cause the depression. So, be in the sun during the day and expect benefits from it during the night.

Socialize

Last lifestyle advice we gave here was about social life and spending time with friends and/or family. People who have more human interaction during the day promote their mental health, emotional health and even physical health. This is even scientifically proven. It doesn’t mean though that you need to be surrounded by the people all time. Some quality alone time is essential for us. Just try not to cut yourself out of the world since that can mess with your mental and emotional state and make it harder for you to reach calmness and relaxation.

Small tricks

This section is going to be fun and short. We are going to present you with a short list of useful tricks on how to feel more relaxed and how to get more rest with less time.

Make hot baths your every night activity
Sign up for a yoga class
Go to saunas
Regularly go to massages, especially if you work out
Choose swimming for you exercise at least twice a week
Make a detailed schedule for the next day before you go to sleep. List all the important and interesting things that you want to accomplish and let them motivate you to get up.
Invest in better mattress and pillow. Quality rest depends also a lot on the comfort you get
Get yourself a sound sleep machine
Spray sleep sprays on your bedding.

Intellectual activity

Now, besides physical activity, there is a pretty awesome way to tire yourself, and that is through your intellectual work. Intellectual activities are beneficial on so many levels. They also spend calories, they promote alertness and cognitive abilities, improve memory, delay and reduce brain decline at old age, make us better people, improve our emotional maturity and social skills and so on. So, if you don’t feel like hitting the gym, don’t worry, there is something great that you can do! Read a book, write something, engage in science or art. Learn new things and stimulate and challenge your brain through tests or quizzes. Regular intellectual work will not just make you feel more relaxed in the evening and more rested in the morning. It will also improve you as a human.

Resting without sleep

We all experience ups and downs in our energy level during the day. Try to solve this problem in healthy and useful ways. Choose very short power naps, yoga, meditation or light exercise to regain your energy. A trip to the spa can also do the trick. Whatever you do try not to make long afternoon naps your routine. Also, when you will that your energy is going low in the middle of the day, don’t just reach for a cup of coffee as a magical easy solution. Teach your body to recover by other means such as meditation or short exercise. Going for a walk can also fix the problem of afternoon energy drop. So, instead of falling asleep for an hour, take your dog for a walk or meditate for 30 minutes. It will do you a lot more good.

The final words

The answer to the question of how to get more rest for less time lies in the smart and efficient manipulation of your energy. Rest is simply a way to acquire energy for the next day. So, in order to need less time to do it, you need to have control over the way you spend your energy, as well as the amount you spend.

Not doing anything the whole day doesn’t mean that you will need less rest. Our bodies don’t work like that, and neither do our minds. With our daily activities, we tell our brain and to our body what we want from them, what we need. So, if you lay down all day, your body will get an impression that its job is to maintain you that way. If you train hard all the time your body will start to “think” that you need to be in the super excellent state and shape all the time, and it will help you do it. So, our activities are the language that our bodies understand. We talk to them through the things that we do.

Change your lifestyle

This way, if you set your lifestyle as very active during the day and you leave less time for sleep, your body will very soon pick this rhythm up and follow you. To explain this, even more, we will mention one example. It is proven that if you constantly rely on artificial vitamins that your body will start to process those same vitamins from food slower and harder. In some way, your body will get lazy. Similar to that, if you signal your body that everything is difficult for you during the day, your body will think that you need more rest during the night. Your body wants to help your goals and follows your rhythm, just try not to set wrong goals and wrong rhythm.

So, when you ask yourself how to get more rest with less sleep, ask yourself how to signal your body that you want to do that. Use your activities and energetic lifestyle to show to your body that you are fast and mean machine that uses the maximum out of everything it gets. So, use the maximum of your day, of your exercise, of your nutrition, of your intellectual activities and pretty soon you will use the maximum out of your rest. Signal your body what you want, and you will eventually get it. After all, your body is not in charge of you, but the other way around.