Tossing and turning got you enduring sleepless nights? If it’s not an uncomfortable mattress causing your restless sleep, your dreams may have something to do with it. Or perhaps your daytime habits are the culprit. Here’s an idea, why not use this extra time at home to discern what it is that’s keeping you up? Keeping a journal on your bedside table for jotting down information about your sleep cycle has many benefits for health and wellbeing. Keep reading to find out how you can use sleep journaling to sleep better.
Here’s how a sleep journal can help you sleep better:
1. You can discover your sleep patterns and habits
A sleep journal should not only account for your dreams and waking times during the night, but should also recall activities prior to bedtime (the evening before), like drinking alcohol, excessive exercising, and drinking caffeinated drinks. Taking note of your behaviour allows you to make connections between your daily activities and night’s sleep. You can then use this insight to identify which habits are preventing sleep and which habits are aiding sleep, so you can adjust your lifestyle to sleep better.
2. You will be proactive about your sleep
When you have identified a problem affecting your wellbeing, you will instinctively want to work towards solving it. Right? So, after keeping a sleep journal for a few days, you will start to learn what works for you and what doesn’t, encouraging you to be more proactive about your sleep and lifestyle. For example, you may notice that drinking alcohol a few hours before bedtime results in a disrupted sleep pattern. So, you will want to take charge and avoid alcohol before you sleep.
3. Your doctor can use it for diagnostic purposes
If there is, in fact, a medical reason for your disrupted sleep pattern, then a dream journal will help a doctor diagnose the problem. Patients often have trouble describing their symptoms, and may recall information about their sleep inaccurately. Keeping a sleep journal helps avoid this issue, as patients can recount the event in detail, as it happens. A doctor can then use the information as a detailed insight into the patient’s condition and make an accurate diagnosis.
4. You can record your dreams
Most people find dreams fascinating. What do they mean? How can we interpret them? And how can we remember them in order to answer the first two questions? The answer: your sleep journal. Writing down what you dreamed as soon as you wake will allow you to recall your dream more accurately and allow you to analyse its potential meaning. You can also use your sleep journal to remember great ideas that you conjured up in your sleep, and use documented dream content to inspire creativity. Dreams have inspired many famous works of art, so who knows? Maybe you’ll become the next great writer or artist.
Want to sleep better? Then get jotting!
If you’re looking for ways to sleep better, grab a book or notepad and leave it next to your pillow. And when you wake, flick on that lamp and scribble down your dreams, waking time and current state. You’ll find the insight into your sleeping patterns to be quite remarkable. And if you want to buy the ultimate mattress to aid in the experience, you can order one from us online. So with that said, sweet dreams!
