Your bedroom is one of the most important rooms in your home. After all, you will spend 25 years of your life sleeping there. How to arrange it to minimize sleep problems and find sleep more quickly? Without becoming a feng shui master, there are a few arrangements you can make to give your bedroom downright soporific qualities.
Bedroom color
If your partner or you love Valentine’s red, we encourage you, for your sleep (and good taste), to think twice before painting all the walls of your bedroom. Indeed, cool colors like blue or green have a calming quality, while warm colors like red, yellow, or orange increase the heart rate.
Always favor pastel colors rather than bright ones, which are softer, with a matte finish rather than shiny — but keep some complementary colors for cushions or other decorative objects. Your bedroom should not be excessively dull, which could depress you over time (this is also why colors such as gray and black are to be avoided). Try creams and off-whites, taupes, water greens, or periwinkle tones.
Clean, tidy, and neat
Order and simplicity are the key to a restful bedroom. A clean decoration will prevent you from feeling suffocated, and well-organized belongings will avoid making you think about the worries of your daily life. Ban all kinds of screens; they are sleep detractors.
Keep the bare minimum, but don’t live like a bachelor who just left the family home: your bedroom must remain welcoming. Curtains or blinds will allow you to maintain darkness favorable to falling asleep by protecting you from street light pollution.
Don’t forget to regularly clean under your bed to remove dust that can cause allergies and slightly clog your airways during the night.
Temperature and ventilation
To fall asleep, your body lowers its temperature: it is therefore useful to give it a boost by ensuring your bedroom is neither too hot nor too cold. 18 °C is the ideal temperature to fall asleep, but you can go up to 20 °C.
If you are a smoker, do not smoke in your bedroom (or anywhere else, that would be better). Take the opportunity to ventilate regularly to oxygenate well and control the temperature.
Aromatherapy
Essential oils can help you sleep well: in your bath, applied on the skin as an ointment, in pillow mists or indoor sprays, some plants can have sedative properties. Already used in herbal tea (chamomile), others like basil, lavender, marjoram, or neroli essence have varied effects. To learn more about what you can ingest to sleep, take a look at foods to consume before going to bed.
Choosing your bedding well
Pillow texture and firmness, biconical spring mattress, pocket springs, or continuous wire, padding, length and width, duck, goose, or synthetic down… so many criteria at first quite mystical, which must also fit into your budget. A complex quest, depending on your preferences and morphology, but which will largely contribute to improving your sleep quality.
Turn your mattress regularly to extend its lifespan (a mattress normally lasts ten years, but without turning it, it can wear out after 5).
Positions for good sleep
We don’t often think about the effects that sleeping positions can have on us, but they have consequences. Fetal position, starfish, on the back or curled up, some are less conducive than others to unobstructed breathing, while some positions tend to compress vital organs.
For minimal problems, try to sleep on your back, the position with the least risks (knowing that you are already in bed, so the notion of danger is very relative).
If you are a couple, you may already know that sex promotes sleep. However, some specialists even recommend having a bed dedicated to conjugal activities, and a bed for sleeping properly, alone, with maximum comfort. They want you to believe your relationship is failing if you are not stuck to each other all the time, but it really depends on your relationship — there is no reason to sleep packed like cattle if it harms you.
There is also the solution of twin beds pushed together, which can be separated if you feel a bit overwhelmed. The least drastic solution remains to take a king size bed, a good compromise. In any case, if you regularly sleep poorly, chances are it will also affect your relationship, so it’s better to take precautions…
No noise, no light
A noisy environment is one of the biggest factors of insomnia, and the one that bothers the French the most. It is therefore crucial to succeed in isolating yourself in your bedroom and eliminate noise sources. However, too much silence can also be distressing… a white noise generator can possibly help you.
If you regularly forget to turn off your nightlight, know that it is always better to sleep in complete darkness: light inhibits melatonin secretion, the sleep hormone. When you are exposed to light during your sleep, your cortisol level increases, which affects your sleep quality. According to a 30-year study by Harvard Medical School, night-shift nurses had a 36% higher incidence of breast cancer than those working during the day.
Don’t live in your bed
The bed is for sleeping or making love… and nothing else! If you go to bed at regular times and do not work in bed, this will condition your body to fall asleep as soon as you are between your sheets. However, if you are the type to watch TV from your bed with a meal tray or work on your laptop until exhaustion, stop everything! Prefer a cuddle with your partner to unwind, or even a book (provided you put it down at the end of the chapter and don’t continue until 3 a.m.).
Feng shui
Feng shui, the Chinese discipline of space arrangement, is reputed to regulate the flow of Qi (the innate spiritual force in every living being) for the balance and harmony of the home. If all other tips have failed (or if you just like having a nice story to tell when you have guests), you can always try. Except that feng shui is not scientifically verified…
On the same subject:
Fall asleep by changing your diet!
Guide your mind to sleep by staying positive all day!
Exercise and tire yourself out to sleep well!
Sexual intercourse helps with falling asleep
