While holidays can be a lovely time of rest and relaxation, they are not always great for our sleep health.
It is really easy to form bad sleep habits during a summer break, and this can cause some real problems when you have to go back to work or at school.
But this does not have to be the case. Here are some tips for how you can better prepare for the return to a normal routine while also getting the best sleep possible.
Plan your time
This is one of the first things that you have to do: organise your schedule (the time you get up, go to work, train, eat, and go to bed) and be as strict as possible with it.
Help yourself with light
Once you get up, try to get as much light as possible in your home so your body will soon understand that it’s time to wake up. The same applies to darkness: to “fix” your biological clock habits faster, try to lower lights as early as possible in the evening, so your body will understand that it is almost time to get to sleep and will adjust accordingly.
Don’t hit snooze
Although you may feel you desperately need some extra minutes of sleep, hitting the snooze button is actually the worst thing you can do. If you snooze, you may go back into a deep sleep, which is harder to wake from, rather than the lighter sleep that occurs in the hour before your body naturally wakes up.
Set your alarm for the real time you have to get up. Then, as soon as you can bear it, pull back the curtains and let the sunlight into the room to jump-start your body clock and let your brain know it’s morning.
Give yourself permission to be sleepless
When you do wake up in the middle of the night, just accept that that is how things are. Tell yourself it’s okay that you cannot sleep. Your body will be working on fixing itself – you need to relax, step back, and give it the time to do its job.