Hacks for a Quality Sleep Setup - Residential Acoustics®

Why Quality Sleep Matters

If we don’t get good quality sleep at night, it can put our whole body out of whack. Not only will you feel tired all the time, lack of good sleep can also affect your physical and mental health. Quality sleep helps improve brain function, aids in muscle recovery, boosts longevity and much more. Keep reading for all the hacks to get quality sleep each and every night.

8 hours seems to be the magic number when it comes to how much sleep you should get each night, but it’s not that simple. You need 8 good hours of sleep each night. Quality sleep can be defined by how much of the night you were in a deep sleep, or REM, as opposed to light sleep when you may have been tossing and turning. How can you make sure that you’re getting to sleep quickly and staying in a deep sleep for most of the night? Check out our tips below for the best quality sleep setup.

How to Create a Quality Sleep Environment

The first step to creating the ideal sleep environment is to avoid exposing yourself to blue light immediately before going to bed. Sources of blue light typically include:

Laptops
Tablets
Cell phones
Televisions

I know we’re probably all guilty of scrolling through our phones until we finally get tired, but this habit actually inhibits your ability to get to sleep. Ideally, you should replace your phone and/or TV with a good book, it’ll put less strain on your eyes and actually help you get to sleep even faster than scrolling our phone. If you absolutely can’t go without your phone or TV before bed, try out some blue light glasses. They filter out the harmful light that strains your eyes and keeps you awake longer at night.

Ideal Sleep Conditions

You’ll also want to keep the natural light and other invasive outdoor light out so you can fall asleep fast and stay asleep. Try installing blackout curtains, or just regular curtains if you just want to cut out some, but not all, of the light. I actually try to avoid blackout curtains, because I like being woken up by the sun coming in through my windows, but to each their own!

Most people I know sleep the same way – with the fan and AC on nice and cold, snuggled up under all of the covers. No one likes to be uncomfortable or sweating when they’re trying to get to sleep at night, especially when they don’t have to be. The only time I should be too warm when I’m trying to sleep is if my power is out and I can’t use my fan or the AC.

Soundproof Your Bedroom to Sleep Better

For any of my fellow light sleepers out there or for those who live in loud areas, soundproof curtains may be a necessity to get to sleep and stay asleep at night. Soundproof curtains can be used over the windows in your bedroom to block out traffic noise, people talking, music, and even some barking dogs.

Be sure you’re not just buying “Blackout Soundproof” curtains for $20 from a website like Amazon. In order to really be considered soundproof, the curtains you purchase should have an STC-rating, meaning they are lab tested and proven to block a certain amount of sound. Nothing made from thick fabric will have an STC-rating, it would need to bee made of a solid material that is also flexible, such as mass loaded vinyl.

If you have loud roommates, you may want to try to soundproof your door to keep out the sound of them chatting or watching TV too loud. If they aren’t too disturbing you can start with installing door seals and sweeps so you can seal up the gaps around your door and prevent sound leaks. For more extreme cases, you may need to pair those products with a soundproof door cover to keep out sound still leaking in through and around the door.

Lastly, if you can still hear noises that are keeping you up at night, you might just need a white noise sound machine. While it may seem counterintuitive to add more noise to the situation, sound machines work to cover, or mask, distracting noises by raising the ambient noise level in your room. They can sound a bit out of place at first, but after about 15 minutes it starts to blend in with the sound of a fan or AC.

Hacks for a Quality Sleep Environment

Here’s the breakdown on how to get the best sleep possible at night if you didn’t want to read the entire article:

Avoid blue light before bed
Use blackout curtains to keep out the sun
Soundproof your windows with soundproof curtains
Soundproof your bedroom door with a soundproof door cover
Use a white noise machine