“Sleeping is the best meditation”, Dalai Lama once said. As a student, you might think that sometimes sleeping late or even being awake all night to study is a duty of a student. However, there are much more possibilities for your path to short or long term success if you can manage to sleep earlier and get up earlier.It’s a common knowledgeand researchers have proven that it is necessary to get at least 8 hours of sleep each day in order to maintain health body and mind. Yet, there are so many successful people such as Donald Trump, the chairman of Trump Organization, or Herb Kelleher, the co-founder of Southwest Airlines, livingin the world and doing quite well but manage to sleep only three to four hours a day which is barely the half of what is proven to be necessary for people. Therefore, this is not an article about teaching you how to get as much sleep as possible. This article is about learning the fundamentals of getting restful and quality sleep; and create an advantage that will take you one step closer to your personal success and transform your habit of sleep. Have you ever had this feeling that for most of your nights, no matter how many hours you sleep, you just don’t feel well rested when you wake up in the morning? Or you look at the clock in the middle of the night and can’t fall a sleep? We, the reporters at the Kookmin Review, have gone througha number of sources that include“I Can Make You Sleep” by Paul McKenna, “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg, and searched internetthoroughly and diligently to recommend, out of many approaches, 5 salient waysto help youimprove or even overhaulyour approach to sleep. Remember again these are the fundamentals of developing a HABIT within your body and mind to achieve superior quality of sleep.

 Fundamental #1: Timing

Perhaps the most common mistake that people make when they have trouble with getting a restful sleep is timing. First you have to try to establish a fixed time when you go to bed and fixed time to wake up. Scientifically the most adequate time to go to sleep in order to get your body fully rested is between 10pm and 2am. During these four hours you should be asleep because most of your organs in your body are functioning at the lowest rate and sleep gives a boost to your organs to get enough repairing, so that your body will be full of energy and ready for the next day. In order to have a fixed time to sleep and to wake up, the key is not to sleep during a day, in other words, not to even take a nap, outside of your planned sleep time. It is like pushing a swing at a right time to make it swing further. You cannot push the swing too early or too late because it won’t give enough force to lengthen the swing. Try to get up half an hour earlier than you normally get up and never go to bed when you are not sleepy.

Fundamental #2: Things to do in bed

You should keep in mind that, there are only two things to do when you are in bed: sleep or make love. Normally people, especially students, bring laptops or books in bed thinking they will eventually fall asleep while they entertain themselves. As a matter of a fact, laptops or books are the convicts that keep you awake! Stop reading or doing anything else except sleeping or making love in bed.

Fundamental #3: Environment

External factors also have great influence on the quality of sleep. Researchers found out that dark, relatively cool, and quiet places encourage people to fall asleep quickly and improve the quality of sleep. If your room is hot, try to reduce the heat by opening windows but keep the bed warm. Remember,for good sleep, cool air, warm bed with lights and noises off!

Fundamental #4: Daily routines

There are three basics to reassure you to have deep and resting sleep in your daily routines. They are: eat healthy, exercise, and avoid caffeine. Try not to eat within three hours prior to your bedtime because your stomach won’t support your sleep when it’s digesting food. Exercise at least 3 times a week as exercise washes out stress toxins and tires your body to go to bed and take a good rest. Avoid consuming much caffeine. That normally means drinking tea or coffee. It’s best not to drink any tea or coffee after 2pm. You may ask why talk about tea? Many people are not aware of the fact that tea contains more caffeine than coffeeand tea caffeine can keep you wakeful for up to 7 hours, slowly, while coffee caffeine keeps you fresh only for an hour or two.

Fundamental #5: Getting your mind ready for asleep

Free your mind from worries andthoughts before going to bed. For many insomnia cases, the main causes are too much thoughts and worries. “Take off your worries when you take off your clothes at night”, said Napoleon Bonaparte. Bear in mind that there is nothing much you can do in bed by thinking about worriesand not falling asleep. Additionally, don’t watch the clock and thinking about how much time you are wasting or why you are not falling asleep. However, you can always keep a paper and a pen by your bedside, so that you can write down great ideasthat come to you while you are falling asleep and resume your ideas the next morning.

Additionally:

Therapy: There are few things you can do physically to improve the quality of your sleep. Tap above and below your eye, tap on your collarbone, tap under your arms next to your chest, and tap between your ring finger and little finger. These are the nerve points that encourage you to sleep and get your body rested. There is no particular order in the above five fundamentals in terms of their influence on your sleep. All the five fundamentals have great power to improve the quality of your sleep from different angles. No matter how long or short hours you plan to sleep, if you would like to have restful sleep and get up with a feeling of truly refreshed and energized, try out these 5 fundamentals to improve your habit to have quality sleep for the night. If you wish the rest of the mornings in your life to feel effusively rested and refreshed, implement these fundamentals diligently in your life as a habit. Have a goodnight and good luck!