Everything in your life will run more smoothly if you can figure out how to get into dreamland with regularity. In today’s society, it may be more difficult than ever to achieve dream states without some assistance.

Regardless of your circumstances, the starting assumption is there are safe methods to help you get better sleep without needing to resort to alcohol or heavy sedatives. Let’s also assume you’re reading this because you are ready to make a change or improvement. Perhaps you are sick and tired of being sick and tired and are desperate to find alternatives.

Learning about the relationship between yourself and your bodymind will go a long way towards helping you find the answers you need to get a better night’s rest. But you can’t expect to change everything at once; you need to find just one thing you can gain control over in your life.

Believing you can get away with less sleep on a regular basis can shorten your lifespan (4).

Sleep deprivation prevents your immune system from building up its forces. If you don’t get enough sleep, your body may not be able to fend off invaders. It may also take you longer to recover from illness. Long-term sleep deprivation also increases your risk for chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease (5).

11 Surprising Health Benefits of Sleep

It’s a vicious circle, right? We can’t sleep if our pain is acting up, then we feel like crap and lack energy and focus when we miss having a good night’s sleep. Stress and worry about our life, our relationships, our health, and our job keep us up at night. The detrimental effects are cumulative.

If you can blame the stress of your job on fifty-percent of your sleep loss, and your bad habits and health choices can be blamed for the remaining fifty-percent of your sleepless nights, then you should be focused on lifestyle changes instead of prescription sleep aids to remedy the problems.

The Institute of Medicine estimates that hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually on medical costs that are directly related to sleep disorders.

The Better Sleep Guide

There are as many ways to work on getting better sleep as there are ways to screw it up. If you want to get serious about your health, then you should do everything in your power to reduce the number of things which detract from sleep and boost the things which help. Easy to say; not so easy to implement.

Biofeedback devices can monitor our sleep and provide recommendations for how to get more of it. Listening to audio designed for inducing sleep (sleep binaurals) can help shut down our brain and wind down the mind. Self-awareness will guide us towards improvement. With devoted persistence, you will eventually discover a combination of progressive improvements you can make to enhance your sleep patterns.

Resorting to pill-popping as part of your normal sleep routine could be considered as a form of defeat if it goes on for too long, especially if you haven’t tried alternatives to vanquish the underlying imbalances in your life. Taking some time to reduce your stress and figure out your personal values will provide you with intuition as to what kinds of changes will make the most impact.

Good sleep helps relieve chronic pain, anxiety, stress, fatigue, muscle tension, illness, and facilitates self-healing.

For people with fibromyalgia, the combination of pain and sleep disturbance is a double-edged sword: the pain makes sleep more difficult and sleep deprivation exacerbates pain. The good news is that a reduction in sleep disturbance is usually followed by an improvement in pain symptoms (7).

If you’re looking to get out of the vicious circle of sleep deprivation, you’re likely going to experience even more discomfort as you start changing your habits and routines. It seems no matter what direction we go to heal ourselves, we need to go through  our pain to get to the other side. The fact things seem to get worse before they get better is a common phenomenon, especially when we’re struggling to get well.