4 ways to sleep like a baby, now and always…

Before the pandemic, getting a good night’s sleep was difficult due to an always-on work culture, pinging phones, Netflix’s ‘watch next episode’ button, and general life stress. Covid then struck. Even if you avoided the virus, you may have become a victim of a nationwide epidemic of pandemic disruption-related insomnia.

Dr. Hasan Merali, a paediatric emergency medicine physician, recently argued in Popular Science that the same simple principles that help lull anxious, overstimulated 3-year-olds into getting the sleep they desperately need also work for anxious, overstimulated adults. You can probably skip the hot milk and teddy bears, but Merali claims that research shows that the essential pillars of a good toddler bedtime work just as well at 43 as they do at 3.

1. Make a bedtime routine. “There is high-quality evidence that regular bedtimes improve toddler sleep. This is just as important for adults “Merali is adamant.
2. Take a warm bath (or shower). “A comprehensive study published in 2019 examined 13 different adult studies and discovered that scheduling a hot bath or shower one or two hours before a planned bedtime significantly reduced the time it took to sleep,” Merali writes. Our body temperature naturally decreases before going to sleep. A hot shower dilates your blood vessels, which speeds up the process.
3. Use lotion. This is not for keeping your skin soft (though that might be a nice bonus). “In a study that randomly assigned 76 infants to receive a bedtime massage with lotion, a massage without lotion, or no massage, the infants who received a lotion massage slept for longer periods of time,” Merali says. You probably don’t have a home masseuse, but you can get some of the same results by applying lotion to yourself.
4. Take up a quiet activity. Bill Gates always reads before going to bed. According to science, he’s not only expanding his mind but also ensuring a good night’s sleep. In one large study of children, “researchers discovered that language-based bedtime routines were associated with longer nighttime sleep duration,” Merali writes, adding that “adults have also been shown to benefit from reading.”

No responsible adult would attempt to yank a young child from an enjoyable pastime one minute and yank them into bed the next. There would be great suffering experienced by all. And yet, we frequently attempt to harm ourselves in this way by skipping right from stimulating TV, nagging work emails, or Twitter doom scrolling to attempting to retire for the evening.

It makes sense why the outcomes are so frequently awful. We are aware that for children, a restful night’s sleep necessitates a careful detachment from the bustle of the day. Adults would sleep better if they were aware that the same rule also applies to them.