Sleeping Environment & Sleep Quality
Effect of sleeping environment on sleep quality
Factors affecting the sleep quality of ones can be divided into two categories:
1. External environmental factors
- - For example: noise, light, room temperature, bed comfort...
2. Internal factors of the human body
- - For example: body temperature, sleeping position, snoring, emotional stress level...
1. External environmental factors
a. Indoor light and noise
Bright light affects the secretion of melatonin, thus, interfering with the sleep rhythm and sleep efficiency. At night, the darker the light in the room, the more favorable it is for melatonin secretion.
In addition, people's hearing is more sensitive than their eyesight at night. During sleep, external noise can interfere with several phases in a sleep cycle, such as falling asleep and deep sleep stages, thus affecting the whole night's rest. Therefore, a quiet sleep environment helps to improve the sleep quality.
b. Room temperature and air quality
Ambient temperature has a great impact on sleep. An environment that is too hot or too cold can disturb sleep quality. Generally speaking, a cooler environment is more conducive to falling asleep and staying asleep.
Poor ventilation or air pollution can affect the sleep quality, so keeping the air in the room fresh is also very important for sleep. If necessary, an air purifier can be placed in the room.
c. Bedding and pillows
Comfortable bedding has a high degree of importance in determining the sleep quality. When choosing the right bedding, it is recommended to use a quilt with good breathability, so as to avoid being woken up by heat or catching cold in the middle of the night.
2. Internal factors of the human body
a. Daylight intake
Daylight intake has a similar effect on the human body as the indoor light factor above, which affects the body's melatonin secretion. If you are not exposed to sunlight for a long period of time during the day, your melatonin level will increase, and you will feel drowsy and sleepy more easily and have poor physical performance throughout the day, which in turn affects your melatonin secretion at night.
b. Eating before bedtime
Eating too much before bedtime, or eating too late, can put a lot of strain on the body's digestive system. During sleep, the body needs a lot of energy to keep the blood flowing through the muscles, as well as to replenish physical energy. Instead, most of the energy is taken up by the digestive system. Therefore, the more energy your digestive system needs, the worse your sleep quality will be.
c. Daily emotional stress level
The human body secretes more adrenaline when under stress. As a result, the heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and blood sugar level will rise sharply. As a result, the brain wave frequency accelerates, and the body's level of alertness and muscle tension will immediately increase. Hence, it is very difficult to fall asleep under this kind of circumstance.
d. Sleeping position
In addition, sleeping posture is also one of the main reasons affecting the quality of human sleep, interested partners can find a related tweets in the history tweets of this account.