Sleep experts believe these annoyances should be kept out of your bed forever, including alarms.
If anything can throw off your work day, it’s a night with no sleep. Despite how important sleep is and how much all of us love it, around 70 million Americans suffer from some kind of sleep disorder, like insomnia, sleep apnea or restless leg syndrome.
Everyone can recover from a single night of restless sleep, but when it begins to affect us over long periods of time, it can alter our weight, increase our risk of heart disease, strokes, and more.
The Huffington Post spoke with several experts who said that sleep can be influenced by a lot of things. Some of these fall out of our control, but others can be managed by our behaviors. Here’s a few distractions they claim can totally ruin our sleep quality.
Pets
According to Roy Raymann, vice president of sleep science and scientific affairs at SleepScore labs, pets should sleep in their own beds at the end of the day.
“Pets can disrupt your sleep at night by jumping on the bed, begging to play or begging for food. Next to that, they might worsen any allergy and bring fleas to your bedding,” says Raymann.
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While he makes some valid points, one study did say that dogs make better sleep companions than cats and even humans.
TVs
No one can be too surprised by this. Aside from emitting a lot of blue light (guys, it’s a big screen), TVs are also perfect for distracting you with a great movie or some reality TV that’ll have you feeling like a zombie in the morning.
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“When you are watching, your brain is secreting chemicals like norepinephrine and dopamine, which stimulate the ‘wake centers’ of your brain, thus making it harder to fall asleep,” says Sujay Kansagara, sleep expert from Mattress Firm.
Work
Despite this being a no-brainer, most of us have worked from bed at least a couple of times. It’s a bad idea. Aside from being super distracting, adding your work into your bed will make your mind wander. Before you know it, it’s 3AM and you’re thinking about all the stuff you have to do for work without actually doing a thing about it.
Alcohol
Despite the fact that alcohol is a depressant, one drink too many can facilitate nightmares, night sweats, headaches and more.
Alarm clocks
According to Christopher Lindholst, CEO of MetroNaps, alarm clocks are bad for you because they interrupt your sleep cycles, and you should complete as many of them as you can per night. What’s the solution, you may wonder? Lindholst says you should train your body to wake up naturally by going to bed at the same time every night. Sounds cute but fake.
