Just as movement, nutrition, and mindfulness require regular practice, so does sleep. Improving your sleep doesn’t mean you need to overhaul your entire routine overnight. Instead, small, consistent changes can create significant, lasting improvements. Below are a few recommended sleep shifts to help optimize your sleep and your happiness. When engaging in a positive intervention, it helps to track your wellbeing as a measure of success. Before you dive in, take your PERMA+ Snapshot and see what your score is today. Next, try each of the sleep shifts below over the coming weeks and then retake your PERMA+ Snapshot to see how the Sleep for Happiness Shifts impacted your wellbeing.
Try the positive intervention as researchers intended…
Positive Intervention: Explore Sleep Shifts
There is no one right way to increase your sleep quality, but there are many small adjustments to be made that might just help. Over the next 6 weeks, try adjusting your daily behaviors, bedtime routines, and sleep environment with the prescribed sleep shifts. Explore and experiment with a variety of sleep shifts starting right when you wake-up in the morning. See what works best for you by tracking your sleep quality, impact on wellbeing (use the PERMA+ Snapshot tool), and energy.
Once you have completed your first 6 weeks of Sleep Shifts, don’t stop there. Explore these additional sleep shifts to improve your quality of sleep.
- Sleep for Happiness On-the-Go
We all have to travel sometimes and many people find sleeping in new locations to be particularly challenging. Try bringing your sleep necessities along for the trip — a special pillow, nightlight, or weighted blanket can make all the difference. Also, set the new environment to stay cool and dark (duck tape can help with the many bright lights in hotel rooms).
- Getting Back to Sleep
Sometimes, life happens, and you wake in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. Explore what happens if you get up and do something, like meditate or read for 15-20 minutes, and then try falling back asleep. A warm cup of tea or snuggle from a loved one can be helpful as well. Avoid turning on screens.
- Use the Sun to Sleep
As silly as it sounds that the bright light of the sun might help you sleep, it’s true. Long before electricity, humans rose and dozed on the sun’s schedule. Explore what happens if you go straight outside for morning light (5-20 minutes) when you first wake, and then head back outside as the sun is setting (5-20 minutes). Letting your body and brain experience the rise and fall of the sun can be very helpful to sleep quality.