There are various factors that affect the sleep. The more active one is, the healthier a person is, the better they sleep.
Food
The evidence for the direct effects of food on sleep tends to be fairly meager. On should try and have dinner as early as possible and should not sleep immediately after it. Dinner should be the lightest meal of all the meals taken during the day and should not be skipped.
Alcohol
With small doses of alcohol, it acts as a relaxant so one goes to sleep. Slightly higher doses means the brain is not going to awaken as readily so in a sense the sleep is a little bit deeper but it is actually its ability to response that has changed. The brain can’t react as quickly as we would want to. Associated with that is poorer breathing, snoring and disturbed sleep.
Caffeine
Caffeine’s an interesting compound in that people vary in how they react to it. An example is women who are pregnant may suddenly react very badly to having caffeine, and then after can drink it again. It probably impacts mainly on the wakefulness promoting system. It doesn’t actually prevent sleep by switching sleep off; it just makes us more alert.
Medicines
Most medicines have an impact on sleep, particularly if they’re psycho active. So those that are used in psychiatry, say for depression will have an impact on sleep. Medicines normally relax our reflexes so they make the person sleep.
Smoking
Smokers can have quite a hard time of sleeping. Time for which nicotine is actually active in the bloodstream is quite low. So as soon as they’ve stopped smoking the reaction of not having nicotine around that time can disturb sleep. Generally their circulatory systems are quite poor so their breathing is disturbed during sleep. The two add up together to not having a good night sleep.
Exercise
It’s a myth that people think that if they really Exercise hard prior to going to bed, they’re going to get a better night’s sleep. But in fact, the exercise itself at that point can both be a stress and can raise body temperature and can create a problem. But Exercising regularly leads to good health, and that experimentally has been shown to generally improve sleep.
