According to a Recent Harvard research, every fourth adult is suffering from Insomnia. It could be a short term issue or could be a result of poor sleeping habits. Though it can be fixed with sleeping pills, they come with some side effects, when used for long term. In this regard, it is better to opt for natural remedies that can help you overcome insomnia with ease. Let’s dive deeper.
Seven Natural Remedies to Help you Sleep Better
Exercise
Good exercise and quality sleep are directly proportional to each other. While insufficient sleep fatigues the body, making it difficult to perform daily activities, exercising relaxes the body, and aids in sleep.
While a number of exercises help in insomnia treatment, cardio and resistance exercises are found to be the most effective of all. Cardio or aerobic exercises work by releasing endorphins, a chemical messenger released by the brain that helps in relaxation. Similarly, resistance exercises increase and drop your body temperature. This drop in temperature mimics a similar pattern that your body prepares before sleeping and signals the brain that it is the time to sleep. Even a 30-minute exercise regularly can help people with insomnia fall asleep faster, sleep longer, and have a better quality of sleep.
By regulating our sleep cycles, a number of other factors like depression, irritability, and anxiety can also be regulated, resulting in an improved quality of life.
Massage
Massage is one of the most effective, non-medicinal ways of inducing sleep. It works on everyone, from infants to adults, including elderly people. Apart from insomnia, it also offers relief from other problems like digestive disorders, anxiety, and headaches as well.
Massages come in several varieties like a Swedish massage with deep, circular movements, deep massage that targets the inner layers of muscles, and trigger point massage that focuses on tight muscle fibers. It has been researched that massaging a body leads to an increase in the serotonin and dopamine levels in the brain that regulates mood. Additionally, massage helps deal with painful muscles that are another factor for insomnia.
A proper massage takes care of insomnia and relaxes the mind along with enabling free movement of the muscles and joints.
Eating pro-sleep foods
It is a fact that what we eat affects how we sleep. There are foods that can help you stay awake, and there are foods that can help you sleep well. For example, Cheese, food packed with the goodness of amino acid (Tryptophan), helps the body to relax and sleep. Similarly, almonds contain calcium and magnesium that are vital for quality sleep as well. On the other hand, cherries contain melatonin – the sleep hormone in abundance. A bowl of cherries can achieve what several medicines cannot.
Bananas contain tryptophan and magnesium, again two powerful sleep-inducing agents. The omega-3 fatty acid of salmon is another sleep-aiding agent that can be comfortably used to cure insomnia naturally. Adding these foods to your diet will enable you to cure insomnia with ease.
Meditation
Meditation works wonders in curing insomnia both at the biological and psychological levels. At the biological level, it slows the heart rate and lowers cortisol, the stress hormone, along with helping reduce oxidative stress and other stress-related inflammations. On the psychological level, it enables us to invoke acceptance and awareness that reduces psychological stress and improves emotional regulation.
When you meditate regularly for at least 30 minutes, it helps you balance your sleep cycle and chakras. This phenomenon relaxes the body and improves rumination, further improving our sleep quality. Meditation is one of the best ways to cure insomnia and should be sincerely practiced by all age groups for a healthy and happy life.
Aromatherapy
Aromatherapy has been an ideal bet for treating insomnia and is often recommended by psychiatrists and therapists for inducing sleep. These oils help in a variety of things, from relaxing the mind to induce sleep. Available in candles, bath salts, diffusers, and massage oils, they are quintessential in treating insomnia by natural methods.
Lavender, ylang-ylang, sage, Valerian, and lemon are some of the most effective essential oils used for aromatherapy. The aroma stimulates the olfactory nerves enough to transmit the neurochemical signals to the limbic system of the brain to regulate relaxation and sleep hormones.
Sunlight
Waking up early is one of the most natural methods of curing insomnia. When your hypothalamus, the gland in your body responsible for promoting sea levels, senses the change in light, it ramps up or down the level of melatonin, the sleep-producing hormone in our body. During the day, we are energized and alert because of the lack of melatonin. At night, we are sleepy because of an abundance of melatonin. An early morning walks in the sun, keeping the windows open to let the sunlight in, and even sitting near the windows at work are simple methods of exposing your body to sunlight without doing anything extra.
Additionally, when the pineal gland is triggered by light, it sends signals to release the wake-promoting hormones, and that makes the difference. It enables us to wake up early in the morning, promotes our sleep cycle to make us sleepy at night, and helps fight insomnia with ease.
Herbal remedies
Herbal remedies have always been an effective and popular method of curing insomnia since the Victorian ages. A healthy lifestyle and effective herbal remedies can work wonders in treating insomnia and reducing anxiety naturally.
Chamomile, Valerian, Passionflower, and Poppy are some of the most popular herbs that can out power the strongest sedatives with minus side effects when used with tea or boiled and consumed. By combining these remedies with a healthy lifestyle, the desired sleep cycles can be conveniently achieved, and we can happily treat and cure insomnia and its root causes with ease.
End Thoughts
If you’ve already tried all these methods and still can’t control insomnia, it’s better to talk to a doctor for a guided treatment at the earliest.
