Good sleep is crucial for runners because it is the primary time for physical repair and directly impacts your performance and injury prevention. Adequate sleep (7–9+ hours) facilitates muscle tissue repair, boosts immunity, enhances mental focus, and restores energy, allowing for harder, more consistent training
Most of us know sleep is important, but getting good sleep is often a challenge. Paying attention to sleep hygiene is one of the most straightforward ways that you can set yourself up for better sleep.
What Are Signs of Poor Sleep Hygiene? Having a hard time falling asleep, experiencing frequent sleep disturbances, and suffering daytime sleepiness are the most telling signs of poor sleep hygiene. An overall lack of consistency in sleep quantity or quality can also be a symptom of poor sleep hygiene.
How Do You Practice Good Sleep Hygiene? Good sleep hygiene is all about putting yourself in the best position to sleep well each and every night.
- Set Your Sleep Schedule: Having a set schedule for bedtime and waking up normalizes sleep as an essential part of your day and gets your brain and body accustomed to getting the full amount of sleep you need.
- Prioritize Sleep: It might be tempting to skip sleep in order to work, study, or socialize but it’s vital to treat sleep as a priority. Calculate a target bedtime based on your fixed wake-up time and do your best to be ready for bed around that time each night.
- Make Gradual Adjustments: If you want to shift your sleep times, don’t try to do it all in one fell swoop because that can throw your schedule out of whack. Instead, make small, step-by-step adjustments of about an hour.
- Follow a Nightly Routine: how you prepare for bed can determine how easily you’ll be able to fall asleep. Try to budget 30 minutes for winding down and take advantage of whatever puts you in a state of calm such as soft music, light stretching, reading, and/or relaxation exercises.
- Dim Your Lights: Try to keep away from bright lights because they can hinder the production of melatonin, a hormone that the body creates to facilitate sleep.
- Unplug From Electronics: Build in a 30-60 minute pre-bed buffer time that is device-free. Cell phones, tablets, and laptops can cause mental stimulation that is hard to shut off and also generate blue light that may decrease melatonin production.
Sleep info source: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-hygiene