We are sure this will sound familiar: your first week of #backtoroutine is messing up with your sleep. It’s 7:00 am, the alarm starts beeping and every beep you hear feels like a sword in your chest. After snoozing around for almost 20 minutes, you’re finally able to get on your feet. The world feels even heavier than the day before, and you can only think of getting back to bed at 23:00 to sleep like a baby. Fifteen hours and eleven cups of coffee later, you are getting ready to go to bed. You feel exhausted, but for some inexplicable reason your eyes aren’t. In fact, your eyes will remain wide open for one, two or maybe three hours until you fall asleep. It’s 7:00 am again, and you feel like there’s not enough coffee in the whole world to make you feel rested. You head to the bathroom et voilá! you realise your skin looks tired too. If you thought sleeping was useless, you were absolutely wrong. In fact, a lot is going on while you sleep:
During the first three hours of sleep your body produces GH (Growth Hormone), necessary for the maintenance of youthful and radiant skin.
The middle two hours of sleep is when melatonin is increased. Melatonin is a hormone that is responsible for regulating your circadian rhythm but it also acts as a powerful antioxidant that helps protect the skin from free radicals. The final three hours (REM), levels of cortisol decrease. The skin’s temperature also drops to its lowest point allowing muscles to relax and become immobile, giving skin its deepest recovery of the night.
Here are four signs of sleep deprivation and its causes:
1. Your skin looks ashy, pigmented or blotchy. When you don’t have a good sleep, your cortisol levels increase triggering inflammation. This inflammation breaks down the proteins in the skin that keep that beautiful glow in your skin.
2. Your skin becomes imbalanced, which leads to a dehydrated complexion, redness, and breakouts. A restless night will drop your pH levels, causing your skin inability to produce the moisture it needs. This will make your skin appear drier or even with redness.
3. You wake up with dark circles. As you sleep, your body’s cells regenerate, especially at skin level.
4. Your skin appears with less elasticity. Your body stresses out from lack of sleep, and stress harms the integrity of collagen in skin. Collagen is an essential player in the elasticity and structure of skin.
We know falling asleep, especially during these times, can be tricky so we have collected for you a list of wonderful things you can do to improve your bedding experience:
- Switch off all your electronic devices 40 minutes before bed: According to the National Sleep Foundation, “using TVs, tablets, smartphones, laptops, or other electronic devices before bed delays your body’s internal clock (a.k.a., your circadian rhythm), suppresses the release of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, and makes it more difficult to fall asleep.” How many of us are guiltily bringing work to bed, now more than ever?
- Keep your room temperature between 15ºC and 20ºC
- Try Nostril Breathing: Sit on your bed with your eyes closed. Close your right nostril and inhale through your left, then close your left nostril and inhale through your right. Continue doing this for 10 minutes.
- Give yourself an orgasm.
- Listen to Sleep Stories.
- Make yourself a herbal infusion of chamomile, valerian root and lavender.