Can’t sleep? Here’s how to get a good night’s rest

Can’t sleep? Here’s how to get a good night’s rest

Coffee can’t fix unhealthy sleeping patterns. When you spend your night tossing and turning, you probably wake up rather bleary eyed, a tad cantankerous and tired. It sets your mood for the day. You find that you are snappish and unable to concentrate much on anything at hand. If this pattern of being under slept continues, it can have rather catastrophic effects on our physical and mental well-being. Apart from moodiness and being unproductive, functioning in a state of chronic exhaustion can fuel anxiety and culminate in depression as well. For most of us, it’s a one word answer. Stress. There’s always something on our minds. It could be looming work deadlines, a fight with our loved ones or making a mistake that we think cannot be fixed. We ruminate over the same thoughts repeatedly, till we can’t sleep anymore. “People underestimate the effects of stress on the body,” says Shefali Verma, a Dubai-based integrative medical doctor, biohacker and educator. “When we get stressed, the cortisol hormone rises,” she says. These high levels of hormones don’t allow a person to wind down. As a result, people find it difficult to fall asleep and lie awake. “They’re unable to switch off,”