Not less or more, but better sleep

We recently went on vacation after two years of staying at home and we had to battle with getting some good sleep. In this article, I would like to share with you the 5 reasons I couldn’t find sleep.

#1 Messy Room

It took me much longer to fall asleep in the messy bedroom. At home, all distractions, means clutter, is removed from the bedroom and everything has its home. At first, we just dumped our luggage in the bedroom and went for sight-seeing and meeting friends. There was little time to organize the new bedroom, so it ended up with things laying on the floor and everywhere else. After spending half an hour giving everything we brought with a home, the bedroom suddenly transferred back from a storage room to a sleeping place. The time was well invested.

#2 Wine O’Clock

Alcohol is sedative in the first half of your sleep; however, it disrupts the sleep in the second half. From my watch, I know that my deep sleep typically falls in the second half of the night. Therefore, it was no miracle that celebrating our vacation with wine in the evenings, did reduce my sleep quality. As soon as I swapped the white wine with apple juice, I was much more rested the next day.

#3 Long Naps in the Afternoon

True vacations include for me to not have a schedule. So there was space for power naps in the afternoon. Unfortunately, they exceeded way beyond the recommended 30 minutes and thus, my night sleep was heavily affected. As I was not used to have an afternoon nap, my brain started to feel dizzy after two hours sleep on the couch (also not the best place to sleep long) and at night, I had trouble to fall asleep. I substituted the afternoon nap with a nice tea and some relaxing music, and I felt much more energized during the day.

#4 No Sleep Schedule

At home, we always go to bed at the same time and get up at the same time, even on weekends. There were only a few exceptions to that in the past two years. During these vacation, we did not follow our normal routine and it ended up having either with too little or too much sleep. As I mentioned earlier, I do not like to have a strict schedule during vacation, however I had to make an exception with bedtime in order to get rejuvenating sleep.

#5 No Relaxing Evening Routine

Yin Yoga is a fixed part of our evening routine at home. We usually do 25 minutes before we go to bed. This part was missing at the beginning of our vacation. As we went to bed, I felt restless, and a lot of thoughts went through my mind what prevented me to fall asleep. Once started also at our holiday location with this relaxing exercise, falling asleep right after laying down was not a problem anymore. You should keep up your relaxing evening routine also outside your home.

Of course, things like mattress quality, pillow size and forms, sheets, blankets and duvets quality as well as temperature, noise and humidity make also a big difference, but these are usually factors, you cannot easily change if you booked your accommodation beforehand. I hope, I could give you some ideas on what to watch out if you also suffer from bad sleep during your vacation.