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Viewing 10 Tips: Stop Sleep Problems from Causing Poor School Grades10 Tips: Stop Sleep Problems from Causing Poor School Grades
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By Donald Saunders A recent study confirms that too little or low quality sleep in teens leads to a fall in performance at school, resulting in lower grades. Here are 10 simple tips to make sure that a healthy child can get the level of sleep necessary to do well in school. • Do not be tempted to take a nap in the afternoon after school. If you do find you are so tired that you cannot keep your eyes open, take a nap - but for no more than one hour. • Although teenagers will frequently spend a lot of time in their bedroom, turning it into more of a 'living' than a 'sleeping' room, avoid using the bed for anything other than sleeping. Do not sit in bed watching TV, reading, playing games, writing, or anything else. Keep it solely for sleeping, so that your body learns to associate climbing into bed with going to sleep. • Do not perform any strenuous exercise within several hours of bedtime. If you want to play baseball or engage in other sports or strenuous activities, make sure you do these shortly after finishing school and not an hour or two before going to bed. • Do not consume any liquids containing caffeine after 3 o'clock in the afternoon. This of course applies to tea and coffee, but also includes colas and chocolate drinks. • Make sure that you get up at the same time in the morning, whether or not it is a school day. Teenagers commonly sleep in on weekends and throughout school holidays. Rather than making you feel better, this simply disrupts your sleep pattern. • Fix a regular time for going to bed and try not to vary this by more than a few minutes from one day to the next. • Do not be tempted to stay up late finishing your homework or getting ready for a test. Although this might seem like the solution to a specific problem in the short term, in the long term your performance will fall and any short term benefits will quickly be lost. • Avoid eating a heavy meal too close to bedtime. You certainly should not go to bed feeling hungry, and having a light snack before bedtime is okay. However, going to bed on a full stomach will make it difficult to fall asleep and affect the quality of your sleep. • Should you find that you cannot fall asleep within 20 minutes or so of climbing into bed, do not just lie in bed trying to get to sleep. The more you try, the more difficult it will become. As an alternative, get up and do something like read a book or listen to some relaxing music. When you begin to feel tired, climb back into bed and you should fall asleep quickly. • At bedtime, make sure that the bedroom is quiet, dark, and cool. Do not shut the room up, turn up the heat, and climb into bed to watch TV. Instead, turn down the heat, open the window a little if possible to let in some fresh air, and make the room as dark as possible. Follow these 10 tips, and soon your quality of sleep will improve, you will feel much more awake and active during the day, and your school grades will improve. About the Author: Help-Me-To-Sleep.com looks at various sleep disorders and covers everything from finding a natural cure for insomnia to dealing with sleep apnea. Article Source: A Language Guide - http://www.a-language-guide.com |
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