Virginia, this is such a good post, and very timely for me.
A few months back, you wrote about the amount of light (or, more correctly, the level of darkness) in the bedroom and how it affects our sleep. That was a big clue for me, because our bedroom was not very dark at the time. Our bedroom is on the front side of the house which means we got ambient light into the windows (even through the drapes) from the streetlights out front and from our neighbor's house on the side (they have a bright front porch-light and motion-detector floodlights; I swear that even trees blowing and bending in the wind turns on those motion-detector lights. Ugh.)
We were sleeping OK. But after reading that post, we put window-darkening shades in between the glass and our drapes. The room got much, much darker and we started sleeping much more soundly. I was very surprised at how much our sleep improved with such a seemingly small change in our room. We also sleep with a small fan running; the white noise blocks out small noises from outside the house that would wake us otherwise.
Thank you for your reminders about sleep. Now I need to work on getting to bed and getting up at about the same time each day. (I am a natural night owl and my husband is a natural early bird. Bedtimes and morning have always been interesting for us.)
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Virginia, this is such a good post, and very timely for me.
A few months back, you wrote about the amount of light (or, more correctly, the level of darkness) in the bedroom and how it affects our sleep. That was a big clue for me, because our bedroom was not very dark at the time. Our bedroom is on the front side of the house which means we got ambient light into the windows (even through the drapes) from the streetlights out front and from our neighbor's house on the side (they have a bright front porch-light and motion-detector floodlights; I swear that even trees blowing and bending in the wind turns on those motion-detector lights. Ugh.)
We were sleeping OK. But after reading that post, we put window-darkening shades in between the glass and our drapes. The room got much, much darker and we started sleeping much more soundly. I was very surprised at how much our sleep improved with such a seemingly small change in our room. We also sleep with a small fan running; the white noise blocks out small noises from outside the house that would wake us otherwise.
Thank you for your reminders about sleep. Now I need to work on getting to bed and getting up at about the same time each day. (I am a natural night owl and my husband is a natural early bird. Bedtimes and morning have always been interesting for us.)
May 8, 2009 - 8:32amThis Comment
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