How Sleep Can Help Relieve Your Pre-Wedding Jitters

Wedding planning process is not an easy task to handle. Destination Wedding Planning even more so!

Travel arrangements, dress fittings, and a long list of other details can quickly take over your life as you prepare for a wedding. While it’s fun and exciting, it can also be incredibly stressful. Some stress may be unavoidable, but you don’t want it to smother the joy of getting married. Well one thing is certain!  Adequate sleep, that’s a full seven to nine hours, helps keep stress under control and maintain your emotional stability as you prepare for the big day.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Sleep for Natural Stress Relief

You’re probably not new to the fact that stress can get in the way of a good night’s rest. However, what you may not know is that as you lose sleep you slowly lose the ability to regulate your emotions.

When the body doesn’t get enough sleep the emotional processing center of the brain becomes overactive and sensitive to anything negative. Simultaneously, the brain’s logic center becomes quiet and inactive. Situations you may normally be able to handle may feel overwhelming and insurmountable when you’re tired.

Lack of sleep then causes more stress, which in turn, causes more sleep loss. The whole repeating cycle can leave you an exhausted, emotional wreck. However, good sleep habits can act as a stopper to the stress/sleep deprivation cycle.

Better Sleep (and Less Stress) Through Good Sleep Hygiene

Sleep hygiene includes the conditions and all of your personal habits that affect the quality of your sleep. High-quality sleep starts in a bedroom that allows your body to fully relax. Everything from clutter to the wrong room temperature can keep you from mentally and physically being able to fall asleep.

Block out as much light as possible and try to keep the room temperature between 60 to 68 degrees at night. However, the ideal conditions are those in which you feel the most comfortable. For example, if you prefer the room warmer than average, either turn up the thermostat or, if you share a bedroom, get a space heater so you can get the rest you need.

Photo by Sylvie Tittel on Unsplash

You can also help yourself get better sleep by:

• Being Consistent About Your Bedtime: As hard as it may be to go to bed on time when you’re planning a wedding, consistency needs to be a priority. Your body times the release of sleep hormones based on your preferred schedule. An erratic bedtime keeps your body guessing, which means you may not be tired when you need to fall asleep.

• Addressing Your Wedding Stress Before Bed: Stress management is a part of breaking the stress/sleep deprivation cycle. What better time than right before bed? While there are traditional favorites like reading a book or taking a warm bath, you might need more proactive techniques when preparing for a big event.
  
  Research from Harvard Medical School has shown that meditation stimulates the body’s relaxation response, causing your heart rate and blood pressure to lower. With time and consistency, it can also strengthen the connection between the brain’s emotion and logic centers, which helps maintain emotional balance despite wedding stress.
  
  If you find physical tension building throughout the day, you may want to try yoga as a stress reliever. It reduces stress-related inflammation in the body while improving mood. Yoga methods that involve deep, meditative breathing and gentle poses are perfect at bedtime. You may even want to consider a few poses while in bed.

• Turning Off Screens and Wedding Planning: You may like scanning through social media or checking your guest list before bed, but the bright blue light from some electronic screens can suppress sleep hormones. Turn them off two to three hours before bedtime. If you have to check on something wedding related, try using a device with a night mode that won’t interfere with your sleep.

Photo by Javier Reyes on Unsplash

Conclusion

Sleep can help you keep any wedding-related chaos in check. The whole wedding experience from the planning to the actual ceremony are a special time that you want to commit to memory. With adequate sleep, it can be a positive experience that you want to relive with your spouse for years to come.

This article was written by Tuck.com for Ellwed blog.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments bellow!

Cover photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash