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Eat Light
Again, something we should be doing for other reasons. If you go to bed with food still in your digestive system, your blood is engaged in distributing nutrients of food to rest of your body and has a hard time doing double duty to help in daily repair work. Also, when your body is healthier, all systems and processes work better, including daily recuperation of sleep.
Lower Your Stress Levels
I'm sure you're surprised by this one, heh? When you go to bed with worries and problems on your mind, you have a hard time relaxing enough to get to sleep. There are many different things you can do to help here, but one of best may be a short period of meditation before bedtime. Resolve to put off problems of day (or of your life) until tomorrow. By getting a quality night's sleep, you'll have more energy and more brainpower to find a solution.
Set a Regular Sleep Schedule
Although our modern cultures play havoc with our schedules, requiring us to get up and out of house at different times each day, if we are to get most we can from our sleep, it's important to always start our days at about same time. The main reason for this is simply because our bodies work by regular cycles, and if those cycles are disturbed, our systems don't work as efficiently. The time we get up in morning is more important to this cycle than time we go to sleep at night, but both will affect quality of sleep that we get.
One thing that most of us do which kills regularity of our sleep cycle is sleeping later on weekends than we do during work week. Of course, that was to try to increase our energy levels, and now that we know how to get most energy from our sleep, this will no longer be necessary.
How To Sleep Shorter Nights
Before you can start decreasing amount of time you spend sleeping each night, it's important to increase quality of sleep by implementing above suggestions. Once you start getting better sleep, you can then adjust amount of sleep you get each night.
Another piece of information that you'll need to know is that during time we spend sleeping, we go through a number of sleep cycles. We drift from light sleep to deep sleep and back again over and over. Most of us experience about 6 to 10 of these sleep cycles, which last about 20 to 40 minutes in length.
Ideally, you want to wake up at end of one of these cycles, when you are in a light sleep, not a deep sleep. This makes it easier to wake up, and helps you to feel more energetic to start your day. The simplest way to find out what works best for you is simply to experiment with different bedtimes, and seeing how much energy you have after waking up next day.
For More Information
If you'd like to learn more about how to get most you can from sleep, visit http://www.keystopower.com/Link/PowerfulSleep.php.
Alan Tutt is the creator of the world-famous Keys To Power Mastery System available at http://www.KeysToPower.com. Learn how to gain absolute control over yourself and your world with the power of your mind and spirit. Free mini-course available.