Have you ever woke up totally broken, as if you were loading carts of coal all night? Do you hate your alarm clock?

Do you recall how easy it was to wake up when you were an infant? The day was waiting for you, full of discoveries and surprises. Want that feeling back? There are five simple steps how to get back to restoring and satisfying sleep.

1. Preparation

Hell No! Like all successful endeavors, preparation is essential to restful sleep. Start with having a hot bath or shower. Continue with clean sheets.

Cleaning your skin before you sleep is essential. Skin is the biggest organ in your body and is often referred to as the third kidney. It excretes fat soluble toxins and unnecessary salts. Also it has an ability to breathe. In fact some animals breathe through skin mostly. That's why don't neglect loofah and soap. Your task is to help your body get better overnight, not to soak in old sweat and toxins.

2. Reverse alarm

Everybody knows how much sleep human needs. Everybody knows when they should wake up. Yet not everybody treats the amount of sleep they need with respect. Often sleep time budget is subject to robbery from other supposedly more important things like watching TV, playing games and even working. To start coping with that situation there is a simple remedy - set a reverse alarm, that notifies you that it's time to sleep now. Sew an action, reap a habit!

3. Airflow

Air is so underrated. People pay much more attention to what they eat, than to what they breathe. But these are both very similar and essential processes. Modern windows make our habitats so air-sealed that apart from the obvious lack of oxygen, there is a lot of Volatile Organic Compounds in the air. Take a look at your bedroom carefully. Painted walls, plastic-based carpets, plastic windows, plastic decorations. All objects exchange molecules with air, and often these molecules or particles are bad news for you, and make you sick. Typical symptoms include irritated nose, throat, eyes and headaches.

Building codes require around 0.35 air changes per hour in a bedroom, which I find inadequate. Of course, I grew up in Soviet Union, where nobody was closing windows, because they did not match the frame anyway. But at least we had fresh air.

So now we're leaving a small window opening and go to sleep under a dawn blanket, or at least keep the window open for 5 minutes, before going off to sleep. Keep yourself open to fresh air, it will help your body to operate more efficiently. And for the reference, Russians have a saying that means "drunk with fresh air" which refers to the light-headedness feeling that fresh air gives you.

4. Light

Right lighting is essential for both sleep and waking up. Very bright light before you go to sleep agitates the nervous system and thus it's harder to sleep. Same is true for sounds and emotions. While you don't want the light to strike your eyes when you're falling asleep, you don't want to try to wake up in darkness either. So, leave your drapes half-open in the warm part of the year. For wintery time try setting a timer that switches on a small and dim lamp. It should not wake you up immediately, but rather should gradually awaken you.

5. Alarm

In addition to the lighting aspect of your start of the day ritual, alarms and sounds are very important. And here physiology comes into play. I bet you have heard about phases of sleep. The essence is that there are deeper phases, which are designed to keep your body rested, and lighter sleep cycles to turn you over and clear the mind. You experience dreams during light phase of sleep, and feel grumpy when awaken in the deep phase of the sleep.

The sad thing is that a typical alarm does not care about your phases and just brutally drags you out of Morpheus realm. (Morpheus is a Greek god of dreams and sleep).

The good news is that you can avoid it, by relying on the properties of sleep phases. While an airstrike may not always awake you in the deep phase of the sleep, a cat's breath can wake you up in the light phase of the sleep. Also you move and turn over during light phase of the sleep.

There are various technical devises which can help you. While ones rely on capturing the sound or movement you produce. Some software for smartphones uses microphone to detect your sleep phases. However I find that this method does not always work. It requires you to sleep with your phone very close to your pillow, which i have problems with, and sometimes it falls down.

A better way is to rely on a quiet sound. The easy way is to set up your mp3 player to start playing a peaceful tune quietly in your headphones in the morning. When you're nearly rested, the deep and REM phases of sleep change nearly every 30 minutes, so if your player is just left playing, you'll eventually awake in the light phase, provided the volume is set correctly. Have a traditional alarm set-up as a backup.

And if you have an Android device, may I suggest the best of both worlds: Gentle Alarm by Mobitobi. It can sound a pre-alarm half an hour before the main alarm. And the alarms have very gentle fade-in, so that I often dream of music, before waking up.

Also I often contemplate buying a Peaceful Progression Aromatherapy Alarm , which affects your senses by light, aroma and sounds simultaneously, but I have not tried it yet.

Don't rush out of bed, stretch your muscles and get up to do some exciting ritual. Have a cup of tea, read the morning newspaper, listen to some good music during your morning routine. The trick is to pull you in gently into a new day...

So, pay attention when you go to sleep, clean your skin before the bed, leave your drapes half-open, allow a lot of fresh air, and select a peaceful tune to set the mood for a successful day!

Eugene Shamshurin

Portsmouth, NH, March 25, 2010