When it comes to getting a decent night’s sleep, most of us know the drill: have a relaxing bedtime ritual, create a restful environment, stick to the same sleep schedule every day, avoid caffeine in the evening.
Our fast-paced, 24/7, technology driven lives certainly don’t help when it comes to switching off. Late-night work emails, Netflix drama binges, disruptive blue-screen light, all conspire to make us feel wired instead of tired.
So as an antidote to the sleep enemies of modern life, we’ve compiled a list of five of the quickest, easiest and most effective science-backed tricks for preparing your mind and body for a restful night’s sleep.
Cool Down With A Warm Bath
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Taking a relaxing warm bath is the oldest sleep tip in the book. But while it might sound counterintuitive, it’s not so much the toasty-warm feeling that helps to send you off into the land of nod but rather the sudden drop in body temperature that occurs when you leave the bath.
This temperature decline mimics the natural drop in body temperature that occurs during the evening as we move towards sleep, thus acting as a cue for relaxation.
One study of elderly people found that those who had a warm bath before bedtime reported falling asleep faster and more soundly. And don’t worry if you don’t have time for a luxurious soak, a hot shower will have a similar effect.
Wear Bed Socks
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They might not be the sexiest bedtime attire but wearing socks could be your key to falling asleep more quickly.
A study at the Sleep Laboratory in Basel, Switzerland, published in the journal ‘Nature’, found that as we approach the threshold of sleep, the body’s temperature regulation system redistributes heat from your core to your extremities. Having cold feet demands more from this system and upsets the natural release of melatonin, a hormone associated with sleep onset.
Chartered physiotherapist and author of The Good Sleep Guide, Sammy Margo concurs: “You won’t get a good night’s sleep if your feet are too cold,” she says. To avoid the opposite effect (overheating in the night), she recommends investing in cashmere as this has natural heat regulating properties.
Turn Up The Noise
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Earplugs are great for blocking out noise – ideal if you live in a city or an apartment block. But for those who find them uncomfortable to wear, an alternative option is to introduce a constant ambient sound, or ‘white’ noise, into your bedroom.
Research shows this masks potentially disruptive sounds by reducing the difference between background noise and ‘peak’ noise, such as slamming doors.
There are plenty of white noise apps available – or, if you prefer to switch off all your electronic devices before bedtime (and, quite frankly, you should), you could invest in a white noise machine.
Park Your Problems
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If worrying about work or problems in your personal life prevents you from drifting off into the land of nod – or getting back to sleep when you wake in the night – jotting down some potential solutions in a notebook before you hit the sack could be the key to a stress-free sleep.
A study published in ‘Behavioural Sleep Medicine‘ split volunteers, all with reported insomnia, into two groups. Before going to bed, one group recorded possible solutions to their worries while the second group recorded their worries and completed worry questionnaires. The group that recorded solutions had reduced pre-sleep cognitive arousal (read: whirring mind).
Fake Daylight
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“Sunlight helps the body’s internal biological clock to reset itself each day so if possible, wake up with the sun,” says Jade Wells, Senior Physiologist atNuffield Health.
Of course, that’s easier said than done in the dark depths of the British winter. As an alternative, she suggests: “Use very bright lights in the morning. There are even alarm clocks that mimic the effect of the rise, rising to wake you up gently every day.”
The Lumie Bodyclock Starter 30 Wake Up to Daylight Light helps to regulate your sleep/wake cycle and combat Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), waking you with a gradually brightening 30-minute sunrise so when you open your eyes you feel awake and refreshed.
Many people have had the experience at least once in their lives: you had a stressful day and fall onto your bed at some point and just want to go to sleep. But somehow, despite exhaustion, that simply doesn’t happen and you flail around frustrated in bed. Grandma’s secret was always a cup of warm milk, others try counting sheep to enter the realm of dreams. But no method is really a panacea. Here is a trick for how to breathe correctly so that you can fall asleep as quickly as possible. You should do it regularly: every morning after waking up and every evening before falling asleep to condition your body and to optimize the effect. When this breathing method becomes second nature, you won’t just be glad about the more refreshing sleep, but this trick, called “4-7-8,” helps immediately with stressful situations, panic attacks, or high blood pressure. Simply try it out, it costs nothing and it’ll definitely help!
1. Breathe in
Everything begins of course with breathing in. First, position your tongue on the roof of your mouth, behind your front teeth. Then inhale slowly while counting to 4 in your head.
Now hold your breath while remaining relaxed and count to 7. Your body now has enough time to absorb the oxygen and give energy to all your organs. The oxygen content in your blood is increased and your body begins to relax.
While breathing out, count to 8. You should try to breathe out as smoothly as possible. If you hear a quiet swooshing noise, you are doing it right. The slow exhaling ensures that the “used” air fully leaves your body. As a great side effect: your pulse will sink and will be noticeably calmer. You can almost feel the tension dissolving. With some practice, this trick works everywhere and anywhere. Even with stress or panic attacks, the body will relax within seconds. It is said to help in general against high blood pressure. And all that just by breathing correctly!
At the beginning, 4 repetitions in the morning and evening should suffice. After 2 months you can do 8 respectively. It is most effective when regularly practiced. But even with acute stress, this trick is a true blessing. Before reaching for the sleeping pills or other questionable substances, you should at least try this “4-7-8” trick.
Share this trick that helps with various life situations and is as simple as breathing correctly.
In this industrial era, there are numbers of options to make use of smartphones as multiple functional devices; one of the interesting own would be converting your smartphone into the wireless mouse… In some cases, both methods will work well together. Monet PC Remote is a recently discovered app which permits the user to control and access the system directly with the help of your tablet or Smartphone.
As you all know these days, Wireless mouse is becoming very popular because of its flexibility and convenience over the wired mouse. To help the people, most of the developer has designed the Remote Mouse app for the smartphones.
With the help of smartphone, one can able to copy the image of a Windows computer, and they access it remotely. If you are searching for a way to use your computer and Smartphone side by side, you can make use of the Remote mouse which is designed by a developer called Yang Tian Jiao. This app will quickly convert your smartphone into a wireless mouse this will help you to use on a Windows or a Mac System.
The very first step, you have to install the Remote Mouse for your smartphone. Before you open this app, you have to ensure that both desktop and your Smartphone are on the same Wi-Fi network.
Next step, is to check your system, whether the Remote Mouse is enabled, then you have to open this app on your smartphone, after it gets free, it will start searching for your system, it will just take a few second to search.
Once your Smartphone gets connected with the system, you can start using it as a mouse. You just need to move the finger across the screen to move a cursor on a system. If you want to select anything on a system, tap with two fingers to right-click and tap with one finger to left-click and pinch to zoom in.
For Other Mouse settings
Access the settings on your smartphone by tapping on a 4-dash menu icon, where you can able to scrolling speeds and control tracking and also toggle the volume controls. This is one of the best methods to convert your smartphone into wireless mouse. Numbers of people are decreasing the stress, and they feel comfortable with turning the smartphone into the wireless mouse.
It’s happened to most of us. You delete a file and realize you need it back. This guide will explain when you can get that file back and how to go about it.
We’ve covered a variety of tools for recovering deleted files in the past, but this guide goes more in-depth. We’ll cover everything you need to know if you want to successfully recover deleted files.
Is it Really Deleted?If you’re not sure whether you permanently deleted a file, be sure to look around for it first. In Windows, you’ll want to open the Recycle Bin and look for the file. You can search the Recycle Bin using the search box at the top-right corner of the window, which may help if you have a lot of files in your Recycle Bin. You can also right-click in the window, point to Sort By, and select Date Deleted to view files that were recently deleted.
Note that programs like CCleaner empty your Recycle Bin when you run them, so having CCleaner or a similar program automatically run in the background can prevent you from recovering files from the Recycle Bin.
If the file was stored in a cloud storage service like Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive, be sure to log into your account on the service’s website and check your trash there — you may find the file is still recoverable. This is the cloud storage version of the Recycle Bin.
If you’re not sure whether you deleted the file, perform a search for it using the search box in the Windows Explorer or File Explorer window. Hopefully the file was accidentally moved elsewhere and you can find it again.
Check Your Backups
You should be making regular backups of your most important files so you won’t lose too much critical data if they ever vanish on you. If you do have a backup, now’s the time to check it for a copy of the file you deleted.
Windows has built-in backup tools, so they may be able to help. Windows 7’s Previous Versions tool may have created a backup of your file, even if you haven’t set anything up. To check previous versions, navigate to the folder that contained your file, right-click it, and select Restore previous versions. You can view backups that have been created and click the Open button to browse them — you may find a backup copy of your important file.
Windows 8’s File History feature isn’t enabled by default, so you’re out of luck if you never enabled it manually. If you have enabled File History, you can visit a folder and click the History button on the ribbon to browse backup copies of files that were once stored in that folder.
Magnetic Hard Drives vs. Solid-state Drives
If you’ve made it this far and haven’t managed to restore your file yet, the only way you’re getting that file back is with file-recovery software. However, there’s some bad news: This may be impossible on some computers.
Traditional magnetic hard drives and solid-state drives work differently. When you delete a file on a magnetic hard drive, its data isn’t immediately erased from the disk. Instead, the pointer that points at the data is removed. The data can then be overwritten. It may be possible to scan the hard drive for leftover data and restore deleted files that haven’t yet been overwritten.
When a file is deleted from a solid-state drive, that file’s is immediately erased with the TRIM command to free up the space and ensure the SSD can be quickly written to in the future. That means that you can’t recover data deleted from solid-state drives — once it’s gone, it’s gone. Very old solid-state drives and old operating systems like Windows Vista don’t support TRIM, but modern solid-state drives and Windows 7 and 8 all support TRIM.
The Safest Way to Recover a Deleted File
If you deleted a file on a magnetic hard drive and you’re still using that computer, the safest thing to do is shut down the computer immediately. If you continue using the computer — even if you’re just installing file-recovery software — it’s possible that a program on your computer could write to the disk and that data could overwrite the deleted file’s data on your hard drive.
With the computer shut down, you should boot from a file-recovery live CD or USB drive or remove the hard drive from the computer entirely and place it in another computer as a secondary drive. The key is to avoid writing to the drive entirely. Use file-recovery software to scan the drive, and hopefully you’ll find the deleted file. If you deleted the file recently and haven’t written to the drive much, you have fairly good odds of recovering it. If you deleted the file two weeks ago and have written to the drive quite a bit, it’s very unlikely that the file will be recoverable.
We’ve covered using the ntfsundelete and photorec tools to do this from a Ubuntu live CD or USB drive.
The Quicker, Riskier Way to Recover a Deleted File
If you’d like to get a deleted file back but it isn’t extremely important and you don’t want to go to much additional effort, you can do it the easier, riskier way. Just install a file-recovery tool likeRecuva, from the makers of the popular CCleaner application. Use that application to scan your hard drive for deleted files and restore the one you want back, if you can find it.
This is riskier because it involves writing to the drive. When you install a tool like Recuva on the drive, it’s possible that you could overwrite the deleted file’s data with the Recuva program data. It’s also possible that other programs running in the background could write to disk and overwrite the data. All it takes is for a portion of the file to be overwritten, and the file may become completely corrupt.
Professional Data Recovery
If the data was particularly business-critical, you don’t have any backups, and you failed to recover it, you may want to consider a professional data recovery service. First things first: Power off the computer immediately if it’s not already off. The longer the computer runs, the more data will be written to its hard drive and the less chance you’ll have of recovering it.
Professional data recovery services deal with everything from dying hard drives that need to be disassembled to recover data to deleted and overwritten files. These services can be extremely pricy and will cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars, so they’re not the ideal solution. However, if you have extremely important data that you can’t recover or replace and you’re willing to pay up, this is an option available to you. Of course, these services can’t guarantee anything — they may be unable to recover your data. They’ll also probably charge you for their work even if they ultimately can’t recover your data.
Avoiding Deleted File Scares
The best way to ensure you’ll never have to recover a deleted file is to perform regular backups. Even just enabling the File History or Windows Backup functionality in your version of Windows will give you some peace of mind. If you store your documents in Dropbox or a similar service or have them backed up to an online location, you’ll also have a backup. All these backup options also allow you to restore previous versions of files.
It’s still possible for a file to be deleted, but if you’re performing regular backups, you won’t lose much data. You’ll have much more luck restoring backups than recovering deleted files. Backup services are cheaper than professional data recovery services, too.
Deleted files aren’t necessarily gone forever, but they’re not always easy to recover. As solid-state drives are used in more and more new computers, proper backup procedures are becoming even more important.
