Marrying the love of your life is truly an exciting moment in time, and if planning to host the wedding you’ve always dreamed of at a distant locale, it can only appreciably enhance the excitement. While there’s a good chance your destination wedding is bound to require significant travel – and likely require a generous portion of your savings too – you want to make sure you’re awake and alert once you arrive at your journey’s end in order to fully enjoy the once-in-a-lifetime event. Preparing for a destination wedding clearly will take some detailed planning, and as part of your regiment of details, you might want to add these few tips into the mix that may help to reduce fatigue and enable you to feel energized on your very special day.
Maintaining healthy sleep habits is of primary concern in reducing fatigue, and though challenging during travel, it is highly doable. If you’re flying to your destination wedding, a contributing factor that causes fatigue or sleepiness is jet lag. Although it’s not always possible to avoid jet lag, there are a few things you can do to help rid yourself of the exhausted feeling a little quicker.
Jet lag isn’t simply a feeling of being exhausted, but rather associated to what’s called circadian misalignment. What this means is that the natural sleep-awake cycle of the body is out of sync with the traveled to destination. In other words, the sleepy feeling of jet lag commonly occurs during the day and causes sleepless nights. A way to elude this unpleasant occurrence is to adjust your sleep-awake cycle prior to making the journey.
Another practice to lessen the effect is if you’re flight is scheduled for an afternoon or early evening arrival, avoid napping and stay awake until your normal bedtime. Be sure, however, that you adjust your normal bedtime to coincide with the new destination’s time zone. Sleeping while traveling may be helpful too, but only if it is within your normal sleep hours attuned to the time of your final stop. Also, during the planning process, be sure to pre-plan time for naps, at least for the first day or so, if you’re arriving several days before the nuptial date. This could work wonders when the big day arrives.
Using light to help you adjust is another trick. Natural light conveys to the body when to sleep or awake. Spending awake time in the sun helps your body clock – or circadian rhythm – adapt to the new setting. As the sun sets and retiring draws near, hop into bed with all lights out and curtains drawn. This will send appropriate signals to your brain, which ultimately should help you sleep soundly.
Another facet of obtaining sound rest is to take note of your diet. Traveling to new places usually involves trying new foods. Spicy meals or meals that are not too agreeable might cause some digestive issues, and combining that with jet lag could undoubtedly affect your sleep. Overeating could create a few problems as well.
If you still find yourself lying in bed wide awake after trying a variation of these prescribed methods, one other aspect important to sound slumber that shouldn’t be overlooked is to make sure you have a comfortable mattress. Whereas it may be somewhat challenging to assure mattress quality when traveling, sleeping on one in your own household prior to your departure may be the best you can do, if you’ve already made the investment, which almost guarantees great rest prior to leaving home for the trip. Although it’s greatly impractical taking your comfortable pad on your excursion, owning a mattress of high quality is, nevertheless, always a good asset. After all, it’s something you and your spouse will be sharing together for many years.
A final tip that may be beneficial and could lead to a restful night is to have fun! Take a long walk with your partner beside the shoreline or through the city, partaking in pleasurable activities along the way. Depending on what you do, it may be tiring enough to get you to sleep well the night before the festivities begin.
Once the formalities of the wedding ceremony have concluded and the reception toasting and congratulatory speeches are given, the extra effort in preparing for your destination wedding and your devotion to getting restful sleep should have you reeling with energy, allowing you to achieve maximum enjoyment on a very important day in your life.
