Take advantage of the Christmas period to refresh your contract beds

The approach of the new year means that you can look at your business with a fresh pair of eyes. You can start to consider how you might improve the accommodations and contract beds to attract more prospective tenants or guests. Millbrook Contract Beds believes that the hospitality industry and student accommodation can benefit from getting rid of any bedroom furniture to give a new lease of life to the room. You can take this opportunity to start replacing any contract beds that are near the end of their life; no-one likes sleeping on an old and uncomfortable contract bed! Continue reading »

Studies in sleep – conclusions drawn from blogs this week

Now that we have introduced you to the common sleep factor problems students encounter and the potential solutions to them Millbrook Contract Beds would like to lend itself to recommendations on how student residences and students houses can help in their ongoing battle with optimising sleep – our answer is academic contract beds.

Of course, sometimes its not up to the individual student and mostly down to landlords and residential lettings in terms of bed quality but as a student you have a right to demand a decent bed. Just because they’ve given you some dust-mite ridden ten year old mattress and cheap wooden slat base doesn’t mean you can’t demand better.

Our recommendations are that you select genuine academic contract beds intended for the very purpose of making your sleeping life easier and effortless. Millbrook specialise in contract beds that are handmade to create the ultimate in luxury sleep. Our 60 years experience has given us the blueprint from which to base our incomparable designs. When it comes to the comfort needs of the academic industry we offer our Academic Collection.

The Campus

The Campus is a smart design that features open coil springs and a standard comfort level. This tends to be the most popular bed for halls of residences, student accommodations and hostels. The mattress has a fresh design in an easy to clean stitchbond cover. The bed frame is available with fixed or detached legs. It’s worth investing in a durable bed for student housing because you want the beds to last beyond just one student stay.

The Conference

Meet the bed that is ideal for space-saving! The Conference has an open coil mattress on a metal skid leg base. With a wipe clean breathable mattress cover that can be leaned time and time again. The fabric which we use dissipates body heat too. No night sweats here! It contains high levels of woollen felt to ensure comfort levels are maintained.

The Residence

Sometimes all you need for those short-term student stays are beds that are reliable and efficient. The Residence has a PVC mattress cover and is highly practical and durable in many types of locations. It’s a hard wearing and comfortable design. It’s also ideal for wipe clean hygiene purposes.

This collection combines practicality, comfort and economy to create an ideal sleep scenario for younger persons who need to get a good night’s sleep.

We can only offer the most comfortable option for students to help them get the best sleep possible, but it is up to the individuals to make sure they regulate their sleep environments to make them fit for a peaceful night ahead.

Get rid of the distractions in the room, set yourself regular sleep hours and avoid all the pitfalls of sleep affecting behaviour.

This Millbrook Contract Beds signing off for the weekend. Good sleeping to everybody!

An Education in Sleep

In our last blog we discussed the problems that have been documented by scientific studies and surveys regarding the nature of student sleep cycles for both children and teenagers. Students tend to sleep odd hours due to their thirst for nocturnal awareness and activity. Millbrook Contract Beds has very much been interested in exploring these problems further and finding the solutions to what could be described as an epidemic of sleep deprivation for the youth of today.

Following on from our introduction in the previous blog now we want to get into exploring the potential solutions to this problem. For students of all ages – teenagers or even those in their twenties – here’s some advice to help you to focus on, absorb and retain information imparted to you in class through better sleep routines.

1. Revision is a necessity for some students and a pre-requisite of any major course at college or university. We recommend that you stop your revision a good hour or two before you want to sleep. You brain needs to wind down and in order to process everything you have been studying over the course of the evening it needs adequate sleep time.

2. Exercise is a great option, especially if you’re already sporty. It’s a perfect way to reduce stress levels and tire you out to help sleep.

3. One major problem that students seem to frequently cause themselves sis eating heavy ad unhealthy meals just before bed – whether they do this in a drunken stupor or simply because they are pressed for time, it spells bad things for your sleep. Don’t eat a heavy meal too close to bedtime or your body will not be able to relax due to the digestion and acids churning around in your stomach. This is why many people suffer with heartburn during the night.

4. A simple piece of advice is to completely avoid caffeinated drinks such as tea, coffee, or fizzy drinks after 6pm. These only serve to unnecessarily stimulate you when you should be winding down.

5. Enjoy a glass of milk before bed instead. Milk contains a chemical called tryptophan which is an essential component of the body’s sleep mechanism. This is a highly recommended technique, especially if you like to have a cold drink before bed – forget the alcohol and fizzies – and say yes to milk!

6. Make sure your room is entirely prepped to go dark when your lights go out. Complete darkness helps you to feel as though you are already on your way to sleep (like a general form of hypnosis) and there is nothing left to distract your eyes. Turn off all electronics so there are no lights or blinks or beams within eyeshot – yes, this includes mobiles. No one should need to call you in the middle of the night!

7. A strange but effective tip is to wear socks to bed. Feet have the poorest circulation in the body and therefore heat escapes from your body this way. Warm comfort is key though this is not to be confused with making yourself hot. Too hot or too cold can be just as bad as each other.

8. Ever tried counting sheep when you have had trouble getting to sleep? The night before an exam can cause a lot of stress and keep you awake as the anxiety gets to you. Try counting sheep. It focuses the mind on a mundane task instead of your worries and stresses. Although it is recommended that if you really cannot sleep you should get up and do something to make yourself feel naturally tired such as read a book.

9. Try to avoid the presence of TV, co mputers in your bedroom unless of course you don’t have anywhere else for them to be as it can be all too tempting to  take a peek at Facebook or your email instead of sleeping– we do realise this is the least likely tip to ever be taken up by a student. Internet access and televisions are such commonplace in a student room that it would hardly be a student room without them. But see if you can do without them for a day and see how you do.

10. The night before an exam can be a very stressful one. Often the adrenaline keeps you awake and sees yout rhough into the next day. Our only recommendation is that you don’t start taking sleep medication to assist you. Unless you have a diagnosed sleep disorder and have been recommended by a doctor to take it you don’t need it.

And those are our top tips for student survival when it comes to sleep and study. In the next part in this blog series we will talk about sleeping environments and the academic contract beds we have designed to optimise sleep for those who have educational commitments.

We’ll see you soon. In the meantime please follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Students Need Sleep – An Introduction to Catching Zzzz’s

Poor sleep can affect a student’s grades, motivation, concentration and their emotional state. With more and more stories popping up in the news about 11-20 year old age groups suffering in education simply because they do not have consistent sleep patterns Millbrook Contract Beds thought it was time to take a look at some of the issues behind this and some of the potential solutions.

Recent studies conducted in different countries by a range of highly respected sleep clinics has determined that younger persons really do need to get roughly 10 hours per night. That includes teenagers. Remember, their bodies and minds are still developing and to nurture that they need adequate sleep time.

College and university students are among the most sleep-deprived out of all demographics simply because of their 24 hour party lifestyle and then vigorous hours of study and research crammed in between. It can be seriously crippling to a young person. Many of these students settle having between 4-6 hours worth of sleep yet it is the first two and last two hours of sleep that matter most hence why 8 hours should be the minimum in order to fully recharge and reset.

The all-nighter is infamous as being an opportunity to study or an excuse to socialise, hard. Sleep deprivation has been proven to impair mental function and ultimately weaken the immune system. Sleep is essential, and has been scientifically proven, to maintain memory, mood, and overall cognitive performance.

If the students are still in school and under the roof of their parents then it up to the parents to enforce stricter bedtime rules and ensure their children are getting the hours required for them to be alert and aware come the morning ring of the school bell. However, once teenager reach 16 they begin to flirt with independence in their learning and education by choosing college and courses that suit their desires and pursuits. This is when they begin deciding what they want to do with their lives and how they choose to live them. Usually, bed time rules cease to apply to them and they begin making their own.

So if you’re a student and you’re independent from home without rules and restrictions from parents; stay with our blog this week for an in-depth exploration of how sleep can be optimised to help academic studies. We can help you achieve a better quality of sleep and fully realise your potential for absorbing more information in classes/lectures.

Ideally you should be getting 9 hours of sleep a night as a teenager. That won’t always be possible of course. Sometimes circumstances just make that impossible and we understand that.

If you want to be on top form in an exam then it’s essential you get a good night sleep. In the next part in this blog series we will tell you how!

Millbrook Contract Beds is dedicated to providing the best sleep experiences for everyone and we hope we can be of help in our blog from time-to-time. For academic contract beds please follow the link or for general sleep advice follow us on Twitter and the blog.

Student sleep cycles versus Millbrook contract beds

Sleep studies are suggesting that students of the college and university variety are losing sleep due to overindulgence in party lifestyles, bad diet regimes and ramshackle sleep cycles. This comes as no surprise to anyone we’re sure. Part of the attraction to being a student for younger people is the pure unadulterated freedom to act out and go wild. Millbrook Contract Beds would like to step in to give our two cents on this particular matter – and no we’re not old granddads without any sense of fun over here! We just know that sleep matters… A lot. Continue reading »