With Spring Forward recently behind us and the ensuing Monday morning pain of getting up an hour earlier while pretending I’m really not, I got to thinking about being robbed of one more hour of sleep.
According to the CDC insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic. I Googled “American sleep deficit” and got 30,300,000 hits. That’s millions of articles about Americans and their sleepiness and that doesn’t even cover all of them. So a bunch of studies tell us that as Americans, we are chronically sleep deprived. Do I really need to convince you that we’re not getting enough sleep to begin with? You’re probably tired right now and I’ll bet you didn’t get 8 solid hours last night. I know I sure didn’t.
Lack of sleep is implicated in weight gain, stress, depression, and time change in particular is implicated in a rise of heart attacks. Scary stuff…
So with all this bad news, what can we do to log more pillow time?
- Avoid caffeine and other chemical stimulants after 3pm to give your body time to process and eliminate it
- Avoid large meals too close to your bedtime. Digestion is different for everyone so I can’t tell you when to stop eating, but uncomfortably large meals will affect your ability to settle into sleep and stay asleep. We’ve all had it happen.
- Set a bedtime – Sounds like a no-brainer, but do you have a bedtime? If it sounds like this, “Well, I usually go to bed after…,” then the answer is no. If it sounds like, “I go to bed at 10:30 unless my kid is sick,” then the answer is yes.
- Cultivate a routine – Start a bedtime routine and stick to it. Set your alarm clock to remind you when it’s time to start your bedtime routine. I do this and I hate it, but I find it necessary or I continue to watch tv, work a puzzle, play on Facebook, etc.
- Log off – Make the first part of your bedtime routine to shut down all the screens in your area. Studies are continually released proving that the light from all our screen time is messing with our melatonin levels and ability to go to sleep. I still struggle with this as I tend to surf Facebook and Pinterest as a relaxation aid.
- Relax – After logging off, put on your jammies, wash your face, take your medicine and get all your other prep activities finished. Now do something to relax. Drink a cup of herbal tea, read a book, meditate, pray, snuggle up, whatever it is that relaxes your body and mind.
- Turn out the lights – Where you sleep needs to be dark. Really dark, like ‘can’t see your hand in front of your face’ dark. No street lights shining in the window, no night lights, no TV’s, no blinking battery chargers, no digital clocks or DVRs beaming the time at you all night long. Dark, dark, dark so your melatonin can do its job.
- Give yourself permission to rest – I know it sounds all hippy dippy, but we have really let this culture of busy-ness take over. It’s okay to take a break from the break-neck speed that is our world.
I think of the whole life rhythm as a bell curve or sine wave. Before you start your bedtime routine you’re sitting somewhere near the top of the bell. The bedtime routine is designed to get you to the bottom of the curve which is sleep. A ramping down of the excitement of the day into the relaxation and bliss that is sleep.
And while most of my tips above deal with the actual bedtime routine and getting to sleep, reducing stress and promoting relaxation during any part of the day can be helpful in getting to sleep. Here’s a good news article on how recent research is proving how massage helps sleep. #SleepWeek
I hope you find something interesting and helpful in this article/rant about sleep. And if you are as outraged and upset about the continuing insanity of changing the time, disrupting our health, and raising our risk of accidents and heart attacks twice a year you can join me in using #LeaveTheClockAlone and #AbolishTimeChange. Or you can sign one of the dozens of petitions that get started this time of year to try to get rid of time change.
Be well and give yourself permission to sleep and to rest.
♥
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