The Value of Sleep
Submitted by 60 IN 3 Blog
One of the things I’ve been struggling with for the past four months is getting enough sleep. For a variety of reasons, most of them my own fault, I’ve been getting 5 to 6 hours per sleep a night, and that’s just not enough. I’ve noticed a number of effects from this:
- Tiredness during the day (duh!) leading to nodding off in meetings and social events.
- Poor focus at work
- Occasional irritability
- Poor decision making at times
- Greater tendency for binge eating
- Greater need for artificial stimulants like caffeine and chocolate
Needless to say, this has made my goals a lot harder to accomplish. So I’m taking a few steps to remedy the situation.
Step 1 - Bed by 10!
I wake up every day at 6:30am. So if I want to get a good 8 hours of sleep, I need to be in bed by 10pm at the latest. Sure, some days I won’t be able to do that, but I want those days to be the exception where I’m doing something fun and important and not the rule, where I stay up late surfing the internet.
Step 2 - New Bed
So long old mattress. Hello new bed! My current sleeping arrangement is very poorly setup. It’s too soft in some areas, the pillow setup is bad and the whole mattress is damaged thanks to the lovely Daisy, also known as super puppy! Time to get something new and this time do a bit more research on it.
Step 3 - No Eating Late
This is an obvious one but I’ve been a bit lax with it lately. No more really late dinners.
Step 4 - No Drinking Late
I’m cutting out the caffeine anyway, but I’m also going to try to cut down on the water consumption after 8 or 9pm. This is to avoid the inevitable trip to the bathroom at about 4am.
Step 5 - Bedroom Rearrangement
My bedroom is both my place of sleep and my place of work. I think this is a bad idea. It should be one and not the other. I’m going to rearrange a few things, get rid of my desk and turn the bedroom into a place of relaxation, not stress.
Step 6 - A Sound Experiment
I’m going to experiment with white noise makers as well as music. I want to see if either one will make a difference in my sleep patterns.
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I’m hoping that all of these things added together will make for a much better night’s sleep.
