It's been awhile, I know, friends. Our school year started, and I stepped back from ye old blog to focus on our work for awhile.
We've now completed three weeks and seem to have found our rhythm, so I'm dusting off the computer and getting back to work here. Lots of things are in the works here at the Circus right now, and I'm excited to tell you about them....just not quite yet. Soon, I promise!
For today, I wanted to talk a bit about something a little bit more serious - a follow up to this post. There will be a couple of follow ups, actually, but for today, I'd like to sit down and talk about something that's near and dear to my heart right now: sleep.
Now, I know what you're all thinking: "Sleep? Who needs sleep? Well, you're never gonna get it!" (You're welcome for the earworm).
But, all joking aside, guess what?
*You* need sleep.
Yes, you.
*Cue the laughter*, right?
I used to laugh, laugh, laugh when someone would suggest that I'd try to get more sleep. I mean, how silly is that, right? The dishes and laundry won't wash themselves. The kids wake up all night long. Husband's alarm goes off too early and wakes you up. I know, I know. I get it. That's my life, too - there's always too much to do and not enough time, and the first thing and easiest thing to sacrifice is sleep.
I mean, there's always better luck tomorrow, right?
Wrong.
If you're dealing with health issues, even something as "simple" as cycle irregularities or heavy periods or a seemingly inability to lose weight, one of the absolutely imperative things that you must do is to take a good, objective look at your sleeping habits.
Are you spending less than 7-8 hours in bed every night? (I know, I used to laugh at this, too).
Are you waking up often?
Do you struggle to get back to sleep when you've woken up?
Are you tired and cranky during the day?
Do you reach for caffeine all.day.long just to get through the day? (believe me, y'all, I know. I used to drink 1-2 pots of coffee A DAY BY MYSELF).
Does it take you a long time to fall asleep at night?
These are just a few of the questions you can use to evaluate your sleeping habits - you can easily pull back even further and take a look at other health-related symptoms to see if your sleeping might be part of the solution. Like I mentioned above, cycle and weight issues could be related to sleep. Your immune system can be affected by your sleep (or lack thereof). Cardiac problems like high blood pressure and an increased risk of heart disease are linked to sleep deprivation. Diabetes and kidney function are linked to sleep deprivation.
Brain function and our ability to make decision, learn new skills, and be creative are all related to sleep deprivation. Sleep issues have also been linked to emotional struggles, like depression, suicide, and controlling our emotions.
Sleep affects our hormone production and our body's response to them, which is why women can have their sleep struggles show up in their monthly biofeedback, aka their period. Our hormones also control things like our ability to feel hungry and full. Have you ever noticed that you want to eat more when you're sleep deprived? That's because our bodies are unable to stabilize hormone production and our response to them. Sleep normalizes appetite.
Sleep improves insulin sensitivity and decreases your risk for diabetes. It stabilizes your cortisol levels - and cortisol levels that are all out of whack are very, very much going to be an obstacle that will be hard to overcome, no matter what diet or exercise program you decide to try. If you're not sleeping, those programs will not be truly successful.
It's during sleep that our body heals and repairs our vessels and brain pathways. During sleep is when repairs are made to our cells.
To keep it short and simple: Who needs sleep? You do. You need sleep.
Okay, so we've got that covered: You need sleep. I need sleep. Most likely, we need more sleep. It seems to be that the "magic number" for sleep for most adults is between 7-8 hours of shut eye a night. If you're anything like me, that number seems insurmountable and completely unattainable.
So, how do we get there? How the heck do we, especially those of us with little ones at home or stressful jobs and lives, get 7-8 hours of sleep at night?
The official recommendations are usually along these lines:
- Reduce blue light in the hour before bed. This means no screens - even if it doesn't seem like it, those screens are stimulating our brains. Giving our brains an hour to "calm down" from the stress will usually lead to falling asleep faster and sleeping more soundly.
- Reduce caffeine and nicotine, especially in the 6 hours before bed. This one made m laugh so hard in years past.
- Develop a sleep routine and stick to it, even on the weekends. Basically, become a creature of habit, just like we do with our kids at bedtime. The kids know that when bath time comes, shortly after that, they'll have a story and then it'll be bedtime. We need to do the same for ourselves.
-Exercise and spend time outside each day.
-Possibly research and try supplements and/or herbal teas traditionally used as sleep aids. This can include things like melatonin, magnesium, and chamomile.
The lists usually include variants of these five suggestions, depending on your source. Almost all can be distilled down to leave you with this short list of suggestions. They seem so easy, but yet so very hard, don't they? That's what I thought, too. It seemed too easy, to simple, too basic to really get to the heart of my problem: I was exhausted and my body was showing it. How could something like an herbal tea or going outside *really* be enough to help me restore good sleep habits and truly effect my health?
Well, would you like a little bit of my personal experience and what worked for me?
Of course you would! Why else would you be reading the Circus blog? ;)
In all seriousness, this was something that I knew I needed to fix. I was unable to make it through the day without oodles of caffeine, I was waking up dozens of times at night, I'd struggle to make it through a day without falling asleep on the couch, I was unable to lose weight, even while restricting my caloric intake, and my period was whacky. Irregular in length, and so incredibly heavy that I'd be unable to leave the house on days 1 and 2 without both a super plus tampon AND an overnight pad (and then my errands had to be less than an hour in length, because I only had about an hour and a half before I'd soak through those).
Even after losing 40ish pounds, I was still struggling with this sleep issue. I was getting woken up multiple times a night by children, and struggling to get back to sleep after each wake up call. The next day, I felt like a zombie. I felt better than the year before, at least (weight loss will do that to you), but my cycle wasn't regulating, and I still *felt* crappy. Recovering from workouts became harder to do.
My coach and I started playing with my macros - feeding my body more carbs on a regular basis to try and support my thyroid, and with it, my hormone production. That helped some, but not enough. I started taking magnesium supplements as an additional support, trying to get those periods under control. Again, more help with those cycle irregularities, but there was an additional side effect - I started sleeping better. It was easier to fall asleep at night, and I started feeling more rested.
My girls still wake up every night, at least once. I don't think that's going away any time soon, so I had to take that into consideration when deciding on my next move to try and help support good sleep habits. My goal needed to be to focus on my quality and quantity of sleep, while not stressing out about the fact that I was likely not going to be sleeping through the night just yet.
I was already exercising most days, and since it was still nice out, I was getting outside almost every day. I was already taking magnesium, and wasn't really interested in any supplements like melatonin. I was still drinking at least a pot of coffee a day, though. I wasn't quite ready to give up my coffee habit, so I decided to focus on the next low-hanging fruit: blue light.
Now, like most of you (I'm guessing), I use my cell phone as my alarm. I needed to make sure that setting my alarm at night didn't lead to "quickly" checking my email, Facebook, and Instagram. I started using the "bedtime" function on my clock app (I have an iPhone) and setting it to remind me to get ready for bed at 10 pm. Every night, when that notification pops up, I try to finish up what I am doing, and walk into my room and plug that phone in next to my bed.
Then I walk away.
Mike and I had set 11 pm as our acceptable, "reasonable" time for bed when we'd talked about how to make sleep improvements when I first started thinking about it. With our kids going to bed by 9:30, we felt like 11 was a reasonable time for us to aim for - it gave us time to finish up chores and spend some quality time together before heading to bed. Because we homeschool and have always been more of a "relaxed morning" kind of family, the kids almost always sleep until 730/8 am on their own. I knew that if I went to bed at 11, I'd almost be guaranteed to be sleeping until 7 am before a kid woke me up for the day. That left me with a solid 8 hours in bed each night. Setting this schedule and reducing blue light exposure before bed became my goal.
I'm happy to report that *most* nights, I was successful. I still have some nights here and there where I'm not able to meet these goals. Those are the anomaly now, though.
At this point, I'd started supplements, reduced blue light exposure, and set up a committed sleep schedule. Now it was time to reduce caffeine, right?
Umm, not quite. I still wasn't ready to give up my afternoon coffee.
I needed to set up a sleep routine first, silly! I had a basic schedule, but other than getting rid of my phone, I didn't really have a routine for getting ready for bed. That became my next goal.
The routine that I've landed on is a simple one - I like to keep it simple, so that it's easy to take with me on our travels. It also feels a little less overwhelming on a stressful day, too, knowing that I only have a few steps to accomplish to "achieve" my routine. Step one was walking away from my phone. Step two became brewing some tea - specifically this one. I take my tea and walk away from the kitchen - even if all of the chores are not done for the day. I curl up either on our living room couch or on my bed, with my tea and a book. Not a book on my phone or iPad. A real, solid, made-out-of-paper book. Guys, I even paid my library fine so that I could check out real books again!
I curl up with my tea, and read, until that tea is gone. That usually gets me until around 1030, and then it's time to get ready for bed, get the dogs ready for bed, and it's lights out.
Alright, so I had a sleep routine and schedule, I'd researched and started supplements, reduced blue light exposure, and I was exercising and getting outside almost every day. It was finally time to attack the caffeine habit.
This is still a work in progress for me, because I'm not actually a big fan of most hot teas. I keep trying, but most of the time I just feel like a cup of tea is coffee's wannabe cousin who tries really hard to be cool but just can't quite cut it. I know, I know, I can't be a real health nut without loving tea, but I just can't do it. I'll keep trying, but other than that Mystic Monk tea at bedtime? I just don't like it.
I started experimenting with other drinks to get me through that afternoon coffee habit - I found a decaf coffee that I actually liked from a local coffee shop. I experimented with things like golden milk lattes (which I love now). I'm still working on it, but most days, I'm finding that less caffeine leaves me feeling MORE energized and less cranky.
So, did giving up my excess coffee habit help?
Guys.
GUYS.
Let me tell you how it's helped:
- I don't struggle to get out of bed most mornings. I used to have a really good relationship with my snooze button. Now I only use it if I happen to wake the baby up and need to get her back to sleep but don't want to fall back to sleep myself.
- There's not a mid-afternoon slump anymore. I used to think that I abso-freaking-lutely needed that afternoon coffee just to get through until bedtime. Now, I make myself a hot golden milk latte because I enjoy the time to sit and drink a hot beverage, NOT because I need a jolt to get through the rest of the day.
- My workouts are better and recovery faster.
- I'm not mindlessly munching throughout the day.
- Life is, overall, just more fun than it was when I was so tired all of the time. I'm taking my little three on adventures and playing with them again by myself. BY MYSELF. No big kids for help! I cannot tell you how shocking this is to me - just know that even a few months ago, the idea of taking the three on my own somewhere was completely and totally overwhelming. Not gonna happen then, I can guarantee you that. They haven't changed all that much.....the change has been my mood and energy levels.
- Now, this last metric is a bit harder to isolate as being related only to sleep, because I've also increased my food intake over the last three months (I'm climbing out of a deficit right now, to give my body time to recover before starting a weight loss phase again), and I started taking the magnesium as a way to help support my cycle health, but guys. GUYS, let me tell you how my cycle has changed since focusing on sleep. I went from a 21-28 day cycle that had luteal phases (the part of your cycle after ovulation) anywhere from 6-10 days long to a solid 26 day cycle with 10 day luteal phases. Every single month it's the same now. I'd love to see that luteal phase stretch a little bit more, but I'm working on it still. 10 days is the lowest "normal" length, so I'm back in the target zone again. But even more importantly? That crazy heavy flow that kept me at home every month on days 1 and 2? GONE. I'm no longer taking Motrin around the clock to reduce blood flow and cramps. This month I have not even taken one dose. Regular tampons are enough - none of that doubling up on tampons and pads stuff. This month, my period was SYMPTOM FREE. No cramps. No back ache. No GI struggles. No cravings. No bloating. No PMS. Nothing. Sleep, y'all. It does wonders for your hormone regulation.
Is it worth it to me to leave dishes in the sink at night now? You betcha.
Is it worth it to unplug at 10 pm and possibly miss some big excitement online? Yeppers.
Is it worth it to replace that afternoon coffee with a golden milk latte? Without a doubt.
Sleep.
Sleep has drastically changed my life - and health - for the better, and I can see it in my chart, my weight loss, my emotional health, and in my energy levels.
So......"Who needs sleep?"
I do.
You do.
Our bodies crave it. Give in to the craving. This time it's okay, I promise.
******
Struggling with sleep and getting enough of it? Shoot me a message and I'll try to troubleshoot solutions for you!
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