“your entire system gets rebooted once you start giving it the proper rest it needs.”
5 minute read
Ask yourself honestly: Are you getting enough sleep? Do you get groggy at 2 pm for no reason? Do you experience unreal stressors or anxiety attacks for no explainable reason? Are you experiencing fat gains or muscle loss for no reason? Or maybe you just aren’t putting on the amount you think you should? If so, you’ll want to read this post.
As Shakespeare said, “Sleep, the main course in life’s feast, and the most nourishing”. If you haven’t heard anything like this about sleep before, you must’ve been living under the largest rock known to man. Sleep is essential and not many people get enough of it. I, myself, have fallen victim to thinking that I could get up and be extremely productive with limited sleep and have been proven wrong on countless occasions.
A day where you only get 4,5 or 6 hours of sleep might be required for a certain period of time, but after that short window, you need to make sure that you fall back into a good rhythm of 7-9 hours a night. Everyone is different. Some may function well on 7 or feel groggy, and vice versa for any amount of time in the 7-9 hour window. The key is to try out adding half an hour increments until you find the right amount of time that works for you.
For example, I find that waking up before the sun gives me a huge boost of energy. This is extremely difficult with my lifestyle because I have not been a morning person for most of my life, as I’m sure most of you can relate to that. Some people may find it easier to go to bed around 8 or 9, but no matter how much energy I expend during the day, the earliest I can seem to fall asleep regularly after putting in a ton of expedient work is around 9:30-10. If you can regularly manage a time around 8-10 pm, props to you. For you guys falling asleep at 8 pm, you can beat the sun everyday, wake up at 5, and get 9 hours of awesome sleep.
For most people, falling asleep at 8 is either impossible or conflicts with their schedule, relationship, or energy in one way or another. If you fall into this category, look into a few of the following things to improve how well you fall asleep at night, which in turn, improves your energy tremendously during the day:
Things you can easily do to help your sleep quality
- Look into blue light blocking glasses(helps shield the blue light from all of your electronic devices) which actually hampers how your circadian rhythm operates if you watch TV or scroll through social media past the sunset. I love Felix Gray, but if you do not like the designs, check out Jade Black.
- Make your bedroom pitch black, get amazing curtains, put your phone in the next room over, no digital alarm clocks, and take anything else that permits light out of where you sleep. All of the external light except for sunlight hurts the quality of sleep that you achieve.
- Stop eating food 3 hours before you go to bed(especially processed or sugary foods) and stop drinking 2 hours before bed(water, alcohol, milk, juice, whatever). Multiple studies have shown that eating or drinking keeps your digestion system and other internal organs active and makes your body believe it needs to expend this energy, which will also hurt the quality of sleep you achieve.
Why is this so important??
You may not realize it, but the quality of sleep that you achieve is so important to all of your body’s functions and tasks that you want to get done the following day.
If you get terrible sleep, your metabolism is slower, which means that you add more fat than you otherwise would.
If you get terrible sleep, your overall energy sucks, causing you to rely on processed and faster to make foods more, which causes you to miss out on workouts because you don’t have any energy because all processed foods drain your energy by not actually filling you up, but that’s an entirely different post.
If you get terrible sleep, your mood is worse and your anxiety/depression/mental blockers are worse than they would be if you got great sleep.
If you get terrible sleep, then the gains that you thought you made from the workout that you put in today will not be as prominent. In fact they will barely take effect. As I’m sure most of you know, muscle doesn’t repair itself and get stronger during your workout. It actually heals when you are sleeping.
So what are you doing still getting terrible sleep? I challenge you to do at least numbers 2 & 3 above for at least tonight to see the massive difference it has on your sleep, body, mood, and happiness.
There are a myriad of benefits to great sleep, and your entire system gets rebooted once you start giving it the proper rest it needs.
Comment down below if you guys have any other advice on how to achieve fabulous, mental boosting, energy boosting, joyful sleep.
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As always, follow us on social media and continue to improve yourself one minutiae at a time. Love you guys. Keep up the great work. And get some goddamn sleep!!