You know, if you are trying to workout, lose weight, and be healthy this is a huge part of the solution. A lot of people are struggling with health and the easiest solution is to sleep more. Ahhh, Sleep. I saw a post on FB the other day talking about how much each astrologic sign needs to function, and while funny and fun to think about, was clearly full of crap. I, personally, am a Gemini and it says that I routinely get either 2 hours or 12 hours. While this is only partially true, it is terrible. An easy way to denigrate your health is to sleep inconsistently for a long period of time.
Picture this basic anecdotal thought process. Keep in mind, there is no science in the next few sentences, just logic. When you are sick, you sleep more. I do, at least. I choose to think that I need that extra sleep so that my body can heal itself when I damage it, and it is telling me to take it easy on it for a few days by giving me a cough, congestion and overall crappiness (not a fever, though, if you have a fever, then you are sick. Exhaustion is not a cause of fever.) So therefore, I think that if I sleep enough each night, then I am doing that healing as I go, so I get sick less often.
Now, that unscientific thought process is not entirely off base. Your body does require a certain amount of sleep each night to allow for cell repair, electrolyte movement, calcium absorption and reabsorption, blood replenishment, clotting factor stabilization, and the list goes on. So, it makes sense that if you do not allow the body to do these things, you will get yourself in trouble.
The CDC and NIH have come up with a sort of cheater’s table for sleep that can be summarized pretty easily in two sentences. Kids need 10 hours of sleep and Adults need 7-8 hours of sleep, per night. (the table can be found here if you care) That is simple enough, right. Get 7 hours of sleep seems pretty reasonable actually.
So why can’t we do that? What is going on in our lives that makes it so that we cannot sleep enough. This is a valuable question for people to ask themselves. I know, personally, that I work a crazy schedule involving working 3 nights per week and getting up with children early in the morning the other days of the week. I switch myself back and forth from a day schedule to a night schedule every week. So, what does that do to me.
This causes periods of what is commonly known as micro sleep is a term that easily explains the period of “What? What just happened?” that occur frequently to people when they do not get enough sleep. If you have ever read 3/4 of a page in a book and realize that you don’t know what it said and cannot remember it, that is probably what it was. The common examples are driving and not remembering, dozing at a desk for about 10 seconds, then having ambient noise wake you up, and of course, playing on your phone in bed, and dozing off just long enough to have the screen go black and you have to reswipe in.
So what do we do? We get more sleep. We do our best to be in a sleepy place in a sleepy mood and ready for sleep about 7.5 hours before we HAVE to wake up in the morning. For me, when I do not work, it means that I need to go to bed at 12:00 or so every night, and to be honest, that seems perfectly fine and adult. When I work, it means that I need to be in bed by 9:30 am or so. It’s something to shoot for.
The Healthy Us 