My promise to prioritize my sleep

Oct 12, 2013 · 2 minute read · Comments
sleepexerciserunningFrick Park

Despite my knowledge (both firsthand and from reading research results) that sleep is important to healthy living, I have been failing to get my optimal sleep for a long time now. There are several reasons of this, but I am taking steps to address each one of them.

Too many activities

I began the process of catching up on sleep today by sleeping almost all day. Abby and I had yesterday decided to cancel our hiking plan for today because we both felt tired and decided it was a good time to just rest. We both have a bad habit of doing too many activities and not getting enough down time.

I already mentioned some of the things I’m scaling down on: musical activities. Today was the Cool Hand Uke workshop and concert, both of which I had decided earlier to skip.

Night time distractions

I’m not sleeping as early or deeply as I should, because of not turning down the lights and getting off the computer at night. I’m going to change that.

In particular, social media at night are the worst. My decision today to take a break from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ will help a lot. Too much stimulation at night.

Exercise

There is a symbiotic relationship between sleep and exercise: the better the sleep, the more energy for stimulating exercise, and the more exercise, the more ready the body is to sleep in the evening.

Today, after I slept almost all day, I found myself with energy to go for a run (I’ve barely been running in the past week). To my surprise, I effortlessly kept going and going, and ended up doing ten miles, no problem, in Frick Park and Summerset.

It was huge confirmation to me, that just catching up on sleep enabled me to enjoy a ten-mile run when I’ve barely been feeling like running at all in the past week.

Conclusion

I’m going to keep up good habits in order to improve my life. Sleep is the number one priority that I believe will benefit everything else.