Wellbeing Weekly Tip#1: Early to bed and early to rise...

Everywhere we look, we receive strong cultural messages that equate rest with laziness, where industry at all costs is praised over recognizing and honouring your body’s boundaries. A crash and burn approach, so to speak – like running a marathon at sprint speed. As any runner would point out, that’s a crap strategy if you actually want to finish the race, leave alone have a shot at winning.

As a mother with two kids below 5 when the pandemic hit, I was already an expert in getting along with limited or interrupted sleep. Or so I thought. And then I hit a hard wall. In May of last year, I felt depleted, exhausted and empty inside. I was out of ideas to help myself. When I turned to a wellness expert for help, her first question was ‘What’s your sleep like?’ Huh? I thought. I was there to figure out how to manage my energy & schedule so I could find more time, what did sleep have to do with it? Well, my iPhone tracker showed I had slept an average of 3.7hrs that month. I’d seen the stat before but as someone who’d pulled many all-nighters through college and lately as a nursing mom, I didn’t see anything wrong with it.

If you are like me, you probably thought of sleep simply as a luxury, something we try and fit in when we have time left over. But what we don’t realize is that when we sleep, our body undergoes a complex restorative process of flushing out toxins, replenishing oxygen reserves, consolidating our memories and learnings from the day, processing our emotions, regulating the hormones in our body and harnessing the awesome power of a complex, biodiverse ecosystem to rebalance and have us ready & functioning at optimum the next day. And our body needs this restorative process to run nightly, on schedule. By sleeping, we are powering our batteries so we can create maximum impact the next day - physically, socially and emotionally.

So, armed with some advice and tips on creating a routine that worked for me, I experimented with resetting my relationship with sleep. I was used to waking up early and enjoyed it. I focused on getting to bed in time. I bought a small reading light and banned devices from the bedroom. I turned in at 10pm. I stopped coffee after 2pm. We gave up Netflix at the start of this year. For many, many, MANY weeks, I simply lay in bed reading or thinking, restless without the usual distractions of work or entertainment on my phone and with a distinct feeling I was wasting what precious time I had. Then it got easier over time to slip quickly into sleep. Forward to today – I’m averaging 6.9hrs this year. With a pre-schooler who still wakes up at nights, I’ll take that.

I know many of us have struggled and perhaps are still struggling with the disruptions caused by this pandemic and the burden it has placed on our shoulders – and it’s tempting to rush in and look to fix it all at once. But take a pause – you can’t run a marathon at sprint speed.

Getting sufficient rest is like putting your oxygen mask on first, or taking strategic water breaks to refresh. It helps you be at your optimal and fully present to respond capably to the needs of the situation. It may decrease the hours you have available on a calendar, but that's an illusion - sleep increases your cognitive & emotional regulation capacity exponentially, giving back many fold in quality what you invest in quantity. Sleep creates performance leverage, period.

Added bonus? With the dark circles gone, you don’t need to dial up ALL the way on that Zoom touch-up feature!

I'm keen to hear your stories. What has been your relationship with sleep this year? And what has worked for you?