Most of you are probably thinking I'm going to reveal some secret regarding how to cheat in some areas of life. In a way you'd be right, but this is not the cheating you're looking for.
It's not a secret that this year for me is about big changes and the biggest is my health and lifestyle. For the past two years I've been pretending to prioritize these two, but obviously if you don't take it seriously and work towards your goals every damn day, you get nowhere and that's exactly what's been happening for the past two years, till November last year, when I said enough is enough and started my wight loss journey for real.
Losing weight was only one thing on my list. The other, just as important as losing weight was fixing my sleep. You would think this is the easiest, as all you have to do is switch off the light and sleep and I wish it would be so easy, but it is not. Have been struggling with light sleep for years, then my switch off time got delayed slowly and got to after midnight and the two combined resulted in me waking up every morning like hit by a truck, even after 7h sleep. When you wake up and feel like being dead, your only wish is to survive the day and go to sleep, but the next morning you wake up just as tired as before and this never stops.
One solution is to seek medical help, but once tell them your problem, the first thing they do is send you to a psychologist, so no thanks, I'd rather try to find a solution on my own, which I did.
There's common knowledge that the sleep you have before midnight counts a lot, they say that's when you rest the most and that was my main goal. In order to achieve that, I gave up trading the NY pm session. This was necessary as I needed my brain to rest, but this was not all. In order to fully disconnect my brain from almost everything that's happening, I needed to log off way earlier than I used to and go to sleep at around 10pm.
Lucky me, my body and mind reacted well to the changes and I'm pleased to say I can get at least one hour sleep before midnight and sleep through the night, without waking up at 3am.
You can see, I've been able to get 7h of sleep every night during the past week and even before, but for the post, I'm only showing data for the past week.
Where I'm failing is waking up time. For some reason the app says the am, ideal waking up time is 7 am but I'm waking up at 6am or even before, every morning, on my own. My body says that's enough and can't sleep more. What is important to mention here is that I am waking up well rested, full of energy, which is priceless. This shows again that quality beats quantity.
Whenever I tested my sleep, the results I got was always the same. I think there was one single case, when I got a balanced sleep, meaning I got the deep sleep and light sleep ratio right. Don't ask me how as that's a mystery, but it was one single case. I gave up monitoring my sleep as it was frustrating to see the same results over and over again, but maybe I should give it a try now, that I've managed to go to sleep early (compared to the period before this) and I am waking up well rested. Let's see if I get better results now.
This is not just statistics though, the reason why I wanted to fix my sleep is ... well, quality of life I'd say, to be able to get more organized and efficient. At the end of the day, not how much you work counts, but how much you achieve and you can only do that if you're fully focused. This is a chain reaction, or better said, one thing is linked to another and to be fully focused, you need energy, a lot of it, which depends on quality sleep as well.
It's easy to let yourself corrupted by a good movie, a night out (for some every night), drinking, eating too much, too late and could go on endlessly, with examples, how you can sabotage yourself, but if you want results, you need discipline too.
Another thing that I knew it is affecting me is inadequate temperature. We had a (they call it) heatwave the past two weeks, affecting most of Europe and while it did not kill me, knew it's affecting me. I can function better if the temperature stays below 25C, even lower and this is something I can't really control. It is how I am wired and no matter what you call me, I don't think I'll ever be able to get used to 35C - 40C temperatures. This year having air conditioning helped me a lot in fixing my sleep.
All in all I'm really happy I've been able to achieve quite a lot regarding both my weight loss and sleep. You can burn the candle on both ends, thinking it makes you look cool in others' eye, but you're burning your health and paying later for it, that's for sure. Fixing your health requires a lot of discipline, I can tell you that, but totally worth it.
Waking up full of energy and getting everything done and still having time and energy for other things is priceless and if I can achieve that on my own, I'll do whatever it takes, no matter what others say.
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