I mentioned in my recent #noloafingloseit post that I wasn't sleeping very well. The last few nights I've been getting a sleep score lower than 70.
This is incredibly low for me, even when my toddler wasn't sleeping through the night well I would squeak out a 75-80.
I'm almost 100% sure that stress is the factor that is affecting my sleep. I'm moving better lately, but with all the death and pain around my community, the financial insecurity, family changes, etc. Stress is still creeping in.
How important it sleep anyway? It reminded me of a short article that Peter Attia posted a couple of years ago about sleep.
For Peter, sleep is the most important factor to long term health, higher in his list than either diet and exercise.
That means for me today, I need to get my sleep on track before anything else. So how do I reduce the stress?
Well some factors are easy to reduce with mental tests/exercises.
For the financial insecurity side I can do the "what's the worse that could happen", and typically get my head under control. Its accepting the decisions of others, especially those that I don't have direct influence over, that I have a hard time with. Especially when those decisions greatly affect my life and family.
I'm talking about the decisions of elected and appointed policy makers. These are the stress factors that I have a harder time to working through.
I need some help with this. What are some of the practices that you have found worked well to manage stress? Especially the kind of stress that keeps you up at night.
Cheers,
NL
