Human beings today are making demands on their bodies and their minds that are in conflict with their biological nature.” ~From Sleep Thieves, by Stanley Coren
We live in a go, go, go society. Energy drinks, coffee, and pastries have become the answer to sleepiness these days. We do not listen to our bodies when they tell us that we need to slow down and to relax. Our views on sleep have changed since the Industrial Revolution and especially with the invention of the lightbulb.
Now, we have all kinds of sunscreen and lotions that suppress the body’s natural production of melatonin. As a result, contributing to the body producing insufficient melatonin that is supposed to facilitate the transition to sleep. Our social lifestyle has evolved with the times with too many options when it comes to entertainment and the types of caffeinated drinks on the menu. Hence, being too active does contributes to how we choose to spend too much time staying up late and thus losing much of our sleep. With all these that are happening, it seems like we do not make sleep as a priority anymore.
Sleep is like the holy grail of all. Every single night it turns back the clock of time on us. Through sleep, it helps to repair our damaged cells and it rebalances our body’s hormones (Peterson & Werneburg, 2018). If all these are not occurring, without the natural process of healing to take place through sufficient sleep, we will be aging much faster because of all the damages that the body is undergoing.
The other thing sleep does for us, is to make us smarter. It cleans out our brain every night from toxins so when we wake up, our brain is on full steam ahead and it can serve us at its best. If these bad toxins are not cleaned out, it may lead to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease (Hamilton, 2013).
Sleep does not just keep us from being cranky, moody, and grumpy but it helps us to cope with stress and what life is hurling at us. Most of us, we are being thrown a great deal of things, it might be the challenges which we face at work, and even back home with our loved ones. It could also be some personal struggles which we may need to tackle from time to time. For some of us especially now during the Covid19 pandemic, the news that we read or hear every day could be quite depressing or even stressful.
With sleep, when we dream in our REM (rapid eye movement) sleep (Cleveland Clinic, 2020; Macmillan, 2017), we have a safe zone – our dreams are like a playground for our mind to throw out everything that we could not cope with (Suni, 2020), or did not digest during the day because maybe we are just too busy, or perhaps it was uncomfortable thinking about it. So when we dream, we have our mind digesting all those things. It is similar to cells being repaired; our mind is also being repaired through sleep (Eugene & Masiak, 2015). This helps us to be more resilient, to keep us going and to make us happy.
If we do not have sufficient sleep, we can become not just grumpy, but more depressed and anxious about how we view our life situation or how we take on challenges overtime (Harvard Health Publishing, 2009). If these sounds quite familiar to us, then we may want to consider the consequences of having insufficient sleep. Like how we spend time in building up a good relationship with others, having sufficient sleep also requires deliberate effort and time being set aside to establish a good relationship.
Here are three things which we could do to love our sleep more.
FOCUS ON OUR SLEEP
Managing our stressors throughout the day is important and not just in the morning or at night as this can affect our sleep. Journal your thoughts when we have something on our mind instead of compiling them until night time, before dumping it all out and expecting it to take care of itself.
Alternatively, penning down our thoughts can be an example of how we symbolically put our worries/ stresses down on paper (Davidson, 2015), so that we do not need to keep thinking about it when it is time for us to sleep. We could always address it in the morning or when the time comes.
LISTEN TO OUR SLEEP
Just like our car dashboard, when we see the light flashing, we will take our car to the mechanics right away. Hence, if we are not sleeping well, please listen to what our body is trying to hint to us and then try to find out what is the real problem. Understand the reason(s) why we may not be sleeping properly.
COMMUNICATE WITH OUR SLEEP
Most of the time we love our sleep, but we can be very frustrated with it and we can get angry with it. Write a letter to sleep. It might sound crazy, but first we can write a complaint letter to sleep. Telling sleep that we are so angry with it because it is never there for us when we need it (i.e. when we struggle to fall asleep). Our complaint could also be that sleep wakes us up early when we are still tired. If this is happening to us, then just tell sleep that we are frustrated about it.
We could also try to write a love letter. Telling sleep how much we miss it. How much we love that feeling when we get enough of it when we wake up the next morning. We could also share with sleep that it has been there for us throughout the night, and it is because of sleep, we now feel fantastic like a superman/ superwoman. Telling sleep how much we look better and able to think smarter just because of it and we will miss it when it is not there. It might seem silly, but it is an exercise that is amazing to do.
All in all, when we learn how to improve our relationship with sleep, our body, mind, and health will benefit from it.
Thank you for having a great relationship with sleep.
Author: Zoe Chu
Founder of Your Sleep BFF
All information is accurate at the time of publishing.