SLEEP
I am not a sleep expert and profess no expertise. The musings below are things I’ve noticed over the years, and are provided in the hope they will help others who are starting out as clueless as I did.
Fast Read:
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Sleep is essential to meeting your goals
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Napping can help you meet your daily sleep needs
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Experiment to determine your ideal sleep cycle
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Develop a sleep ritual
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Naptime can vary
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Eat after your nap
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The Details:
As it is for many people, sleeping is one of my favourite activities. But if you work out, sleep is essential. I found that I could not meet my goals without treating sleeping with the same discipline as eating and training.
We all know the dogma that adults need 7-9 hours of sleep each night, but I believe that one of the best things about being an adult is that you can stay up as late as you like, and most nights go to bed after 1AM. Indeed, late night is often my most productive time.
With 5 kids, not to mention work, wake-up is 7AM if I’m lucky! How to make-up the difference?
In architecture school I learned the fine art of napping. The only quiet time I could work in the studio was the middle of the night, but classes were during the day. Between the 2 turned out to be the perfect time for a restorative nap.
It took me a while to get the hang of it. I had to match my nap to my sleep cycle. If my nap was too short or too long I would wake up groggy rather than refreshed. It turned out that 1-hour was perfect for me, and now I don’t even need to set an alarm clock to wake up after about an hour.
I also had to develop a sleep ritual to bridge between the alertness of work and the relaxation required to fall asleep (and dream). For me, it is reading, but I’ve heard of many others, including a soothing drink, music and, of course, sex. As with the sleep cycle, I had to experiment to find the best trigger, that would say to my brain ‘It’s time to shut down and go to sleep.’
When I have my nap is not consistent but varies with what my schedule allows. Sometimes it is late morning, sometimes late afternoon. I try to avoid napping after 6PM because that sometimes interferes with my night sleep. Without any nap I can get quite cranky. But surprisingly I’ve managed to fit a nap into almost every day for over 30 years.
And rather than lose productivity, I think I’ve managed to increase what I can get done in a day because I basically go through 2 work cycles in the average day. What I cut out is that logy period that many people experience mid-afternoon, especially after eating lunch. I eat my lunch after I wake up from my nap, so I’m fully energized.
How intensely I nap seems to vary with my workouts. The day after my leg workout, is often a very deep sleep because my body is so tired. When my leg workout is particularly intense, I may even need 2 naps, or at least a nap and a quiet period the next day (or two), to recover. While that may seem like a terrible waste of time, I’ve found exactly the opposite. The restorative time occupies what would otherwise be the slowest period of my day, when my brain and body are spent, and I would otherwise accomplish very little.
Ironically, the hardest part of my sleep regime has been disclosing it to other people. Like many people, I associated daytime napping with old people and boredom. But as I came out as an unapologetic napper, I’ve found that co-workers and family accept my unusual schedule because my energy and productivity prove napping’s effectiveness.
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Lots more pictures on Instagram: Fit_Fun_50s
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