The change:  to get more sleep

Most everyone that is reading this is or has been a mother of young children at one point in their lives.  You know what it means to be sleep deprived. I don’t think I have to say anymore about how it feels to not get enough sleep.  I wrote a fun post about some sleep facts that you can read here.

why make the change:

I think we all know how important health wise it is to get sleep.  But did you  know that based on your sleep it will affect your motivation to want to change your habits in life?  Lack of sleep will affect whether you successful make those changes.

Think about weight loss.  If you are motivated to lose weight, you might dive into it full force and do great for a little while.  Then over time, kids wake up a lot during the night and your sleep level goes down.  The next few days while you are trying to catch up on sleep, you are more tired.  When you are more tired you don’t want to exercise.  It is much easier to just grab some comforting food instead of taking the time to make a healthy low fat meal.  You use the excuse, “well I will start again next week.”  Then the cycle goes around and around.  Your weight loss comes to a halt.

The same is true for de-cluttering your home.  You might start de-cluttering and weeding out part of your home then you stay up late some nights and aren’t able to catch up on sleep.  So that great big project you started of “organizing and de-cluttering” your home starts becoming this monstrous thing you took upon your self.  You start looking at your project as too overwhelming, because you are tired, and just give up on it and go lay and watch TV.  You want to comfort your feelings of feeling crappy and tired so you just give up on your de-cluttering.  Sounded too good to be true anyways.  Your strong feelings of being motivated and wanting to de-clutter your home have taken a back seat.  Time for tiredness to take over.

How to make the change:

• Go to bed earlier.  If you are tired and not getting enough sleep, quit staying up late.  Go to bed, in a few days when your body  has adjusted you will be able to go to sleep a little bit later.  But for now—go to bed.
• Some of you like to wake up early and get your day started—but if you were up late into the night with a child or just couldn’t sleep, then sleep in.  Don’t make this a regular thing but for those occasions when you could not avoid being woken up during the night then use it.
• Have a bedtime routine.  For myself I like to brush my teeth, get a drink, and shut down my computer, tvs, and phone.  Then I like to lay in complete silence and have a time with the Lord.
• Do not go to bed watching TV or surfing the internet, it will only keep you awake longer at night.
• If I am having a hard time falling asleep, I think about my day and go over what I did, I like to take this time to think about what happened or what I could have changed.  Maybe pray for our children–we have many children by the time I get through them all I almost always am tired and will fall asleep:)

If you are having problems wanting to start any of these lifestyle challenges, look at your sleep habits and evaluate whether you are getting enough or not.  That may be the factor.