Photo by Taryn Elliott on Pexels
No, really, what is sleep hygiene? I had to look the phrase up after meeting with my health coach last week. I was meeting with my coach at the recommendation of my doctor’s physician assistant after a reading of my vitals indicated weight gain and slightly poorer health indicators. (I wrote about that visit, and the PA’s poor bedside manner in a previous post as well as the power of a simple compliment.)
Now, I could have let that bad visit sour me off of taking control of my health and just sulked my way through to my next physical check-in. I mean, why do I need to see a health coach anyway? I knew why I had gained weight—I was eating more, and I was moving less. This, I knew, was a guaranteed recipe for gaining weight. I knew what I had to do to lose weight. I needed to track my food intake, and I needed to increase my physical activity.
The problem was that even though I knew how to lose weight, I had done it several times in the past, I just didn’t want to live my life tracking every single calorie that I put into my mouth. I’m sure you can imagine just how joyless it is to go to holiday parties and have to track every cracker, every swipe of cheese spread, every carrot I put into my mouth. I didn’t want to spend every outing choosing salad and fish.
I didn’t want to spend almost two hours each day trying to get yoga and cardio into my daily exercise routine. Not only did I not want to do that, I didn’t have the time to do that.
But, since the health coach was free, I decided, what the heck? What harm could there be in meeting with this person? I filled out a lengthy health assessment before the call, and I made sure to be honest. I wanted to increase my energy and general well-being, but I did not want to live my life shackled to calorie counts, brown rice, and hour-long workouts every single day.
When I got on the call, I didn’t really know what to expect. And when that happens to me, I usually just open up like a spigot and talk, and talk, and talk. It’s my nervous default. Whenever I’m feeling anxious about a new situation, I desperately try to fill the quiet with talk.
I talked to this woman whom I had only just met about my life-long struggle with food and food noise (those constant thoughts about food and what to eat we can sometimes have). I talked about how I had started a new running routine that I was really enjoying and that my daily yoga habit had settled down to just a five-minute morning yoga routine. I talked about how my previous weight-loss eras had me eating sensible portions for my main meals, but how I had slipped into eating a ton of snacks—salty snacks were my guilty pleasure.
And, I talked about how I absolutely did not want to go back to tracking every single thing that I ate.
“What about your sleep routine?” the health coach asked.
That kind of stopped me in my tracks. In all my confessional talk about food, exercise, and weight loss, I hadn’t given much thought to my sleep routine. Once, after college, I remember having a bout of bad insomnia. I would try to go to sleep around 1030, and I would toss and turn and toss and turn. I couldn’t sleep, and I would get increasingly anxious as the clock blinked 1130 pm, 1200 am, 1230, 100, 230, 300. It was awful. It stressed me out, and the stress made it more difficult to sleep.
I didn’t seek professional help, but I decided to just try staying awake and going to sleep when I naturally felt tired. I had an epiphany after this. If I just let my body go to sleep in its own time, I let go of all that clock-watching and the anxiety that it produced. After that, my body seemed to naturally go to sleep between 1130 and 1200. If I didn’t force myself to sleep before then, I didn’t feel any anxiety, and then I would just go to sleep.
All was well until social media. After that, I would lie in bed and doomscroll. First on Twitter and then on that dastardly addictive app, TikTok. My sleep time started to slowly creep up from 1200 to 1230, from 1230 to 130. It was nefarious. And it was leaving me sleep-deprived the following day.
And, if I was exhausted, then I would make poor food choices. I would be too tired to exercise.
And so, we decided to tackle sleep hygiene as one of my first long-term lifestyle changes. According to the CDC, sleep hygiene encompasses those good habits that you have around your sleep time. Those habits can include:
Avoiding drinking alcohol and eating heavy meals close to bedtime. (Check)
Getting exercise during the day. (Check)
Having a dark, comfortable place to sleep. (Check. I spray a light lavender spray in my room before sleeping.)
Have a consistent sleep time. (Check; see above anecdote about finding my natural sleeping time.)
“Remove electronic devices, such as TVs, computers, and smart phones, from the bedroom.” (Uh oh).
That last bullet point was going to be hard. My coach talked about the addictive nature of the dopamine hits I was getting from my nighttime social media habit. And she was absolutely right. I needed to scroll longer and spent less time on each scroll as my habit grew.
So, this past weekend, I bit the bullet. I bought an alarm clock, and I moved my charging devices into another room outside of my bedroom. Last night was my second night of sleeping without my smart phone charging right next to my bed.
I’m not going to lie. That first night was monumentally hard. I did feel like an addict, tossing and turning and staring at my bedroom door, willing myself not to get up and grab my phone.
This second night, though, was a bit easier. And, I’ve actually gotten a good amount of reading done. I’ve replaced the area on my desk where my phone used to sit with a stack of my TBR books.
I still want to check my phone, and it’s only the third night tonight, but I have started to feel better and less fatigued during the day. Baby steps.
Here’s to better sleep hygiene for everyone!