How Changing Your Nights Could Return Flow to Your Days

The truth about the impact of sleep on every area of our lives.

We’re all looking for a magic pill, that one simple thing that would make everything in our lives easier. Whether it be the right diet, the right mindset, the money hack or, the key to the perfect relationship. But what if it were as simple as going to sleep?

How could that be? Surely the quality of our sleep doesn’t apply to all those areas of daily life? Scarily though, it does.

There is no money to be made in encouraging us all to get more sleep, so instead, we are inundated with tools to ‘do more’, ‘be more’ and, fit more into our already hectic lives. We can find podcasts, self helps books and, articles by the hundred, all advising us on ways to maximize the potential of any given moment. We streamline our time and block off every 30 minutes to achieve success and finally get to the end of that ‘to do’ list.

Yet to do those things effectively we need a clear head, and our thought processes not to be scrambled by another night of not enough sleep. Juggling faster and faster, inevitably leads to falling plates, so how can we stop and still catch them all?

Most of us are now aware that sleep is the pathway by which our bodies switch over to the parasympathetic nervous system, but what does that mean?

The parasympathetic is the system in charge of our rest and digest functions. By reducing our stress and anxiety levels, the body switches into its restorative mode, digesting not only the food and nutrition we have consumed throughout the day but the emotional and mental input we have consumed. We spent a large portion of our days flooded with hormones reacting to the stimulus and stressors we constantly encounter, and it is the job of the parasympathetic system to ‘unwind’ us.

“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” — John Steinbeck

It is not crucial to the maintenance of life, but it is essential to a life well-lived. Our human potential for a happy life, one that is as long as we need to achieve our true purpose, cannot be reached while we are running on empty. The stress levels which raise our blood pressure, tax our hearts and, have us reaching for the closest quick fix to boost our mood, those are all the things that lessen our quality of life.

The actions of rest and replenish are needed daily, and our lifestyles have turned that once calm place of surrender and rejuvenation at night, into a panicked hyper-speed triage center in which our internal processes have a short window of time to patch us up before we head straight back out into the fray.

Similar to the advice to eat 5 a day, the recommended 8 hours is just the minimum your body needs, and time in bed as we all know isn’t always an indicator of time asleep.

Matt Walker’s research at the Center for Human Sleep Science and his book ‘Why We Sleep’, tells us that if you look at the effects of changing our sleep patterns by just one hour the effects on the human body are shocking. The one hour I’m referring to is the change twice a year of daylight savings time. When we lose an hour, the result is a 24% increase in heart attacks the following day, with a 21% reduction in the autumn when we regain that lost hour. The same pattern is seen in the numbers of car crashes, road traffic accidents, and suicide rates. That tells us that the consequences of lack of sleep are instantaneous. This is not an effect that builds up over time so we can push it to one side, intending to deal with it later.

As Matt says, the simple truth is short sleep causes and predicts mortality.

‘The shorter your sleep the shorter your life.’

Our wellness is reliant on this very simple thing, an element of daily life which we are in full control of if only our minds would get out of our way, and back away from the busyness equals success train.

So maybe you’re nodding your head, agreeing, and thinking yes, I really should get more sleep soon. Perhaps you’re relying on the idea that I’m talking about chronic sleep deprivation, or at least long-term disrupted sleep, but I’m not. Shockingly after only one night of 6 hours or less sleep and your physiology is impacted.

Your immune system function is reduced immediately along with several other systems within the body, and that is saying nothing about your mood or cognitive abilities, which affect not only your work life but your personal relationships also. We may not want to face it because running on empty and having low-level consistent stress is our new normal, but this lifestyle is at the heart of the reasons why we are facing so many problems in our everyday lives.

How many of us buy supplements for vitamins and minerals? How many of us do our best within our budgets to buy organic food? We are all eager to do the best we can for ourselves when that involves consuming a new idea or a magic pill, but not when the answer is the simplest and easiest thing to do.

“Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.” — Thomas Dekker

Don’t sell your days short by extending your nights.

So, close the screen, you’ve done enough for today. Take yourself to bed and take nothing with you other than a glass of water and someone to snuggle up to if a starfish position isn’t necessary and get yourself some rest. It will all still be there tomorrow.

If you are new to this platform, you can Join Medium here to read more stories