Get more sex and sleep!
Earlier this week I talked about how we change our nutritional habits when we are ill and how much how health could benefit if we were to bring in these habits into our ‘normal’ daily lives.
Well, we don’t just eat soup when we are ill, we also increase our sleepy time too.
Obviously, we increase our sleep time when we are ill because we are shattered. We don’t have energy to do anything other than binge watch Netflix and sleep.
But there is something else happening in the background that we might not be aware of….
The time when we sleep, is maintenance time for our bodies.
So, when we are ill and we shut down for hours or days on end, it is actually our body’s way of saying ‘I need some downtime to repair this problem’.
Every night when we go to sleep our body slows down. Our breathing slows and our heart rate drops to a less stressful rate than what we subject it to during the daytime.
Our body’s immune system starts to work on repairing the damage or wear and tear caused during the day. It flushes out toxins, searches for and repairs cell damage, balances blood sugar levels, calms the mind and repairs muscle damage to name just a few processes.
But why do we wait until we are ill to allow our bodies to do this?
All we are doing is fighting fires and catching up on health as and when we need to or when our bodies tell us we need to because it cannot carry on at the pace we are living our lives.
Imagine the good we could do ourselves if we allowed ourselves more downtime and actually let our bodies reset themselves every night?
We would have less illnesses, our blood sugar levels would remain balanced reducing the risk of diabetes, we would wake with more energy which would result in healthier food choices the following day (you would no longer need the Redbull)
Our hormones balance during sleep. We get an increase of things such as growth hormones and the stress hormones such as cortisol that have sky rocketed during the day, come back down to earth and a much more normal level.
Our brains also get a rest when we sleep and this downtime allows our brains to filter out all the shit information we accumulate during the day. Our brains reset and we lose the heavy brain fog we wake up with each morning as we fret about the 1001 and tasks ahead of us.
You might be thinking now, ‘ok, I will go to bed earlier’, but that isn’t the entire answer.
I encourage you to think back to how our bodies are supposed to operate.
We are designed as humans to be active during the day (hunting and gathering) and we relax in the evening.
We couldn’t hunt in darkness, it was too dangerous, so we would sit by campfires as the
sun goes down. We would laugh, tell stories, dance and f**k. That is what we are hard wired to do!
So, switch off the tech 3-4 hours before bedtime.
Take all the incandescent light out of the room and mimic the dark night sky with black out curtains.
Get that TV off, light some candles and talk to each other.
Sit on the floor and engage those core and posterior muscles like we are meant to do instead of throwing yourself on that super comfy sofa.
Allow your body to de stress, reconnect with your breath, talk about your day and make love to your partner. Connect again and raise each others energy levels (maybe don’t go back to nature too much here or you will be raising more than just energy levels over the next 18 years!)
Forget what modern society tells us.
We must come home from work and watch television until we have just about enough energy left to walk like zombies up to bed.
That is absolute horse shit! We are not designed this way and we will all feel so much better, sleep so much better and have so much more energy if we allow ourselves to go back to basics for those 3-4 hours before we hit the pillow.
And when you do go to bed, keep the room cool. No heating!
Wrap your body under the duvet, snuggle up and again, keep the room tech free and dark.
The bedroom is for 2 activities. Sleep and sex.
It is not for seeing what Sandra had for dinner and posted to Facebook or for ‘reality tv’.
Sleep and sex only in the bedroom please.
No go away, get some candles, buy some dark curtains and have the best nights sleep of your life tonight!
