On My Way to Healthy Sleep
In the last post, I started to lay down the path of how I learned to sleep better. I knew I had to look into my recent past to discover what had changed. What was different, how could I fix it? If I could find that, I would surely find some healthy sleep.
I made a list.
1. Higher stress
2. Less exercise.
3. More responsibility.
4. Better diet. (Healthy Diet = Healthy Sleep)
Of course there were more, but those were the highlights; four pillars of darkness keeping my mind’s eye unfocused and prohibiting my best rest. If was going to sleep better, I needed to focus.
What did I do?
I forced myself into a regular exercise routine. This helped tremendously. I was so encouraged by my progress, I actually believed it might be enough for me to get the healthy sleep I needed without a lot added.
It wasn’t.
I had merely placed my heel against the first step of a long road in front of me; a path filled with roadblocks that only ended a in a horizon humming with healthy sleep.
I kept exercising, every day increasingly conscious of what I was putting in my body. I ate lighter foods and less sugar. I was willing to do just about anything, so long as it helped me have healthy sleep.
My diet helped. Again I believed I was just about there.
I wasn’t, and I had a long hallway to walk before I felt healthy.
Sleep was still a struggle. I wasn’t falling to sleep late at night and rising far too early in the morning. I felt anxious before bed because I knew what was waiting. Days grew increasingly frustrating; I was exhausted, had trouble concentrating, and felt like my ADHD (which I’ve had since I was a child) was growing worse.
Worst of all was the horrible depression I felt whenever I went wrestled through too many sleepless nights trying to find just a heartbeat’s worth of healthy sleep.
I was confused, annoyed, and desperate for a solution.
I never gave up. You might remember the rest of the list; things such as rising responsibility and an increase in stress. I took note and started searching my mind for the effect on my rest.
When your mental state is in shambles, you cannot expect to feel healthy; sleep will suffer, night after night.
That isn’t how our bodies work.
I started tending to the stress areas in my life. I wanted to see if I could change things around; perhaps go to bed with inflated peace of mind.
I was somewhat successful, but failed to produce the significant changes I needed. It’s not how much stress you have, but how you handle what comes that matters.
Unfortunately, my sleep issues went nowhere, and I was still far from finding a way to have a normal healthy sleep routine.
I re-examined my diet, digging deeper into what might be producing the results. I was staggered when I finally realized how much I was affected by the smallest degrees of change in my diet.
I used to believe eating healthy meant eating things like whole grains, fruits and veggies, and drinking lots of water. This is all great for a healthy diet, but there is also much more to consider.
I finally pieced the evidence together and developed a solution. My search was not only to sleep better, but to find resulting success in all my endeavors.
In my next post, I’ll tell you what I found, and how it led me to healthy sleep.
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