A Good Night's Rest

I woke up this morning with about 5 hours of sleep, and dear god I could feel it. 

For the past month or so I have been keeping myself to a decently strict sleep schedule, go to bed at 10:00 PM and wake up at 6:00 AM. No sleeping in, no going back to bed, I get up and I start my day immediately. Alright, maybe not immediately considering half the time I stare at a wall for 10 minutes daydreaming, but I think that's more of a "me being a space cadet" issue than any fault of the sleep schedule. Regardless, the effect that it's had over the past month is quite shocking to me. The urge to lay back down after my alarm goes off has been drastically reduced since I started, and my habit of staying up until "whenever I feel like it" has been almost nonexistent due to having a consistent wake up time. Don't get me wrong, the first week or so sucked, but as I went along my body seemed to adapt to the daily cycle. It's great that I have a level of consistency throughout my day so that I can more easily plan any activities I would like to get done. What surprises me the most though, is that any of this even worked. Of course, I looked this up beforehand, and studies show that this is an effective way to be more alert in the morning and go to sleep easier at night. The surprising part is that I ACTUALLY followed through with it. My sleep schedule has been an issue for about as long as I can remember, and I've never had the initiative to actually do something about it, nor the motivation to go out of my way to look for a solution. Heck, it's one of the first consistent lifestyle changes that I have made in quite some time. I'll admit it was hard to notice the effects at first, but this morning made it feel like night and day (pun intended, sorry not sorry). After staying up two hours past my bedtime bingeing a show, while at the same time forgetting about daylight savings, this morning felt rough, I felt sluggish, drained of energy compared to my normal. That's when it finally clicked that this sleep schedule thing was actually working. I felt more closely related to a shuffling sack of meat then a human being this morning. My eyes were struggling to stay open, I felt significantly more sluggish in my activities, and I wouldn't stop yawning. Looking back on the past few days, I can recognize that I felt a considerable bit more "normal". I doubt that I'm going to (willingly) stop doing this anytime soon. Now that I think about it, I can definitely build on this to make myself a great morning routine. Granted, anything I make in that regard is better than my current routine (wake up, put on pants, stare at the wall for 5-20 minutes, make up the rest as I go).


Push-ups: 220/50000
Sit-ups: 220/50000
Three segment staff form: 0/1000
DMS 3,4 & 5: 0/1000
Kilometers: 160.69/1609
Sparring: 0/1000
Acts of Kindness: 10/1000
Bedtime Routine: 36/300
Dedicated Outdoors Time: 130/21900 (converting the 365 hours into minutes for more precise measurements)
Video Game to "ups" ratio: 1800-220

Comments

  1. I find sleep routine is crucial for my well-being. The funny thing is that if I manage to go to sleep on time, I usually wake up just before my alarm goes off.

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  2. ^samesies. Some days I’m like, yay! I get to sleep in! Then I wake up at the same time anyways. On another note, morning routine sounds like a great plan. Maybe work in some DMH reps…

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