Lately I'm guilty of not sleeping enough, even with all the knowledge I have about the importance, I choose to spend some time on my new journey on the expense of sleep.
Yet again I will take some useful visuals from Precision Nutrition to discuss our topic.
If you have this facial expression as our person on the image, you clearly need more sleep too. Let's go through the 5 main points and talk about them.
Brain dead and grumpy
The amount of sleep you need varies person to person, the general interval is between 7-9 hours, for women one hour more than for men.
I estimate that I need around 7.5 hours to function on a normal level, heavy workouts can add 0.5-1 hour; my wife enjoys more sleep and the kids can do 11-12 hours as its expected at their age.
In 2018 after our second kid was born my days got quite short with 5-6 hours of sleep, that made working in the Software industry harder, because it is hard to focus for a longer time and that's a basic need to get in the flow for some efficient coding work, therefore I opted for more dev support and review kind of works, which usually require short intervals and less creativity as well. I have a talent in finding and seeing errors, inconsistencies even without actively looking for them, which decreases the effort needed to be efficient with a review that needs this skill.
In the beginning of 2023 I have tried to go without caffeine and sleeping 8 hours a day, with success, which was much better than sleeping 6 hours of course, but with 8 hours of sleep it feels like I'm wasting time, when I should be doing something, like writing a blog post...
That leads us to the current day, when I tried to get to 7 hours on average on a weekly basis, bit shorter on some days, lot longer on weekends, with a lot of caffeine. It's arguably not the healthy way and I lack focus in the mornings, so I need to get that 0.5 hours that's missing and lose some of the caffeine. I do enjoy writing these at night. 🦉
It's not mentioned, but you can feel tired if you sleep too much as well.
Find your sweet spot and keep a schedule that allows you do to it daily.
Sickness
I can vouch for this one. The kids have brought home a lot of viruses, as that's something they do in these younger years and with my workouts in, even if I got it from them, it was over like in a day or was really mild that didn't even affect my workouts.
However, if I had 2-3 days in a row with less than 6 hours of sleep, that raised the chances of catching the sickness to like 90%, it makes it nearly inevitable to catch what they have. Then bringing up the sleep game and keeping the workouts it wasn't too serious.
My advice here is that if you have potential virus carriers around, then either keep distance or if you love them just sleep more - and workout!
Diet
Certainly, if I don't sleep enough I feel like I don't have energy constantly throughout the whole day and what gives us energy? Food. Will it resolve the issue? No. Will it create more issues? Yes.
If you are on a weight loss journey, do sleep what you need.
A nice technicality is that you are not hungry while you are asleep - it's taken care of by specific hormone levels, so we don't wake up for that - and most of us usually don't eat while sleeping. Do you any sleepwalkers in your family? Do they eat while wandering? Let me know in the comments!
Workout
Most of the muscle building is about resting, we workout for an hour then rest for 23 or workout for 2 hours then rest for 48 - at least average people. We workout with progressive overload to signal to the body that we want to be capable of bearing more weight, then it adjusts the composition while we rest.
Sleep is the peak of resting, builds the muscles, develops the nervous system to be prepared for future harder challenges and you don't even need to lift a finger while it's being done for you.
Note: that's why casein protein is recommended before sleep, as it provides the building material for a longer time than other variants.
You can read more about sleep science here and practical tips here.
If you need help with your gradual lifestyle changes drop me a message on linkedin, email me at [email protected] 📧 or book a free appointment. 📅
Just sleep 😴