Time for a Nap.
I know I’m not alone when I say that this pandemic has wrecked havoc on various parts of my life, one of those being my sleeping habits. My schedule continues to shift around taking away any sort of routine, not to mention there are a lot of really great shows and movies available on Netflix…so all this combined has led to less than ideal sleep, and I am really starting to feel the effects.
For me personally, when I don’t sleep well, I don’t eat well. I don’t have the energy to cook fun, nutrient dense meals, and would much rather just order a pizza or grab a quick snack. I feel sluggish so working out doesn’t sound like fun, and then when it gets later in the day I realize how not great I ate, or how little I moved, I start to feel guilty and try to make up for it. I then can’t get to sleep because I have too many endorphins pumping through my body from an evening workout, so I turn on TV, and before I know it it’s midnight and I’m back to square one.
Just recently, my husband and I had to complete a small online program for our health insurance benefits, we both selected to complete the session on sleep, and it was full of awesome information. I knew sleep was important, and I knew it could effect nutrition and vice versa, but there is so much more to it. Here is some of what I learned.
Practicing my afternoon power nap with the pups.
There are four stages of sleep. Each stage provides different benefits.
The phase of “light sleep” helps restore energy to the body and strengthen neuro-connections that help hold all the data from the day. It essentially is strengthening your memory.
Stage three sleep, called deep sleep, is when all the physical benefits take place, your body goes through hormonal changes, decreases the production of stress, and more - all this helps bring your body’s tissues and organs back to peak levels and help you metabolize fat and carbs for energy (woohoo nutrition). It also also allows your brain to chill out, literally giving your brain a chance to relax from all the hard work it does for us on daily basis.
REM Sleep. This sleep is essential for higher order cognitive functioning, memory and learning. It helps your mind connect recent experiences to prior knowledge.
Drinking water too close to bed time can be considered a sleep inhibitor. It causes you to miss out on different stages of sleeping that you need when you get up for a bathroom run! And here I was just focused on my hydration!
Your body experiences “shadow cycles” during the day that mimic your sleep cycles at night. This can lead to you feeling like you need a “power nap” in the afternoon, and you probably do, that’s about a 20 minute nap. For a basic work day schedule, the ideal nap time is between 1-3pm. You can alter your nap time based on your shadow cycles and what you need to get out of it.
They connected everything to sleep, from the bedroom environment, caffeine, noise, and more. It was such a great session about sleep, but I’ll leave it to the experts to take it from here. I will say that I have started to make some minor adjustments into my sleep routine, and I am already feeling so much better.
Now, you may be saying to yourself, isn’t this a nutrition blog? You’re right it is. But as I briefly mentioned above, the two go hand in hand. Poor sleep can lead to poor nutrition, and improper nutrition can lead to poor sleep.
As much as this pandemic has altered our way of life, it also allows us the opportunity to learn something we otherwise wouldn’t have. I challenge you all to learn something new today.
-Brooke