So you can be at you're stylishly best all the next day.
Healthy Beauty & Style Guide, by Lisa D Liguori -
I have never had any problems sleeping.
Ever.
I closed my eyes, I went to sleep. Just like that.
Until now.
Now, it looks like this. I go to sleep. I wake up. It is dark. It is early. Very early. I am awake. Very awake. For too long. When I finally do get back to sleep, dawn has come, and at the point when I am again in a deep sleep, POOF. It is time to wake up and start the day. And then, I am tired. All day.
Menopause. Apparently, this is a sign of a new stage of life. Menopause. Hormones. Pah.
I attended a talk for parents of teens at a local high school. The subject of sleep was brought up, this time in terms of teens sleeping habits. It caught my attention though, because, I seem to be having the same sleep issues as teens. Which is, we desperately need it for our health and we are often times up in the wee hours of the night. We know, that in order to look and feel our best, we need to eat the right foods and get 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night. I dug around a bit, and here are some tips I have come up with.
1. Routine Schmoutine Put yourself on a regular sleep schedule. Got to bed at the same time, wake at the same time.
2. Go to bed early, without your laptop or your novel Keep your bed and bedroom a sacred space. No T.V., no working in bed (ahem, I say this as I work with my laptop, on my lap, in bed. Clearly, I need to work on this one.)
3. Complete darkness I turn the clock with the lighted up numbers away from me, or I cover it up with a scarf. I am looking for black out drapes, because on nights with a full moon, the light of the moon comes right into the room. Even dim lights, can confuse the body clock. Our bodies need the natural rhythm of light – for awake time, and dark – for sleep time. We confuse our sleep cycle with too much light at night.
4.Cooler temperatures I open a window to let fresh and cool air in. I take a shower an hour prior to bedtime so that my body tempature heats up, then cools down when it is time to sleep. Cooler temps are more conducive to sleep.
5. Eat a light, high protein snack before bed Almonds are my favorite. Or walnuts with a few dark chocolate chips. Yum.
6. Stay away from sugar I have found a correlation between eating sugar during the day, and my sleep disturbances. So has Alison Golden at A Secret Life of a Warrior Woman who wrote an insightful post on managing her self care.
7. Sweet Rituals A bit of lavender oil on my wrist. (My daughter likes it right on the tip of her nose.) A cup of hot tea. A tour around the dimly lit house, turning off lights, snuffing out candles, putting this and that away. A bit of uplifting reading, such as The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, by Deepak Chopra, which sits on my bedside table at the moment. All of this serves as sweet bedtime rituals to tell my psyche that it is time to slow down. That it is time to prepare for sleep. So snuggle into your silk pillow case ( a great anti-aging secret) and sleep well! This may seem a bit of a pain in the putooty, to put all this together each night, but I can tell you, that when I implement this strategy I do sleep well.
At any rate, I needed to make some changes, or my 14 year old and I are going to be spending lots of quality time in the kitchen, at 2:00 A.M. Which, really is not a bad thing after all, I suppose.
Have you experienced rocky sleep patterns? What have you done to alleviate the problem?
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