I haven’t slept well lately. Have you? As many of you now know, getting good rest is a huge part of living with a stilled lizard brain. And when our lizard brains cool down we are able to live a much fuller, much richer life.
With the advancing technologies now available to us, we are now able to learn more and more about why getting good rest is so important. Frankly, it seems as though the scientific community is learning just as quickly how much a lack of rest can affect us. Like so many other areas of our life, however, we are seeing that a lack of rest doesn’t have some great and immediate detriment to us and thus we often live whole seasons thinking that it isn’t as important as it really is.
Let’s face it, if you don’t get a good night’s sleep tonight, it isn’t like you are completely inoperable tomorrow. In fact, I am becoming more and more impressed at how many people we are encountering here at Rewire actually doing an incredible job with such little good rest. But if you are one of those people, please don’t be duped. If you are highly functional on a lack of good rest, I beg you to consider what you could be if you changed a few habits and actually started a new regiment of deep and restorative sleep.
We have published a number of articles on rest and will keep talking about this because, if indeed you want to Rewire your mind, learning (or re-learning) how to rest is nothing shy of crucial.
In the spirit of appealing to all of us who can gather a few nuggets through a simple list, let me offer a handful of thoughts and actions to consider in order to live a more rested life:
- Build exercise into your day. I’ve yet to meet an individual who works out daily who doesn’t understand the correlation between a good workout and a good night’s sleep.
- Stop eating late. Metabolically, the body simply doesn’t do well when we eat and immediately hit the sack.
- Limit starchy foods (especially at night).
- Limit alcohol intake late. There is some amazing new research that shows how the brain is wakes itself up after getting put down with alcohol or any other depressant.
- Avoid watching any screens before going to sleep. This one is really hard these days given all of our gadgets, but the blue spectrum of light that is present in all computers, TV’s etc… keeps the brain active and limits good rest
- Pay close attention to what causes you stress. Cortisol is a terrible neurochemical when released repeatedly because of stress. Please contact us for more info on this, or come to one of our workshops.
OK, that’s it. That should be plenty for now. My hope is that you or someone you love will benefit by deploying at least one of these strategies. As for me, I am off to practice what I preach and get some good sleep. Getting more rest could be one of the most powerful effects of Rewiring that we have yet seen in ourselves and our clients.
