Check-in on Sleep

Are you feeling more rested?

We’re halfway through our spiritual practice for this month - sleep. How are we doing?

As a reminder, our sleep practice consists of : 

• Sleeping in one night this month so you can determine what a full night of rest is for you

• Thinking through our morning, afternoon, and evening routines to see if there were any tweaks we’d like to make to help us in getting our desired amount of sleep each night.

• Implement one or two tweaks to see if they help.

• Attempt to get your desired amount of sleep at least two nights a week.

• Pray the closing blessing before bed.

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HOW IT’S GOING FOR ME

This practice has been hit or miss for me this month, but there are a couple of things I’ve noticed that I’m using to help me in this practice the rest of March.

I’ve learned that I get roughly 1 ½ hours less sleep each night than my ideal of 9 hours. 

This surprised me at first, because if you had asked me how much sleep I was getting, I would have thought it was way less. My ideal is 9 hours and some days it felt like I was only getting 5 or 6 hours each night. But when I actually tracked my sleep in my planner this week, I realized that MOST nights I was getting between 7-8 hours of sleep.

I’m not sure if this means that I truly need the 9 hours and anything less is going to make me feel tired the next day. OR if perhaps there was another emotional reason making me feel tired at certain points in the day (see below).

Going forward, I want to attempt 9 hours of sleep a few nights a week to see if this alters things more for me. Which means I need to get to bed earlier than I do.

My tiredness wasn’t physical but rather mental and emotional.

Since I was paying attention to my feelings of tiredness, I noticed something huge this past week. I routinely felt tired in the afternoons and the evenings after dinner. BUT it wasn’t  physically tired. Rather it was more mental and emotional.

My daily routine looks like this most days - 

• Homeschooling the girls and/or having meetings in the morning and early afternoon

• Attempting to do household chores or any of my work type tasks in the late afternoon

• Cooking and making dinner, having dinner and getting the kids to bed in the evening

• Cleaning and taking some time for me (or hanging with my husband) after kids are in bed until I go to sleep

I noticed that the two periods I felt most worn-down each day were the late afternoon time I set aside for myself to do chores or work AND the late evening time after kids were in bed.

At first, I thought this was because it was when I could breathe and rest each day and my tiredness was catching up with me.

But now that I’m looking at things, I’m seeing I’m more emotionally and mentally tired in those parts of the day because of feeling like I’m “on” and surrounded by people in the other parts of the day.

I “feel tired” because I was hustling and moving and talking to other people before these times, and instead of giving myself a little breather to be introverted and rest my mind, I’ve filled my down-time portions of my day with chores and mental work. 

I’m becoming more and more introverted the older I get (that’s a story for another time) and through this practice I realized I wasn’t adjusting my daily expectations to this. I was still operating as young Melaina, who could go-go-go and get lots of tasks done even if she spent a large portion of her day being her kid’s teacher or in meetings with other people.

So going forward this month, I’m tweaking my afternoon and evening routines to give myself a breather. Instead of finishing school with the girls and immediately going into a time of cleaning our entire apartment and writing all the copy for my website, I’ll give myself some time to just decompress and breathe, and pare down my task lists during those portions of the day.

Is that a little disappointing to me? Yep. Do I wish I could power through and work on things and get so much accomplished each day? Of course.

But part of practicing sleep, and alongside it rest, is learning that I am a finite human and God loves me regardless of my productivity. 

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HOW IS IT GOING WITH YOU?

How are things going with you, friend?

Have you figured out how much sleep is best for you each night?

What tweaks are you making in your daily habits, and how’s it going?

Click the comment button below to share with us. I’d love to hear how things are going for you.

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WHAT’S NEXT

My church (The Vine) is going through a series called “Soul Care” and we have daily devotionals alongside it. In today’s devotional we read through Psalm 139 and I was struck by part of verse 18.

When I awake, I’m still with you. (Psalm 139:18b)

I love how this simple verse timely reminds me that when I’m asleep, God is with me. And when I awake, God is with me still.

Next month we’ll add in a small practice to our bedtime routine that’s going to help us begin to notice more how God is with us in our days. So look forward to that in a couple of weeks.

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