Getting Sleep: Insomnia

Getting Enough Sleep

Getting sleep sounds easy enough but studies show that more than 70 million Americans suffer from a sleeping disorder.  Getting sleep is needed in order to stay motivated and improve our quality of life.  When people are unable to fall sleep, it can cause psychiatric conditions such as depression and isolation. From experience, not getting enough sleep can cause headaches and frustration because you feel pressured to fall asleep at a reasonable time to get a reasonable night’s rest.  Till this day I haven’t found the perfect solution but I’ve learned a few reasonable tricks, they are as followed;

1)      Exercising:  Whenever I go for a run on the boardwalk or even to the gym, I tend to exhaust my body, not necessarily to the breaking point but to the point where I can feel sore after. As a result, when it’s time to fall asleep, I have an easier time falling asleep but most importantly, STAYING ASLEEP.

2)      Using our mobile devices less:  This can be our cellphones, tables, laptops etc.  I say this because we as young adults tend to text and listen about the stories of others to the point where we’re somewhat obsessed with the lives of others, instead of paying attention to what’s occurring with our lives.  We all have been guilty at some point of our lives involving us constantly looking through our mobile devices to check if we ever got that reply back. This is a bad habit because we’re constantly checking our phones, thus losing the track of time. As a result, our phones can delay our sleep because we’re too obsessed to turn our mobile devices off when it’s time to fall asleep.

3)      Eat lightly:  From experience, whenever I indulged into a big course meal at chipotle, I tend to feel a sense of tiredness, not so much exhausted but I tend to doze off.  I looked this up on google, and it’s actually normal, especially if you work a lot. However, it’s not good for your health and especially if you do this on a daily basis like I did during this past winter.  As a result, I got acid reflux.  Some of the effects of acid reflux are delays of sleep from the acid build up in the stomach.  So from experience, avoid anything fatty or fried past 10 pm.

4)      Stress: Stressing and overthinking what occurred throughout the day or what’s to occur the following day can delay our sleep by making us too anxious before bed. In this situation, I try to listen to some classical or smoothen music to relax my process of thought, in an effort to relieve some negative thoughts.

Overall, I think sleep is very important and can determine our motivation efforts.  Also, we should always aim for at least 6-8 hours of sleep.  Just think about it for a moment, if we get more sleep at night, we will improve our self-appearances because we'll look somewhat normal lol, and this can ultimately improve our self-esteem because we won't be constantly worried about how we look.