All-Nighter

I take extremely good care of myself. I sleep eight hours a night, I exercize , I meditate, and I feed my body exceptionally well. Over the past two months I have seriously upped my game on the latter. And since David Wolfe came into my life a few weeks ago, I have discovered a food and nutrition gear that I didn’t even know existed!

I feel awesome! And…it’s just getting better by the day!

One of the key components to my wellness strategy is sleep. I am an eight-hour-a-night kind of a girl. Even on the weekends I am in bed by 10:00 and awake by 6:30. I love sleep and I am a total wimp if I don’t get it.

Two nights ago I pulled an all-nighter to get my taxes done. I decided that I wanted to file on time and didn’t want them hanging over me like a big, black cloud any longer. So I worked until 2:30am and then fell into bed. The problem was, I was so wired-up that I couldn’t sleep properly and felt more tired by the time 6:30am rolled around and it was time to start my day.

The by-product of my all-nighter was that yesterday I felt like I had been hit by a bus! I dragged my butt around all day and felt terrible. My energy was low, I felt weepy and sad, and all the wonderful food that may have helped me to feel better felt like far too much work. Even the bag of goji berries sitting on the counter felt enervating to even contemplate eating.

And the result of my lethargy? Polishing off a half-eaten bag of potato chips standing over the sink. And then feeling totally crappy afterwards…not just physically, but emotionally as well. And guess what? That made me want to eat even more chips. Thank goodness there were no more half-eaten bags in the cupboard or I just might have been unable to resist the siren song of Miss Vickie and her wicked chips.

I feel more like myself today but have had to be very mindful of my food choices. It has not felt easy to feed myself today and I am still craving potato chips.

So here’s my startling observation resulting from my all-nighter…

We are a culture of sleep-deprived people. There are very few of us who consistently choose to put aside eight to ten hours and night for rest. So does that mean that all those sleep-deprived people are moving around in the fog that I felt yesterday? Does it mean that they feel sad and overwhelmed by life? Does it mean that they are simply too tired to make good food choices? Does it mean that they feel that it’s all just so hard that a bag of potato chips over the sink is the answer?

I couldn’t possibly answer any of those questions without a significant amount of research. However, my hunch is that I actually already know the answers.

Here’s my Radical proposition…that for one month every year we choose to leave the invention of electricity behind. That, after dinner,  when it starts getting dark, we do not turn on lights, use the TV, sit at the computer, or play on our devices. We give ourselves an opportunity to tune-in to those Circadian Rhythms that kick-in after dinner that tell us its time to go to bed.

And to navigate around after dark, especially in the winter when it gets dark at 4:30, we could use candle light the way our ancestors would have just over a century ago.

But, really, reading by candle light is the fastest way to put yourself to sleep!

Just sayin’… 🙂