Dear Sleep,

I know I’ve been neglecting you for a very long time, but please don’t think I don’t love you. I miss you so much and I’m doing my best to spend more time with you every night. I know you are so good for me, all of me, but life gets in the way. I promise that I’ll keep trying to give you more of my time. Please don’t give up on me.

With all my mind, body, and soul,
Sandy

Besides my cat Ernie, who’s got time to sleep these days? I know I sure don’t. Although I’m getting closer by upping my sleep from 3 – 4 hours a night to 5 – 6 hours, I know it’s not enough. The three key elements to healthy living is diet, exercise, and sleep equally. If you’re lacking in any of those areas, you will be unbalanced.

Did you know that all that hard work you do to build your strength and endurance goes to waste when you don’t get enough sleep? Sleep is where the magic happens.

Sleep is an active physiological process, one in which your body is busy carrying out vital activities, while you are unconscious. While asleep your body alternates between two forms of sleep: rapid eye movement, or REM, and non-REM sleep. This cycle repeats several times throughout the night. While REM sleep provides the energy to the brain that supports it during waking hours and is necessary for restoring the mind, stages 3 and 4 of non-REM sleep, known as slow-wave or deep sleep, are essential for restoring the body. Even their names, slow-wave versus rapid eye movement, are indicative of their different healing natures.Read more: http://www.livestrong.com/article/155363-sleep-muscle-recovery/#ixzz2bU5Ax05S

So, how much sleep is enough? It depends. The National Sleep Foundation suggests that although there is no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to how much sleep adults need, but they suggest 7 – 9 hours. (http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/how-sleep-works/how-much-sleep-do-we-really-need)

There are ways to tell if you are not getting sufficient sleep, such as a reliance on an alarm clock. Breus suggests this test to see how much sleep you need: If you need an alarm clock to wake, try going to sleep 15 minutes earlier. Do you still need an alarm clock? If you do, push your bedtime up another 15 minutes, he says. Do this until you no longer need an alarm to wake up. This exercise should give you a pretty good idea about the amount of sleep you need per night. (http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/news/20101130/how-much-sleep-do-you-really-need)

Well, I failed the test BIG TIME. I have to set 2 alarms to wake me up just in case I turn the first one off by accident while trying to hit the snooze button. Even when I try to sleep in, Ernie has me up at 4am. While I don’t have the luxury that he has of sleeping all day, I will continue to try and work less and sleep more.

Next run: Tomorrow, 12 miles at the Charles Street 12.