This week is the first in our resilience and wellbeing series, thinking about life practices that can help us to grow in resilience. During tough times, having life practices that we can fall back on that allow us to foster resilience can help us to boost our wellbeing and even notice a sense of flourishing.
This week we are going to focus on sleep.
Sleep is important because it helps us to de-stress, allowing our mind to unwind and providing restoration for knocks to our emotional and mental wellbeing. It boosts our bodies by helping us to physically recover, providing energy and boosting our immune system. It also gives our mind a rest, helping our brain to recover and revive.
During lockdown my sleep has been a mix of good and not so good. Last week I found myself having intense dreams, multiple wake ups a night and feeling the grumpy impact of interrupted sleep. I couldn’t work out why but I definitely noticed the impact on my overall mood.
We can’t always figure out why our sleep is good or bad, but taking a quick audit of our sleep habits and practices can help us notice things we might not otherwise see.
Take five minutes now to honestly answer these questions and take a quick audit of your sleep. We’ve created a download you can use to answer these questions, or just use something you have to hand:
How would you rate your quality of sleep from 1 – 5 [1 = poor, 5 = great]?
Have I been able to fall asleep quickly or do I take a while to unwind?
If you’re taking a while to unwind, what might be the cause of this?
If you have a bedtime routine : What has my bedtime routine been like over the past week?
If you don’t have a bedtime routine : would having a bedtime routine be helpful for me? What could it look like?
Do I have regular sleep hours i.e. go to bed/fall asleep around the same time each day, or do they change from day to day?
Celebrate your successes! And if there are parts of this that don’t look like what you would want, that’s ok. Changing habits takes work and time but starting with accepting where we are now allows us to grow. Now that you have a realistic picture of your sleep habits, you can create a plan to either continue what you’re doing or make changes that will impact on your wellbeing.
Over the next few days we’re going to be sharing some tips related to these areas of sleep and give you ideas for how your wellbeing can be enhanced through some simple adjustments.
What are your top tips for getting good sleep? Or what healthy habits do you have that we could share to inspire others?
Our thoughts about resilience have been inspired by this article : https://elemental.medium.com/your-surge-capacity-is-depleted-it-s-why-you-feel-awful-de285d542f4c