- Difficulty initiating sleep
- Difficulty maintaining sleep
- Early morning awakening
- Non restorative sleep
This will, by far, be my biggest hurdle in getting my fit healthy self back (aside from that pelvis thing). From my past experience I learned that we need to boost testosterone in order to build muscle and create ‘growth hormone’ – the thing that restores cell damage. Yes, I know I’m female and testosterone is that thing that guys have. We do have a bit of it in us too though ladies.
Do you know how to boost this growth hormone? There are a couple of ways but primarily it’s SLEEP. More sleep = more testosterone = more growth hormone = more muscle = more calories burned = slimmer me = happy healthy me again!
Work out hard, eat right, sleep well. It all looks so simple written down. Not so simple when you’re running your own business, have 4 small children, 1 of which wakes up multiple times a night due to teething, another that just woke up complaining of a sore stomach, another that had a blood nose at 1am and one more that basically yells all night and wakes you up all the time because you think you hear crying….it looks like I passed on some weird sleep issue to that one!
I’ll sort it out though. I’ve done it before, I can do it again. I read an article when I was a teen that mentioned most people fall asleep within 7 minutes. I remember lying in my bed as a teen and willing myself to be like a regular person. I eventually managed to master falling asleep within 7 minutes. Then I became a Mum. So for about 1 year of my life, I slept well.
The others I know that have sleep issues are the creative type. I tend to think that’s why I have such a hard time. What happens is that as soon as my head hits the pillow and I’m done focusing on my daily life, images and ideas start to flood my mind. It’s not just one or two things. It’s HUNDREDS at a time. I can literally see things in my mind as though they were right in front of me (not in a crazy way lol). I can hear words for ideas to create something the next day, week, month etc. It’s nuts.
Some nights I’ll sit up and write hurriedly in a book or piece of paper that I keep nearby and others I’m so exhausted and my eyes feel like they’re burning because they’re so tired that I just have to lie there with these images going round and round in my head until the next morning when everyone else is awake and I’m finally tired enough to dead myself to the world.
So, you can see my dilemma. I LOVE the creative part of myself. It helps make a lot of things in life extremely easy for me. Sleep, however is not one them. So wish me luck. I’m out to conquer this beast that has forever plagued me.
