Not another blog on sleep – ok well maybe it is!
But hear me out…
I’m sure you’ve seen, heard and watched many different pieces of information on sleep and how important it is for us. This is not going to give you any new knowledge.
Knowledge can be acquired, Knowing is a realization, and Wisdom must be earned.
We all know that sleep is good for us. We all know we should make it a priority, yet most probably don’t.
As a person who tracks all forms of data to do with fitness, training and any health metric I can get my hands on, I’ve recently been looking at my sleep in more depth. I’ve got years of sleep data from various devices that I’ve worn. Is the data perfect – not really but it’s consistent (by that I mean comparing data from the same device over many months) and it’s the best we can have from home.
I’ve spent a good amount of time over the last few years in the outdoors, camping with my family, hiking trips etc. I’ve noticed a huge difference in my sleep when I’m in the outdoors compared to when I’m at home in the city.
I’ve always prioritized sleep and tried to do the things you’ll see suggested all over the internet. The last 4 years however, have been subpar for my standards – yes, since kids came along – but we do our best (or do we!)
Digging into some of the data and trying to piece together what makes me sleep better when I’m in the outdoors, led me to a few assumptions.
I still have the kids waking up, needing a drink or pee which disturbs my sleep, both at home and while camping but here are some things I think may contribute to better sleep (or worse sleep at home):
- I think the biggest is TV – as many people do, we get sucked in to watching TV before bed. This stimulation will not promote a good nights sleep I’m sure.
- WiFi – having WiFi buzzing around the house all night probably doesn’t help. We have ours on a timer but we can pick up the neighbours from our house
- Light pollution – any kind of lights on at home or from the street probably don’t help with a great nights sleep
- Noise pollution – cars driving by, household noises etc
- Air pollution – I don’t think we understand or think enough about how bad for our health breathing in all the pollutants that are in a city all day
- Natural rhythms – go bed to bed when it’s dark, wake when it’s light
I guess the connection to all of these is ‘stress’ – the less stress our body is having to deal with will probably lead to a better sleep which in turn will enable us to be better prepared to handle ‘stress’ – catch 22!
I wrote this purely to have more people think about things like this. Unfortunately we can’t fix them all, but we can look at ways we can minimize the impact of them on our sleep and ultimately on our health.
People spend hundreds of dollars on skin care, hair care, nail care, supplements, fat loss etc. when better sleep could probably give similar results.
Like I said, you all know that sleep is a key ingredient for health but do you always prioritize it?
