Bad Sleep = Bad Decisions

For me, there’s nothing worse than a bad night’s sleep.

You wake up 20 times in the middle of the night and shift around in bed, hoping to find a position that will keep you stationary for more than a half hour. Your alarm goes off and you want to chuck it against the wall, but it’s OK because you have a couple backup clocks in your nightstand. While lying in bed, you think of all the possible lies you can say to your boss for not going to work. You decide it’s not worth missing work, so you get up and almost fall over because you are so tired. You basically just stand in the shower and let the water hit you while you think of how you can nap while standing up. Conveniently, your commute especially sucks today, so you arrive to work pissed off, and of course you proceed to have a bad day at work because a client is super annoying, or a customer yells at you, or your boss finds multiple ways to criticize you. You come home and your head finally hits the pillow, where you proceed to have a great night’s sleep. It’s a brutal, vicious cycle.

Today, I have not had one of those drastic bad sleep days, but I definitely did not get good sleep. Bad sleep can really mess up your weight loss plans. On bad sleep days, I don’t really look forward to working out later that evening, because all I want to do is sleep when I get home. I also dread the 30 minutes that I have to put in toward exercise…I wish I could just do 5 minutes and get the benefits of a 30-minute workout. On good sleep days, I feel a lot more energized and psyched up for workouts, and I feel like I can go for 45 minutes or longer, even if the workout itself is particularly exhausting. On bad sleep days, I don’t really feel like cooking anything for dinner because of my tiredness, so I just want to get something fast and easy. Unfortunately, food that is fast and easy is generally super fattening. On good sleep days, I can cook a Thanksgiving turkey with all the fixins. Bad sleep can also be a huge downer for your psychological health. You just feel more rundown, depressed, blue, angry, and frustrated.

However, I have generally found that exercise and eating healthy during the bad sleep day remedy the harmful effects of a bad night’s sleep. As much as I don’t want to do that 30-minute workout or eat a healthy, home-cooked meal, I’m usually glad that I did those things, because I become alert, refreshed, and generally happy. If I have a bad night’s sleep, but I eat a healthy breakfast and lunch or find some sort of activity to do in the morning or at lunch, then I usually get lifted out of the doldrums of bad sleep and proceed to have a great day and night. Granted, this can be a very hard thing to convince yourself to do, and exercise can be particularly tough when not fully rested…but sometimes you have to silence your own negative thoughts, and if you can win the psychological battle, then you can usually win the physical battle too.

As of this afternoon, I’m winning the psychological battle, so tonight’s schedule of a healthy dinner followed by exercise doesn’t look so daunting at the moment.