Sleep is a very essential part of being alive, at least for humans.  If you don’t sleep, bad things happen.  Aside from the obvious, being tired, sleep deprivation affects your metabolism, your healing time, your mood, the bags under your eyes, your blood pressure, your ability to handle hard work or blood sugar swings, your ability to think straight, and your pain.  If you sleep less than 6 hours per night, you’re more likely to die.  You’re more likely to get into an automobile accident.  You’re more likely to have heart disease, or develop dementia.

Athletes need more sleep.  We just do.  Sleep is the time when a bunch of internal cleaning, healing, and growth happen in the muscles and bones, in the circulatory system, in the endocrine system.  However, injuries causing pain tend to decrease the amount of good sleep you get.  If you can’t sleep, you can’t heal, and you hurt more, which causes you to sleep less.  That’s why good physical therapists will try to get you to find a position where you can sleep.

There are things you can do in order to get better sleep, but it is never a one size fits all.  I know that I work best when I get 9 hours sleep at night.  That doesn’t mean I’m lazy.  That’s just how long it takes.  My husband needs a mere 7 hours per night.  That’s fine too.  Sometimes I need naps, because parenting is hard work.

There are times when it is difficult to get to sleep at night.  There are times when my brain races, planning something for the next day, going over something that happened from all different angles.  For me, sleep requires that I relax the focus.  I have to look at the pretty unfocused ever-shifting pictures.  Focusing on any of it keeps me from sleeping.  Knowing this, I can set up a meditative anchor for going to sleep.  Safe and relaxed, everything can wait until the morning to go over in my mind.

Metaphorically, this means that we need periods of rest to balance the periods of massive productivity.  We need periods of fasting to balance the periods of feasting.  We need periods of stillness to balance the periods of burst training.  We need periods of trash science fiction novels to balance the periods of hard mental thinking work.  We need periods of being warm balanced with periods of being cold.  We need periods of slow breathing balanced with periods of breathing hard.

What do you do to get enough sleep?  How does your sleep get disrupted?  Do you need to go to bed earlier?  How could you stop using stimulants or sedatives to get the restorative sleep you need?  Does your family respect your need to go to bed earlier than them?  Or later?  What about your children?  Do they get enough sleep?