Maintaining Motivation – Sleep Routine

SLEEP ROUTINE

Having a healthy sleep routine is essential to maintain your motivation. Notice that it’s not just sleep that helps your motivation – it’s a healthy sleep ROUTINE.

What’s the difference?

Healthy sleep is when you fall asleep quite quickly and easily, don’t fully wake up during the night, and feel refreshed in the morning.

A healthy sleep routine is a consistent sequence of events and environmental conditions at specific times that tells your body and your mind that you are preparing for sleep so it can slow down, calm down, and help ensure you achieve healthy sleep for the amount of time that your body needs to fully rest and recharge.

When you get into a healthy sleep routine, your circadian rhythm – your ‘body clock’, or natural 24-hour cycle that responds primarily to light and dark influencing your physical, mental and behavioural routine – gets ‘set’, and your body recognises the signs that it’s time to sleep.

When you have an unhealthy sleep routine, your circadian rhythm will be disturbed because you are not doing what it expects you to do at certain times. It creates uncertainty and a lack of safety and security for your brain and body, which can lead to tiredness during the daytime, a struggle to focus and concentrate, and difficulty making decisions or accessing memories – all essential to our success on our Clutter Clearing Journey.

As parents will know, when babies and children have a consistent, predictable sleep routine, evenings are just easier for YOU. It also gives that child a sense of safety and security because they know what to expect, what is expected of them, and it also helps them learn how to fall asleep on their own.

When children have a sleep routine, they are more likely to go to sleep earlier, take less time to fall asleep, sleep longer and wake up less during the night. (sleepfoundation.org)

Although sleep / bedtime routines are more commonly associated with babies and children, adults benefit from them too. When adults have a consistent, predictable sleep routine we take less time to fall asleep, sleep longer, wake up less during the night, and more importantly – we wake up feeling refreshed and less stressed because our body has had the time to do what it needed to while we slept.

When we wake up feeling refreshed and less stressed, we are less likely to feel overwhelmed and more likely to be able to focus and finish things that are on our Weekly Planner – including ‘Doing the Doing’ of our Journey videos. A good sleep routine really can help us succeed on our Journey.

4 Benefits of a Good Sleep Routine

1. Attention and Concentration

A good sleep routine helps you maintain energy levels which will help you maintain attention and concentration and enable you to stay focused, thus you have a greater chance of finishing things.

2. Learn and Make Memories

While you sleep your brain organises, processes and files away all the thoughts, feelings, and memories it has accumulated during the day into your long-term memory. That is why you often have ‘lightbulb’ moments when you wake up after a good night’s sleep. It is because your brain has had enough time to process, organise and make sense of everything.

3. Physical Health

It has been proven that a good sleep routine improves your immune system, your heart, and helps you manage your weight more easily by allowing your body to rest, repair and rebuild. A good sleep routine also gives your body the time and energy it needs to process and eliminate cortisol from your body – the stress hormone – which in turn means we wake up feeling refreshed, relaxed, in a better mood and more able to focus. It is probably why the best time for most people to do their Clutter Clearing Journey videos is in the morning when there is the least amount of cortisol in the body.

4. Mental Health

A good sleep routine reduces stress, improves mood, and enables you to think more clearly, all of which benefit your mental health. Studies have shown that sleep and routine can be as powerful as medication in treating depression. Consequently, sleep is often a key factor for people in managing their mental health.

How to Create

a Healthy Sleep Routine

The easiest and most successful way that Clutter Clearers have created a healthy sleep routine is by following the Brendan Burchard 3:2:1 Formula.

First, decide what time you want to turn the light off to go to sleep every night. i.e. your actual bed time. Then work backwards from that time:

• 3 hours before bed, no food
• 2 hours before bed, no work
• 1 hour before bed, turn off digital devices, turn your phone to silent, and no screens or phone calls i.e. TV, computer, tablet, your phone on silent.

If you are worried about your social life, simply leave events a little earlier than you might normally leave.

During that last hour you could go for a walk, pray, look at your weekly planner for the next day, spend quiet time with a pet, talk to your partner about your day, just sit quietly in bed and maybe read, read your affirmations, do some T.R.E, yoga, meditation or mindfulness, listen to relaxing, calming music, do your Success / Gratitude Journal.

Try the 3:2:1 Formula for at least 5 nights a week for 30 consecutive days (or 1 Term) and you’ll discover you go off to sleep quicker, have deeper sleep, wake up feeling more refreshed, are more focused and productive during the day, and find it easier to make decisions about the things in your clutter.

Good sleep is the easiest tool in your toolbox to get – and stay – motivated. If you have a mental or physical health condition, good quality sleep and a healthy sleep routine is even more important to your success.

You can clear your clutter fast, or you can clear your clutter forever, but you can’t clear your clutter forever, fast.

If you NEED to clear your clutter and you’re ready to accept that you can’t clear it forever FAST, click on this link and visit my Help Centre to find out how I can help you get started. https://www.clutterclearing.net/clares-help-centre/