No sleep 'til bedtime.

 Our daily lives are constant, we are always moving from one thing to the next with what seems like little or no rest, and our bodies do not have time to refresh of rejuvenate before the next barrage of activity. Our lives consist of work, exercise, family, socialising- there is always something to do. This is great as our lives are full and there is an element of excitement involved here, but all of this never-ending activity leads to us being run-down or stressed or even to our ill health.

Everybody wants to lead a full and productive life, but we also need to make time for adequate rest where our body which carries us through this chaos that is called life can revitalise and be restored with new energy. Without adequate rest - and especially if  this continues for an extended period of time -  we are running on our adrenaline, and this means that our natural energy resources have been depleted. We derive our energy from the food we eat, and this is why the types of food we eat are so important. This topic is on sleep though, so I won't talk about nutrition here but in a different post.

We allocate time in our daily lives for certain activities, so we also need to put aside time for rest where we can switch off from the world and restore essential vital energy. It is important that we utilise that 6-8 hours or sleep each night so we can perform at our best. Sleep is the great healer. it is better for us than any medicine and it will give us naturally what we need. As with anything, prevention is better than cure, if we do what is good for us now and in this moment, we will not need to pump our bodies full of drugs in the future because you have done wrong by it.

In our culture, we put so much emphasis on pushing on or forging forward that we do not listen to that which we rely on to allow us to do this - our bodies. The more we work with our bodies, the more attuned to it we become, the more in sync we become with our own bio-rhythyms that we innately know what is good for it. When we are at this point, we know when we need to rest, we know when we need to eat and we know what foods to eat to make it perform optimally. We need to work with our bodies, listen closely to what it is telling us.
When we are rundown, our body is telling us to rest, it is tired because we have pushed it too far.

When we do something, we want to do it well, and this extends to any arena in our lives. We cannot do this adequately without the proper rest that our body needs.

Sleep equals optimal performance. That is the take home message here;-)