Most of us don’t get enough sleep and a lot of us don’t get enough rest, either. It is not easy to do, in part because our culture glorifies busy-ness and stress. We look askance at anybody too relaxed—don’t they know how difficult it all is?
I’m not downplaying the difficulties we are all facing in these uncertain and plague-ridden times. And I hesitate to suggest yet one more thing to add to our endless to-do lists. Except that this one helps with all the other ones: go to bed on time.
I’m not saying that we all need to be tucked up virtuously by 8 p.m. or anything. That would be silly. We all have different rhythms to our lives and some of us are just hitting our stride then. What I am saying is that we do better when we have a bedtime and stick to it. Ideally, that time should be seven or eight hours before we have to get up again.
We might have to do some negotiating with ourselves and other people to make this work. Maybe we’ll have to stop after two episodes of that great show. Maybe we’ll have to explain that it is all right to do a few dishes in the morning instead. At first it might be hard to go to sleep at our new bedtime. We might lie there resentfully feeling like a fractious toddler who is definitely not tired, not one bit, no way. We’ll have to practice.
But once we start getting the sleep and rest we need, we might find that we’re not so crabby, we make fewer mistakes, and we feel better. We find focus that we’ve been missing.
I could be wrong. Try it out and see.
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